“We’ve asked you nicely, we’ve offered you a place to go,” he said. “Now I am warning you. These premises do not belong to you. The owner wants to take possession of them. You are being given fair warning that, tomorrow morning, we will vacate the premises by force if necessary. I strongly suggest that you take your things and exit the building by choice.”

Part Fifteen Jesse—May

PART FIFTEEN

JESSE—MAY

1 By force, he said. We all hunched beneath the window of Ale’s room, listening. One by one, guns started coming out of waistbands. I damn near shit myself. We were getting to the end of this thing.

Night was falling, and we knew that whatever happened in the morning, a lot of us might not make it out alive. That was a real motherfucker, you know. Just proof that this world doesn’t want people who are doing good, it doesn’t want people who can rely on each other, it doesn’t want anything without a dollar behind it, or, better yet, a trillion.

I looked behind me to the bed. Ale’s rash had gone away, and his fever had broken. It might have been something viral, not bacterial. We didn’t know. The kid still wasn’t okay, though, listless and puking. We had to get him out of there.

Makayla was a little better than she had been in the hours immediately after Jaden was killed. After Jaden was killed. It all seemed like a dream. Jaden had been one of the best of us, certainly better than me, better than Makayla. And his body had been dragged off so the news crews wouldn’t see it, taken to some morgue. He was gone. Nothing was bringing him back.

I thought Makayla had gone clearly out of her mind when it happened. We found her screaming. After a few hours, she came back from wherever she had gone inside her head, shaken as fuck. She was a wreck. She needed to leave the building, too.

All of us that were left stood in Ale’s room until long things had settled down outside. The police never left, but they made themselves less of a presence. They lurked in the street like a group of wolves waiting for something to die.

After some time had passed, José, Sebastian, and I went back to our apartment. We were keyed the fuck up and there was no way any of us were going to sleep.

“There’s going to be a firefight tomorrow,” José said. He was clearly freaking out. Sebastian seemed calmer, but there was no denying that we were all losing our shit.

“Maybe we’ll just fight them with the shields and batons tomorrow,” Sebastian said.