The Echo Room

by Parker Peevyhouse

  He had to hide. A luminescent stripe pointed him away from the direction of the voice, down a short corridor to a bolted door. Rett gave the bolt only a cursory glance before he ducked into a dark side room.

  A minute later, he had pulled on a clean jumpsuit and stashed the soiled one in a bin. One, bloody jumpsuit. Two, parched throat. He had no idea where the words had come from. What am I doing here?

  He’d been outside—that much was obvious from the dirt on his feet and the grit that wouldn’t come off his face. Outside in the cold. His skin was still clammy. He remembered darkness, panic. What happened? Where am I?

  It was a dream, or some cruel prank, one Garrick had set up. He lured me here somehow, pulled that let’s-be-friends-after-all bullshit that I fall for way too often. It had been Garrick’s favorite trick to play ever since the disastrous day Rett had tried to be kind to him. He’d overheard the director say that Garrick’s mother had died, so Rett had given Garrick a Milky Way he’d snatched from a charity package. A foolish thing to try on a guy like Garrick, who hated pity more than anything else. Garrick had split it between them, waited until Rett had started chewing, and then said, “Your mom’s not coming back, either, you know. None of them are.”

  Rett had been left to shut out the dark thought with better ones: the sun on the pond near his home, the smell of paper and ink in the comic store, the magic of Times Square lit up at night.

  The trip to New York—buildings so tall and spangled they seemed made of starlight. At the door to Walling, his mother had asked him to remember that trip, her lips trembling at the corners of her smile. “All the lights, and the Statue of Liberty out on the water. We’ll go again when I come back.”

  She wasn’t coming back—but Rett had a plan to go where she was, the workhouses. He’d finally get what he’d tried to wish for years ago, under shooting stars.

  But first, I have to get out of here.

  He bolted out of the closet and almost tripped over a fire extinguisher lying on the floor. Completely out of place in front of the heavy door with the massive sliding lock. And why was the lock bent like that? He tugged at it. Jammed.

  Sweat broke out on the back of his neck. This isn’t a prank.

  The singing had stopped. The place was too quiet now. Rett crept down the hallway feeling like the bait in some great metal trap.

  He gaped at what he found: one of the striped walls had been lifted away to reveal a room taken up by a long sectional couch. And kneeling on the couch, looking at a ladder overhead, was a girl with short brown hair tucked behind her ears.

  She caught sight of Rett and whipped around to face him, so fast that Rett shrank back. But then she winced and put a hand to her head, her fierce expression both fragile and sharp, like broken glass.

  Rett’s hand went to the scar over his ear, so that he was a mirror of the girl. The sharpness went out of her as she met his gaze and they exchanged looks of pained sympathy.

  “Do you know—?” Rett peered around at the scuffed metal walls. “What is this place?” A warehouse for odd happenings, he answered himself.

  “I don’t know.” In her baggy white jumpsuit, with her hand lifted and her shoulders squared, she looked like a bird readying for flight. Like she could break her way out of their strange cage at any moment.

  The thought dazzled Rett. She could help me get out of here. If I don’t mess this up.

  “I think someone mixed up my reservation,” Rett joked. “I booked the Industrial Plus room.”

  “And I made the mistake of assuming the Quarantine Suite would be private.” The corners of her mouth twitched.

  “Quarantine? Is that what’s happening?” Rett ran through the list of his body’s current complaints: nausea, dizziness, headache. Gnawing anxiety.

  “I’ll admit I’ve felt better.” The girl moved her fingers through her hair and grimaced with fresh pain.

  “Are you okay?” Rett almost moved closer to help, but he didn’t want to spook her. And anyway, with her cut-glass expression, she seemed strong enough to help herself. To help him, too, maybe.

  She softened a little at whatever look he was giving her. Something pitiable, he guessed, based on how his head throbbed. “Are you?” She looked him over as if to check for further injury. Rett tensed under her scrutiny, remembering the bloodstain on the jumpsuit he’d stashed in the bin. Whose blood? he wondered again. And then thought, Good thing I changed.

