Monument 14: Savage Drift (Monument 14 Series) (15 page)

“Your suits! Your suits!” he stammered.

“Are the windows shut?” Astrid asked.

Where was my backpack? I’d been using it as a pillow.

“Who knows?” Niko shouted.

“Masks first!” I said.

Our visors, with their built-in air-filtering mouthpieces, were at the top of the pack.

I handed Astrid hers and put mine in. The rubber felt weird in my mouth, but I drew in a breath.

Filtering the air was the most important thing for Astrid and me. But for Niko, he had to get the suit on and seal it up, otherwise he’d blister and burn.

Astrid and I fumbled with our suits, pulling them up. I realized the whistling sound was coming from the suits! There was a little plastic eyelet, the size of a dime, at the lapel and it was now shrieking and giving off a bright red LED light.

The drift was making its way through the neighborhood behind the gas station, swooping and diving, getting closer.

Niko zipped his mask closed. He was safe.

I saw the red light on his suit turn green and the whistle died out.

Astrid had her suit on now, was shoving her feet into her sneakers. I zipped her face mask to the body of the suit.

“Hold still!” I told her. Her light went green.

Me next.

“We have to get Jake!” Astrid shouted. She didn’t have her mouthpiece in yet.

“No way!” Niko said. “Jake’s fine. He’s in the store!”

The drift was encompassing the minimart, now, and would be on us in a second.

I got my suit up and Astrid zipped my face mask down. Green.

Through the side window I saw Jake and Rocco sprinting toward us, chased by the swirling black soot.

And I saw, behind them, a man step out of the minimart with a gun.

BANG!
He was aiming for Jake and Rocco! He must be AB, and now paranoid and freaking out.

The drift was hitting the windshield with a zinging, scouring sound.

I saw Rocco stumble. Had he been hit?

I took the filter out of my mouth so I could talk. “I’m going to help!” I shouted. “Stay here!”

Before Niko could stop me, I had the door open and was running to Jake and Rocco.

Rocco had not fallen from the shot.

He was blistering.

Maybe if we got him inside the truck—and I saw Jake stop and go back to Rocco.

BANG!
The man with the gun had fired way off to the side of us. I saw the bullet spark against the sign giving the rate for diesel fuel.

Jake was leaning over Rocco’s fallen body. There was blood. Lots of blood. We had to get him inside, quick.

“I’ll help you!” I shouted, the words mashed up because of my mouthpiece.

But Jake wasn’t helping Rocco up. He was sliding the handgun out of Rocco’s shoulder holster.

Jake took the gun and fired a shot back at the minimart guy. The
BOOM
of the gun was shockingly loud, at that range.

“Help me get him inside!” I shouted to Jake.

“It’s too late!” he answered and I saw he was right.

Rocco was already gone, the grit had seared into his face and arms. His body was starting to bubble.

Bile rose in my throat. By then Astrid and Niko were there.

“I told you to stay inside!” I shouted.

BANG!
The shopkeeper shot toward us and Jake took another shot at him.

“Come on!” Jake shouted.

BANG!
The shopkeeper shot again and there was this tremendous light. A fireball blossomed from the gas pump right next to the truck and then the sound, a
WHOOOOOSH-POW
of an explosion, as the fuel tanks under the ground exploded.

As soon as we could get up, we ran.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

JOSIE

DAY 33

The nurse tells us we have to wait in line.

“He’s an old man,” I say, my arms trembling. “His arm is broken and his breathing is all wrong. He might have a punctured lung.”

The nurse feels for his pulse.

“Listen—,” she says. “He’s very old—” Starting to say, what? That he was too old to be worth treating? That he was too old to save?

“I know Dr. Neman,” I stammer. “The doctor. She’s my friend.”

“Dr. Neman is not on duty,” the nurse answers. “You’ll have to wait—”

“Listen,” I tell her. “I was lost and wild. I was eating out of his trash can. I had killed these men and I was lost to the world and he called to me. He brought out a cup of hot chocolate and reached out to me. I could have killed him. But he believed in me. Do you understand?”

“Be that as it may—” She is reaching for the phone now, probably thinking about calling security.

