No Dawn Without Darkness
“Don’t hurt her,” Marco says, pulling Ginger off.
“What did you do to her?” Ginger growls.
“I saved her life,” he says, and shoves Ginger out of the car. She just stands there, stunned.
Marco lifts the girl—Lexi—in his arms and carries her to one of several motorcycles standing in an odd formation just to the right of the door to the fire stairwell. “You can drive this across the mall to the HomeMart. My only condition is that you take her with you.” He slides Lexi’s leg over the seat, then sits her gently against the cushioned metal backrest.
“Either of you ever ridden a motorcycle?” he asks. As he speaks, he pulls off the harness he had the nail gun in and slips it over Lexi’s head, strapping her to the bike.
“My cousin’s moped in India,” I say.
“Probably the same kind of thing,” Marco says. “One of my guys hotwired all these for us. In terms of riding, from what my boy says, you just squeeze the clutch, which is this metal bar here—”
“I can manage this,” I say. It’s enough like the moped that I can get us across a parking lot.
He looks up at me. “I still think your plan sucks.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
Ginger slips onto the seat between me and Lexi. “Let’s go.”
Marco hands me a walkie-talkie. “It’s the one we took off the cop, like a hundred years ago when we got our all-access key card,” he says. “I saved some battery, for what, I have no idea. Maybe it will help get you inside.”
I pass the walkie-talkie to Ginger, then check the bike’s in neutral and turn it on. I want to ride away, but that feels wrong. I can’t think of anything else to say, so I say, “Thanks.”
He winces half a smile, then nods. “Yeah.” He takes a step back toward the door, pauses to brush a piece of hair from Lexi’s mouth. “I hope you make it.”
Hope. For all the asshole posturing, Marco hopes.
“The mall offices,” I say. It’s a chance, but I decide to take it. “Preeti’s in there. She’s sick, and there are others. If the fire gets bad, please help move them.”
Marco sighs, continues toward the door. “I can’t promise anything.”
It’s done. He’ll do whatever he’s going to do.
“Hold on,” I say to Ginger. I let out the clutch and we roll into the dark.
M
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PARKING GARAGE
Shay’s motorcycle is a point of light in the black. I did everything I could to save you, Lexi. Not that you’ll know about it.
Back to phase two.
It looked like the gang had cleared the weapons room as instructed, so now it’s just a matter of wiping out the green-face threat and securing a new command center on the second floor.
No sense walking into battle when you can ride. I grab the nearest bike, start the thing up, then navigate my way to the central pavilion. Mike told me he punched an SUV through the glass, so I easily make it to the steps. Heath gave us a lesson on riding, but this is the first time I’m really doing it. The engine buzzes between my thighs; the wheels scream on the tile. I bounce up onto the first floor.
Funny, this all started with Mike and a bike. Ha! It rhymes.
I am a comet, blasting down the hall, swerving around crap, my headlight carving tunnels of light through the dark to the escalator. The bike flies off the top step onto the second floor.
Down the hall, the food court is on fire. Meaning the second floor might not be the best place for a new command center. Scanning the floor above, I see most of the third floor from the T. J. O’Flannigan’s on back is en fuego. So we have very little time before we must be cleared out of the bowling alley.
My team is supposed to regroup in the Abercrombie. But as I drive up, the place is a ghost store. I continue down the hall, toward the food court, and discover why.
Anarchy. Mayhem. Garden-variety vandalism. Heath and another guy are torching the horses on the carousel.
“Where the hell is everyone?” I yell, pulling alongside the broken fence that once held a line of squalling kids.
“Here!” Heath yells back, waving his hand, which grips an ax. “At the party at the end of the world!” He returns to chopping the head from one of the ponies.
There’s Laila, flinging flaming tennis balls from her slingshot at Donna, one of our own. They’re both laughing, even though Donna’s hoodie has caught on fire. And there’s Jake and Neil dragging some helpless douchebags from a store. Where’s the discipline? What about the freaking plan?
