Sky on Fire (20 page)

Batiste placated her, nodding and basically telling her, “Yes, yes. We're going to get him taken care of right away.” I couldn't understand his words, but I could see what he was saying. Placating his mom and grinning all the while.

Then he introduced Niko. And she listened to what Batiste was saying. She was hearing, no doubt, that this worn-out-looking boy with serious brown eyes and the gaunt, haunted expression had saved the life of her son.

“Niko-ya…,”
she said, tears again in her eyes.
“Gompata. Nomu nomu gompata, Niko-ya.”

She fumbled under her sweater and pulled a necklace over her head. It was a gold necklace, with a gold cross on it. A tiny Jesus there on the cross.

Batiste's mother pressed the necklace into Niko's palm and folded his fingers around it. Then she raised his hand and kissed the back of it again and again.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

DEAN

 

DAY 15

I screwed the tops on tight and shook them. A little spilled on the top of one of the bottles. I wiped it on my T-shirt. They had to look
perfect
.

I set them in my cart along with the soup and the crackers. I raced over to the paper plate aisle and grabbed some of those blue keg cups.

When I came wheeling back toward the Kitchen, the boys were just finishing sets of frog jumps. They started from a squat and then had to jump up and touch their heels together and then land and do the whole thing again.

It looked hard as hell and the cadets, and Jake, too, all looked like they might puke.

“Thirty seconds more! You can do it!”

I set up the juice on the table and chucked a Duraflame in the brass fire pit.

“Fifteen seconds, don't give up!”

I set the soup cans on the counter and grabbed a saucepan.

“Done! Good work, men!”

There were groans and curses from the cadets as they all basically collapsed.

“You guys should hydrate!” Payton commanded them.

Payton strolled over to me in the kitchen. He picked up one of the juice bottles and looked at it.

I tried not to stiffen.

“Drink water,” Payton directed over his shoulder. “You gotta hydrate with pure water.”

He put the juice bottle down and my heart sank.

I'd put all the pills in those bottles.

Dear God, what if Payton didn't like juice?

Payton headed off to the Food aisles. Maybe to find plain water.

I cursed to myself. I should have saved some of the pills. Were there more? Maybe there were more in the Pharmacy.…

*   *   *

But then Kildow and Greasy came over. Both were sweaty and thirsty, apparently.

Kildow opened the bottle and poured a keg cup full. He didn't notice that the seal on the bottle was already broken. Or if he did, he didn't care.

Greasy grabbed the other bottle and drank right from it.

“That's gross, man,” Kildow told him.

“Who cares?” Greasy answered. “There's aisles full of this stuff.”

He looked at the bottle.

“Ew, what is this?”

“It's juice, but it's got, like, vegetables in it,” I said.

“It's juice, but it's got, like, vegetables in it,”
Greasy parroted, mocking me.

I shrugged.

Zarember came forward, taking the other bottle. He poured a tumbler of it and drank.

“Tastes good to me,” he said, winking at me.

I felt bad. Zarember was definitely the nicest one. Here he was standing up for me and I had just drugged him.

Jake ambled over.

“What's this?”

I tried to tell him with my eyes, but he didn't see me. Too dark.

“Juice,” I said. “That kind Chloe liked.” I was trying to tell him somehow that, I don't know, the juice had the sleeping pills Niko had given Chloe and then I realized he wasn't even there when that happened. He had been out on the road.

Jake picked up the container and chugged.

“Jake!” I shouted, before I could stop myself.

And the cadets all looked at me.

I tried to play it cool.

“He's gonna puke, he chugs it like that.…”

And somehow I was right. Jake set the bottle down (now only half-full) and took two steps away and vomited all over the floor.

The cadets laughed and clapped one another on the back.

I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.

Payton came back hauling two gallon jugs of water.

“You idiots,” he scolded good-naturedly, “I told you to hydrate with water.”

Payton set the water down next to Jake.

“Welcome to the Air Force, son! You earned your first curl hurl!”

Laughing, Payton picked up the bottle of juice from the counter and smelled it.

