Pass/Fail (2012) (26 page)

He didn’t think this strange emptiness would last. Every person in town hadn’t just got up and moved away forever in the middle of the night. They had to be coming back—and when they did, Jake knew the first order of business would be to march him behind the gym and shoot him. Just like, presumably, they had already done to D.

Why they hadn’t done that already—why they were giving him this eerie grace period all alone by himself in a half-finished town—remained a mystery. But maybe he could take it more as an opportunity. He could load up a car with food and water and drive west, toward the mountains. Toward New Mexico. Mr. Irwin had thought he would be safe there, that it was far enough away that Mr. Zuraw couldn’t track him there. Of course, he’d been wrong.

Jake might have to go farther than that. He might have to go to California. Or Mexico. What he would do when he got there was anybody’s guess, but at least he would be alive.

There was plenty of water in the pantry still but the selection of canned foods was limited. Jake headed down to the garage to fire up the station wagon and take it to the local grocery store. When he got down there, however, he found that the garage was empty and both of his parents’ cars were gone.

He didn’t really worry, though, until he checked the Campbell’s garage, and the Flemings’. There were no cars there, either. Still he kept his cool and spent the rest of the day looking for a car anywhere in the neighborhood. Then in the center of town.

By nightfall he had confirmed there wasn’t a single car, truck, or even a bicycle left within the entire township. When the people left they must have taken their vehicles with them.

This was going to be harder than he’d expected.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

He spent the next few days getting ready.

In a sporting goods store in the center of town he found a good backpack, the kind mountain climbers and long-distance hikers used. It had two big compartments and an aluminum frame that only weighed a few pounds, and best of all it had a built-in water sack with a plastic tube he could suck on when he got thirsty. In a clothing store he found a good hat with a floppy brim and a string he could tighten under his chin.

He was going to walk through the desert, following the roads where he could, until he reached the mountains. D had survived up there for years—though Jake was pretty sure it wouldn’t be easy, or much fun, he was pretty sure he could do the same. After all he and D shared the same DNA, the same ability to solve problems and get out of bad situations.

It was possible that before he reached the mountains, he would see some sign of human life again. Jake was willing to believe that Mr. Zuraw had evacuated the entirety of Fulton in one night, but he just didn’t think it would be possible to clear out the entire state—certainly it wouldn’t be done just for one weird educational experiment that had to be kept secret from the general population. Jake fully expected to walk just a few miles and find a bustling little town just over the next hill, full of people going about their daily business, living perfectly normal lives.

He wasn’t sure if he could trust them. For all he knew the police in every town in Arizona had an eye out for a seventeen year-old boy who looked like he’d just realized his whole life was a lie.

If he met anyone on the road, he would have to play it by ear. Honestly he would be so happy to see another living human being, he wasn’t sure he could make a good, logical choice, so maybe his best option was to travel by night and hide if he saw any car headlights.

He had a lot to think about, a lot of planning to do. Luckily he had a lot of free time.

Thinking that made him laugh out loud. He was in the middle of the town center and he looked around quickly to see if anyone had heard him. That made him laugh even harder.

He was just outside the township offices, which included the public library. He’d been meaning to come down there for a while, intending to search the library for any books on desert survival techniques. As he stepped inside the darkened offices and switched on his flashlight, the beam touched something golden at the far end of a hallway. Jake headed that way to get a better look and saw he’d lit up three letters painted in gold on an otherwise unremarkable door:

YSC

It couldn’t be, he told himself. The door was right between the offices of the PTA and the School Board, which he supposed was an appropriate place for it, but there was no way the acronym stood for what he thought it did. There was no way the Youth Steering Committee met in such an undistinguished place. Mr. Zuraw had even told him as much—after luring him into the maze of death, he’d told Jake that the YSC were some of the most important people in the country, and that they could meet wherever they liked. Surely this couldn’t be it. And Jake had been down that hallway dozens of times. How had he missed the gold letters every single time?

He pushed open the door. The room beyond was windowless and dark. Jake opened his pack and took out a battery-powered lantern he’d found in the sporting goods store. Switching it on, he carried it inside the room and placed it in the middle of the floor. The light didn’t show much, but Jake could make out the edge of a horseshoe-shaped table that ran around three walls, leaving an open space in the center where someone could stand and address the entire Committee at once. He also saw more flashes of gold.

He was shaking a little when he walked up to the nearest patch of gold and picked it up. It was soft in his hand. A mask. A mask like the Proctors wore, but gold instead of silver.

“I’ve been here before,” Jake said, out loud. He almost expected a reply. The last time he’d been in that room, it had been full of people. People in golden masks. The memory came back so fast it hurt. It literally gave him a headache. It felt like a bandage was being torn back inside his head.

He’d almost remembered when he was down in the maze. He’d seen the golden masks in his head, but had thought it was just his imagination acting up. Now it all came back to him and he knew he’d been summoned here the very day he was born.

Born of course was the wrong word. The day his vat had coughed him up, was more like it. He’d been brought here, naked, still wet, and completely docile. Full of drugs that kept him from acting out and also from forming long-term memories. He had to see the place again to remember any of it.

“We want you to pass the tests, Jake,” someone had said to him. A kindly voice. Not like the electronic buzz of the Proctors at all—this was the voice your father had when you were a baby. The voice you wish your father had. It was soothing, and merciful, and warm. “Will you try your hardest for us?”

Jake had nodded happily. He would do anything for that voice.

The ring of gold masks around him had focused on him, twelve mirrors, not quite perfect mirrors: where the masks of the Proctors reflected only who you were, the masks of the YSC showed you what you could be, what your best self might be.

“We’re very proud of you, Jake. You’ve done very so well so far. The last seven times you came very close. This time we want you to go all the way.”

