My burning lungs told me I’d been holding my breath. I only realized that I knew the answer as I heard myself say it out loud: “We’re seeing what Ezekiel saw after he turned into a Host. This is the inside view.” My heartbeat made itself known against my ribs. “He’s being played like an avatar in a video game.”
Chatterjee blew out a breath. “It’s as though the virus was … engineered.”
For the first time, I noticed that the footage also played on the rear membrane, but upside down and reversed. Ms. Yee had taught us how pinhole cameras used to work, and it looked like a version of that.
I refocused on the front membrane. Ezekiel’s path continued in jerky fast-forward. Another turn and the ten-yard line flew by. The footage zipped forward at a dizzyingly swift rate, made even more dizzying by the close-up sight of the ground underfoot. Once the field had been covered by the gradually widening spiral, the point of view entered the bleachers, scanning them, then reversing back to solid ground. Like the male Hosts we’d seen in town, it seemed Ezekiel broke from the spiral pattern only when he encountered an obstacle or a redundancy. Then he straightened out, headed for new terrain, and started over from a different center position.
“They’re not just walking in patterns,” Ben said. “They’re covering all the ground. Searching strategically.”
“For what?” Alex asked.
“For us,” Ben said.
“Wouldn’t it be more effective to keep their heads up and scan for movement?” Alex said. “I mean, if you’re on the lookout for kids, it seems pretty dumb to keep your eyes glued to the ground—or your non-eyes or whatever.”
I hadn’t looked away from the membrane. Slowly, it dawned on me what Ezekiel had been doing. The realization made my throat go so dry that I had to swallow before I could talk. “They’re Mappers,” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“What do you mean?” Ben asked.
Ezekiel’s lips fluttered as if he were about to say something, but all that came out was an odd vowel sound. The fast-forward stream kept zipping across the membrane covering his eyehole.
“They’re mapping the terrain,” Dr. Chatterjee said.
Ben’s laugh was high-pitched, nervous. “For what?”
I pried my eyes off the sight beneath me, looking at Patrick. “Do you remember Sheriff Blanton?”
Alex spoke before Patrick could reply. “What about my dad?”
I said, “When we came in, he was in your closet with his head tilted back toward the ceiling.”
“Like he was catching a signal,” Patrick said.
“What if he wasn’t receiving?” I said. “What if he was transmitting? Sending data.”
“Data?” Ben said. “What data?”
“This,” I said, pointing at the miniature feed playing in Ezekiel’s eye membrane.
We watched all that terrain continue to be vacuumed up and outlined as Ezekiel chewed up turf. It was hard to tell where he was heading until he bumped into a wall. The angle crept along the wall, coming to a locked door. Ezekiel’s hand rose into range, clutching his massive janitor’s ring of keys. He tried maybe fifteen keys in the lock, though considering the sped-up view, this took only a few seconds to watch. And then a key fit, the door swung wide, and the scene scrolled through a classroom. It moved through various floors and classrooms, the school’s interior being mapped like the football field.
The whole time Ezekiel’s cheek twitched, his Adam’s apple undulating. Aside from that, his face stayed expressionless.
“Wait a minute,” Ben said. “So you think this thing’s turning people into computers?”
Dr. Chatterjee said, “As organisms we’re not unlike computers to begin with. I mean to say they’re not unlike us. Maybe that’s why the eyeholes go all the way through. Maybe they need to access—or plug into—all parts of the brain.”
I could feel the heat of Ben’s gaze fixed on me, but I couldn’t look away from the footage fast-forwarding across Ezekiel’s eye membrane. It flew into the humanities wing, entering various classrooms and spiraling through them. I felt a chill as the point of view neared Mr. Tomasi’s room, passing the very spot where we stood. It zipped through Tomasi’s room, spiraling out to the perimeter in seconds. As it zipped toward the door, a familiar meaty hand swung into the frame holding a stun gun, the gleaming barrel filling up the screen. A bolt of lightning fizzled across the membrane, the spark so bright it made us jump. The next view was straight up at the ceiling, each tile delineated with those weird blueprint lines, though they were now even more scrambled and staticky than before. Soon enough the ceiling slid into a blur, passing through the doorway into the hall, and then we were looking up at ourselves looking down at us.
Live footage.
“I asked you a question, Chance,” Ben was saying.
“Sorry,” I said. I couldn’t lift my eyes. I could barely even speak. “What?”
Ben’s image, even fuzzily captured in the bubble membrane, looked annoyed. “I said, ‘Transmitting to who?’”
Before I could answer, a sudden movement in Ezekiel’s eye startled me so badly I jerked back onto my heels.
