No Safety in Numbers

  He filled the guy’s mug and the other empty cup on the table. “Don’t tell,” he said.

  The guy smiled weakly. “You’re a good kid,” he said.

  Marco nodded and walked quickly away, reminding himself that he hated these people.

  Toward the end of the breakfast rush, two security guards walked in through the back entrance and approached the server station. Josh was crouched against the wall holding a bag of ice to his shoulder—he’d pulled something lifting a bin full of dirty dishes. If things kept up this way, Marco and Josh would have to be taped together to function.

  Marco hopped off the stool and grabbed two menus from the side of the server stand. “I’ll take these guys.”

  Josh didn’t even look up.

  The guards wanted to sit in the back, away from the hallway. It didn’t matter to Marco, so he sat them in a booth in the back corner. As he led them to their seats, they continued their conversation as if he weren’t there.

  “You see that memo from the Suits?” the one said.

  “Don’t mention it,” the other replied. “You’ll ruin my appetite.”

  “You think it’s serious?”

  “What kind of sick monkey would put that in a memo as a joke?”

  Marco slid the menus onto the tabletop. “We’re out of almost everything,” he said. He opened his pad and examined the list of what remained. “I think I can do eggs, maybe toast.”

  The worried guy glanced at Marco. “Two coffees,” he said.

  “And whatever else they got left back there,” the other said. “Two of that.”

  Marco nodded and gave their order directly to the cook—the computer system was useless now that none of the regular menu items were available. He went to grab the coffee and saw that the pot was empty. Marco needed to brew a new pot, and to do so, he needed more grounds. He checked the bar, but the Enforcer wasn’t there. A guy sat alone at the counter, a half-empty beer in his hand, and watched the sitcom being rerun on the TVs. The news channels were all blocked—not that they’d shown more than vapid speculation over the last few days. Marco wondered what had happened to cause the government to cut them off. Nothing good.

  The door to Mr. Seveglia’s office was slightly ajar. Marco knocked, pushing the door open. Mr. Seveglia was slumped over his desk. Marco touched his shoulder. The body slid farther across the desktop, knocking over a glass of water.

  Marco ran out to the dishwashing sink and washed his hands. He didn’t know why he was so shocked; Seveglia had been hacking like crazy. But shit. He had to think. He had to tell someone. But what if everyone just panicked and left him alone with this dead guy and the surly customers? No, he needed a plan before he broke this bombshell. First, he had to make coffee. Coffee. Yes. Make the coffee. He needed time to plan.

  Marco went back to the office, opened the door, used his apron to grab the keys from the desk, and shut the door quietly behind him. Then he grabbed coffee from the locked bar cabinet and returned to the machine. Everything would be fine. He would think of something. He wiped his face on his sleeve. When the pot was full, he returned to the guards.

  They didn’t see him as he approached; otherwise Marco was sure they would have shut their mouths.

  “But how can a flu be deadly?” the worried guy said. “Isn’t the flu just, well, the flu?”

  Marco ducked into the nearest booth and sunk below the dividing wall so he could eavesdrop.

  “You heard of the Spanish flu? Killed millions of people,” the other guy said.

  “But that was a hundred years ago,” Worrier said.

  “That’s the thing about flus,” the other guy said. “There’s no cure for a flu virus, only natural immunity. The Suits explained that when a flu mutates, no one has immunity and it’s a potential pandemic. Nothing they can do about it.”

  “But to quarantine this place indefinitely?” Worrier said.

  “Better than letting it spread,” the other guy said. “Plus, we get overtime on top of the bonus.”

  “Quarantined,” Worried repeated, as if letting his own words sink in. “These people are going to eat each other alive.”

  Marco stood and went to the cops’ table. He tried to control the tremors running throughout his body as he poured their coffee. “Your orders should be out soon,” he said.

  The worrier cop waved his hand at Marco, as if to say who cared when the food came.

  This was exactly Marco’s thought on the issue. What else mattered besides getting out of here before being killed by either choice a, the flu, or choice b, the other inmates?

  Nothing else mattered.