And then I see Mike standing over a girl he just felled with one swipe of a bat. He’s laughing, even as I see a guy slam him in the back with a two-by-four.
If they think I’m giving up, giving in to this place, they are insane.
I gun the engine, stall, restart the damn thing, and fly toward the escalator. I jump onto the third floor and ride into my bowling alley, down my hall, to my stockpile of food.
The smoke is so thick, I can barely breathe. I heft the bucket of dried eggs, and get five feet before I’m sucking wind.
How could they give up? After everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve done to get here?
I drag that damn bucket to the front of the bowling alley. My lungs burn—screw my lungs, I keep going. Haul the box of chips, the crate of water. Only when I cut my hand open on the edge of a flat and there’s no one to catch the pallet before it drops onto my boot do I admit it: I am no longer good at alone.
The entrance to the bowling alley glows orange as I approach out of the dark. Human screams, some from pain, some not, compete with the voiceless roar of the fire. It’s close enough for me to feel its heat.
I get on the bike and ride across the hall, down the hallway, and stop in front of the mall offices.
“Ryan?” I yell, punching open the door.
A metal pole whacks me across the chest.
“Get the hell out!” the douche screams.
“Shay told me to come here,” I say. “She asked me to—”
The punch glances off my cheekbone, scraping the charred flesh of my skin, and I black out.
Water splashes across my skin and Ryan shakes me back to life. “Can you ride that bike?”
“So much of me wants to kill you right now.” I push my body upright. My cheek pulses with pain.
“We have to move these people,” he says, shuffling down the hall. “And I don’t know how to work a motorcycle.”
A half-dead book light hangs from a ceiling tile and illuminates several prone bodies. Ryan backs out of the dark at the end of the hall, dragging a girl by the ankles. “There are four including her who can’t walk down,” he says, laying her at my feet. “You take them on the bike. I’ll follow with the ones who can move on their own.”
It’s Shay’s sister, Preeti. She’s sick, probably not going to make it to the end of the day, and really, are any of us?
“Why are you even bothering?” I say. “If you’re not burned in the fire, you’ll be choked by the smoke. Even on the lower floors, it’s just a matter of hours.”
“Tell me now if you’ve given up,” he says. “I’m moving these people with or without you.” He shuffles on his makeshift crutch back into the dark.
I hate him more now than ever.
But I still lift the girl in my arms, place her on my bike, then go back to get another.
G
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ON THE WAY TO HOMEMART
Shay stops the bike when the headlamp finds solid wall. She twists the handlebars, scanning the concrete with the beam until she finds a door marked FIRE.
“The HomeMart should be up those stairs,” she says, and cuts the engine.
We slip off the bike. Shay leaves the headlight on, so we’re not sucked back into the endless black that surrounds us. I drop the nail gun and walkie-talkie by the wa
ll, then help Shay carry Lexi across the pavement.
“I’ll get the door,” Shay says.
The last time I saw Lexi, we’d been doing laundry, the three of us. Maddie and I left to sample clothes from our secret closet. I’m still wearing the top she told me to try on.
Marco stole our chance. He took the one chance Maddie had and hid it from us in the basement. So our plan didn’t fail, it never could have succeeded in the first place. All because of Marco.
Lexi’s eyes flutter, then squint at me. “Ginger?” she whispers.
Tears spill down my cheeks. “We’re taking you to your mom,” I say.
“Help me!” a voice rasps and a man claws his way into the cone of the headlight.
Shay grabs the nail gun.
“This is almost over,” she says to him. “We have no food. Just the bike, which you can have. But we need to go up those stairs to the HomeMart.”
“Take me with you,” the man says. “Don’t leave me.”
“We won’t leave you,” Shay says, taking the man’s hand.
Is she insane? He’s going to kill us.
But he doesn’t. The man takes her hand and begins to cry.
Then she turns to me, smiling. It’s like she’s seen the future, already knows we make it out.
