We slipped through the unguarded doors. Shadows inside the warehouse tricked my eyes at first into believing people hid within the aisles of machinery, furniture, sign boards, exhibit frames. Cement formed symmetrical columns that rose to impossibly high ceilings. Paint peeled off the columns in thick chips, and dusted the junk beneath. Dirt, rat droppings, grease, rust, who knew what else, covered the cement floor.
Maibe and I hid in one of the aisles. Above our heads ran a network of catwalks attached to a spiral staircase of metal. Even looking at them upset my stomach and turned my brain fuzzy and made the memories crowd close. Soldiers, and strangely, people in doctor uniforms, came and went through the door at the far end of the warehouse. Someone had put up an entire section of rooms with framing, plywood, maybe caging of some type, it was hard to tell.
My heart skipped a beat when I examined the catwalk again. The grating skirted just a few feet above the makeshift rooms like a metal skeleton. My feet lost feeling as I pictured climbing across. The grating was low enough for me to jump onto the ceilings of the rooms below it and high enough to freak me out. But no matter—I had found my way in and I would climb those stairs and that catwalk, memory-rush or not.
“I need you to stand guard while I go up high.”
“But it’s one of your triggers.” Maibe rose from the floor. “The memory-rush will take over and I won’t be able to get you down and—”
“I’ll be fine,” I said even though I didn’t really know that. My stomach grumbled and I thought about the supplies left behind in the garbage can. Things had been moving so fast, I hadn’t made us eat anything since yesterday. The sky outside had darkened considerably in the last hour which only increased the spookiness of the place—but my catwalk would be hidden as soon as I crossed the lip of the first room’s wall. I didn’t want to waste another minute, the itch of finally going into action begged to be scratched. Plus the sooner I climbed up, the sooner I could get back down.
Maibe set up at the base of the spiral stairs, behind a damp and molding cardboard box of marketing materials for a waterless cookware set. I grabbed a nearby screwdriver, thinking it would make an excellent weapon and maybe a way to dig the others out through the drywall.
I prided myself on climbing the stairs like a ninja cat, whatever that was, using yoga skills learned at the gym that had served me well on the streets when it came to dodging undesirable people, animals, vehicles. It felt as if I were climbing two stories even though it was probably not much more than one story. Sweat made the screwdriver slippery in my hand. I wiped my palms on my clothes and smelled that distinctive metallic odor that always happened when skin touched cheap metal. I jammed the screwdriver into my waistband and cursed and told myself to get it together. My head felt woozy and full of space, as if there wasn’t enough oxygen this high up.
Maibe’s waiting form disappeared over the lower horizon of the ceiling panels as I crawled. Now, other than the pale light that filtered in, everything was dark and I was safer than ever, like I was pressed between a sandwich made of ceiling and roof. I crouched to rest for a moment, to still my heart rate, to concentrate on my breathing, to feel something solid even if it was just the grate under my fingers. But it was a mistake to stop moving. The memories crowded in and my mind went dark and then lit up blue, everything was pale blue and I watched it all transform into a house and I knew the house.
The pale blue house stood alone and lightning lit it up in flashes because there were no street lights that worked on the bad side. The rain soaked through my layers of clothing and newspaper and the wind drove the rain into all of me and everything smelled like the rot in take-out boxes left in the dumpster too long.
Father carried the last bit of food—a box of crackers. He was drunk. That kind of red-faced drunk that made him walk around like a sailor on board a ship in a storm. The rain and the wind and the darkness soaked the streets and turned them into streams that would soon roar into rivers if we didn’t take shelter soon and I waited for Father to notice the blue house because if I said it first he would never let us go inside. I was eleven and I wanted to go inside but I was afraid of Father’s red-rimmed sloshy eyes that meant he would hit me soon and maybe my mother too.
My mother held my hand even though water slipped between our palms and she pinched hard to keep hold. She stumbled behind Father and the lightning showed how tired she felt and how she wouldn’t stand up for me tonight if I made Father angry.
Father’s feet stopped moving but his body swayed back and forth. “There,” he said, swallowing the word like a gulping goldfish, but he said it.
People-shapes moved behind the windows and I clamped down on my mother’s hand until she said, “Gabriela!” and yanked her hand away and I fell into the street river, the water splashing onto my face, cold, gritty, smelling of oil and those outside bathroom places we used sometimes. But my knees burned because I wore shorts but the water would wash away the blood and it would be okay once we got inside. Except there were people inside, or maybe demons inside, and then we would have to keep looking but then the river would drown us.