  Marco left the coffeepot on the server stand and untied his apron. He tossed it at Josh.

  “The place is yours,” he said.

  Josh looked at the apron, then at Marco. “Dude,” he said. “Not you too.”

  “Good luck,” Marco said. And he meant it.

  The guards had given him an idea—if they came in through the back, they had universal card keys, meaning they could open any service door in the mall. Marco needed one of those keys. Once he had it, he could search every corner of this place for an exit. There had to be a way out. And Marco would be the one to find it.

  R

  Y

  A

  N

  Ryan had never read so much in his life: two books in as many days. All it took was being jailed in a mall. The Chocolate War made him uncomfortable, as if Shay were accusing him of being no better than the assholes in this book—even though she knew nothing about his smashing the Tarrytown guy’s face. Would she be scared of him if she knew? That cold pleasure he’d felt made him sick. He didn’t want to be scary.

  “I need a bathroom,” Mike said, kicking the fence.

  “Quiet down,” the cop on duty shouted. “Just use the corner farthest from where you sleep.”

  The cops were useless. They changed every few hours and none offered a shred of information. How long would they be held in these cages? Was there going to be some trial? The guards shrugged off every question. They just sat in the folding chair near Mr. Reynolds’s cell and read their magazines.

  “You boys have any cell signal?” the Audi guy asked.

  “They shut down the towers days ago,” Mike said.

  “Why would they shut down the cell towers?” Drew asked.

  “To keep us from talking to people on the outside,” Mr. Reynolds said, his voice low and grumbling. “That’s just like these government people. They don’t want our families to know we’re being caged like a bunch of rats.” He yelled the last few words in the cop’s direction.

  The cop just turned the page and slurped his coffee.

  Ryan couldn’t get warm. His head hurt. He crawled to where Drew and Mike sat in the back corner. The two were huddled together, mumbling.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  Mike looked at him. “Nothing,” he said. “Yet.” He turned his head back to Drew.

  The Audi guy coughed loudly. He’d been coughing and snotting up a storm all morning. He must have had some cold. Ryan hoped he hadn’t caught it. “Hey,” Audi shouted in a gravelly voice, his head turned toward the cop. “I need some water.”

  “Meal’s in an hour,” the cop grunted back.

  Audi coughed again. This time, the coughing went on for a while. He seemed like he couldn’t get a breath. He coughed and then gasped and then coughed some more.

  Ryan had never seen anyone cough like that. “He needs some water!” he shouted.

  The cop looked up. The Audi guy fell to his knees. He was still coughing. His fingernails were bluish. Was it from gripping the pavement?

  Ryan wanted to run. He was ready to claw through the walls to get away from that coughing. What was wrong with this guy? Then he felt a tickle in his own throat. He swallowed.

  The cop picked up his walkie-talkie and mumbled something into it, then lugged his fat ass out of the chair and began fumbling for the keys to the Audi guy’s cell. Mike grabbed Rya
n’s arm and pulled him against the wall farthest from the Audi guy.

  Audi was on the floor now. The coughing had stopped. He was kind of whining. He sounded like a sad dog. Ryan was frozen where he stood on the cement.

  The cop got the cage open and ran to the Audi guy. “Hey,” the cop said, shaking him.

  This disturbance brought on another fit of coughing. The cop had to lean away from Audi, he was thrashing so badly with each hacking cough. His hands were blue now. When he opened his eyes to gasp for breath, they were red—not bloodshot, all red. Then he coughed up some bloody, foamy spit.

  The cop jumped back. “What in the name—”

  A guy in a hazmat suit pulled the cop out of the way. Ryan saw that a whole team of medical guys had appeared in front of the row of cells.

  The hazmat guy injected Audi with something, and he fell limp. Another grabbed Audi’s legs, and the two of them lifted him onto a gurney.

  “We’ll send another team down,” the hazmat guy said to the cop. “We’ve got to isolate these individuals.”

  The cop seemed as freaked out as Ryan felt. He nodded and shut the cage door.

