Monument 14: Savage Drift (Monument 14 Series) (14 page)

He drove in silence for a while, then he said, “It’s jacked up. It’s jacked up big-time, Sam.”

We’d given him fake names. Niko’s idea. I was Sam. Astrid was Anne. Niko had given the strangely unfitting name of Phillip and Jake was Buddy, which fit perfectly.

Did Niko secretly want to be a
Phillip
? Did he want to trade his serious, all-business demeanor to be someone who wore plaid pants and ate pâté and, I don’t know, lettered in badminton?

I think in the time that I’d known Niko he had made maybe four jokes. None of them funny. A Phillip he was not.

“I lost my ma,” Rocco told me. “Flushing. She was about eighty though, so, I don’t know…”

This awkward admission made me feel for the guy.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. Maybe I’d have to revise my opinion of him.

He relaxed back in his seat and checked the side mirrors.

We were going seventy-five, easy.

“I do a lot of people-movin’ is what I do. Lot of people want to get out of the East Coast and get west. Anywhere. Any town with electricity and running water. People have given up on finding their people. Given up on their houses—half the houses are molded up or got sewage in the basement. People just want out. Refugees are everywhere and all of ’em trying to get somewhere else.”

I hadn’t given much thought to what life would be like in Pennsylvania. Maybe Niko’s uncle wouldn’t want us, after all. Maybe the old farm was already overrun with refugees.

Rocco interrupted my train of thought: “You know what I get paid in sometimes?”

“What?” I asked him.

“Tail,” he boasted.

It took me a second to realize what he meant.

“Yup. Girls and women in all sizes and shapes. People gotta get where they need to be.”

No. It was not possible to like Rocco Caputo.

*   *   *

After an hour, I traded with Jake.

Niko was leaning back against the wall of the cabin, half asleep. Astrid was asleep on the top bunk, her back turned outward.

“Want to lie foot to head?” I asked Niko. “Maybe we could get some sleep.”

It was a little weird to lie in the narrow bunk with Niko. And a little gross to lie in that bed at all, when I thought of what the trucker had done there with the poor refugee women, but I was tired.

Up front, Jake and Rocco got along perfectly well, which didn’t surprise me at all.

Before I fell asleep, I heard Jake ask Rocco about the drifts.

“I tell you what that’s about. It’s the cleanup. You got FEMA and whoever in there, cleaning up the blast zone and they’re sweeping up clouds of dirt and everyone’s in a tizzy. I been all over the area and I ain’t seen nothin’,” Rocco said. “Here’s what I think—those refugee camps are big money, BIG money for the people running them. They don’t
want
people to go home. Think about it!”

“What about the Army, though? I mean, they all wear those protective suits. We even bartered for one for our friend”—a tiny beat here while Jake remembered Niko’s fake name—“Phillip. You saw it.”

“You got taken, my friend,” the trucker laughed. “Those outfits are PR, nothing more. Take a look at ’em. They’re paper-thin. All for show.”

“Really?” Jake said.

I didn’t believe that. Why would the Army go to that expense?

“I guess we got ripped off,” Jake said.

“Happens to the best of us,” Rocco conceded.

“Hey, I been wondering, why do they call it Kansas City if it’s in Missouri?” Jake asked.

“Now, there’s a good question,” Rocco said. “Midwest. It’s all a bunch of retards.”

Yeah, they got along just fine.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

JOSIE

DAY 33

We’re in our room. The kids are playing rock chuck, a game Freddy invented using some small rocks and bits of gravel the kids picked up in the courtyard.

Rock Chuck involves setting up obstacles on the floor and then throwing the rocks to knock down the obstacles. Sort of like a pathetic DIY Angry Birds, which I used to play when I was their age.

Mario is playing Rock Chuck along with the kids. They asked me, too, but I refused.

Mario wants me go to the clinic.

My stupid knuckles don’t look right. Swollen, too red. A little whitish ooze growing under the skin near the cut parts.

“Promise me you’ll stay here?” I ask him.

“I’m up next,” he grouches. “Of course I’m staying here. Where do you think I’m going to go? Fly to Mars?”

That gets a laugh out of the kids.