I nod, and pick up the walkie-talkie.
Shay leaves the nail gun by the bike. We each take a side, shoulder to Lexi’s shoulder, and slowly, the shadow guy gripping Shay’s hand like a lifeline, make our way up the stairs.
• • •
The stairwell lets us out in a service hallway. The first door we come to has the word HomeMart spray-painted across it.
Shay goes right up to it and knocks.
“I knocked,” the man says. “They didn’t answer.”
“I’m sure a lot of people have knocked on this door,” I say. Lexi is heavier than I can manage, and we slump down the wall to the floor.
“I’m sure people haven’t knocked, then called.” Shay takes the walkie-talkie from my hand, clicks on the volume, and squeezes the talk button. “Senator Ross, it’s Shaila Dixit. I have Lexi. I’m at the service door. Please let us in.”
She releases the button.
The senator’s probably long gone by now. The government cleared the adults out, I’m sure, left the rest of us—
“Miss Dixit?”
We lock eyes. Holy crap, she’s really still here. It hits me that I never thought this would work, that the whole time, even with Maddie, I thought I was merely stalling Death, not betting on survival.
“Yes!” Shay yells, then remembers to hold the talk button. “Yes,” she says again, more calmly. “Senator, we need to talk to you—”
“You have Lexi? She’s alive?”
“Yes,” she says, giving me the thumbs-up. “We’re outside a door on the south side of the store. I need to tell you something. I have Dr. Chen’s notes.”
There’s a pause.
“Wait by the door.”
I clutch Lexi to me, hug her so hard that even in her near-comatose state she weakly swats at me and whispers, “Too tight.”
Something in the door clunks. It opens. The senator stumbles out into the dark. “Shaila?” A lantern flickers to life. The senator’s face is haggard. Her hair is a spiky nest. “Miss Dixit?”
Behind her is more darkness. Shouldn’t there be light? People? I think I hear banging.
“Where is everyone?” Shay asks.
“They’re trying to escape, have been for hours. At this point, it’s just something to do,” she says. Then she turns to me. “Lexi!” she cries, and falls to her knees.
She throws her arms around her daughter and catches me in the hug too. My body starts shaking with sobs. I don’t even feel sad, I’m just crying, like my brain still has to catch up.
“I have Dr. Chen’s notes,” Shay says, interrupting. “Do you still have some connection to the government outside?”
The senator releases me, keeps one hand on Lexi like she could disappear at any moment. “Thank you for bringing her. I didn’t think I’d get to say good-bye.” She smiles at Shay like Lexi’s already dead. “Here,” she says, and pulls the satellite phone I’d seen her with back in the normal mall from a pocket. “You can call, but they won’t answer. I’ve been leaving messages for days. At least you both can say good-bye to your families.”
And I thought I’d been blown away before. My chest sucks inward, but it’s not breath, it’s just that I’m completely shattered.
Shay takes the phone. “They’ll answer my call,” she says, and hits the call button.
She waits, and I hear the recording. Shay gazes into the lantern light, then speaks. “My name is Shaila Dixit. I have the notes of Dr. Chen from the CDC.” She explains about the mutation. That we’re not a threat anymore. Then hangs up.
“Do you know what happened to Dr. Chen?” the senator asks.
“Someone shot him,” Shay says.
The senator nods like she expected it.
Shay calls again. She tells about how Dr. Chen must have figured all this stuff about the mutation out right before he died, that he must have tested his idea on her because she was coughing blood, hours from death herself, when she got to the med center, but she lived. She’s the proof he was right. She hangs up.
“I’m so sorry,” the senator says. She holds Lexi, and it’s not clear which of us she’s speaking to.
Shay calls again. She tells them she started a fire in the bookstore and that it’s spread. That the whole mall will burn to the ground with everyone inside it, and that it doesn’t have to be that way. That they could save us. That all they have to do is pick up the phone.