  Rett realized he still had his hand to his head in some salute to pain. He put it down. “I can pretend if you can.” He smiled weakly and gave her the same look he used on new kids at Walling Home, the one that said he wasn’t looking for a fight, that they could watch out for each other. “I’m Rett.”

  “Bryn.” Her eyes were honey under glass, hard but warming. She moved her liquid gaze to an open doorway, and the honey went molten with dread.

  “What’s wrong?” Rett asked.

  “Do you ever see something and think, ‘If this were a movie it’d be no big deal. I’d just go with it’?”

  Rett held his breath. What is she talking about?

  “There’s a gun,” Bryn explained. “On the floor in there.”

  5:52 A.M.

  The gun: a menacing gleam of metal against the darker floor. It didn’t look like Rett thought it should. He’d never seen a real gun in person, but he’d seen them on TV and on the internet, and inked in the comic book pages kids drew and passed around Walling. The barrel of the gun on the floor in front of them was a tube that might detach in your hand, like something added as an afterthought. The grip was a grooved rectangle. It looked like someone’s idea of a space-age gun. “What should we do with it?”

  Behind him, Bryn said, “Put it in the desk?”

  Rett hesitated. How would other guys act in this situation? Excited? Tough? Guys like Garrick, who came after you in the yard, trapped you in small spaces until you bribed them to let you out. Made you drink beer with them in the shed, let’s be friends now—and then hid the empty bottles in your drawer so you got in trouble. Yeah, he’d love this, Rett thought.

  He leaned down and picked up the gun with his fingertips, trying to touch as little of it as possible. Its grip was rough and scarred from use, and the gleam of the metal was marred by scratches. He opened a desk drawer and laid the gun inside. It occurred to him that he should take the bullets out, but he had no idea how to do that. He closed the drawer and immediately felt relieved that the gun was out of sight.

  “Wish we had some light in here,” Bryn said, her soft voice brushing away Rett’s gloomy thoughts. “I feel like I’m breaking and entering somewhere I don’t even want to be.”

  Rett felt along the wall until he discovered a switch. Flipped it up and down.

  “Oh, is that how people turn on lights—with switches?” Annoyance edged Bryn’s voice. “I already tried that.”

  “Right.” Rett’s face flushed. “Here’s another one. Or a button, anyway.” It was marked with a painted symbol, a row of three overlapping circles. Rett squinted at the strange, segmented blob and then gave the button a jab.

  Nothing.

  “Guess the power’s out,” Bryn said.

  “What’s this for?” Rett prodded the heavy rubber that lined the doorway. He moved to examine the doorway from the other side—partly for the chance to pass close enough to Bryn to test whether she really gave off electricity, or if that was just the way she made him feel.

  He thought he felt a current, but it was just the brush of her sleeve. Focus, he told himself. Got to figure out what happened in this place. “There are scratches on the wall out here.”

  Bryn came to look over his shoulder. Her gaze followed the scratches downward. “All over the floor, too.”

  Rett looked down at the strange array of gouges—

  And at the half-smeared trails of boot prints.

  Boots. Someone else was here. Might be here still.

  Rett touched the place on his jumpsuit where that someone’s bloo
d had been smeared just minutes ago.

  What did I do?

  What will Bryn think I did?

  Bryn knelt to look closer at the floor, and Rett’s heart stopped. Her fingers trailed over long gouges. “How do you think this happened?”

  “I—” All Rett could think about were the prints. Had she noticed them?

  She squinted at the skylight overhead. “Could be someone set up a ladder to get to the skylight and it scratched the floor.”

  When he didn’t respond, she said, “I also happen to know from experience that this is what a floor looks like after you play indoor field hockey on it.”

  Rett tried to laugh, but he was all nerves. “I would have expected more broken teeth.”

  “You’re thinking ice hockey. Field hockey is more about breaking shins.”

  “Uh.” His shins suddenly itched.

  “Don’t worry.” She gave him a wry smile. “I don’t have much practice at it.”

