by Kit Reed
Tick lets her go. “OK,” he says. “Let’s start over. What are you doing here?”
“It’s not like I wanted to come. Some strange, big guy dumped me in the tunnel. He said ask for Tick.” Then she stops. “Wait. Are you him?”
Oh, Tick thinks. Oh. Surprised, he grins. “Maybe.”
“I heard voices up here and I . . . Why are you smiling?”
“Never mind. The kid that dropped you. White hair, ski mask?”
“How did you know?” Now she is smiling too.
“Old friend, sort of.”
“He wasn’t very friendly. Won’t talk to you, never smiles, doesn’t look you in the face.”
“That would be Lance the Loner. We don’t hang out, but he’s a friend.”
“He lives down there?”
Tick says, “I don’t know where he lives.”
“It’s dark in those tunnels. Creepy.”
“You were about to get in worse trouble,” Tick says.
“You mean the guards.”
“No. The Dingos. They were marching you off to do . . . I don’t know what, but it looked bad.”
“Oh!” Her voice changes. “I get it now. That was you with the flags and the noise and the plastic.”
“Pretty much.”
“You!” The sweep of her hand takes in everybody in the room: James and Willie stacking supplies while the littles fold up their banners and deflated wading ponds and Jiggy and Nance lay out food like old troupers—the Castertown Crazies. Minus one, although Tick does not yet know that one of his kids is missing. “You’re the guys who brought out the guards!”
This makes his grin even broader. “Yeah.”
“Well, thanks . . . I guess.” The girl screws up her face the way you do at the doctor’s, when you’re about to get a shot. “Look, I really have to go.”
Tick is too smart to warn her all over again. Instead he asks, “You want to go home?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know, exactly. Everybody’s gone.” There is a long, long pause while she considers. “But I can’t stay here.”
“If you leave now, you’ll end up in the State Home. That’s where Security sends lost kids. You have to wait.”
She says in a low voice, “I can’t.”
“You have to. Go out in the morning, when you can blend in. You know, at high tide.”
“Right. When gazillion shoppers are here.”
“Yep. Noon’s best. People don’t see you, they’re all about their lunch.” Tick grins. Good. “Look, if you want to call your mom or your dad, we have the store phone.”
She doesn’t answer right away. When she does it comes as a surprise. “I don’t exactly have a mom and dad,” she says. “No. Wait.”
“What?”
“I do, but I don’t know where they are.” She is deciding whether to tell him. “They. Ah. They kind of disappeared.”
“Disappeared!” Tick’s eyes snap wide. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” The look that crosses her pretty face is stuck somewhere between grief and confusion. She’s trying to explain something she doesn’t understand. Finally she tells him, “I was in bed. People came. I heard them arguing. When I woke up they were gone.”
Tick says carefully, “When?”
“What?”
“When did it happen?”
“Before the Grand Opening, I think.”
“I’m sorry.” This is all Tick says, but certain pieces are coming together in his head.
“I was little. It’s been years.” She’s trying to smile but it isn’t exactly working. “It’s OK. I live with Aunt Christy.”
Right, Tick thinks. And I live here. He offers, “So do you want to call your aunt or what?”
She corrects. “Or I did. I haven’t seen her since Sunday.”
“Like, she took off?”
Her voice drops. “Unless they took her.”
This has so many echoes for Tick that he can’t get past it. “Didn’t you call the cops?”
Her face goes eight different ways. “And end up in the State Home?”
Tick grimaces. “I thought that was only for kids they catch here.”
“Like you.” She looks at him with clear gray eyes.
Something passes between them. He nods. “Like me.”
“No,” she says. “They pick up any kid who’s lost their family anywhere, and dump them in the Home.”
His voice sinks. It isn’t a question. “And nobody asks where their families went.”
“No.” Tick won’t know it, but Jule Devereaux is repeating Aunt Christy the day her folks vanished. She is saying exactly what Aunt Christy said, in that same flat tone of despair, “You can’t even trust the police. It isn’t safe in Castertown.”
“That’s terrible.”
