Nomad (19 page)

Jess pulled on her mother’s arm. “We need to go.”

The woman cradled her husband in her arms, rocking back and forth as the sea of people streamed past her. Celeste let go and stood, nodding. Taking one last look, she turned and walked with the flow, reaching to grab Jess.

But Jess stood still.

Her instincts told her to run. Away. To follow the herd. But the first rule of tactical decision making was to follow the plan—unless there was a good reason to deviate. Jess gripped her crutches, felt them dig into her armpits, and steeled herself against Celeste trying to pull her with the crowd. She stared up at the disappearing mushroom cloud, the rain clouds now coming together under it, a pillar of black smoke rising to meet them. Sometimes the right thing to do was the thing that felt wrong.

“Come on, we need to go,” Celeste urged, her voice desperate.

“No,” Jess said from between gritted teeth. She pulled away from her mother. “This way.” She swung forward on her crutches, straight against the flow of the crowd.

“JESS! What are you doing?”

The military Humvee on the corner, the man in the military uniform. That had to be whom her father sent. He said he told the driver to return, and not to leave, not for
any
reason. She glanced up at the column of black smoke. She hoped that this didn’t exceed
any reason
for an Italian military attaché.

“Dad sent someone to get us.” Jess pressed through the crowd. “If he’s still there, that’s our best bet on getting out of here.”

“We need to go to the American Embassy!” Celeste screamed. She followed Jess anyway.

“Are you kidding? No way we’ll be getting in there now. And if we weren’t getting out of here by ourselves before, now there’s absolutely no way.” Jess swung forward, swearing and screaming at people to watch where they were going, to get out of her way.

“Are you sure?” Celeste muscled her way beside Jess. She looked into the sky. “Was that a nuclear bomb? Should we be walking toward it?”

Jess shook her head. “It seemed too small for a nuclear blast, as big as it was.” She had firsthand experience with conventional munitions, but the truth was, she wasn’t sure. Small tactical nukes existed. “Five minutes this way, and we can see if the driver is still there. If not, then we can go your way.”

A gamble.

They crossed the
Piazza Navona
again, pushing through the crowds choking the streets. The flood of clean-faced, scared-looking tourists clutching their children became interspersed with the staggering, ragged and bloodied. A woman, naked, her body burnt and flayed, ran past them screaming. By the time they reached the other side of the
piazza
, everyone was covered in soot, their clothing ripped to shreds over fresh scarlet wounds.

Black smoke billowed up Angela’s street when they turned into the alley, dust and debris scattering into the
piazza
. Jess stopped to pull her tank top around her mouth. She squinted into the dust. She couldn’t see past the sea of people flowing toward her, the alleyway fading into grayness. Gritting her teeth, she squinted and swung forward on her crutches, doing her best to ignore the wailing people passing her. A woman screamed, appeared out of the grayness holding a bloody mess in her arms. A tiny baby. She disappeared into the brown-gray mist.

Jess’s eyes teared.

There.

On the corner.

A car pulled up and its driver jumped out and looked around, then waved at her.

“Mom!” Jess screamed, turning to find Celeste stumbling behind her. “He’s here, the man Dad sent!”

Jess hopped forward, swung as fast as she could on the crutches. The outline of the car grew clearer. But that was no Humvee. She swung another few steps closer.

And that was no military attaché.

It wasn’t even a man.

“Jessica!” yelled Massarra, the young woman who’d helped them the night before. “Come on, get in.” She ran around the other side of his car, a small Hyundai, and opened the door.

Swinging the last two paces to the car, Jessica grabbed onto the door and stared at Massarra. “What are you doing here? Did my father send you?” This didn’t make any sense. Jess glanced inside the car. One of Massarra’s uncles nodded at her, urged her to get inside the car.

“I knew you were here,” Massarra replied. “As I said, we were driving north. We need to hurry.”

The billowing smoke thinned, and dark droplets inked the cobblestones. Jess looked up, the smoke clearing enough to see the clouds again, churning in the sky. Her hair blew back in a sudden wind, and a squall of raindrops fell across the car. Black streaks ran down the windshield. If that was an atomic blast, this rain could be toxic.

“Please, help me,” a woman pleaded in front of Jess, half of her face gone, replaced by an angry red mass of blood and blackened flesh hanging under one eye.

Huge black drops fell from the sky, spattering off the cobblestones. Tactical decision making dictated following the plan, but it also meant being flexible when needed. The black rain pelted against the windshield, ran in dark rivulets down Jess’s arms.

“Mom!” Jess yelled. “Get in!” She opened the back door for Celeste and waited for her mother to get in beside the uncle.

Jess jumped into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.

20

R
OME,
I
TALY

“SORRY, BUT I cannot drive to Germany.” Massarra’s smile turned to a grimace. She shifted gears and accelerated onto the on-ramp of
Autostrade 90,
Rome’s ring road. “We are driving home to Turkey. It’s a twenty-hour drive, but it’s the only way. I can drive you near to Florence, but I must go east from there.” Her two other uncles had managed to get a flight, she explained. After getting the car, she decided to look for Jess and Celeste. She knew they needed help. Once you became involved in someone’s life, she explained, there was an obligation to stay involved. At least, that was he way her world worked.

Whomp-whimp…whomp-whimp…
the windshield wipers swished back and forth, slicking the rain away. Jess glanced to her right. Through the mist, a gray smudge over the center of Rome stretched into the clouds. Stopped cars lined the
Autostrade
, the passengers outside them hanging over the guardrails, everyone staring at what was left of the Eternal City.

Massarra’s uncle sat stoically in the back seat beside Celeste. This one didn’t speak English, Massarra explained, switching into Arabic from time to time to update him.

