No Dawn without Darkness: No Safety In Numbers: Book 3 (4 page)

G
I
N
G
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IN THE SERVICE HALLS, HEADED TOWARD HARRY’S (THE MED CENTER)

A
couple years ago, Maddie dragged me to a corn maze—at night. She knew all about my fear of the dark, and had insisted there’d be lights and stuff plus moonlight. Naturally, that night there was no moon. And the lights—if you can call strings of orange Christmas lights, strobes, and fake torches “lighting”—were on the
outside
of the maze. But we were already inside it before I realized we had stumbled into veritable darkness.

Between the narrow paths, the death metal music yowling from the parking lot, and the sounds of torture and witches cackling, I was totally flipping out. Then arms reached out of the corn and grabbed my shoulder. I collapsed on the ground and started shrieking to be let out. The kid who’d grabbed me stepped out of his hiding place in the corn, hauled me onto his shoulder, and carried me back to the entrance. Outside, I hid behind a bale of hay so Maddie’s mom wouldn’t see me, then waited, mortified and freezing in my skimpy cat costume, for Maddie, who came bounding out after about a half hour.

“You beat me?” she asked, bewildered, when I popped out in front of her.

“I guess.”

“Wasn’t it just the best thing ever?” she asked.

I told her it had been awesome.

Now, as we make our creeping progress down the service halls, I am again faking things for my best friend. The main difference being that back then my biggest concern was that my blubbering might ruin her night. Here, if I break down, it could get us both killed. But without a face mask, Maddie cannot breathe. So our plan is to head down to the med center on the first floor to find one.

I hold tight to her sleeve and we move in sync through the suffocating blackness.

“This looks like a stairwell,” Maddie whispers, holding up her glow stick to a sign on a door.

She shuffles silently through. I slide my feet forward. We get to the top of the stairs, then the door slams behind us. A lighter pops and reveals a guy’s face.

“Boo!” he says, grinning.

“There’s a toll for using our stairwell,” a girl’s voice coos below us.

Maddie rushes forward. The fabric of her cloak slips through my fingers, and I nearly topple over the edge of the first step. I’m alone.

Oh god.

No time for panic. Must breathe. I find the railing and race down.

“They’re moving!” Lighter Guy shouts.

I do not stop. On the first landing, I skid around the corner and keep going down.

“They’re here!” the girl’s voice says from behind me.

A hand grabs my hood, choking me.

I fling my left elbow back and hit something. I’m free. I run, stumble, skip, scrabble down the stairs and land on a body.

“Ging!”

It’s Maddie. She tumbles forward. I collapse on top of her.

“Move,” she grunts, crawling out from under me.

I feel along the cement until I hit wall.

“I’ve got an exit,” she whispers.

I move toward her voice, feel skin. She grabs my wrist, and pulls me through the dark until my hand touches a metal door.

“Going somewhere?”

A flame pops from a second lighter, picking out a girl’s face not more than four feet from us.

Maddie points a small spray can at her. “Yes, we are,” she says.

Silly string shoots from the can, hits the flame, and bursts into a fireball in the girl’s face.

She screams. The fire disappears.

The metal door moves behind my back. Maddie yanks my arm, pulling me through and out of the stairwell.

“Knew that can would come in handy,” she says after the door clicks shut behind me. “Grabbed it at the Halloween place.”

Her breathing sounds funny.

“Use your inhaler,” I say.

Two new glow sticks crack to life, lighting Maddie’s shaking head. “You’ve seen a real attack,” she says, handing one to me. “Better save it for when I’m truly sucking wind.”

How long until then, Mad? What if they come after us—right now, could you run?

“Let’s just get to the med center,” I say instead, then put my hand on the wall and start walking.

• • •

The hall is short and leads us into the courtyard. It’s eerie to see so much of the mall stretching into what seems like infinite blackness punctuated now by several spots of bright orange: more fires.

