“Where are you?”
“Here! I hurt my knee.”
“Is this you?”
“Get off my face!”
I want to help them. I want to throw a glow stick—all the glow sticks at them. Just go away! Leave us alone in our corner.
“We don’t want to hurt you!” the guy yells. “Please, just one stick.”
I stay silent and still.
Maddie moves, something rustles. Green light bursts forth, then flies. The glow stick hits the wall, then lands.
“Thank god!” the girl cries. The green light lifts. Lights a face. Glints off the wet trails of tears on her skin.
Then I feel a hand on my foot.
“Now give us another.”
I kick my legs, drive my feet into a body. All instinct, no thought.
The guy wraps his arms around my legs, crawls his fingers up my body. I punch him. He grunts, takes the blows. Maddie releases my mouth.
“Get off me!” I scream, grabbing at hair, eyes, ears—pushing them away.
“What are you doing, Gav?” the girl cries to her partner.
Then there’s a blur of pink light and the smash of something hard hitting something harder. The guy falls still, head in my lap.
“Gavin!” the girl screams. The green light comes toward us.
Maddie drops the pink glow stick and broken pieces of walkie-talkie, swings her bag, and nails the girl in the head. The girl’s body hits the ground with a thud.
“Stop it!” I scream, referring to everyone, though only Maddie is listening. I drag my butt along the floor, away from the guy’s body. His head slides over my thigh, then thunks onto the cement.
“I should have known,” Maddie mutters, slinging her bag over her cassock. “I can’t believe I was that stupid.” She bends to pick up the green glow stick. Her hand is shaking. “This is not a freaking charity event.”
Maddie shoves the green glow stick into my chest, and marches toward the door leading into the service halls. “We go right,” she says.
I shuffle along until I can catch a corner of her sleeve in my claw.
She looks back at me like she’s going to punch me.
“Please,” I yelp.
She pulls me into a hug. “You have seen my self-defense skills,” she says. “And yet you still think it’s wise to sneak up and grab me?” She kisses my head, then tows me along.
• • •
There are a few emergency lights still burning in the service halls. Maddie won’t let me linger by them. She says they are too dangerous. “People can see you,” she whispers, “but you can’t see them.”
How is stumbling through the dark with firefly-level lighting in our hands any less dangerous?
Maddie stops and tests the first door handle. “Unlocked,” she mutters. “All the magnetic doors must be unlocked.” The door is marked CLAIRE’S. “Did we check here before?” she asks.
“Maybe,” I say. After escaping security’s attack on the IMAX, we ran down the maze of service hallways, then searched around the arcade. Who knows what stores we missed?
“Then let’s check it out,” she says, and we enter, glow sticks first.
The first thing my glow stick illuminates is a dead body.
I scream. Maddie punches my arm. I stop screaming.
We roll the body over. It’s a boy. He smells god-awful. Blood dribbles from his mouth, nose, and eyes. His skin is weirdly dark, like patches have been blacked out. I step over him, grab the edge of a shelf, and throw up Snickers bits and bile.
“He’s not even cold,” Maddie says. What possessed her to touch him?
“Wipe off your hands,” I say, thrusting hand sanitizer at her.
“I already had the flu.”
“Just wipe them.” I haven’t had the flu. Plus the virus has mutated now. Maybe Maddie can get it again. I’d like for us to not end up like this guy.
When she hands it back to me, I rub a small amount of the stuff over my face and hands. It stings my eyes, but what’s a little pain compared with ending up an oozing obstacle on a stockroom floor?
We poke around the junk in the stockroom, but there’s no sign of Lexi. I don’t even know what a sign of Lexi would look like.
“Ready to call it?” I ask.
“Let’s check the store.” Maddie heads for the exit into the store proper.
I got my ears pierced with Maddie and her mom at a Claire’s when I was ten. My dad was furious. He pulled the studs out and let the holes close up. Then, when I was thirteen, he took me to a “nice place” and had real diamond-and-gold studs put in. Of course, I had a reaction to the fancy earrings, and had to switch to the cheap, surgical steel ones I’d gotten years before at Claire’s.
