No Easy Way Out (13 page)

I
t was a relief to lie on her cot in the black after keeping up appearances for Preeti all evening. All her energy had gone into smiling and chattering on about happy things to keep her sister in good spirits. At dinner, she’d found Kris and introduced them. He’d been wonderfully normal, as Shay had assumed he’d be, and his normalcy took some of the pressure off. But once dinner was over and they returned to the JCPenney, Shay was again a one-woman act.

She tried to sleep—she was exhausted, it should have just happened—but closing her eyes did not stop her mind. It was like, having shut away the sadness, her brain was scrambling around for its missing parts. Every noise startled her. The walls felt too close. She needed a drink, to go to the bathroom, a breath of fresh air.

Off to her left, toward the front of the store, someone coughed. Big hacking coughs. They didn’t stop.

A flashlight beam cut the black and closed in on a woman hunched in her cot.

The guard holding the light, his face in a serious full-coverage, hard plastic mask, like the one firefighters use, grabbed the woman’s arm and injected her with something that knocked her flat. Another guard materialized from the black, and together they hoisted her cot up and across an aisle, then out the front of the store.

Shay couldn’t look away from the empty space on the floor left by the missing cot. How many more would be gone by morning?

Some people whispered. Then Shay heard Preeti sniffle. Slipping off the side of her cot, Shay crawled to Preeti. Without a word, she slid her body up onto Preeti’s cot and wrapped her arms around her sister. Preeti curled against her, spine to sternum, and cried.

This kind of being with her sister was easy. It took no effort to hold Preeti as she cried. Just her body there, solid. It had to be somewhere, so why not here? Shay’s mind, though, scrabbled around, restless. Preeti quieted, her breathing fell into a rhythm, all around became a symphony of snores, but Shay’s brain raced on. She stared at the one light left burning until it shone in green relief against the insides of her eyes.

• • •

Marco banged on the door in the garage until it opened.

Drew was the first out. “Let’s get this party started.”

Mike followed bearing a handle of vodka. Noticing Marco’s gaze, he said, “I always bring my own. Who knows what bathtub crap they’re going to be swilling at this dive.”

Marco swiped his card and opened the door that led into the fire staircase nearest the bowling alley. He grabbed Ryan’s arm before he followed Mike and Drew into the stairwell.

“You spread the word?” Marco whispered.

“I told a girl who looked like a partier, if that’s what you mean.”

This was not encouraging. He let go of Ryan’s arm and tromped up the stairs behind the three. At the top, he swiped his card into the door marked
BLAZING LANES
.

“After you,” Mike said, clasping the door.

Marco led the way into the bowling alley and opened the door to the storage area. Two girls stood over the keg trying to jam the tap into its top.

Drew shoved Marco out of the way. “Might I assist you lovely ladies?”

Mike unscrewed his bottle and took a swig. “This is supposed to be a party?”

Surveying the room through the lens of Mike’s sarcastic drawl did not improve matters. The strobe light pulsed lamely from its corner, but did little more than annoy the eyes with the overhead light on. There was no music playing—Marco had forgotten to put in a CD. And the two girls were not exactly the hotties Marco had been hoping for.

Ryan slumped into one of the chairs. “It’s better than spending another night in that dungeon.”

“I’ll give you that.” Mike passed him the bottle, which Ryan declined.

Drew managed to finally tap the keg and in a sputter of foam, got the beer flowing. The mood lightened significantly with this fortuitous event. Upon the discovery that there were no glasses (
HOW COULD I FORGET GLASSES OF ALL THINGS!?!)
Drew suggested they all suck it straight from the tap, which apparently made everyone the merrier.

Ryan held a keg stand for longer than either of the girls, and Drew for longer than everyone. Mike remained by the CD player, into which he had inserted his own iPod and which now blared some drum-and-bass rap song. Marco tried to remain invisible by the door.

“Taco!” Drew yelled. He waved for Marco to approach. “Get your ass up here!”

Marco had never imbibed alcohol of any sort. A keg stand seemed like the wrong way to begin the process of acclimating to the stuff. “I’m good.”

“That was not a request!” the doofus barked, and strode across the room.

