Pass/Fail (2012) (25 page)

He had to get Megan out of the school. He looked to his left and saw a corridor leading to a broad set of exit doors. “Come on,” he said to Megan. “I’ll go first, okay? I’ll lead you out of here.”

She nodded. Then she lifted the gun and swung it around, pointing it at the crowd. A lot of kids screamed, and not just the girls. Some of them tried to get back, to get away, and only succeeded in knocking over the people behind them.

Jake didn’t have time to reassure them, to calm down the panic building in that mass of people. He grabbed Megan’s free hand and dashed to the left, down the corridor. There were fewer kids down there—there was almost a free path all the way to safety.

Then Brent stepped out of the crowd. Brent, in his black t-shirt, the kid who had led Jake in circles through the maze of death. Brent who had never liked him. Brent stuck out one leg just as Megan was passing him. She went forward with her hands down to catch her and at first Jake thought she could recover, that she could get back up. But then her forehead bounced off the tile floor with a sickening thud. The gun flew out of her hand and skidded down the hallway, kids jumping backwards away from it as if it were a poisonous scorpion.

“Your girlfriend’s a psycho,” Brent said.

Jake made a fist and started to wind up for a punch to Brent’s jaw, but there was no time. In an instant, half the kids in the school were on top of him, on top of Megan.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Jake couldn’t see anything. There were bodies everywhere, and shouting, and hands grabbing him—he tried to fight them away but there were too many. He was being dragged, then carried, then dragged away, further away from Megan. That was all he knew. He called her name again and again but he couldn’t hear his own voice over the shouting. He heard someone crying close by.

It wasn’t her.

Suddenly there were fewer bodies around him and he was almost standing on his own feet. Someone grabbed his arm and he smacked at the intruding hand but then a face appeared before him—Cody’s face—looking scared, looking worried but Cody said something and hands behind Jake pushed him up fully onto his feet.

“Come on,” Cody said, just loud enough to be heard over the roaring.

Kids lined the halls, pressed up against the lockers three deep. There was just enough room in the middle of the hall to push through. Cody was moving through the crowd ahead of Jake, forcing a path through the kids. None of them looked at him, or at Jake. They were craning their heads around, pushing impatiently at each other trying to see what was going on behind Jake. He tried to turn around himself, to see if Megan was still back there but Cody grabbed him and spun him around to face forward again, to pull him forward through the crowd.

Jake just didn’t have much fight left in him. He allowed himself to be led out of the crowd, into a less populated section of the hall. Jake’s head started to clear when he had a good breath in his lungs and nobody was shouting in his ears. He started thinking again, then, and he called Megan’s name again.

Cody grabbed him hard. “She’s gone,” he said, his voice firm. It was not a statement you could argue with. “The police are already here, and they have her. You do
not
want to go with her.”

“I can explain it to them,” Jake said.

“No, you can’t, because right now nobody is listening. They’re going to close down every doorway in the school, lock us all in here. In here with Mr. Zuraw and the Proctors, do you understand? You have to get out, now.”

Yes. That made sense. Jake had received his third FAIL, and it was all over. Mr. Zuraw would already be looking for him. Looking to take him to his final appointment behind the gym, where he would get a bullet in the back of his head. Just as the guidance counselor had promised the first day of school. There was a finality about that logic that almost made Jake want to turn around and give up, turn himself in and take what was coming to him. The straightforward solution to the logic problem of his life.

“We have time, I think,” Cody said. “In all this confusion they won’t see us slip away.”

Jake thought about that. If he ran now, he could never come back to the school, never show his face anywhere in Fulton again.

But he would still be alive.

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe later, I can do something to help her.”

“Sure,” Cody said. “Just get out of here first. That door—I don’t see anyone guarding it. Not yet.” They headed through one of the exit doors on the side of the school. It didn’t lead anywhere except for a concrete path that curved around to the parking lot. Out that way Jake saw dozens of police cars sitting right in front of the school’s main doors, their lights flashing and painting the school blue and then red, blue and then red.

“We can’t go through there,” Cody said. “They won’t let anyone through, especially not you.”

Think. Just think
, Jake told himself.

“This way,” he said, and pointed around the other side of the school, toward the ruins and the desert beyond. “We can head out a ways, get out of view, and then double back to the highway.”

“Okay,” Cody said, and they set out at a fast walk, not wanting to look like they were running but not wanting to waste any time, either. They were both sweating and grimy by the time they reached the main road, but Jake was pretty sure no one had seen them. “Now what?” Cody asked.

“We could try to hitchhike into the city,” Jake suggested.

“Too risky,” Cody said. “We need a car of our own.”

“My station wagon,” Jake said. “And if we go to my house before we leave, I can grab some money I’ve been saving, we can change our clothes—”

“And get some water, maybe even some food to take with us,” Cody said, nodding.

They didn’t need to discuss what they were doing too much. It was just assumed, by both of them, that now the time had come they would run away together. Jake didn’t question too deeply the instant rapport the two of them shared. Cody had always been his best friend. They could usually finish each others’ sentences and they tended to think in very similar ways. In a crisis they made a perfect team. He remembered a time, when they were both twelve, and they—

No.

Jake had never been twelve.

But he’d always known Cody. They had always been best friends.

He couldn’t believe otherwise. Every time he tried to accept the evidence, to put together a logical deduction, he failed. Something in his brain wanted so badly to believe that he and Cody had grown up together, that they had always been best friends, that it was actively fighting the rational, thinking part of his brain.

That was dangerous, he knew. But it would be far more dangerous to try to get out of this situation without Cody. He wouldn’t have made it out of the school.

