Plague

  Sam checked the map. Only now did he notice the cross-hatched line indicating a railroad track. He hadn’t known what it was before.

  Sam wished he’d thought to bring binoculars. There was something off about the building. It was too isolated. Although, Sam reminded himself, there might be a whole bunch of buildings just beyond the FAYZ wall. So maybe this one building was just at the edge of a big compound.

  But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like this place was deliberately far from anything else. He doubted it would even be noticeable from a satellite photo. Everything except the few cars were painted the same ochre color as the surrounding emptiness.

  “Let’s check the building first.”

  The door was unlocked. Sam opened it cautiously. Dirt and dust had filtered onto the polished linoleum floor. A main room, two hallways leading away, and two private offices behind glass partitions. There were half a dozen gray-painted metal desks in the main room and old-style rolling office chairs, some with mismatched cushions. The computers on the desks were blank. Lights off. Air-conditioning obviously off, too; the room was stifling.

  Sam glanced at framed photos on a desk: someone’s family, two kids, a wife, and either a mother or a grandmother. He spotted a stress ball on another desk. There were official-looking binders and racks of ancient floppy disks.

  Everything was dusty. Flowers in a tiny vase were just sticks. Papers had flowed from desks onto the floor.

  It was eerie. But they had all seen plenty of eerie: abandoned cars, empty homes, empty businesses.

  One thing they had not seen in a very long time: a jar of Nutella was open on one desk, lid nowhere to be seen, and a spoon standing inside.

  The three of them leaped as one.

  “There’s some left!” Jack cried with the kind of pure joy that should have signaled the discovery of something far more important.

  Sam and Dekka both grinned. It was a large jar, and it was at least half full.

  Jack lifted the spoon. The Nutella dripped languidly.

  Jack closed his eyes and stuck the spoon in his mouth. Without a word he handed the spoon to Dekka.

  It was like a religious ritual, like communion. The three of them taking spoonfuls, one after the other, each silent, each awed by the wonder of intense flavor, of sweetness after so much fish and cabbage.

  “It’s been, like, how long?” Dekka asked. “It’s sweet.”

  “Sweet and creamy and chocolaty,” Jack said dreamily.

  “Why is it still creamy?” Sam asked.

  Jack had the spoon. He froze. “Why is it still creamy?” he echoed.

  “This jar had to have been opened months ago, back before FAYZ fall,” Sam said. “It would be all dried out. All crusty and stiff.”

  “I’d still eat it,” Dekka said defiantly.

  “This wasn’t opened months ago. This hasn’t been open for even a few days,” Sam said. He put the jar down. “There’s someone here.”

  Jack had started reading some of the papers strewn carelessly about. “This was a research station.”

  Dekka was tense, looking around for intruders, enemies. “Research on what? Weapons? Aliens?”

  “‘Project Cassandra,’” Jack read. “That’s the header on most of the memos and stuff. I wish I could get into these computers.”

  “Someone is here,” Sam said, sticking to the most important fact. “Someone who can unscrew a jar of Nutella and eat it with a spoon. Which makes it not a coyote. There’s a person here.”

  “Someone from Perdido Beach?” Dekka wondered. “Maybe someone left town and found this place and never came back. It’s not like we would notice everyone who ever left.”

  “Or someone from Coates.” Sam made a motion with his hand, indicating silently that he would go down the hallway to the left and Jack and Dekka should be ready to back him up.

  It wasn’t a long hallway. Just four doors on each side. Milky light came through a reinforced glass window in the door at the far end of the hallway.

  Sam opened doors, one at a time. The first two opened onto empty private offices. The next opened to a dingy room with a metal table and chairs, facing each other. A screen was on one wall. A clipboard was on the floor.

  Sam picked it up. “‘Project Cassandra,’” he read aloud. “‘Subject 1-01. Test number GV-788.’”

  He placed the clipboard on the table and went to the next room.

  He opened this room and instantly knew someone was inside. Even before he saw anyone.

  This room had a window of regular glass and sunshine poured in. There was a bed, a desk, a large blank TV mounted on one wall. Game players lay dusty beneath the screen.

