“Where’s KC?” My mother kept shouting this over and over as we hastily threw our split kits over our shoulders. I don’t know why she continued to ask; it’s not like we misplaced her and we’d suddenly remember where we left her if she kept repeating her name.
“Mom, Dad, why are we leaving now?” Jesse said with a quiver in her voice.
“We got a text from Mary warning us to get out of here. She went to tonight’s so-called secret meeting as one of the uninoculated.” If this is the sugarcoated version that Dad usually gives Jesse, then things must have been worse than I thought. Maybe things were so bad he couldn’t be bothered to sugarcoat things.
“We’re not leaving! We can’t leave KC behind!” My mother’s voice was pumped full of anxiety and we were all feeling it. There was that tension in the air that warns you that something is coming, that if we didn’t get moving soon we would never get out of there. But my mom was right. We couldn’t leave KC behind. We didn’t go through what we went through in that refugee center only to lose her now.
Mom ran from window to window looking to see if KC was approaching the building. Dad and I kept trying to phone and text her, even though we knew the signal shut down immediately after Mary sent her message. Suddenly Mom stopped next to the bay window, frozen in place by what she saw outside of it. We joined her to see what would stop her from her worried pacing.
There were army trucks full of frightened looking people. There were trucks that were not full yet, but were quickly filling up with more frightened looking people who were being marched at gunpoint towards the waiting vehicles. I searched those faces to see if any of them were KC. I’m sure the others were doing it too.
“Renee, we have to move. Now.” My dad’s voice was calm and controlled. “I’ll stay and wait for KC. You get the kids out of here.” Dad handed me his phone while he talked and showed me the last text he received.
“They voted overwhelmingly to incarcerate the inoculated, effective immediately. You can hide in my apartment. My key is under the mat.”
I guess I should have been shocked, but I wasn’t. The signs were there. I just wish I had been clever enough to read them and kept tabs on my sister. I bet my parents felt the same way. We gave each other guilty looks over Jesse’s head, willing each other to come up with an answer to get our family back together so we could escape.
Our thoughts were broken up by the sound of many feet thundering down the hall. Something had spooked the residents. Maybe they saw the trucks too. Maybe they also got texts before the signal cut out.
My father whispered harshly in my ear, “Take care of your mother and Jesse.” Then he pushed us towards the door shouting, “Go. GO!”
I took my mother and baby sister by their hands and dragged them towards the door.
KC exploded through the entrance before I could get there, with a wild look in her eyes and completely out of breath. She took in the scene of us in mid-run wearing our split kits, took a deep breath, and exhaled with a cry, “How did you know?”
“How did we know?” my mother said incredulously. “How did you know?”
I took a look at KC and I could see that she was hiding something. I don’t think she was talking about our current need to flee. She was talking about something that happened to her. But instead of explaining herself she walked up to dad and grabbed her split kit from his hands and flung it onto her back.
“It doesn’t matter right now,” she said in a falsely composed tone. “I’ll tell you when we get somewhere safe.” Our parents wanted an explanation, but they wanted to get out of there even more, so they keep quiet.
We ran out into the hallway but before we got there I whispered, “Seriously, where were you?” into her ear.
She gave me a cagey look back and whispered, “I was at Chip’s.”
“The Chip? Chip the amazing? Chip the magnificent?” That explained how she was dressed. “What happened?”
“Let’s just say I left him breathless.”
We joined the throng of escapees in the hallway, holding on to each other’s packs to keep from being separated. We moved slowly towards the stairs but were pushed back by a panicked throng of runaways. We would have had a better chance of getting ahead if we’d just let go of each other, but we didn’t want to risk separation. I was wondering what the plan was when I heard the sound of screams coming up the stairs. Their cries were quickly followed by the orders from soldiers to, “Stop!”
“Quick! To the elevators!” my father ordered. I discovered the benefit to being at the back of the pack when we were able to turn around and stay just ahead of the mob retreating out of the stairwell. But still, running to the elevator went against everything I’d been trained to do in an emergency. You’re never supposed to use the lift when things go wrong. Besides, wouldn’t they be full of descending refugees?
But I looked ahead and saw where my father got the idea. There, beckoning like the entrance to Shang-ri-la was an open and empty elevator. It felt like a trap.
“Shouldn’t we go back to the apartment?” I asked dad as we ran.
“No. They’ll come for us there, and we’re too high to escape out the window. I have an idea. Just trust me.”
That was good enough for me. We dove into the elevator and hit the close button, but not before ten other runners jumped in with us. One of them hit the button to the lobby. My father hit the button to the second floor.
Oh right. We were going to Mary’s apartment. The others would go the rest of the way down and distract the soldiers, while we safely hid at her place until things blew over. At least that’s what I was thinking when we reached the second floor and spilled out into the hallway. Unfortunately the others recognized who we were and figured we’d be the ones to follow in a crisis. I purposely avoided looking at anyone in the lift with me so I wouldn’t be able to picture them later, but they attached themselves to our unstable wagon and we couldn’t get rid of them.
“Poor Mary is going to end up with more guests than she had bargained for,” I thought. No good deed goes unpunished…
“I can’t find her key!” my mother cried as she reached her door. In fact, there wasn’t even a doormat. Who would take Mary’s doormat?
My father tried the door, but of course it was locked. That was another way you could tell who was inoculated and who wasn’t. The inoculated generally didn’t have anything to fear and left their doors unlocked. Things weren’t stolen because it was too easy to find the culprit when you lived in a domed community guarded by soldiers on all sides. It helped that no one wanted to do something that would get them kicked out of the community; no one wanted to go back to having to fend for themselves on the outside.
“Shhh. I hear something.” Dad and I put our ears to the door and tried to pick up something besides our heavy breathing. What we heard was even heavier breathing on the other side of the door. Dad turned around and addressed the group. “There are already people in there.”
