The boy named Porter jumped off the top bunk, and regarded Andy with suspicion. He was a few inches shorter than Andy and very thin, with spindly arms and legs. There were dark circles under his eyes, giving him a haunted look. He scratched at a red welt on the back of his hand.
“Hi,” Andy said. “I’m Andy.” He extended his hand.
The boy took a half step back. He stared at Andy’s hand as if it were radioactive.
Andy let his hand drop and sighed. A cold greeting in a muggy room, he thought. He could feel sweat start to trickle down his back. As the silence stretched out, Andy looked around the room. Steel-framed bunk beds bolted to one wall. A metal desk and chair against the other wall, covered with papers. A folding chair squeezed between the bed and the desk. That was it.
There were pictures taped up all over the walls.
“You like to draw, huh?” Andy asked as he took a closer look at the curling papers stuck to the walls. “Whoa.”
All the drawings were of things being destroyed. Cars, buildings, planes. Jagged lines showing the explosions arced across the pages. Pieces of metal flying, smoke billowing. Andy looked closely at a dark smudge in the corner of one of the drawings. He shuddered when he noticed tiny, jointed legs sticking out of the splotch. A bug had been squashed onto the paper.
Each of the drawings had a small signature.
Andy turned back to the boy, who managed to look both fearful and defiant at the same time. “Pyro?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“I like to blow stuff up. I don’t care what you think,” he said, not meeting Andy’s eyes. He sat down at the desk. “That’s how I got here. I was in a foster home. Blew up the kitchen. No big deal. I got burned.” He showed his left arm to Andy. Along the underside of his forearm was an ugly, purplish patch of skin that ran from his elbow to his wrist.
“My foster parents got sick of having to call the fire department, so they decided to ship me out here.”
Andy dropped his duffel on the bottom bunk and said, “Look, I really don’t care what you like to draw, as long as you don’t try to set me on fire. I have to take a leak after that kidney-pounding bus ride, so can you tell me where the head is? Otherwise, my bladder’s going to be the next thing that explodes, and it won’t be pretty.”
Pyro gave a half grin and left the room, motioning for Andy to follow.
There were some other boys standing and talking in the hallways, some making their way to the bathroom, toothbrushes and towels in hand. A few of them glanced furtively at Pyro and Andy as they made their way down the hall. Andy caught glimpses of large black ants crawling along the ceiling panels.
At the junction of two hallways, there was a desk with a heavyset man sitting behind it. He had a graying crew cut and wore a Reclamation School, Inc. shirt. A thin younger man with messy hair, a scraggly beard, and glasses was having an animated conversation with the man at the desk. He was holding a small, transparent plastic box with something alive in it.
“… and you’re telling me you found this thing right here in the hallway?” The bearded man held the box up to the light as the thing inside scuttled around. “Geez, just look at it, there’s like, six, seven, eight, nine legs on it. Something’s going on around here, Albertson. I just found out that the headmaster sent the exterminator I brought in back home. It doesn’t make sense; I mean, why bring me out here if it’s not to control these bugs? And what’s causing these mutations? I’ve been finding some stuff in other parts of the building and outside on the grounds you wouldn’t even believe …” the younger man was saying.
The heavyset man held up a hand to stop the rush of words as Pyro and Andy walked past the desk.
“Well, I don’t understand why Switch sent away the exterminator you called, when the things are eating us alive … hold it a sec, Doc. Porter … what are you doing out again? Didn’t I just see you a few minutes ago? You’ve got about ten minutes before lights out. Let’s get a move on.” He peered at Andy and stood up. He was massive, about six foot five. “You’re Greenwood, right? I’m Albertson, the proctor for this unit. Don’t be a screwup, and we’ll get along fine.” Andy just nodded as he looked up at Albertson’s neck, which was thicker than Andy’s thigh. Andy noticed some raw-looking sores on the man’s neck.
What is doing that to everyone? Is that from the bugs? Andy thought with a shiver.
Sensing a little tension, Pyro nudged Andy in the ribs, and they started down the hallway again.
“Yeesh, that guy’s a moose.”
