“Yeah, and she said we should run, too,” Howard added.
“Run?” Savannah asked. “From Elana?” She looked pensive.
“What?” I asked her.
“I was just thinking about how the only people Fiona was afraid of were the Shepherds. She told you to be afraid of them, too.”
“Well, I am afraid. And Dani is a Shepherd.”
“So then, what does it say that Dani is afraid of Elana?”
“It says she’s her boss,” Eric cut in. “And that the Shepherds won’t stop Elana when she comes to rescue us. Come on, Sav. Don’t encourage her.”
I looked from Savannah to Eric. “What is that supposed to mean?” I stood up and put my hands on my hips. “You all think I’m crazy?”
“No,” said Eric. “We’re here, aren’t we?” He seemed to regret those words the second they left his mouth. His face changed completely. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Of course it is.” Mom left Dad because she thought he was crazy, too. Maybe she’d think Eric and I were crazy now. “Don’t worry about what Mom will say when we see her. You can tell her this was all my idea.”
“Gills . . .”
The leaves over our head began to shake; then the ground began to rumble. We crouched, clinging to one another, as the shaking grew stronger and stronger, then faded away.
“What is that?” I asked. It was the same thing that had happened at the chimp habitat.
“The launch of phase two?” Eric suggested. “It happens every thirty minutes or so.”
“They aren’t launching anything,” said Howard. “We would have seen it from on top of the cliff.”
“We didn’t see anything, but trust me, you can feel the rumbling from the ground,” Eric said.
“Have you been chased the whole time?” I asked.
“No,” said Savannah. “But this hiding spot is better than the last one.”
“Yeah,” said Eric. “Savannah’s practically made it her office. She’s been reading.”
“I just want to know what’s going on with those chimps.”
So did I. I drew closer.
Savannah wrinkled her nose and scooted away from me. “I notice you didn’t stop to dunk your head.”
“It wasn’t like there was a bathroom up there on the cliff. Or anywhere else.”
“Tell me about it,” Sav said. “Your brother used a tree.”
I peered into the windows against the building’s wall, but the interior was too dark to see anything. “Think there are bathrooms in here?”
“It’s worth a shot. Whatever they have has got to be better than a tree.”
I ran my fingers along the window frame. “Could we kick it in?”
“Let’s try.” Eric lay down on his back with his feet across from a window. “Help me. On three.”
I lay down beside him and drew my legs back.
“One,” I said.
“Two,” he added.
“Three!” We kicked out.
The windowpane popped free from the frame, and a second later, I heard it shatter against the floor in the room below.
Eric stuck his head through the hole. “Some kind of basement. This window’s up near the ceiling, but we can lower ourselves down.”
“Can you see anything?” I asked.
“Desks.” He shrugged. “A few computer terminals. Looks abandoned, like everything else around here.”
“Well, maybe they left the water on,” I said. “Let’s check it out.” Carefully, Eric and I lowered ourselves, feet first, into the room. My feet scrabbled against the side of the wall as I reached tentatively out with my toes for a ledge or a shelf or a tabletop, but I felt nothing.
“I can’t hold on,” I said in a huff as the corner of the ledge dug into my armpits. “Eric?”
“Got it,” his voice floated up beside me. He’d lowered himself all the way down, and was hanging by his fingertips. “Just a second.” He let go of the ledge and slipped down the wall. There was a huge crash.
“Eric!” I screamed, hanging from my arms on the ledge, my feet wheeling out into darkness.
“I’m okay,” he called from below. “I just . . . flipped the table or whatever I was standing on. It’s fine. Just drop.”
I did as he said, landing hard on the floor several feet down. Something crunched and crackled beneath the soles of my feet.
The dark room smelled stale and brown, like a root cellar or an old shed. The dim light from the window wasn’t enough to illuminate anything, and got even dimmer as the shapes of Savannah and Howard blocked the window as they followed us. I stepped away from the wall to let them drop, and kicked something on the crackly ground. It skittered away from me.
