No Safety in Numbers

  The portable scanner dragged down the pockets of Lexi’s hoodie, knocking against her thighs as she walked back toward the Apple Store.

  “Hey, baby,” some kid across the hall howled. “Nice humps.” Then he started singing that song. Badly. “In the back and in the front, you got them workin’.”

  “Fuck off,” she mumbled, and walked faster.

  Back in the Apple Store, she tried to work on her movie. She had to do something other than rub alcohol on her hands. But every few minutes, a question would pop into her brain, like Did he say dead? Have people DIED???

  The Senator pushed open the stockroom doors just before seven. She’d been going back and forth to the PaperClips using some maze of back hallways.

  “I need to talk with you,” Lexi growled from the shadows.

  Her mother started, eyes widening in shock, then sighed. “Really, Lex,” she said, rubbing her forehead, “I’m about ready to keel over as it is.”

  “I saw the PaperClips.” Lexi slid the scanner across the desktop. “And I heard what they’re testing people for.”

  Two cops shuffled into the stockroom behind the Senator and she waved them into the store. The stockroom doors closed, leaving Lexi and the Senator alone in the dim light shining from between the shelves.

  The Senator considered Lexi for a moment, then sank into the chair at the desk. “You sure you want to know?”

  Gooseflesh pricked out along Lexi’s skin. She hadn’t expected the Senator to give in so easily.

  “Yes,” she said, feigning certainty. “Are you really going to tell me?”

  The Senator smirked. “I know you think I still see you as my little baby, but I know you’re a big girl now.”

  Her use of the phrase “big girl” nearly put Lexi through the roof.

  Dotty wrapped her fingers around Lexi’s hand. “You’re sticky,” she said.

  “Hand sanitizer,” Lexi said.

  Dotty squeezed her fingers. “Good thinking.” She explained that a small device of unknown origin was discovered in the parking garage by some kid. The thing was attached to the ventilation system for a part of the mall. It pumped something into the air.

  “A biotoxin?” Lexi asked, her voice cracking on the word.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out in the medical ward,” Dotty said, as if a biotoxin were merely an air freshener. “We’re testing people to see if anything’s wrong with them. The device itself kind of imploded when the Feds pried it off the air duct—we couldn’t get a reading of what had been inside it.”

  “Have people died?”

  Dotty exhaled slowly. “As far as I know, one old woman, but that could be unrelated.”

  “So what are they going to do once they figure out what’s in the air?” Lexi’s leg began to jiggle.

  “Then the medical teams will start working to fix it. Federal agents are handling most of the operations now, so my information is limited to what they decide I need to know. I’m hoping the tests say it’s plague.” She crossed her fingers and looked to the heavens. “Come on, plague!”

  Lexi laughed. It wasn’t funny, but she desperately needed to laugh. “When plague’s your best-case scenario, you know you’re in trouble.”

  “At least plague is curable.”

  Dotty dropped her hand back onto Lexi’s. They sat there, hand in hand, for a moment. Then Lexi slid down off the desk. “Thanks for telling me,” she said.

  “I trust you,” her mother said.

  “Does Dad know?”

  “He does.” Dotty stood and pulled her jacket straight. “But we need to keep this between the three of us, okay?”

  “You’re not going to tell people?”

  “Not until we know what we’re dealing with,” she said, sounding more like the Senator. “We don’t want people to panic.”

  “Who’s the we?” Lexi asked, stepping back.

  Dotty gave her a playful punch on the arm. “The good guys,” she said. “Your friendly local government and FEMA overlords.”

  “Why does that not make me feel better?”

  “We try our very best to not make everything worse,” Dotty said. “Old government motto.” She smiled at Lexi. “So are we in agreement? We keep this a Ross family secret?”

  “Like all those gold-plated toilet seats we keep in the basement?”

  “Exactly,” Dotty said, putting an arm around Lexi.

  Lexi didn’t even try to shrug it off.