“Smells off,” he said.

Payton hadn't drunk any and neither had the tall, gangly cadet, Jimmy Doll Hands.

*   *   *

Then Anna came back.

“There's a room,” she announced, sounding as bored as she could possibly sound. “There's a camp stove and bunks in the back. It was all hidden away.”

“What?” Payton asked.

“They hid it from us,” Anna said. “And there's lots of clothes there and stuff.”

Payton strode across the Kitchen, to where I was stirring the soup.

He grabbed me by the hurt shoulder.

The pain seared through me and I cried out.

“A
secret
? We take you in, we hook you up, make you part of our squadron, and you're keeping
secrets
from us?”

He threw me down to the ground and my head hit the side of the fire pit. Sparks flew up in the air.

Payton marched over to Jake.

Just then, Kildow sat down, heavily, into a bench.

Payton grabbed Jake by the hair and dragged him to his feet.

“WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO TELL ME, JAKEY?” he screamed.

“Payton, please!” Jake pleaded. “I'm sorry!”

“You're sorry?”

“We meant to tell you but then it was too late!”

“Yeah it's too late!” Payton shouted. He punched Jake in the face. “Hit me back! Hit me back, you lying sack, and then we'll see what happens!”

Jake was bleeding from the nose. His head hung down. He looked defeated.

“You won't hit me back because you know I will destroy you!”

Payton kicked Jake in the side and he fell to the ground. Jake didn't move. He was out.

Then there was a heavy
THWOMP
kind of a sound and Greasy had passed out.

Zarember groaned and fell to his knees and then face forward onto the floor.

“What the hell?” Payton hollered. “What did you do to my men?”

He looked up, and looked at me.

“It-it-it must be the juice,” Jimmy stammered. “You and me didn't have any!”

“Grab him!” Payton shouted.

I tried to get away, but Jimmy caught my leg and tripped me.

Payton snatched a handgun from a pile of the cadets' gear.

Then he grabbed me and slammed me down onto the top of one of the tables in the Pizza Shack.

It was the same table I'd hidden under with Astrid during the earthquake, one million years ago.

Payton pressed the gun into my eye socket.

“I should never have trusted you, Deano. You got the look of a freakin' intellectual about you, you know that? What'd you do to my boys and why'd you keep secrets from me?”

Then there came two delicious sounds.

First a scream—“Uncle
Payton
!”—from Anna.

And then the
ROAR
of a battery-powered chainsaw.

Astrid stood in the middle of the fallen cadets out on the gym space. She held the chainsaw in one hand and in the other she had Anna by the hair. In the darkness behind her, I could see the little kids.

“You get away from Dean,” she commanded.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ALEX

 

0 MILES

“Where
were
you guys?!” Sahalia shouted. “I've been waiting for an hour! I thought I lost you.”

She looked small and scared. I always thought of her as being so mature. But now she looked her age. The same age as me, that is. Thirteen.

She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a large sweater. Her hair pulled out of her face. She looked squeaky clean.

She only forgave us when we explained about Batiste and how happy he looked going off with his mom.

After we got clothes, we were each given a backpack.

They were white, with no logo at all. They had inside them a little Dopp kit, with a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, and soap. Also some basic first aid stuff—wound wash, Band-Aids, antibiotic ointment, a foil pack of pain pills.

All the food vendors: Wolfgang's, Burger King, Pizza Shack, etc. had been turned into mess halls. The food was the same (from what I've been told) for every meal. Oatmeal for breakfast, with fruit, if you got there early enough. Beef stew for lunch (no one there was a vegetarian, I guess).

Chicken stew for dinner. Rice on the side. Oranges for dessert. Sometimes apples.

There were boxes and boxes of bottled water to drink.

We stood there, a little lost. People bustled around in every direction.

I scanned the faces passing by, hoping to see one of our parents. If I could find them in time, they'd make someone go back for you.

But it was useless. There were thousands of people milling and pushing past.

“Look!” Sahalia said. She pointed up to a big board.

