The White City by Alec Michod

Author:Alec Michod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Eighteen

Those could be the stomps of searching feet, solid, fast, coming down on the gangplank overhead. First light breaks early and hard, this Wednesday, cutting in through the peephole in the wall. Their exit, while rushed, is slow, contingent upon the ebbing of sleep. They awake around the same time, except that young Billy prefers to return to dream and Skurlock, jerking upright, exhaling a cloud of breath that smells of three-day-old cabbage, elects to get a move on and to this end says, “Let’s go.”

Billy wants to know where, but he’s still halfway asleep, so every word’s garbled.

Where they’re headed, however, not even Skurlock quite knows. What he does know is that, soon enough, whoever’s after them will be able to find them all the easier on account of the daylight. Best go to the exposition and blend into the throng and seek the pleasures everyone seeks.

Billy, as yet, isn’t ready to get a move on, so he says, “Leave me alone, Han.”

But Skurlock will have none of it and lunges in and grasps both of the kid’s forearms, tugs.

“I’m tired.”

“Don’t care,” says Skurlock. “We must get out of here right this minute,” and the tall man stands, stretches, refits his head with his black hat, straightens his trousers, kicks the soot from his boots, for they slept in a cavern of coal and appear to this world as Negroes. “Come on,” and he leans in once again and grips the boy’s arms, so hard that the boy hoots. His face already crimson, he lifts Billy from his slumber and into a wall. He places his left knee in the kid’s crotch and presses with all his weight, such that the boy’s hoot is now a howl, a yelp, and Skurlock’s screaming, “Come on, you little fucking tyke, we’re leaving. Now!”

They go. Down passageways so steep their feet skid on the wood, under trellises crowded with cobwebs, up stairs so rickety that one step breaks as Skurlock ascends, and finally across a wide, open room, the walls of which are gold, the ceiling a pictograph of a clement day in the Italian countryside, the colors once vibrant, now darkened by time, the flooring a marble dulled to concrete with occasional floorboards overlaid. Skurlock almost trips.

They’re outside now, in the sunlight and the wind, which seems stronger even than last night.

Both of their faces are sooty, itchy, but only the boy has taken to scratching it. The effect is that, once Skurlock has taken his handkerchief and wiped Billy’s face of soot, there linger red scratch marks, the skin around them swollen so that he looks as if he’s been pressed up against a wall of bars.

The sky above is blue as azure and cloudless, save for one lone bird.

All at once, Skurlock hears the searching steps behind them coming closer, louder in volume. Where to go? Back to the White City? That might be too predictable. He knows this place beyond city limits where they could go, where the world as you know it appears to fall from the earth, apart from gravity.

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