Theaella

67

I ushered JoJo before me, struggling somehow to rush her and not rush her at the same time. She barely had to crouch to get through the fence, Bunny dragging in the dirt. Matthew followed her, and then it was just me with Eddie in the tight corridor.

I could hear his shallow breaths, practically feel them against my back. My hands cramped around the handles of the baling hooks. I forced myself to release them, letting them dangle from my wrists by their loops. Fighting down my panic, I bent over, stretched my arms into the gap, and slid through. Vincent caught my hands as I knew he would and whisked me through the gap. Alex lowered the chain-link section as gently as she could, closing it like a curtain. It made the faintest click.

Eddie reached the fence, his eye tunnels aimed just in front of his toes. We stood right on the far side of the chain-link. All he had to do was tilt his head up an inch and he’d see us.

But instead he turned on his heel—a neat pivot like you see in the army when some junior officer is dismissed—and continued his course along the fence line. I exhaled.

We moved backward, keeping our eyes on him even as he continued his right-angle swivels through the trash zone. The dew-wet grass of right field shot up beneath the cuffs of my jeans, tickling my ankles. At last I felt the dirt of the infield beneath my boots and turned to face Creek’s Cause High. I realized now why Vincent had pointed us here. After a few school shootings swept through the heartland, the town council had voted to make the grounds as secure and contained as possible.

It was the only place in town that was completely fenced off.

Who’d have ever thought high school would be our last safe haven?

We spread out, breathing easier as we headed toward the dark, sprawling building. The football stadium loomed to the left. We reached the math-and-science wing first, Mrs. Wolfgram’s classroom at the near end. Cupping my hands like a scuba mask, I put my face to the window. The rows of empty desks inside looked emptier now. Proofs scribbled on the dry-erase board. Faded charts breaking down geometric 3-D shapes and surface areas. A dangling wooden octahedron made from eight equilateral triangles, an extra-credit project built by Janie Woodrow or, more likely, her overly involved mother. I thought about how competitive Janie always was, wearing down the teachers to turn her A-minuses into straight A’s, and how much I resented and envied that at the same time. A memory flashed at me, Don Braaten pinning Janie down in the middle of the road, his grown-man knee crushing into her back, her cheek smashed to the asphalt. Had there been tears? We were too far away to see, but Janie tended to cry easily.

I used to make fun of her for her color-coded Post-its, her collection of mechanical pencils, her flawless handwriting, and now I regretted every unkind word.

To my side, Vincent jiggled the handle of a service door. Locked.

The faintest clank.

Inside the room with me.

I froze, one boot inches above the dusty floor.

It came again. Clank-clank.

I bit my lip, lowered my weight. Was it one of the machines, shuddering with a dying jolt of electricity?

I leaned around the band saw. The vertical blade cut my view in half, but I could still make out a man hunched over the workbench across the room. Though his back was turned, I could see his hand to the side, hovering over various tools, deciding which one to grab. Wrench … Phillips head … clawhammer.

The hand closed around the clawhammer.

The man straightened up and started to turn, his legs swinging stiffly. I dropped behind the base of the band saw, my knees rising to touch my chin. I heard another clank and realized that the sound came from leg braces.

Dr. Chatterjee.

The footsteps neared. Clank-clank. Clank-clank.

I debated shouting for Vincent, but if there were other Hosts all around us, that would only alert them. I braced myself, hoping Chatterjee would change course. My baling hooks were at the ready, but I hadn’t killed anyone yet and prayed that I wouldn’t have to now. Sweat stung my eyes. My heartbeat came so loud I thought he might hear it.

Clank-clank. Clank-clank.

A worn loafer set down in view—clank—and I knew his next step would bring me into full sight. I set my feet and sprang.

But my boot skidded on a slick of sawdust, and I fell forward, dropping the baling hooks, my palms jarring the floor. I rolled over onto my back, arms raised over my face. Dr. Chatterjee stood nearly on top of me, the hammer swaying at his side.

