Untaken (26 page)

He leaned sideways a little as he barfed, so only about half of the puke landed in his lap.

“Oh boy,” I muttered. “Oh boy. Oh, gross.”

Brandon made another little “urp” noise, but nothing else came up.

Most of the Drone’s tentacles lay limp on the floor, and those still moving wound backwards and forward in a dreamy sort of way, spreading swathes of the gross oily blood stuff around the floor, like it was trying to paint a picture.

“Nope,” I told myself. “Remember the rules. No puking for
you
, Gracie McNeil.”

I leaned in close to Brandon again, trying to ignore the throw-up smell. “Brandon? We have to get going. There could be more of them.”

Where should we go, though? We still needed to find Jake, and although fear had given me the strength to drag Brandon out of the reach of the dying Drone, I didn’t think I could carry him around the—possibly Drone infested—mall on my own.

Could I leave him? He might pass out. He could puke again and choke on it. He could wander off somewhere, then I’d have two pain-in-the-ass boys to search for instead of just one. For the first time, Brandon’s hesitation when I’d joked about just leaving Jake behind at the mall made a certain sense.

“I’m not you, though, Commander Lightning,” I told him. “Luckily for you, I’m dumber than I am mean, but if you get puke on me, I might just change my mind.”

I found a shopping cart lying on its side outside of Target. It wasn’t easy to get Brandon into it. He helped as best as he could, but his arms and legs seemed to have plans of their own, and it wasn’t until his strength ran out and he went limp in my arms that I was finally able to dump him into the cart.

I slung the gun around my own shoulders. It was much heavier than I would have imagined, but the weight of it was comforting somehow, and I had to admit, having it with us had been lucky so far, even if it wasn’t in the way Brandon originally planned.

Brandon didn’t look very comfortable sprawled in the bottom of the cart, with his lanky legs sticking up over the sides, so I took off my jacket—which was covered with gross smears of vomit and blood anyway—and balled it up under his head. Not really hospital grade care, but it was the best I could do for now.

It would have been impossible to explore the mall with the flashlight switched off, so I propped it up in the kiddy seat of the shopping cart. It was too late to worry about being sneaky now. The rumbling and squeaking of the cart wheels would be more than enough to give us away if there were more Drones about, especially if they were in better condition than the one Brandon killed. Or broke. I still didn’t know if the Drones were technically
alive
. Space Man pets? Space Man robots? No one even knew what the Space Men themselves actually looked like. Maybe the Drones were the Space Men, although that didn’t feel right somehow.

The cart bumped over cracks in the floor and crunched over broken glass. I stuck close to the storefronts, checking our position every time we reached an open space with a map kiosk.

I wondered if it might be better to find a way out of the mall and go back to the car to wait, when my corridor opened out into the cavernous space of a food court. A big, square fountain filled the middle of the court, with tables and chairs set all around it. A glass dome like the one in the Mountain Post washed a slowly fading amber glow over the area, what was left of the day’s light. I pushed the cart forward through the last patch of darkness separating my corridor from the dimming light of the atrium, and the wheels bumped against something soft.

At first I thought it was a pile of old clothes, then the familiar stink hit me and I took three quick steps backward, my heart thumping in dizzy waves.

A man. The front of his shirt was scorched and black with old blood. Shot in the chest, I guessed. Drones grabbed—they didn’t tear people open as far as I’d seen.

My first urge was to bolt, but the cart and Brandon were heavy, and I had no idea if there were more Drones nearby. Or worse. Maybe some crazy guys with guns hid waiting to shoot any trespassers. My gaze fell back to the bullet hole in the dead guy’s chest.

“Brandon? Hey, Brandon? You think you can walk for a bit? Please?”

Nothing. Not even a groan this time. I sucked in a ragged breath. I had to stay calm and think rationally.

The dead guy was past the gooey up stage. He must have been there a while, so there was probably nothing to get all freaked out over anyway. I steered the cart carefully around the edge of the pool of dried blood, and made my way toward the fountain. There was another dead guy here, not shot this time, but hung by the neck from one of the decorative arches at the fountain’s center. His face was black and so puffed up it was almost round, like an old Halloween pumpkin. A gun lay on the floor nearby, not dropped, but propped up neatly by the edge of the fountain. There was a pair of shoes too.

I stared at the shoes, listening to my own ragged breathing. The shoes were worse than the bodies. I could see the dark prints left by the man’s heels inside the shoes. Why had he taken them off? So he could wade out into the water? And then what? Just took off his belt and hung himself? I raised a shaky hand to push my hair back off my face.