He hefted Marco’s struggling body over his shoulder and planted him on top of the keg. One of the girls jammed the tap into Marco’s mouth and what tasted like liquid stale Triscuits flooded in. Marco swallowed too late, and beer shot out his nose.

“He’s totally snarfing!” the girl shouted.

Ryan pulled the tap from Marco’s lips. “Don’t drown him.”

Drew planted Marco back on his feet, and he stumbled until he landed on his ass near where Mike surveyed the scene.

“You popped your cherry,” Mike said, swilling more vodka.

“I’m going to be sick.”

Marco staggered for the door and was thrust aside by more revelers in search of the rumored keg. Ryan had done his job. The senator would have to be happy with Marco’s effort.

The door next to the storage room was marked
JANITOR
, and inside, as Marco had hoped, there was a large sink. He shoved his face under its faucet and took big gulps. He had to wash that Triscuit taste out of his mouth. The water did something to calm his stomach. He belched, adjusted his shirt, and stalked off to meet Lexi.

• • •

Lexi had to fake going to the bathroom to get away from Maddie and Ginger. Why they were pretending to care what was going on with her was beyond Lexi’s imagination, but it didn’t matter now. Now she was seconds away from seeing him again. Her real friend.
Boyfriend?
Potentially.

Lexi kept wanting to check her phone, but it had died, and so the only marker she had for how much time had passed was the incremental increase in her anxiety with each passing heartbeat. First, her leg began to jiggle—classic Lexi move; her mother was always telling her to stop jiggling lest she vibrate dinner off the table. Next, nail biting. Once she’d managed to tug a hangnail to bleeding, she moved on to pacing. Pacing didn’t last long; Lexi transitioned to spinning in the desk chair. She was nearing the nausea point when the knob turned.

“Marco?” she whispered, trying to stop her brain in its spin cycle.

“You expecting someone else?” He slipped in and shut the door behind him. “No security escort tonight, Your Highness?”

“Hey, I didn’t ask that guy to Taser you.”

“Not yet,” Marco said.

Lexi wondered if he was implying something of a sexual nature. A twinge of fear tickled her spine, but then he smiled a crooked smile and she laughed a little too loudly to show that she had totally gotten that he’d been joking the whole time.

They entered the service halls and soon were faced with a locked door.

“Dead end,” said Lexi.

“For some,” whispered Marco. Then he slipped a card through the reader and it opened.

“You stole a card key?” Lexi asked, feeling something between anxiety and awe.

“Don’t freak out. I used to work here,” Marco clarified, holding the door open. “The card was a privilege of employment.”

They took the back hallways the long way around the mall, which took for-freaking-EVER, but Marco was jumpy about crossing the “public areas” of the mall when using his card key.

“You haven’t yet had the pleasure of feeling your nuts burned off by a Taser,” was his explanation.

When they reached the vicinity of the ice-skating rink, the elevator dinged as they were about to unlock the security door. They bolted down the service hall and hid around a corner, then watched as a shrouded gurney was wheeled out of the elevator and through the doors.

“We were right,” Lexi whispered.

“
I
was right,” Marco retorted.

As soon as the gurney was gone, Lexi and Marco snuck over to the door. Beyond it was a hall that led to the cavernous storage room for the Zamboni. The retractable doors between the rink and the storage room were open, meaning the air was so cold, Lexi’s eyeballs hurt. She and Marco ducked from pile of crap to pile of crap until they reached the far end of the storage room and peered out the doorway.

There was no more ice-skating rink. There was merely a gigantic pile of bodies. It was like a garbage dump, just heaps of bodies tossed one on top of the other. The glassy eyes of one man seemed to be staring right at Lexi. She whipped back around the wall and threw up on the cement.

“Frak,” Marco said, pushing himself flat against the wall. He stared at the huge barrel in front of him as if it might provide some explanation for the body dump.

Lexi knelt against the pavement, then pushed herself away from her own sick and leaned against the wall. “We’re screwed,” she said. “All of us. Screwed.”

Marco suddenly dropped and threw himself over her, finger to his lips.

The wheels of the gurney squeaked past.

“That makes one fifty today,” said the person steering the now empty gurney.

“Better than yesterday,” the other said. “We had two hundred yesterday.”

