No Easy Way Out (14 page)

The music transitioned to a dance beat and the girls writhed around Drew, who looked happier than Ryan had seen him in days. Other people had shown up, and they mostly kept in their little groups, dancing or hovering around the beer. Someone had stolen some glasses from the bowling alley bar, but even though the drinks were now mobile, there were always those guys afraid to let the keg out of their sight.

Mike remained on the sidelines, as always. He never really attended his parties. Mike preferred to observe people, then saunter through after people were drunk to receive their congratulations for throwing another awesome party. Drew was the guy calling the shots at the event itself. That was the way they worked—Mike set it up and Drew carried it out.

At a regular Mike party, Ryan hung by the TV half watching whatever sport was on—there was always some game playing. Parties were all about dancing and drinking, and he wasn’t much of a dancer and tried to avoid the drinking games because they always became a little too intense. Never play beer pong with football players. When his girlfriend of the moment showed up, they’d find some place to hook up. All told, parties were not that great, but they were better than nothing.

However, these regular complaints weren’t what had his butt glued to the chair. Tonight, he simply wanted to be somewhere else. With someone else. Specifically, anywhere with Shay.

The song changed and a bunch of the girls squealed. Drew picked two up, one in each arm, and spun them, thwacking a random dude in the face.

“Hey, dickhead, watch yourself!” the guy shouted.

Drew dropped both girls—no joke, dropped them—and turned to the shouter. “What did you call me?”

The guy, who looked about twenty-five, stood taller. “You hit me in the face,
dick
head.”

Drew shoved the guy in the chest, and that was all it took. Three guys launched themselves at Drew and he went down. Girls screamed. People pushed back to give the fight its due space. Mike paused the music and stood. Ryan sensed something awful coming.

Where the hell was Marco?

Mike pulled something from his waistband.

Ryan bolted out of the chair and threw himself into the fight. “Get off him!” he shouted, pulling at every limb he could get a grip on. With his help, Drew was able to shove the mob off him, kicking one in the gut so hard he puked and fell to the floor. Drew squared his back to the wall and Ryan stood beside him, fists up.

Drew grabbed a chair and wielded it in one hand. “Get out of my party before I have to get angry.”

The fighters looked ready to test Drew’s resolve until Mike joined the two of them, gun in hand.

“You heard the man,” he said.

The guys did not look happy. “Be seeing you,” one said with a menacing chin thrust.

“Any time,” Mike snarled.

The four left. Mike shoved the gun back in his pants.

“Anyone else interested in a fight?”

People hung back, clutched their beers.

“Excellent.” Mike went back to the CD player and turned on the music.

Ryan put a hand on Drew’s shoulder. His shirt was soaked through with sweat. “You okay?”

Drew set the chair down. “Better than okay, J. Shrimp.” He smiled and Ryan noticed two of his teeth were dark with blood. He pushed past Ryan and rejoined the dancing girls.

Ryan went over to Mike. “Where’s Marco? Shouldn’t he be keeping things cool?”

“Why would Marco be in charge of keeping anything cool?”

So Mike had no idea this was Marco’s party. What else did Mike not know about Marco?

Mike pointed to the door. “Shrimp, you monitor guests for the rest of the night. Keep the assholes out.”

Ryan nodded, not sure how he was supposed to spot the assholes. He made a rough assumption that anyone who looked like a person Mike wouldn’t invite to one of his parties was out.

The best way to turn assumed assholes away was to tell them the keg was kicked. When Ryan saw an asshole in a group of non-assholes, he turned the whole pack away—better safe than sorry. As the night wore on, however, even with turning away a large number of potential assholes, the room was packed beyond capacity. Ryan was not even sure another body could squeeze into the space.

Footsteps slapped their way toward him. “Sorry, dude, party’s full,” Ryan said.

“It’s me,” Marco said. “And what the hell are you— Oh.” He looked in the doorway. “Crap.”

“I’ve been turning people away, but still—”

“You’ve been turning people away?”

“Some assholes attacked Drew, so Mike put me on watch to keep any other potential assholes out.”

Marco swore something vicious under his breath.

“What, you were hoping for a fight?” Ryan was not sure why turning people away would be such a bummer.
Another thing I don’t understand about this guy.

