Trapped (12 page)

Within an hour it was snowing full force again, as if someone was up on the roof pushing it off by the shovelful. The daylight lasted just long enough for us to get a good look at this truly depressing sight. Everyone was back in the room, listening to the radio, and the mood had taken a nosedive.

Pete gave Jason and me this ridiculous excuse about how he’d tried to go to the shop to see the snow-kart but had gotten lost in the dark. So lame: The school wasn’t
that
big. We didn’t really push him on it, though. It didn’t seem like the time for it, with the storm back to full strength and everyone close together in the same room.

Listen, it’s not like I cared all that much what base Pete did or did not get to, out there on the stairs or wherever they were. It just kind of bothered me that he didn’t feel like he could tell his friends about it.

Anyway, right now, we were listening to Elijah. Will wonders never cease, right? He’d been talking to Les, and Les had been laughing, so Jason was like, “What’s so funny?”

We didn’t have a lot of entertainment options in our little room, and anything that’d take our minds off the cold was welcome. So now we were all facing Elijah, or his shadow, anyway. The sun had gone down and that was all you could see of anyone. We’d gotten pretty good at identifying people by their
shapes. It was the hoods, hats, and jackets that gave us away, since we’d been wearing the same outfits for days.

Elijah was talking about the time Georgie Tate had put his head through the sheetrock dividing wall in the library. We’d all heard about it, but Elijah was one of the few people who’d seen it happen. Like I said, he was always in the library.

He was saying that it wasn’t in a fight, like everyone thought. He hadn’t bull rushed Joe Sindelar and missed. Elijah was saying how it was a dare, and how Georgie was only mad at Joe afterwards.

It was a pretty funny story, actually. I guess you sort of have to know Georgie, who’s a nice enough guy but way too excitable. Anyway, the dare was to ram his head into the wall while the librarian was out of the room, and it just didn’t occur to him that he might end up putting his head right through the sheetrock.

So now we all knew the truth of what happened and we got to have a few last laughs at Georgie’s expense, and it was all thanks to Elijah. It was the first time he’d really spoken up much in the room. Mostly, he made little comments on the side to Les, and Les would make that little clucking laugh of his.

I’d assumed he was laughing because Elijah had said something weird or morbid or whatever, and that that’s why Les liked him. Now it occurred to me that maybe he was laughing because Elijah was actually kind of funny, nothing more complicated than that.

So anyway, we ended the day laughing, and that was fitting. The day hadn’t been all that bad. I mean, yeah, there was the
whole crapping-in-a-pudding-can thing, and it was nearly as cold inside as out now, but there’d been encouraging things too. A helicopter flew by the school — a “rescue chopper” Jason had called it — and the storm had let up for a while.

As decent as the day had been, it was a drag to bed down for another cold night on the hard floor. All of us were in here now, because it was too cold for Elijah and Les to stay across the hall. Our only heat sources were body heat and the hot air from any talking we might do. It wasn’t much against the whole outside, gone mad with winter. If you got too cold, you could go and sit in front of the fire bucket, but you had to sit right in front of it. That room was below freezing with the window open.

It wasn’t even seven o’clock, but it had been dark for a while. We’d just eaten the last scraps of food and would need to go back to the caf tomorrow. Now there was nothing to do except hunker down and listen to the radio. We’d all built little nests with our jackets and blankets and anything else we could find. Julie turned the radio up so we could all hear without leaving our nests.

The little window in the storm was passing over Hartford now. Andy was excited about it. He was looking out the window, and he could see some people moving around downtown with flashlights and camping lanterns. One guy even had a homemade torch, like a caveman in the city.

It was sort of fun to hear about. People were moving around and going outside for the first time in days. But those people didn’t know that the storm wasn’t over. I just hoped they didn’t wander too far into it.

A while later, we turned off the radio to save batteries. There was nothing to do but hope for sleep. Of course, another word for hope is pray, and that was something we could do too. Jason and I got up out of our nests. He’d found another blanket in a cupboard in the shop. It was made to throw over chemical fires and not for comfort, but it was better than relying on a bunch of sheets to stay warm. I’m not sure of my point here, except that it was a proper nest he was climbing out of.

