No Easy Way Out

  Flopping down on his cot, Marco slathered all his exposed skin with hand sanitizer, then finally allowed himself to relax. In that momentary pleasure, he thought of other pleasurable things, like Shay, and recalled that he had totally bailed on helping her find a place to hide like he’d promised the night before. Leave it to him to screw up the one thing he actually cared about.

  He would make it up to her. Tomorrow. He would find her and do something—steal her some food from where they were stockpiling everything in the Sam’s Club. Yes. She might like that.

  He could handle this. He could keep all the balls in the air. He would handle this. He was in control.

  DAY

  NINE

  L

  I

  G

  H

  T

  S

  ON

  The glare of Lights On woke Shay after what felt like mere minutes of sleep. Her body was stiff, like an old puppet’s, and her head swam. She was still in Preeti’s bed, and her sister lay rigid in her arms.

  “I don’t want to be here,” Preeti whispered. “I want to go home.”

  “Yeah,” Shay answered for lack of something better.

  “I dreamed of that coughing.” Preeti hunched tighter against Shay. “Coughing everywhere and men in black trying to catch me. All I could do was crawl. They were always right behind me.”

  “It was just a dream,” Shay said.

  “But it wasn’t,” Preeti said, sitting up. She pointed to the empty space where the missing cot, and missing woman, should have been. “There really are men in black.”

  Shay shuffled up on her elbows. Moving hurt her head like a blow. The pain focused to a laser point just above her right eye. “That woman was sick,” she said, wincing. “The men took her to the med center. To protect us.”

  Preeti didn’t answer right away. “There are more,” she said. “I count ten more spaces.”

  Shay glanced around. There were odd breaks in the lines of cots, more missing women, missing girls. She wondered why they took the cots. Did they not expect the women to return? Of course they didn’t expect them to return.

  This was not helping anyone. Preeti needed normal. She needed to get out of bed and do something other than stare at empty spaces.

  “We should brush our teeth,” Shay said, sitting up. A red-hot poker ran through her skull. She ignored it. “We should get breakfast.”

  “I don’t want to go out there,” Preeti mumbled. She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

  Shay stood, forcing her awkward limbs to function. “You just need to get out of here,” she said, pulling Preeti’s arm. “This place is depressing. You’ll like school.”

  “School?” Preeti asked, incredulous.

  “It’s what they’re calling running around the food court with your friends.”

  Preeti perked up at the word. “Do you think Lia and Sahra are still here?”

  “You’ll have to see,” Shay said, shrugging playfully, happy for the mask so she didn’t also have to fake a smile.

  It was hard to tell how many people were missing at breakfast. Yesterday, some team had moved tables—everything from cheap plastic and metal backyard sets to fancy carved-wood dining room displays—into the first-floor courtyard, but there were not enough seats for everyone and no assigned tables. It looked like the same crowds as had eaten dinner, but maybe with so many people, no one noticed ten, twenty, a hundred missing bodies.

  “Can we ride the Ferris wheel at school?” Preeti asked. Her fears seemed to have dissipated with the promise of school and friends.

  “You can do whatever your teacher says.” Shay poked a pile of what she’d been told were grits. How could grit be food?

  Preeti ate what she’d been given like a thing starved. Spoonful after spoonful went into her mouth. “You going to eat yours?” she asked, scraping the last grits from the plastic.

  Shay shook her head, pushed the plate toward her sister, and refit her mask over her mouth.

  It was disconcerting how quickly Preeti had recovered. Where was the sadness, the anger of yesterday? She hadn’t even mentioned calling Ba. Not that Shay was interested in reliving that torture. Her head throbbed. She needed to go to the med center. But not before getting Preeti to school. Preeti would only freak out if Shay told her she felt like crap.

  • • •

  Ryan snuck from car shadow to car shadow through the parking garage. With the showers now on this level, whoever was in charge had all the lights turned on. Keeping Ruthie and Jack a secret was going to be harder. Their SUV was too close to the new shower establishment. Maybe he could convince them to move into the closet? No, that would be worse. And what if Mike or Drew went back there to get something?

  Mike had decided that he liked living in the bowling alley. They’d discovered a walk-in fridge, just like the one in the Grill’n’Shake, in the room next to the place where the party had been. The metal door had been padlocked, but a few blows from a fire extinguisher had smashed both it and the handle. Mike and Drew pried the thing open with metal bars scrounged from the party room. Inside, they’d found a meager selection, but still. It was food.

  Ryan had made off with a bag of rolls and a can of mandarin oranges. He’d also found a can opener in the bar, so there’d be no broken toys this morning. To get away without Mike and Drew freaking out, he said he’d forgotten something in the storage room. A clean shirt or whatever.

  “Bring one back for me,” Drew had muttered, crumbs spewing from his mouth.

  Ryan felt warm inside, seeing the SUV. He knocked on the door using the special three-knock code they’d developed—one short, one long, one short. Ruthie pushed the door open. Her eyes were red with tears.

  “Jack’s sick,” she said.

