Pass/Fail (2012)

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Pass/Fail (2012) Page 21

by David Wellington


  He didn’t really worry, though, until he checked the Campbell’s garage, and the Flemings’. There were no cars there, either. Still he kept his cool and spent the rest of the day looking for a car anywhere in the neighborhood. Then in the center of town.

  By nightfall he had confirmed there wasn’t a single car, truck, or even a bicycle left within the entire township. When the people left they must have taken their vehicles with them.

  This was going to be harder than he’d expected.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  He spent the next few days getting ready.

  In a sporting goods store in the center of town he found a good backpack, the kind mountain climbers and long-distance hikers used. It had two big compartments and an aluminum frame that only weighed a few pounds, and best of all it had a built-in water sack with a plastic tube he could suck on when he got thirsty. In a clothing store he found a good hat with a floppy brim and a string he could tighten under his chin.

  He was going to walk through the desert, following the roads where he could, until he reached the mountains. D had survived up there for years—though Jake was pretty sure it wouldn’t be easy, or much fun, he was pretty sure he could do the same. After all he and D shared the same DNA, the same ability to solve problems and get out of bad situations.

  It was possible that before he reached the mountains, he would see some sign of human life again. Jake was willing to believe that Mr. Zuraw had evacuated the entirety of Fulton in one night, but he just didn’t think it would be possible to clear out the entire state—certainly it wouldn’t be done just for one weird educational experiment that had to be kept secret from the general population. Jake fully expected to walk just a few miles and find a bustling little town just over the next hill, full of people going about their daily business, living perfectly normal lives.

  He wasn’t sure if he could trust them. For all he knew the police in every town in Arizona had an eye out for a seventeen year-old boy who looked like he’d just realized his whole life was a lie.

  If he met anyone on the road, he would have to play it by ear. Honestly he would be so happy to see another living human being, he wasn’t sure he could make a good, logical choice, so maybe his best option was to travel by night and hide if he saw any car headlights.

  He had a lot to think about, a lot of planning to do. Luckily he had a lot of free time.

  Thinking that made him laugh out loud. He was in the middle of the town center and he looked around quickly to see if anyone had heard him. That made him laugh even harder.

  He was just outside the township offices, which included the public library. He’d been meaning to come down there for a while, intending to search the library for any books on desert survival techniques. As he stepped inside the darkened offices and switched on his flashlight, the beam touched something golden at the far end of a hallway. Jake headed that way to get a better look and saw he’d lit up three letters painted in gold on an otherwise unremarkable door:

  YSC

  It couldn’t be, he told himself. The door was right between the offices of the PTA and the School Board, which he supposed was an appropriate place for it, but there was no way the acronym stood for what he thought it did. There was no way the Youth Steering Committee met in such an undistinguished place. Mr. Zuraw had even told him as much—after luring him into the maze of death, he’d told Jake that the YSC were some of the most important people in the country, and that they could meet wherever they liked. Surely this couldn’t be it. And Jake had been down that hallway dozens of times. How had he missed the gold letters every single time?

  He pushed open the door. The room beyond was windowless and dark. Jake opened his pack and took out a battery-powered lantern he’d found in the sporting goods store. Switching it on, he carried it inside the room and placed it in the middle of the floor. The light didn’t show much, but Jake could make out the edge of a horseshoe-shaped table that ran around three walls, leaving an open space in the center where someone could stand and address the entire Committee at once. He also saw more flashes of gold.

  He was shaking a little when he walked up to the nearest patch of gold and picked it up. It was soft in his hand. A mask. A mask like the Proctors wore, but gold instead of silver.

  “I’ve been here before,” Jake said, out loud. He almost expected a reply. The last time he’d been in that room, it had been full of people. People in golden masks. The memory came back so fast it hurt. It literally gave him a headache. It felt like a bandage was being torn back inside his head.

  He’d almost remembered when he was down in the maze. He’d seen the golden masks in his head, but had thought it was just his imagination acting up. Now it all came back to him and he knew he’d been summoned here the very day he was born.

  Born of course was the wrong word. The day his vat had coughed him up, was more like it. He’d been brought here, naked, still wet, and completely docile. Full of drugs that kept him from acting out and also from forming long-term memories. He had to see the place again to remember any of it.

  “We want you to pass the tests, Jake,” someone had said to him. A kindly voice. Not like the electronic buzz of the Proctors at all—this was the voice your father had when you were a baby. The voice you wish your father had. It was soothing, and merciful, and warm. “Will you try your hardest for us?”

  Jake had nodded happily. He would do anything for that voice.

  The ring of gold masks around him had focused on him, twelve mirrors, not quite perfect mirrors: where the masks of the Proctors reflected only who you were, the masks of the YSC showed you what you could be, what your best self might be.

  “We’re very proud of you, Jake. You’ve done very so well so far. The last seven times you came very close. This time we want you to go all the way.”

  “I will,” Jake had said, in a voice so full of determination and desire it made him wince to hear it in his memory.