I roll my eyes. “You know what I mean.”

I don’t want him going to the fence to try to tell the reporters I am here. He had whispered the secret of my identity to one of his heavyset paramours at Plaza 900. We have to wait and see.

Mario shoos me off so I go to the clinic.

They house the clinic in Rollins, by the north side of the O containment compound.

Going there means an endless wait in a nasty line.

The doctor had told me to come, sure, but that doesn’t mean I can skip to the head of the line.

The clinic is a suite of maybe four rooms—built to accommodate the colds, flus, and drinking concussions of the Mizzou undergrads housed in the Virtues.

Now it is besieged by malnourished trauma victims suffering all sorts of horrible injuries and maladies.

As I understand it, there are a handful of prisoners with medical training—O types who can be of service. They work shifts along with a couple of Good Samaritan doctors and nurses who are paid by the state to care for us.

I get in line behind a woman with a lined face and streaked blond hair. Her hair is the kind of frosted and tinted blond-girl hair that takes hours in the beauty shop.

She has two inches of dark brown roots and the whole mess is greasy and tied back with what looks like a piece of old mop string.

She turns and looks over her shoulder at me.

I carefully study my weeping knuckles, avoiding eye contact.

“You were out there,” she said. “I can tell.”

Her breath stinks of crazy.

I’m sure mine does, too.

“I was out there.” She tries to smile. “We lived in Castle Rock. And the day the compounds hit, my husband, he just melted away in a pool of blood. We had our own company. We sold insurance. All kinds. Health, auto, home, life, you name it.”

I look up at the ceiling.

“I think of all our policyholders. They must be phoning me and Dave day and night. But what can I do? Dave, he melted away. There was just bones and meat and blood and I just lost it. I mean, I really did.”

I wish that she would stop talking to me.

She is looking away and it is almost like she is talking to herself now.

I sniff my knuckles. They smell, hmmm, sourish.

“I have a five-hundred-thousand-dollar life policy on him, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to collect. Proof of death? How will I get that? He was a pool of blood, like I said. He was blood and bones at the end. His blood was hissing like it was on fire.”

Please let her stop talking to me. I put my fingers in my ears, but I can still hear her.

“I don’t feel right, still. I don’t feel right in the head,” she says, as if explaining why she is waiting on line. “And you don’t, either. None of us do. And I don’t know if we ever will. I just don’t know.”

She is looking into my eyes and I know she won’t leave me alone until I answer.

I lower my arm, withdrawing it from contact.

“Yeah,” I whisper. “We’re all broken.”

“I know it.” She nods. “That’s the truth.”

*   *   *

She and I inch up the line a ways.

My stomach is starting to growl.

And then Aidan comes for me, crying.

And I know Mario has gone to the gates.

*   *   *

I run, Aidan at my heels.

“He was trying to get their attention about the article thing,” Aidan says as we run.

It is like the other day, a crush of prisoners at the gate, all yelling to the four or five reporters on the other side of the second gate, who are yelling questions to them and recording it all.

I see that Venger and a couple others are already there with the tranq guns.

“Where are the others? Get the others!” I shout to Adian.

At first I don’t see Mario and then I see he has fallen and is getting crushed down to the ground.

“Mario!” I scream and I dive into the tangle of bodies, some of them falling, now from the darts, other pushing and fighting and still screaming to the reporters.

“They’re killing us in here!” one man is shouting.

“We’re being starved to death!”

I have a hand on Mario. He is unconscious and I try to get myself over him to protect him from the crush of bodies. One by one the people go dead and limp as the darts fell them.

My rage comes up. An electric fence of adrenaline hums up to fighting pitch. I want to hurt the people, to push them back and make them pay for hurting my Mario, but I shout in my head at my own self.

PROTECT HIM—stand your ground and keep him safe.

Then there are only a few of us still conscious and I see some soldiers come and move the reporters away from the fence on the other side.

I am crouching over Mario now.

“Mario, Mario, can you hear me?” I ask.

His head lolls back on his shoulders as I lift his torso. His legs are pinned under the body of a fat lady. He has blood on his head, but not necessarily his.