“Harry’s is back this way,” Maddie says. Her voice is hushed. She must have noticed the fires.

Harry’s security gate is half open. We feel around and find the makeup counter that served as the check-in point for the sick. I prick my finger on something. Sneaking my glow stick out from my sleeve, I see that the glass top of the counter has been shattered.

Farther in, the curtain partitions have been knocked over. People have ransacked this place. People might still be ransacking this place . . .

Someone coughs near enough to where I’m standing that I startle and hit a curtain, which knocks something else and sends it clattering to the ground.

“Is someone there?” A guy’s voice, the cougher. “Please, if you’re there, come here and help me out of this gurney.” He coughs again. No way I’m going in there. “Security tied this plastic cuff to my wrist and I can’t get off the stupid bed. Please, just help me get off of here.” Security must have tied the sick down to keep them from escaping—I’m suddenly glad I was only put in jail.

Maddie waves her glow stick side to side at me: our symbol for “No.”

We shuffle on. He keeps begging.

“Please! I need a drink! Water! Anything!”
Cough.
“Please, don’t leave me!”

Tears well up. I’m a coward. A stupid, weak, horrible coward. This guy is going to die and it’s my fault.

“We should help him,” I squeak.

“We only help each other,” Maddie replies, turning around. “We did not tie him to that bed.” She holds both sides of my face, her glow stick lighting our skin a freakish pink. “This is not on either of us.”

I can tell that he has gotten to her too. Her eyes are shiny.

I nod, take a step, and trip. Over someone. A person. An adult.

“Maddie!”

This woman is not dead from the flu. There’s a hole in her forehead.

“MADDIE!”

“Shut up!” Maddie hisses.

We kneel in front of the woman. Maddie begins to pat her down.

“What are you doing?” I manage. My voice is a trickle of sound. I’m barely able to muster the air to speak.

“Win,” Maddie says. She flicks on a flashlight. “Look what she had in her pocket.”

It’s a tiny flashlight, one of those little metal ones, but who cares? Its light is brilliant in the black. I lunge over the body to get closer to it.

“Chill,” Maddie says, passing it to me.

I hold it up to Maddie’s face, then back to mine, shine it over the whole room, desperate to see again, to really
see
.

I regret that decision immediately. There’s another body with a gunshot to the head. Around the gunshot victims are other bodies, on gurneys, on cots, just slumped on the ground. Dead kids, dead adults. Flu victims. This place is no longer a med center. It’s a morgue.

I kneel beside the body I tripped over. She had a flashlight; she might have masks or some medicine, something useful so we can just leave, right now.

“I already checked her pockets,” Maddie says, blinding me with a beam of light. She’s found a second flashlight on the other gunshot victim.

“What if you missed something?” I retort. “See, here’s a pen.”

“Fab,” Maddie says. “You can write me a prescription for an inhaler.”

“How ’bout a get-out-of-quarantine-free note?”

“
Dear Government People, The air is toxic, so I had to leave the quarantine. Sorry if I spread the deadly flu. Kisses
.
”
Maddie blows one into the air.

We try to laugh, but then Mad starts wheezing and I have to dig out a bottle of water to help her get it under control.

I sit back on my heels. “Maybe the supplies are in the back?”

Maddie nods.

The fabric walls are undisturbed near the stockroom doors. People cough in the dark beyond them, some crying, some calling for help. We ignore them.

In the stockroom, we find what we came for. There are boxes of particle masks. We stuff our bags and pockets. I slip two masks over my face, then sling five more around my neck.

“We should sleep in here,” Maddie says.

“No.” The word escapes my lips without my having even thought about it.

Maddie flashes her light at me. “This is the safest place we’ve found.”

“We have different ideas about safe,” I say, thinking of the bodies, of the dying, outside the stockroom door.

