I was still in shock even though cutting my hand deep on the jewel brought me back to the current moment, somehow knowing deep down that my best friend was gone forever, and mind fog was threatening to take over. This was not the time to dissociate and check out. I needed to find my sister and get back to the store.
I pushed myself to my feet, still half heaving and hyperventilating with blood dripping down from my hand as I shoved the broken jewel and book into my backpack. I still hadn’t even cracked the book open to look inside. My shoes were caked in mud along with being soaked from falling, along with most of my body. I was shivering, but it wasn’t cold.
I reversed my footsteps and was headed back north again, with the lake on my right. It was always my navigational tool in the city. If it was on the left, I was going south - right I was going north.
I hoped my sister was okay. Like I said earlier, she’s smarter than most adults combined, not even in a nerdy way. She just understands people, and is self sufficient. She just is very empathetic.
As I was creeping along buildings and trees again, I noticed pools of blood everywhere, worse than when Alex and I had seen before we got sidetracked. It looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse, and my heartbeat quickened along with my pace.
Usually crossing Michigan Ave to the lake was overly crowded and full of tourists, and you had to wait for the light to say you could walk because of traffic. I crossed, ignoring the lights, and it felt like a ghost town; I had only experienced downtown like that traipsing around on Christmas Eve and holidays of the like. As if you owned the town, being there by yourself for once.
I reached the slope where I panicked and shoved us earlier, and slowly tried to scoot down before I was sliding uncontrollably. To my panic, my sister was nowhere to be found, but in the mud she had written, “Cultural Center”.
I was obsessed with the place. The lobby and building itself is quite large, so another pang of anxiety ran through me, but at least she was in shelter. I hightailed it over there and burst through the doors where the lobby was dead quiet.
I called her name reluctantly and after no answer, made my way up the marble stairs.
I heard rustling behind a closed door, prepared myself for death, and flung it open with less bravado and confidence than I wanted. Luckily, there she was, looking through a desk. She darted under as I opened the door and hopped back up a second later when she realized it was me. I must have looked like a mess, I realized in the moment. I definitely felt like it, emotionally and physically, but didn’t stop to consider I looked probably like a swamp monster from my knees down.
“Where’s Alex?”, she asked.
I hesitated. She wasn’t 5 years old but she was barely pushing 12, and shit seemed to be hitting the fan more and more quickly. “We got seperated, I’m sure we’ll find each other again.” It wasn’t a full lie, and I intended on telling her when we had a game plan. She was like a sister to us, and the grief was too strong to talk about yet.
To my sisters’ shock, I started stripping my clothes off. “I’m soaked, lady, I’m going to get sick if I don’t get out of these clothes for a minute, don’t judge me.”
My tone made her laugh until she saw my still bleeding hand and rushed forward to look at it.
“I’ve already snooped around most of the building and it was practically empty. There was a first aid kit in the office in the lobby. I’ll go get it!”
I grilled her that it was actually empty and made her take a piece of an art structure in the office we were in that looked to be made out of metal, similar to a fireplace stoker. I had a weird feeling that now that we weren’t directly next to a body of water, we were safe from whatever creatures had been pulling people off floaties and getting closer to land.
I curled up in the fetal position, sobbing and grieving for a moment before I remembered the book and the second half of my mission. I stood up, shaky like a newborn baby giraffe and rifled through my backpack until I had the broken jewel on the floor next to the book. Jagged parts of the remaining jewel were still set in the cover, and without thinking, I placed the broken off piece back on it, where it fit perfectly. I swore shards broke off when I fell, so it should have had some gaps or missing pieces, but it almost looked good as new, and somehow even more shiny than when it first caught my eye. I went to carefully remove it so I could finally open the book, and it felt stuck, exactly the same as how I first found it. I heard the door open and my sister was lugging the big first aid kit in.
“Jesus, were they getting a lot of injuries here?” I cracked and got a little grin out of her. She saw the book and started grilling me, why I would steal it and what it was. I told her I just felt like I had to, it was like something deep inside propelled me to take it, and she sat down next to me, getting out the peroxide and bandaids.
“What is it?” I shrugged, and finally opened the front cover. The jewel still held tight to the front as I gently set it down. Have you ever seen a Bible passed down through a family where the owners signed their names, or school books where you signed your name and the year you had it until you turned it back in at the end of the year? It looked like that, each name signed in intricate cursive. I flipped to the front page and was shocked when I saw what looked like the beginning of a novel, but every other word was maybe in Latin or some language I couldn’t understand or recognize. I saw my name, Alexs’ and my sisters’ between broken sentences.
I quickly turned a few pages while she tended to my other hand, and saw crude drawings of water, of sharp waves with what looked like tentacles reaching out, kind of like what the lochness monster heads looked like in old photos.
I snapped it shut and she was just about done bandaging me up.
“We have to go back to the store and find out what this is. And I need to apologize.”
She looked apprehensive but nodded. We gathered our things and I thew my clothes back on (I still had an undershirt and underwear on, I wasn’t sitting bare-ass naked in the cultural center.) They were still damp but not as bad as before.
As we made our way down and out I hesitantly asked her what the city looked like on the way to getting here. She said there was a lot of chaos, people running around, a lot of them screaming names and seemingly looking for people. As I cracked open the door to make sure it was clear, I told her to try to ignore everything; the streets were still dead and blood was everywhere. She still gasped, and I took her hand and shifted my backpack. We were going to hightail it back to that store.
On the way, some shops looked broken into, I could hardly imagine how the Gold Coast was faring with thousands of dollars worth of bags and clothes sitting in the windows of high end stores. We passed by a few people that seemed to be in shock wandering aimlessly, that seemed to not even notice us.
As we crossed back near the store, puddles of blood made my sister ask where Alex was. I ignored her, I had a sudden thought wondering about our parents. They were divorced, but owned a company together in the West loop/industrial district a little Northeast of Greektown and coexisted enough to keep it up and running. They always managed to tolerate each other enough to keep what brought them together going, and keep roofs over our heads.
I told myself they were safe. They were far away comparatively, though it was only about a thirty minute walk, if you walk like a normal person. Maybe an hour for the habitual slow walkers or tourists.
We were coming up on the store, and the lake looked like a hot tub that someone turned on full blast. Waves were crashing everywhere and there even seemed to be bubbles frothing about.
I grabbed my sister’s hand and forced a smile before we entered back to where we were just hours ago, when it felt like it had been a week.