Quarantine: The Saints q-2

by Lex Thomas

  Quarantine: The Saints

  ( Quarantine - 2 )

  Lex Thomas

  A cross between the Gone series and Lord of the Flies, Quarantine #2: The Saints continues this frenetically paced and scary young adult series that illustrates just how deadly high school can be.

  Nothing was worse than being locked in—until they opened the door…

  McKinley High has been a battle ground for eighteen months since a virus outbreak led to a military quarantine of the school. When the doors finally open, Will and Lucy will think their nightmare is finished. But they are gravely mistaken.

  As a new group of teens enters the school and gains popularity, Will and Lucy join new gangs. An epic party on the quad full of real food and drinks, where kids hookup and actually interact with members of other gangs seemed to signal a new, easier existence. Soon after though, the world inside McKinley takes a startling turn for the worse, and Will and Lucy will have to fight harder than ever to survive.

  The Saints brings readers back to the dark and deadly halls of McKinley High and the QUARANTINE series.

  Lex Thomas

  QUARANTINE

  THE SAINTS

  To our family and friends. For still hanging out with us after we dropped off the face of the Earth.

  1

  THE OUTSIDE. IT WAS A PLACE WHERE THINGS were alive, where forests grew, where your friends weren’t trying to kill you, and the air didn’t taste like dust. The door to the outside was now open.

  Hissing torches filled the dark hallway with red. Will held Lucy’s hand. They ran like mad down the hall, trailing the rest of the Loners. They’d gone back to get their gang when those gun-toting kids from the outside had opened the doors. Will watched the Loners ahead of him dash around the corner and pour into the front foyer. He heard happy screams.

  Will and Lucy burst into the foyer. Bright light streamed in from the mysterious white room beyond the steel graduation doors. The rest of the Loners were already crowded at the doorway, fighting each other to get through first. Half of them were in tears. Sunburned kids from the outside stood at the edges of the foyer, leaning on their rifles and waving the Loners forward.

  Will and Lucy charged toward the light. Will wanted inside that room so badly, but the rest of the Loners were ahead of him. He and Lucy pushed against the backs of the Loner mob. The approaching thunder of running feet filled the halls behind him. The other gangs were coming. All of them.

  “Faster!” Will shouted at the Loners in front of him, who were still passing through the graduation doors ahead.

  Shrieks of joy echoed through the foyer as kids from every gang flooded into the foyer from hallways, and came charging down the central staircase. Clamoring students slammed into the backs of Will and Lucy, pushing them through the graduation doors and knocking them to the floor of the blinding white room beyond. If they hadn’t scurried to the side right away, they would have been trampled.

  The white room. It was uncharted territory. The only McKinley kids that had ever made it this far were graduates. Will squinted, trying to make his eyes adjust to the brilliant light that overexposed the room. This area must have been on its own generator. He realized that the entire, wide ceiling was one large panel of light, except in the center, where there was a giant mechanical contraption. It had eight metal arms that each held a hose with a spray nozzle at its end. The device’s arms were drawn in on itself, like a dead spider. The floor and walls were all white ceramic tile except for an eight-by-eight-foot metal door to Will’s left and an observation window by the ceiling.

  Lucy’s hands grasped Will’s arm and lifted him off the floor.

  “Come on,” she said. “Hurry.”

  Will and Lucy flowed with the crowd toward a door at the other end of the room. They fell in beside Belinda and Leonard, but the crowd around them had mostly become a patchwork of different-colored heads. They left the white room behind and entered a long corridor. They teetered at top speed, and clung to each other for balance. On either side of them, down the length of the hall, were holding cells, each with a thick, clear, plastic door. Hanging ceiling lamps revealed that each cell contained a cot, a sink, a toilet, and a desk bolted to the wall. Stacks of magazines lay on the floor of some cells, a deck of cards was scattered in another, and in the last cell, Will noticed that the walls were graffitied with permanent marker doodles. One was a happy-face sun looking over a graveyard.