  Ryan’s first thought: I did this. He’d had the flu. Maybe he was still contagious when he met them.

  He crawled into the van and looked over the first row into the way back. Jack was curled like someone had kneed him in the groin.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “I brought you some rolls.”

  “My tummy hurts,” Jack moaned.

  A stomachache was not coughing. This was not the flu. I didn’t kill him.

  Ryan was suddenly able to think. He pulled the can opener from his pocket and passed it to Ruthie. “You need to eat,” he said. “See if you can get him to at least eat a roll or something. And drink. If it’s a stomach problem, he needs lots of water. I’ll go to the med center and see about getting some Pepto or Tums.”

  “And he’ll be okay?” Ruthie was clearly freaking out.

  Ryan grabbed both her shoulders and stared into her eyes. “Chill,” he said. “Jack is going to be fine.” He opened the bag of rolls and handed her one. “Just take care of yourself. I’ll take care of Jack.”

  Ryan pressed the door closed and slunk toward the showers. Thinking this was an ideal opportunity, he crept to the end of the line and joined the crowd. The guard on duty down here was merely an old dude passing out towels and chunks of soap. When Ryan reached the head of the line, he was given a towel and white wedge.

  “When you’re done, throw the soap on the ground and put the towel in that bin.” A large, wheeled canvas container stood near a parked wagon.

  “Are there razors?” Ryan asked, rubbing his prickly face.

  “Safety razors are in the Home Stores. Ask a guard.”

  So that was a no for him. Whatever. He didn’t have much facial hair to begin with. Maybe Shay liked her men fuzzy. Or could grow to like him that way at least.

  After showering, which felt like goddamned heaven, he changed into his other pair of clothes from the duffel in the closet and joined the rest of the mall on the first level. People were sitting at tables eating breakfast. This tot
ally normal event made Ryan sad. Why couldn’t he be a part of this? Why was he an outcast just for trying to escape? Like every one of these people hadn’t thought about it.

  That was when he saw Mr. Reynolds. The jerk was holding court at an iron backyard dining set, a crowd of guys his age—old and gray-haired and rich-looking, even in their mismatched clothing—nodding along with whatever he was saying. Ryan ducked behind a crowd of women to avoid getting spotted. No telling what that bastard would do if he saw him.

  Why did Reynolds get to live like a normal person? He was the asshole who got Mike and Drew and him into this mess. It had been Reynolds who convinced Mike to try to escape out the garage, who got them all in trouble with security, who would have left Ryan to die of the flu, and who blew their escape out the roof by only thinking about himself. And yet it was Mike, Ryan, and Drew who got stuck munching soup crackers in a dark closet like a bunch of outlaws? It was completely unfair. Like everything else about this place.

  Ryan had to focus. Get to the med center and get back to Jack. He had people depending on him. He wasn’t a smug, sell-out, selfish ass pretending to be some big shot. Ryan mattered, at least to Ruthie and Jack.

  The med center was guarded by a mom-aged woman. She ate her breakfast while playing Scrabble on a tablet. “Sick or visiting?” she said, without looking up. “There are no visitors for flu patients.”

  Ryan decided that saying sick might get him admitted and saying helping someone sick might invite too many questions, so he said, “Visiting.”

  “Name?”

  That had him. “Dixit,” he said. “Preeti Dixit.”

  The woman abandoned her game and switched to a different program, some sort of spreadsheet. “She’s not here anymore.”

  “Um, well, yeah, but she told me that she forgot something, and wanted me to pick it up.”

  The woman shrugged. “The lost-and-found is in the back,” she said. “But it’s only phones and stuff, anything that could be wiped down. No clothing, no books.”

  Ryan nodded. “It was her phone. Can I check if it’s here?”

  “Enter at your own risk,” she said, pointing to the hall between two rows of curtains. “Take that path to the back wall, then through the door marked STAFF. Box is on the shelf on the right.”

  Ryan glanced into the rooms created by the curtain system as he passed. There were few people in here, all of them looking normal save for the odd air cast or bandage. None of them looked like a flu victim.

  Ryan saw the top of a head over the curtain wall coming his way, so he ducked onto the escalator, which was off, and ran up it. The second floor was entirely different from the first. The only curtains here were a row of them against the security gate at the entrance to the mall, blocking the view out. The rest of the floor—a whole department store’s worth of floor—was just people on cots.

  Each person had on a mask, except for those with tubes in their mouths hooked up to machines. But there were few of them. Those people were in a row on actual gurneys near the back wall. Most people lay still on their cots, inches from the floor and a foot from the next patient. Every few seconds, one would start convulsing with coughs, then another, like there was some timer controlling them all.

  But the worst part was the area next to the gurneys. An area the size of half an end zone was covered in what looked like mattresses, and piled on these beds were bodies. Dead bodies. Had to be. Not one moved. There were a bunch of them lying there. Like some gross sleepover.

  “You shouldn’t be up here!” A woman strode toward him, a surgical mask over most of her face.