Savannah and Howard crunched down behind me as I brushed debris off my pocket and reached inside for my flashlight. Time to see what was going on in here.
I flicked the switch. The beam caught the white glow of a skull, lying an inch deep in a brown, wriggling mass on the floor.
Wriggling . . .
I raised the flashlight to my brother. His feet, his legs, his entire body was crawling with—bugs.
Shiny, crackly-carapaced, six-legged beetles crawled everywhere. The floors, the walls, the tipped-over legs and broken edges of the aquarium table we’d upended, and, worst of all, the glimmering silver material of Eric’s utility suit. There must be hundreds of them. Thousands.
I dropped the flashlight and clapped a hand over my mouth to stifle my own scream. There was nothing, nothing my brother hated more than bugs. The beam of light washed weakly over the walls.
“What is it?” Eric swiped at his face and the beetles went flying. “What?”
I reached for my flashlight, and a beetle crawled over it. I grimaced as its stubby little antennae waved across the beam. The shadow of a giant bug head graced the wall.
“Um, Eric,” I said gently, kicking the flashlight to dislodge the bug. “Don’t freak out, but—”
Howard flipped on the lights, bathing the room in a wan fluorescent glow. Giant aquarium tanks lined the walls, and inside each lay fresh white bones and thousands upon thousands of brown-black beetles. Savannah and I shied away from the bugs spreading like a puddle across the floor. Eric was positively covered in them.
He looked down at his body, let out a high-pitched squeal, and started jumping up and down. “Get them off! Get them off, getthemoff, getthemoff!”
He batted at his legs and shrieked. “Gillian! Help me!”
“Hold on!” I started swiping at his clothes. “Eric, hold still!”
“I can’t! I can’t!” He danced from side to side, pumping his legs like a giant silver grasshopper, which only made him lose his footing and fall back among the beetles. He tried to turn over, smacked into bare skull, and went completely berserk as the beetles swarmed his arms.
Savannah threw back her head and laughed.
“Sav!” I hissed as I knelt among the crunching black carapaces and swatted bugs off my brother. “Not funny! He’s going to get eaten alive!”
“Nah,” she said, and kicked waves of the bugs away with her feet. “Those are dermestids.”
“Derma-what?”
“Dermestid beetles. Oh, you are so not country, Gillian.”
I paused in my frantic attempts to delouse Eric. Horseflies I knew, and carpenter ants. What was an especially backwoods bug?
Howard came forward with a broom, sweeping a clear path among the insects. He started brushing them off Eric. The broom worked way better than my hands. “They use them in taxidermy. My dad has a colony. They’re flesh eaters.”
Eric whimpered.
“Dead flesh,” Savannah clarified. “They’re super gross, but they don’t bite humans.”
Eric shot to his feet and shook out his hair. “Are there any down the back of my suit?” He shuddered. “Help me. Help me!”
I double-checked for stragglers on my brother while Howard swept the bugs back into the remains of the broken aquarium, and Sava
nnah examined the other tanks.
“These look like more chimpanzee skeletons,” she said sadly.
“They gave the chimps to the bugs to eat?” I asked, horrified.
“They gave corpses to the bugs,” Sav said. “Dermestid beetles only eat dead things, remember? That’s what makes them so great for taxidermists trying to get skeletons. They’ll clean a skull in no time, and it’s much easier and you get way better results than trying to do it yourself, or using chemicals. All the hunters in town—even Mr. Noland—keep a tank or two in their workshop for when they clean deer carcasses for stuffing.”
“You people have these things in your basements?”
“Not me,” said Savannah. “I don’t have a basement. And Mom doesn’t hunt, anyway.”
“Museums use them, too,” Howard added. “It’s not weird or anything.”
“Um, yes it is!” insisted Eric. “It’s super weird.”
I nodded in agreement. There was no way museums used bugs to clean off specimens. And I bet Savannah wouldn’t be so calm if they’d been crawling all over her!
“Your dad keeps maps of Area fifty-one,” Savannah shot back. “At least these bugs are real.”