  The crowd bottlenecked again at the next doorway. People behind Will and Lucy started pushing harder, screaming to move faster. They squeezed into the next room. The doors in and out were airtight. Metal closets lined the walls. The little room was packed beyond capacity. A bunch of Skaters behind Will and Lucy pressed against the crowd with solid, continuous force. Will felt merged with the bodies around him, like meat through a sausage grinder. Finally, they were spit out through the second door. They stumbled into a wide room with a hall to the left and to the right. Outsiders blocked those passages and waved everyone forward.

  This new room was lined with desks that must have once held computers and machinery, but now only tangles of wire remained. Desk chairs were strewn over the room. An American flag on a pole was tipping into a dead, potted palm. The place had been abandoned in a hurry.

  “Oh my god,” Lucy muttered, squeezing tight on Will’s arm.

  Will had already seen it. In the center of the wide far wall, beyond the writhing, multiheaded silhouette of the dashing crowd, sunlight streamed in from open double doors. He almost cried.

  The crowd surged. Loners ahead were making it outside, into the sunlight. Kids from other gangs too. Will saw the outside in glimpses. Snowcaps on the distant hills. Clumps of luscious green grass sprouting up across the front lawn. Swaying trees. A pigeon flying in a quartz-colored sky.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Lucy said on repeat, as they raced toward the doors.

  One outsider stood at the exit, holding one of the doors open, as kids wrestled their way past him, fighting each other to get out first. The kid was tall, he had long white hair, and one of his eyes was so bloodshot that the white of his eye was a deep red.

  “Keep going, keep going!” the red-eyed boy said to Will as he reached the doors.

  Lucy tugged Will back. He looked back at her in a panic. What was she doing? They were only a few feet from freedom. Her face was taut with terror. Will heard the blast of a car horn.

  “Bus!” Lucy said.

  Will turned to see kids in front of him dive out the doors. A blazing yellow school bus was barreling toward Will, seconds from smashing into the building. The outsider kid hadn’t seen it yet; he was still shouting at the crowd inside.

  Will shoved Lucy to the side, away from the doors. He grabbed the outsider kid, and yanked him out of the way.

  Will and the outsider hit the floor just as the bus plunged through the entrance. The impact jolted the entire wide room with a clap of metal against concrete. Chunks of ceiling dropped, nearly crushing them. Dust clouded the room. All the lights in the facility flickered and died.

  For a moment everything was still and silent.

  Will breathed in dry air. He was alive. The outsider pushed himself up and held his head, dazed. Coughs mingled with the creak of metal and the tick of a hot engine. People slowly began to rise around the room. The entire structure had collapsed around the crushed face of the bus, covering the doors and windshield with gigantic slabs of concrete. All that could be seen was the bus’s front grille and bumper; not a speck of the outdoors was visible anymore. One unbroken headlight cut through the thick dust, and stared deep into the new darkness.

  “No,” Will heard himself say.

  He was staring over at Lucy. She was unconscious. He sc
urried to her and took her head in his hands. He brushed her soft tangle of white hair away from her face. He touched her pale cheek; it was cool.

  “Lucy. Wake up,” Will said. All he wanted was for her big, beautiful eyes to open, some sign of life, but her body remained limp. He could feel his voice getting weaker with emotion. “Please,” he said.

  Still nothing.

  All around, kids struggled to their feet. They pulled at the rubble, but the heaviest slabs stayed put, locked in place around the bus. There was no budging any of it.

  The wailing began. Kids cried, and held each other. They beat at the bus with their fists. Dust still swirled in the headlight’s path.

  Will held Lucy’s head gently in his hands.

  “You can’t leave me,” he said. “You can’t. Please, Lucy.”

  Lucy coughed. Her eyes fluttered open. She looked up at him, confused.

  “Did we…,” she rasped. “Are we getting out?”

  Will couldn’t bear to look her in the eye.

  “No.”

  2

  THIS ISN’T REAL, LUCY THOUGHT.