Anyway, we kneeled there on the floor and prayed. Not loud, but enough so that we could hear each other.

“Gimme a break,” said Pete, tossing a book at us. “Bible thumpers!”

He was kidding. All he meant was that he wouldn’t be joining us, and that was fine. Jason went first, and he was halfway through when someone came up and joined us. I knew it was one of the girls, but it took me a while to figure out that it was Krista. It’s funny how you can recognize someone’s voice in how they cry. She was just crying a little, just small, soft sobs, and she got it under control once she knelt down.

I guess, if you think about it, church was probably something she did with her family. Now she didn’t know how much of her family was left. Same for Jason. I’m amazed we weren’t all crying, though I bet if you woke up in the night, you’d hear others.

Anyway, when it was my turn, I prayed to the archangel Gabriel. He’s the one with the trumpet, the one that made the announcements. That’s what we wanted, right? We wanted news. It didn’t have to be divine, just good.

The whole thing probably didn’t last more than three or four
minutes. Then we climbed back into our nests. Maybe we slept better, maybe we didn’t. I will say this: I only woke up once during the night. It was something I heard: a deep rumbling sound.

At first I thought it was thunder, but that was impossible. It doesn’t thunder during snowstorms, right? I was groggy and it was the middle of the night, so when I didn’t hear it again, I sort of wondered if I’d ever heard it in the first place. The mind plays tricks, you know? I guess if I’d thought about it more, I might’ve figured it out. But a few minutes later, I fell back to sleep.

It was still snowing the next morning. Of course it was. This would be our fourth straight day in the school and, without a doubt, the worst one yet. I didn’t know it at the time, but I guess I got a clue when I woke up to the sound of someone sneezing.

I was too sleepy to figure out where the sneeze had come from, but it didn’t really matter. Some kind of bug had been lingering in someone’s system, and after all these days of cold temps, crappy food, and not much in the way of sanitation, it’d pushed its way back to the surface. Soon, we’d all have it. How could we not? We were all living in the same room, windows closed.

I climbed out from under my blanket. No need to put my jacket back on. I hadn’t used it as a pillow the way I had the first few nights up here: I’d worn it. But still, the cold hit me as soon as I stood up, pricking my face and my fingers as I pulled on my sneakers and tied them. If I had to guess, I’d say the temperature was down to forty degrees in the main room now, and colder in the hallways. I put my gloves back on, straightened my hat, and went to the bucket room.

A wave of dark smoke hit me as I pushed the door open. For a second, I panicked, thinking maybe the bucket had tipped over and the whole room was on fire. But it was just a little smoke
pushing out into the open air of the hallway. When I got closer, I could see that the fire was almost out. I pulled a chair up in front of it, took my gloves off, and spent maybe five minutes getting it going again.

I added some of the paper we’d stacked under a brick nearby: notebook paper, old tests, stuff like that. Then I threw in a few more chunks of 2x4 and waited for it to catch. I was in no hurry, the warmth felt good on my fingers. Once it got going, I leaned down and let it warm my face. I took my hat off and pushed my fingers back through my greasy hair.

I stood up and held the old pudding can in my left hand as I took a leak. Then I walked over to the open window and dumped it out. I looked down at the first stain of the day, a golden-yellow hole melted in the surface of the snow. The other, darker stains from yesterday were totally covered now. It was like the storm didn’t want to look at them anymore either.

It would’ve seemed impossible, even just a few days ago, but the snow was maybe three feet below the second-floor windowsill. I looked out. How long would it take to reach the windows? It was already drifting up against some of them. Could it keep going long enough to cover them, like it’d covered the ones downstairs? There was no higher ground, no place left for us to go.

It was early and my mind was still muddy and unclear. I sort of let it stay that way. There are times when you want to think clearly, and I just felt like this was not one of them. Thinking clearly would just make me more aware of how screwed we
were, more aware that there was nothing one fifteen-year-old could do to stop a storm.

As it was, I was thinking about how my season was going down the drain. Our first game had been canceled and our second game was supposed to be tomorrow night. I felt weak right down to my joints. I went through the motions of a jump shot, imagining the basket along the far wall. Normally, I picture those going in, but this one felt offline, maybe even short. I could almost hear Coach now: “Basket’s that way, Weems!” I wondered if there was any way to practice in a dark gym.

