Finally the Mapper lowered his head and continued on his course.
I urged Cassius onto the dewy lawn, and he darted along with his nose to the ground, sniffing.
“Come on,” I whispered. “Just go already.”
He moved closer to the edge of the lawn, toward the fence line.
“Hey, stop. Cassius. Cassius.”
I was gonna tug him back toward the building, but try telling a dog where to go to the bathroom. At last he lifted his leg and started peeing right on the fence.
As I looked up, a Host emerged from the darkness, the hollowed-out face right there on the far side of the chain-link. My insides froze. I opened my mouth to yell but somehow managed to stop the noise in my throat.
The Host was Mr. Tomasi, his elbow-patched corduroy blazer looking frayed, his eyeholes focused on the ground in front of him.
He swept past me, close enough that I could smell a lingering trace of his cologne. His loafer moved right through the spot where Cassius was peeing, but he kept on, never so much as raising his head.
I watched until he vanished back into the darkness, and at some point I remembered to close my mouth.
I looked down at Cassius, and he looked up at me, his forehead furrowed.
“Let’s not do that again,” I said.
We headed back up the broad stone steps to the front doors. When we stepped inside, a hand set down on my shoulder, hard, startling me.
Ben had snuck over from his post in the gym to spy on us.
“If you’d screwed up,” he said, tapping my chest with his stun gun, “I’d have killed you myself.”
I believed him.
ENTRY 17
I’m snuggled in the sheets, and Sue-Anne sits next to me, leaning against the headboard, reading from To Kill a Mockingbird. Patrick is down with Uncle Jim in the garage, helping him change out the brake pads on his truck. He’s eight and gets a whole other set of privileges, including coming up to bed later.
I lie as still as possible, hoping that if I’m good, she’ll read one more chapter, that she’ll keep going forever. But she doesn’t. She finishes the page and closes the book, and my heart sinks. It is my third month in their house, and this quiet time with her is my favorite time of all. Tonight I will figure out how to fall asleep alone. Tomorrow I will get up early to help on the ranch before school. Everything is different.
Sue-Anne leans over, kisses my forehead.
The words burn in my chest, and before I can catch them, they are out of my mouth. “I hate them,” I say.
On her way out the door, she pauses. “I don’t understand.”
“My parents.”
She takes a moment, her lips pouched out like she’s thinking real hard. “Why do you say that, Chance?”
“They didn’t have to get drunk and get in a stupid car crash. They had me and Patrick at home. They never even thought about us that night.”
She doesn’t say anything. She just nods—not like in agreement but to show she’s listening. I know I’m acting like a baby, but I can’t help it. Everything’s burning—my chest, my face, my eyes.
“And I don’t want to—” My breath catches in my throat, and I have to stop for a second. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I say it anyways. “And I don’t want to grow up yet.”
She nods again, and her eyes are wistful, and I realize that even though I’ve known her my whole life, maybe I don’t know her much at all. When she speaks, her tone is as soft and kind as I’ve ever heard it. “Sometimes what we want isn’t what we need.” I look up at her, confused. “What does that mean?” I say.
A commotion jarred me out of the dream memory.
Hushed whispers and quiet footfalls. But it wasn’t the noise that was alarming so much as the panic running through the room. I opened my eyes, disoriented by the tall ceiling, the bright light streaming through the high windows, the movement all around me. On a slight delay, reality flooded in.
The gym. With the survivors. Uncle Jim and Sue-Anne dead. Kids snatched. Hosts everywhere. Our town overrun.
I sat up and followed the current of hushed anxiety. It had direction to it, pointing at Patrick in the lookout post atop the bleachers. With Alex at his side, he was ducked beneath the windowsill, his eyes wide.
His stare found me among the kids, and he gestured for me to get up there. I didn’t like the expression on his face.
Keeping hunched over, I crept across the floor, then up the bleachers, wincing every time they creaked. At last I reached him. Beside him, Alex was breathing hard, her chest rising and falling as if trying to tamp something down.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
Patrick pointed above his head. As slowly as I could, I raised myself up and peered over the sill.
Mappers lined the front fence. They stood shoulder to shoulder, blank faces peering through the chain-link. Their heads were nodding up and down in unison.
I dropped from sight, putting my back to the wall, and blew out a breath.
“Your mouth’s bleeding,” Patrick said.
I’d bitten down on my lip hard enough to draw blood.
Below, the other kids looked up at us expectantly. Chet Rogers chewed on the collar of his shirt nervously, his breaths starting to get that asthma rasp. Dr. Chatterjee leaned on the dry-erase board, light glinting off his eyeglasses. Ben Braaten cracked the double doors to peer out into the corridor, his shoulders raised. For once, even he looked nervous.
“What are they doing?” Patrick whispered.
I shook my head with bewilderment.
After I’d caught my breath, I inched back up to take another look. They were still there, maybe forty of them, their heads rocking robotically. At once they stopped. They turned and walked in single file down the length of the fence, then turned once more to face the building and started moving their heads again. Their eyeholes scanned the front lawn, scouring the contours of the building. Then I understood.
