“Borrowed,” Kris says. “Just borrowing.”
Simon throws his arms up. “What the hell did we set up patrols for? Where are my door guards?” He grabs the chips and hurls the bag across the room. “What the hell are we doing here, people?!” Simon picks up a tablet and begins reading from a list. “Jake, Liz—door duty. Diane, Giles—first patrol. We have a system, people. This is the way we’ve survived.”
A girl plays with the zipper on her hoodie. “I had to go to the bathroom.”
“And you let in a thief,” Simon says, slamming the tablet down. “I want two people per door at all times from now on.”
Another girl, the one who caught Shay and me—Sydney—nods and takes the tablet.
The postal people tape Kris’s hands behind his back, then toss him beside me, under a wide shelf, between boxes and a huge canvas bin of trash.
He’s got a black eye. It makes him look less like a pretty-boy actor. “Who gave you that?” I ask.
“Your pals Mike and Marco,” he says. “Thanks for leaving me, by the way.”
Last time I saw Kris, he was helping me get a little girl named Ruthie into the HomeMart. Once we got her inside I had to ditch Kris because Mike’s gang ambushed the security team’s food caravan and I saw my old teammate Drew go down in the fight.
“I thought my friend had been shot,” I say. “But it was the flu.”
“You’re better off without them,” Kris says. He shuffles toward one of the legs of the shelving unit and begins rubbing the tape holding his wrists against the edge.
I can’t argue. When I left Mike, he had a gun pointed to my face.
The postal people huddle in the opposite corner. From what I can hear, Simon is tearing them a new one over their failure to take security seriously. My arms are free. There’s nothing holding me down except my ankle. They can tell just by looking at me that I’m no threat.
The tape cuffing Kris snags, and he tugs his arms apart until it splits. He then crawls, slowly, toward the edge of the shelf, slides his hand onto the top, and feels around. “Gotcha.” He brings his hand back down, holding a thin laptop.
“Saw it while they were taping me up.” Kris opens it and begins clicking through windows. “We can find Shay. Here we are.” It’s a database of names, ages, whether someone’s sick or dead, and current check-ins. Kris scrolls down to Dixit. Next to Shay’s sister’s name, it says JCPenney.
That’s where Shay went. She could still be there.
He looks at me. “Coming?”
Shay would come for me, no question. Hurt, sick, outgunned, she’d be there.
I could play defense between Shay and an attacker. Even broken, I could at least do that.
I try to stand and hit my head.
“Slow down, champ. We need a plan,” Kris says, slipping the computer back where he found it. “There’s a door over there.” He points past the garbage bin.
I get my knees under me. “That’s our plan,” I say. I crawl over, then jam myself between the bin and the wall. Kris positions his arms behind the other corner of the bin, and on my nod, we shove the whole thing over, sending weeks’ worth of trash spilling across the room.
Simon whips his head around. “Was no one watching them? What the hell have we just been talking about?” he screams, and the whole group of them comes charging.
Kris pulls open the door. I scramble up, using the wall as a crutch, and hobble to him.
“You have to move faster than that,” he says, glancing over my shoulder at the advancing line of postal people wading through the foot-deep pile of crap.
There’s a brick by the door that must have been some kind of doorstop when this place was still functioning. I heft it, then slam it down on the inside door handle, which pops off the door and into my hand. I step into the service hall and then shut the door.
“Where’d you get that idea?” Kris asks.
One night, my dad got fed up with some stupid fight Thad and I were having over a video game. My dad hauled us up to our room, and to keep us in there, he busted the doorknob. Thad crawled out the window, just to stick it to the old man.
“Just came to me,” I say.
Kris flips on a book light. “I keep this well hidden,” he says, smiling. I do not want to know where.
Next to us are the smooth metal doors of an elevator. I wedge the door handle into the seam and wrench the elevator doors apart far enough to get my fingertips in.
“I don’t think the elevator’s working,” Kris says.
“The postal people expect us to come out the service halls on this side,” I say. “No way I can outrun them.” The doors slide open onto the empty shaft. “They won’t expect us to change floors.”
Kris shines his light into the elevator shaft. I guessed right. Just like in that movie, there’s an emergency ladder on one wall.
The elevator car is above us. “We’re going down,” Kris says.
He helps me get onto the rungs, then slides the doors shut behind us.
It’s a slow climb down. Kris stops at the first floor, but I shake my head.
“Parking level.”
“It’s got to be pitch-black down there,” he says.
“Security controls the first floor.”
He nods, keeps descending. Seems he’s aware that security is the enemy. We drop onto the floor of the shaft, push the release on the doors, and crawl into the black of the parking level.
We’re near where they built the showers. The air feels damp, and it smells like mildew. Kris scans around with his light, but it gets lost in the huge, black space.
“JCPenney’s on the other side,” he says, and we begin picking our way across the mall.
I have to lean on Kris after a few steps. We move even slower. He’s no athlete.
“Can’t you put any weight on that leg?” he grunts.
“I am putting weight on it,” I snap.
A door opens somewhere nearby. We stop. Beams of light swing around.
“Headlamps,” Kris says. “Crap.” He turns off his light.