There was still no one knocking on the door or tapping at the glass for their turn, so I sat back down and had a drink from the water cup. I remembered the sneeze I’d heard. Next time, I’d bring my own cup.

We’d refilled the jumbo-sized peach can with snow from the windowsills three or four times now, but you could still taste the peach syrup that used to be in it. And it was warm too, because we kept it near the fire to melt. It was like warm peach water, kind of good, actually. I downed the first cup and had a second.

It turned out there had been someone waiting. It’s just that Elijah was not the type to knock. He’d just been waiting silently. For how long, I wondered. Had he seen the jump shot? Could he tell it was a miss?

I’d kept him waiting long enough, and I knew he probably had to take a leak. But it was the first time I’d seen him alone in days, and there was something I had to ask him.

“What did you mean, we’re all going to die here?” I said. “That goth crap is just not cool. Not now.”

It came out more hostile than I’d intended. Again, it was early. Elijah took a moment to process it and then fired back.

“I’m not goth,” he said, blinking into the light coming from the open door. “Is that what you think this is, me trying to be dark and cool and morbid, pretending to be a vampire or something stupid like that? I know this is serious, and I guess maybe I shouldn’t have said that to Les. I didn’t mean it literally. It was just, ‘We’re gonna frickin’ die,’ like, we’re all screwed, you know? And we are.”

Now my mind was the one struggling to process all those words, so I just asked him about that last part.

“Yeah, why’s that?” I said. It was a truly stupid question: Why were we screwed? Why weren’t we, was more like it. At least I tried to dial my tone back a bit.

“They don’t know we’re here,” he said.

“Who doesn’t?” I said, but I must’ve known. I must’ve, because the words hit me hard in the stomach.

“They think we were on the buses. You know some of them didn’t make it. And if they did, people will just think we didn’t make it home from the bus stop. Even if they know we were getting picked up, they’ll just assume we got picked up and never made it. And our phones might as well be bricks.”

“Jason’s dad knows,” I said. “Krista’s mom …”

“Are you dense? They were both on the road. So was my … Anyway, you can’t even see the road now. Can’t even see where
it used to be. We’re missing, and so are they, probably. How many people do you think are missing right now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What about Gossell?”

He just looked at me, and I looked down at my feet. It was getting a little late in the game to believe in fairy tales.

“No one knows we’re here,” he said finally. It didn’t sound weird or morbid or anything. It just sounded like a fact.

By the time I got back to the room, Jason was already up. He had half a cup of water left from last night and was brushing his teeth with his finger. I should probably do that too, I thought. The girls might’ve had some toothpaste left, but I doubted they’d share. Jason had his hat and jacket on and was getting ready to go to the shop.

Across the room, Julie sneezed. So she was the one who had brought the snot into our little world. I left the room a minute later, tagging along with Jason. I knew it wouldn’t matter much. Within a day or two, we’d all have Julie’s bug, starting with Pete.

You know that phrase, “I could do that with my eyes closed"? Well, that was a pretty good description of Jason making the trip to the shop. It was pitch-dark by the time we reached the bottom of the stairwell, but he barely even slowed down. He was talking to me, but it wasn’t to talk, it was to let me know where he was, which way to go.

We were moving too fast. It felt lame to say so, so I didn’t. I kept one hand along the wall and did my best to keep up. Still, I mean, what was the hurry? We had only two things in this world: snow and time. And all it would take was a pen on the floor for me to fall and break my wrist or something. And wouldn’t that just cap off a magical week?

A few minutes later, we were at the back of the school, and weak light was leaking out into the hallway through the broken glass of the shop room’s door. Jason pushed it open. He went to the back windows to slam some of the snow off, then went right to the big table where his snow-kart was lying upside down. I got the impression that he knew exactly where he’d left off and what he wanted to do next.

For a kid obsessed with war and stuck in what was basically becoming an underground bunker, this was good for Jason. It was something to keep him occupied, something to do. I left him to it: I had my own project in mind.

