Over the next few days, Dezi and Mikey stalked me. Dezi had to wrap his knee in an Ace bandage, and his limp was pretty pronounced. But he deserved it. I tried to make sure I stayed within eyeshot of Patrick, and he tried to make sure he stayed in eyeshot of me.
Twice a day like clockwork, Alex checked the crappy little TV. She’d kneel at the base of the bleachers, plug it into that twelve-volt battery, and spin her way through a sea of static. She’d click to every last channel, giving the old-fashioned dial a full turn, and then she’d wiggle the rabbit ears and do it again.
Night after night Patrick, Alex, and Eve would gather with Dr. Chatterjee in his classroom and watch me put on the Rebel helmet to see if the coordinates for our next meet had been beamed to me. Night after night the helmet held no new information.
I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for.
No message meant we couldn’t save the world. Or Alex.
A message meant the serum was ready and Patrick and I would go to our highly unpleasant deaths.
We trusted Eve and told her we were waiting to meet with the Rebels again. But we left out the specifics of the serum and how Patrick and I were due to, you know, explode. It was my choice, and I’m not sure why I made it. I just felt like that was something private for me, Patrick, and Alex. It had been the three of us for as long as I could remember, and even if Eve was my not-really-girlfriend, something felt wrong about including her. We didn’t tell Chatterjee either, mostly not to worry him. We would tell them in due time, once we had the serum in hand. Maybe it was selfish, but dealing with their concern on top of my own mounting dread felt like too much. Plus, the more people who knew, the bigger the risk of Ben finding out. And Ben finding out would change everything.
We went through our routines numbly, the three of us locked inside our secret. JoJo took to carrying Bunny around by the ears, the stuffed-animal head swinging at her side like a kettlebell. The food supplies got lower, the necessity of a grocery-store run growing more urgent. We were down to wilted iceberg lettuce, browning apples, and open-faced lunch-meat sandwiches made on bread with holes where we’d picked out the mold.
Given all the lookout shifts and stress, exhaustion settled into me, bone-deep. I found myself nodding off one day while I was supposed to be mopping the hallways. When I finally got back to the gym, Alex was busy with her futile TV ritual, on her knees before the tiny screen.
The desperation of it struck me differently, maybe because I was so tired. I walked over and rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Alex,” I said. “Maybe it’s time to stop.”
She kept on twisting the dial through fields of static. “It’s my form of praying,” she said.
What could I say to that?
I left her alone. Patrick was on perimeter duty, and Eve was handling the supply station, so I took the opportunity to catch up my notebook entries. As soon as the sun was down, I dozed off hard into a comatose serenity.
Until I felt a cramping in my throat.
Pain spread like fire through my body, my trapped breath swelling, swelling, until my chest and stomach bulged out. This was it, my genetic programming taking over, transforming me into a dispersal mechanism. I had no choice. It was terrible. And yet a small piece of me wanted to yield. Once I gave in, would it actually feel good?
My eyes flew open.
It took a moment for me to identify the dark figure leaning over me as Mikey. But there he was, his hands fastened around my neck. I struggled against him, but he was much stronger than me. He hunched over my cot, his shoulder muscles popping with exertion, his forearms as thick around as tree branches. As my vision wobbled in and out, I recognized Dezi’s silhouette to his side. Dezi was standing with his arms folded, enjoying the show. My pent-up breath burned even worse, igniting my chest. I flailed and flailed but couldn’t manage to squeeze a sound out through my compressed throat.
Sweat dripped from Mikey’s forehead onto my face. His features were twisted, snarling. There was nothing in them that I recognized. Fury had overtaken him. He was as far gone as a Host.
Realization dawned. He wasn’t trying to hurt me.
He was trying to kill me.
My eyesight fuzzed over completely, spots bleeding into spots.
A crack echoed off the high ceiling of the gym.
The pressure released.
I drew in a screeching breath and then another. As my vision restored, I saw Mikey drop away, his body collapsing like a sheet of rock crumbling from a cliff face.
Alex stood behind him, hockey stick in hand.
She turned to Dezi, and Dezi flinched.
Alex said, “You’d better drag him out of here, or you’ll get the same.”
Dezi bent down out of sight with a grunt, and then I heard the rustle of clothes and deadweight dragged across the polished gym floor. It was so dark that no one else had even seen what had gone down.
I managed to sit up, my cough turning into a hacking fit. My Adam’s apple felt as though it had been crushed.
Alex sat next to me, her arm around my shoulders. Slowly, I got my breathing under control.
“You okay?” she asked.
I tried to talk, but only a rush of air came out. I had no voice. So I nodded.
Alex said, “We’re falling apart.”
I nodded again.
“Those Rebels better get in touch with us soon,” she whispered. “I don’t know how much longer Chatterjee’s gonna be able to hold it together here.”
“Not … long,” I whispered hoarsely.
“You need some water or something?”
I shook my head.
“Get some rest, okay?”
I nodded.
She settled back onto her cot. I looked across the gym to the far corner. Mikey had regained consciousness. He was sitting on the edge of his mattress, doubled over, rubbing the back of his head. Then he threw up on his feet.
The sight warmed my heart.