  To them there was no difference between McCartney, Jake A and McCartney, Jake H. The next clone out of the vat would still be part of the same experiment, one more lab rat in the same old cage. Jake had thought the YSC would be shocked to hear how excessive the tests had become under Mr. Zuraw. He knew now that they had forced Mr. Zuraw to become what he was. Their need, their desperate desire for someone who could pass the tests, had pushed and warped him until he’d become the murderous lunatic who had made Jake’s life an empty joke.

  There was a single sheet of paper on the horseshoe-shaped table. It was a memo, a report from Mr. Zuraw. Jake read what it said without understanding much: “Subject H displays remarkable skill at test-completion, even when averaged with past results, but is easily distracted by social cues. My informant, Codename Y, reports increased anxiety and a deficit of task-orientation whenever subject H is in close proximity to the female. Y’s recommendation is to divert the female from her attachment to H, and I concur.”

  Jake scrunched up the paper in his hand, crunching it into a tiny, dense ball. They had planned his whole life out in this room, point by point. Zuraw and Codename Y had made all his decisions for him. They had—

  Something struck Jake then. Codename Y. CODename Y. CODY.

  Jake left the room, not bothering to shut the door. He didn’t go to the library. Instead he wandered out of the township offices and into the street. There was nothing there he wanted, just then.

  He had to go to the school. He had to go down into the maze again, and find Mr. Zuraw’s office. Not the guidance office, but the place the madman had gone to hide. Jake was sure he would be down there, still pulling his strings and working his machinery. Getting ready for the next series of tests. He would find him down there, and he would—he would—

  He had no idea what he would do.

  His feet kept walking toward the school, even as his brain tore at itself. Tried to reconcile everything that had happened, everything he had learned. Before, during the lightning round, he hadn’t had time to think about the fac
t that his mother was a Proctor. Or that his best friend had been deceiving him—and spying on him—his entire life. Now he had time to think about everything. Now he had time to feel.

  He was almost jogging toward the school, running past empty street after empty street where the houses were empty, the promises were empty, the people had always, always been empty, when he stopped so suddenly he had to catch himself before he fell over. He had seen something out of the corner of his eye. Something that just couldn’t be.

  Over there—that was Megan’s house. It was as dark and as empty-looking as all the others. Except… it wasn’t. He looked closer. Something was off. Yes, there. In one of the first-floor windows.

  A human hand pressed up against the glass. A girl’s hand.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  He had to break down her door to get inside. It was locked and the deadbolt was set. He shouted her name and hammered on the door but when she didn’t respond he had to rush it with his shoulder, the way D had knocked down the doors in the underground maze. Jake had never been physically tough and he thought all he would get for his trouble was a broken arm, but when he hit the door it crumpled like balsa wood and he fell through, onto the carpet of her foyer.

  Inside the house was silence and dust. He was encouraged at least to see there was furniture, that it wasn’t just the empty shell of a house. The air smelled stale and dry and was suffocatingly hot.

  He found Megan in the living room, her top half sprawled across a couch with her arm up to touch the window, her legs dangling behind her. Her left leg was swollen and purple at the ankle. She was wearing a silk nightie and she was a mess.

  Her hair was unkempt, her face pale white. Her eyelids fluttered when he turned her over but they didn’t open. She wasn’t conscious and he was terrified she was going to die on him.

  He couldn’t wake her. He tried shaking her by the shoulders, then he tried chafing her wrists but her eyes wouldn’t open. Her lips were badly chapped and he thought she might be dehydrated, but when he tried pouring some water into her mouth she gagged and spat it out. He searched the house until he found a bathroom and then soaked a hand towel in water from his pack. When he put the end of the towel in her mouth she sucked at it for a while. He mopped her face and arms with the wet towel to try to cool her down.

  Careful not to touch her injured leg too much, he pulled her up onto the couch so she was in a comfortable position. Then he sat down in an armchair where he could watch her, and tried to think of what to do next.

  Cell phones, he thought.

  It shamed him, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. D had said that cell phones and computers were common outside of Fulton. That even kids had them. Yet when Megan had seen a cell phone in Jake’s presence, she had acted as if she’d never seen one before in her life. If she had claimed to come from some small town that was behind the times, maybe he would have believed that reaction. But she said she was from Chicago—certainly if cell phones were as common as D said, they would have them in a major city like Chicago. He had asked her point blank if she’d ever seen a computer before, and she’d said no.

  How real was she? How much of what she’d told him, of what she’d said to him was real—how real were her kisses? Cody had had his doubts. Of course, Cody had been working for Mr. Zuraw the whole time. Cody had lied every time he opened his mouth.

  But that didn’t mean Megan was real.

  The injury to her ankle was real. He was worried it might be broken. It had to be at least sprained to look as bad as it did. He should probably splint it. There was a fireplace in the living room, with a pile of wood sitting next to it. He picked out two short lengths of wood, not too thick. Then he took a table cloth from the dining room and tore it into strips. Careful not to jar her too much, he tied the splints to her leg to immobilize it. She would probably need a cast, but he didn’t have any plaster to make one, so the splint would have to do.

