Theaella

69

Then he regarded the rest of us. “Everyone line up by age,” he said. “Youngest in the front. I’m gonna write all your names and birthdays in order here. So we know.”

After some jostling and confusion, we formed a single row. Everything proceeded in orderly fashion, pretty amazing given what was going on. Maybe we were just happy to have something easy to do. Marina took her spot ahead of Maria, having been born a few minutes before her. Dr. Chatterjee listened to everyone, then jotted his or her information up on the board in his neat hand. The line moved slowly forward. I tried to choke down my fear, to keep my gaze ahead at Rocky’s black curls, at JoJo and the Mendez twins, but every step of the way I sensed Vincent back there toward the end of the line. I didn’t want to know how near the end he was.

Finally I couldn’t fight the urge anymore, and I turned and looked back along the long line of kids, past Ben and Alex and Eve.

Vincent was the second kid from the end.

The last in line was Chet Rogers, his big ruddy face downcast. His arms trembled, and his left knee jackhammered. He twisted one sweaty hand in the other.

Whereas Vincent was trying to fight off his fear and doing a pretty good job of it. I don’t think anyone except me could tell how rattled he was, but I knew him the way only brothers know each other. The way he knew me.

His jaw looked tight. His mouth thin and firm. For a moment I thought he was holding it together for me like he always did. But then I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Alex.

And she was looking back at him. I didn’t think it was possible for her to seem more upset than she had when Britney died, but she held herself now as if her body were hollow, as if her insides had crumbled away.

I knew she felt that way because I felt that way myself.

Eve traced where I was looking and stepped forward in line. “I’m so sorry, Chance,” she said.

“I’m fine,” I said, and turned back around quickly so she couldn’t see me bite my lip. I reached down, and sure enough, Matthew was there, his black muzzle pointed up at me. I scratched at his scruff beneath the collar the way he always loved, and he tilted into me. “Good boy,” I said. “Good, good boy.” It was all I could do to hold myself together.

Finally I arrived at the front of the line. I had to fight to keep my voice from cracking when I spoke to Dr. Chatterjee. “July fourth,” I said. “Not sure what time.”

“Thank you, Chance,” he said. “I seem to recall you were born in the morning.”

I went and took my seat on the bleachers with the others. After a while Alex came and sat next to me.

“Hey, Blanton,” I said.

“Hey, Little Rain.”

It made me smile, which I’m sure was her intent. “I hate when you call me that,” I said.

She leaned over, gave me a playful bump with her shoulder. “Yup.” But it was sad, too. There was nothing more to say, really. It was just a way of reaching out, of connecting. We were united in that moment as the two people who cared the most about Vincent. And about what was gonna happen to him.

A while later—though we tried not to notice how much later—my brother joined us on the bleachers. Together we listened to Chet give his birthday in a trembling voice.

Ben hopped up onto one of the middle bleachers and started pacing across it. The front of his shirt was stiff with dried blood from where he’d wiped his hands. “Look,” he said, “the first thing to figure out is who’s in charge. And I think it’s pretty clear who’s protected us the best so far.” The heel of his hand rested on the stun gun tucked in his waistband.

“Dr. Chatterjee’s in charge,” I said.

Ben cast his broken gaze over at me. “Dr. Chatterjee,” he said, “can’t hold a gun. Not with that grip.”

A lot of the kids looked taken aback. We’d heard students be rude to teachers before, but we’d never seen one be so dismissive before.

Ben’s mood had changed since he’d returned from taking care of Britney’s body. He seemed more cocky, his eyes gleaming with some secret confidence.

Dr. Chatterjee took off his glasses again, calmly polishing them. “Is that what you think leadership is about, Mr. Braaten?” he asked.

“Not generally,” Ben said. “But now more than ever.”

“How about wisdom? Experience?”

“You may have noticed that age ain’t exactly being rewarded in the new order.” Ben scanned the kids’ faces. “Like I said, I’m willing to do what has to be done to keep you guys safe.”

“You wouldn’t send help for d**k and Jaydon,” Eve said, “when they went to help the others. So which of us are you keeping safe?”

“The majority of you.”

“Which is fine,” Vincent said. “Until you’re not part of the majority.”

Rocky spoke up. “I think our leader should be Dr. Chatterjee,” he said. “And whoever’s oldest.”

We looked up at that board, Chet Rogers’s name at the very bottom. His birthday four days from now.

And Vincent’s name written right above.

Chet made a nervous noise. I thought maybe he was going to say something, but he drew into himself. He crossed his arms over his chest as if he were hugging himself. His eyes stayed lowered as he tried to smooth out his breathing, but he was wheezing pretty good. I remembered how his mother and the school nurse always seemed to hover nearby, fearful of an attack. A kid with asthma in farm country was at no small risk. If he had an episode now, I’d have to run to the nurse’s office to fetch his oxygen mask.