How many people did Mary text?
Dad knocked on the door as we all held our breath. The breathing on the other side of the door got faster, but there was no answer. Did they honestly think we were going to believe there was no one there?
Dad turned back to the door and talked through it in a deep, commanding voice. “Listen to me. If you don’t let us in, we’ll tell the soldiers where you are.”
What happened next came as a surprise. The door swung open to reveal a large man standing there with a gun. “You won’t be telling anyone anything when you’re dead,” he growled before he started firing on us.
My father yelped and pushed us out of the way. Jesse and my mother stumbled and fell, but he quickly pulled them to their feet as the other followers were picked off. We took off down the hallway with Dad in tow and rounded the corner at top speed while splinters of wood and concrete exploded around us. I couldn’t believe this was one of our neighbors, and he was trying to kill us!
“Where are we going?” my mother yelled over the gunfire.
Suddenly I knew exactly where were going. I don’t know how, I just…knew. It was like there was a committee in my head that instantly called up a memory and made a decision based on it. My mother and sisters were banging on every door down the hall, begging to be let in. My father was trying to keep up, limping and looking behind him to see if we’d been followed. I summoned up my most commanding voice and bellowed, “Follow me!” My family stopped what they were doing and looked up at me in surprise, so I added an even more forceful “NOW!”
My parents exchanged looks but did what I demanded. KC and Jesse came straight to my side, but my parents were struggling. My father’s lame leg was trailing blood. My mother was clutching her side and wincing. Blood seeped out through her trembling fingers. I think she had so much adrenaline coursing through her she didn’t realize she was hurt. I should have had some kind of feeling about that like fear or worry, but I didn’t. All I felt was an urgency to get them somewhere safe, and I knew just the place.
We reached it at the end of the hall—apartment 411. Old Lady Simpkins place. The Wicked Witch of the East. Killer’s first victim.
I began to tear away at the yellow POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape, but something told me I was going to need to keep that intact, so I removed them as carefully and quickly as I could. The door opened on the first try. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Why bother to lock a dead woman’s apartment? There was no mystery to solve in her death, and I could imagine the CSI write-up went like this: she didn’t have the rabies vaccine, Killer bit her, she wandered out as a newly converted RB, the soldiers shot her, and the real estate value on her place went down with the old lady.
I ushered my family in. All I wanted to do was slam the door, but that newly discovered part of my brain told me I wasn’t finished. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to do next, but I was confident that the committee inside my head would tell me, just like it instructed me to come here. I looked down the hallway and I saw what I missed before: my parent’s Hansel-and-Gretel trail of bloody breadcrumbs leading straight up to this door.
I pulled my shirt off and ran back down the hallway. I began to mop up the crimson mess with my shirt and as I went. I started to laugh the laugh of a crazy man. I had been wearing the T-shirt I got from the last Killers concert that I went to. Why couldn’t I have worn something more absorbent? The shiny concert iron-on just spread the blood around. My parents’ blood. There was so much of it…so, so, much. How was I going to save them? I waited for my new brain to tell me, but it remained silent.
I looked up from what I was doing and realized I’d unconsciously made a new trail with the blood. The point wasn’t to clean it up; it was to turn it into a diversion. It now looked like an injured person had been dragged from one of the locked and unresponsive apartments right to Mary’s door. Thankfully it was closed, the shooter back behind its temporarily effective barrier. A nasty thrill ran through me when I thought of the soldiers coming straight to their place of refuge, the sanctuary they denied us. And why not set them up? They had enough space in there for us! Instead they chose to shoot their own neighbors. Worse yet, they shot my parents. They deserved this.
But another space opened up in the older part of my brain, the part that kept my personality from before the Lost Day. It spoke to me, using my mother’s voice. “Houston, you are not a monster.” My conscience fought with the side that wanted revenge, but ultimately it won. I had been thinking monstrous thoughts, but I wasn’t about to act on them and let them take over. I felt the new brain give in with a dejected sigh. Fine. I spread the thickening blood back to the elevator and connected it to the red drag marks down the hall. I took the plant off the windowsill and broke it on the floor, spreading the dirt around the front of Mary’s door. I opened the window to make it look like people might have escaped out there, and as I did I could see a mixture of police and soldiers driving away busses full of my inoculated friends and classmates. People like me.
I dragged the rest of the blood…so much blood…to the end of the hallway where it ended in a T-junction. To the right was old lady Simpkins’ place. To the left was another window. I was out of blood. Well, almost out. I had steeped in enough of it to make a few feet of bloody shoeprints and had more than enough on my hands and forearms to mimic the prints of someone crawling and injured, right up the wall and to the windowsill. I opened the window to make it look like more escaped this way...and knocked the decorative plant right out of it. It crashed with the audible impact of a shattering gunshot and drew an immediate shout of, “What was that?” from below. Dammit.
I removed my shoes and threw them down the hall. I bunched up my bloody shirt and did the same. I wiped my hands on my jeans the best I could and tiptoed back to the zombie Simpkins’ former home. As I reached it, I took one last look down the hall at my handiwork, and as I contemplated my cover-up, a disturbing question sliced through my thoughts.
Where were all the bodies?
What happened to the people who were shot? There were at least ten of them with us. I relaxed slightly at the realization that the blood was not all my parents’ but a mixture of several victims. That meant they hadn’t bled out as much as I thought they had and probably had a chance. But still, what happened to the others?
I hoped I would have the chance to figure that out later. I stepped back inside the apartment, replaced the yellow DO NOT CROSS tape over the entry as best I could, and silently closed the door. This time I locked it. This wasn’t Old Lady Simpkin’s place anymore. It was ours.