by Lex Thomas
“No, leave my zip alone!” the boy said, lunging for the jug.
Violent got to it first, holding it out of reach suggestively. He looked down, then thrashed around in anger. He moaned, then threw the necklace at Lucy. It skidded to her feet, and she picked it up. Violent tossed the jug into the boy’s lap, and he dumped some of the liquid onto a rag. He clasped the wet rag to his face and breathed in deeply. He exhaled with a sob.
“Let’s go,” Violent said.
Lucy looked at the necklace in her hand, then to the huffing kid. He rocked as he cried and punched at the floor.
“How do I know this belonged to your mother?” Lucy said.
“It’s all she ever had,” the boy said, through a chemical haze.
“They tried to take it from me at the labs, but I hid it from
’em. Them metal bedposts were hollow. Them doctors didn’t know that. That’s the only reason I’m alive, that necklace. I went back for it when I shoulda run. That’s how I got lucky.
Ev’rbody else got snagged. I got out… lucky…” At first Lucy tried to make sense of his rambling. It sounded like crazy talk. Labs. Doctors.
“You’re the one,” Violent said. “You’re the infected kid they were trying to catch.”
“Lucky,” he said again, his face pinched with pain. “They shoulda left us in the mountains. They shoulda left us alone.” He scrambled to dampen his rag with the jug. Violent ripped it from his hands and threw it across the room.
“Give it back! Give ’em back to me!”
Violent threw the torch aside. She dropped to her knees and grasped him by his soiled dress.
“You made this happen. You ran into this school when you knew what could happen?”
“They was gonna kill me,” he said. It was barely a whisper.
“You brought all this on us?” Violent said, spitting her words like bullets.
The boy shook his head, moaning, frothing, crying.
“YOU DID THIS?”
“Violent…,” Lucy said.
“YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED!” Violent screamed. She punched him in his mouth. His eyes fluttered back, and his lip split. She punched again. And again. Long, arcing punches that cut his face, and puffed his eyes, and bent his nose.
“Stop it!” Lucy shouted. “Stop it!”
Lucy pulled at Violent. She wouldn’t stop. She was a jack-hammer. She was going to kill him. Lucy hiked up what was left of her skirt and kicked Violent in the head. Violent yelped and fell over on her side, holding her ear.
“That’s enough,” Lucy said.
Lucy turned to the boy and crouched. His face was mulch.
Lucy winced at the sight of him. His breaths were labored, like he was breathing through a snorkel. But he was alive, and he was lucid.
Lucy took his hand and placed the necklace in it. She couldn’t imagine the guilt he carried. The deaths, the murders, the brutality, the hopelessness; he’d created all of it. It wasn’t his fault, he was just trying to survive. But she still hated him for it. She wished he had died that day.
Lucy stood, and walked over to Violent. Violent still stared at the boy. Lucy helped her up. The two of them walked out the door without another word.
Lucy counted off the room signs when she saw them.
1242… 1238… 1231…
David was so close.
1210…
Lucy and Violent slid into a water-soaked corridor.
Huge chunks of plaster from the ceiling and the walls lay scattered on the floor. Water rained down in waterfalls and then flowed toward a wall of rubble that blocked the end of the hallway. The Loners were there, clustered in the hall; a group of Sluts too. They waited in silence. It was unsettling.
“What’s going on?” Violent asked one of her girls.
“Don’t know if that dude’s gonna make it,” one Slut said.
Lucy looked to Violent in a panic.
“Go,” Violent said. “Hurry.”
Lucy let go of Violent and splashed through the wet hall to room 1206. The room had no floor. There was a flash of light from the room below.
“David?” she called out. “Will?”
“Lucy?” Will said.
“Oh, Will, thank God.”
Will reached his hands up to her. He helped her lower herself into the ruined room below.
“You made it,” he said.
She hugged him and held him tight. She could feel his face turn toward hers. She thought she felt the slightest kiss on her cheek, but she couldn’t have been sure. She laid eyes on David.
