Plague (12 page)

Lana laughed, caught herself, laughed again. Then she kept laughing, stopping, trying not to laugh again, and failing.

“I don’t know why I’m laughing,” she said, almost apologizing and definitely puzzled.

Sanjit smiled.

“I don’t know why I’m laughing,” Lana said again.

“You’re probably a little stressed,” Sanjit said dryly.

“You think?”

Lana laughed again and Sanjit realized he was really enjoying her laugh. It wasn’t silly or hysterical. It was, like everything about this strange girl, wise, sardonic. Profound. Mesmerizing.

“Oh, dude,” she said, sobering. “Is that what you’re here for? Laughter is the best medicine? Is that it? Am I your act of charity or whatever? Heal the Healer with the power of laughter?”

The full force of her cynicism was back on display.

“I don’t think I want to heal you,” Sanjit said.

“Why not?” she snapped. “I mean, let’s not lie, huh? I’m about as screwed up as a girl can be. I am a monument to screwed up. Why don’t you want to heal me? I’m a freaking mess!”

Sanjit shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You think I’m so messed up, it will be easy to get into my pants, is that it? I’m an easy target?”

“Lana,” Sanjit said, “you carry a pistol and look like you’ll use it. You have a dog. You tried to kill a monster all on your own. Trust me when I say, no one. No. One. No one looks at you and thinks, ‘She’ll be easy.’”

Lana sighed wearily, but Sanjit didn’t believe the sigh or the weariness. No. She wasn’t tired of him.

He said, “I saw you. I heard your voice. I connected. It’s not very complicated. I just had a feeling. . . .”

“Feeling?”

Sanjit shrugged. “Yeah. A feeling. Like the whole point of my life, from the alleys in Bangkok, to the yachts and private island, to coming here like a crazy person trying to fly a helicopter, like all of it, from birth to here, point A to point Z, was all some big cosmic trick to get me to meet you.”

“Whatever,” she said dismissively.

He waited.

“The other day you said I was the second bravest girl you ever met. Who was number one?”

Sanjit’s smile disappeared. In the space of a heartbeat he was back there, in that filthy alley smelling of rotten fish, curry, and urine.

“The pimp who knocked my teeth out? He was going to finish me off,” Sanjit said. “You know? To send the message that you couldn’t refuse him. He had a knife. And man, I was already half dead. I couldn’t even move. And this girl was there. No idea where she came from. I never saw her before. She, uh . . .”

Suddenly, to his own amazement, he couldn’t talk. Lana waited until he found his voice again. “She came up to the guy and just said, ‘Don’t hurt him anymore.’”

“So he let you go? Just like that?”

“Not quite. Not quite. She was a pretty girl, maybe eleven, twelve years old. So, you know, a nice-looking young boy is worth some cash to a pimp. But a pretty young girl, well, she was worth more.”

“He took her?”

Sanjit nodded. “I was sick for about a week, I guess. Thought I was going to die. Crawled as far as a pile of garbage and just . . . Anyway, when I was able to move again I looked for her. But I didn’t find her.”

The two of them sat there looking at each other. It seemed to go on for quite a while.

“I have to go to town,” Lana said finally. “I can’t seem to cure the flu thing. So much for being the Healer. But I can at least deal with the usual broken bones and burns and so on.”

“Of course,” Sanjit said and stood up. “I’ll let you go.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t come with me,” Lana practically snarled.

Sanjit suppressed the smile that wanted badly to break out across his face. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“DEKKA.
WAKE UP.”

Her eyes opened. She blinked up at Sam. It was full daylight. Not even early morning, later. She had slept a long time.

A sharp intake of breath. She jumped up and began patting her body, probing, pushing, feeling for anything that shouldn’t be there.

The divot in her shoulder burned like fire.

Her stomach growled. Her feet ached. Her scraped shins hurt. So did her back from sleeping on a rock.

“I hurt all over,” Dekka said.

Sam looked concerned.

“I mean, that’s good. Hunter couldn’t feel much of anything, right?”

Sam nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. So I guess burning a hole in you was actually a good thing?”