The store is narrow and crowded with merchandise. Apparently, the senator’s society had no use for Hello Kitty costume jewelry and faux-silk scarves. Further emphasizing the store’s uselessness is the fact that the security gate is pulled down over the entrance to the mall.
The screams and shouts we’d heard in the stockroom are louder here. The cavernous black of the main mall echoes with voices.
“Get that guy! He’s got a flashlight!”
“She stole a bag of nuts!”
“Get the boys together—I found some kids with a stash of batteries.”
“Hey! That’s my bag!”
“Get her!”
“Get him!”
“Get them!”
The space between the shouts is filled with slapping footsteps and the squealing shoe soles.
Flashlight beams cut through the black like a laser show, sometimes catching a fleeing person, sometimes simply glinting off the windows, sometimes hitting a mirror and sending sparks of light all over. Multicolored glow sticks, glow necklaces, and glow wands wink in the shadows or streak by in a blur. Down on the first floor, someone has lined the rim of the central fountain with candles. A bright orange blaze from an unseen corner on the third floor suggests others have sabotaged the sprinkler system and actually built bonfires. Even with this, the majority of the place is still black, black, black.
“Lexi?” Maddie says, then coughs. “The air tastes stale.” She pulls out her inhaler, gives it a shake. “Not good.”
“Do you feel an attack?” Sixth grade, in gym, Maddie’s breathing got so bad, the teacher brought in an oxygen mask.
“No,” she says. “But without air-conditioning, I doubt the air is going to get better.” She takes out a water bottle and sips. “Figures I survive the killer flu only to die from asthma.”
Die? Why is she talking about dying? “You said you’re fine.”
“Now,” she said. “But one more bonfire, and I’m going to be hacking up a lung.”
“What is it, the smoke?” I ask. I’m sort of yelling because that’s better than sort of crying. I rack my brain for the information handed out in those elementary school presentations by the fire department. Stay low to the ground. Cover your mouth with a wet cloth.
“Let’s get face masks,” I say. “From the med center. On the first floor.”
Maddie watches the craziness out in the halls. “We have to find Lexi,” she says, gripping the links of the gate.
I grab Maddie’s shoulders and turn her to face me. “You can’t help her if you can’t breathe.” I straighten the strap on her bag, then pull up the hood of her cassock. “We are going to the goddamned med center.”
Maddie smirks, then gives a little salute, shoulders squared. “Yes, sir!”
“Help!”
Someone crashes into the security gate. We stumble back and hit a display, sending beads bouncing everywhere.
It’s a guy. He rattles the links. “Let me in!”
Neither Maddie nor I move. We hide our glow sticks in our sleeves and pretend to be shadows.
“I’ve got him!” Another boy materializes from the black. He has a headlamp on, like he’s camping. More boys with headlamps surround the pathetic kid. They tug his hands loose from the gate, pull
off his coat, and begin shaking out the pockets.
“You could let me keep a bag of chips,” the pathetic guy cries. Two headlamps have his arms and hold him still.
One of the headlamps is this guy I met early on in the quarantine: Mike. Egomaniac football player, a senior at one of the local high schools. We kind of hooked up, but he kissed like he was trying to bite my face off.
“Cleaned him out?” A tall kid in a duster coat steps forward, bends down, and picks through the loot. All beams are on him.
“It’s Marco,” Maddie whispers.
Marco’s with the headlamp gang? It looks like his face got messed up. One side is red and oozy, like he tried to burn it off.
“What should we do with him?” Mike asks—wait, Mike asks Marco?
Holy crap. Marco—scrawny, geeky, video-game-playing, nerdy-movie-quoting Marco—is the leader of the headlamp gang?
“Toss him,” Marco says. “He won’t try to steal our stash again.”