“It doesn’t matter,” Marco said. “You and Mike and Drew have to come with me.”

“Why?” Ryan saw a flashlight streak across the wall at the far end of the hall. That could only mean one thing. “Did security follow you?”

Marco looked confused, then, glancing down the hall, nodded. “We have to get you out of here.”

“We can’t leave Mike and Drew,” Ryan said.

He shoved his shoulder into the mass of people by the door and began driving his way toward the music. The music was deafening next to Mike, but Ryan managed to communicate the approaching security problem by screaming directly into Mike’s ear.

Marco popped out of the crowd just as Mike nodded his understanding. “You’ll never get out that way,” Marco yelled. “Follow me.”

Some people started to scream, but Ryan couldn’t tell if it was because of the party or because security had arrived. He didn’t bother turning to look. Marco led them to a narrow door at the back of the room and pushed both Ryan and Mike into it.

“Where’s Drew?” Marco asked.

Ryan pointed to the dance floor.

Marco rolled his eyes and shoved his way back through the crowd. There was more screaming now, definitely a sign that security had arrived. Suddenly, Drew’s body crashed against the door frame.

“What the hell?” he shouted.

“Get in there and be quiet.” Marco pushed Drew through the doorway, passed something to Mike, and slammed the door on the three of them.

They were in some mechanical space. Three steps led up onto a metal bridge over the long shafts and gears of the machines. Dangling in the air to his left were bowling pins, all organized in the pinsetters.

Mike flipped on whatever Marco had passed him. It squealed, then began speaking. It was a police radio. From the chatter, it was clear security was busting the party.

“We’d better get away from the door,” Mike said, creeping up the stairs.

The three tiptoed down the catwalk to the far end of the space and listened to the muffled shouts and screams from the remains of the party on the other side of the door.

• • •

Marco slammed his back against the door. Before him, the party-goers were roiling like flies against a window. So much for his vow to stay away from people. Security stood at the exit—the only way out save the dead end mechanic’s passage over the pinsetting machines in front of which Marco stood. There was one man in full riot gear in the open doorway to the hall, but the overhead lights glinted off the helmets of others behind him. Still, the revelers scrambled from wall to wall and climbed on chairs in an attempt to escape their fate.

“Everyone, calm down. You will not be harmed. We are here to confirm your registration and escort you back to your Home Stores.”

It took several more announcements of this nature before people stopped raging. Security did not enter the room, but rather ordered people to come out single file to check in. Marco got into the line along with the others. He did not want to draw any attention to himself or the narrow door to the walkway. The only important thing was to keep them from finding Mike & Co.

At the exit, a man with a stun baton forced Marco against the wall. He shuffled forward with the line until he reached another stun-baton-wielding guard. The baton flipped down in front of him, halting his progress. A second person jammed something into Marco’s ear.

“What the hell?” he asked.

“Normal temp.” It was a woman’s voice. “Asymptomatic.” The baton lifted.

Marco shuffled forward. Near the end of the hall stood three more guards, one of whom had a tablet.

“Name?” said the tablet bearer.

Behind him, Marco heard shouting.

“One-oh-one. Tag him.” The woman’s voice.

“I’m not going in there!”

Marco turned and saw a guy get shoved into what Marco knew to be the food storage room for the bowling alley. The door was slammed. The guard flipped down the stun baton in front of the next victim.

“Name?” the tablet guy repeated.

Once Marco was identified, he was led by another guard to a table in the restaurant. The metal gate blocking it and the bar area off from the rest of the mall had only been raised halfway, so Marco had to duck under it.

“Take them down,” Marco’s guard said, pushing him forward toward the table, where there sat four other guys surrounded by two guards.

On the short journey back to the Lord & Taylor, the others complained about security busting the party, but otherwise seemed pleased with the evening. Marco gave himself a mental pat on the back for having actually pulled the night off. So a few people were jailed for having mild fevers. Given Marco’s recent revelation of the death rate from the flu, he was prepared to accept the willy-nilly bagging and tagging of anyone with even the remotest sign of having it.

Flopping down on his cot, Marco slathered all his exposed skin with hand sanitizer, then finally allowed himself to relax. In that momentary pleasure, he thought of other pleasurable things, like Shay, and recalled that he had totally bailed on helping her find a place to hide like he’d promised the night before. Leave it to him to screw up the one thing he actually cared about.