I can’t tell if he’s been hurt or is just tranquilized.

I get down on my screaming knees and edge him up from under the tangle of bodies. With my hands under his arms, I drag him over the others.

“Mario! Mario, it’s me!” I yell over the chaos.

I see that his arm is hanging wrong. The hand flapping off to the side in a way hands can’t, when the bones are intact.

I pull him as carefully as I can, though I stumble on the bodies on the ground. I step on legs and arms and hair. Just a few more bruises for them when they wake.

I pull Mario over the other fallen prisoners and lay him on the ground. The arm is wrong. Clearly wrong.

The guards back off and are now pulling bodies off the pile and laying them in rows.

Lori and the other kids swarm over Mario, kissing him and crying.

“Wake up! Wake up!” Heather screams.

“Get back! Don’t touch him!” I shout. “His arm is broken!”

“What do we do?” Lori moans. “Oh my God! Mario!”

And then I see that his breathing isn’t easy. He seems to be gasping.

I bend down and listen to his mouth.

“Shut up, you guys!” I holler.

I listen, is there a rasp? A wheeze?

He might have a punctured lung or something.

“We need to get him to the clinic. Right now,” I tell them. “Lori, help me. I’m going to lift his body and you stay at his side, holding his arm. Try not to let it flop around or grind the wrong way.”

“What do you mean ‘grind the wrong way’?”

“Don’t let it grind any way! Now on the count of three.”

We lift him.

*   *   *

Unconscious bodies are heavy. But not as heavy as dead ones.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DEAN

DAY 33

I woke to the screech of brakes and Rocco’s loud voice, “Pit stop number two. Vinita, Oklahoma. Wake up. We leave here in fifteen minutes.”

Pit stop number one had been three hours earlier in Durant, Oklahoma.

We had spent twenty-five dollars on four ham sandwiches and a pint of warm orange juice. Our money was not stretching the way we’d hoped …

We would have ninety-two dollars left, after we paid Rocco Caputo.

“I’m gonna hit the head, guys. See you inside,” Jake told us.

Jake got out with Rocco while the rest of us woke up.

Astrid gave a sleepy moan from her pull-down bunk. “Are we there yet?” she asked, half joking.

I stretched up in between the two front seats, where there was a bit more room.

The gas pumps for the big rigs were set off at a distance to the rest of the gas station/minimart.

I watched Jake talk to Rocco as they walked toward the minimart. I knew that Jake didn’t really share Rocco’s view on the world. He was just getting along, making our trip easier by gaining Rocco’s trust. Jake could get along with anyone. It had saved our lives back at the Greenway, when cadets invaded the store. I shouldn’t begrudge him it now.

But I did. I really didn’t want Jake to do anything right or good. I wanted him to screw up time and time again until Astrid got it that
he
was the loser. I wanted her to see that he was an unreliable, macho jerk-off braggart.

Was that so wrong? (I already knew it was.)

“Do you want me to help you down?” I asked Astrid. She was sitting on the bunk, with her feet hanging over the edge, rubbing her face with her hands.

“I feel like I could sleep for another year,” she said, yawning.

“Any more cramping?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Feel tight, really tight, but not crampy.”

“Do you want me to go get you a snack so you can keep sleeping?”

“Nah, I need to pee.”

Niko came up front with me, rooting through his backpack. He took out some money.

“Let’s just get one really big bottle of water. It’s cheaper if we share,” he said.

I moved back to help Astrid navigate the footholds molded into the side of the trailer.

“You know,” she said. “I’m hungry again. Starving.”

“We can get Astrid a snack, right, Niko?” I said, just as he said, “Guys?”

Suddenly the air was pierced by a high, thin whistling sound. It seemed to be coming from—from inside the truck cabin.

Then Niko yelled, “GUYS!”

Astrid and I stepped forward and looked out the windshield.

The light was weird, like before a thunderstorm. Then I saw it.

A black mass, skittering across the ground. Then up in the air, moving, writhing. It moved like a flock of starlings. Up and down, swooping and settling and spreading out, then contracting.

A living black cloud—maybe the size of a football field.

Niko was pulling his suit up. Thank God he still had it on and tied around his waist.