No Dawn Without Darkness

  “I think she’s sick,” the guy says, holding her gaunt face up to the light.

  “Here,” Ryan says, and hands him a few pills, ibuprofen. “It’s all I’ve got.”

  I go to check my pockets and my hand pats the messenger bag. I guess I never took it off. But inside, there’s only Tagore’s poems, and the notebook.

  • • •

  Baxter’s is not as abandoned as we’d hoped. Five candles sit atop bookcases at strategic points around the store. They give off enough light for us to see the shadows of four people holed up in the coffee bar.

  Ryan shifts on his crutch. “I say we sneak in, and just take them with the Taser.”

  “And if its battery dies?” I ask.

  “I think we can take a few bookstore guards.”

  “Normally? Yes. With half your limbs out of action? Less sure.”

  The candles spawn wide swaths of flickering shadow. “What if I create a distraction?” I say. “I can burn a book with one of those candles, get them to come after me, then run out of the store. You can get into the back, grab the cookies, and head out through the service halls.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “My badass self can handle making one little distraction.”

  “I just never imagined you setting fire to a book.”

  “Let’s consider these special circumstances.”

  He takes my hand. “We should stick together,” he says, eyeing my other hand, which grips the bag with the notebook inside. “You burn the book,” he continues, “then meet me here and we both sneak back, together.”

  How do I tell him that I can’t go back? “If I wait, I’m a target,” I say. “And you’ll be safer peg-legging it out through the service halls.”

  He half smiles. “Yeah, no,” he says. “You’re right.”

  “I can hold my own against a couple of bookstore guards.”

  “I know you can.” He leans toward me, places a palm on my cheek. “These guys won’t know what hit them.”

  My lips find his. The kiss starts small and grows.

  “See you back home,” he says, not letting go of my hand.

  I kiss his fingers and then crawl across the hallway.

  The candle is a cup of molten wax. I pour some out onto Nana’s book, keeping a few pages dry to act as a wick. I burn this book as an offering, Nani. Watch over me. And over Ryan, Kris, and the others. Help them take care of Preeti, while I take care of them.

  R

  Y

  A

  N

  INSIDE BAXTER’S BOOKS

  The food is right where Kris said it would be. I’m safer going through the service halls like Shay planned, but I grab the box and head back into the coffee bar. I want to let her go, but I can’t.

  I slip down the steps and duck behind a stack of magazines. There’s no sign of the guards. Shay’s idea worked. But the other side of the store is hidden now by a large cloud of smoke. Maybe it worked too well.

  I sneak through the stacks, maintaining cover until I hit wall. The smoke isn’t from the book Shay burned. A part of the rug is on fire, and the rest is catching fast. The guards smack the flames with a poster.

  “Over here!” one says, and points to a patch of rug that just caught.

  The one with the poster whips it toward the new branch of the fire. Behind him, the flap of wind feeds the flames. They spread like water across the rug.

  “Shay,” I whisper, sneaking around the entry wall into the dark corner we’d started at.

  She’s already gone. For a second, I let myself pretend she’s headed back to the mall offices, but I know that’s not where she went. That kiss was her saying good-bye.

  I step out into the hall so I can see where she started the fire. The guards have cleared out. Their shadows move up to the coffee bar, then into the kitchen I just left. The rug’s catching like it’s made of gasoline, out of control fast.

  I tuck the box under my good arm and start back to the offices. Across the mall, a shadow darts through a patch of light shining up from the lower floors. It could be Shay. I could go after her.

  But Kris is expecting this food. So are the people we promised to help. I’m not going to let them—

  A headlamp flashes on near the top of an escalator catching Shay in its light.

  “Hey, Mike!” I scream, taking a chance it’s him. “Over here!”

  Shay runs into the darkness. The headlamp follows her. Have I made things worse? And then I see Mike down the hall, lit orange by the fire that’s spreading behind me.

  Crap.