A voice echoes, “I think the bikes were parked somewhere over here.” It’s the guy from the pet store.
“You have to hotwire them or can we just roll them?” Mike’s voice.
No thought, just instinct, forgetting everything except Mike’s gun in my face and Tina’s dead eyes, I bolt. I get one step before my ankle gives out and I fall onto a car. The alarm blares. Headlights flash.
Kris grabs me, hauls me up. “Nice move.”
“Someone’s down here!” Mike yells. Footsteps echo.
We try to run, but I am too slow. The footsteps gain on us.
“It’s Ryan!” Mike screams. He’s close enough to make me out in the flashing of the headlights.
In front of us is a crappy old van advertising some car repair business. Its windows are blown out.
“Stop,” I say.
I reach in the broken back window and open the rear doors. The van’s floor is crammed full of car parts, including a car battery and screwdriver.
“Make for the wall,” I say, stumbling to the side of the van.
I lay the car battery under the gas tank, then place the screwdriver across the terminals and pray the thing isn’t completely dead.
I scramble for the wall, ankle be damned.
The battery explodes, launching the van a foot in the air and shooting flames out from under it. The gas tank catches, and there’s another explosion that knocks me into a sedan. I hear shouts, and a bunch of car alarms start to blare. I make it to the wall and find Kris.
“What the hell did you find in that van?” he asks, face lit by the fire.
“Car battery,” I say. “My grandfather tested old ones by touching the terminals with a screwdriver. Lost two fingers when one exploded.”
“So you knew it would do that? Weren’t those your friends?”
“A couple parked cars were between them and the van,” I say. “And no, not anymore.”
&nbs
p; • • •
We find a door to a fire stairwell, and go up a flight.
Kris stops on the first-floor landing. “Postal people will be looking for us on two.”
I pull myself up using the handrail. Goldman and his two guys can’t be everywhere on the first floor.
“JCPenney should be over there,” I say, opening the door on the right.
Kris turns on his light and shoves his shoulder under mine. “And we’re off.”
G
I
N
G
E
R
IN THE SERVICE HALLS, HEADED TOWARD HARRY’S (THE MED CENTER)
A couple years ago, Maddie dragged me to a corn maze—at night. She knew all about my fear of the dark, and had insisted there’d be lights and stuff plus moonlight. Naturally, that night there was no moon. And the lights—if you can call strings of orange Christmas lights, strobes, and fake torches “lighting”—were on the outside of the maze. But we were already inside it before I realized we had stumbled into veritable darkness.
Between the narrow paths, the death metal music yowling from the parking lot, and the sounds of torture and witches cackling, I was totally flipping out. Then arms reached out of the corn and grabbed my shoulder. I collapsed on the ground and started shrieking to be let out. The kid who’d grabbed me stepped out of his hiding place in the corn, hauled me onto his shoulder, and carried me back to the entrance. Outside, I hid behind a bale of hay so Maddie’s mom wouldn’t see me, then waited, mortified and freezing in my skimpy cat costume, for Maddie, who came bounding out after about a half hour.
“You beat me?” she asked, bewildered, when I popped out in front of her.
“I guess.”
“Wasn’t it just the best thing ever?” she asked.
I told her it had been awesome.
Now, as we make our creeping progress down the service halls, I am again faking things for my best friend. The main difference being that back then my biggest concern was that my blubbering might ruin her night. Here, if I break down, it could get us both killed. But without a face mask, Maddie cannot breathe. So our plan is to head down to the med center on the first floor to find one.
I hold tight to her sleeve and we move in sync through the suffocating blackness.
“This looks like a stairwell,” Maddie whispers, holding up her glow stick to a sign on a door.
She shuffles silently through. I slide my feet forward. We get to the top of the stairs, then the door slams behind us. A lighter pops and reveals a guy’s face.
“Boo!” he says, grinning.
“There’s a toll for using our stairwell,” a girl’s voice coos below us.
Maddie rushes forward. The fabric of her cloak slips through my fingers, and I nearly topple over the edge of the first step. I’m alone.
Oh god.
No time for panic. Must breathe. I find the railing and race down.
“They’re moving!” Lighter Guy shouts.
I do not stop. On the first landing, I skid around the corner and keep going down.
“They’re here!” the girl’s voice says from behind me.
A hand grabs my hood, choking me.
I fling my left elbow back and hit something. I’m free. I run, stumble, skip, scrabble down the stairs and land on a body.
“Ging!”
It’s Maddie. She tumbles forward. I collapse on top of her.
“Move,” she grunts, crawling out from under me.
I feel along the cement until I hit wall.
“I’ve got an exit,” she whispers.
I move toward her voice, feel skin. She grabs my wrist, and pulls me through the dark until my hand touches a metal door.
“Going somewhere?”
A flame pops from a second lighter, picking out a girl’s face not more than four feet from us.
Maddie points a small spray can at her. “Yes, we are,” she says.
Silly string shoots from the can, hits the flame, and bursts into a fireball in the girl’s face.
She screams. The fire disappears.
The metal door moves behind my back. Maddie yanks my arm, pulling me through and out of the stairwell.