With my wrists I jerked at the baling hooks’ nylon loops, trying to tug the handles into my palms. They bounced off my fingers. I couldn’t look away, not even as Dr. Chatterjee leaned over me. For an instant the faint light from outside hit his wire-rimmed eyeglasses at the perfect angle, turning the lenses to mirrored circles. I knew that once he moved another inch, the glint would vanish and I would see what lay beneath.

I steeled myself for those tunnels, two circular views through to the ceiling above, and I wondered if this would be the last thing I’d ever see.

Dr. Chatterjee looked down at me.

With real eyes.

I let out a garbled sound, choking on a gasp.

His gentle voice descended on me with that great lilting accent. “Chance? Is that you?”

It took two tries before I could find any words. “Dr. Chatterjee,” I said. “Wait—you’re a grown-up. Why aren’t you infected?”

He held out a trembling hand to pull me up to my feet. “That isn’t the question,” he said. “It’s the answer.”

We all headed down the long school hallway clustered together, Dr. Chatterjee moving at a decent pace despite his leg orthotics. I was still breathing hard, relieved that I hadn’t had my skull caved in by my favorite teacher.

“White matter!” Dr. Chatterjee announced excitedly. “It’s the key.”

“Like brain white matter?” I asked.

“Shouldn’t we keep our voices down?” Vincent said.

Dr. Chatterjee waved him off. “It’s safe in here. Now, look.” He unclipped an electronic unit swaying from his belt like a holstered gun. We all crowded around to see it in the dim hall.

“Wait,” Rocky said. “That’s the carbon monoxide detector thing, right?”

We looked at him, surprised.

“What?” he said. “I was emergency room captain in Mrs. Rauch’s class last year.”

“That’s right,” Dr. Chatterjee said. “It detects carbon monoxide, natural gas, other hazardous leaks. But check this out.” He clicked a button, backlighting the screen, which blinked code red. Beneath it two words flashed: UNIDENTIFIED PARTICULATE.

His face, shiny with sweat, held equal parts worry and excitement. “So my hypothesis is that this airborne particulate enters the human body—”

“Tell him about the spores,” Vincent said to me.

Dr. Chatterjee stiffened. “What spores?”

“Like the zombie ants,” I said.

His lips quivered a little. He scratched at the side of his face, the stubble giving off a rasping sound. It occurred to me that I’d never seen him not perfectly clean-shaven. “What do you mean, Chance?”

“Well, we saw Hank McCafferty—” I caught myself, feeling a surge of remorse. I glanced nervously at Rocky and JoJo.

Rocky’s eyes glimmered, but he kept his chin up. “It’s okay,” he said. “I want to know.”

I took a deep breath. Then I continued, filling in Dr. Chatterjee, starting with when Vincent had interrupted me in the barn. The acrid smell on the wind. The hammering noises and screams carrying over from the McCafferty place. When I got to the part about Mrs. McCafferty in the grain silo, JoJo buried her and Bunny’s faces in her brother’s chest. I described climbing to the top of the water tower and the sight waiting for us, Hank blown wide open, releasing spores to the wind.

Rocky held his sister tight. He didn’t sob, but tears spilled down his cheeks. Alex put her arms around him from behind, holding him even as he held JoJo. My face burned as I related details of Hank’s death—I knew as well as anyone that a child should never have to know too much about that—but I also realized that everything was different now.

We couldn’t lose track of our emotions, certainly, but we couldn’t give in to them the way we used to. Maybe Rocky and JoJo would need this information someday. Dr. Chatterjee certainly needed it now.

I finished telling him about the scene at the water tower and said, “Like those ants in that video you showed us. With the parasite?”

He took off his glasses and polished the lenses on his rumpled button-down shirt, though they did not look in need of polishing. “Ophiocordyceps unilateralis,” he said quietly. “The pieces are starting to fit together.”

“How?” Vincent said.

“Those adults out there”—Chatterjee pointed a trembling finger through the doorway of the nearest classroom to the windows and beyond—“have been infected.” He shook the detector, the words blinking out at us again: UNIDENTIFIED PARTICULATE. “This parasite attacked their white matter.”

“So why didn’t it attack ours?” Alex asked.