He was hunched over against a wall, just beyond another thin waterfall. She could only see the white of his eye patch undulating behind the wall of water. She could make out the shape of his arms. They were spattered with dried blood.
Lucy let go of Will and moved toward David. Will stopped her.
“Don’t—” he said.
Lucy looked to Will. She had to go to David. She had to.
“Get back,” David said with heavy sigh.
“But—” she said, and didn’t know what to say next. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
“We’re killing him, even this close. We’re toxic to him,” Will said.
“No,” Lucy said with a whimper.
“David, you have to go now,” Will said.
“But… right away?” Lucy asked.
Will gently tossed David his phone. David barely caught it.
“Use the phone’s light. Follow the blood trail,” Will said to him.
Lucy noticed bloody paw prints on the floor’s rubble. They pointed toward a triangular hole in the wall of rubble, where David stood.
“We’ll wait an hour, then follow,” Will said. “That should give you time to get far enough away.”
”Listen,” David said. “We don’t know what’s out there.” David stopped to cough. It took him a good ten seconds to get his voice back.
“When you leave,” David continued, “you gotta stay hidden.
I’ll tie… something red to the back door, okay? That’ll tell you Dad’s not in the house, and it’s safe to go in. Just be careful. Take Lucy and go to the basement. Hide there. I’ll call.”
“Okay,” Will said.
“And keep her safe. Promise me you’ll keep her safe.”
“I promise.”
“Please, I won’t come near. I just want to see you,” Lucy said.
David didn’t move. He kept his face hidden.
“Please—”
“I can’t. Lucy, this isn’t the end. I just need a head start.” Lucy was close to breaking down. It was the end.
“I’ll-I’ll see you soon,” she said.
Tears clouded her eyes. She wiped them away as fast as she could. She wouldn’t miss a single moment. The white of his eye patch quivered behind the rushing water, then was swallowed by the dark when David turned away. He cast the phone light on the hole in the wall and climbed through. A small hunk of plaster fell as he brushed up against it, and it landed in a puddle. A moment later, the light of David’s phone faded away and he was gone.
She stayed there, staring. Will touched her arm.
“You should sit down. Rest,” Will said. “We’re gonna need our energy, and we can’t go in there for another hour.” The tears still flowed, as heavily as the water from the ceiling.
“You wouldn’t believe whose ass I had to kick to get David here,” Will said.
Lucy couldn’t wait an hour. It felt impossible. She ran to the hole in the wall and peered through. She just had to see him one last time. It was a labyrinth of wreckage inside. The plink-plink of dripping water resonated through the tunnel. It wasn’t a tunnel as much as it was the empty space left between the piled chunks of wall, ceiling, and floor. The chunks rested precariously on one another like a stack of dominoes. She caught the glow of David’s phone, then she saw his silhouette.
“David!”
He turned. The glow of the phone illuminated his face. It was swollen and bloodi
ed, but his good eye sparkled. Was that a smile?
A second later, a chunk of ceiling in front of him fell, pulling an avalanche of rubble down with it.
She screamed. Her legs buckled beneath her; she collapsed into a puddle.
Will ran to her.
The tunnel was gone.
40
David was shaking from adrenaline.
He’d almost been crushed. Pain throbbed, everywhere. He cast the light of his phone back at the passage he had just crawled through. It wasn’t there. Dust and dirt, kicked up by the collapse, still spun in the air. He pressed his full weight against the blockage in several places. Nothing gave. It was solid, through and through.
“Lucy!” he shouted. “Will!”
He pressed his ear to the wall of rock. He could hear faint shouts on the other side, but he couldn’t make out the words.
He heard a whimper behind him. David turned and faced the path ahead. He held up his phone. It was littered with dogs.
Doberman pinschers with broken backs lay limp over jagged hunks of debris in front of him. They dangled out of holes and crannies. They were sandwiched between blocks of wall.
