A
N
ON THE WAY TO HARRY’S (THE MED CENTER)
The lamp pole I was using as a crutch snaps, and I fall onto Kris, who’s carrying Preeti.
“Sorry,” I say, grabbing onto his shoulder. “I still can’t stand on the ankle.”
“‘There’s always room for one more,’” Kris says in a voice. He adjusts his hold on Preeti, and we slog ahead.
“On the plus side,” he says, “I’m going to leave this mall in amazing shape. I mean, just feel these muscles flex!”
“Meanwhile, I’ll probably lose my foot. Good-bye, football.”
“Well, that’s why we have two, right? And the football, isn’t that just to get girls?”
It isn’t, I start to say, but then I can’t come up with anything better, so I just laugh.
It takes us forever to make it to the end of the mall where the med center is. We hobble in, and the smell causes us both to stop.
“Something died in there,” I say, collapsing against the wall of the entrance. Puke sours the back of my throat.
“I’m betting more than one thing,” Kris says, scanning the space with his light.
The place has been trashed. And the air will only get worse the farther we go inside. Our eyes meet.
“We don’t have a lot of options,” he says.
“She’s safer here,” I say.
Kris lays Preeti across some chairs near the entrance. “If we’re lucky, people will just take her for another corpse.”
Medicine will most likely be inside a cabinet, so we head in and search the piles of crap for box-like shapes. I lift a sheet of curtain-wall and find a girl.
“Help,” she whispers, and tugs her arms. She’s handcuffed to the cot with plastic strips.
“Security?” I ask.
She nods. Before the blackout, they were rounding people up. The healthy went to jail, the sick here.
Kris pulls a knife from his pocket. “Gift of Goldman,” he says, and cuts the ties holding her.
“Water,” she says. It’s more of a breath than a word.
She’s half dead. Kris and I glance at each other. She looks at us like she knows what we’re thinking. But she doesn’t grab at us. I guess she’s not hoping for much. Probably assumes we’re going to leave her to die.
“I’ll find some,” I say.
“I’ll check for others,” he says.
Before I go searching for a water fountain in the dark, I decide to make myself a decent crutch from the broken pole of a curtain rod. I wrap strips of canvas curtain around the top to protect my pit.
“Kris, I need light.”
He flashes the area around me. I see a short hallway on a nearby wall marked BATHROOMS. There’s a kidney-bean-shaped tray in the junk pile at my feet. It’ll do for a cup.
“Thanks,” I say. The light swings back to where Kris is searching.
It takes me a while, tripping over crap every few steps, but I find a water fountain on the wall where I guessed it’d be. On the slow walk back, my crutch catches on something that crashes to the ground.
“You okay?” The half-dead girl flashes a tiny LED light at me.
“Where’d you find that?” I ask, pulling my crutch free and lurching the last few steps. I pass her what’s left of the water.
“I found my purse,” she whispers after gulping a sip.
Kris returns with a red-eyed kid. “There are more back there,” he says.
“I’ll clear a space.”
The half-dead girl, whose name is Claire, helps me move some of the junk. I drag another cot over for the kid, then hobble to the water fountain to get him a drink. When I come back, there are two more people.
Kris is breathing hard and sweating through his shirt. “I think I covered this floor,” he says. “It’s not pretty. And they’re not all dead from the flu. Someone came through here shooting.”
That could only be Mike or Goldman. I can’t decide who’s more likely to have shot people in a hospital.
“Find any medicine?”
Kris shakes his head.
“They kept it upstairs,” Claire says. “I was here before, for a stomach problem.”
Kris sighs. “I’ll go check.”
I dig two more cots out of the rubble and set the two other guys on them. As I go for more water, the nearest curtain wall shifts. It’s another survivor.
“I have ibuprofen!” he barks. “Nurse gave it to me when it went dark.” He shakes the bottle. There are lots of pills inside. “Take it,” he says. “Just don’t leave me!”