He would make it up to her. Tomorrow. He would find her and do something—steal her some food from where they were stockpiling everything in the Sam’s Club. Yes. She might like that.

He could handle this. He could keep all the balls in the air. He would handle this. He was in control.

T
he glare of Lights On woke Shay after what felt like mere minutes of sleep. Her body was stiff, like an old puppet’s, and her head swam. She was still in Preeti’s bed, and her sister lay rigid in her arms.

“I don’t want to be here,” Preeti whispered. “I want to go home.”

“Yeah,” Shay answered for lack of something better.

“I dreamed of that coughing.” Preeti hunched tighter against Shay. “Coughing everywhere and men in black trying to catch me. All I could do was crawl. They were always right behind me.”

“It was just a dream,” Shay said.

“But it wasn’t,” Preeti said, sitting up. She pointed to the empty space where the missing cot, and missing woman, should have been. “There really are men in black.”

Shay shuffled up on her elbows. Moving hurt her head like a blow. The pain focused to a laser point just above her right eye. “That woman was sick,” she said, wincing. “The men took her to the med center. To protect us.”

Preeti didn’t answer right away. “There are more,” she said. “I count ten more spaces.”

Shay glanced around. There were odd breaks in the lines of cots, more missing women, missing girls. She wondered why they took the cots. Did they not expect the women to return? Of course they didn’t expect them to return.

This was not helping anyone. Preeti needed normal. She needed to get out of bed and do something other than stare at empty spaces.

“We should brush our teeth,” Shay said, sitting up. A red-hot poker ran through her skull. She ignored it. “We should get breakfast.”

“I don’t want to go out there,” Preeti mumbled. She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

Shay stood, forcing her awkward limbs to function. “You just need to get out of here,” she said, pulling Preeti’s arm. “This place is depressing. You’ll like school.”

“School?” Preeti asked, incredulous.

“It’s what they’re calling running around the food court with your friends.”

Preeti perked up at the word. “Do you think Lia and Sahra are still here?”

“You’ll have to see,” Shay said, shrugging playfully, happy for the mask so she didn’t also have to fake a smile.

It was hard to tell how many people were missing at breakfast. Yesterday, some team had moved tables—everything from cheap plastic and metal backyard sets to fancy carved-wood dining room displays—into the first-floor courtyard, but there were not enough seats for everyone and no assigned tables. It looked like the same crowds as had eaten dinner, but maybe with so many people, no one noticed ten, twenty, a hundred missing bodies.

“Can we ride the Ferris wheel at school?” Preeti asked. Her fears seemed to have dissipated with the promise of school and friends.

“You can do whatever your teacher says.” Shay poked a pile of what she’d been told were grits. How could grit be food?

Preeti ate what she’d been given like a thing starved. Spoonful after spoonful went into her mouth. “You going to eat yours?” she asked, scraping the last grits from the plastic.

Shay shook her head, pushed the plate toward her sister, and refit her mask over her mouth.

It was disconcerting how quickly Preeti had recovered. Where was the sadness, the anger of yesterday? She hadn’t even mentioned calling Ba. Not that Shay was interested in reliving that torture. Her head throbbed. She needed to go to the med center. But not before getting Preeti to school. Preeti would only freak out if Shay told her she felt like crap.

• • •

Ryan snuck from car shadow to car shadow through the parking garage. With the showers now on this level, whoever was in charge had all the lights turned on. Keeping Ruthie and Jack a secret was going to be harder. Their SUV was too close to the new shower establishment. Maybe he could convince them to move into the closet? No, that would be worse. And what if Mike or Drew went back there to get something?

Mike had decided that he liked living in the bowling alley. They’d discovered a walk-in fridge, just like the one in the Grill’n’Shake, in the room next to the place where the party had been. The metal door had been padlocked, but a few blows from a fire extinguisher had smashed both it and the handle. Mike and Drew pried the thing open with metal bars scrounged from the party room. Inside, they’d found a meager selection, but still. It was food.