  He looked around, desperate for something else to distract her from the prints. “What do you think is behind there?”

  He pointed at the striped wall opposite the room with the couch.

  “No handle,” Bryn said, squinting at a rusty plate on the wall.

  “Hang on.” Rett went over and kicked at the wall so that it bounced up and he could get his fingers under it. He turned, hoping to catch a look of approval from her, but she was frowning at how the wall had stuck halfway open.

  “This place looks like it’s seen better days,” she said before she ducked into the room beyond.

  Quick, Rett told himself. The boot prints.

  He swiped his bare foot through the tell-tale prints, but there were so many, tracked all over the floor of the main room in a dizzying pattern.

  She’ll think I’m bad, that I did something bad. He couldn’t bear the thought. Because it wasn’t fair. Even though he’d always had to fend for himself, he’d tried not to be like the others, like Garrick, who hunted people and hurt them and humiliated them.

  And because …

  He couldn’t explain the blood.

  Or the sinking feeling that he really might have done something terrible.

  He got down on his knees and used his sleeves to wipe away as much of the dirt as he could, even while he thought, This is crazy, what am I doing, this is—

  “Rett? What’re you doing?”

  Rett bolted upright. The half-lifted wall between him and Bryn shuddered. She’s coming back. And most of the floor was still covered in boot prints while he knelt there obviously trying to get rid of them.

  In an instant, he was on his feet, bolting down the hallway to the closet where he’d found the clean jumpsuit. He yanked a bin out from under the shelf. The sight of the bloodstained suit stashed inside sent a sharp pain through his gut.

  “Rett?”

  Bryn appeared in the closet doorway, rigid with suspicion. She looked down at the boots Rett had yanked onto his feet a moment earlier, and then at the bin he was shoving back under the shelf. Now if she sees boot prints on the floor, maybe she’ll think I’m the one who left them, Rett thought. No need to explain that someone else has been here, that whoever it was must be sporting an unpleasant injury that I might have given them …

  “Where did you get those boots?” Bryn asked.

  Rett cleared his throat, and the sound was dry as a death rattle. “They were here.” He glanced at the bin and then quickly away. “In the bin.”

  Bryn made a movement as if to look in the bin herself, so Rett quickly added, “This was the only pair.”

  Bryn pulled back stiffly. She looked at Rett for a moment, unease showing in the flat line of her mouth. A wild thought crossed Rett’s mind: I wish I knew a joke that would make her laugh. Knock, knock …

  “What’s in your hand?” Rett asked, eager to shift her attention.

  She held up a tube full of green liquid.

  “Emergency smoothie?” Rett tried.

  Bryn’s eyes flashed, but her stony expression didn’t crack. “It’s a light stick.” She pulled another out of her pocket and handed it to him, stretching her arm out so she wouldn’t have to step any closer. “It’ll glow if you bend it.”

  Rett tried not to take offense at the distance she kept between them. I’m messing this up. “What else did you find? Any water?”

  Bryn’s gaze went to something over his shoulder and he turned to see a showerhead over a stall door. He must have seen it earlier but it hadn’t registered. “Try the knobs,” Bryn said, her words coming out in a rush.

  Rett lunged toward the stall and fumbled with a knob on the wall. “Nothing.” Disappointment settled over him like cold fog.

  “There’s got to be some way to make it work.”

  “Maybe we need to turn the water on at the source?” he said.

  “Which is where, usually?” Bryn asked.

  “Where are the water controls in an experimental detention facility? I don’t know.”

  “You think this is a prison? I thought those were supposed to be locked from the outside.” She gestured at the mangled bolt barring the exit door behind her.

  “Whatever this place is, there should be a way to get the water going. A knob … or a lever.” As soon as he said it, an image popped into his head of a lever mounted on a wall. Where had he seen that?

  Bryn leaned against the doorway. “Clearly something is wrong here.”

  The back of Rett’s neck prickled. He couldn’t help glancing again at the bin that held the bloodstained jumpsuit. What went wrong? What happened?

  I swear I didn’t do it.