I need the knife to get him free, so I drag myself to the escalator Kris went up. “Kris?”
I don’t see the book light.
Bracing myself on the handrail, I hop my way up to the second floor. His light’s near the far wall.
“Kris!”
“I found two girls back here!” The light shifts as he turns. Something glitters off to my left.
“What was that?” I shout. Claire’s light doesn’t reach much farther than the first cot.
He scans the floor. It’s water. There’s a crack in the ceiling, and water is raining down from it.
“Isn’t the skating rink above Harry’s?” I ask. With no power, the whole thing would melt in what, days? Hours?
The ceiling groans, there’s a boom like thunder, and the crack splits. Water gushes. A pipe dangles. A pipe with fingers. Not a pipe, an arm. Then the whole body drops through.
Kris’s light swivels back toward the wall. “Get those people ready to move!” he shouts.
As I scramble down the escalator, I hear another body drop with a sickening thunk. So that’s where the senator stored the dead. Thousands of bodies, about to collapse on our heads.
“We have to go!” I shout to Claire.
She finds a gurney with wheels. I roll it to where we’d cleared the floor and start helping the ones we rescued onto it. Kris comes barreling out of the dark with the two girls, one over each shoulder.
“There’s more,” he says, and hands me syringes labeled TAMIFLU.
“We have a transport,” I say, patting the cart. “There’s a guy over there with ibuprofen who’s tied to a cot.”
“Add a headlight,” Kris says, handing me his book light, which I clip on the front of the gurney’s frame between a kid’s legs.
Kris goes to collect ibuprofen guy while I load the two girls onto the gurney. Kris and the guy—who can walk—return, and we roll. Kris and I push, while Claire and ibuprofen guy kick stuff out of our way.
“We make a decent team,” Kris says between breaths.
Team. It’s a different word to me now.
“Yeah,” I say, and push harder with my one free arm. In the entranceway, we fit Preeti onto the gurney with the others. The thing is almost too heavy for us to move. But the floor is clearer here, so ibuprofen guy, real name Joe, helps us push.
Once we get out to the courtyard, there’s a new problem. On the second floor, a war seems to have broken out.
“Things get better and better,” Kris says, wiping his forehead with the hem of his shirt.
“Lord and Taylor’s over there,” I say, nodding to our right. “There’d be cots at least.”
“Too exposed,” Kris says. “Who knows how many people are in there.”
“A smaller store then,” I say.
“The mall offices!” Kris says, clapping his hands on the gurney.
“Aren’t they on the third floor?” No way we get all these people up there.
“It’s the only place I know of that’s separated from the service halls, from everything, really. There’s one door. We can defend one door.”
I wave the crutch. “I can’t defend anything.”
Kris pulls Goldman’s Taser from his back pocket and points the handle at me. “You can with this.”
I heft the thing, and feel a ton more powerful. “But how do we get up there?”
“Left!” Kris shouts.
A shadow solidi
fies into a person running toward us. I level the Taser at them. “Stop!”
The person lifts a pole like she’s going to bash my arm. Then freezes. “Ryan?”
My blood goes cold. “Shay?”
It’s too much, too good. She drops the pole and falls into me. I wrap my arms around her, and the crutch holds us both up.
I bury my face in her hair. “You’re alive.”
“You’re here,” she says, voice muffled by my shirt.
Kris pushes us apart. “My turn,” he says.
Shay bursts into a smile and hugs him.
“We have Preeti,” I say. “We found her for you.”
She doesn’t look happy. “Preeti?” she asks, her face twisted. “But Preeti’s in the HomeMart.”
“We found her in the JCPenney bathroom,” Kris says. “She’s sick.”
Shay’s face hardens. “They locked her out?”
“Did you try to get her into the HomeMart?” Kris asks.
“I have to see her,” Shay says, pushing past us both.
She stops when she sees the crowd, then looks back at us. “Who are these people?”