The headlamps gather the stuff they picked off the guy and slink away down the hall.
The pathetic guy is dropped into the black. “Thanks for the help,” he says. The gate rattles. “Hello? I know you’re in there.”
The gate will protect us. “What do you want?” I squeak.
Maddie elbows me in the side.
“Food, water,” he says, sounding almost jokey, “a nice place on Fire Island for the summer. You have any of the above?”
I pull out a Snickers and throw it at the gate. “Here.” I feel sorry for him. He doesn’t seem bad.
“Did you just throw food, water, or a very small beach hut?” The gate rattles.
But I’ve been the worst judge of bad, so I clamp down on that sorry feeling and hold on tighter to Maddie. “What should we do?” I whisper.
Maddie elbows me again. “What’s it like out there?” she asks him.
“Oh, it’s a picnic in the park.” The gate rattles again, then a bright white light flashes on. I’m blinded by its brilliance. Then the light goes out. We hear a wrapper crinkle. “Oh, god, chocolate has never tasted so good.”
“What was that light?” Maddie asks.
It flashes on again, this time illuminating his face. He is totally hot. And older. Like maybe twenty-five. He has long eyelashes that curl over soulful eyes. He is, like, the definition of my type. Then the light is gone again.
“It’s a book light,” he says. “I keep this puppy hidden on my person to avoid losing it in such shakedowns as you girls just witnessed. Thanks for the help, by the way.”
“What would you have liked us to do?” Maddie says. “We can’t open that gate. And even if we could have, it’s not like we’re looking to hang with thieves.”
He leans against the gate, causing it to creak. “Girlfriend,” he says, “thieving is all we’ve got left.” He offers to share his tale of woe for two more Snickers. This sounds like a good deal to me, so I toss two more at the gate. Once he locates them with his light, he continues.
His name is Kris. “When the lights went out, I was hiding in Baxter’s Books. I left the store, and came across those headlamp nutbags in the bowling alley just sitting on a huge pile of grub. We’re talking jerky, pretzels, trail mix in little bags.” He takes a moment. “Anyway, they chased me over here and now you know as much as I.”
Maddie is frozen against the table, arms crossed over her chest. I slide down to the floor, to his level. I would feed him all my food if he would just turn on that light again.
“How could the headlamp people have gotten so much food, and hauled it all the way up to the bowling alley?” Maddie asks, still sounding wary.
“Before the blackout, a bunch of lunatics armed to the teeth took on a food caravan guarded by security. Security was trying to move the food into the HomeMart before it was locked down. The headlamp people must have been with the lunatics. Which suggests they have weapons. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried stealing from them first.”
I crawl to the gate. “Please turn on your light,” I say, holding out a Snickers.
Just when he’s about the grab it, he snatches at my bag instead.
Maddie kicks the gate, knocking his hand loose, and drags me back. “Ginger!” she scolds.
He laughs. “Oh, come now,” he says. “I won’t bite. Okay, I might bite, but I’m just starving. There’s been no food service for, god, how long? A day? And how many packets of madeleine cookies from the bookstore coffee shop can you eat?” He turns on the light—a peace offering? “Actually, I can tell you exactly how many—fifteen. Then you begin to hate madeleines.”
“Was there a girl with the headlamps?” Maddie asks. “A black girl, kind of curvy? With the burned guy, the leader?”
Kris flashes his light at us. “I don’t know. There were a bunch of them there. We could go check,” he says. “I’ll show you where they’re hiding for a bag of candy.”
“No need,” Maddie says. “I’m sure we can find the bowling alley ourselves.”
“Suit yourself,” he mutters, shrugging. “But you sure you don’t want a hulking male presence along to defend you?”
Kris is far from a hulking male presence. Even Maddie cracks a smile.
“I think we’ll do all right on our own,” she says.
“Best of luck, then.” He flicks off his light. I hear the gate clatter, then footsteps. We are alone again.