“Not quite ready to find that funny, Sam. Where’s Jack?”

Sam pointed toward the top of a hill. They were in a very dry and empty place. The hill wasn’t much more than two hundred feet high and was more of a dirt mound than a mountain.

Jack was at the top, shading his eyes and looking to the northeast.

“What do you see?” Sam yelled to him.

“There’s a place over that way that looks like it’s all burned.”

Sam nodded. “Yeah. The hermit’s shack. What else?”

“Bunch of rugged-looking hills, all rocky and stuff,” Jack yelled. He started to climb down but the dirt was loose, so he slid and slipped and fell. Then he stood up again and jumped.

He jumped thirty feet and landed very near Sam.

“Dude,” Sam said.

“Huh,” Jack said. “I never realized I could do that.”

“There might be other ways you can use that strength, too,” Sam said.

“I wish I could use it to find some water.”

“Dekka, what do you think? We climb those mountains or go through the burned zone?”

“I kind of hate climbing.”

“The mine shaft isn’t too far from the shack,” Sam pointed out.

“Yeah. I remember where it is,” Dekka said. “We just don’t go there.”

It wasn’t far to the shack. Or more accurately the few charred sticks that marked Hermit Jim’s shack. Sam pulled out the map again. He measured with his fingers. “It looks like six or seven miles to the lake. I guess we’ll all get a drink when we get there.”

The Santa Katrina Hills were on their left now. They were bare stone and dirt, and some of the rock formations looked as if they’d been shoved right up out of the earth, like the dirt was still sliding off them. Off to the right there was the taller mountain, and the cleft in that mountain, which hid the ghost town and the mine shaft.

None of them spoke of that place.

It was an hour’s thirsty walk across very barren land before they reached a tall chain-link fence. The dirt was the same on either side of the fence. As far as they could see there was nothing that needed fencing.

There was a dusty, rusty metal sign.

“‘Warning, restricted area,’” Jack read aloud.

“Yep,” Sam said. “We are subject to search.”

“How great would it be if someone did come and arrest us?” Dekka said wistfully.

“Jack. Rip down the fence.”

“Really?”

“The barrier’s that way.” Sam pointed. “We should hit the barrier and follow it to the lake. And like Dekka says: if there was anyone around here to arrest us, it would be great. They’d have to feed us and give us something to drink.”

Sam wasn’t sure quite what he expected to find at the Evanston Air National Guard base. He wasn’t sure quite what he’d been hoping for. Maybe a barracks full of soldiers. That would have been excellent. But failing that, maybe a giant tank of water. That would have been nice, too.

What they found instead were a series of underground bunkers. They were identical on the outside: sloping concrete ramps leading down to a steel door. Jack kicked the first one open.

Sam provided illumination. Inside was a long, low room. Completely empty.

“Probably kept bombs here or something.”

“Nothing here now,” Jack said.

They opened four more of the bunkers before admitting that there was nothing to be found.

Wandering through the bunker field they came upon a truck with the keys in the ignition. The battery was dead. But there was a liter bottle of Arrowhead water, half full.

The three of them rested in the shade of the truck and shared the water.

“Well, that was disappointing,” Sam acknowledged.

“You wanted to find bombs?” Dekka asked.

“A giant supply of those meals soldiers eat, what are they called?”

“MREs,” Jack said. “Meals ready to eat.”

“Yeah. Some of those. Like, maybe a million of those.”

“Or at least the truck could have worked so we could drive and not walk,” Dekka grumbled.

They started walking again. Already the half liter of water seemed like a distant memory. They began to notice the blankness of the barrier looming ahead. It rose sheer from the sand and scrub.

“Okay, so we hang a left. Let’s go find this lake and get back to town,” Sam said.

They kept the barrier on their right. The terrain was getting more difficult, with deep gullies, like dry riverbeds, cracks in the desert smoothness.

Ahead, shimmering like a mirage, was a low building that reminded Sam of the kind of “temporary” building schools sometimes resorted to. There were few windows and these showed the horizontal slats of ancient blinds. Air-conditioning units poked out of the walls in several places.