“Knew that can would come in handy,” she says after the door clicks shut behind me. “Grabbed it at the Halloween place.”
Her breathing sounds funny.
“Use your inhaler,” I say.
Two new glow sticks crack to life, lighting Maddie’s shaking head. “You’ve seen a real attack,” she says, handing one to me. “Better save it for when I’m truly sucking wind.”
How long until then, Mad? What if they come after us—right now, could you run?
“Let’s just get to the med center,” I say instead, then put my hand on the wall and start walking.
• • •
The hall is short and leads us into the courtyard. It’s eerie to see so much of the mall stretching into what seems like infinite blackness punctuated now by several spots of bright orange: more fires.
“Harry’s is back this way,” Maddie says. Her voice is hushed. She must have noticed the fires.
Harry’s security gate is half open. We feel around and find the makeup counter that served as the check-in point for the sick. I prick my finger on something. Sneaking my glow stick out from my sleeve, I see that the glass top of the counter has been shattered.
Farther in, the curtain partitions have been knocked over. People have ransacked this place. People might still be ransacking this place . . .
Someone coughs near enough to where I’m standing that I startle and hit a curtain, which knocks something else and sends it clattering to the ground.
“Is someone there?” A guy’s voice, the cougher. “Please, if you’re there, come here and help me out of this gurney.” He coughs again. No way I’m going in there. “Security tied this plastic cuff to my wrist and I can’t get off the stupid bed. Please, just help me get off of here.” Security must have tied the sick down to keep them from escaping—I’m suddenly glad I was only put in jail.
Maddie waves her glow stick side to side at me: our symbol for “No.”
We shuffle on. He keeps begging.
“Please! I need a drink! Water! Anything!” Cough. “Please, don’t leave me!”
Tears well up. I’m a coward. A stupid, weak, horrible coward. This guy is going to die and it’s my fault.
“We should help him,” I squeak.
“We only help each other,” Maddie replies, turning around. “We did not tie him to that bed.” She holds both sides of my face, her glow stick lighting our skin a freakish pink. “This is not on either of us.”
I can tell that he has gotten to her too. Her eyes are shiny.
I nod, take a step, and trip. Over someone. A person. An adult.
“Maddie!”
This woman is not dead from the flu. There’s a hole in her forehead.
“MADDIE!”
“Shut up!” Maddie hisses.
We kneel in front of the woman. Maddie begins to pat her down.
“What are you doing?” I manage. My voice is a trickle of sound. I’m barely able to muster the air to speak.
“Win,” Maddie says. She flicks on a flashlight. “Look what she had in her pocket.”
It’s a tiny flashlight, one of those little metal ones, but who cares? Its light is brilliant in the black. I lunge over the body to get closer to it.
“Chill,” Maddie says, passing it to me.
I hold it up to Maddie’s face, then back to mine, shine it over the whole room, desperate to see again, to really see.
I regret that decision immediately. There’s another body with a gunshot to the head. Around the gunshot victims are other bodies, on gurneys, on cots, just slumped on the ground. Dead kids, dead adults. Flu victims. This place is no longer a med center. It’s a morgue.
I kneel beside the body I tripped over. She had a flashlight; she might have masks or some medicine, something useful so we ca
n just leave, right now.
“I already checked her pockets,” Maddie says, blinding me with a beam of light. She’s found a second flashlight on the other gunshot victim.
“What if you missed something?” I retort. “See, here’s a pen.”
“Fab,” Maddie says. “You can write me a prescription for an inhaler.”
“How ’bout a get-out-of-quarantine-free note?”
“Dear Government People, The air is toxic, so I had to leave the quarantine. Sorry if I spread the deadly flu. Kisses.” Maddie blows one into the air.
We try to laugh, but then Mad starts wheezing and I have to dig out a bottle of water to help her get it under control.
I sit back on my heels. “Maybe the supplies are in the back?”
Maddie nods.
The fabric walls are undisturbed near the stockroom doors. People cough in the dark beyond them, some crying, some calling for help. We ignore them.
In the stockroom, we find what we came for. There are boxes of particle masks. We stuff our bags and pockets. I slip two masks over my face, then sling five more around my neck.
“We should sleep in here,” Maddie says.
“No.” The word escapes my lips without my having even thought about it.
Maddie flashes her light at me. “This is the safest place we’ve found.”
“We have different ideas about safe,” I say, thinking of the bodies, of the dying, outside the stockroom door.
“We don’t have to worry about the dead, and security chained everyone else in here to their cots.” She’s flipping her fingers up one by one, counting off reasons like reason has any credibility in this place. “Plus, none of the crazies from outside are coming in here—I mean, if they haven’t made it past that gore-fest by now, they’re not coming. There is nowhere else in the mall with these kinds of built-in security measures.”
“It smells.”
She can’t argue with that. The bodies are starting to rot, and the stench fills the whole store.
Maddie’s light shrugs. “I’d rather gag on some corpse stink than be woken by some random person ripping my bag from my body.”
She doesn’t say it, but the words rip and body make me think of all the other things people could do to me in the dark. I’d never even see them coming.