“I will,” Jake had said, in a voice so full of determination and desire it made him wince to hear it in his memory.

To them there was no difference between McCartney, Jake A and McCartney, Jake H. The next clone out of the vat would still be part of the same experiment, one more lab rat in the same old cage. Jake had thought the YSC would be shocked to hear how excessive the tests had become under Mr. Zuraw. He knew now that they had forced Mr. Zuraw to become what he was. Their need, their desperate desire for someone who could pass the tests, had pushed and warped him until he’d become the murderous lunatic who had made Jake’s life an empty joke.

There was a single sheet of paper on the horseshoe-shaped table. It was a memo, a report from Mr. Zuraw. Jake read what it said without understanding much: “Subject H displays remarkable skill at test-completion, even when averaged with past results, but is easily distracted by social cues. My informant, Codename Y, reports increased anxiety and a deficit of task-orientation whenever subject H is in close proximity to the female. Y’s recommendation is to divert the female from her attachment to H, and I concur.”

Jake scrunched up the paper in his hand, crunching it into a tiny, dense ball. They had planned his whole life out in this room, point by point. Zuraw and Codename Y had made all his decisions for him. They had—

Something struck Jake then. Codename Y. CODename Y. CODY.

Jake left the room, not bothering to shut the door. He didn’t go to the library. Instead he wandered out of the township offices and into the street. There was nothing there he wanted, just then.

He had to go to the school. He had to go down into the maze again, and find Mr. Zuraw’s office. Not the guidance office, but the place the madman had gone to hide. Jake was sure he would be down there, still pulling his strings and working his machinery. Getting ready for the next series of tests. He would find him down there, and he would—he would—

He had no idea what he would do.

His feet kept walking toward the school, even as his brain tore at itself. Tried to reconcile everything that had happened, everything he had learned. Before, during the lightning round, he hadn’t had time to think about the fact that his mother was a Proctor. Or that his best friend had been deceiving him—and spying on him—his entire life. Now he had time to think about everything. Now he had time to feel.

He was almost jogging toward the school, running past empty street after empty street where the houses were empty, the promises were empty, the people had always, always been empty, when he stopped so suddenly he had to catch himself before he fell over. He had seen something out of the corner of his eye. Something that just couldn’t be.

Over there—that was Megan’s house. It was as dark and as empty-looking as all the others. Except… it wasn’t. He looked closer. Something was off. Yes, there. In one of the first-floor windows.

A human hand pressed up against the glass. A girl’s hand.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

He had to break down her door to get inside. It was locked and the deadbolt was set. He shouted her name and hammered on the door but when she didn’t respond he had to rush it with his shoulder, the way D had knocked down the doors in the underground maze. Jake had never been physically tough and he thought all he would get for his trouble was a broken arm, but when he hit the door it crumpled like balsa wood and he fell through, onto the carpet of her foyer.

Inside the house was silence and dust. He was encouraged at least to see there was furniture, that it wasn’t just the empty shell of a house. The air smelled stale and dry and was suffocatingly hot.

He found Megan in the living room, her top half sprawled across a couch with her arm up to touch the window, her legs dangling behind her. Her left leg was swollen and purple at the ankle. She was wearing a silk nightie and she was a mess.

Her hair was unkempt, her face pale white. Her eyelids fluttered when he turned her over but they didn’t open. She wasn’t conscious and he was terrified she was going to die on him.

He couldn’t wake her. He tried shaking her by the shoulders, then he tried chafing her wrists but her eyes wouldn’t open. Her lips were badly chapped and he thought she might be dehydrated, but when he tried pouring some water into her mouth she gagged and spat it out. He searched the house until he found a bathroom and then soaked a hand towel in water from his pack. When he put the end of the towel in her mouth she sucked at it for a while. He mopped her face and arms with the wet towel to try to cool her down.

Careful not to touch her injured leg too much, he pulled her up onto the couch so she was in a comfortable position. Then he sat down in an armchair where he could watch her, and tried to think of what to do next.

Cell phones
, he thought.

It shamed him, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. D had said that cell phones and computers were common outside of Fulton. That even kids had them. Yet when Megan had seen a cell phone in Jake’s presence, she had acted as if she’d never seen one before in her life. If she had claimed to come from some small town that was behind the times, maybe he would have believed that reaction. But she said she was from Chicago—certainly if cell phones were as common as D said, they would have them in a major city like Chicago. He had asked her point blank if she’d ever seen a computer before, and she’d said no.

How real was she? How much of what she’d told him, of what she’d said to him was real—how real were her kisses? Cody had had his doubts. Of course, Cody had been working for Mr. Zuraw the whole time. Cody had lied every time he opened his mouth.

But that didn’t mean Megan was real.

The injury to her ankle was real. He was worried it might be broken. It had to be at least sprained to look as bad as it did. He should probably splint it. There was a fireplace in the living room, with a pile of wood sitting next to it. He picked out two short lengths of wood, not too thick. Then he took a table cloth from the dining room and tore it into strips. Careful not to jar her too much, he tied the splints to her leg to immobilize it. She would probably need a cast, but he didn’t have any plaster to make one, so the splint would have to do.

While he was finishing up she woke up, but he didn’t realize it until he sat back to inspect his work and then glanced up at her face. Her eyes were open. Those deep blue eyes, confident eyes. The eyes that had drawn him to her. Trusting eyes.

Cell phones
, he thought.
Kids in Chicago all have cell phones
.

But those eyes—they were hard to argue with. Those eyes watched him with recognition, and trust. And something more. Belief. She believed in him. She always had.

“Hi,” she said. Her voice was a weak croak.

“Hi yourself,” he told her.

“I fell down the stairs. I switched on the light but it didn’t work. In the dark I tripped,” she told him. “My leg—”