The girl looks into her hands the way you do when you don’t want people to see what you are thinking. “It’s . . . Agh.”
“I know.” Tick doesn’t know her well enough to tell her what happened to him, at least not yet. He says kindly, “You don’t look so good.”
“It’s nothing!” Her pretty face is a mess but she tries to pass it off with, “Probably I’m just hungry.”
“When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know. Yesterday lunch, I guess.” Then she blushes. “Oh, right. PowerBar. This guy Lance gave me a PowerBar.”
“Right. Lance the Loner.”
“I was so hungry I forgot I was eating.” This sounds so stupid that Tick laughs and the girl laughs.
The Crazies take this as a signal that everything’s OK, and drop what they’re doing to gather around.
“I’m Tick Stiles.”
“Right.”
“I kind of . . .”
“Run this place,” she finishes as the Crazies drift into the circle. “Hi. I’m Jule Devereaux.”
“And these are my main men Willie and James,” Tick says. “The purple hair’s Jiggy and that’s Nance . . . Don’t worry, there won’t be a names quiz. These guys—” He waves toward the rest and as he does so realizes they’re one short, no time to deal with that now, just finish the introductions and get everybody settled before the morning cleaning shift rolls in. “These are the Castertown Crazies.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Then, because the hideout is shipshape and James is nuking a carton of Belgian waffles that fell off a truck in the wide service corridor that runs behind all the stores, Tick grabs two paper plates and offers her one. He points to narrow steps leading to an abandoned platform. “Sit down. Eat.”
IT IS LATER. THE other Crazies have laid out their bedrolls and crawled in to sleep but Jule and Tick are still talking. In the stillness, she turns to him. “You never said what you’re doing here.”
“Who, me? What does it look like?”
“Hiding out, I guess, but why?”
“No place to go,” he says.
“You too?”
“Nobody home,” he says. “I don’t even know if home’s there any more.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Not really, the mall’s OK. Enough to eat and there’s always plenty to do.” After all these years the next thing still sticks like a rock in his throat. Tick coughs. “Besides, my folks are gone.”
“Gone!”
“Disappeared, pretty much.”
“Oh.” A shiver goes through her. “Like mine.”
He nods.
But she won’t leave it at that. When he doesn’t go on she says, “So, what? Did you wake up one morning and they were gone?”
“Not exactly. It happened here. I was on one of the rides and when I got off they weren’t anywhere.”
“This is too weird,” Jule says.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know yet.” In this light the girl’s eyes are almost too clear. As if he can see straight through to the back of her head. “When did you lose them?”
He shrugs. “For all I know, they lost me. You don�
��t always know whose fault it is.”
“Unless you do. Now, when did it happen?”
“Don’t get hung up on this, but . . . Agh.” Tick doesn’t know why it’s so hard to get out the rest, but it is. “It was the day before the Grand Opening.”
Jule’s face tightens. She is squinting at something he can’t see. “Did they, um, work for Zozzco?”
“They were the architects.”
“Wow!”
“What do you mean, wow?”
“Oh, wow. Mine designed the WhirlyFunRide.” For the first time since she blundered in here Jule’s whole face lights up. She elbows him. “Don’t you think that’s strange?”
“Everything’s strange,” Tick says, but before he can follow up he hears frantic hammering.
Just when they most need to be quiet, there is someone banging on the wooden false front of the abandoned music store. At the sound, Willie and James get up, ready to fight off whatever comes. Waving them away, Tick darts into the crawl space between the glass store window and the protective wall.
“Shut up!” he hisses.
The knocking doesn’t stop. “Hurry!”
“Who is it?”
A little voice flutes, “Hurry up, it’s me!”
Hissing for silence, Willie and James tug at the carpet covering the outside door they spent so much time securing.
“Come on, let me in!”
“Shut up, we’re coming!” Tick takes his knife and pulls out the staples. Together the three boys pull back a flap just wide enough for whoever it is to stop hammering and come in, for Pete’s sake.
“Doakie!”
Instead a fuzzy, gangly black dog scrambles in, yapping wildly in spite of the fact that behind it, somebody is going, “Shh shh, shut up, Puppy! Puppy, shut up!”