His forehead pressed to Lexi’s. His breath misted against her cheek. She felt shimmery tingles dart over her skin.

The door slammed closed. They were alone with the corpses.

Marco flung himself away from her, careful not to expose himself to another glimpse of the rink. “I should have known.”

“Known what?” Lexi asked. “That my mother was piling a billion bodies on the ice-skating rink?”

“That this virus was some freak killer flu. Essentially, that the majority of the mall was screwed. Why else would they trap us in here? To keep the good people of Westchester safe in their McMansions, that’s why.”

Lexi’s mind kept drawing a blank. “This many people can’t have died. There were only maybe seventy in the freezer. There are—”

“Thousands. That looks like a freaking Bieber concert worth of bodies.”

“We can’t tell anyone,” Lexi said, only realizing after she’d spoken that she was repeating her mother’s words.

“Of course we can’t,” Marco said, standing and beginning to pace between the barrel and the wall. “People would lose their shiznit if they knew this many people had died.”

“So, what? Do we just do nothing?” Lexi hoped Marco had an answer, because she was freaked out beyond the capacity for rational thought.

“I’m going to start taking extra precautions. No more interpersonal interaction. I am staying ten feet from every freaking disease-carrying douche in this mall.”

It took Lexi a moment to realize that this most likely foreclosed any further touching between the two of them. “Does this mean we’re not meeting in my office anymore?”

Marco smirked. It wasn’t exactly a cute smirk, more like a calculating smirk. “You have any more mysteries in need of solving?”

“I won’t know until tomorrow.”

“Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

They snuck back to the JCPenney in silence. Strangely, Lexi could no longer remember what the rink exactly looked like. She could recall the beams of the ceiling, the general level of freaked out she’d felt, but not the bodies themselves.
Whatever.
Better that she couldn’t. Who wants to remember something like that?

She bumped into Marco when he stopped suddenly at a door. She tried not to obsess about how much she liked being pressed against him, even for a second.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

He didn’t answer, just opened the door for her. She walked through. He didn’t follow.

“Aren’t you coming?” Shouldn’t they talk more? Didn’t he want to hang out?

“I don’t live here,” he said coolly.

“But I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Tomorrow.” And let the door slam.

Lexi slunk back to her cot in the alcove. Why didn’t he want to hang out more? Of course, for him even entering the JCPenney was risky. Maybe he was afraid of getting Tasered again? She couldn’t blame him for that. And he said she’d see him tomorrow. That was good. He would see her again. That was almost a promise of a second date.

“Off with your boy again?” Maddie’s voice hissed through the dark.

“Where’d Lexi find a boy?” Ginger was on Lexi’s other side.

“Just taking some alone time,” Lexi lied. She would not tell anyone about the bodies. As insane as she felt admitting it, her mother was right to not let that tidbit out.

“With the boy?” Maddie would not let it go.

Lexi decided to throw her a bone. “Maybe.” She smiled to herself in the dark. She had something neither Maddie nor Ginger had: a boy.

“You’re going to have to do better than that over breakfast, so think of some juicy details or I strangle you with skinny jeans.” Maddie shifted in her bed. “I am dying for gossip and you’re the only one who’s got any.”

A part of Lexi wanted to gossip with them. She’d never felt this way about a boy before, never found excuses to bump into a guy (literally) before, never felt a fire under her skin when he spoke. Was what she felt normal? Was she making a fool of herself? But Lexi wasn’t sure Maddie and Ginger wouldn’t make her the butt of their jokes, they who’d played Truth or Dare enough times to know the rules. Surely tingles from a boy’s platonic touch held little in the way of interest gossip-wise to them. So she rolled over onto her stomach and remembered the feel of his breath on her cheek and said, “Maybe,” so quietly, she wasn’t even sure Maddie had heard.

• • •

Ryan surveyed the party from a chair in a corner. Mike had taken over and turned what had been a lame group of people with a keg into a legit party.
Leave it to Mike.
He could take even this crappy excuse for a party and make it into a scene.

Much of the work was done by simply having the overhead lights out, but Mike had also found some flashlights, which he jammed in the corners to provide some “romance,” as he’d said. That plus the strobe plus some decent music equaled not bad.