  “I told you I’d kill you if I saw you again,” Mike yells.

  I spin on my crutch and hobble into the part of the bookstore that’s not on fire.

  “Teammates don’t cut and run,” he says from behind a bookcase. He’s followed me in. “What would your brother say? Leaving your team for some girl.” His words compete with the roar of the fire.

  “Thad wouldn’t hurt people,” I say, winding around a wall of shelving. The flames climb up the nearest bookcase. Smoke blows right in my face and I drop, coughing.

  “Thad would do what he had to,” Mike says from the other side of the bookcase. “He would take out any opponent to save a friend.”

  I dare rolling over the fire, then turn the corner into another row. “You don’t have to do what you do,” I say. “You just like doing it.”

  The bookcase beside me creaks and leans. Books rain down on my head. I scramble away from it, down the aisle, then turn up toward the coffee bar.

  “I like surviving,” Mike says, climbing over the toppled bookshelf.

  “Surviving is easy,” I yell, pushing a rack of magazines between us.

  He grabs my good leg and I fall on my face. I flip onto my back, and he crawls over me.

  “Survival isn’t easy,” he says. A rack of newspapers behind him catches and shoots flaming bits of paper into the air. “But it’s all we have left.”

  “This isn’t survival,” I say, not even trying to block whatever’s coming. “This is kicking ass for sport. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Caring about someone else, trying to help them survive? That’s hard.”

  “You let your girlfriend go out there alone,” Mike says, grinning. “How’s that helping her to survive?”

  “Shay doesn’t need any help,” I say. His eyes stand out from the smeared black that coats his skin. “But you do.”

  And I nail him in the gut with the Taser.

  • • •

  It takes all my strength to get Mike up the steps and into the kitchen behind the coffee bar, dragging him behind me, his ankles pinned between my good arm and my hip so I can use the crutch. By now, the whole bookstore is on fire and the smoke is choking thick. I pull my shirt over my mouth and crawl out to get the box of cookies, then set them on Mike’s chest.

  The smooth tile is easier to pull him along. I get him out of the store and down the service hall before he starts to twitch.

  “What the hell?” he shouts. His feet are still limp in my hands.

  “Hold still, dickhead. I’m saving your life.”

  “You had a Taser?” he asks after I drag him a few more yards.

  “Kris took it off Goldman.”

  “We wondered where his went.”

  We’ve come far enough to have cleared the fire.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” I say, dropping his legs and grabbing my box. “You and Marco could stop being assholes and actually help people.”

  “It is how it is,” he says. He moves his shoulders, an arm.

  “See you on the outside, then,” I say, hopping down the hall.

  He doesn’t say anything more. He doesn’t come after me either.

  • • •

  “Where’s Shay?” Kris asks when I come into the offices, which now have better lighting. Little candles that turn out to be crayons are stuck to the corners of all the desktops.

  “She left,” I say, holding out the box.
r />   He sits in a desk chair. He rests his forehead on his hands. “I hope she makes it,” he says, finally.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  Instead of answering, he coughs blood across the desk’s blotter. I lift him, lay him down on the floor.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have surrounded ourselves with sick people,” he says. His voice is pinched. His head’s burning hot.

  “We don’t leave people behind,” I say, unrolling the canvas from my crutch and shoving it under his head.

  He coughs blood onto the rug. “Our team needs a new motto,” he says.

  “How about ‘No dying’?” I grab his water bottle off the desk and pour a sip into his mouth.

  He swallows. “You print the T-shirts,” he says. “I’ll make a sign.” He closes his eyes.

  “Kris?” I shout.

  His eyelids crack open. “I’m not dead yet,” he says in that stupid voice.

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  “Counterproductive,” he grunts, and falls asleep.