  They decided to go to Chopsticky Buns for dinner. It turned out to be the best meal the family had shared in a long while. Mom and Dad joked about lapses in personal hygiene. Lexi didn’t feel the need to make any snarky comments. She was steeped in a soup of warm fuzzies for her parents. And all it took was one life-threatening bomb.

  There were only two smudges on the otherwise perfect evening: One, Dotty was tailed by two security guards (a little over the top, no?); and two, Chopsticky Buns had run out of egg rolls. Dotty seemed unduly disappointed about the latter.

  “We’ll get you one after dinner from the food court,” Lexi said, seeing her mother’s face droop at the news.

  Dotty flashed a small smile. “Yeah,” she said. She picked up her phone and began tapping out a text.

  After dinner, they began their trek back down to the Apple Store. Just as they stepped off the escalator onto the first floor, a woman came up to Dotty.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “You’re the Senator, right?”

  The woman didn’t look good. She had bags under her eyes and her clothes smelled like a locker room. A man stood a few feet behind her with two small kids. One of the kids had a runny nose that was dripping off her upper lip.

  Dotty shifted her body so that Lexi was behind her. “Yes,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  “I heard you were in charge of this nightmare,” the woman said, not even trying to control the tone of her voice. “And I need you to let us out of here.” She pointed at the man and two kids. “My kids can’t sleep on those cots in the hallway, and we’re all at our wits’ end.”

  Dotty straightened herself and put on her “official” voice, the one she used for the mall announcements. “I’m sorry, ma’am. We’re working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation—”

  “Don’t give me that double-talk nonsense!” the woman shouted. Lexi noticed other shoppers had begun to stare.

  One of the guards approached the woman. “Please step back, ma’am.”

  The woman looked at him like she was just itching to slug him in the jaw. “Don’t you touch me,” she said. “I want to know why this woman is holding us in here, that’s all.”

  This did not seem like the ideal moment to tell the woman that the best-case scenario was an outbreak of the plague.

  The guard puffed out his chest. “I’m going to ask you again, ma’am. Please step back.”

  The woman’s husband came to her side. “We know our rights,” the man said. “We just want to get out of here.”

  Another man approached. “Yeah, let us out of here.” He turned to the other people who’d gathered in their stretch of hallway, pumped his fist in the air, and began to chant. “Let us out! Let us out!” Others joined in. Lexi saw the guard pull a walkie-talkie from his belt and mumble something into it.

  Arthur came up behind Lexi and grabbed her shoulders. “Come with me now,” he whispered in her ear. He tugged her away from Dotty.

  “What about Mom?” Lexi said, stumbling away from her.

  “She’d want to be sure you were safe,” Arthur said. They began to run back to the Apple Store. As they ran, the chanting got louder.

  It was like watching a storm roll in. From the front window of the Apple Store, Lexi could see where they’d left her mother standing in the hallway. Lexi pressed herself against the floor-to-ceiling glass and watched, horrified, as more and more people crowded together. Their shouts echoed around the open spaces of the mall like thunder.

  Lexi pulled out her phone. She needed to
talk to Darren. She opened a text, then saw that there was no signal. Not that she couldn’t get through—there was no cell signal at all. Our friendly FEMA overlords must be using a damper. This explained the near-constant congestion of the cell signal; now they’d simply jammed the entire frequency. The government did not want the riot tweeted.

  A troop of twenty mall security guys bearing full-body plastic shields marched into the hallway. They banged on the back of the shields with police batons. One held a megaphone and repeated over and over, “Remain calm! Step back against the walls!” No one seemed to be listening. The crowd’s chanting grew louder. The people turned from her mother to face the oncoming invasion.

  Something hit the glass above Lexi with a bang. She fell back on her hands, breathless, and glanced up. A spiderweb of fractures surrounded a white puncture. On the ground were the remains of a cell phone. If she were four inches taller, it would have nailed her between the eyes.

  Ginger and Maddie staggered into the Apple Store, screaming.

  “What is going on?” Maddie yelled to no one in particular.

  Ginger slumped against a counter. “I just wanted my comforter,” she mumbled. “I didn’t want to sleep on the floor again.”