A virtual eyeball rolled into the membrane, replacing the view of us. Squirming and veiny, it stared up from the space where a real eyeball was supposed to be.
Alex screamed. I might have as well.
Not Ben, though.
Ben had his stun gun out in a flash. He fired it directly through Ezekiel’s forehead into the brain. All light vanished from the membrane, taking that horrific eyeball with it.
ENTRY 16
“What the hell was that?”
“And what does it want?”
“Where is it?”
“Are there more?”
“Did it see us?”
“I don’t know.”
The tense voices washed over my back. We were still right outside Mr. Tomasi’s classroom, but I was at my locker, twirling the combination dial.
“Does it know how to get here?”
“Well, it is a friggin’ Mapper, Ben.”
“But why would it think we’d stick around? Wouldn’t it think we’d be long gone?”
“That’s true,” Chatterjee said. “If it saw us, then it knows that we saw it see us.”
“Plus, the signal looked all weak and screwed up,” Patrick said. “Maybe it wasn’t transmitting clearly.”
“Either way,” Alex said, “we’ll have to watch out even more.”
“Meaning what?”
My combination lock clicked open, the battered metal door swinging on its rusty hinges.
Taped to the inside, a photo of me, Patrick, and Alex at the creek. We’d propped a camera on a rock and set the timer before huddling together, Patrick in the middle, one arm around each of our necks. Our only concern that day had been finding flat rocks to skip.
“Ezekiel used keys,” Alex said. “We saw him use keys.”
“Big deal,” Ben said. “They’re using all kinds of things.”
“The big deal is, lots of teachers have keys to the outside fences,” Alex said. “And it’s clear the Mappers want to record everything.”
“Ezekiel already got the school,” Ben said. “We just saw it.”
“But he didn’t finish. And we don’t know what he transmitted.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Patrick said. “They might come back to finish the job.”
“We need to switch the locks and post lookouts,” Alex said.
I flipped through various textbooks in my locker. A pencil box. An old apple, soft and brown. In the back I found what I was looking for: my composition notebook from English. I ran my hand over the battered black-and-white static design of the cover. The corners were worn, dog-eared, the pages nearly filled. I set it aside and reached for the one beneath it, still blank. The one I was gonna use when I ran out of room in the old one.
Behind me Dr. Chatterjee said, “We have a lot to keep track of.”
“Yeah, we d
o,” I said, elbowing my locker closed as I turned. At the clang, the others looked over at me. I gripped the new notebook. “We need to start writing all this down.”
* * *
In the quiet dark of the gym, surrounded by sleeping bodies, I stared down at my neat, slanted handwriting.
It was past midnight. I was still working in the barn when I heard the rolling door lurch open. I started and lost my grip on a block of hay. It tumbled off the baling hooks.
Once we’d gotten back to the gym, we’d circled up the kids and reported what we knew. Or at least what we thought we knew.
At the mention of the eyeball, terror rippled across the room, stiffening the spines of the kids. Now we weren’t just talking about parasites and altered adults. We were talking about aliens, advanced technologies, government conspiracies. The room buzzed with theories.
It quickly became clear that our questions would find no answers right now, so Dr. Chatterjee took charge, focusing our efforts. We’d sprung into action, setting schedules for lookouts, checking that all lights and appliances were in the off position, then getting the backup generator up and running. The generator was supposed to supply three weeks of power, but with everything turned off aside from the water heater, refrigerators, and freezers, we were hoping to stretch out that time frame much longer. Patrick and Ben ran sneak missions to the chained-shut perimeter gates, switching the school’s locks for thick padlocks from our PE lockers.
After my lookout shift watching the northeast quadrant from a perch atop Mr. Tomasi’s desk, I spent the afternoon and evening talking to as many kids as possible to start piecing together the story of what had happened—what was happening—to Creek’s Cause. Everyone seemed to have a different bit of information. Through bouts of tears, JoJo and Rocky bravely described the events of the last week around their house. Dr. Chatterjee and I sat down and figured out how a parasite like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis might have worked its way through Hank McCafferty’s distended gut into the frontal cortex of every adult in our county.
By the time midnight rolled around, my hand was cramped from writing and I had caught up to myself here, now, in the gym.
I clicked off the Maglite I’d checked out of the supply station that Eve Jenkins had been given the job of running out of the storage room. Then I leaned back on my cot, staring up at the high ceiling. Pennants overhead announced various sports titles. It had seemed so important last year when our baseball team won regionals.
I turned my head, looking at the cots lined neatly in rows. Most kids were sleeping, but a few were crying, some more quietly than others. Patrick was on lookout atop the bleachers, his big form barely visible against the casement window, watching over everything like a guardian angel. Less than a week until he turned eighteen. If we didn’t get help or if the spores didn’t magically dissipate, he’d turn into something unrecognizable. The thought stole the breath from my lungs.