At his house Jake pushed open the door and then jumped to one side, expecting his mother or his father to come running at him with a gun. They were both at work, however—or wherever they went during the day—and Jake stepped inside into an empty house and went right to the kitchen. He grabbed the car keys and was looking around for food—fruit, cans of soup, anything that wouldn’t spoil before they could eat it—when he heard Cody calling his name from upstairs.

Maybe his dad was home after all. Jake dropped the keys on the counter and went to the bottom of the stairs. “Cody?” he called. “Everything okay? What are you doing up there?” Maybe Cody had heard something, or maybe he was just grabbing some clean clothes from Jake’s closet.

“Jake, come on up,” Cody said. He didn’t sound worried.

Jake headed up the stairs two at a time. When he reached the top he saw his door, at the end of the hall. It was wide open. A pale blue envelope was lying on the floor just inside his room.

He walked into his room, not knowing what was going on. Not knowing why there would even be an envelope there, he’d failed his last test, and—

A thought flashed through his mind. He’d never met Cody before the first day of school this year. Cody had been in Florida, with his grandmother, all summer long. And Jake hadn’t been born before that. Jake couldn’t think of a single clear memory of Cody before that day, because he knew he didn’t have any.

He spun around as the door slammed behind him. Cody had been pressed up against the wall. Now he lunged forward, something flashing in his hand. Jake felt a sharp sting in the side of his neck.

Cody stepped back again. He was holding a hypodermic syringe. A droplet of clear liquid beaded the end of the needle.

“Sleep,” Cody said.

Jake just had time enough to swear at his so-called friend, before everything went black.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Cody had betrayed him.

Cody was in on it. Maybe Cody was even one of the Proctors.

Jake didn’t wake up so much as fade back into consciousness. He spent a long time with his eyes open, lying on his back in his bed, convinced that everything was okay and there was no reason for him to move at all, no reason especially to sit up, to get out of bed. The sunlight moved across his room, lighting up one wall and then the other and then turning orange as the sun set again, and slowly he rolled over and started to stretch.

When he sat up he got a head rush so bad it made him squeak in pain. He had no idea what Cody had injected him with, but he could feel it still coursing through him, trying to drag him back down into the bed.

He fought back.

Rolling to the floor he saw the blue envelope lying by his door. He grabbed it up and tore it open by force of habit. It was a PASS, for all the good it did him. His next step was to get out of his room. He managed to get to the bathroom. After twenty-four hours asleep he needed that pretty badly. When he was done he crawled out into the hall and pushed himself up with his hands against the painted wall. He called out for his dad, for his mom. For anybody. Nobody replied. Maybe he was alone in the house.

It was starting to get dark outside. He staggered over to the light switch at the top of the stairs (being very careful not to fall down them) and flipped it on.

Nothing happened. Maybe the bulb was burnt out, he thought, and went back to the bathroom to try the light there. Nothing. In the lengthening shadows he looked down at the toilet. It had flushed just fine after he used it, but the bowl hadn’t refilled. He tried the taps on the sink. When he twisted the knobs all the way over he heard a faint, distant moaning sound but got not water.

That woke him up pretty fast. He headed downstairs and searched the house but found no one. Every light switch he tried was useless. There was no power, which also meant no air conditioning—which wasn’t just a luxury in Arizona, even this late in the year. There was no water, but at least he had a solution for that.

Before he tripped over something and broke his neck he found a flashlight in a kitchen drawer and flipped it on. With its narrow little beam he was able to find the three gallon jugs of water his mom had always kept at the bottom of the pantry. When you lived in the desert you got used to not having access to plentiful water and you made preparations against disaster. In the desert heat, those jugs would last Jake about three days, he knew. Surely, the water would be back on by then.

His next step was to go next door. The Campbells lived there, a nice retired couple, and he thought they might know what was going on. He rang their doorbell again and again but got no answer, so he went around back and tried the door there and found it open. Inside the house was clean and tidy. There was no sign of a struggle or a rapid departure. But nobody was home. Which was weird, since Mrs. Campbell was wheelchair-bound and hadn’t been away from her house by night in years—well, at least as long as Jake could remember.

He thought of the smiling little elfin face of Mr. Campbell, who was always working in his garden, tending to his succulents. The man had always had a wave and a nice word for Jake when he came home from school. It just wasn’t possible that Mr. Campbell was part of the Curriculum.

Was it?

Jake went to the next house down the block, which the Flemings owned, a family with two baby girls. Nobody was in when he forced the lock on their garage door, nobody asked him what the hell he thought he was doing when he tramped all over their house looking in vain for any sign of human occupation, any clue where they might have gone. He tried all their light switches and all their faucets, and nothing worked.

He didn’t know who owned the house third down the block, a pale blue ranch home with darker blue trim on the shutters and along the roof. He couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone in the yard. When he got inside he found nothing—nothing at all, just bare walls and floors, not a carpet, not a chair. There weren’t even any interior walls, just naked pillars holding the roof up. It was the shell of a house. Just enough of a house that when Jake walked past it he wouldn’t think it looked fake.

The fourth house on the block was the same. So was the fifth.

By that time Jake was starting to get pretty tired. There was still some of the drug in his system and he had been climbing around houses all evening in the last of the day’s heat. He drank water until he wasn’t thirsty anymore, then went back to his own bed, which stank of his own sweat but at least it was his. It seemed way too creepy to think about sleeping on someone else’s abandoned sheets.

In the morning nothing had changed, except that Jake was ravenously hungry and his throat was parched and burning.

He drank some water, which helped, and then opened up a can of soup and ate it raw. He would need to find a way to make fire, if this was going to go on for a while. He sometime expected a Proctor to jump out from behind him at any time and yell “surprise” but with each hour that passed that seemed less and less likely.

He spent a long part of that day just staring into space. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that—the last time he’d had a moment’s peace, a moment to think for himself. Eventually it got so boring he got up and got to work.

The first order of business was to get out of Fulton.