  “Are you okay?” Will said to her.

  She was still on the floor. She stared at the mangled grille of the bus. It was one with the building now. Kids had given up trying to move the stubborn, concrete slabs that covered its front.

  “I’m—” Lucy said.

  She didn’t know what to say. To say something would be to acknowledge that this was actually happening, that she’d seen nearly her entire gang escape McKinley before she could, and that the only way out of the school had been destroyed.

  Everybody else was furious. McKinley kids had the outsiders backed up against the bus. They were screaming at them, asking desperate questions, with so many shouting at once that all Lucy could hear was one long, unintelligible blast of anger and confusion. The outsiders looked frightened. They had their rifles and pistols drawn and pointed at the McKinley kids.

  The boy with the red eye stepped out in front of the other outsiders.

  “Everyone, shut up!” the red-eyed boy said.

  His voice carried, and the screaming subsided.

  “We aren’t the bad guys,” the red-eyed boy said to the crowd. “We didn’t drive this fuckin’ bus in here.”

  Will squeezed Lucy’s hand. She hadn’t realized he was holding it, but of course he was. In the last two weeks, as the food had run out, as they began to starve, as death became a certainty for them, Will had always been there, holding her hand.

  “Can you walk?” Will asked Lucy. He was looking at the outsiders, like he didn’t want to miss a word of what they had to say. Lucy didn’t either. She nodded.

  Will helped her up, and they shuffled over to the teeming crowd around the outsiders. The room was hot with their breath. Anguished faces and torches extended back through the room, and down the hall beyond.

  “Who are you?” a Varsity yelled.

  “My name’s Gates,” the red-eyed boy said. “Look, just calm down. We’re infected just like you. And we were trying to get you out of here.”

  “Bullshit!” a Freak shouted.

  Gates’s red eye flared. “It’s not bullshit! You think we want to be trapped in this place?”

  “Who was in that bus?” a Geek yelled.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Gates?” a Freak girl next to Lucy said in a trembling voice. Gates calmed at the sight of her worried face. She held a torch, and firelight licked the thin lines of scar tissue that stood out in sharp relief all down her forearm.

  “Yeah?” he said to her.

  “What’s out there?” she said.

  The crowd went quiet. It was what they’d all wanted to know for the last year and a half.

  “Well… what exactly do you know?” Gates said.

  “The military told us that the virus was spreading, and they were working on fixing it and we haven’t heard anything since,” Belinda said from the back of the room.

  He blinked his way through what Belinda had just said, his red eye blinking much more than the other.

  “Shit, I don’t know where to start,” Gates said. “Uh…”

  The room waited patiently for any information he could give them. Gates seemed surprised by just how captivated they all were. A minute ago, they were a vicious, barking mob.

  “Let’s see,” Gates went on. “The infection hit us about three weeks after you. Most of us went to St. Patrick’s Academy down in Denton.”

  “The private school?” Will said.

  “Yeah,” Gates said, brightening a bit when he saw that it was Will asking. “We’d heard there was a quarantined school in Pale Ridge and all these people had died, but Denton is fifty miles south of here, and the news said we had nothing to worry about.” His eyes unfocused as he got lost in the memory. “The day it hit us, it was school spirit day. All our parents were there. We were all out on the lacrosse field. One second it was fine, the next, parents were vomiting blood all around me. My mom—”

  Gates cleared his throat and stopped talking. He looked out at the crowd of McKinley kids again.

  “I’m sure this stuff is nothing new to you. Must have been the same here,” he said. “But when the soldiers came for us, they didn’t try to quarantine us, or capture us. They started shooting. Two hundred and thirty-two of us eventually made it out of there alive. We hid anywhere we could, and we stayed on the move. They were evacuating the whole state, and they were having a hard time. People driving over each other’s lawns, and cars crashing into each other and shit. It was nuts. The virus was spreading so fast. The more kids caught it, the more adults died. Parents with teenagers were trying to get their kids out of the state before they caught the virus. It got real messy. Any soldier that saw a teenager with a bald head, they’d kill you. And it wasn’t just the soldiers either. Everybody had guns. Fuckin’ grandmas were shooting at us.”