“Yeah, his dad must have been an elephant that escaped from the circus,” Pyro said. “I think he was in the Navy or something. As a battleship. The funny thing is that all these huge guards seem to be freakin’ petrified of Switch.”
“Who was that other guy talking to Albertson?” Andy asked as they made their way through the corridor.
“He’s a freak. I heard he’s some kind of scientist, a bug expert or somethin’ like that. Supposedly, he’s studying bugs around here. Don’t know if you noticed, but we’re being overrun by ants. They’re getting into everything, and they sting.” He held up his hand. “One of them crawled onto my hand in the middle of the night, and when I tried to shake it off, the thing stung me. They’re huge, too. I’ve never seen ants that big.
“Anyway, some exterminators came out, but they left right after they got here. Maybe the ants scared ’em away.”
Pyro led Andy to the communal bathroom, all steamed up from showers running.
Andy got rid of what felt like several gallons of pee and then brushed his teeth. Pyro waited for him outside the john. They started back to their room.
“Five minutes ’til lights out,” a voice buzzed from the intercom speaker in the hallway.
Suddenly, Pyro grabbed his sleeve and pulled him into a side hall.
“Wait … hey! What is it?” Andy asked.
Pyro said in a low voice, “Just someone I don’t want to run into if I don’t have to.” He waited for a minute, and then said, “Okay, I think the coast is clear. Let’s —”
He stepped out into the main hall again, right into the large belly of a hulking kid.
“Hey, Pyro. Where ya goin’ in such a hurry?” The kid grabbed Pyro by the T-shirt. He was close to six feet tall, dressed in a grubby Reclamation School, Inc. shirt, and worn jeans that were too short. A brutal nose was centered in a doughy, thick-lipped face. His head was flattened on top, which was accentuated by a buzz cut. Heavy brows shaded dark, turbulent eyes.
Pyro’s voice cracked to a squeak. “H-hey, Joey … just gettin’ back before lights out.”
Joey took a tighter grip on Pyro’s shirt, barely glancing at Andy.
“I been lookin’ for you. When are ya going to get more of the stuff?” he growled.
Andy noticed that Joey kept glancing around at the floor, at the ceiling, as if he was watching for something.
“Geez, Joey, I don’t know. The proctors have been changing their night routes, and —” Joey gave him a rough shake. “Tonight! We’ll go back in tonight.”
Joey sneered. “That’s what I thought you were gonna say. Don’t screw up, and don’t get caught. I left the empties in your room.”
Empties? Andy thought.
Joey let go of Pyro with a slight shove, almost knocking him over. Andy just stood there, frozen.
“Whadda you lookin’ at?” Joey growled. He shoved Andy into a set of lockers running along the hallway and joined the teeming crowd of boys making their way back to their rooms.
“Moron,” Pyro said under his breath.
“What was that all about?” Andy asked.
“Lights out in three minutes. All students return to your rooms immediately,” sounded over the loudspeaker.
“Forget it. C’mon, let’s get back to the room,” Pyro said, leading the way back through the halls.
ANDY DREAMT THAT HE WAS IN A BLISTERING desert, lying pinned on the ground, surrounded by little black ants. Some of the ants crawled across his f
ace and started talking in his ear. He jerked awake. For a moment, he completely forgot where he was and turned over, but then it all came back in a rush. The whispering was coming from the room.
He sat up groggily, wiping sweat from his forehead. “What’s going on?” he mumbled.
Pyro’s voice came from the top bunk. “Nothing, just go back to sleep.”
Something fell onto the floor with a clatter. It was a flashlight.
Pyro’s voice hissed, “Fer cryin’ out loud, Hector, you moron! What is wrong with you? You’ll wake the whole place!”
A muffled voice, sounding like it came from up above the ceiling, retorted, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Don’t yell at me!”
“Okay, okay, Hector, I’m sorry. Just keep it down, will ya?” Pyro whispered back.
Andy picked up the flashlight, and climbed a couple of rungs of the steel ladder to the upper bunk. Pyro was sitting on his bed with a pair of shorts on. Posters that had been pinned up to the ceiling were hanging loosely, pushed out of the way. One of the panels in the ceiling had been lifted aside. Another kid’s head was visible through a square hole in the ceiling, just above Pyro. All Andy could see were reflections off a pair of black-rimmed glasses, which kept slipping from his nose. Big droplets of sweat dripped off his face.