Father stumbled up the path and my mother followed and I ran after them. The water dragged my feet down like weights and the cold made my legs move slowly. He pushed on the front door and fell over inside because it hadn’t been latched. It was open as if waiting for us to find it and use it but demons always liked to invite you inside, like you were meant to be there, before they revealed their true nature. Alli had taught me that at the last shelter Mother and Father had taken us. She said those were the places you had to watch for the most. The unlocked places.
But Father and Mother did not know about Alli’s stories. They kept going and I followed because they would not care if I stayed all night outside and that would be worse.
There were people inside, but it was so dark and only the lightning sometimes showed them. There might have been demons walking around, hiding in the shadows, and there was lightning and one of the shadows stayed a shadow. I ran to my mother and grabbed her hand even though she might slap me for surprising her. But she didn’t notice.
“Just give me the box, Dennis. I’ll keep it for us.”
Father laughed and I was not sorry for the dark because then I didn’t have to see the look on his face and then there was a ripping sound, the kind cardboard and plastic make, the kind food wrappers make.
Mother snatched her hand away from me and went to Father, arms outstretched, one warding her face and the other held out, the lightning freezing her pose like someone had taken a photo. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t even think you can tell me what to do.”
Lightning flashed and he threw the cardboard box at her and swung his arm around and then darkness made him disappear, but the sound of flesh hitting flesh rose above the rain and howling wind and someone laughed and I screamed, “I’m not hungry!” but she didn’t listen because the next flash showed her barreling into his stomach, but he did not move, not an inch, and then it went dark again but the wap of his hit sounded again and someone else laughed and then something hit me in the head and my thoughts spun in the dark until I didn’t know which direction I faced. I ran into another room, away from the shadows and found stairs and climbed them and hoped and hoped there would be no shadows up there because the holes in the roof let water in and people and demons did not like to get wet.
The stairs creaked and a few gave way under my feet, but if I could find a place, just a little place where shadows could not fit. My head hurt, my stomach hurt, I couldn’t see where to go and the wind howled and filled the whole house with howls like a pack of demons would snatch me out of the house and drop me and I was too high because I had walked up four floors and when they dropped me my body would split and seep blood and all of me would get washed away by the river so no one could find me. A window shattered and threw glass on my left side like little bullets and wetness came with it and more cold because the demons had broken in!
I ran and ran and smacked into a knob that punched into my chest and I clawed at the door until it unlocked and ran into the room and cried. “Please don’t punish me no more!” My stomach hurt and my head hurt and I fell onto the floor. I shivered and waited for the demons to grab me.
“You ain’t being punished.”
I looked up and in the next flash of lightning I saw an older boy curled on a towel next to me like Aunt June’s cat liked to do except this boy didn’t hiss at me and looked like he didn’t mind I was next to him.
“It’s rain for the flowers and trees. It washes away the battles bad people wanted to have on the streets. It means the angels are trying to win,” he said.
Light flickered and held and was a golden color from a lighter. There was another boy and a girl, and the boy looked older than everyone but the girl looked older than me but not too much. They sat cross-legged around a candle and did not stay shadows. My pounding heart slowed down and I sat up.
“I’m Leaf,” the curled-up boy said. “That’s Mary, and that’s Spencer.”
“Tell us your name now,” Mary said.
“Gabriela,” I said, a sob catching my name in my throat.
“No. Your real name,” Mary said.
I felt confused and didn’t know what she wanted me to tell them. Then I said, “Gabbi with an ‘i’.”
“Gabbi with an ‘i,’ are you here alone?” Leaf asked.
I almost gave a different answer. It was on my lips but then it changed at the last second. “Yeah,” I said because it was both truth and a lie but mostly truth.
Leaf shared a look with Spencer but the dancing lightning from outside covered it up except Leaf said, “We’re jumping the train to California. You can come if you want.”
“It’s better in California,” Mary said. “It don’t take so much storms to get rid of all the bad stuff out there.”
“There are more angels there. My cousin told me,” Leaf said.
The storm held its breath. I stopped crying. I wiped my cheeks and hardened myself to the shadows downstairs. I could hear the truth in what Leaf said because I really wanted it to be true. “Okay,” I said. “I want to go with you.”
■
The memory-rush faded and my senses came back to me.
I moaned and pressed my face into the grate like I had pressed my face into that wood floor. My mouth felt thick with dust, but I was grateful the memory-rush hadn’t been one of the bad ones.
I pushed on as soon as the memory let me. Weak people let the memories take over and made them feel sorry for themselves. I wasn’t weak like that. Even if I couldn’t always fight off the memories, I always tried.