“He said, ‘You put on this mask and you can have this cocoa,’ and he tossed a mask over to me. And I knew that he was offering me a way to come back to the human race. Some part of my monster brain knew that it was a chance and it was my last chance.”

Now I am crying and Lori, standing behind me, is crying, too. The rest of the kids, too, probably.

The nurse wants us to move out of the doorway but I’m not budging. Mario’s gaspy breathing is my metronome and I tell her the rest.

“I put the mask on. And after I calmed down and started to be able to think again, he handed me a note.

“See, my friends had left me behind. They had to. My … my boyfriend, he had to take the others, five of them, all kids, to safety. So he had to leave me behind.

“But he left a note.

“And Mario gave it to me and I read it.”

“I am sorry!” the nurse says. “But we don’t have the supplies to spend on this kind of a case—”

“He gave me shelter,” I weep, my arms shaking, shaking, shaking. “He fed me and let me rest and gave me new clothes and a safe place to be. And when the bombs fell, up top, we thought we were done for. We prayed through the night, asking God for the chance to live.”

“I don’t have the authority—,” she says.

“He begged God for me to have the chance to find my friends,” I sob. “Don’t you see? He’s a good man. He’s all the family I have left.”

“Rah!” she shouts in frustration. “Fine! Fine then. Come this way.”

I step forward, my arms screaming now.

“Tell your friends to go away,” she snaps.

I choke on a gasp of relief and Lori leads the kids away.

“Put him here,” the nurse says, pointing to a blood-stained cot between two holding other people—a squat man with a bandage around his waist and a sleeping woman whose head is wrapped in gauze, stained yellow at her eyes.

“What happened here?” says a Latino guy wearing a T-shirt and jeans with a stethoscope around his neck.

“Dr. Quarropas, I’m sorry. But the girl insisted—”

“She was right to insist. This guy must be eighty years old!”

“I know,” she snaps. “But he’s not the most treatable—”

“Don’t,” he says. “I’m a doctor. I won’t hear that crap about treatable cases. Not one more time.”

“It’s not coming from me—,” she protests, but he isn’t paying attention anymore. He bends over and listens to Mario’s breathing and opens his mouth gently to look inside.

“Doesn’t sound good,” he says. “What happened to him?”

He opens Mario’s eyes and looks in with a pen light.

“There was a mob at the gate,” I say. “He got trampled. Maybe hit with a tranquilizer but I’m not sure.”

“Probably sedated. What’s his name?” the doctor asks.

“Mario Scietto,” I say.

“Mario! Mario!” he says. “Can you hear me? Mario Scietto!”

Mario lays there, looking like a broken bird. He looks very small, laid out next to the two people on either side.

The doctor takes out a minitab.

“New file,” he says into the phone.

So minitabs work again. At least for people running the show.

This was the first I had known.

“Mario Scietto. Late seventies, early eighties, question mark. Sedated by Etorphine dart. Crushed in mob.”

He listens to Mario’s chest with his stethoscope, shaking his head.

“Compound or transverse fracture ulna, radius, left arm. Fractured ribs question mark.”

A gasp escapes from my lips. Dr. Quarropas looks up, as if focusing on me for the first time.

“You need to go,” he says.

“Is he going to be okay?” I ask.

Suddenly I see stars, the room goes slanted in my vision.

The doctor puts his hand on my arm. A part that is bruised from my midnight journey on the Men’s hall. I wince, the pain making the room straight again.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine.”

For some dumb reason, I put my hands behind my back. I don’t want him worrying about my stupid knuckles when Mario is in danger.

“They’re not feeding you well enough. You look like you’ll blow away. And what’s wrong with your hands?”

“Nothing,” I say.

He gives me an expectant look.

I show him my knuckles. There is definitely some greenish pus around the edges.

“How’d this happen?”

“I had to clean something,” I say. “I scraped them.”

“Rhonda,” he calls. “Where’s the roll gauze?”

“We’re out,” she calls back.

“Squares, then, I’ll tape them on,” he yells.

“We’re out of tape.”

“Jesus!”

“Is Mario going to be okay?” I ask again.

“I think so.”

The doctor crosses to a small sink and motions for me to follow. He runs warm water into the sink and motions for me to wash my hands with antibacterial soap, all the while talking about Mario.