He was my best friend. He was my only family. He was the only person left who’d known me since I was born, who’d held me when I was a baby.
What would you do if you only had seven days left with your favorite person in the world?
Cassius lay beneath my bed, sleep-breathing with a faint whistle, but that only reminded me of my other pups and made me feel more alone. I thought of Zeus out there somewhere. I’d been eight when he was born; I’d known him half my life. I’d delivered him myself, the biggest boy in the first litter that Uncle Jim had let me take care of. Zeus’s first act had been to yawn a puppy yawn in my face, his pink tongue curling. I pictured him now, grown and powerful, running through the forest, the other ridgebacks at his side. Were they hungry? Were they cold? Cassius whimpered in his sleep. Did he miss his father as much as I did?
Tears slid down my temples. With everything going on, I was crying over my missing dogs? And yet they seemed the only thing safe to focus on right now. When I thought of Mom and Dad or Uncle Jim and Sue-Anne or what was waiting for Patrick, I wanted to come apart.
Springs creaked on the cot next to me as Alex sat down, her hair twisted up in a threadbare gym towel. Fortunately, the locker rooms were right off the nearest hall, so we had easy access to toilets, sinks, and showers. Chatterjee had set a two-minute limit on hot showers to save energy, and Alex had been one of the first to jump on the offer. She smelled like soap and some girly shampoo, and if I hadn’t felt so embarrassed for crying, I might have been distracted. I wiped at my cheeks, hoping she couldn’t see my face in the darkness.
She lay back and shot a sigh at the ceiling. With Patrick on lookout and the kids around us asleep, it was almost like we were alone. That made me uncomfortable, but I wasn’t sure why.
“I thought it was bad when my mom left,” she said. “Every day when school got out, I used to run to the oak tree out front. And I’d sit on that low branch—the one that dips down, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Everyone knew that branch.
“And I’d wait and pray that her little Jeep would turn in to the parking lot. And she’d pull up and flash that huge smile and say, ‘I was just kidding, honey. I’d never leave you behind. I’d never leave you—’” Her voice cracked, and she covered her mouth. “I guess I couldn’t believe I’d never see that smile again.”
You can see it anytime you want, I thought. You just have to look in the mirror.
But I didn’t say anything, because that wasn’t the point, and besides, there was something precious and rare in her telling me this. Like it was some jewel she’d uncovered in the sand and handed to me.
“And now I just feel dumb for thinking that my mom leaving was so bad. Like it was some huge earth-changing thing. Big deal, right? Compared to this. I mean, pretty much all the grown-ups we know are changed into robots. And so many of our friends are captured. God knows what’s being done to them right now.”
I rubbed my eyes hard, remembering Sam Miller being carried into the church by his grandparents, his little body swinging between them.
When Alex spoke again, her voice was a hoarse whisper. “Nothing’ll ever be the same.”
Someone coughed across the gym, and another kid turned in his sleep, murmuring from a nightmare. I looked over at Patrick, faintly backlit up there against the pane, steady as a gargoyle.
“When my parents died,” I said, “I thought nothing would ever be the same. And it wasn’t.” I sensed her head turning toward me. “But that just meant I had to figure out a new way.”
“To what?”
“To live, I guess.”
The sheets rustled as she nodded. “I suppose we all do now.”
We lay like that for a time in the darkness, breathing.
“Patrick never talks about stuff like this,” she said. “And there’s a kind of strength in that. But there’s also a kind of strength in not being afraid to talk about it.”
My first instinct was to defend Patrick, to point out that he wasn’t afraid of anything. But I kept my mouth shut. Maybe it’s because I enjoyed how it felt, this secret compliment.
A wet slurp landed on the side of my face. Cassius, licking off the trails of my tears. He whimpered at me insistently. I knew that whimper.
It meant he had to go to the bathroom.
And I’d trained him from the instant he was born only to go outside. Which meant that now I had to risk my life so my dog could pee.
That really sucked.
He hadn’t gone all day. I hadn’t even thought about it. I wondered how many other things I had yet to consider.
I sat up with a groan, like an old person. “I gotta go,” I said. “Take him out.”
“Out out?” Alex asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“How you gonna do that?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
Cassius and I threaded quietly through the cots and across the court. Ben guarded the double doors, sitting on a metal folding chair like some kind of security guard. The set of his jaw showed just how much he dug the pos
ition of authority.
“Where you going?” he asked.
“Front lawn.”
“Front lawn? Now? What for?”
I gestured at Cassius. “He’s gotta go.”
“He can use the bathroom.”
“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 Cassius. “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.
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