In their flight from the center of Rome, the crush of people—ragged and bloody walking corpses—had thinned after a few blocks. There was nothing they could do but get out, get away from the noxious black rain. At the first roundabout, they passed a knot of overwhelmed ambulances, and after a few more blocks, only the noise of sirens and police cars screaming past into the city gave any indication of the destruction behind them. They’d been caught in a heavy downpour, but the rain was almost finished. Just a spattering onto the windshield. The sun broke through the clouds.

Massarra turned off the wipers. “You said you had a friend you stayed with, in Chianti?” She glanced at Celeste in the back seat. “Giovanni? Perhaps I could drop you there?”

“It’s not a
bad
idea.” Celeste leaned forward. “Giovanni sent you a text, saying we could come back there, right?” she asked Jess. “If we needed help?”

Jess nodded. “But I haven’t talked to him. And how did…?” She looked at Celeste, flicked her chin in Massarra’s direction.

“You fell asleep, but Massarra and I talked for hours. I told her about where we stayed, about your father. If anyone has communication gear to reach Ben, I’d bet Giovanni has it. Short wave radios, all sorts of stuff in his office.”

Jess nodded. It did make sense.

“And…” Celeste whispered, beckoning Jess to lean closer. “…We don’t know what’s happening. Maybe this is just a small part of something larger. We need to get somewhere safe.”

Jess hadn’t thought of that. Was this the first salvo in the start of a global war
?

Images of New York burning flashed through her mind. They had the radio on, but they could only find Italian stations. None of them, not even Massarra, spoke Italian well enough to decipher what the radio announcers screamed about. They kept the radio on anyway. After stopping at a gas station on the way out of Rome, they managed to piece together that there hadn’t been any other attacks. Not yet, anyway.

Massarra took the exit for
Autostrade
A1, the highway connecting Rome and Florence. The skies cleared, patches of blue showing through, and apartment blocks gave way to rolling hills.

“Giovanni’s castle withstood a thousand years of everything the world threw at it,” Celeste said to Jess in a low whisper. “Those Etruscan caves, I’ll bet people hid in there from earthquakes, eruptions…”

Jess stared at a village nestled on a mountaintop in the distance. High up. Protected.

“Okay,” Jess conceded, “let’s go back to Giovanni’s place.”

Celeste squeezed her shoulder. “Good.”

Even so, something about this felt wrong. The most important thing in any crisis was to collect information and find a safe place to regroup. Jess just lived through a horrific disaster, but that wasn’t it. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, but something wasn’t right.

Then again, they didn’t have many options.

Massarra had probably saved their lives not once, but
twice
in the past twenty-four hours, and Castello Ruspoli was about as safe a place as she could imagine.

“Massarra, can you take us to the Castello?” Celeste asked, sitting back. “It’s 45 minutes off the A1, to the west.”

“Yes,” Massarra replied. “But I can’t stay. Do you know the way?”

“I know the way.”

Jess settled into her seat and watched the countryside slide by. The drive from Rome to
Castello Ruspoli
wasn’t far—not in North American terms, not even two hours. The change in scenery was dramatic; in twenty minutes they went from cityscape to the rolling, baked-earth hills of central Tuscany. Surreal. She watched a man in a tractor till his fields, as if that mattered anymore.

At
Bettole
they pulled off the main highway and wound their way through small towns. At open-air cafés, people stood in groups watching TVs, images of a wrecked Rome flashing as they passed. The setting sun lit high, thin clouds pink as Massarra pulled the car onto a dusty road with a sign for
Castello Ruspoli
. Climbing the zigzag road up the side of the hill, through the olive groves, at the top they followed a brick-walled alley to the main castle gates.

Massarra stopped the car at the entrance. It was closed. “This is it, yes?”

Staring out the windshield, Jess saw the first star of the night in the darkening sky—not a star, she realized, but Venus. But there were no lights in the castle. Strange.

“Yes, this is it.” Jess stepped out of the car, arranged her crutches, and swung to the small wooden entrance beside the massive iron portico gates. “Hello?” she called out.

“Are you sure you won’t stay the night?” Jess heard her mother ask Massarra.

“I will make sure you have somewhere to stay, but we need to go,” came Massarra’s quiet reply.

“It was nice to meet you again,” Celeste said to Massarra’s uncle as she got out.

Jess searched for a buzzer, a knocker. Nothing. She banged the door with her fist, as hard as she could. “Giovanni!” she yelled. “It’s Jess and Celeste.”

The place felt deserted.

Had something happened? Maybe Giovanni left for Florence. Massarra could drop them there, but the prospect of another city felt dangerous. And how or why would they look for Giovanni anyway? She liked being in the countryside. Open space. Calming her breathing, she listened. Crickets sang in the silence, their chirps echoing off the walls.

She turned to Massarra and Celeste. “I don’t think anyone is”—the door to the castle swung open—“here.”

Giovanni stood in the doorway, a holstered handgun on his hip. “Yes?” he asked, his brows knitted together in a scowl.

“Ah, sorry for not calling,” Jess mumbled. “But, we got stuck in Rome.” As her eyes adjusted to the darkness inside, she saw two thick-set men in bullet proof vests and dark clothing standing behind Giovanni. Between them stood Nico, who smiled warmly and waved.

But Giovanni didn’t smile. He stared hard at Jess. “And…?”

She hadn’t given much thought to how Giovanni might react when they showed up on his doorstep. He had invited them, after all. She imagined an impassioned reunion, tears over the horrors of Rome. It made sense that they might show up. She didn’t expect this cold, standoffish reaction. She felt self-conscious, exposed, the stump of her leg cold. “We were hoping we might be able to stay here. You invited us.”