It is a half-grown Scottie from a pet store.
Next Doakie wriggles through the hole.
Tick groans. “Don’t you know we can’t keep pets in here?”
“Oh please,” Doakie wails. “He got too big to sell!”
“If he barks they’ll all come down on us!”
“They left him tied up out back,” Doakie says, and what he says next is both mystifying and terrible, “and the truck was coming to take him to the Dark Hall!”
FOURTEEN
IT IS A WEEK later.
Burt Arno is in a tearing hurry. It’s been seven days since he lost his living sacrifice. Excuse me. The girl he was delivering to the Dark Hall for personal reasons.
OK, he thought it would get him in good with old man Zozz, who could care less if he lives or dies. Less, he supposes, since his one big chance to get tight with the man in power went up in smoke. If Amos Zozz was watching from on high or something, he saw what a frooging failure Burt is, and if he knows, and it made him mad . . .
Yikes, he thinks. What if he wants me to die?
Burt has reason to worry. Seven days since the disaster, and with every one of them, things are getting worse.
It took him ’til now to track Stiles and his band of geeky sub-teens and half-baked rug rats to their new hideout. Hurrying along, Burt is itching for a confrontation. If he’s ever going to be top dog here, he has to hit Stiles so hard that he flies out of the ballpark. Where Burt comes from, that’s the way it’s done. Gangs rule, he thinks. I rule. He hopes.
He thuds along thinking, Just wait’ll they get a load of this. He is carrying a hastily lettered note.
Wynton Marsalis fountain at 4 a.m.
Be there or be dead. Come alone.
Burt Arno
Good, he thinks, rereading. This is really good. Plus, it’s written in blood. This time, he’ll do like I say. Nice touch, Burt cut himself shaving, so there you go. See, he and his Dingos ran away from the State Home so long ago that Barlow and Tidgewell have faint moustaches, and once a week Burt and his best buddy Kirk scrape their faces with six-track razors to get rid of the fuzz.
Tonight his hand slipped. Maybe he’s a little bit nervous about this meeting. Partly, he doesn’t know what he’ll do or say. Get revenge on the Crazies, he supposes. Get the girl back, so he can offer her up to the real ruler of this place. Or is he getting cranked up to beg for help?
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know!
Truth is, with Mag gone, Burt doesn’t know what he wants.
With her gone, he doesn’t know where to start.
He doesn’t even know what to say.
Um. “Hand over my sacrifice?”
Now, what Burt means by “sacrifice” is a puzzle to him. He just knows that there is a Dark Hall, that Amos Zozz is the ruler and if he could just get friends with him, everything would be fine. Last week he thought he’d found just the thing to do the trick, after which at Zozzco, he’d be a VIP. The old man would thank Burt for the present, and Burt would have him in his power. This Amos would do whatever Burt said, like throw Stiles and his pesky followers out of the MegaMall, so Burt could rule. Now because of the Crazies and their stupid flags and banners, the powers are chasing him instead. The forces of Amos Zozz are out to get him. He’s sure of it, and he’s running scared.
How does he know? The people in black, for one thing. Ever since the trouble, people or things in black have been following him, although whether they’re in black uniforms or black Security gear or funeral parlor outfits or pelts of fur, he isn’t sure. They’re always there, always out of sight.
Everywhere Burt goes, they are. If they are people. He doesn’t know. All he sees is large shapes, darting shadows—movement that he catches out of the corner of his eye. By the time he whips his head around to check, they’ve vanished. Did Amos Zozz send them? Zozzco? Or is it something scarier? Burt knows there are other gangs of kids out there somewhere in the MegaMall, and nobody bothers them. It isn’t fair!
This is all this kid Stiles’s fault. Burt and his tribe were this close to delivering the girl, after which he was certain the big man would thank him. He and Amos would get to be friends and Burt would be the real insider then. He’d be hanging out with The Power, and Tick could go hang.