She started the fire? And Marco stole Lexi out from under us. The senator locked us out in the mall, the government locked us in here. They all screwed us, Maddie. Everyone let us down.
“My next call is to 911,” Shay says, leaving yet another message. “I will tell them everything I told you, and ask that they share it with whatever news agency will listen. I am not letting this place go down without a fight.”
The man from the basement crawls into the circle of light.
“John?” the senator says. “Goldman said you got separated. I had hoped you survived.”
He gives her a pinched smile.
And then the phone rings.
All four of us jump.
“Hello?” Shay says.
We all lean in for the answer.
M
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MALL OFFICES AND PET STORE
I carry Preeti and another kid down to the first floor on my bike. The pet store is near the escalator and looks empty, so I stash them in there in a dog bed. As I ride back up to get the next invalid, I pass Ryan and the gimps fumbling down the steps through the smoke.
“I put the kids in the pet store,” I say, pausing at the top of the stairs.
“There’re more in the back room on the right.”
The book light in the hall looks like a lighthouse locked in fog, the smoke’s so thick. I haul the girl closest to the door out into the hall. The air is sticking in my throat. Thank you, Senator, for keeping a supply of face masks handy. I sling on two, but still can barely breathe.
I heft the girl’s body onto the bike. One arm on the handlebars, one arm around the girl, we bump and ride down to the first floor.
Ryan’s made it down with the crew of the damned. He’s setting them up near the cloudy remains of the fish tanks.
“Here’s another.” I let the kid slide off the bike onto a stack of cat litter bags. She starts to roll off. I stick a leg out and catch her before she hits the tile.
“This is better, right?” Ryan asks as he eases the sick girl off my foot and onto the ground.
“Better than running a crew? Better than kicking everyone’s ass? No. This is not better than that.”
He shakes his head like I’m such a moron.
“You se
lf-righteous prick,” I say. “Like you’re not getting off on your moral superiority. Like your bagging Shay doesn’t make you feel like the biggest dick in the room. In the immortal words of Mel Brooks, It’s good to be the king, and you know it.”
“It feels good to help people, yeah,” he says, dragging the girl to a pile of dog jackets near the wall. “But I didn’t bag Shay. She’s not baggable. Your problem?” He’s back in my face. “You’re pissed because she chose me over you. You just wanted someone to like you. But who the hell really likes a bully?”
“Screw you.” I start the damn bike and roar out of there like a goddamned hurricane.
Screw all of these people. Screw the whole goddamned mall. Screw this fire. Screw the smoke. I rev the bike and just ride and ride. As a wall looms, I turn up the stairs and fly the other way.
Holy crap. The whole second floor is just people running, screaming. Some are trying to get down out of the smoke, but most have joined in the bedlam my old crew ignited in the food court. That place is like a mosh pit.
Bodies slam into one another. Punches fly. Hair is pulled. They don’t even seem to notice the fire.
I keep riding. I bump up the stairs and park outside the mall offices and slink inside like the asshole I am and grab the next sick douche in the lineup.
As I drag his limp body down the hall, the front door handle rattles.
No one I want to run into would be coming in here. I drop the guy’s arms. What the hell is weaponizable in this place?
“I saw you come in here, Headlamp.”
Holy shit, it’s Knife-fist. This guy won’t die!
The nearest door opens into an office crammed with useless computers. I duck in, grab a flat screen, and wait. He steps into the doorway.
I smash him in the face with the screen and drive him back down the hall.
He swipes at me with his armored knuckles, catches the good side of my face. I duck, and the blades scrape up my cheek. He knees me in the gut, kicks my calf.
“Told you I would kill you,” he says.
I catch him in a headlock. “You’ll have to try harder than that.”
He pulls me onto his back and drags me into the reception room, then spins and slams my spine against the wall, squeezing the air from my lungs. I lose my grip on him. Knife-fist thrusts away from my body, turns, pulls back his arm to nail me with his claws.