“What are you doing?” Andy asked the other kid.
The kid pushed his heavy glasses back up his nose a bit, and looked at Pyro.
Pyro grabbed back the flashlight, and handed it up to the boy in the ceiling. “Stay outta this. Better if you don’t know.”
Andy grabbed Pyro’s wrist, which was slippery with sweat. “Hang on a second. If you guys get caught, I’m in the same room and busted just like you, so I’m in.”
Pyro looked at Andy twitchily, then over at Hector. Hector frowned. “It’s okay by me. We can use the extra hands. You have to promise not to yell, though. There’s too much yelling around this place.” Andy thought that Hector looked to be on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
“I’ll try to watch it,” Andy replied.
“All right. Let’s go, and I’ll tell you about the whole master plan once we’re clear of the proctors,” Pyro said. “You should get rid of your T-shirt, because it’s wicked hot in there.”
Andy stripped off his sweat-soaked T-shirt. “Great. It’s already pretty flamin’ hot right here,” he muttered.
“Here,” Pyro said. He handed Andy an almost empty can of bug spray, with a little cartoon roach on the can, lying on its back. “There’s a lot of bugs where we’re going, so kill ’em when you see ’em.”
Hector disappeared back into the hole in the ceiling, followed by Pyro. Andy climbed the ladder up onto the top bunk, and then into the hole in the ceiling.
It was at least ten degrees hotter in the crawl space over the ceiling. Pyro held up a finger over his lips. Andy nodded. The area they were in seemed to be a gap between the floor of the second story and the ceiling of the first. It was dark, and the heated air was stagnant, unmoving. There was enough room to make their way on hands and knees, their heads just touching the top of the space. Andy could feel drops of sweat running off him.
It was a tight fit. The boys had to squeeze between water pipes, electrical conduits, and matted pink insulation. Thick metal beams crisscrossed their path. Bundles of wires threaded around the beams, disappearing to the floors below or above. Cobwebs hung from every surface, clinging to the boys’ faces and shoulders. Every few seconds, one of the boys jumped as an ant crawled over his hand. The odor of bug spray was strong in the confined space, the cans hissing as the stuff coated the bugs, the beams, and the boys.
Andy’s right calf contracted painfully in a cramp as he dodged the beams. After a few twists and turns, they came to a shaft that extended downward into shadow. Andy could feel cooler air flowing up the shaft. There was a recessed ladder that Hector grabbed onto. He started downward. Pyro followed him, and Andy followed Pyro, taking care not to lose his grip on the sweat-slick ladder. The flashlight shone on bundles of colored wires that followed the ladder downward. The black ants were using it as a highway.
As they climbed downward, feeling for the next rung in the darkness, Andy noticed that it was getting cooler. The cooler temperature was a relief. Andy was feeling parched and a little light-headed.
Finally, they reached the bottom. The ladder ended in a small space, about eight square feet. A small recessed tunnel led away from the bottom of the ladder. The wires that traveled alongside the ladder went right into the tunnel, inside plastic tubing.
“No one can hear us down here. We can take a rest for a minute,” Hector said.
Andy looked down the narrow tunnel. “Where are we?”
“I found it,” Pyro asserted. “I wanted to scope out this place as much as I could, right after I got here. I needed to have someplace to hide out if things got really bad.” He shrugged.
“There’s no way to get down here from the school. I mean, it’s been blocked off, not just boarded up, or locked. Someone walled in these rooms so they couldn’t be found from the inside of the school.”
Andy asked, “Why would they do that? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Who knows?” Pyro answered. “They forgot to do anything about the air ducts and the area over the ceiling. They must have been in some big hurry, I guess. I was lucky that I was able to loosen one of the ceiling panels in my room without the USS Albertson finding out. What a tool. Anyway, once I was able to get up into the ceiling, it was just a matter of trying every direction and seeing where all the passages led. I don’t think anyone’s actually been down here besides us for years.”
