Theaella

68

“Check in your weapons, please,” Chatterjee said, gesturing to the lowest bench. We stepped into the gym, Matthew staying next to me like he’d been trained. As Vincent, Alex, and I laid down our weapons, JoJo ran to the Mendez girls, and they did a three-way huddle-embrace. The rest of our little band spread out, greeting our friends, bumping knuckles and waving. It was comforting, but I also felt a weird embarrassment. One of the McGraw boys from my PE class was balled up in a corner sobbing. Leonora Rose, who I’d known since forever, squeezed me in a tight hug. Others crowded in on me with a million questions.

Chubby Chet Rogers leaned toward me, his cheeks flushed with concern. “Did you see my little brother?”

Someone else said, “My mom—was my mom in the square?”

All those dread-filled faces, hands grabbing at me, trying to get my attention. Fighting through claustrophobia, I shook my head. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t. I don’t know.” The kids finally eased off and left me alone, going back to their groups. Gossip swirled all around, bitter with desperation.

“I heard Tommy’s dad put him in a duffel bag.”

“Sheila saw Patrice slung over her mommy’s shoulder in a burlap sack. She said she could see her in there squirming.”

Through the press of bodies, I saw Alex resting her hands on Britney’s shoulders, talking to her. Britney was crying. I figured Alex had told her about seeing her dad and uncle in the square, working the jackhammers, taking down the power grid. They were Hosts like everyone else’s parents. For the first time in my life, I was grateful that my mom and dad weren’t around. Seeing Uncle Jim and Aunt Sue-Anne had been painful enough. At least I never had to see this happen to my parents.

I reached the bleachers and realized I was standing next to Eve Jenkins. She said hi quietly and turned her right cheek away from me, the one with the scrapes.

Vincent had always thought that she had a crush on me, though I wasn’t sure. She’d do things like borrow my science textbook, then stop by our house later with it, apologizing that she’d forgotten to give it back. Vincent said it was an excuse to see me, but I wondered if she was just absentminded. She was pretty in a simple kind of way—dark hair with straight bangs, round face, a dimple in one cheek when she smiled. Even though she was also older than me, next to Alex she still looked like a kid.

Then again, I supposed I still looked like a kid, too.

Up in the bleachers, JoJo and Rocky were sitting behind the Mendez twins, helping them put their hair up in pigtails to cover the patches that had been yanked out.

Eve’s eyes were still lowered, her face turned slightly away. I figured maybe I should take a page from JoJo and Rocky’s book.

“Hey,” I said to her. “You okay?”

Her eyes were watering. “It’s nothing.”

“Fingernails?”

She nodded, maybe because she knew she’d start crying if she spoke.

“Can I clean it for you?” I asked.

She firmed her trembling lips. Then she turned her face fully to me for the first time. Her brown eyes held tiny flecks of yellow. “My mom,” she said. And that was all she could get out.

I took some Neosporin from one of the first-aid kits on the bleachers and put it on a soft gauze pad. I rested one hand on her warm cheek, and she closed her eyes. When the pad dabbed her cuts, she flinched, squeezing the wrist of my hand on her cheek. I didn’t pause, and she didn’t stop me. Matthew walked over and nudged her, and she lowered her other hand. He licked her palm. Once I’d finished, Eve took a shuddering breath and opened her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

We were interrupted by a loud rapping sound. We turned to see Alex tapping the dry-erase board with her hockey stick to get everyone’s attention. Vincent was up front with her, Dr. Chatterjee to the side. The gym fell silent.

Britney stood beside Alex, her face red from crying. They were holding hands, but now Alex let go and stepped in front of the board.

“Okay, guys,” Alex said. “Let’s talk about where we are with everything. Have you tried a phone?”

“Of course we tried a phone,” Ben Braaten said. He wasn’t as tall as Vincent, but he was thicker, with beefy biceps and big square wrists. His flannel shirt tugged up in the front, snared around something shoved in the waistband of his jeans. As he swaggered closer, I saw that it was a bolt gun used to stun cattle before the kill. It made sense, since his dad worked at a slaughterhouse. An image from earlier came to me—Don Braaten in his bloodstained overalls, pinning Janie Woodrow to the road.

Matthew gave a low growl, and a moment later Ben breezed by me, bumping my shoulder. He ran a hand over his bristling crew cut. The rippled flesh from a skin graft at his hairline never ceased to fascinate me, not because it was ugly—it wasn’t—but because it always looked to me like some otherworldly mark. When his drunken older brothers had crashed the Camaro, Ben alone had emerged from the fiery hull, and the scar on his forehead seemed like the thumbprint of an angel or a devil branded into his flesh, marking him to survive.

He crossed his arms, confronting Alex and Vincent. “Phone lines are cut. Internet’s out. Power’s out. We got the emergency generator, but we figure it’s best to use it as little as possible, keep the lights off so we don’t draw the—What’d you call ’em? Hosts? We gotta go through the entire school before we power on the generator, make sure all the light switches and fans are off, anything that’ll alert them. We were just about to get started. So thanks for the quick thinking, Alexandra, but we got it covered.”