  G

  I

  N

  G

  E

  R

  IN THE THIRD-FLOOR SERVICE HALLS

  We started at the IMAX and we’ve been working our way out, searching stockrooms, stores, even under the tables in restaurants for Lexi. I time the pace of our search to the volume of Maddie’s breaths: As she wheezes louder, I search faster. When we started, I was careful—I knocked on doors, threw in a glow stick to check for potential attackers, searched methodically and tried not to make too much of a mess—now I fling open the door, flash on my light, and tear through every goddamned corner.

  We’ve found some people, none of them Lexi. In one stockroom, we were nearly shot by a security guard hunkered down behind a wall of shelving, his voice distorted by a fireman’s plastic face mask as he warned, “I will kill both of you if you come any closer.”

  In the back of the sports bar, we find a pile of bodies. All flu deaths. They must have gotten sick together and died, one by one.

  “What do you (wheeze), think it feels like (wheeze), to die?” Maddie stares at the pile, leaning against the edge of a countertop like she’d crumble without it.

  “These people died of the flu,” I say. “It felt like having the flu.” She shouldn’t be dwelling on this. We need to keep moving. I sweep the room with my light.

  “Do you think it hurts?” She takes a pull on her inhaler. “I don’t remember what it felt like when I had the flu.”

  The bodies are bloated and smelly. Blood oozes from the eyes, the mouths, the noses. The skin of the hands and faces is splotchy black. How could they not have felt that? How could their deaths have been anything other than horrific?

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Neither of us have the flu.” I flash my light in the last unexplored corner. “Lexi’s not here. Next stockroom.”

  “I’m going to die,” Maddie says.

  I refuse to look at her. I storm over to the door and open it. “Let’s go.”

  “I can (wheeze), feel it.”

  “It’s just the dark,” I say. “The dark is depressing.”

  She laughs, wheezes, coughs. “We’re tripping over bodies stacked like pancakes and you say the dark is depressing?”

  “The dark is depressing me,” I say, though we both know the dark is nothing compared to the sound of Maddie’s breathing.

  Please, Lexi, be in the next stockroom. Please . . .

  • • •

  We reach the arcade, which we know is clear, and I’m about to suggest braving the fire stairway toll-takers to begin searching the second floor, when I realize Maddie is not beside me.

  “Mad?” I whisper into the black.

  My voice echoes around the hall. No answer.

  I fumble in my bag for my light. Turn it on. To hell with any attacker, I have lost Maddie.

  The light finds her some ten feet back, slumped against the wall. I run to her.

  “Mad!”

  She’s wheezing. I grab her bag, but she stops my hands.

  “It’s empty,” she manages between choked breaths.

  “Both?”

  She drops her chin to her chest, coughing and wheezing on.

  No. This is too soon. Goddammit, Maddie, you used too much. Wasted what you had! We need Lexi to get into the HomeMart, and we need to get into the HomeMart to save you!

  “Okay,” I say. “We go to the HomeMart and bang on the door until they answer. They can leave us out here, but they have to give us an inhaler. They have to.”

  Maddie feebly waves a hand. “Look at the light,” she whispers.

  The beam from my flashlight is a solid cone of sparkles. I can taste the air on my tongue. It’s like licking the inside of a chimney.

  “You’ll be fine once we get a new—”

  She coughs, swipes a hand at my face. “Can’t make it,” she wheezes. “Can’t walk.”

  I wish I could carry her. But I couldn’t carry anyone on a good day, let alone when I’m exhausted and have only eaten Snickers bars and water for days. I could go there on my own—except how could she defend herself? No, we have to stay together. But she needs air.

  The security guard.

  He had an oxygen mask.

  He doesn’t need it. He would be just like the rest of us without his mask. But Maddie, she’ll die without it. I could go talk to him. Reason with him. He’s a policeman. Sort of. It’s his duty to serve and protect. His duty to give me his mask.

  “I’m going to get you an oxygen mask.”

  Maddie gives me the oh-honey look. Screw it. I hug her, drag her as best I can flush against the wall so no one will trip over her, and then run through the dark, flashlight beam bouncing, to find that stupid guard.

