Theaella

71

“I don’t know how to break this to you, Ben, but dogs don’t generally use toilets.”

His face shifted, and for a moment I worried that I’d joked too hard. But instead he held out his hand. “Flashlight.”

“How am I supposed to—”

“I don’t care how you do anything. I’m not having you put the group at risk if a Host sees you out there. And a flashlight means you could be spotted from far away.”

I slapped the Maglite into his palm.

He leaned over me. “Don’t make a noise. And make sure your dog doesn’t either.”

He shoved the doors open and made me walk under his armpit to get out. I headed down the hall, hesitating by the front doors. Since setting foot inside the school, I hadn’t been back outside. It felt safe in here, sheltered and protected.

“You heard the jerk,” I told Matthew. “Not a sound.”

I pushed the doors open, and we eased out, the night breeze chilling my neck, my hands. Though we kept on the lawn close to the building, I shot nervous glances through the front gates to the parking lot and the street beyond. A few Mappers moved along. I couldn’t make out anything more than their shadowy forms, but I recognized the posture, the pattern of their steps.

One of them stopped and tilted his head back. His eyes, aimed at the heavens, began to glow. I watched, fascinated and horrified. If our theory was right, he was uploading data. Sending along the terrain he’d scanned to whoever that squirming virtual eye belonged to. The breeze wafted over the sound of throaty clicking, the same sound Sheriff Blanton had been making in Alex’s closet. It struck me that it sounded a bit like a fax machine trying for a connection or the noises I’d heard Internet dial-ups make in old movies.

Finally the Mapper lowered his head and continued on his course.

I urged Matthew onto the dewy lawn, and he darted along with his nose to the ground, sniffing.

“Come on,” I whispered. “Just go already.”

He moved closer to the edge of the lawn, toward the fence line.

“Hey, stop. Matthew. Matthew.”

I was gonna tug him back toward the building, but try telling a dog where to go to the bathroom. At last he lifted his leg and started peeing right on the fence.

As I looked up, a Host emerged from the darkness, the hollowed-out face right there on the far side of the chain-link. My insides froze. I opened my mouth to yell but somehow managed to stop the noise in my throat.

The Host was Mr. Tomasi, his elbow-patched corduroy blazer looking frayed, his eyeholes focused on the ground in front of him.

He swept past me, close enough that I could smell a lingering trace of his cologne. His loafer moved right through the spot where Matthew was peeing, but he kept on, never so much as raising his head.

I watched until he vanished back into the darkness, and at some point I remembered to close my mouth.

I looked down at Matthew, and he looked up at me, his forehead furrowed.

“Let’s not do that again,” I said.

We headed back up the broad stone steps to the front doors. When we stepped inside, a hand set down on my shoulder, hard, startling me.

Ben had snuck over from his post in the gym to spy on us.

“If you’d screwed up,” he said, tapping my chest with his stun gun, “I’d have killed you myself.”

I believed him.

I’m snuggled in the sheets, and Sue-Anne sits next to me, leaning against the headboard, reading from To Kill a Mockingbird. Vincent is down with Uncle Jim in the garage, helping him change out the brake pads on his truck. He’s eight and gets a whole other set of privileges, including coming up to bed later.

I lie as still as possible, hoping that if I’m good, she’ll read one more chapter, that she’ll keep going forever. But she doesn’t. She finishes the page and closes the book, and my heart sinks. It is my third month in their house, and this quiet time with her is my favorite time of all. Tonight I will figure out how to fall asleep alone. Tomorrow I will get up early to help on the ranch before school. Everything is different.

Sue-Anne leans over, kisses my forehead.

The words burn in my chest, and before I can catch them, they are out of my mouth. “I hate them,” I say.

On her way out the door, she pauses. “I don’t understand.”

“My parents.”

She takes a moment, her lips pouched out like she’s thinking real hard. “Why do you say that, Chance?”

“They didn’t have to get drunk and get in a stupid car crash. They had me and Vincent at home. They never even thought about us that night.”

She doesn’t say anything. She just nods—not like in agreement but to show she’s listening. I know I’m acting like a baby, but I can’t help it. Everything’s burning—my chest, my face, my eyes.

“And I don’t want to—” My breath catches in my throat, and I have to stop for a second. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I say it anyways. “And I don’t want to grow up yet.”

She nods again, and her eyes are wistful, and I realize that even though I’ve known her my whole life, maybe I don’t know her much at all. When she speaks, her tone is as soft and kind as I’ve ever heard it. “Sometimes what we want isn’t what we need.” I look up at her, confused. “What does that mean?” I say.

A commotion jarred me out of the dream memory.

Hushed whispers and quiet footfalls. But it wasn’t the noise that was alarming so much as the panic running through the room. I opened my eyes, disoriented by the tall ceiling, the bright light streaming through the high windows, the movement all around me. On a slight delay, reality flooded in.

The gym. With the survivors. Uncle Jim and Sue-Anne dead. Kids snatched. Hosts everywhere. Our town overrun.

I sat up and followed the current of hushed anxiety. It had direction to it, pointing at Vincent in the lookout post atop the bleachers. With Alex at his side, he was ducked beneath the windowsill, his eyes wide.

His stare found me among the kids, and he gestured for me to get up there. I didn’t like the expression on his face.

Keeping hunched over, I crept across the floor, then up the bleachers, wincing every time they creaked. At last I reached him. Beside him, Alex was breathing hard, her chest rising and falling as if trying to tamp something down.

“What’s going on?” I whispered.

Vincent pointed above his head. As slowly as I could, I raised myself up and peered over the sill.

