The Wanted by Lauren Nicolle Taylor

Author:Lauren Nicolle Taylor [Taylor, Lauren Nicolle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clean Teen Publishing
Published: 2014-10-31T06:00:00+00:00

JOSEPH

I know what the end of war sounds like.

It sounds like broken glass crashing against metal. Shrieking and cheering. It sounds like clapping and sighing at the same time.

I know what the end of war feels like.

It feels like relief trapped inside death. Wanting freedom. Knowing the cost of freedom. Celebration and agony wrapped together in bloody bandages.

I should know by now what it is to lose someone, but it’s always fresh. Like a retractor, it opens old wounds again and again.

I let my hands fall from my face and my ears began to ring dully. The lights slammed on, showing the devastation and the success. Torn apart by the blast, one gate hung pathetically from a twisted hinge, the other lay flat on the ground. People stopped for about five seconds before they flooded the opening in elation, knocking my shoulders in their haste to get through.

The people of Palma were ready for this. They stepped between the bars on the ground like they were playing hopscotch. Most of the soldiers were already lined up against the concrete wall, disarmed with their hands on the back of their heads. The gunman who’d shot Nafari had been taken down too.

I rushed to where I’d last seen him.

The ground and wall were scorched black. There was no body. I started tipping up debris and calling out his name. “Nafari! Nafari!” I screamed, my voice disappearing, my ears thrumming.

A hand gripped my shoulder. “What are you doing, my man?”

I flinched and swung around, my fists up, ready to fight.

“Whoa, let us help you,” the man said, his voice deep and tinny, his face scored with age. He had kind eyes, and I latched onto that.

I tried not to cry as he waited for me to speak. The whole situation was pounding down on me like an enormous fist from the sky. “The man who freed you, who blew the gates is here somewhere…” I managed breathlessly, sweeping my arms over the piles of concrete and segments of iron, pointing to the vague area where I’d seen his smiling face before a blanket of white.

“Nafari!” I yelled again.

The man nodded and started yelling Nafari’s name. Somehow, word traveled, and soon there were twenty people upturning bits of gate and rubble and shouting his name. All the while, others were leaving the compound.

I looked up at the where the gate used to be and saw Desh standing there, beaming. The others were picking their way over the debris too.

“Here!” someone shouted.

I ran to them, my legs grating against sharp rubble. A twisted arm protruded out from under a collapsed shed. The guard’s shed. I kneeled down and grabbed his wrist. A thin pulse blipped under my fingers.

“He’s alive,” I said, relief pouring out of every pore in my body. He was alive.

The others ran towards me, and we pulled the sheets of tin from his body. I gave him a quick physical assessment. He was bleeding badly, but he would live. Some men lifted him up and laid him on one of the sheets of tin.

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