Eric was too scared to argue. “Can we please go now?” he begged, his eyes wide.
Sav had her hand pressed against another tank. “Look, this one was a juvenile,” she said.
I made the mistake of glancing inside. An even smaller, more childlike skeleton was nestled among the crawling beetles. “This is disgusting.”
“I wish I knew why they were doing it,” Savannah said softly. She shook her head. “Those beautiful creatures!”
“Please tell me she’s not talking about the bugs.” Eric had his back flattened to the wall farthest from the tanks. “Let’s get out of here. Come on. What are we waiting for?”
“But where is here?” I asked. “Let’s figure out a plan. We have to hide from the Shepherds until Elana and Dad come.”
“Do we know where they’re meeting us?” Savannah asked.
I looked at Howard, who stared at the floor and shrugged.
“We . . . kinda didn’t finish the conversation with them.”
Eric and Savannah turned to me.
“I . . . um, might have thrown the phone off a cliff.”
“Oh, Gills . . .” Eric let his head thump against the wall. He looked pale. “What, did they threaten to put Mom on the phone?”
“Hey!” Savannah and I cried.
“It’s true!” Eric said, indignant. “She shuts down the second Mom tries to do anything with her. She has all summer!”
“That’s hardly important now,” Savannah said. I loved her for sticking up for me, but it didn’t stop the lump in my throat.
I stared down at my hands. “It wasn’t Mom,” I said softly. “It . . . it was Dad.”
“What was Dad?” Eric leaned forward.
“He didn’t sound like himself,” I said. “He was talking about how angry he was that I’d gone off grid, and how it was okay for us to sacrifice our freedom for safety.”
“You mean he sounded like a normal person for a change?” Eric said.
“You’re right,” I snapped. “Dad’s not normal. He doesn’t think like normal people, like Mom. But that’s what I mean. He sounded different. And I didn’t like it.”
“I’d like it,” Eric said. “I actually really liked it this summer, knowing that dinner wouldn’t poison me and the house wasn’t going to burn down every night. I liked that Mom was there with clean laundry and to take me to swim practice. If Dad was like that all the time, I wouldn’t want to go to Idaho, either.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “If Dad were like that all the time, no one would be going to Idaho, because—” My jaw snapped shut.
It was so silent in the room you could almost hear the crunch of thousands of dermestid mandibles ripping apart thousands of scraps of dead meat.
If Dad were like that all the time, he and Mom would not be divorced. He’d still be at the university. We’d still be a family, and Omega City would be nothing but a myth.
I drew in a single, shaking breath. “We’ll go back to the beach,” I said with finality. “They can’t miss us there.”
Savannah took the cue. “Great. But you, Gillian, are finding a bathroom first. We need to wash that poop out of your hair.”
18
SWEET DREAMS
LUCKILY, THERE WAS A BATHROOM DOWN THE HALL FROM THE DERMESTID beetle room. Savannah and I made use of their hand soap, and Eric stripped nearly naked under the air dryers, hoping to blow every last remnant of the beetles off him.
“You’re lucky we’re underground,” Howard said, as he helped my brother aim the nozzle of the air dryer on every nook and cranny. “Above eighty degrees, dermestids can fly.”
Eric looked faint.
Savannah, meanwhile, was scrubbing my scalp under the faucet. “I still want to know what they’re doing with those apes.” She started rinsing out my hair. “All those skeletons.”
“Ow.” I pulled my head out. “I want some hair left.”
“Sorry.” She held up sudsy hands. “This soap isn’t exactly tangle free.”
“I was much more gentle on your hair last night.” I wrapped my head in a pile of paper towels. It might not have been fine shampoo, but I had to admit my hair smelled much nicer than it had all afternoon. “What did the papers from the chimp habitat say?”
“Not a lot that made sense,” Savannah said. “There were a bunch of different tests. Bone density and muscle loss and stuff, and then there was another set where they were giving the chimps the same intelligence tests, over and over and over. Do you want to see?” She unzipped her pocket and pulled out the paperwork.