But Ben paid Chet little mind. “If we’re going for stability,” Ben said to Eve, “why would we choose leaders who are next in line to die?”

Vincent stood up abruptly. “Let’s cut to it. Do we agree that everyone gets a vote?”

Most everybody nodded.

“Okay. How many vote that Dr. Chatterjee’s in charge?”

About three-fourths of the hands went up.

“That’s settled, then,” Vincent said, with a glance at Ben. “Now let’s get back to figuring out just what the hell to do.”

“Fine,” Ben said. He cast a look across the faces of the kids. “But think about it. When the next Host shows up, who do you want between you and it? Me or Chatterjee?”

“For now, Mr. Braaten, we will let that remain a rhetorical question,” Dr. Chatterjee said, “and get back to the facts as we’re learning them. Eighteen appears to be the age at which people … transform.” His forehead furrowed as he puzzled this out. “Once that chronological point is crossed, it’s as if a switch is thrown, making the person susceptible to spores in the air.”

“How do you know the spores aren’t already inside us all?” Eve asked. “Just hanging out, waiting to spread?”

Dr. Chatterjee blinked a few times. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I don’t.”

“No,” Chet said, still rocking himself. “You’re right.”

“How do you know?” Chatterjee asked. “Chet? How do you know?”

“I … um, I saw my neighbor—Mr. Gaeta? Right after it happened. He was chasing a kid down the middle of our street, and a car…” Chet gasped a few times. “I saw his brains when they … spilled out. And they were black. Like covered with oil. And then next…” His breathing quickened, and for a moment I thought he might hyperventilate. “The car plowed into the kid he’d been chasing.” He took in a gulp of air. “Luis Millan.”

At this a wail went up from the back of the gym. Probably one of Luis’s cousins. We were all shocked.

“His head was…” Chet’s hand hovered by his forehead. “And his … brain … I could see … it looked normal. It wasn’t all black and oily. Not yet. So no, I don’t think the stuff was in there. I think it waits in the air until the second we turn eighteen. Your brain’s ready, and then that next breath costs you … everything.” He stared at his trembling hands. “Like Britney.”

Alex pulled the cuffs of her sweater down over her fists. She jackknifed over, her feet up on the bleacher bench in front of her, her arms pressed between her thighs and her chest. Vincent sat beside her, rubbing her back.

Again I looked across at my brother’s name and birthday written up on the board. Then down at the wet smudge from the mop where Britney had fallen.

I didn’t mean to speak, at least not that loudly, but there was my voice, carrying across the gym. “How could they know?”

“How do they know any of it?” Ben said. “They know to burn the guns. They know to cut the power. And the phone lines. The grown-ups—it’s like they’re still in there somewhere, but just the bad parts.”

Beside me, Alex shook off a shudder.

I said, “What I mean is, how could the parasite know exactly when Britney turned eighteen?”

Rocky said, “Well, Dr. C. said the white matter—”

“I know, I know,” I said. “But everyone develops at different rates. I mean, we’re humans. It’s not like we’re trees and you can just cut us open and count the rings inside. I know that doctors can make guesses based on teeth and bone development and stuff, but it’s not like we have some internal meter or something. Besides, nothing can tell when we actually enter the world. I mean, as opposed to conception or being in the womb or whatever.”

“If there is a meter of some kind,” Eve said, “maybe it starts the instant air first hits the lungs?”

“But there isn’t one.” I looked over at Dr. Chatterjee. “Isn’t that right?”

“Not a meter, exactly,” he said. “But there is something. Structures on the tips of chromosomes called telomeres. They’re repetitive nucleotide sequences that get shortened every time DNA duplicates. Recently there’s been some research indicating that these provide estimates for how long an organism has been alive and how long it has until it dies. They’ve been doing promising work with warblers on Cousin Island—”

“But those are estimates,” I said.

“As our technology advances,” Chatterjee said, “we are finding them to be alarmingly accurate as indicators of life expectancy.”

“Fine,” I said. “But we can’t tell how old a person is to the day. To the minute.”

“Well…” Ben stood up, his weight creaking the bleacher. “We can’t.”

I felt a tingling under my scalp. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we’re dealing with more than spores and parasites,” Ben said. He hopped down the benches, one after another, then stood at the bottom and looked up at me, Alex, and Vincent. “When I was out there taking care of Britney’s body, guess who I bumped into? Ezekiel. Looks like our ol’ janitor was sleeping off a hangover in the football stadium again, woke up with the commotion.” Ben took a moment to wipe his hands across the front of his shirt, mimicking the gesture that had left those bloody streaks. “So I handled him, too.” With a glance at Chatterjee, he added, “Maybe not as well as our elected leader here could’ve.”