  The hazmat guy gave the four of them the once-over. “You all appear asymptomatic, so you should be all right for the time being. We’ll be back to move you to the medical ward for observation.”

  No matter how shitty he felt, Ryan was not going anywhere with that hazmat guy.

  “Shrimp,” Mike barked, as if answering Ryan’s plea.

  Ryan dragged himself to the back corner.

  Mike pushed on the fencing; the mesh bent back, creating an opening a little over a foot wide. They’d undone the wires that held the cage together. “Just big enough for a Jumbo Shrimp to fit through,” Mike said. He raised his eyebrows and cocked his head toward the hole.

  “What about you guys?” Ryan asked.

  Drew smacked him on the back of the head. “You get out and filch the keys, then let us all out.”

  “How am I supposed to get the keys?” Ryan asked.

  Mike pulled Ryan’s collar, dragging his head down to hiss in his ear. “I want a clean hit, right in the gut,” he said. “Just like we do a hundred times every practice. You’ll knock the old bag right out.”

  Mike let go of him and Ryan stumbled back onto his ass. Tackle a cop? Ryan glanced over his shoulder at the floor of Audi’s cage. A little puddle of bloody drool congealed on the cement where Audi had collapsed.

  Ryan did not want to be moved to the medical ward.

  “Okay,” he said.

  They waited until they were sure the cop was not looking, then Mike and Drew pushed on the fencing. The hole opened up and Ryan shoved himself through the gap. The metal edges of the links scraped at his shoulders, but he managed to drag himself out onto the pavement.

  He was free. He could just run. Not even an option.

  Mike jerked his head at the row of parked cars. Ryan dashed to hide behind a minivan’s bumper.

  Drew strode to the front of his cage and began to rattle the door.

  “Yo!” he shouted. “I want out of here before that asshole comes back.”

  “Shut up,” Mike said, walking up to Drew.

  “You shut up,” Drew said, shoving Mike.

  Mike shoved him back and then one of them was thrown against the cage wall, shaking the whole jail. That got the cop up.

  “You boys quit it,” he said, groaning as he got up out of the chair. He began to walk along the front of the cages toward Mike and Drew.

  This was the moment. Ryan sprang from behind the minivan and charged at full-speed. He dropped his shoulder and hit the cop square in the gut. The guy popped air from his lungs and fell flat on the pavement. His head hit the cement and he was out.

  Ryan stood. It’d been a clean tackle.

  “Hey!” Another cop appeared out of the shadows.

  “The keys!” Drew shouted.

  Ryan pulled the keys from the cop’s pocket and passed them to Mike. Then he hefted the downed cop’s radio and threw a pass directly into the advancing cop’s skull. The guy dropped like a tackle bag.

  What have I done?

  “Fuck yeah, J. Shrimp!” Drew howled.

  Mike burst out of the cage. He knelt beside the cop and patted him down. The cop groaned.

  “He’ll be fine,” Mike said, tucking something into his jeans.

  The ding of an elevator opening its doors echoed throughout the garage. The medical team…

  “Kid!” shouted Mr. Reynolds. He held his hands up.

  Mike chucked the keys over the fence wall and Mr. Reynolds caught them. Then Mike took off toward the central pavilion.

  Drew and Ryan bolted down the pavement after him.

  S

  H

  A

  Y

  Can I have another ice chip?” Preeti asked, her voice muffled by her stuffed and running nose.

  Shay spooned a sliver from the cup in her hands, lifted Preeti’s face mask, and dropped the ice onto her sister’s tongue. Preeti groaned and rolled over. In the other bed lay Nani. She coughed violently, then fell back into a sleep like death. The skin around her lips was cracked and peeling. Her ears and fingertips were turning blue just like the woman who’d died. Shay had pulled the sheet up to hide them from Preeti.

  After leaving Ryan, she’d raced back to the Snooze-Select, heart bursting at the thought of getting out of the mall with him. When she got there, Nani’s bed was empty. On the comforter was a note in Preeti’s loopy, little-girl scrawl that read: “Called spacemen. Sick.” Shay had bolted down the halls, pushed past dawdlers on the escalator, and burst screaming into the EMC. The senator had taken her back to where her family lay on neighboring deathbeds.