  Did I?

  “Neither of us feels great,” Bryn explained. “What if this really is a quarantine situation?”

  Panels Rett had drawn for Epidemic X flashed through his mind: biohazard suits looming over sickbeds, patients staggering through hallways, zombies breaking through windows.

  Rett pressed a testing hand to his forehead. Sweaty, but not feverish. Without thinking about it he reached for Bryn’s. His fingers brushed her skin, but he couldn’t say whether she felt warm, because a tingling sensation now traveled up his arm. “You feel…” He cleared his throat again. “… okay.” He took a hasty step backward, a little fevered now.

  Bryn didn’t seem to notice. “It’s just … you know how all those kids have to live in boarding facilities because their parents are sick?”

  Rett’s stomach clenched. “I live in one of those facilities.”

  “So do I.” Bryn’s gaze was probing. “Walling Home.”

  “Walling Home?” Rett’s head buzzed. We’re both from Walling Home? “Same here.”

  “This might sound stupid,” Bryn said, “but do you remember that comic that someone drew on scrap paper? And people passed it around and added their own pages?”

  Rett nodded. Epidemic X.

  “There was this one big panel that showed a guy infected by a zombie plague and locked in someone’s basement. It wasn’t even a great drawing, but I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  Rett swiped a hand over his heated face. “I drew that panel.”

  Bryn’s mouth twisted. “Oh.”

  “I mean, you’re right, I’ve never been great at drawing.”

  “I can’t draw at all, if it helps.” Bryn fidgeted. “I just meant that I keep wondering if that’s what happened to us, if we got sick and so they left us here alone?”

  Rett looked at the boot prints on the floor between them. We aren’t alone.

  “I know there’s no such thing as a zombie plague,” Bryn went on. “Although, honestly, I’ve spent a whole lot of time listening to my boyfriend argue decently plausible zombie outbreak theories…”

  Rett felt a strange pang in his chest at the word boyfriend.

  “But what if it’s something like that,” Bryn went on. “Everyone at Walling has parents too sick to take care of them. It’s strange, isn’t it? Why are so many people sick?”

  “I guess when you live in a place
for kids whose parents are sick, then of course it seems like everyone’s parents are sick. Right?”

  Bryn shrugged. “There’s a conspiracy theory website, Dark Window, that says it’s the government’s fault that people are getting sick. That there was this big experiment to make crops more resistant to pests and drought, and it went wrong, and the corn and wheat and everything made people sick.”

  “I’d believe that if there were enough corn and wheat and everything to go around.”

  “Dark Window says that’s the government’s fault, too,” Bryn said. “Another outcome of their failed experiment.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  She shrugged again. “My stepdad used to say the internet’s really only good for checking the point spread before a Buckeyes game.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think the Buckeyes have a bad habit of choking when it matters most.” Her gaze went to the floor, and Rett wondered if she noticed the boot prints, if she thought it strange that they stretched out into the hallway even though Rett had only just put on the boots. He startled when she spoke again. “And I think this place feels like an isolation cell. Like if we could get that door open, we’d find ourselves in a forgotten section of some kind of medical complex. Probably yet another place the government decided to pull funding from because public health is such a frivolous cause.”

  Images flashed through Rett’s mind: a hospital bed, a bank of bright lights, a huddle of white lab coats—

  “I … I think you might be right,” he said weakly.

  Bryn swiped her fingers over a dust-coated wall. “Do you think anyone knows we’re here? Do you think they’ve forgotten us?”

  “We could bang on the door, if you feel like that would help.”

  “Would anyone hear us? What if we’re in some abandoned part of the city that everyone’s steering clear of because they know there’s an outbreak situation?”

  Rett moved around her to the heavy door and pounded his fists on it. “Hey! Hey, is anyone out there?” His voice echoed off the metal walls.

  “Rett,” Bryn said.

  Rett beat his fists some more, unloading his frustration on the door.

  “Rett, I don’t think we should do that.” Bryn pulled at his sleeve. “I have a bad feeling…”