Ryan had made off with a bag of rolls and a can of mandarin oranges. He’d also found a can opener in the bar, so there’d be no broken toys this morning. To get away without Mike and Drew freaking out, he said he’d forgotten something in the storage room. A clean shirt or whatever.

“Bring one back for me,” Drew had muttered, crumbs spewing from his mouth.

Ryan felt warm inside, seeing the SUV. He knocked on the door using the special three-knock code they’d developed—one short, one long, one short. Ruthie pushed the door open. Her eyes were red with tears.

“Jack’s sick,” she said.

Ryan’s first thought:
I did this.
He’d had the flu. Maybe he was still contagious when he met them.

He crawled into the van and looked over the first row into the way back. Jack was curled like someone had kneed him in the groin.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “I brought you some rolls.”

“My tummy hurts,” Jack moaned.

A stomachache was not coughing. This was not the flu.
I didn’t kill him
.

Ryan was suddenly able to think. He pulled the can opener from his pocket and passed it to Ruthie. “You need to eat,” he said. “See if you can get him to at least eat a roll or something. And drink. If it’s a stomach problem, he needs lots of water. I’ll go to the med center and see about getting some Pepto or Tums.”

“And he’ll be okay?” Ruthie was clearly freaking out.

Ryan grabbed both her shoulders and stared into her eyes. “Chill,” he said. “Jack is going to be fine.” He opened the bag of rolls and handed her one. “Just take care of yourself. I’ll take care of Jack.”

Ryan pressed the door closed and slunk toward the showers. Thinking this was an ideal opportunity, he crept to the end of the line and joined the crowd. The guard on duty down here was merely an old dude passing out towels and chunks of soap. When Ryan reached the head of the line, he was given a towel and white wedge.

“When you’re done, throw the soap on the ground and put the towel in that bin.” A large, wheeled canvas container stood near a parked wagon.

“Are there razors?” Ryan asked, rubbing his prickly face.

“Safety razors are in the Home Stores. Ask a guard.”

So that was a no for him. Whatever. He didn’t have much facial hair to begin with. Maybe Shay liked her men fuzzy. Or could grow to like
him
that way at least.

After showering, which felt like goddamned heaven, he changed into his other pair of clothes from the duffel in the closet and joined the rest of the mall on the first level. People were sitting at tables eating breakfast. This totally normal event made Ryan sad. Why couldn’t he be a part of this? Why was he an outcast just for trying to escape? Like every one of these people hadn’t thought about it.

That was when he saw Mr. Reynolds. The jerk was holding court at an iron backyard dining set, a crowd of guys his age—old and gray-haired and rich-looking, even in their mismatched clothing—nodding along with whatever he was saying. Ryan ducked behind a crowd of women to avoid getting spotted. No telling what that bastard would do if he saw him.

Why did Reynolds get to live like a normal person? He was the asshole who got Mike and Drew and him into this mess. It had been Reynolds who convinced Mike to try to escape out the garage, who got them all in trouble with security, who would have left Ryan to die of the flu, and who blew their escape out the roof by only thinking about himself. And yet it was Mike, Ryan, and Drew who got stuck munching soup crackers in a dark closet like a bunch of outlaws? It was completely unfair. Like everything else about this place.

Ryan had to focus. Get to the med center and get back to Jack. He had people depending on him. He wasn’t a smug, sell-out, selfish ass pretending to be some big shot. Ryan mattered, at least to Ruthie and Jack.

The med center was guarded by a mom-aged woman. She ate her breakfast while playing Scrabble on a tablet. “Sick or visiting?” she said, without looking up. “There are no visitors for flu patients.”

Ryan decided that saying sick might get him admitted and saying helping someone sick might invite too many questions, so he said, “Visiting.”

“Name?”

That had him. “Dixit,” he said. “Preeti Dixit.”

The woman abandoned her game and switched to a different program, some sort of spreadsheet. “She’s not here anymore.”

“Um, well, yeah, but she told me that she forgot something, and wanted me to pick it up.”

The woman shrugged. “The lost-and-found is in the back,” she said. “But it’s only phones and stuff, anything that could be wiped down. No clothing, no books.”

Ryan nodded. “It was her phone. Can I check if it’s here?”

“Enter at your own risk,” she said, pointing to the hall between two rows of curtains. “Take that path to the back wall, then through the door marked
STAFF.
Box is on the shelf on the right.”