  As much as the hazmat-suited doctors pretended to give a crap about Preeti and Nani, Shay could tell they couldn’t care less about her family’s survival. Every hour or so, someone would poke their tented head through the curtains, but only to ensure that the machines were all beeping properly. Not so at her mother’s hospital. If they could just get the hell out of here, Shay knew that Ba could save them.

  But how to escape? Ryan was long gone. Nani’s car was in the outdoor lot. All Shay had was a piece of information, something the senator would not like let out of the bag.

  Shay put the cup of ice on the metal tray between the two beds and exited the curtain-room. She grabbed a hazmat suit by the sleeve.

  “I need the senator,” she said.

  The suit turned. The man picked her fingers from the plastic. “Please don’t pull the fabric,” he said. “The senator is helping other patients. She’ll see you when she’s available.”

  She’ll see me now or she’ll regret it.

  Shay began a room by room search for the woman. As she neared the front, she saw her step out of a curtain-room.

  “Senator,” Shay stated. “I have to speak with you.”

  The woman looked worn out. Her suit was wrinkled. A piece of hair stuck out at an awkward angle. Her dark skin had an ashy tone. But her eyes were fierce as a tiger’s. “Miss Dixit, there’s a bit of a line.”

  “I know you’re the reason we’re all stuck in here.” Shay felt rather ferocious herself.

  The senator stood straighter. “I’m not sure what you think you know, Shaila, but I’m happy to hear what you have to say.”

  “I have a proposition.” Shay swallowed. “You get my grandmother and sister out of here and to my mother’s hospital and I won’t tell people that it was your screwup that got us all quarantined in the first place.”

  The senator’s face softened. Shay wanted to punch that face with its look of pity.

  “Miss Dixit,” the senator said, placing her hand on Shay’s shoulder. “Even if I could get your grandmother and sister out, I would not do it. Yes, you’re right, it was my call originally to lock down the mall, and that was technically against protocol. But protocol is being altered as we speak, given the gravity of our current situation, and I doubt you could find many
outside the mall to support your claims of wrongful imprisonment.

  “I understand that you are upset and worried, but that is really no excuse for extortion and I would appreciate you thinking more carefully before attempting to blackmail a public official. It is, after all, a crime.”

  The senator squeezed her shoulder and walked away.

  Shay felt like a husk, like her soul had flown free quite some time ago. She had to get out. Get away. There had to be a way out.

  She needed an ally, a friend, a coconspirator. Ryan had mentioned that Marco had tried to help him escape. Maybe he could help her. Maybe together, they could come up with some previously inconceivable route out.

  Shay checked back in on Preeti and Nani. No change—Preeti slept, Nani coughed. I will get you out of here.

  She grabbed her bag and legged it for the Grill’n’Shake. By some lucky twist of fate, Marco was leaving the restaurant just as she approached.

  “Hey!” she yelled, putting on her friendliest face and giving him a big wave.

  Marco froze for a second, glared at her. “What do you want?”

  Shay wasn’t sure why he was so cold. It didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, she had to turn things around. “Just the person I was looking for!” she said, smiling wide.

  His shoulders relaxed slightly. “Really?”

  She threw her arms around him. “Really,” she said. It felt good to hold a body.

  Marco stiffened in her embrace and she let him go.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m all messed up. Nani’s sick. So is Preeti.”

  “Sick how?”

  Shay felt tears bloat her eyelids. “The doctors won’t say anything. They’re both just sick with like the worst cold ever.”

  “It’s not a cold,” Marco said. He waved her over to a bench in the corner, away from the crowds. “It’s the flu. A killer flu, like in the movies.”

  It was as if she’d known all along. “The bomb?”

  He nodded. “We have to get out of here,” he said.

  “That is exactly why I came up here,” she said, relieved he’d brought it up, relieved that maybe he’d already worked out the method of their escape. “So how do we do it?” she asked.