  Lucy could hear the crowd get sick. Her stomach sank too. She thought of her own family trying to leave Colorado, scared they were going to die. Somewhere along the way she’d convinced herself not to think about whether her parents had died. She thought most kids in here had done the same. Now, those feelings took hold of her again.

  “We ate what we could steal or what we could hunt,” Gates continued. “We hid wherever we could. In the mountains, in the sewers. Empty barns. But we were never safe. They murdered so many of us. Some were lucky enough to phase out. There’s only forty-two of our original group now.”

  “Are our families out there?” a sunken-chested Nerd boy said.

  Gates looked at him, perplexed. “Were you listening?”

  The Nerd boy continued to stare at Gates, like he hadn’t answered him yet.

  “No, they’re not,” Gates said.

  The Nerd turned and walked back into the crowd.

  Gates took a deep breath. “Since the evacuation, the only adults around have been military search squads. I take that back… there are a few nut-jobs out there that refused to move out, and every once in a while you’ll get some angry bastards who come back to Colorado, wanting to kill any infected they can. That’s probably who was driving this bus. But mostly, it’s been soldiers and infected.”

  “They didn’t let you turn yourself in?” Lucy said.

  A flicker of a snarl upset Gates’s somber face.

  “No, they did,” he said. “They drove these giant armored trucks around. They’d blast the same announcement over and over, that we wouldn’t be harmed if we came forward and got into the back of the truck. They said they had a facility for the infected where they would be taking us, and we’d be safe there. A lot of other kids did turn themselves over.”

  Emotion choked Gates to a stop again. One of the outsiders, a girl with short white hair, walked to Gates and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. He cleared his throat and dug his knuckle into his red eye, then started up again.

  “But it was all bullshit,” Gates said, and shook his head. “You can be sur
e they drove those kids straight to a gas chamber.”

  This boy is a liar, Lucy thought. He was playing with their heads with all this talk of murderous adults on the outside. He had to be a liar. Please let him be a liar.

  “And then, you’ll love this… that offer to turn ourselves in had an expiration date. They let us know that if we didn’t turn ourselves over by their deadline, our refusal to come forward would be viewed as a hostile action. That’s what they called it. Like we were the bad guys. They said that we would be considered ‘deadly threats with intent to do harm.’ Basically, turn yourself in or we’re going to come kill you. And that’s the way it’s been since then; we run, they hunt us. Well, it was until about a month ago.”

  “What happened a month ago?” Lucy said, annoyed that this guy was pausing dramatically. He had the room riveted, and he knew it.

  “The military picked up and left. Just like that. We’d been hiding in the woods over by Tilsing Hills, and we stayed there for a week ’cause it seemed like it had to be a trick. But another week passed, and they still didn’t come back. Eventually, we went ahead and walked into town. That first day we took whatever we wanted from the stores and houses we could break into. There were other kids like us, crawling out of their hiding places and passing through. We traded information, stuff we knew about where we’d been. Somebody said they heard McKinley was still locked up and you weren’t being fed anymore. We figured somebody better let you out.”

  He smiled.

  “You guys are kinda celebrities to the kids out there. You’re the first ones. There wasn’t an infected out there who didn’t wish they could trade places with a McKinley kid. No one shoots at you in here. For whatever reason, you all got to stay safe in your high school, they even fed you.”

  Lucy found herself cussing uncontrollably, but she wasn’t alone. The whole hallway was pissed.

  “You got no idea what it’s been like in here,” a voice said, louder than the rest. Lucy knew it immediately. Violent pushed through the crowd with a slight limp. She didn’t seem to care that the outsiders were tightening up on their guns. She stopped just ahead of the rest of the McKinley kids, and stood there fuming, with a sharp cafeteria knife in her hand. She looked so strong, like none of this had frightened her in the least. Violent could handle anything.