  “I-I hurt m-my ankle,” Ryan stammered, trying to pull his eyes away from the mattresses.

  “Get a mask on and wait on the first level!” The woman forcibly turned him around and pushed him down the stairs.

  Ryan stumbled down, trying to make sense of what he’d just seen. It didn’t look like a place anyone expected to leave. You went from cot to mattress to where? Was the stockroom on the second floor packed with corpses?

  Bile burned his throat at the thought. This was like some death factory. He would never let them take Jack.

  Ryan loped down the hall toward the exit.

  “Find your friend’s phone?” the woman at the entrance asked.

  Ryan kept running, needing to put some distance between him and that place. He would find stomach stuff somewhere else, anywhere else. He would never go in that place again.

  • • •

  Marco sat outside the senator’s office contemplating what the hell the woman could ask of him next. He figured he deserved a major thank-you for last night’s festivities. Anything after the thank-you that didn’t include And here’s a fried chicken basket as a reward was going to set him to screaming.

  The security guard had woken him from his cot some brief moment after Lights On. “The senator needs to see you,” was his only introduction. Marco figured she was eager to hear how he made such a success of this party insanity. He would try not to blurt out Dumb luck.

  He peered into the office to see what was taking so long. The senator had a half-eaten bagel on her desk and the fat cell phone was again pressed to her ear. Where did that woman get a bagel? Marco salivated at the word.

  “Well, that’s discouraging,” she said into the phone. “Chen tells me he’s gotten nowhere in here. But my hygiene initiative seems to be working. Only three hundred new admits yesterday.”

  Three hundred. All destined for the ice-skating rink. How many more could be piled on before the whole thing cracked and crashed down into the medical center below? Maybe that would be better, save the trouble of transporting the bodies up a floor.

  “I need more than twenty-four hours. Give me seventy-two at the least. I can show you real results in seventy-two.”

  She sounded like she was bargaining. With whom? For what?

  “I suppose I should say thank you.” She bit her bagel and chewed slowly. “Tomorrow, then.” She put down the phone but remained staring out the square of window.

  Marco decided to knock. His stomach was growling. Maybe she’d share the bagel.

  The senator glanced at the door, then swiveled in her chair to face him. “You failed me, Carvajal,” was how she began.

  “I threw the party,” he said, confused. “Security came. Nice move checking people’s temperatures, by the way. How many sick did you sentence to the medical center?”

  “Security did an excellent job controlling the party itself,” she said, patting her mouth with a napkin and replacing her mask. “I want to talk to you about the twenty or so people they found rampaging around the mall after being kicked out of the party by ‘some kid.’ I’m assuming this kid is you?”

  That goddamned Ryan Murphy was screwing up everything in Marco’s life. Couldn’t the flu have killed him when it had the chance?

  Marco cleared his throat. “It wasn’t me,” he said, banging together a plausible excuse. “I went to the can and some kid took up bouncer duty by the door.”

  “These people you let escape? They smashed the front windows of the Jessica McClintock store and were caught defacing the mannequins. How do I explain this to the other mall residents? This makes it look like we don’t have control.”

  “You don’t have control.” Marco wondered why this was such a revelation.

  “If we don’t provide the illusion of control, we’ll have anarchy. Your job is to help me project this illusion. And if you can no longer manage your job, I am going to have to relieve you of your card key and all privileges of non-compliance that up until now you have enjoyed.”

  She will pry this card from my cold, dead fingers.

  Marco shifted to sit taller. “You told me to throw a party, I threw a party. I did everything you asked.”

  “Tonight, you make sure to go to the bathroom befor
e the party. Let me know at our evening meeting where to deliver the keg.” She picked up the bagel and pointed him to the door. “And do a better job of working your mall assignment. I got a complaint report from your coworkers on construction that you were slacking off.”

  Screw construction. Screw her and her job. Like Marco needed this crap in his life. But without the card key, he was a sitting duck like the rest of them, fodder for the medical center, another body on the ice. Not a lot of options trapped here in Suck City.

  He had to problem solve. He’d completed an experimental party. What had he learned? Mike and Drew were a liability. Mike had control issues. Everyone had control issues. Marco would control their control issues. They were not invited to tonight’s event. He would provide his own security by not attending the party—no chance of facing a beat-down if he wasn’t there.

  First job was to find out who got tossed from the party last time. That douche Ryan would be able to identify them. Marco would get them to sign on to this new party—he had to find a new spot for it, a bigger place, better decorations, decent music. Then those guys would spread the word. He just had to keep Mike from hearing about it. Which meant finding Mike. So much plotting, so little time . . .

  • • •

  Lexi noticed several solutions to the problem of what to do with your mask while eating. Some wore it like a party hat on their heads, others like a necklace. She saw one guy with it balanced on his beard, just below his mouth. Another woman had hers on her forehead like a stunted horn. Lexi decided to go for the utterly original mask-on-ear look.

  “Now that’s a fashion trend I see sweeping the runways this spring,” Maddie mused from across the picnic table.