David knew they were a manifestation of his fear, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
This school had taken everything from him. His bones felt hollow. His muscles felt like they were slipping off his bones.
He didn’t want to leave Will and Lucy behind. He wanted to bash against the obstruction behind him until it was dust. It wasn’t fair. These fallen rocks had made a liar out of him. He told them that he would get them all out, and now they were trapped again. They would all die of starvation.
He had to get the food drops started again. Graduation too. If he could get out, he could let the world know what was happening inside these walls. He had to try-it was his only chance to keep Lucy and Will alive.
David stumbled away from the obstruction. The dogs were still there. He heard the sound of a thousand dogs, panting in unison. Each dog he passed bared its teeth as he neared. He saw one dried-blood paw print and then another. He hoped the trail would lead him outside.
David careened off jutting rocks, avoiding scratching claws and snapping teeth. He could only see two feet in front of him by the phone’s anemic light. He followed the blood trail wherever it led, sometimes having to crawl on his stomach. He lost track of the trail at times and crawled into cramped passages that came to dead ends.
It could’ve been minutes or hours since the tunnel’s collapse. He had no way of telling the difference. He might have been traveling in circles, he couldn’t tell. He kept going.
His vision was savaged by more things that weren’t there.
They couldn’t be there. He saw all the rubble as acne-scarred flesh. He saw his own arms as eels, black and wet and squirm-ing. For a good fifty feet Sam silently followed close behind him, with his arms outstretched, wanting a hug.
But gradually, the hallucinations faded. In time, he didn’t feel like his brain was evaporating anymore. He didn’t feel that nuggets of lungs were rising up in his throat. He just felt like he’d been beaten up by the whole football team, which he had been. It was a good feeling.
David turned a jagged corner. He crawled into a slim space between two horizontal slabs of wall. If whatever was holding those two slabs apart gave way, David would be squashed flat. As he slithered through, David’s phone died. The battery was done.
David threw the phone aside and continued on, blind. His hands were his eyes. He felt his way through rocky crevices and disjointed passages. He saw light ahead, a dark gray shimmer in the blackness. He moved toward it as fast as he could. The light forced him to squint. A short tunnel of debris extended above him like a chimney, and beyond it, he saw the gray material of the canopy, just like in the quad. It glowed from the moonlight shining through. He climbed-one final effort. Something scurried down the rocks by him. It was a rat.
David pulled himself out of the tunnel and onto a slanting hill of rubble. He realized that he was on top of what once was the East Wing. The heavy synthetic material of the canopy was in his face; it covered the entire hill of rubble. He could almost see the moon beyond it, a crinkled blur of white.
He caught just a whiff of cold, fresh air, but after a year of breathing the recycled, dead air in the school, that whiff was like a spoonful of sugar. He turned his head when he heard a flutter, and he saw a tattered hole in the canopy above him. It was being blown about by a chilly winter breeze. He crawled up to it, grabbed the gnawed and torn edges of the hole, and pulled his head through. A limitless night sky was above him.
The stars were sharp and brilliant pinholes, and the silver moon was nearly full. He breathed deeply. The air was rich, like biting into a tomato off the vine.
I did it, he thought. I got out.
David climbed out from underneath the canopy. The material sloped up and up above him, over the hill of craggy ruins, all the way to the roof of the remaining building. He looked below him. The canopy ended at the ground, twenty feet down, and beyond it, he saw trees. Real trees. He didn’t realize how much he’d missed them until he saw them. He half slid, half climbed down the rest of the canopied rubble hill and stepped onto grass. It was soft under his shoes. The lawn of the campus stretched out before him. He ran to a nearby tree. He just had to touch it. The bark was aged and rough and natural. He savored another gust of fragrant air. It smelled of leaves and grass and rain. He never wanted to be inside again.