  While he was finishing up she woke up, but he didn’t realize it until he sat back to inspect his work and then glanced up at her face. Her eyes were open. Those deep blue eyes, confident eyes. The eyes that had drawn him to her. Trusting eyes.

  Cell phones, he thought. Kids in Chicago all have cell phones.

  But those eyes—they were hard to argue with. Those eyes watched him with recognition, and trust. And something more. Belief. She believed in him. She always had.

  “Hi,” she said. Her voice was a weak croak.

  “Hi yourself,” he told her.

  “I fell down the stairs. I switched on the light but it didn’t work. In the dark I tripped,” she told him. “My leg—”

  “It might be broken,” he said. “I’ve done what I could. Try not to move too much.”

  “No problem,” she said, and smiled. “Right now I don’t think I could sit up.” She just laid there and watched him for a while before she said, “You found me.”

  “Here, have some water,” he said, and handed her the plastic tube from his pack. He drank a lot of it before she handed it back.

  “There’s nobody here, is there?” she asked. “I called for help. I screamed a lot. But nobody came.”

  “As far as I can tell,” Jake said, “you and me are the only people in the whole town right now. I thought I was alone.” He laughed. “I was beginning to think I was dead, and that this is what happens to clones when they die. But then I found you.”

  “You found me,” she said again. She made it sound like he’d done something pretty special. “Well,” she said, turning her face up toward the ceiling, “if this was Heaven, I think I would feel a lot less crappy right now.”

  He laughed.

  She fell asleep again a little later. He woke her gently when he’d finished making dinner for the two of them. Soup, from cans, cooked over a little camp stove he had in his pack. She was still very thirsty. She had been lying across the couch, unconscious, for days in the dry still heat of the empty house.

  “I think that we’ve been suspended,” Jake said, when they’d finished eating. “Mr. Zuraw said he would suspend you for pulling the fire alarm.”

  “What are you in for?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Take your pick. But I don’t understand why they would suspend me when they can just kill me instead. I got my third FAIL. I’m done.”

  “Maybe Mr. Zuraw has a heart after all,” she told him. “Maybe he’s going to let us have one night together before—before that happens.”

  Jake doubted it. But he was happy enough to just be with her, as hot as it was in the house. As bad as the food was, as scared as he might be, he was still glad.

  They talked about little things until she fell asleep again. Jake made a bed of pillows for himself next to the couch—he had decided he would stay by her side through the night at least and make sure she was okay. As he lay down to go to sleep, her eyes opened again and she looked over at him.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She reached out to touch his face. Her hand felt very cool and soothing against his skin. “You said you loved me. So. Me, too.”

  He twisted his head around to kiss her palm. “Go to sleep,” he told her. “You need your rest.” He wasn’t sure what he would do in the morning. He couldn’t very well leave her like this. She might die if he left her alone. But if he stuck around, if he waited too long, the Proctors might come and get him.

  In the end it wasn’t his decision to make.

  When he woke up in the morning the house felt empty and too still, as if time had stopped altogether. He sat up very slowly and saw that he couch was empty.

  Megan was gone.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  “No, no, no, no, no!” Jake howled. He kicked at the couch, at the walls, at the antique furniture in the living room until it cracked and broke. He wiped at his mouth, rubbed his eyes, swore every curse he could think of.

  Still he wasn’t sure what Megan’s disappearance meant. Had the Proctors come for her in the
night and lifted her gently off the couch (gently so she didn’t scream as they moved her broken leg), so gently they hadn’t woken Jake, who was lying right next to her? Or had she slipped something into his food to make him sleep a deep dreamless sleep, then got up herself on a leg that only looked broken, and crept off like a spy in the night?

  Cell phones—she’d never heard of cell phones before. Even though every kid in Chicago had one. It was enough to prove she was a spy. That she worked for Mr. Zuraw, and that everything she’d ever said to him was a lie.

  Or maybe it wasn’t enough.

  Mr. Zuraw had implanted memories in Jake’s brain before he was even born. Fragile, simply-constructed memories that fell apart if you looked at them too hard. But they’d been enough to make him think he’d lived seventeen years in this town. That he had friends here, and family.

  Could he subtract memories from someone’s brain, as well? Maybe he had hypnotized Megan into thinking she’d never seen a cell phone or a computer before.

  It was possible. She could still be real. Their love could be real.

  He had to find her. He had to know for sure. The rational part of his brain, the part that had kept him alive through so many tests and puzzles and traps, kept telling him he should just let it go. That he should gather up his pack and his things and leave Fulton for good, walk out into the desert and disappear.

  His heart had to know.

  She would be at the school, if she was anywhere. She would be underground in the maze of offices and storerooms under the school. He would go. He would confront her. And then he would leave, if he still could. If the Proctors didn’t catch him while he was down there. He remembered how D had gotten around them, by wearing one of their masks and acting as if he knew what he was doing. Maybe that would work for Jake, as well, though he doubted he could match D’s self-assured tone of voice.

 

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