“Oh, yeah,” Vincent said, gesturing around. “Looks like you’ve got everything solved, Ben. No need for any new ideas.”

“We’ve managed just fine so far without big bad Vincent Rain. We got a system in place, and that’s the only reason you’re looking at a hundred survivors. We don’t need some blonde waltzing in here giving orders.”

Vincent’s mouth tensed. “I didn’t hear her give any orders.”

“What? She can’t speak up for herself? She needs you to look out for her like you’ve looked out for your kid brother since your parents croaked?”

Vincent set down the shotgun and took a step forward. Ben smiled that twisted smile and raised his fists. “Okay, then.”

Dr. Chatterjee tried to get between Vincent and Ben, but he was too slow; Vincent had already breezed by. “Hang on,” Chatterjee said. “This is the last thing we need right now.”

Vincent and Ben had almost closed in on each other when a scream from outside lofted in through the high windows. The two of them froze. JoJo covered her ears, squeezed her eyes shut. It came again, a child’s cry.

And then suddenly it cut off.

Marina Mendez scampered up the bleachers to the top bench and put her face to the window. “They got Angie B.,” she said.

The silence that followed was broken by a few of the younger kids sobbing. Slowly, I became aware of Vincent and Ben close to me, still locked in their standoff. Vincent stepped back from Ben, holding his hands to the sides. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he turned to Dr. Chatterjee and the other kids. “I was being stupid.”

Alex glared at Ben. “Have you tried the TV?” she asked.

“Cable lines are cut,” Ben said.

“How ’bout the crappy old one with the rabbit ears in the teachers’ lounge?” Alex said. “You think of that?”

Ben reddened a little. “Who cares about the TV?”

“I do. Because with a TV we can see how far this thing’s spread.” Alex reached over her shoulder, grabbing the handle of her hockey stick and whipping it free of the backpack. It looked like she was unsheathing a sword. “I’ll go get it,” she said. “You stay here and act important.”

She turned and pushed out through the swinging doors. Vincent started after her, but Britney wiped her face and said, “It’s okay, Vincent. You stay and help figure things out here. I’ll go with her.”

He hesitated a moment, then nodded. Britney grabbed a baseball bat and jogged out after her best friend, her ponytail bouncing from side to side, the bright ribbon flashing into view.

“Okay,” Chatterjee said. “Chance, will you come up here and explain to everyone what you explained to me?”

I walked to the front, sensing all those sets of eyes on me, a familiar self-consciousness welling in my chest. I felt better when Matthew padded over and sat next to me. I cleared my throat. “Look, I’m not sure about this, but there’s some stuff I thought might be right, maybe.”

“Chance,” Vincent said. “Just tell them.”

So I did. I went through what we’d managed to work out about the spores and the Hosts. Saying it out loud again, I realized just how much we still didn’t know. I felt like an impostor standing up there acting like I was some kind of expert. It didn’t help that Ben stood in the front, arms crossed. A few times Vincent urged me to speak louder so the kids in the back could hear, too. It was hard, but I got through it.

As soon as I was done, the questions started pouring in.

Eve asked, “Why do some of them swell up and explode and others chase kids around and look at the ground and stuff?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“In some species it’s not uncommon to see differentiated roles,” Dr. Chatterjee said, stepping in to help me. “Like ants and bees have drones, workers, and queens. Or it could be that the first-generation Hosts serve to spread the infection and the second-generation Hosts…” He paused. “Act differently.”

Little Jenny White raised her hand next. “I stabbed Mrs. Johnson through the stomach. And she lived.”

Her cheeks were flushed, and her chin trembled. Nine years old or so, standing there in a bloody dress, talking about putting a knife through her neighbor’s gut. A week ago it would have been unthinkable. A day ago it would have been unthinkable.

When Jenny spoke again, her voice was hoarse. “So how do you kill them?”

“We think it’s their brains that are effected,” I said. “So you gotta shoot them in the head.”

Marina Mendez piped up from her post by the window atop the bleachers. “Just like z—”

“Don’t say it,” Rocky cut in.

Dezi Siegler, one of Ben’s buddies, called out from the back, “But we don’t have any guns. Except your brother. And you.”

“Yeah,” Leonora Rose said. “Does other stuff work? Like if you bash them in the skull?”

Ben tugged the bolt gun from his jeans and held it up over his head. He tugged the trigger. Compressed air hissed, and there came the thunderous smack of the steel rod firing. “This worked just fine,” he said.

The raised gun caught a beam of light from the high window. The end was coated in blood.

“But I thought that was just a stun gun,” Eve said.

“For cattle.” Ben thumbed another air cartridge into place. “But compared to a cow skull, a human’s is like an eggshell. It’ll put a Host on the ground in seconds flat.” A smile blossomed on his face. “Trust me.”