I lay down on my cot, but I couldn’t sleep. Alex was right. The fabric of the new order we’d established here was tearing. Ben and his crew were growing bolder by the day. If they hurt me and Patrick bad enough, there’d be no meeting with the Rebels, which meant no serum, which meant that everyone on the planet was done. Another moral obligation for us to endure.
I found myself on my feet, walking through the dark halls to Dr. Chatterjee’s classroom. I fished the spare key out of my pocket and let myself in quietly through the repaired door.
As I had so many times before, I pulled on the Rebel helmet.
No glow. No response. Same blank screen of the face mask.
I tried to speak through my bruised voice box but still couldn’t. I swallowed and then managed a faint rasp: “I am Chance Rain.”
The helmet lit up with a blue glow. This part never got old—having my head stuck into an advanced alien technology. But the screen stayed as empty as ever.
I reached to take the helmet off when suddenly the face mask came to life, virtual symbols rotating through variations.
I realized I was holding my breath.
Once again the message rolled into place. MEETING TIME: 15 DECEMBER AT 1700.
The date and time at which I would be given the means to kill myself.
I finally understood what people meant when they said that they felt their heart thumping in their chest. I could feel every pulse, sense the blood shoving itself through my veins.
“Where?” I said in that same hoarse whisper.
The slots scrolled again through endless unfamiliar symbols, finally settling on two numbers, each taken out to thirteen decimal points. A latitude and a longitude. Like I was communicating with a machine and not a human.
“Show me on a map.”
The helmet slammed me into outer space. I was moving almost too fast to process. I stumbled a little and then righted myself. Stars winked by.
Milky Way.
Pluto.
Saturn.
Mars.
I decelerated into North America, the view finally slowing.
Our state. The valley.
Creek’s Cause flew by.
The flat plain to the west of the high school, miles out.
Closer, closer.
Flatland. It all looked the same.
I traced the vein of the highway.
An exit sign blipped past: STONE SPREAD, 137 MILES.
I skimmed across a single-lane road, forging north.
Another sign: STONE SPREAD (POP. 53).
A scattering of ragged homes and barns, long abandoned.
A dusty stretch of earth a half mile past a row of dilapidated stables.
A spot no different from any other spot.
The image froze for an instant, and then the blue glow extinguished.
Breathing hard, I pulled off the helmet. The room flipped around me, my sense of balance out of whack. I pressed my hands to my head and waited for the spinning to stop. I took a step, waited out the vertigo, and then walked evenly to the rear classroom door that let out onto the back fields.
As much as I wanted to rush to Patrick to give him the news, something stopped me there at the rear of the classroom.
I turned and looked behind me. School desks in neat rows. The lingering smell of dry-erase markers. Colorful diagrams of amoebas and protozoa.
My gaze settled on my old seat. Fourth row, second from the front. How many notes had I taken in that chair? How many lectures had I listened to? Daydreaming at that desk, I’d imagined dozens of futures for myself. None of them involved what was waiting for me on December 15.
A few weeks’ time. That’s all I had left. I had a sudden awareness of the seconds ticking away, the bomb planted inside me waiting to blossom into … into what?
I turned heavily back to the rear door. The knob felt ice cold against my palm. I eased the door open and stepped outside.
The night chill seeped through my clothes. The clouds were as dark as gravy against the midnight sky, the moon blotted from sight.
I scanned the perimeter for Patrick, but the gloom was too thick for me to make out much of anything. The entire school was fenced in, a concession to worried parents a while back when school shootings seemed to sweep across the country. I started out across the field toward the baseball diamond. The chain-link running along the first-base side looked out past a row of Dumpsters and onto the rear of the grocery store. I kept my attention pegged there as I approached. Unmowed grass flicked across the toes of my boots, giving off whispers. The earthy smell, clean and fresh, rose to my nostrils.
Patrick always worked his way clockwise around the perimeter, so I figured I’d go the other way to ensure that our paths crossed. I couldn’t wait to share the Rebel update with him and start laying plans.
I stepped from the dew-wet grass onto the dirt of the infield, making sure to tag first base out of habit. Keeping a sharp eye out for any movement among the Dumpsters behind the Piggly Wiggly, I hugged the chain-link, heading for home plate. I got halfway down the line when my foot kicked something in the dirt. It skittered away.
I looked down and froze.
A severed zip tie.
My eyes traced a bunch of smudges in the dirt back to a gap in the chain-link fence. An L-shaped cut, big enough for someone—or something—to shove down the flap and step through.
The slit in the fence had been there forever—we’d snuck through it ourselves on our first approach to the school after the Dusting. But Patrick and I had repaired it shortly after, suturing up the gap with zip ties under cover of night.
The rest of the cut zip-tie loops lay clumped at the base of the fence like maggots.
I walked over to them and stared down, trying to quiet the sense of unease building in my ears.
I had to run to warn the others, but I was having a hard time getting my legs to listen. I took a step back and then another.
A crunching sound finally broke through my shock.
Footsteps.
Too late I realized that I’d been so focused on what might be on the far side of the fence that I’d lost track of what might already be in here with me.
Fear clawed its way up my throat.
I turned.
Two large shadows were right on top of me, attended by a drone of circling flies. Clicking bones held together by rotting flesh and tattered grocery-store uniforms.
Black coasters for eyes.