“He’s going to sleep for a good long while now, and while he’s out, I’ll set his arm. I’m going to examine his rib cage, too. We’re going to do the best we can.”

He pats my knuckles dry with a paper towel and then he holds a spray over my hands.

“Cough,” he whispers.

“What?”

He coughs, loudly, and I join in. While we cough, he sprays my knuckles, dousing them with a foam that congeals, almost immediately, into a flexible kind of rubber flesh seal.

Rhonda comes to the door.

“Oh my Lord,” she says. “Tell me you are not using Dermaknit on this girl. You know that is our last bottle!”

The doctor winks at me.

“She was headed for a nasty infection. Had to be done.”

I am sure I was looking at him with the fish-mouthed gawk of a zombie but I couldn’t get used to being handled like I mattered, like I had some rights to humane treatment. And being joked with, like the world was a place in which people could still joke and be merry and tease each other and cough to cover up the sound of a spray.

He is being playful and kind. I must have been looking at him like he was from Mars.

“I think your friend will be fine,” he says, the smile slowly fading from his face. “Why don’t you come visit him tomorrow.”

“Now, you heard the doctor,” the nurse says to me.

“Hey!” a man from the head of line calls in. “When’s my turn?”

“I’ll need your help in a moment to set this fracture,” says Dr. Quarropas to the nurse. “But you can bring in some patients so the line doesn’t go nuts.”

The nurse puts her hand on the small of my back and shows me out of the room.

“You got what you wanted,” she says to me. “Now get out of here.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

DEAN

DAY 33

Our backpacks were gone—they’d been in the truck.

Jake didn’t have a suit, but since he was type B, that hardly mattered.

The rest of us had our suits.

Drawing air through the mouthpiece was awkward, but it worked, even at a sprint. And the fact that you were basically holding the mask to your face by having the mouthpiece in your mouth meant the whole face mask/visor didn’t jar around too much. It was surprisingly stable. Even at a full sprint. Japanese design.

*   *   *

Jake was in the lead. He led us across a low field of brown grass into a residential neighborhood.

I ran behind Astrid and I did it on purpose. I thought I could block a bullet if the guy shot at her. Probably dumb, I know, but that’s what I did.

Small, nice-looking houses were on either side of the street.

Jake dodged behind a minivan and waited for the rest of us.

“Everyone okay?” he asked.

We nodded, all of us catching our breath.

The thing was, those mouthpieces made it hard to talk.

“You okay, Astrid?” he asked her. She nodded, clutching her belly.

She bent down and at first I thought she was going to be sick, then I saw that her sneakers were untied. She had pulled them on over the feet of her safety suit without tying the laces.

Thank God she hadn’t tripped.

“Follow me,” Jake said. “We’ll just, uh, we’ll find a car.”

He started edging down the street.

There was screaming, from one of the houses. A horrible, nerve-jangling sound.

I looked to Niko, Should we help?

He shook his head and followed Jake.

Then we saw a young woman in the street.

She was in front of a small white house that was nestled between two larger houses made of brick.

She was muttering to herself and carrying an armload of stuff, miscellaneous stuff to an idling Mazda sedan parked at the curb. She wore exercise clothes and her brown hair was coming out of a ponytail and sticking to her mouth.

There were things on the ground behind her—a picture frame. A tub of mayonnaise. Straw hat. Couch pillow.

She threw the armload into the back of the car and scrambled to retrieve the fallen items and shove them in, too. Then she saw us.

“Stay back!” she screamed. And I saw a big knife in her hand. A chef’s knife.

She’d been carrying it while she held the stuff, which was why she was dropping it everywhere.

Also, she was clearly type AB and fully, wildly paranoid.

We were a hundred and fifty feet away.

“No! No! No!” she cried. She backed away from us—from
us
—and then we saw a man behind her, moving fast.

I spat the mouthpiece out and shouted, “LOOK OUT!” and I rushed forward, trying, I don’t know, to save her.

But the man got her before we did.

He was broad shouldered, bald with a pot belly, and he was O.

He stalked toward her from behind, his arms and white button-down shirt splattered with blood. Head down, eyes gleaming with the call to murder.