Mappers lined the front fence. They stood shoulder to shoulder, blank faces peering through the chain-link. Their heads were nodding up and down in unison.

I dropped from sight, putting my back to the wall, and blew out a breath.

“Your mouth’s bleeding,” Vincent said.

I’d bitten down on my lip hard enough to draw blood.

Below, the other kids looked up at us expectantly. Chet Rogers chewed on the collar of his shirt nervously, his breaths starting to get that asthma rasp. Dr. Chatterjee leaned on the dry-erase board, light glinting off his eyeglasses. Ben Braaten cracked the double doors to peer out into the corridor, his shoulders raised. For once, even he looked nervous.

“What are they doing?” Vincent whispered.

I shook my head with bewilderment.

After I’d caught my breath, I inched back up to take another look. They were still there, maybe forty of them, their heads rocking robotically. At once they stopped. They turned and walked in single file down the length of the fence, then turned once more to face the building and started moving their heads again. Their eyeholes scanned the front lawn, scouring the contours of the building. Then I understood.

“They’re mapping the grounds,” I said, addressing the gym in a loud whisper. “Through the fence.”

“Why don’t they just break in?” Chet asked. “They’ve used jackhammers and stuff.”

“Maybe they want to leave as much of the infrastructure standing as possible,” Dr. Chatterjee said.

“For what?” Ben asked.

I thought of that squirming virtual eye rolling into place in Ezekiel’s head. “The question isn’t ‘For what?’” I said. “It’s, ‘For who?’”

Vincent, Alex, and I rose again, bringing our noses level with the sill. The Hosts finished wagging their heads and then broke apart, branching off into the neighboring streets, their faces lowered as usual.

I exhaled, and everyone else, reading our expressions, seemed to as well.

“Well,” Dr. Chatterjee said, “let’s get to the day, then.”

Logistics consumed the morning. The lookouts rotated, reporting back to Ben. A few of the kids took a shift in the cafeteria. Dr. Chatterjee told them to burn through the perishables first, so they served up runny eggs, cartons of milk, and OJ. I fed Matthew and took him out to the flower bed by the sheltered picnic area so he could go to the bathroom. In the gym Vincent cranked open the casement windows, letting the stale air out. The fresh breeze was a relief, what with the hundred or so bodies in close proximity. Alex turned on the TV, which still showed business as usual elsewhere in the world. Dr. Chatterjee continued to check the carbon monoxide detector at intervals, jotting the “unidentified particulate” readings on the dry-erase board.

Vincent walked over and stared at the board. I came up behind him and looked at the readings over his shoulder. They hadn’t dropped at all. In fact, they hadn’t even varied, the percentage remaining dead steady since Chatterjee had first started gathering data yesterday. My stomach roiled.

“You okay?” I asked.

“It’s only been a day,” Vincent said. “The spores have to dissipate at some point.”

Finally he turned, tried for a casual smile. He didn’t say what we were both thinking: Yeah, but will they be gone six days from now?

By the edge of the bleachers, JoJo gave a cry of delight. She crawled under the risers and retrieved—of all things—a Frisbee. She called out to her brother, and they started tossing the disk back and forth. Even here, even now, kids were kids.

A movement at my side broke me from my thoughts, and I glanced over. Alex had drawn level with me. Eyeing the readings, she took in a shaky breath.

She looked over at me, her expression changing. Then she started jogging toward the bleachers.

“Alexandra,” Vincent said. “Hang on.”

But she hopped up on the first bench. “Hey!” she called out, careful not to yell too loud, mindful of the open windows. “Everyone listen up.”

She waited a moment as the others stopped what they were doing.

“I don’t know about you guys,” she said, “but I don’t want to just wait around here and do nothing.”

“What do you propose, then?” Dr. Chatterjee asked.

Alex gestured at the TV, showing a fake-tanned weather reporter gesturing at a map. “We have to get outside the infection zone.”

“You won’t make it a block.” Ben’s voice carried over to us from the base of the bleachers. He was sitting on the floor in a fall of light from the windows, turned away so only his profile was visible. His legs were kicked wide, his shoulders drooping. His hands were doing something on the floor, but from this angle I couldn’t tell what.

“Even if you could, where you gonna go?” Eve asked.

Alex tilted her head, indicating the SPTV logo beneath the still-yammering weather reporter. “Stark Peak is closest.”

Ben gave a nasty laugh. “You’re gonna risk escaping town, getting all the way across the valley and up over Ponderosa Pass?”

He had a point. Ponderosa Pass was nearly fifty miles away.

“Hell, yeah,” Alex said. “It’s a different weather system over the mountain range. Let’s hope that the spores stay here in the valley, socked in like fog.”

“It beats waiting holed up here anyways,” Vincent said. “The Hosts are doing two things: Mapping the terrain. And collecting all the kids. We still don’t know why. But we know they’re doing it for someone.”

“For whoever that eye belongs to,” Chet said, his voice wrenched high with fear.

“Which means,” Vincent said, talking over the muffled outcry caused by Chet’s comment, “that someone needs to go get help. Because whatever’s coming hasn’t even gotten started yet.”

“We’re safer here,” Ben said.

“They were at the gate this morning,” Vincent said. “At some point one of them will catch wind that we’re in here. They’ll get in eventually.”

Ben shifted, the floor between his legs coming visible, and I saw at last what he’d been up to. He’d been pulling the wings off dying flies. They wiggled against the floorboards like little beans. He plucked up another one lazing across the seam between floor and wall. “If they do,” he said, pinching off one translucent wing, then the other, “I’ll take care of it.”