Ryan had long since left the room and yet Mike still held the gun out to where his head had once been. Mike was trembling; his jaw was locked in a snarl.
“He’s gone,” Marco said, eager to forget Ryan’s existence. “Screw him. I’ll be your wingman.”
Mike remained frozen for a few seconds longer. Then he mimed firing the gun. “Bang.” He turned to Marco. Sweat ran in rivulets down his forehead and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he hadn’t slept in months. He looked like he and Marco were on the same page.
“We’re thinking of starting a revolution,” Marco said. “I think you could be of some help with that.”
“The senator and her security assholes killed Drew,” Mike growled. “They’ve taken everything.”
Marco needed Mike, or whatever was left of Mike, to focus. “Sure,” he said. “But if you want to beat the senator, we need to take out her eyes and ears. Which means taking out the mall offices.”
One of the flamethrower girls joined the pow-wow. “But we just want to stop them spreading this new flu, right?” she said. “Shouldn’t we go to the med center?”
“They will stop you dead in your tracks,” Marco said, “because they can see you coming. There are cameras covering every inch of the mall. We take out the cameras, we can move without fear of Big Brother.”
Mike clapped a hand on Marco’s shoulder. “I like it. How do we knock them out?”
Marco figured they could just walk in the front door of the mall offices and take out anyone standing in their way. The hallway was short and narrow enough that they could cover the whole thing from the front door, then neutralize anyone in the adjoining rooms as they moved toward the senator.
“We could snag her as a hostage,” Mike said, sounding excited. “Those doctors will have to give us the virus if we have her.”
“See how it’s all coming together?” Marco replied, hefting Shay’s coat. Everything was coming up chaos.
Mike pulled a black ski mask from his pocket and dragged it over his skull. “Let’s move.”
• • •
Marco had determined that a shock-and-awe entrance to the battlefield would best serve their purposes. Thus, Heath hefted a chair through the glass reception window of the mall offices, crawled in, and buzzed open the door. Much to everyone’s surprise, the offices were devoid of people.
“What the hell?” a girl observed.
“Interesting,” Marco mused. Something strange was going on indeed.
He told Mike to cover him as he broke into the monitoring room for the closed-circuit camera system. There was no one in there either. But from that room, they could see the entire mall. There were few people save security in any of the monitored areas of the mall; teams of security seemed to be moving up the escalators toward the third floor; but the most intriguing activity was at the other end of the mall, at the HomeMart.
“They’re done abandoning ship,” Marco said, pointing to the relevant screen. On it was pictured the closed-over front of the HomeMart. “They’ve taken the residents two by two and locked themselves in an ark.”
Mike spat at the screen. “If they’re not here, then they’re not watching. I say we take out the med center.”
Marco pointed to a blinking red light. “Remote access. They must have set up a link inside the HomeMart.”
“Then unlink it,” Mike commanded.
“Why would I know how to do that?” he said.
“So what, then?” Mike was completely relying upon him. It was a delicious feeling.
“We even the playing field.” Marco walked out of the room. “If we can’t see them, then they shouldn’t be able to see us either.”
• • •
They’d divided into two teams. Marco took Heath and one girl, Kaylee, with him on his mission to the parking level. He handed them little strap-on camping headlamps when they reached the door marked ELECTRICAL.
“Won’t there be a light?” Kaylee asked.
“Not for long.”
The electrical transformer wasn’t in a cage like the HVAC system. It just sat in a room, four fat cubes with little yellow warning signs depicting a hand and a bolt of electricity. Wires came out the top and ran up the wall and across the ceiling.
“What do we do?” Heath asked.
Marco opened the door on one of the cubes, revealing the curved casing of the transformer. “Take the bat off your back and get to it,” he said, pointing at the thing. Marco had selected these two in particular because they had wooden bats strapped to their backs.
Heath stared at Marco for a second, a dubious expression on his face, then shrugged and unsheathed his bat.
“This one’s for Drew!” he shouted.
The two of them whaled on the thing for a couple of seconds with no result.
“The lights are still on,” Kaylee remarked.
Marco flipped up the collar to his coat and took the hockey stick from his back. “Keep hitting it until they no longer are.”
The three of them took aim at different parts of the thing, but no amount of abuse led to even a shuddering of the lightbulb. More drastic efforts were needed. Kaylee had a climbing ax hanging from her belt.
“Might I borrow this?” he asked, pointing to the weapon.
She unhooked it and passed it to Marco. There were gloves in the coat’s pockets, which Marco slipped on to protect his hands, then he took aim at the center of the nearest cylinder and drove the spike into the transformer’s side.
The explosion knocked Marco across the room. Kaylee was thrown into the adjacent transformer. Sparks flashed. She screamed, then didn’t—her body fell to the floor. The lights flickered, then blinked out.
A headlamp flashed in Marco’s eyes. Marco saw Heath’s lips move, heard the word “Marco” all thick like they were under water. Heath grabbed Marco’s leg and began dragging him from the room. Marco noticed his arm was on fire. Panicked, he unbuttoned the charred leather coat and let it slip from him. It sunk in that without the coat, he’d have been fried. Like Kaylee.
Once in the parking garage, Marco kicked his foot loose from Heath’s grasp.
“I can walk,” he rasped. He stripped what remained of the leather gloves from his hands.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” Heath said.
As they ran between the cars, headlamp beams bouncing before them, they heard sizzles, saw flashes of light—their lamps bouncing off shattered windshields. But the world was dark now. Marco enjoyed the black.