  Books were piled high on a side table.

  And one book was in the hands of a boy who sat in a reclining chair with his feet up on the desk. He was maybe twelve. His black hair hung down his back almost to his waist. He would probably be tall when he stood up. Thin. Dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a black-and-white Hollywood Undead T-shirt.

  “Hi,” Sam said. He frowned.

  The boy barely reacted.

  “Don’t I know you?” Sam pressed.

  The boy looked at him with eyes narrowed to slits. He smiled a little. He seemed to want to go back to his book.

  “Dude,” Sam said. “Aren’t you Toto?”

  The boy’s eyebrows went up. His lip quivered. He said, “Is he real?”

  He was speaking to a life-sized Styrofoam head of Spider-Man, complete with blue and red cowl, that rested on a shelf.

  “I’m real,” Sam said. Then he yelled, “Dekka! Jack!”

  “Why is he yelling?” Toto asked Spidey. “He could be a Decepticon.”

  “I’m not a Decepticon,” Sam said, feeling a bit ridiculous.

  “It’s the truth,” Toto told Spidey. “He’s not a Decepticon. But maybe he works for the Dementors, for Sauron, for the demon.”

  “What are you talking about, Toto?” Sam asked.

  Jack and Dekka came rushing up. “Whoa,” Dekka said.

  “He knows what I’m talking about,” Toto told Spider-Man. “He guesses, he’s testing. ‘What are you talking about, Toto?’ he says. Right. He knows. He knows the demon.”

  “I don’t work for anyone,” Sam said.

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire. Someone sent you.”

  “Albert, but—”

  “They always try to lie, but it never works, does it?” Toto said.

  Sam turned to Dekka. “I think our boy here has been alone for a long time.”

  “He means I’m crazy.” Toto addressed Dekka directly, not Spider-Man, though he glanced back at the Spidey head and seemed torn between Dekka and the web slinger. “The truth teller, truth teller Toto.”

  “Are you test subject 1-01?” Jack asked.

  Toto didn’t seem to hear. But now tears were welling in his eyes. “One zero one. Yes. One zero two, what happened to her, do you want to hear?”

  “Yes,” Sam answered.

  “Should we say, Spidey?” Toto bared his teeth and snarled, “She used to live across the hall. Darla. She was eight. All her stuff was Hello Kitty. She could walk through walls. She didn’t want to stay, she wanted to go home, so she tried to just walk right through the wall to the outside and the guards tased her as she was going through and you know what happened?”

  “Tell us.”

  “He doesn’t want to know, not really, does he?” Toto asked Spidey. “He’s seen too many bad things, hasn’t he? But I’ll tell him anyway, which is that the Taser froze her halfway through the wall. She died. They had to bust out the whole wall to get her out of there.”

  “Albert’s cat,” Jack said.

  Sam nodded. They’d all heard the story of the teleporting cat that misjudged and solidified with a book inside it.

  “They aren’t surprised,” Toto said. He tilted his head and shook it back and forth, vastly amused by some secret joke. “They know, don’t they?” he asked Spidey.

  “Yeah, we know,”
Sam said. He raised his hand, palm out, and fired a brilliant green beam at Spider-Man’s head. The fabric of the cowl caught fire and the Styrofoam within melted.

  Toto’s pale face went paler. He swallowed hard and looked directly at Sam for the first time.

  “Sorry, man,” Sam said. “But honestly we have all the crazy we can stand. And we don’t have all day.”

  “Yes, he’s telling the truth, he’s in a hurry.”

  “He’s still talking to Spider-Man,” Dekka pointed out. “He’s nuts.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re all a little nuts, Dekka,” Sam said.

  “No, he’s not nuts, the Sam boy,” Toto said and he shook his head back and forth. Then, slyly, he added, “Anyway, he doesn’t think he is.”

  “We’re looking for a big lake. Lake Tramonto. You know how to get there?”

  “We don’t know how to get anywhere,” Toto said. Suddenly he looked as if he might cry. “Where’s Spidey?”

  “How long have you been here?” Sam asked impatiently.