“You’re teenagers,” he said. “You have less.”

Vincent drew back his head. “We do?”

“Of course. Kids have a lesser-developed frontal cortex.”

“Rub it in,” Alex said.

“Look,” Chatterjee said. His hands shaped the air as they did when he was in teacher mode. He seemed to forget that one of them was gripping a clawhammer. “Every year from childhood on, white matter wraps around more and more of the nerve cells of the brain—that process is called myelination.”

“What is white matter?” Rocky asked.

As the sun inched up, squares of light from the windows stretched across the classroom floor opposite us. Some of the male Hosts had drawn closer to the school, spiraling their way around the front parking lot. One man in a scuffed denim jacket drew closer to the fence, his shoulder rat-a-tat-tatting along the chain-link, the sound sending electricity up my spine. Dr. Chatterjee took Rocky by the arm, drawing him out of sight past the doorway, the rest of us following. Sensing that something was wrong, Matthew leaned into my leg, his black-mask face pointed up, no doubt reading the stress coming off me.

“White matter transmits information from different parts of the body back to the cerebral cortex,” Chatterjee said, the hammer wagging by his face. “Which helps with executive function—decision making, attention, planning, motivation. Think of the myelination of axons as creating information pathways, connections that allow communication between all the parts of the brain. That’s what maturity is, really. Teenagers grow more white matter every year. But the last part of the brain to be myelinated is the frontal lobe.”

“So you’re basically saying we’re all stupid,” Alex said.

Chatterjee shook his head. “I’m saying that part of being a kid, a teenager, is that you literally don’t have the capacity yet to think fully about the consequences of your actions.”

Alex cut in: “Where have I heard that before?”

Vincent had leaned back around the doorjamb to spy on the Hosts outside. Chatterjee yanked him back, as if proving his point, while barely slowing down. “That’s why teenagers can be impulsive, angry, lovesick, higher in risk taking—”

“Well,” Vincent said. “We’ll need risk taking now.”

“That’s absolutely true. But if what Chance is saying is correct, then this airborne parasite invades its host and gains control by spreading through the white matter, seizing control of the frontal cortex.” He waved the clawhammer in a circle. “From there it takes over the brain and the nervous system, manipulating the host like a puppet. It can run the human body as if it’s a machine, operating the muscles without regard for pain or injury.”

I thought about Uncle Jim’s death shudder. All those men we’d seen out there, walking their mindless spirals. Coach Hanson scrabbling forward to get us, not even caring about the bone sticking out of her leg.

I suddenly understood. “So if the parasite is spread through white matter, the frontal cortex—the puppet master—has to be covered with white matter for it to become infected. Or else the spores have no pathways to get to our brain’s control centers.”

“That’s right!” Dr. Chatterjee said. “Which means the thing that makes it harder for teenagers to formulate mature decisions is the same thing that saved you. And saved me.”

Suddenly I felt much younger than my fifteen years. There it was, tightening around my spinal cord, that same sensation I’d felt as a six-year-old waking up to Sheriff Blanton standing on our porch, shifting awkwardly from boot to boot, hat in his hands, bad news on his face. That feeling of bone-deep aloneness, as if I’d been set adrift, a boat left to navigate across the rocky slate of the ocean. If what Dr. Chatterjee was saying was true, then the people least equipped to make good decisions were the only ones around Creek’s Cause left to make them.

Like me.

But Vincent was still focused on Chatterjee. “Why’d it save you?”

“Do you know what causes multiple sclerosis?” Chatterjee asked.

We all shook our heads.

“White-matter lesions.” He smiled. “I have enough holes in my brain that the parasite couldn’t take me over either.” Turning, he started back up the hallway, wobbling past the cracked-porcelain bank of water fountains. I hurried to keep up, Matthew scampering along at my side. With his big strides, Vincent had no problem regaining the lead.

we couldn’t lose track of our emotions, certainly, but we couldn’t give in to them the way we used to. maybe rocky and jojo would need this information someday. dr. chatterjee certainly needed it now.

i finished telling him about the scene at the water tower and said, “like those ants in that video you showed us. with the parasite?”