“We’re trying to save them,” Kris says.
I take her hand. “Help us,” I say, then lay out our plan.
As I talk, her hand tightens around the strap of her bag. When I finish, she looks at the gurney, then at Kris, then me.
“I can’t,” she says.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “Are you hurt?”
She opens the bag. “I found this,” she says, and explains her own plan. “I have to get to the HomeMart. I could save the whole mall, these people included.”
It’s like I understand what she’s saying but still can’t make sense of it. “But this is your sister,” I say. “And me. I just found you.”
Kris steps closer. “Did you just hear that?” he says, pointing to where the battle had gone down on the second floor. “That’s the whole mall now. You’ll be killed before you make it to the fountain.”
She looks at the gurney, steps closer. The others shift so she can see Preeti.
Shay smoothes Preeti’s hair from her cheek, and Preeti’s eyes blink open. “Shay?”
“I’m here,” she says. Tears drip down her cheeks.
“Please,” I say, standing behind her. I’m afraid to push too hard, and afraid she’ll go if I don’t say more.
“I’ll help,” she says, reaching back and taking my hand.
THE
S
E
N
A
T
O
R
AUDIO LOG
Day seventeen.
This is the third audio report. The third delivered to a machine. Are you even listening to these? I have not received a single call from you. But I did get your text: Still analyzing situation. No one found that comforting.
Things have gotten pretty rough in here. A couple more kids fell ill. I decided to isolate them in a back office rather than lock them and their parents out. I just couldn’t do it, not with all the screams I hear echoing around out there. Sue me!
Given your failure to respond to my requests for information, I decided to share your ultimate plans with the population in the HomeMart. We have collectively decided to try to escape. I let you know this so you can’t claim shock when we pierce whatever blockades you have built to keep us inside. If you shoot us as we emerge, you are doing so knowing that we are coming.
I have decided not to accompany my fellow Home-Martians—such a cute name! One of the kids came up with it. I am going to wait here, with my family. Wait for whatever you have in store for us.
On a final note, I broke protocol and made an anonymous call to my favorite local news station. Had the number memorized since my campaign days. I left a tip that the government was planning on leveling the mall with everyone still alive inside it. Perhaps that should be factored into your analysis.
S
H
A
Y
ON THE WAY TO THE MALL OFFICES
One more flight,” Ryan says as I meet him on the landing. He’s smiling like this is a group date and we’re about to get our first moment alone.
I nod, let him kiss my cheek as he hops ahead of the lumbering crowd. We’re now one floor up and at the opposite end of the mall from where I was supposed to be. But this is Preeti. This is Ryan. These aren’t just strangers begging for my help.
Joe has Preeti, and Kris carries the two girls I abandoned on his shoulders. The two other guys drag themselves along, and Claire is with the little boy, Silas. I stay back to guard our rear.
Claire helps Silas onto the escalator. As she follows, two guys lurch from the shadows and grab her.
“Give us your light!” one shouts.
I whack them both in the head, and, thankfully, they scatter.
“We are so lucky we found you,” Claire says, gasping.
“I can help you with him,” I say, and hook an arm around Silas.
We make it up the last flight of steps, and down the hall to the mall offices. Kris clips his book light to the frame of the drop ceiling in the central hallway. When we open the doors to the actual offices, it’s clear someone has already been through. The floor of the surveillance room—who knew there were cameras all over the mall?—is coated in shattered glass and cut wires. But at least the place is empty, and the offices themselves are mostly intact.
There are even some beds in a back room. I open Dr. Chen’s laptop and place it in the middle of the floor to give us light.
Kris brings Preeti in first, and I kneel next to her cot.
“You came back,” she whispers.
“I had to find you,” I lie.
“No, I mean from the flu,” she says, somehow able to sound annoyed even though her voice is vapor thin.
“Well, so did you,” I say, and quickly correct myself, “will you, I mean. So will you.”