  No hello. No glad to see you. They’d been shopping. Both wore new clothes: Ginger, a fluffy pink sweater, and Maddie, a see-through tee with a black bra.

  Lexi stood and wiped the dust from her jeans. “Then take it and leave before things get any worse.”

  Maddie gawked at her. “You want us to leave?”

  A bottle flew through the open entry and smashed against the table. Ginger screamed as shards of green glass exploded into her side.

  Lexi rushed to her. “We have to get away from this door,” she said, thrusting a shoulder under Ginger’s arm.

  Maddie nodded and pushed Ginger off the table, who stumbled, sobbing, after Lexi.

  One of the Senator’s police detail burst into the Apple Store with one arm around Dotty’s shoulder. He pointed to the Apple salespeople. “You have a security gate?” he asked.

  A woman nodded and held up a key.

  “Close it!” he shouted. He dropped Dotty next to a table and ran out.

  Lexi lowered Ginger onto her comforter.

  “Oh shit,” Maddie muttered. “Oh shit, oh shit.”

  Lexi pulled a large shard from Ginger’s arm. There was no blood.

  “I think the sweater took most of the damage,” Lexi said, smiling.

  Maddie shoved Ginger, then started crying. “Don’t fucking do that to me!”

  Ginger laughed through her tears. “I guess I tend to overreact when assaulted by glassware.”

  They pulled the largest pieces from Ginger’s sweater, then she carefully pulled the thing off. She had a few superficial scrapes, but nothing serious.

  “This tank is so unflattering,” Ginger said, pulling at the fabric of her undershirt.

  “Lucky for you,” Lexi said, “the last thing anyone is looking at right now is your shirt.”

  The Senator was busy organizing the fear-stricken Apple staff. They’d closed the security gates and now rushed about boxing up any exposed computer equipment.

  “Let’s get away from the madness,” Lexi said, and led Maddie and Ginger into the stockroom. As they slammed the door shut behind them, they heard the telltale crash of a shattering storefront window.

  “What is wrong with people?” Maddie said, slumping into the seat at the desk where only a few hours ago Lexi had interrogated her mother.

  She could tell them, explain everything. They’d be grateful. Maybe grateful enough to be her friend.

  She didn’t need friends that badly.

  “They’ve been locked in a mall for three days,” Lexi said.

  “I guess the Muzak’s enough to drive even the sanest person nuts,” Maddie said.

  “Maybe they really wanted to go to work,” Ginger said.

  Maddie looked at her like she’d grown a harelip. “Yeah, they’re rioting so they can get back to the office.”

  “I missed ballet class,” Ginger said. “No way I’m getting Coppelia in the winter recital now.”

  Maddie kicked her feet onto the desk. “Well, I got out of field hockey practice. Thank you, security situation.”

  Lexi wondered what she’d missed. She was a member of no club, no sport. She’d checked in on her online worlds—nothing missed there.

  “I had a bio lab,” Lexi added. It was all she could think of.

  Neither reacted. They probably sensed she had no outside life to lose.

  “I’m bored,” Maddie said. “Maybe we should go back out to the riot.”

  Ginger shoved Maddie’s feet off the desk and sat down. “I’m not risking my life to give you a thrill.”

  “What about that time I convinced you to go skydiving?”

  Ginger rolled her eyes. “We had parachutes.”

  All these things to do in the real world. Lexi had watched some YouTube videos about skydiving to get ideas for CG camera moves.

  “We could listen to it,” Lexi offered, pulling the scanner from her pocket. She flicked the machine on. After a squeal and a crackle, they heard hysterical shouting, screams, muffled blows.

  “Launch the tear gas!” a voice shouted.

  “Not in a confined space!” The Senator.

  A muffled boom like a gunshot. More screams.

  Lexi slid the scanner onto the desktop and they huddled around it, silent, mesmerized. After some time, they noticed that they were holding on to one another. And when the screams finally died down, when the chatter over the scanner became mere orders to herd the former rioters into their stores, the three stayed there, woven together, until Lights Out buried them in darkness and they curled on the cement floor to sleep.