  It was Jack who answered. “A little more than a year. The start date for subject 1-01 was several months before the FAYZ.”

  Sam thought it over for a few seconds. Wondering what to do. He couldn’t just dump the kid and walk away. Could he? Especially after he’d impatiently burned Spidey.

  On the other hand, the very last thing he needed was another person to keep track of. And it didn’t look like this kid was going anywhere. Sam could always pick him up later. And in any case, if they found the lake then the whole town would probably be moving, and they’d pass this way again.

  “Listen, Toto, I’m going to pretend you’re not completely crazy. I’m going to leave it up to you. So you either come with us and start acting at least a little bit normal, or you stay here. Your choice.”

  Toto kept glancing back at the brown and black magma that had been the Styrofoam head. But in between he looked at Sam and Dekka and even Jack.

  “What do you have to eat?” Toto asked.

  “Dried fish. Cabbage. Artichokes.”

  To Sam’s amazement Toto literally licked his lips. “You have some other things, too, but you don’t want to share. That’s okay. I’ve only had Nutella. Ever since.”

  “You must have a whole lot of Nutella,” Dekka said, unable to conceal her greedy hope.

  “Yes.”

  “Show us,” Sam said. “Show us what you’ve got. Then we’ll go find this lake.”

  Sam led the way outside. Jack and Dekka fell in beside him. “They knew, didn’t they?” he asked Jack.

  Jack still had a fistful of papers scooped up from one of the desks.

  “Yes,” Jack said, still fascinated, reading through printed sheets of data as he walked. “I don’t think they knew what, or knew what was causing it. But they knew.”

  “What did they know?” Dekka asked.

  “Whoever was running this place,” Sam said angrily. “They knew something was going on with kids in Perdido Beach.”

  Jack caught up to him, grabbed his shoulder, and handed him a piece of paper. “A list of names.”

  Sam’s eyes went directly to his own name, third on a list of five names. “Toto, Darla, me, Caine, and Taylor.” He shoved the paper angrily back at Jack. “Not all of the freaks, but some of us, anyway.”

  He didn’t know what to say or think. It made him angry, but he didn’t even know why it should. Of course they would want to learn about kids who suddenly developed supernatural powers.

  And of course they would want to keep it secret.

  But still it made him angry and uneasy. “This means they know. People on the outside, they’ve been able to guess some of what happened.”

  “The real data are on those computers,” Jack said. “This printout is just a small file. If the power was back on . . .”

  Sam glared at the barrier near at hand. And wondered, not for the first time, what kind of welcome they would get if that barrier ever came down.

  Chapter Eighteen

  32 HOURS, 36 MINUTES

  TOTO LED THEM from the facility to the train.

  It was farther than Sam had thought. It had been a trick of perspective in the desert emptiness that had made the train seem to be right beside the building. In fact, they were a ten-minute walk away.

  There were two yellow and black Union Pacific diesel engines. Both still stood upright on the track.

  Behind the engines was a rust-colored boxcar, also still on the track.

  Behind these came a jumbled mess. There were seven derailed flatbed railcars. Each had spilled two containers— massive steel rectangles—onto the dirt and stunted bushes.

  At the far end, the barrier had sliced a boxcar in half. The barrier had snapped into place, bisecting the burnt-orange boxcar, and the sudden shift must have derailed the other cars.

  But Sam, Dekka, and Jack were not very interested in such speculation. Dozens of plastic-wrapped pallets had been flung across the tracks and the ground, spilled from the sliced-open boxcar.

  Each of the pallets was piled high with flats of Nutella.

  “That’s, like, hundreds and hundreds of jars,” Sam said.

  “Thousands,” Jack said. “Thousands. We’re . . . we’re rich.”

  If each jar had been a giant diamond, Sam would still have preferred the Nutella.

  “This is the greatest discovery in the history of the FAYZ,” Dekka said, sounding like she was witnessing a miracle.

  “What is a phase? What do they mean by phase?” Toto asked.

  “FAYZ. Fallout Alley Youth Zone,” Sam said distractedly. “It’s supposed to be funny. Dude: what’s in the rest of these containers?”

