Theaella

72

“How about the other kids out there?” Alex said. “Shouldn’t we get help for them?”

“It’s too late for them already,” Ben said. “We gotta protect what we have.”

“Until what?”

“The other cities’ll catch word soon enough. Send the army and scientists or whatever. Until then we just have to stay alive.” Ben looked at Vincent. “Course, some of us have more time than others.”

Over on the bleachers, Chet stifled a sob.

“That could be weeks,” Alex said. “Remember last July? The tornado? How long did it take for Stark Peak to send two lousy fire engines?”

Ben let the fly’s body drop among the others. He walked over, turned off the TV, and shoved it under the bleachers. “We need to conserve electricity. Turn off anything that uses energy we don’t absolutely need for survival. Buy time. Like I said, most of us can afford to wait.”

“We don’t make decisions solely based on what’s best for most of us,” Dr. Chatterjee said.

“You’re right,” Ben said. “I can’t tell you what to do.” He pointed his shiny face over at us. “You wanna get caught like d**k and Jaydon or kill yourself, be my guest.”

“And what’s your plan?” Vincent said. “If help doesn’t magically arrive soon?”

“The cafeteria freezers are stocked with food. We live with crops and cattle all around us if it gets to that. One nighttime sneak to bring back a few cows could feed us for months. We got everything we need right here in Creek’s Cause.” Ben stood up, grinding his boot on the wriggling fly parts. “So let’s call it like it is, Vincent. You’re just freaking out because you’ve got less time than everyone else. Aside from Chet, that is.”

“We’re all on a clock here,” Vincent said. “You’ve got what? Six more months than me?”

“That’s a lot of months for those spores to go away. Or for help to get here.”

“Or for something else to get here first,” Vincent said.

At this the kids bristled.

Vincent looked out across all those faces. “Is anyone willing to go with us?”

A low pulse of fear started up in my stomach. That “us” included me for sure, and I knew that if Vincent asked, no matter how scared I was, I had his back. The kids looked away, one after another. I couldn’t really blame them.

“How ’bout you, Chet?” Vincent asked.

“No way,” Chet said. “No way I’m going out there.”

“You have even less time than I do.”

“I know. But if you saw what my dad did to my little brother…” He started wheezing a bit and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Vincent. Not with them out there. I just can’t do it. I’ll take my chances that the air’ll get better.”

“No one else?” Vincent’s voice echoed around the hard walls of the gym.

He turned and looked at Alex and me. I felt my stomach lurch as if I’d walked off a ledge and was endlessly plummeting.

His eyes met mine. He said, “We leave at nightfall.”

*

The day passed in a crawl, sunlight inching across the gym floor until it hit the far wall and started to climb. At last dusk textured the air, and Dr. Chatterjee ordered the high casement windows cinched shut against the cold.

Alex sat on her cot wearing Vincent’s black cowboy hat, her face tilted down. Her hair fell like a curtain across her cheek, blocking her eyes from view. She was taping her fingers carefully, like she did before hockey games, neat protective strips between the knuckles, biting each piece off the roll. Her hockey stick lay across her thighs.

She looked pretty bad-ass.

I was watching her while pretending not to watch her at the same time, so when Vincent spoke right behind me, I nearly jumped off my cot. I set down my composition notebook and said, “What?”

He laid his shotgun across one shoulder. “I said, ‘Get what you need from the supply station.’”

I headed over to where Eve Jenkins sat at a desk she’d pulled over in front of the open door to the storage room. She’d done a great job organizing everything inside, bats and crowbars lining one wall, knives stashed against the others. Bins held flashlights and compasses and pocketknives. Most of the food remained in the cafeteria, but she kept energy bars, granola mix, and apples in a crate for the lookouts.

When she saw me coming, she smiled and straightened up a bit. I looked past her into the room. “Wow, this is pretty cool.”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just organizing stuff. I’m sure anyone could’ve done it.”

“You know, you are allowed to just say thanks.”

She blushed a little. “Thanks. What do you need, Chance?”

My baling hooks, hung on a peg in the back, gleamed as if calling to me. I nodded at them.

She said, “I figured you were gonna ask for a hunting rifle, but we just have the one from Leonora Rose, and there’s no ammo.”

“Too big anyways,” I said.

“I heard you were a c***k shot with a rifle.”

I shrugged. “I have okay aim,” I said. “But I need something for up close.”

She blanched slightly, then lifted the baling hooks from the peg and brought them over.

I gripped them again, the wood firm and comforting in my hands. “Guess I’m gonna need a flashlight, a folding knife, some matches, and a couple of energy bars. Everything else we’ll figure out along the way.”

She shifted her weight uncomfortably. “Ben says you can only take what you brought. He said we gotta preserve supplies and weapons for the lookouts.”

Ben had decided he was running security, and no one had undecided it for him since.

Her lips pressed together, that pretty dimple making a tiny crescent in her right cheek. “But…,” she continued, “I think Ben’s sort of a jerk. And Dr. Chatterjee never agreed to the rule. So.” She gave a quick look at the double doors where Ben’s chair sat empty, then grabbed the supplies and slid them across the desk to me. “Here you go.”

“Thanks, Eve.”

When I turned away, she said my name. I looked at her over my shoulder.

“Make sure you come back,” she said. A wisp of glossy dark hair drifted down over her face, and she blew it away.