She coughs, then reaches into her waistband and pulls out Nana’s book of Tagore’s poems. “My bag got taken,” she says, “but I took this out first.”
It’s missing its cover now and is so rumpled, it can barely be called a book. But my eyes water feeling those pages, seeing the notes written by my innocent self, the girl whose biggest problem was that her friends hadn’t called. Nani’s favorite poems are dog-eared from before she gave the book to me, and Nana’s too, from before he died. A whole history in curled, brown paper.
“Can you hold it?” she wheezes.
“Let me get you some water,” I say, and tuck the book into the bag beside Chen’s notebook.
Ryan finds me sobbing over the sink.
“We have flu medicine,” he says. “She’ll get better.”
I drop my forehead against his chest, feel his arm wrap around my shoulders. Could it really be so easy?
Kris’s silhouette appears in the doorway. “Staff meeting,” he says. “Back office.”
Claire and Joe sit in the chairs opposite the desk. Kris drops into the swiveling seat behind it, and starts rifling through the drawers. “We’ve got vitamin pills in here,” he says, laying everything on the desktop, “and some crayons. Computer cable. A floppy disk.” He pulls out a flat black square. “God, no one’s cleaned this thing out in a decade.”
“Vitamin pills,” Ryan says, picking up the bottle. “With that and the medicine we got, we’re golden.” He sounds so happy, triumphant, like he’s beaten all the odds.
“We’d be golden if it weren’t for the impending probability of starvation,” Kris says. “Claire and Joe haven’t eaten in days, nor have any of the others, I’m guessing.”
“There’s dog food in the pet store,” Ryan offers. “Shay and me, we can go down.”
We’d be on the first floor. So close. He could help me get to the HomeMart.
Ryan and Kris talk like family, skipping the unnecessary words as they hash out whether dog food is worth the risk traveling to the first floor. Not just the risk to u
s, but to these others, to Preeti—if we fail.
What am I thinking, abandoning my sister for this notebook? It’s just another excuse, this week’s distraction. Even if I get through the HomeMart’s locked gates, get the notebook to the senator, assuming she even has a way to talk to the people on the outside, what will that be worth if Preeti dies alone, in the dark, like Nani?
The pet store plan is scrapped as too risky.
“There’s a chance the madeleine cookies I left in Baxter’s are still there,” Kris says.
Ryan volunteers us.
Claire puts a hand on my arm. “I’ll watch Preeti,” she says. “We’re all family in here.”
“Thanks,” I say, still staring at Preeti’s shadow in the other room.
The bookstore is just down the hall. Ryan and I will run there, race back. Claire will watch her, and Kris will, too, and when Ryan and I return, we’ll have food. Preeti will get better.
But then what?
“Take the book light,” Kris says, walking Ryan and me to the front.
“No need,” Ryan says, pulling the Taser from his waistband. “This thing has a flashlight.” He clicks on a bright, white beam. “Tried to zap a guy and blinded him instead.”
“Whatever works,” Kris says. “Just come back.”
• • •
We head out into the darkness, Ryan’s fingers entwined with mine.
“You look pretty badass with the pole strapped to your back,” he says as we move down the hall.
“Don’t let the costume fool you,” I say.
“Fool me?” he says. “I’ve seen you throw down. You’re the most badass person I know.”
Now he’s just brown-nosing. “You’re forgetting Mike.”
“Mike’s just an ass,” he says, completely serious. “Bad-ass is reserved for people with a code. You have to be good to be badass.”
I squeeze his fingers. He might be the first and only person ever to call a five-foot-one, ninety-pound Indian girl “badass” and really mean it.
Ryan steps over an obstacle that turns out to be a person: a hand shoots out, grabs his crutch.
“Please!” a voice begs.
I whip out my pole to whack the arm, but Ryan blocks my swing. The Taser’s light reveals a boy and girl, two regular kids, curled one around the other.