I crawled along the catwalk and noticed there were lots of dividers—at least twenty-four rooms to search. From above them I realized they formed a sort of double-row semi-circle. I guessed there must be a hallway in between. On the other side of the rooms, opposite the warehouse from where I climbed up, was a large room that opened like a hole beneath the grating. In the middle of it was a dentist’s chair with its back to me. Spotlights shone down on it and a tray on wheels was next to it. Equipment rimmed the edge. I knew how light refraction worked and how bright lights inside that room made it almost impossible for people to see me in the shadows. It took the rods in the retina of the eye many minutes to adjust from light to dark, that’s why pirates wore a patch over one eye. Not because they lost it in a fight, but because it kept an eye always at the ready for seeing what needed to be seen in dark places like the hold of an enemy ship or the coastline at night during a raid.
I moved across the grating until I reached the room’s lip and saw the profile of the chair. A person was strapped to it. My breath shortened, my heartbeat increased, my fingers began to tingle as I thought about jumping. If it were Spencer or Leaf or one of the boys I was going to jump from this catwalk and rescue them. I’d land on all fours, and we’d barrel through the door, whatever door was closest, and I’d scream for Maibe and we’d take our chances on the run, because you always ran from a fight—
A person wearing a doctor’s coat walked into the room and the light made it obvious that this doctor was also a Feeb. I moved silently across the grating until I faced the dentist chair head-on. I primed myself to launch off the edge and onto the woman’s back.
But then I saw it was Corrina strapped to the chair and I stopped.
I don’t mean to say I wasn’t happy to see her—well, I wasn’t happy to see her—but I wasn’t unhappy to see her, but she didn’t need my immediate rescuing either.
She wasn’t one of us.
The adrenaline rush faded and now that I knew where Corrina was, I crawled back to the cells and lowered myself to the ceiling. I dug at the drywall with my screwdriver. My hole took too long, this sort of thing always took too long, but I finally made an opening big enough to see through. This was when I discovered that all the drywall did was cover up a metal cage underneath.
The pinhole let light through, which made it easy to see who was in the cell when I put my eye to it.
A Feeb like me, but not one of my crew.
I did not speak a word or otherwise let the whimpering person curled in a fetal position on the cot know about my presence. I continued onto the next cell and repeated my steps with the screwdriver.
Once I punched through I saw this one also held a Feeb, his marks clear on his balding head. It was Officer Hanley. He paced his cell with his head buried in his hands and acted like he hadn’t heard me. He was probably so deep in the fevers he couldn’t hear anything. I moved on, feeling like I was in a sort of X-rated peep show. He’d gotten his payback but I felt sick to my stomach.
The next ceiling hole revealed Leaf and I almost teared up from the joy of seeing his stupid, curly, unkempt hair while he carved into the wall with his fingernails. “Leaf,” I said while pressing my mouth against the hole. I quickly took my mouth away to replace with my eye.
Leaf stilled for a moment, then resumed his carving.
“Leaf! It’s Gabbi.”
Leaf looked up with his Feeb skin marring an otherwise pixie-like face. He had stripped off all his winter clothes and wore his favorite yellow t-shirt because yellow was a bright, happy color and he liked to pretend the world was the same way. If anyone could be said to be the mother of the group, it was Leaf. I’d never understood how he had survived this far on the street, except that Spencer must have found him early on and took him in before the drugs and the survival sex that most of the rest of us had faced had done permanent damage. I’d made a pass at Leaf once, on a lonely night long before the Vs came on the scene, long before I’d known the true state of relationships in the group. He hadn’t humiliated me when he turned me down. Even though I’d gotten hot with embarrassment he’d said something to make me laugh and it was like it had never happened.
If anyone was too good for the street, it was Leaf.
He smiled, but only one side of his face turned up. “Hi, Gabbi. That’s the real you, right? Not some ghost-memory playing tricks on me? Though I guess if this were a ghost-memory I’d be seeing you instead of just hearing you, huh?”
“Leaf,” I said in a strangled voice. I had to take my eye away to put my mouth over the hole and I hated to lose sight of him even for a second. “What happened? What have they done?” I switched back to my eye. Half of his face was strangely frozen. I pressed my eye harder onto the hole so that its edges gouged my skin but I didn’t care. It wasn’t just his face, but one entire half of his body seemed limp. My nose breathed in drywall dust and my throat constricted.
“This is not a good place, Gabbi. Not a good place at all.” And then he burst into tears but they only came out of one eye and he bowed his head so I could not see it and I wanted to scream.
“Leaf. Leaf! I’m going to get you out. I promise. I’m going to fix this, I’m—”
“Spencer’s next door,” Leaf said.