“They’re mapping the grounds,” I said, addressing the gym in a loud whisper. “Through the fence.”
“Why don’t they just break in?” Chet asked. “They’ve used jackhammers and stuff.”
“Maybe they want to leave as much of the infrastructure standing as possible,” Dr. Chatterjee said.
“For what?” Ben asked.
I thought of that squirming virtual eye rolling into place in Ezekiel’s head. “The question isn’t ‘For what?’” I said. “It’s, ‘For who?’”
Patrick, Alex, and I rose again, bringing our noses level with the sill. The Hosts finished wagging their heads and then broke apart, branching off into the neighboring streets, their faces lowered as usual.
I exhaled, and everyone else, reading our expressions, seemed to as well.
“Well,” Dr. Chatterjee said, “let’s get to the day, then.”
Logistics consumed the morning. The lookouts rotated, reporting back to Ben. A few of the kids took a shift in the cafeteria. Dr. Chatterjee told them to burn through the perishables first, so they served up runny eggs, cartons of milk, and OJ. I fed Cassius and took him out to the flower bed by the sheltered picnic area so he could go to the bathroom. In the gym Patrick cranked open the casement windows, letting the stale air out. The fresh breeze was a relief, what with the hundred or so bodies in close proximity. Alex turned on the TV, which still showed business as usual elsewhere in the world. Dr. Chatterjee continued to check the carbon monoxide detector at intervals, jotting the “unidentified particulate” readings on the dry-erase board.
Patrick walked over and stared at the board. I came up behind him and looked at the readings over his shoulder. They hadn’t dropped at all. In fact, they hadn’t even varied, the percentage remaining dead steady since Chatterjee had first started gathering data yesterday. My stomach roiled.
“You okay?” I asked.
“It’s only been a day,” Patrick said. “The spores have to dissipate at some point.”
Finally he turned, tried for a casual smile. He didn’t say
what we were both thinking: Yeah, but will they be gone six days from now?
By the edge of the bleachers, JoJo gave a cry of delight. She crawled under the risers and retrieved—of all things—a Frisbee. She called out to her brother, and they started tossing the disk back and forth. Even here, even now, kids were kids.
A movement at my side broke me from my thoughts, and I glanced over. Alex had drawn level with me. Eyeing the readings, she took in a shaky breath.
She looked over at me, her expression changing. Then she started jogging toward the bleachers.
“Alexandra,” Patrick said. “Hang on.”
But she hopped up on the first bench. “Hey!” she called out, careful not to yell too loud, mindful of the open windows. “Everyone listen up.”
She waited a moment as the others stopped what they were doing.
“I don’t know about you guys,” she said, “but I don’t want to just wait around here and do nothing.”
“What do you propose, then?” Dr. Chatterjee asked.
Alex gestured at the TV, showing a fake-tanned weather reporter gesturing at a map. “We have to get outside the infection zone.”
“You won’t make it a block.” Ben’s voice carried over to us from the base of the bleachers. He was sitting on the floor in a fall of light from the windows, turned away so only his profile was visible. His legs were kicked wide, his shoulders drooping. His hands were doing something on the floor, but from this angle I couldn’t tell what.
“Even if you could, where you gonna go?” Eve asked.
Alex tilted her head, indicating the SPTV logo beneath the still-yammering weather reporter. “Stark Peak is closest.”
Ben gave a nasty laugh. “You’re gonna risk escaping town, getting all the way across the valley and up over Ponderosa Pass?”
He had a point. Ponderosa Pass was nearly fifty miles away.
“Hell, yeah,” Alex said. “It’s a different weather system over the mountain range. Let’s hope that the spores stay here in the valley, socked in like fog.”
“It beats waiting holed up here anyways,” Patrick said. “The Hosts are doing two things: Mapping the terrain. And collecting all the kids. We still don’t know why. But we know they’re doing it for someone.”
“For whoever that eye belongs to,” Chet said, his voice wrenched high with fear.
“Which means,” Patrick said, talking over the muffled outcry caused by Chet’s comment, “that someone needs to go get help. Because whatever’s coming hasn’t even gotten started yet.”
“We’re safer here,” Ben said.
“They were at the gate this morning,” Patrick said. “At some point one of them will catch wind that we’re in here. They’ll get in eventually.”
Ben shifted, the floor between his legs coming visible, and I saw at last what he’d been up to. He’d been pulling the wings off dying flies. They wiggled against the floorboards like little beans. He plucked up another one lazing across the seam between floor and wall. “If they do,” he said, pinching off one translucent wing, then the other, “I’ll take care of it.”
“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 Patrick. “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 Dick and Jaydon or kill yourself, be my guest.”
“And what’s your plan?” Patrick 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, Patrick. 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,” Patrick 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,” Patrick said.
At this the kids bristled.
Patrick 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 Patrick 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?” Patrick 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, Patrick. 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?” Patrick’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 Patrick’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 Patrick 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 crack 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, Patrick and Alex were sitting together. He held his hands over hers and they were leaning in, his hat cocked 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 Cassius’s head reared into view beside them.
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