There’s this thing, I guess you’d call it a theory. It’s called Occam’s razor. The first time I heard it mentioned, I thought it was Ockham’s racer, which is why I paid attention. There’s this NASCAR driver named Jeremy Ockham and, whatever, it’s an easy mistake to make. Anyway, the theory is just that the simplest solution is usually the best one. It’s not like I needed some ancient dude to come up with a theory to tell me that, but that’s the way the world works: First one in gets the prize.

Anyway, Jason’s snow-kart was a lot simpler than it had been. Just switching out four wheels for one propeller made it simpler. But it still had a lot of moving parts, and that meant a lot of things could still go wrong. I figured I’d make something simpler. Really, they were just about the simplest things you could think of. And sure enough, I was almost done by lunchtime.

I left Jason down there, still working, and went back up. I say lunchtime but we really didn’t have any food left, except for some peanut butter and jelly with no bread, so we had to plan
the next trip to the cafeteria. When I got back into the main room, they were already talking about it. It’s like they were drawing straws.

“Maybe you and Weems should go,” Les was saying to Krista.

“No way,” said Krista. “We did our part.”

“Yeah, but you, like, know where stuff is,” said Les.

“Not really,” she said. “It was pretty dark then and it will be totally dark now. I wouldn’t even know which way was up.”

This is maybe lame to admit, but it kind of hurt my feelings. That first trip to the caf with Krista had been like the one highlight of this whole thing. I even thought, maybe … Well, whatever, it just kind of sucked that she didn’t want to do it again. I heard myself saying that I didn’t want to go either. It was like, you can’t fire me, I quit.

It didn’t matter much: Pete and Julie were happy to make the trip. No surprise there.

“Try to be back before dinner,” Les said with a smirk.

Julie laughed, but Pete shot Les a look. Pete needed to be careful with that. I made a mental note to mention it to him when he got back.

The trip wasn’t exactly going to be a tunnel of love, though. It was permanent midnight down there, and there were enough things to run into or trip over to make it legitimately dangerous.

We had a long talk about making a torch or something like that. I won’t bore you with the details because we didn’t do it. They just took Krista’s iPhone and used the little bit of light
from that. It was really all the things were good for at that point, except to drive us crazy.

During the “War and Its Aftermath” section in U.S. history, we learned about “phantom limb syndrome,” where people have a limb amputated or whatever but the nerve endings are still attached so sometimes it’s like they can still feel it, like maybe they have an itch in their missing leg. That’s what it was like to be without working cell phones for so long. Sometimes I’d go to check mine, only to remember it was still home on the dresser. And thinking of home just made me worry about my mom again.

And it wasn’t any better for the others. I’d see Jason just sitting there for like fifteen minutes at a time, watching the little picture of an envelope for his text message flip over and over, not disappearing, not being sent. When the screen timed out and went black, he flicked it back on and went back to watching the little envelope. So it was like phantom cell phone syndrome. In a way, it was really stupid, but it seemed just as real as the cold.

Anyway, Pete and Julie came back sooner than expected. I guess maybe it was too cold down there for much fooling around. Pete was saying how the iPhone worked pretty well: “It’s not much help in the hallways, but you can bring it right into the walk-in fridge and hold it up to the labels.”

Krista and I had done the same thing, of course, and the similarities didn’t end there. “Uh, dude,” I said, “you brought back, like, the exact same things we did.”

And it was true. They’d dumped their haul out in the center of the room: PB&J, bread, cold cuts, pudding, peaches …

“And cookies!” said Julie, holding up a jumbo pack of fake Oreos and sounding a little defensive. “You guys didn’t find the cookies.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess that’s something.”

“Fine,” said Julie. “We’ll go back down.”

No one protested too loudly. We were sick of pudding and peaches.

They’d been gone maybe two minutes when I heard that weird sound again:
RRRRMMM!
It was like two tons of gravel shifting around above our heads. This time I knew it wasn’t thunder, and I knew I wasn’t dreaming or imagining it, because we all heard it.

“What the — ?” said Les.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Krista.

I gave Elijah a quick look: We could always count on him for the bad news.

“It’s the snow,” he said. “Pressing down on the roof.”