Thirty yards away, there was a double line of chain-link fence. It surrounded the entire campus, and razor wire was spooled along its top edge. He saw a guard tower. He saw parked jeeps. Moonlight shimmered across the lawn. There were prefabricated buildings across the campus that he didn’t remember. When he looked at the school itself, he saw that the canopy covered the entire massive building, like the school was undergoing a permanent fumigation.
He had to get off this campus. The world needed to know what was happening in McKinley, and it was up to him to tell them all. He couldn’t afford to screw it up. He knew he should wait, survey the scene, make sure no one was around, but he couldn’t. He had to move.
David ran for the fence.
41
Sam trundled down a pitch-black hall.
It had been two weeks, and the lights still hadn’t come back on. He couldn’t see a thing. His muscles spasmed with each step, and his legs wobbled underneath him. His belly twisted and growled. He could taste his own bile on his tongue. The food was gone. His food. The rest of the school had devoured it all.
Those animals. He despised every one of them. They turned on each other like Sam knew they would. The gangs fell apart, and now they all lay out in the quad, starving and helpless.
Like babies. Disgusting, pink little babies, crying and waiting for someone to feed them.
He’d show them. There was a gas line to the boiler in the basement. He’d break it loose. He’d let it leak for a day, maybe two. Then he’d drop a torch from the third floor down the center shaft of the stairwell.
The babies would burn. He’d hear their wailing screams as the fire boiled the flesh off their bones. He’d probably burn too, but he’d be dead soon anyway.
Sam saw a pumpkin-colored glow coming from around the corner ahead. It was the fluttering light of a torch. He crept forward, careful to not make a noise, and peeked around the corner.
There in the front foyer, standing by the graduation booth, with their backs to Sam, were Will Thorpe and his skank friend, Lucy. Will held the torch while the skank tried her thumb on the booth’s dormant scanner.
Sam slipped his kitchen knife out of his belt. The fire’s light glinted off the blade’s serrated edge. He snuck toward them.
Revenge was only fifteen feet away.
The back of Will’s neck was exposed. Sam could see the bumps of his vertebrae nudging out from Will’s neck just slightly. He’d push the blade in between them and twist.
Ten feet. They still hadn’t
heard him. He slunk forward.
This was too perfect. He had to suppress an urge to laugh.
Four feet. He tightened his fingers around the knife’s handle.
Two feet.
Sam heard the smooth SHIIICK of metal sliding against metal. The steel doors to the outside opened. Brilliant daylight gushed in through the doorway, brightening the entire
room. He winced and shielded his eyes.
Sam darted behind a nearby column and hid. He braced himself for men in gas masks and haz-mat suits. The soldiers were probably coming to slaughter them once and for all. He peeked around the edge of the pillar just far enough to see Will and the skank. They hadn’t moved. They stood there, like idiots about to be shot. Sam poked his head out farther. He could see the open door to the outside now.
A teen boy with white hair walked in. Sam couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The kid wore dark blue jeans and a ski jacket, and he carried a hunting rifle. He was followed by more white-haired teens, all wearing casual clothes and tot-ing guns. There must have been forty of them.
Sam glanced back to Will and the skank. They were just as dumbfounded as he was.
The kid in the ski jacket homed in on the two of them. His face brightened. He lowered his gun and walked toward them with a big smile.
“You got no idea how long it took us to get that door open,” he said. “You okay? You hungry?”
Will and the skank stared back.
“Don’t worry,” the kid said. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”
“Where are the soldiers?” Will asked.
“Oh, they’re gone,” the kid said. “We came to get you out.” Sam felt small fingers touch his wrist. He jumped and spun around. A girl stared up at him. She had a round, wholesome
face and long white hair that draped over the shoulders of her down vest. She couldn’t have been older than thirteen.
“Hi,” she said sweetly.
Sam slowly snuck the knife down the back of his pants.
“Hi,” Sam said.
“You want some food?” the girl asked. She pulled a granola bar out of her pocket.