In a parking area there were more sand-colored camouflaged trucks. A couple of civilian cars. All neatly squared away between white lines.

A tall antenna stabbed at the sky. And beyond the building a tumbled mess of huge rust- and ochre- and dust-colored blocks.

“Hey, that’s a train!” Jack said.

Sam checked the map. Only now did he notice the cross-hatched line indicating a railroad track. He hadn’t known what it was before.

Sam wished he’d thought to bring binoculars. There was something off about the building. It was too isolated. Although, Sam reminded himself, there might be a whole bunch of buildings just beyond the FAYZ wall. So maybe this one building was just at the edge of a big compound.

But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like this place was deliberately far from anything else. He doubted it would even be noticeable from a satellite photo. Everything except the few cars were painted the same ochre color as the surrounding emptiness.

“Let’s check the building first.”

The door was unlocked. Sam opened it cautiously. Dirt and dust had filtered onto the polished linoleum floor. A main room, two hallways leading away, and two private offices behind glass partitions. There were half a dozen gray-painted metal desks in the main room and old-style rolling office chairs, some with mismatched cushions. The computers on the desks were blank. Lights off. Air-conditioning obviously off, too; the room was stifling.

Sam glanced at framed photos on a desk: someone’s family, two kids, a wife, and either a mother or a grandmother. He spotted a stress ball on another desk. There were official-looking binders and racks of ancient floppy disks.

Everything was dusty. Flowers in a tiny vase were just sticks. Papers had flowed from desks onto the floor.

It was eerie. But they had all seen plenty of eerie: abandoned cars, empty homes, empty businesses.

One thing they had not seen in a very long time: a jar of Nutella was open on one desk, lid nowhere to be seen, and a spoon standing inside.

The three of them leaped as one.

“There’s some left!” Jack cried with the kind of pure joy that should have signaled the discovery of something far more important.

Sam and Dekka both grinned. It was a large jar, and it was at least half full.

Jack lifted the spoon. The Nutella dripped languidly.

Jack closed his eyes and stuck the spoon in his mouth. Without a word he handed the spoon to Dekka.

It was like a religious ritual, like communion. The three of them taking spoonfuls, one after the other, each silent, each awed by the wonder of intense flavor, of sweetness after so much fish and cabbage.

“It’s been, like, how long?” Dekka asked. “It’s sweet.”

“Sweet and creamy and chocolaty,” Jack said dreamily.

“Why is it still creamy?” Sam asked.

Jack had the spoon. He froze. “Why is it still creamy?” he echoed.

“This jar had to have been opened months ago, back before FAYZ fall,” Sam said. “It would be all dried out. All crusty and stiff.”

“I’d still eat it,” Dekka said defiantly.

“This wasn’t opened months ago. This hasn’t been open for even a few days,” Sam said. He put the jar down. “There’s someone here.”

Jack had started reading some of the papers strewn carelessly about. “This was a research station.”

Dekka was tense, looking around for intruders, enemies. “Research on what? Weapons? Aliens?”

“‘Project Cassandra,’” Jack read. “That’s the header on most of the memos and stuff. I wish I could get into these computers.”

“Someone is here,” Sam said, sticking to the most important fact. “Someone who can unscrew a jar of Nutella and eat it with a spoon. Which makes it not a coyote. There’s a person here.”

“Someone from Perdido Beach?” Dekka wondered. “Maybe someone left town and found this place and never came back. It’s not like we would notice everyone who ever left.”

“Or someone from Coates.” Sam made a motion with his hand, indicating silently that he would go down the hallway to the left and Jack and Dekka should be ready to back him up.

It wasn’t a long hallway. Just four doors on each side. Milky light came through a reinforced glass window in the door at the far end of the hallway.

Sam opened doors, one at a time. The first two opened onto empty private offices. The next opened to a dingy room with a metal table and chairs, facing each other. A screen was on one wall. A clipboard was on the floor.

Sam picked it up. “‘Project Cassandra,’” he read aloud. “‘Subject 1-01. Test number GV-788.’”

He placed the clipboard on the table and went to the next room.

He opened this room and instantly knew someone was inside. Even before he saw anyone.