He grabbed the flashlight out of Hector’s hand. “C’mon, let’s move it. I don’t want to push our luck because Joey’s afraid of bugs.”
He squeezed into the tunnel and disappeared.
Hector shrugged and made his way into the small crawl space.
Andy had a moment of panic as he pictured himself caught inside the little tunnel below tons of rock and dirt, but forced himself to follow Hector and Pyro.
They emerged in a small storage closet, after Pyro opened the aluminum grate that sealed the duct they had crawled through.
The tiny room was littered with stacks of papers and notebooks. Pyro opened the door to the closet, and ventured out.
He led them down a dusty corridor with doors lining each side. He stopped at one marked STOREROOM 3, and opened the door with a creak. Inside the large room were boxes and crates. Some of the crates near the door had been opened. Andy thought he could guess by whom.
Pyro tossed the flashlight back to Hector and climbed up to the top of a short stack of sealed plastic crates. He spread his arms and in his deepest voice (which wasn’t very deep), he intoned, “Welcome to my kingdom.” Hector giggled.
Andy asked, “What is this place?”
“We think it’s from when this was some kinda army base, or defense plant, or something,” Hector said.
“Yeah,” Pyro chimed in, “this is where they kept stuff they didn’t want anyone to find, I guess.”
Hector had opened one of the bottles of water they had taken from the staff lounge and left in the hidden room, and chugged almost the whole thing down in one swig. He let out a tremendous, echoing belch. Andy and Pyro laughed.
“How long has this stuff been down here?” Andy asked.
Hector and Pyro looked at each other. “Who knows?” Hector shrugged.
Pyro went over to a pile of crates. The top one had been opened. He reached inside and took out a canister the size of an oilcan. In the light of the flashlight, Andy could see that it was painted olive drab and had numbers stenciled on it. He could make out the word INSECTICIDE RS4-B. Pyro shook it, sloshing some kind of liquid around inside. He turned to Hector and said, “There’s enough left for tonight. Fill the bottles up, will ya?
“The ants started showing up a few months ago. A few of us got stung, but Switch wouldn’t call in an exterminator until he got stung
a few times. Turns out that Joey, who runs the biggest gang in here, is allergic to bee stings. He’s petrified that he’s allergic to these ants, too. I spotted this stuff the first time I came down here. It turns out that it kills the ants, so I’ve been filling bottles of the stuff for Joey, and in return, he doesn’t have me and Hector pounded.”
Hector flipped up a light switch on the wall next to the door and whined, “Awww, how come I have to fill the bottles …?”
Pyro snapped, “’Cause he’s my roommate, dipstick. If he was your roommate, you’d be showing him.” He grabbed Andy’s arm and said, “Wait’ll you see this!”
They left Hector filling the empty spray bottles that Joey the thug had provided, and went farther down the hall. There were papers and trash on the floor, coated with a layer of dust. A trail of footprints led to another doorway, which Pyro opened.
It was pitch-black inside.
“Hold on … I always have trouble finding the switch,” Pyro said. Andy noticed that there was an echo.
With a clunk, the front lights came on. Andy gasped.
The room was much bigger than the other room, more like a warehouse, and stretched back out of view of the weak front lights.
“Wow …,” Andy said as he saw the immense size of the room. It was filled with barrels and crates of all shapes and sizes, and rows of boxes. Some of the barrels had words stenciled on them: ATTACK, FRIEND, FOOD, QUEEN. Other barrels bore strange symbols. He saw what looked like a big “H” with the word HEXAPOD running across it. Another was an orange circle with spiky shapes piercing it; underneath, it said DANGER: MUTAGEN.
There didn’t seem to be any kind of order to any of it, as if everything had been thrown in here and then forgotten. “Whoa …,” Andy breathed again. He looked at Pyro, and saw a dazed expression on his face. “Hey, you okay?”
Pyro giggled crazily and ran to one of the nearby boxes, then held up what looked like a glass tube filled with some kind of greenish liquid. “Chemicals! Look at ’em all!” He raced to an opened crate, and pulled out sealed packs with warning stickers all over them.
Infestation Page 2