“Orbital duration,” I read aloud, then turned to Howard, who was studying the codes we’d found at the radio station. “Orbital. Does that sound like they put the chimps in space?”
“Yes,” he said without looking up. “If they mean the time they spent in orbit. Especially since it’s a bone density test. Space travel is known for destroying bone density and muscle mass, because of the lack of gravity. That’s why they make the astronauts on the space station work out on treadmills and stuff.”
I considered this. So they put the chimps in space, then bred them, then put those chimps in space, and bred them. . . .
I thought about the skeletons. And then they killed them and let the beetles clean their bones, and tested their bone density. . . .
Back at the beginning of the space program, NASA had studied the chimps, too. They wanted to make sure apes could survive in space before they sent up humans. What if the Shepherds were doing the same thing?
“They want to know if we could survive in space for generations,” I said. “They’re breeding the chimps and testing them to see if we can make it as a species if we have to go to space. Permanently.”
“But where are they putting these chimps, up in space?” Savannah asked. She was sitting on the edge of the counter, zipping and unzipping the neck of her utility suit. “They don’t have a space station.”
“I don’t know.” I said. “But it’s like Anton said at dinner about focusing on space exploration. Clearly the Shepherds think our next step is living in space.”
“Can we figure this stuff out after we get rescued?” Eric asked. “It shouldn’t take too long for Elana and Dad to get out to the island. They could already be here.”
“True. They aren’t going to find us in an underground bathroom. Let’s look for a way out.”
“A way that doesn’t involve going back to the dermestid room,” Eric added.
We got ourselves together and took off down the hall. Despite the size of the building, there were only three more rooms on this floor. One was clearly just storage, and another, marked Lady Birds, looked empty when we peeked through the small window set into the door.
“Figures,” said Eric. “If it’s birds.”
Savannah laughed. “No, i
t’s a misspelling. Ladybirds is another name for ladybugs.”
“Oh,” said Eric. “Well, that’s not too bad.” But I noticed he still shuddered and swatted nervously at the back of his neck.
Near the end of the hall, we passed a door marked Sericulture.
I directed my flashlight inside. Giant webs crisscrossed the space, spilling out from the boxes that lined the walls. Soft, dark shapes fluttered about and twitched in the dim light from the high windows, caught in webs of their own making.
“Eww,” said Eric. “Spiders.”
“Those look like moths,” said Howard.
Multiple signs posted on the door featured the Shepherd symbols and the animals’ stats in simple black and white. Most of the signs had “completion dates” marked on them, but two did not:
GROUP 5
SILK PRODUCTION: SATISFACTORY
SILK STRENGTH: IDEAL
JAM PRODUCTION: UNSATISFACTORY
REPRODUCTION RATING: IDEAL
RESOURCE RATING: SATISFACTORY
COMPLETION DATE:
GROUP 17
SILK PRODUCTION: SATISFACTORY
SILK STRENGTH: UNSATISFACTORY
JAM PRODUCTION: IDEAL
REPRODUCTION RATING: SATISFACTORY
RESOURCE RATING: SATISFACTORY
COMPLETION DATE:
“Silk production . . . do you think these are silkworms?”
“Don’t open the door and find out!” Eric begged. “Come on, we have to hurry and meet Dad.”
“Right,” I said, still staring at the moths. “But the more info we have for him, the better, right?”
“No,” said Eric. “Not when it’s bugs.”
“They look like moths to me,” said Howard.
“Silkworms aren’t worms,” said Savannah. “They’re caterpillars. So maybe the moths are the adults. What do you think they mean by ‘jam’?”
“You can eat moths,” Howard said.
“No.” Eric’s tone was final.
“Yes,” Howard said. “You crush them into a paste, like peanut butter. It’s a great source of protein. They’ve looked into it for astronauts, but they’d have to eat, like, two hundred moths a day.”
Savannah and I gagged. Eric, I think, might have actually thrown up a little in his mouth. Moth jam?
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