It had numbers listed in batches, along with hours of departures and gate information. Like 7,989–8,425 Gate B7 11:45 a.m.

Our numbers weren't even on the board yet.

“Let's get food,” Niko said. He was carrying Max on his back, piggyback style. “Then I'm going to get you guys to the gate.”

“What are you going to do then?” Sahalia asked, sounding edgy.

“I'm going to go find someone and organize a rescue.”

I looked at Niko. I couldn't read any emotion on his face.

“Do you mean it?” I said.

“Of course.”

Before I could get excited, Max threw up. It was pure bile—a weird neon-green color. His eyes rolled in the back of his head and he started to shake.

People around us screamed and made a commotion.

A big guy helped Niko to get Max down onto the ground but Max was still shuddering and shaking.

“We need a medic!” someone shouted. “We need a medic here!”

Grown-ups were all over us now, and we were getting pushed apart.

“Clear back!” shouted a woman. “Clear BACK!”

She was a reservist—we'd seen lots of them on the inside of the airport. Their uniforms were a little different from the regular Army soldiers.

She pushed the adults back with one arm and with the other she escorted an overweight medic. He had a satchel full of medical supplies and a red cross painted on his uniform.

He removed a syringe of some kind and shot it into Max's arm and the quaking stopped.

“He's going to be okay,” the medic said.

“All right, you heard him. The boy's going to be fine. Everyone get to your gates. We need to get you out of here as soon as possible, folks! This is an evacuation, not a sideshow!” the reservist bellowed.

She had gray hair pulled back in a bun and was much shorter than the other soldier, but she was clearly the boss. She wore camouflage fatigues and had the three bars of a sergeant on her arm.

Then Ulysses asked something in his heavy accent.

His eyes were wide and he was pointing at the lady.

I couldn't believe what he was saying and I turned to see the lady reservist's face.

Ulysses repeated, “Mrs. Wooly?”

And it was.

It was Mrs. Wooly, Dean!

It said it right there on her uniform:
WOOLY
.

She looked at Ulysses blankly for a moment. Her face just wiped clean of all emotion and then she shouted, “Ulysses Dominquez?”

She looked at him, at Niko, at me and Max and Sahalia, and then she gave a kind of screech. A giant, triumphant screech!

And she hugged Sahalia, nearly lifting her off the ground. And then she hugged me and Niko and Ulysses.

“These are my kids, Goldsmith!” she shouted to the medic. “These are the ones I've been telling you about!”

“No kidding,” he said, already at work bandaging Max's feet. “Really? From Monument?!”

Ulysses got down next to Max and was trying to wake him up, to show him we'd found Mrs. Wooly.

Max's eyes fluttered open.

“Look!” Ulysses crowed. “Mrs. Wooly!”

Max looked up at her. He started to cry. “Why didn't you come for us?”

“Oh, Max, I tried,” she said.

“We waited and waited!” Max wailed.

Mrs. Wooly pressed her hand to Max's forehead.

“I tried to come for you, buddy. I put in a request with my CO but that didn't look like it was going to pan out. So I've been asking every chopper pilot I meet if he would just sneak me over to go and look for you but none of them would do it for me.”

The medic finished wrapping Max's feet. He patted Mrs. Wooly on the shoulder and headed off.

Sahalia was looking at Mrs. Wooly with an emotion I couldn't read. Anger? Contempt?

“We needed you!” Sahalia said accusingly. “We lost … we lost people. Brayden got shot! If you had come…” She couldn't finish the sentence, but she didn't really need to.

Mrs. Wooly pushed some hair out of Sahalia's face. She took Sahalia's hand in hers.

“Oh, Sahalia, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that whatever happened happened. It must have been horrible, honey,” she said in her gravelly voice.

“I made it to the high school and I was trying to get a hold of a bus to come for you guys and there was this little kind of riot there and then this alert came over the radio. I had to report for duty. That's how it is for us. When called to serve, we gotta serve. But I swear to you I've spent every moment trying to figure out how to get you rescued. But none of that matters. You're here. You made it.”