“We don’t have to worry about the dead, and security chained everyone else in here to their cots.” She’s flipping her fingers up one by one, counting off reasons like reason has any credibility in this place. “Plus, none of the crazies from outside are coming in here—I mean, if they haven’t made it past that gore-fest by now, they’re not coming. There is nowhere else in the mall with these kinds of built-in security measures.”

“It smells.”

She can’t argue with that. The bodies are starting to rot, and the stench fills the whole store.

Maddie’s light shrugs. “I’d rather gag on some corpse stink than be woken by some random person ripping my bag from my body.”

She doesn’t say it, but the words
rip
and
body
make me think of all the other things people could do to me in the dark. I’d never even see them coming.

“Okay,” I mutter.

We find a corner and sit shoulder to shoulder. We place our glow sticks in front of us on the floor. I stare at them as if they are the dying embers of a fire. I think of marshmallows. Maddie is somehow able to fall asleep. I feel her breathing gently on my shoulder. I watch the glow sticks fade, knowing that even if I shake them brighter, they will only grow dim again.

• • •

Maddie’s coughing jostles me awake. She is folded over her bent knees, hacking and wheezing. Each inhale is a quick suck of air, like she’s drowning, and each exhale a slow whine.

I snap on my flashlight and begin pawing through her bag. Every tube I pull out is a glow stick—where’s the goddamned inhaler?

I dump the bag. Stuff rolls everywhere. I pounce on the inhaler and pass it to Maddie.

She takes a single pull.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have slept in a dusty stockroom,” she manages between gasps of air.

The air is thick and still, and the corpse smell has increased by, like, a billion. Even through my mask, these things are obvious.

“We should get out of here,” I say.

“Moving makes it worse,” she whispers. “Just give me a minute.”

“Shouldn’t you hit the inhaler again?”

“It’s nearly empty.”

Meaning she isn’t sure this will be the last attack, or the worst. She’s saving her breaths.

“I’m going to look for drugs,” I say.

“I’m not sure now is the time to experiment with getting high, dearest.” Maddie takes a sip of water, closes her eyes.

“Inhalers,”
I say, trying to gather the contents of her bag from the shadows. “They have to have medication in here for regular diseases, right? I mean, they took down people’s illnesses that first night. It must have been for a reason.”

Maddie shrugs. “I just can’t believe I wasted puffs those nights we tried to get into the parties.” She holds up the measly little life-saving cylinder. “I never even got to dance.”

“Choking to death and you’re still thinking about parties,” I say.

“Focus on the good stuff, right?”

• • •

Harry’s has two floors. If it were up to me, I’d keep the drugs in the second-floor stockroom, which is the place farthest from the only accessible entrance. I leave my bag and Grim Reaper cloak with Maddie and head out, picking my way across the first floor to the escalators.

There are no curtains on the second floor, so my flashlight illuminates the whole place. It’s just bodies on cots. Row after row after row. Dead bodies. Like a cemetery without the dirt. Then one coughs. I have to keep going.

One foot in front of the other, I shuffle between the cots, flashlight beam scanning the faces to see if any are alive enough to attack me. After the first few, I shine my beam elsewhere. I knock into a cot and a bloated arm flops against my leg. I keep walking. Groans in the dark. Screams from the mall outside. I keep walking.

The stockroom door is open. Blocked by a body. Another gunshot victim. Why would anyone go on a shooting spree in this place? Like there wasn’t enough dying going on in here? What is wrong with people? And for a moment, I forget why I came here and am simply overwhelmed by the need to run. Run anywhere. Go anywhere else.

But there is nowhere else to go. I pinch my skin until I can control my breathing. I wipe away my tears with a sleeve. I have to focus.

Around the body, on the floor, are plastic bags and tubing, as if someone were tossing supplies like confetti.

Supplies.

My flashlight catches a stack of plastic boxes—one has a snarl of tubing sticking out. The first is full of catheter bags. Gross. The next has masks, the one after, gloves. And then, buried under all this useless stuff is a box marked
TAMIFLU
.