  DAY

  FOUR

  TUESDAY

  S

  H

  A

  Y

  There were limits to how long a person could remain positive in the face of adversity, and Shay had reached hers. She had spent the night in SnoozeSelect taking care of Nani, who shivered with cold one minute and threw her blankets off the next. Around midnight, she developed a cough. Of course, when Shay asked Nani what was wrong, she said It’s nothing, I’m feeling better, just a cold. How was Shay supposed to help when Nani lied about her symptoms?

  Although the mall god had announced at Lights On that free food would be provided at the former testing stations, there was a long line at the Burger Baron. Shay had eaten her free ration, but was hoping the servers would give her some soup, as Nani refused to eat solid food.

  Shay had scoured the entire diabetes section of the Merck Manual, for which she’d paid a significant chunk of change yesterday afternoon, and had found nothing to explain what a cough and chills had to do with diabetes. She’d ordered Preeti to buy Tylenol, since that was what Ba gave them when they were sick, but Nani couldn’t swallow the pills. She spat them out, complaining that the pills stuck in her throat. So Shay had Preeti get children’s liquid Tylenol. Nani spilled half the bottle when a fit of coughing took her mid-sip.

  Apart from the two shopping trips, Preeti had been useless. She whined about going to Hollister, how Shay had promised they could sleep in Hollister. Shay had finally blown up at her and screamed You want to go to Hollister, then go! And Preeti had left.

  “We’re out of toaster sticks,” the girl at the register droned when Shay reached the front of the line.

  “Do you have any soup?”

  The girl spoke into her headset mic. Shay heard the voice on the other end reply in the negative. “Not until noon,” she said.

  “Then just a coffee,” Shay said, dropping a bill on the counter.

  Shay slunk away from the registers with her steaming cup and plopped into a seat. She considered going to the clothing depot—along with the free food, it had been announced that people on the outside had donated clothing—but from the shouts echoing up from the first-floor fountain, it sound
ed like it was already too much of a madhouse. She was definitely not volunteering for the requested “Cleanup Crew.” No gift certificate was worth entering the bathrooms for longer than absolutely necessary.

  Brilliant sunlight streamed through the glass ceiling. Shay closed her eyes, let the bright light burn through her eyelids. It must have been a beautiful day outside. She tried to remember what day it even was.

  “Hey there.”

  Shay cracked open her eyes and shielded them with her hand. Ryan stood in front of her, the sunlight behind him forming a blazing halo. God, he was pretty.

  “I’m so glad I found you,” he said. He had a bruise on his face. Somehow, it made him even better looking.

  “You were looking for me?” she asked, trying to seem nonchalant.

  He smiled that irresistible half smile. “Well, yeah,” he said. “We have a date to make up.”

  His use of the word date energized her better than any cup of coffee. Preeti was in Hollister, Nani was fast asleep…

  “You want to go to the bookstore?” she asked, standing. Was she trembling from lack of sleep or the nearness of him? She rolled and unrolled the hem of her kameez between her fingers.

  “Can we go somewhere else first?” he asked. “I want to show you something. It’s kind of my secret.”

  “We’re already sharing secrets?” she asked.

  “I read your poems.”

  “Tagore’s poems,” she corrected. “What secrets of mine could you learn reading them?”

  “You made notes in the margins,” he said. “Your favorite poem”—he sat and began folding a napkin—“is about a flower”—he took her coffee stirrer—“only the spirit can touch.” He lifted his creation: a paper flower on a stirrer stem. He held it out to her. “My mom taught me to make these.”

  He took her hand, gently, his fingers slowly winding into hers, and pressed the flower to her palm. Warmth radiated from Shay’s hand to her body, out, then down.

  “Onward?” she asked.

  “Onward,” he answered.

  Ryan handed Shay a mess of nylon webbing. “You have to, um,” he stammered, “put this around your, well, legs?” He was blushing. “Here, let me show you.”