This room had a window of regular glass and sunshine poured in. There was a bed, a desk, a large blank TV mounted on one wall. Game players lay dusty beneath the screen.

Books were piled high on a side table.

And one book was in the hands of a boy who sat in a reclining chair with his feet up on the desk. He was maybe twelve. His black hair hung down his back almost to his waist. He would probably be tall when he stood up. Thin. Dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a black-and-white Hollywood Undead T-shirt.

“Hi,” Sam said. He frowned.

The boy barely reacted.

“Don’t I know you?” Sam pressed.

The boy looked at him with eyes narrowed to slits. He smiled a little. He seemed to want to go back to his book.

“Dude,” Sam said. “Aren’t you Toto?”

The boy’s eyebrows went up. His lip quivered. He said, “Is he real?”

He was speaking to a life-sized Styrofoam head of Spider-Man, complete with blue and red cowl, that rested on a shelf.

“I’m real,” Sam said. Then he yelled, “Dekka! Jack!”

“Why is he yelling?” Toto asked Spidey. “He could be a Decepticon.”

“I’m not a Decepticon,” Sam said, feeling a bit ridiculous.

“It’s the truth,” Toto told Spidey. “He’s not a Decepticon. But maybe he works for the Dementors, for Sauron, for the demon.”

“What are you talking about, Toto?” Sam asked.

Jack and Dekka came rushing up. “Whoa,” Dekka said.

“He knows what I’m talking about,” Toto told Spider-Man. “He guesses, he’s testing. ‘What are you talking about, Toto?’ he says. Right. He knows. He knows the demon.”

“I don’t work for anyone,” Sam said.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire. Someone sent you.”

“Albert, but—”

“They always try to lie, but it never works, does it?” Toto said.

Sam turned to Dekka. “I think our boy here has been alone for a long time.”

“He means I’m crazy.” Toto addressed Dekka directly, not Spider-Man, though he glanced back at the Spidey head and seemed torn between Dekka and the web slinger. “The truth teller, truth teller Toto.”

“Are you test subject 1-01?” Jack asked.

Toto didn’t seem to hear. But now tears were welling in his eyes. “One zero one. Yes. One zero two, what happened to her, do you want to hear?”

“Yes,” Sam answered.

“Should we say, Spidey?” Toto bared his teeth and snarled, “She used to live across the hall. Darla. She was eight. All her stuff was Hello Kitty. She could walk through walls. She didn’t want to stay, she wanted to go home, so she tried to just walk right through the wall to the outside and the guards tased her as she was going through and you know what happened?”

“Tell us.”

“He doesn’t want to know, not really, does he?” Toto asked Spidey. “He’s seen too many bad things, hasn’t he? But I’ll tell him anyway, which is that the Taser froze her halfway through the wall. She died. They had to bust out the whole wall to get her out of there.”

“Albert’s cat,” Jack said.

Sam nodded. They’d all heard the story of the teleporting cat that misjudged and solidified with a book inside it.

“They aren’t surprised,” Toto said. He tilted his head and shook it back and forth, vastly amused by some secret joke. “They know, don’t they?” he asked Spidey.

“Yeah, we know,” Sam said. He raised his hand, palm out, and fired a brilliant green beam at Spider-Man’s head. The fabric of the cowl caught fire and the Styrofoam within melted.

Toto’s pale face went paler. He swallowed hard and looked directly at Sam for the first time.

“Sorry, man,” Sam said. “But honestly we have all the crazy we can stand. And we don’t have all day.”

“Yes, he’s telling the truth, he’s in a hurry.”

“He’s still talking to Spider-Man,” Dekka pointed out. “He’s nuts.”

“Yeah, well, we’re all a little nuts, Dekka,” Sam said.

“No, he’s not nuts, the Sam boy,” Toto said and he shook his head back and forth. Then, slyly, he added, “Anyway, he doesn’t think he is.”

“We’re looking for a big lake. Lake Tramonto. You know how to get there?”

“We don’t know how to get anywhere,” Toto said. Suddenly he looked as if he might cry. “Where’s Spidey?”