Well, Tick wrecked that. The Crazies waved their stupid flags and banners at the cameras like the red flag in front of—what is it, the cow? Whatever! Security came boiling out and there’s been trouble ever since. Shadows following, that stop when he stops and move when he moves. Certain things he finds just when he thinks he’s safe in the hideout. Strange objects. Crossed sticks. A bloody razor. Face it, they’re out to get him.
They want him down in the Dark Hall, he just knows.
Got to do something! The big question is, what?
Burt is angry with Tick, unless he’s mad at himself, for getting into this. He is also scared. He doesn’t know if he’s out to kill the Crazies for messing him up like that, or if he wants to track them down and beg for help.
Ack, it is confusing! Whatever he does, he’d better do it fast, he thinks, running hard. Worried, wild and distracted, Burt Arno is rushing into the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.
Everybody knows you go miles to avoid the Zozzco offices, but Burt is in a hurry. This is exactly where he is right now. He’s taking a dangerous short cut through the biz sector of Amos Zozz’s commercial empire. This is where the brains of the business are housed. Computers. Accountants. Piles of money, for all he knows. It’s a risky half hour after closing time. Oh, yes he is cutting it close. Doesn’t he know better? Doesn’t he know the management people work late? Without Mag here to tell him these things, he doesn’t know much. OK, he forgot how dumb it is to be here, where any executive can pop out and catch him. Now that he’s banished her, Burt forgets a lot of things.
He doesn’t want to admit that Mag is the brains of his operation, but without her, everything’s a tad bit harder to keep track of. Like, whether she quit the Dingos or he kicked her out of the tribe. Face it, Mag was his chief of operations, and now look. So this is her fault, for losing the captive. Unless it’s Tick’s.
That’s Strike Two, Tick Stiles
. First you missed the Big Faceoff in the Montecassino Courtyard, which makes Burt look bad in front of his people. Then you lost me the girl. You’ll pay. Everybody but Burt Arno has forgotten the Big Faceoff, but Burt remembers. It’s burning a hole in his belly. His big moment, up in smoke. He and Tick were supposed to parley that night. Tick would turn over the territory and everything the Crazies possessed to make up for the insult, count on it. The peaceable jerk would give it all up—food, money, electronics—that kid would empty his pockets if he had to, anything to keep the peace. They were this close. Burt was feeling way good about it, until the girl and Security and the whole bad thing.
Now look. Burt wants war, or something. He needs this meeting! It’s like being in the middle of a sneeze that you can’t finish. Aaah. He keeps waiting for the choo.
Hang tough, he thinks, going along in a muddle. Mag would know what to do. Never should have let her go. Muddle, he thinks muddily, mud, mud, muddle, what’ll, what’ll I do . . .
This is Burt, trudging through the office corridors.
He looks up. Yikes, the office corridors!
What was I thinking?
Lucky for him the doors are all closed and the corridor is empty. The Zozzco office staff probably packed up and went home for the night. He did a dumb thing, taking this route, but for the moment, he’s safe.
Get Tick Stiles, he thinks muddily, get him good. Burt Arno thinking is like thawing meat. It takes a while. He still isn’t sure exactly, but, hey! First, get even. He makes an excited little hop. Idea! Then get him on my side.
Cheered, Burt goes a little faster. His trot turns into a kind of jig that keeps him zigzagging from side to side in the narrow corridor. He skips along. Grinning, he raises his right foot in the red canvas Chuckie and taps the wall with his toe.
Zip. Nice. Skip to the other side. Tap with the left foot in the green Chuckie.
Right. Tap. Take that, Crazies.
Left. Tap. Take that, Tick Stiles.
Right. Bonk. And this is for everybody in the Dark Hall. Oh, I don’t mean you, Mr. Zozz!
Left. Bonk. He is feeling better.
Right. Actually, he’s feeling pretty good! Get help and get even. No, get even and get help. By this time Burt Arno is humming. The heck with Mag, I can do this. Improved, he goes along tapping and bonking his sneakers against the walls. I don’t need her at all. By the time he hits the end of the corridor he’s on a roll and, lunging to make that parting left-hand tap, he misses the wall completely and comes tumbling into the marble courtyard where . . .