“You think Lexi’s with the headlamps?” I ask, shuffling in the dark.
“Marco’s face was burned,” she says. “Maybe he was in the IMAX when the tear gas exploded. And maybe Lex was there with him. We didn’t exactly scour the place before security busted in—” She’s cut off by a wracking cough.
“First, we get face masks,” I say.
She nods and takes another sip.
THE
S
E
N
A
T
O
R
AUDIO LOG
Left on a machine using a satellite phone and a pre-arranged phone number:
This is Dorothy Ross calling with my report on the status inside the mall, in accordance with your order after the loss of internal and external monitoring due to the power outage. I had expected to speak with someone directly. Maybe I got the time wrong? Please confirm my call-in times for the future.
We have approximately five hundred people packed in the HomeMart—adults and young children. The temperature is seventy-five degrees; last night it was seventy-two.
As requested, I sent my chief of security, Hank Goldman, out with John Dawes, an electrician, to investigate the power situation. They made it to the transformer, but found it had been damaged beyond repair. Mr. Dawes suggested that the transformer would not have exploded on its own. Mr. Goldman readily supported his claim that this was deliberate sabotage. I have not had further reports from Misters Goldman or Dawes, nor have they returned to the HomeMart.
I have collected all batteries and hand-crank generators, light sources, and walkie-talkies. What power we have will be directed toward maintaining the walkie-talkies and this satellite phone, then to the light sources.
We have food, though not enough. I have ordered the remaining members of security to divide what we have into rations, giving the most to the children. By some blessing, the plumbing still works, so we have water, and there are bathrooms and a staff kitchen in the store.
I have asked all the adults to pitch in to keep the store clean, including maintaining the bathrooms. The HomeMart is conveniently well-stocked with cleaning materials.
I have limited information about the conditions in the rest of the mall. From what I hear through the locked security gate, which is solid like a garage door, the situation has descended into chaos. I have not heard further reports from Dr. Chen, and assume that he has either succumbed to illness or been compromised in some other way. He was not able to update me on the progress of his research before all communication was cut off.
Please call me ba
ck to update me on your timeline for the situation. In particular as to whether you have decided to go forward with Project Closed Book. I fear the news about Dr. Chen decides the matter. I would like to be informed before you destroy the mall with me and everyone I love inside it.
R
Y
A
N
INSIDE THE POST OFFICE
Wake up!” a guy yells, then slaps my face.
I block, too late, and scurry back, away from the hand. Last thing I remember, I was running from Goldman. He was yelling that he’d kill me. Then two people with glowing green heads jumped me.
My eyes are blurred out by the light. I’m somewhere with power.
“I don’t know why you brought him back here,” the guy says. The voice is familiar.
“Giles punched him,” a girl says. “I didn’t want to just leave him out there.”
“Last time I saw him, he attacked us.” A new guy—Giles, I bet. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Bet your ass,” the first guy says. “And Diane, no more bringing home strays. We are not running a goddamned shelter.”
This room is the back of the post office and this guy is the leader of the post office gang—Simon, I think. The ceiling lights are out, so I was wrong about there being power, but with all the flashlights and lanterns hung everywhere, it’s as bright as it was the last time I was here, three days ago. With Shay.
“The girl I was with,” I say.
“He speaks!” Simon says.
“Did she come here?”
Simon throws Shay’s universal key card at me. “Traded information on the whereabouts of her sister for this, which is useless now that all the service hall doors are open.”
Out of nowhere, a guy in a hooded sweatshirt steps forward. “Where is she?”
“Who let this guy in?” Simon yells, brandishing his fist of knives and grabbing the guy’s arm.
The postal people are on the intruder in a second. One pulls back his hood. It’s Kris. Shay’s co-teacher. The guy who hates me.
Kris puts his hands up. “I’m just looking for Shay,” he says. “Tell me where you sent her and I’ll get lost.”
Diane frisks him and pulls a bag of chips from his pocket. “He stole food.”