Brandon stirred, trying to say something, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

“Brandon? You awake?”

Nothing.

I eyed the man’s gun. I knew I should probably take it, but the thought of touching anything of his gave me the creeps. It would be like knocking over a gravestone. A piece of paper rested beneath the gun, weighted down by it, and I stooped to read the note.

“
i had to kill them, but i don’t have to live with it. they look like us, but they’re not
”

“Jeez Louise,” I muttered. What was that even supposed to mean? I didn’t know, but it was enough to give me a grade A case of the shivers all over again.

Brandon groaned in the cart, trying to sit up.

“Whaz happening?” he asked, his voice thick and foggy.

“Lay back down,” I said. “You hit your head and you need to stay put until I figure out what to do next.”

“Whez Dad?”

“Oh, brother. Brandon, just stay put and shut up. I can’t deal with this right now.”

But instead of lying back down, he struggled to climb out of the cart. I managed to pry his fingers off the sides so that he flopped back down into an uncomfortable-looking position, but he showed no signs of wanting to settle. I swung the cart around so he faced away from the hanging man. Last thing I needed was for him to freak out more than he was already.

“Dad?”

I flinched at the way his voice echoed round the empty food court.

“Be quiet—” The words died in my throat. Shapes drifted down from the roof high above, like balloons falling when the clock strikes midnight in a New Year’s Eve party scene.

Drones.

More than I’d ever seen. Hundreds of them floated down from the roof in a dreamy way, tentacles unfurling behind them like streamers as they fell.

I knew I’d never be able to run away in time, not with Brandon and the cart to push, and anyway, where would I run to?

Instead, I watched them as they fell, hoping that the end, whatever it was, wouldn’t hurt too much.

Jake

e found the quarter right away, lying in the middle of the floor, a little ways back from the bench where he’d sat to try on the big, squishy boots.

Mean old thing!

Hiding away one minute, lying smugly in plain sight the next, making him feel foolish. Jake rubbed the Shiny with his thumb, enjoying the smooth feel of it, and maybe he should have been paying more attention to where he was going and less to that no-good hiding Shiny, because when he opened the door that he’d thought would take him back outside to the Big Kids, there was just a room with some lockers, and a bucket on wheels with a mop in it.

Jake squatted down and wrapped his arms around his head, eyes shut tight until the glowing silver patterns in his mind were all that he could see. After a minute, the confusion let go a little and he could stand up and look around again.

He should go back to the place with the giant animal—the Bufferlow, the Big Kids had called it. He’d liked the Bufferlow. It stood very still and let him pet it. It looked like it would be soft, but its hide was rough and bristly, an unexpected sensation. Jake had the idea that perhaps if he went back to the good place with the Bufferlow, he’d remember which way to go from there, but when he took the turn he’d thought might lead him back to the Bufferlow he ended up in another corridor instead.

This one was white stone, with lots of the weird rooms that the Big Kids said were called “stores.” People stood in the store windows. Jake knew they weren’t real people. He’d touched one like it in stores before. These people were hard and cold like stone. Jake didn’t like the way their blank eyes stared, or the way their filled-in mouths were stretched into hungry smiles. Jake knew that they couldn’t move. They couldn’t hurt him. He knew that, but when he was alone, it was hard to remember.

Jake decided not to look at them.

But when he wasn’t looking, it was too easy to imagine them sneaking closer and closer, until a set of those cold, hard hands closed around his neck. Jake whipped his head around to look at the fake people, but they were standing just as they had been, behind the big, glass windows.

He walked a little faster, glancing back over his shoulder to keep an eye on them, but that wasn’t such a great idea either, because he tripped right over his own feet and fell smack onto his face. The flashlight skittered away across the floor.

Hurt.

His arm hurt where it hit the floor. It was hard for him to breathe, and he couldn’t see the dark corridor, or the flashlight, or the scary fake people. Silver lines and patterns unspooled endlessly before his blank eyes, not in neat loops and spirals now, but in crazy sunbursts. He was getting mixed up. He needed to look up at the sky to set the patterns all back in their places. Tears leaked from his eyes and he scrubbed them away with his bruised hands. He hated the way the tears felt running down his face; couldn’t get used to the sensation at all. Finally, the silver lines faded, and Jake could see enough to pick up the flashlight. It still worked, in spite of an ugly crack in the cheerful red plastic of its housing.