I realized she was prettier than I’d thought.

“Do my best,” I said.

JoJo ran over and clamped onto my side, hugging me. She was crying. “Don’t leave, Chance. Please don’t.”

I bent over and kissed her head. “I have to,” I said.

She pried herself from me, ran off, and hid beneath the bleachers. Rocky sat on one of the middle benches. I caught his eye, gestured to the space where JoJo had disappeared: Take care of your sister. He nodded, but I could tell he was scared, too.

I turned away. Over in the middle of the cots, Vincent and Alex were sitting together. He held his hands over hers and they were leaning in, his hat c****d back on her head so their foreheads could touch. He must’ve felt me looking at him because he stood up, and then Alex saw me, too, and rose to her feet. A moment later Matthew’s head reared into view beside them.

Vincent lifted the shotgun, balancing it on the ledge of his collarbone. The hockey stick spun expertly in Alex’s hands. Vincent reached over, plucked his Stetson from Alex’s head, and seated it firmly on his own. With a baling hook, I gestured toward the door.

As we headed out, I could feel the eyes of everyone in the gym on us. We were the brave few. Or the soon-to-be-dead few.

We reached the double doors, pushed them open, and headed down the corridor. Matthew trotted at our side, his head raised, tongue lolling. He probably thought we were going for a stroll.

By the front of the school, Ben stood lookout, that stun gun shoved into the waist of his jeans. As we neared, he spun the keys around his finger like a cowboy showing off his revolver.

Vincent halted, studied him. “You’re enjoying all this, aren’t you?”

Ben considered for a moment. “I’m used to death, Vincent. I grew up around a slaughterhouse. It gave me an up-close look at, you know, the cycle of life. And I knew exactly how my life was gonna play out. How many hours I’d work when I was twenty or thirty or forty. How much overtime I’d pull on weekends during culling season. What kind of crappy place I’d live in when I got older and what bar I’d drink at.” He swallowed, and I could see in his face the same longing I sometimes felt, the dreams he didn’t allow himself to have. “I get to protect people now. Make choices that actually matter. I get to actually matter.”

His eyes glimmered wetly. Again I thought back to that car crash that had taken his brothers and wondered what he’d lost in the flames. Or found.

“So yeah…” Ben turned to slot the key into the lock. He opened the big door for us, the air billowing in, cold and unforgiving. “The end of the world is pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me.”

The three of us crammed beneath a stand of oak, the velvety leaves tickling our necks and the backs of our arms. Matthew remained outside the tangle, lying flat on the dirt, his snout resting between his paws. We’d taken a high vantage on a hill, town square sprawling before us. It had quieted down a lot since we’d last seen it, the Mappers dispersing to scan new terrain. In fact, I couldn’t see a single Host on the vast lawn or the bordering streets. Aside from movement in the church windows and the glow of the forge from Bob n’ Bit Hardware, there was no sign of life at all. Jackhammered chunks of asphalt lay like boulders on the street. A power cable dangled from the roof of the One Cup Cafe, striking the sidewalk and sending up sprays of sparks. The pallet jack dragged into town by Afa Similai remained in the front courtyard of the church, but the dog crates were missing from it, as were the other trunks and cages I’d spotted there earlier.

We’d doglegged through the neighborhood by the school, drifting through wisps of fog, making painfully slow headway. We’d kept close to the houses, moving through yards, hiding behind trash cans and parked cars. More than once we’d had to hold our breath and keep our heads ducked as packs of Hosts drifted by. Matthew obeyed my hand gestures perfectly, all those cold morning hours of training paying off. Vincent and Alex debated grabbing a truck but decided the noise of an engine would be too risky here in town. If we drew a throng of Hosts, we’d be as stuck as a car in a herd of sheep.

The square now was as desolate as I’d ever seen it.

Alex leaned over, her hair brushing my face. “Where are they all?” she whispered.

I said, “Maybe once they’ve mapped an area, they move on.”

Matthew’s head lifted, his ears flattening against his skull.

The clack of a screen door drew our focus to the line of shops. A kid sprinted out of the One Cup Cafe and through the fountain of sparks. He looked tiny, dwarfed by the hugeness of the square. He sliced between two parked cars, zigzagging across the open grass. Even way up here, we could hear his panicked breaths. He hurdled a bench and ran for the road. Patches of fog blurred his outline.

Vincent said, “Is that…?”

“Andre Swisher,” I said.

Suddenly there were faces in the windows of the houses and storefronts. We watched, breathless. Various doors banged open all around the square, a haunted-house orchestration, Hosts filling doorways and the mouths of alleys. Way across in the hospital, a woman in an untied gown pried open the ER doors and halted in the threshold, her stance wide, her arms spread to hold the doors at bay. For an instant they all just stood there, watching with their non-eyes.

Then they flashed into motion.

Andre screamed, switching direction once and then again, but the Hosts bounded toward him, cinching the noose. They were female, moving fast enough to burst their muscles. Though there were only seven or eight of them, they shot at him from every direction, streaking across the square. Sam Miller’s grandma leapt over a car, landing on all fours, then rocketing forward.

Vincent tensed, bringing one knee under him like a sprinter at the starting line, but Alex put her hand on his back, firm, and said, “You go down there, you’ll die. We can’t help him right now.”

Matthew whined faintly, and I hushed him.