  • • •

  His was the second door down from where we started. Or was it the third? The third is silent, no guard. So the second.

  I open the door, throw in a glow stick.

  “I will shoot!” he barks.

  “I need your help!” I yell back.

  “Go away!”

  “Please!” I shine the light on myself, reveal my completely unthreatening lameness to him. “I couldn’t hurt you if I wanted to.”

  He doesn’t say anything in response, which I take as a good sign.

  “I need your help,” I continue. “My friend is dying.” My voice chokes on the word. I force myself to keep going. “She has asthma and can’t breathe this disgusting air. Please, give me your oxygen mask. She’ll die without it.”

  “I’m not giving you crap.”

  “What?” Did he just say what I think he said?

  “All you teens can die as far as I care. Get out before I shoot you.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to help people?” I manage. “Isn’t that your job?”

  “My job, kid, was to lock all of the healthy teens up and tie down the sick in the med center to try to keep all of you from dying.” I hear a click—did he just load a weapon? “But that was before you blew the electricity. Then you killed Skelton, Goldman, Kearns. Now I’m staying locked down until I get the all clear to return to the HomeMart.”

  “The all clear?” I click off my light. No sense in giving him a target.

  “Once you all have died of the flu or have killed each other—the all clear. I knew you kids would lose it the second security pulled out. I told Goldman. He should have stayed in the HomeMart.” His feet scuffle across the ground. “You still here?” He pauses. “You better get out before I make you get the hell out. I am not dying out here, not for you animals.”

  I drop to the ground and crawl into his room, toward where his voice had been.

  “Hey,” he shouts. “I said get out of here!” His voice is quieter, echoes down the hall. He’s yelling into the service passage.

  The door clicks shut. “You still in here?”

  I try to remember the layout. His shelf was about fifteen feet from the door, on the left. My hand hits something. The shel
f? I lie down in front of it, inch onto my side to make myself invisible.

  His footsteps slap on the cement toward me, then I hear clothing rustle—he must have to squeeze himself between something and the shelf to get back behind it.

  What am I doing here? How am I going to get the mask from him? I need a plan. I’ll wait for him to fall asleep—no, Maddie needs the mask now. No waiting. No plan. I need the mask.

  The shelf.

  Lying on my back, I spin my body and brace my shoulders against the floor. My toe hits a solid part of the shelf. I kick hard against it with both legs.

  The shelf is heavy but this is for Maddie’s goddamned life, so I push harder, put every muscle I have into it, and the thing starts to tilt.

  “What the hell?” the guard screams, and then I hear the thud and crash of boxes and whatever else was on the shelf. The guard groans, yells, swears, then shouts, “I will shoot you!” and clicks on a flashlight.

  He’s trapped, caught between the shelf and the one behind it, suspended like a fly in a web.

  I climb onto the shelf, my fingers grabbing for whatever part of him I can find. I locate what I think is an arm, then grope around until my knuckles knock on something smooth—the mask.

  “I will kill you!” He reaches for me and drops the light.

  The floor is now visible. I grab a metal tube lying under him. And then I kneel over his writhing body, silhouetted through the shelving, and hit him with it, anywhere, everywhere, except for where the mask is.

  A gun fires.

  I smash his hand. He yelps with pain and the gun clatters to the ground.

  Fingers reach through the shelf, scratch my legs. I hit him over and over. The shelf shifts, like he’s trying to push it. I keep going. The shelf settles. His hand falls away.

  I swallow, my throat is dry.

  The mask.

  I pull it free. Then follow the tube to the oxygen tank, which is strapped to him. My trembling hands work the release buckle, and the tank comes loose. I lift it and the tube through the shelves.

  And then I’m gone, through the black, into the deeper black of the hallway, down, down the hall, into the darkness. My breath hiccups.

  It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. He should have given it to me. He didn’t need it. He should have given it to me.