Ryan glanced into the rooms created by the curtain system as he passed. There were few people in here, all of them looking normal save for the odd air cast or bandage. None of them looked like a flu victim.

Ryan saw the top of a head over the curtain wall coming his way, so he ducked onto the escalator, which was off, and ran up it. The second floor was entirely different from the first. The only curtains here were a row of them against the security gate at the entrance to the mall, blocking the view out. The rest of the floor—a whole department store’s worth of floor—was just people on cots.

Each person had on a mask, except for those with tubes in their mouths hooked up to machines. But there were few of them. Those people were in a row on actual gurneys near the back wall. Most people lay still on their cots, inches from the floor and a foot from the next patient. Every few seconds, one would start convulsing with coughs, then another, like there was some timer controlling them all.

But the worst part was the area next to the gurneys. An area the size of half an end zone was covered in what looked like mattresses, and piled on these beds were bodies. Dead bodies. Had to be. Not one moved. There were a bunch of them lying there. Like some gross sleepover.

“You shouldn’t be up here!” A woman strode toward him, a surgical mask over most of her face.

“I-I hurt m-my ankle,” Ryan stammered, trying to pull his eyes away from the mattresses.

“Get a mask on and wait on the first level!” The woman forcibly turned him around and pushed him down the stairs.

Ryan stumbled down, trying to make sense of what he’d just seen. It didn’t look like a place anyone expected to leave. You went from cot to mattress to where? Was the stockroom on the second floor packed with corpses?

Bile burned his throat at the thought. This was like some death factory. He would never let them take Jack.

Ryan loped down the hall toward the exit.

“Find your friend’s phone?” the woman at the entrance asked.

Ryan kept running, needing to put some distance between him and that place. He would find stomach stuff somewhere else, anywhere else. He would never go in that place again.

• • •

Marco sat outside the senator’s office contemplating what the hell the woman could ask of him next. He figured he deserved a major thank-you for last night’s festivities. Anything after the thank-you that didn’t include
And here’s a fried chicken basket as a reward
was going to set him to screaming.

The security guard had woken him from his cot some brief moment after Lights On. “The senator needs to see you,” was his only introduction. Marco figured she was eager to hear how he made such a success of this party insanity. He would try not to blurt out
Dumb luck
.

He peered into the office to see what was taking so long. The senator had a half-eaten bagel on her desk and the fat cell phone was again pressed to her ear.
Where did that woman get a
bagel
?
Marco salivated at the word.

“Well, that’s discouraging,” she said into the phone. “Chen tells me he’s gotten nowhere in here. But my hygiene initiative seems to be working. Only three hundred new admits yesterday.”

Three hundred. All destined for the ice-skating rink. How many more could be piled on before the whole thing cracked and crashed down into the medical center below? Maybe that would be better, save the trouble of transporting the bodies up a floor.

“I need more than twenty-four hours. Give me seventy-two at the least. I can show you real results in seventy-two.”

She sounded like she was bargaining. With whom? For what?

“I suppose I should say thank you.” She bit her bagel and chewed slowly. “Tomorrow, then.” She put down the phone but remained staring out the square of window.

Marco decided to knock. His stomach was growling. Maybe she’d share the bagel.

The senator glanced at the door, then swiveled in her chair to face him. “You failed me, Carvajal,” was how she began.

“I threw the party,” he said, confused. “Security came. Nice move checking people’s temperatures, by the way. How many sick did you sentence to the medical center?”

“Security did an excellent job controlling the party itself,” she said, patting her mouth with a napkin and replacing her mask. “I want to talk to you about the twenty or so people they found rampaging around the mall after being kicked out of the party by ‘some kid.’ I’m assuming this kid is you?”

That goddamned Ryan Murphy was screwing up everything in Marco’s life. Couldn’t the flu have killed him when it had the chance?

Marco cleared his throat. “It wasn’t me,” he said, banging together a plausible excuse. “I went to the can and some kid took up bouncer duty by the door.”

“These people you let escape? They smashed the front windows of the Jessica McClintock store and were caught defacing the mannequins. How do I explain this to the other mall residents? This makes it look like we don’t have control.”