  Toto looked uncomfortable. He squirmed so much he looked like he was dancing. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Are you lying?” Dekka demanded sharply.

  “No lies,” Toto said, eyes flashing. “I’m Toto the truth teller, subject 1-01. Not Toto the liar.”

  “Then what are you saying? You never looked in any of these containers? There’s fourteen containers. Plus that first boxcar. What do you mean you don’t know?” Dekka found it outrageous.

  Toto did his squirmy dance again. “I couldn’t get them open. They’re locked. And they’re steel. I hit them with chairs, but they wouldn’t open.”

  Sam, Dekka, and Jack all stared at the strange boy.

  Then they stared at the containers.

  Then they stared at one another.

  “Well,” Sam said, “I do believe we can get them open.”

  Approximately eight seconds later Sam had burned the lock from the nearest container. Jack then pushed the door open.

  The contents of the container were wrapped in plastic but still unmistakable.

  “Toilets?” Dekka said.

  Many of the porcelain fixtures were cracked from derailing, the shards held in place by the shrink-wrap.

  A second container revealed more toilets.

  The third container held what had to be thousands of medium-sized cartons. The cartons contained baseball caps. Dodgers caps.

  “One size fits all,” Dekka said, disgustedly. “But I’m an Angels fan.”

  “This is going to take us a while to go through everything,” Sam said. “But I think it’s probably worth it.”

  The fourth held wicker lawn furniture.

  “Or not,” Sam said, disgusted.

  The fifth container was wicker flowerpots and cracked terra-cotta pots as well as two pallets of plaster yard pretties: cherubs, gnomes, and the Virgin Mary.

  The sixth was house paint and deck stain.

  The seventh was better, a mixed load, pallets of shrimp-flavored Cup-a-Noodles, chicken-flavored ramen, coffee filters and coffee makers, and boxes of mixed teas.

  “I wish I’d had some of those noodles,” Toto said wistfully. “It would have been nice to have noodles.”

  “Noodles are fine,” Sam agreed.

  “I wouldn’t say no to some noodle
s,” Jack said.

  “True, true statement! He would not say no to noodles,” Toto babbled.

  The eighth container was empty. Nothing.

  The ninth was two big pieces of industrial machinery. “Whatchamacallits,” Jack said. He searched for the words. “You know. Like industrial lathes or whatever.”

  “Yeah, great,” Dekka said. “All we need is two hundred and twenty volts and we can set up a machine shop.”

  Sam was starting to feel anxious. Nutella and noodles were fine. Great, in fact. Miraculous. But he’d been hoping for more food, more water, more medicine, something. It was absurdly like Christmas morning when he was little: hoping for something he couldn’t even put a name to. A game-changer. Something . . . amazing.

  When Jack opened the tenth container he just stood, staring.

  Sam said, “Okay, what is it?”

  No answer.

  Sam leaned over Jack’s shoulders to look. Pallet after pallet of heavy cartons. Each carton was emblazoned with the Apple logo.

  “Computers?” Sam wondered. “Or iPods?” Neither would be of any use.

  At last Jack moved. He rushed to the nearest pallet, then hesitated. He carefully wiped his hands on his pants. Then he tore away the shrink-wrap and gently, cautiously, opened the first carton.

  It was with trembling fingers that he lifted out a white box. On the box was a photo of a laptop.

  “That would be great if we had internet,” Sam said. “Or electricity.”

  “They ship them fully charged,” Jack snapped, angry at Sam’s interruption. Like Sam had started talking in church. “It’s been so long but . . . but they may still have some charge.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. “So you can play some games. Let’s move on to the next—”

  “No!” Jack cried, his voice somewhere between anguish and rapture. “No. I have to . . . I have to see.”

  He spent five full minutes carefully opening the box, lifting out Styrofoam packing pieces like they were fragile works of art.

  It was like watching some unfamiliar but profound religious ritual. Sam found it almost moving. He’d never seen Jack so emotional.

  He picked patiently at the small piece of tape that held the laptop’s thin foam sheath in place.

  And finally he held up the silver laptop as if holding a baby in his trembling hands.