I switched back to my eye, cursing the hole’s smallness. He’d turned up his face again. Wetness made one cheek shine. His good hand brushed it away. “Hurry up, Gabbi, if that’s really you up there and not some side effect I had avoided the pleasure of experiencing until now, oh, the doctor will love this little development, won’t she…” He turned his head to the side as if forgetting he talked to an actual person, to the person who was going to rescue him.
His head jerked and he gazed up. “Oh, there you are. In the hole. Nicely done, very sneaky, very Gabbi-chic.”
I tapped out a message in Morse code because I couldn’t speak around the lump in my throat: S-T-A-Y A-L-I-V-E.
Ano had made us learn the code from a stolen library book. We’d been traveling by train last year under big night skies, bright stars, and a feeling that everything was working out for us. We’d made a game out of learning it. We’d been headed back to California and dreaming about the future.
Leaf smiled. “I’ll sure do my best, captain.” He fake saluted with his good arm.
I scrambled up and over to the next room. I dug into the ceiling, using all my strength, caring little now for noise and everything now for speed. This time I made the hole more like a diagonal ditch. Dust flew into the air and coated my face, my eyelashes, my hands, my nose. I sneezed and snot came flying out, but I didn’t stop to wipe it, just kept digging until I punched through and widened it enough for both my eye and mouth.
Spencer stood tall beneath me, staring at exactly where I worked. Dust coated his dark eyebrows and hair, turning it into an old man gray color that better matched his Feeb skin. His arms were crossed, both eyes blinked, both arms moved.
“And does this rat have two legs or four?” he said quietly.
“Spencer.” I whispered his name like a talisman of protection because that’s what he was to me and the others.
“Ah, it comes on two legs, and is rather a sight, or should I say, sound, for sore ears.” He cocked his head to the side. “Gabbi, what the hell took you so long?”
“I got here as fast as I could. I swear.”
He held up a hand and my heart beat wildly. Could I have made it here faster, could I have done something different? Was this my fault? A sick feeling grew in my stomach that brought me back to long nights and dark moments and a hand gripping my bicep in such a way that I knew I’d never escape, no matter how much I screamed or kicked or cried.
“You better stop whatever thoughts are in your head right now. You are not a victim. You can’t be. Victims don’t survive the streets, and here you are, alive.” He paused, stuck out his chin in that defiant, prideful way he had. “We’re not victims either. So cut that crap out. We’re alive and we’re going to stay that way—most likely, anyway. Do you have a plan?”
“I…” I’d found them, that had been the plan. I’d found them and figured the rest would come and I’d just see a way out. But all I could see was the hours it would take me to dig out a hole big enough for even one of them to fit through if I could get something that would cut through the cage wire and they were all in separate rooms and I surely would not get them all out in time and who would we have to leave behind?
“You never run without a plan, Gabbi. I thought you knew that.”
“I do know that, I do…” It’s how I’d avoided capture by the police and the shelters and the pimps. It’s how come I knew how to make a fresh batch of bread and take a bath out of a bucket and sleep with the windows cracked in the midst of an apocalypse.
But I didn’t have a plan for this.
Spencer sighed. “Just kidding, twit. I’ve got a plan and it’s better than whatever dumbass thing you could have thought up.”
Relief flooded me. You could count on Spencer. He would know what to do and I would be able to do it and stop trying to figure all this out on my own.
“They’ve been checking on Leaf in the early morning,” Spencer said, “Take out the nurse and guard, and you’ll have the keys to every prison cell in this section. Think you’re up for that?”
“Killing an uninfected…a real person?” I’d only killed Vs up until that point and no matter how much I wanted to claim it didn’t bother me because they were trying to kill me first—it did bother me.
“It may come to that. Whatever they did to Leaf—” Spencer’s voice cracked. “He was screaming, Gabbi. I could here him through the walls and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t stop it.” The tough, laugh-at-the-world facade peeled off for a moment, revealing a seventeen-year-old who was angry and sad.
I held my tongue for a long moment, examining myself to see if I was really capable of such a thing. And then like a ghost-memory, Leaf’s broken face rose before my eyes. “Yeah. No problem.”
“Okay find some place safe to hole up for the night. I’ll figure out how to get a message to the others. Try to sleep or something.” He turned and lay down flat on his cot, threaded his hands together, and put them behind his head.
“How are you going to get them a message?”
“I’ll figure out something. I’ll claw open the walls with my bare hands if I have to.”
I realized I didn’t know one thing and I wondered if it meant something really bad had happened, even worse than whatever had happened to Leaf, something so bad that Spencer couldn’t even bear to bring it up. “Spencer?”
“Yeah?”
“Are Ano and Jimmy and Ricker…are they okay?”
“I don’t know.”