Untaken (27 page)

He wished the Big Kids were with him. Even Brandon, who sometimes yelled.

When he heard a voice calling his name, he wondered at first if he imagined it, like he’d imagined the fake people stealing along behind him. But the voice called out again, and what’s more, he recognized it as Gracie’s. Jake started to run, but checked himself, wary of taking another spill. Everything was quiet, then he heard another voice. Brandon, this time.

Jake walked quickly, the special Shiny turning in his hand. It was slippery with sweat. He closed his fist tight around the metal and thrust his hand deep into the pocket of his jeans, to be sure it couldn’t slip away again.
Roll
away again.

The corridor ended in a big space where light spilled down from another of the strange windows in the roof.

There they were! Gracie and Brandon were in the middle of the big room. Brandon was lying in a cart like a little kid. Was it a game? The kind of game called a joke? Jake never understood why things were a joke, but he knew jokes were happy things. Maybe the Big Kids weren’t mad at him after all. As he started toward them, Gracie’s head snapped up and her mouth dropped open. Jake squinted up at the roof too, to try to see what she saw.

His first thought was the false people, but they wouldn’t be
up
, and anyway, the Big Kids weren’t scared of the false people like he was. When he noticed the first of the Drones drift down out of the gloom, Jake relaxed. They were spent and old and lost, and the sad “alone” feeling in him reached out to them. Their job here was almost done. Those that hadn’t fulfilled their task had waited too long, and the life inside of them was weak and dying. No danger to the Big Kids, but they didn’t seem to know it. Gracie’s mouth was open in a big scared “O” and now that Jake looked more carefully, there was something about the awkward loll of Brandon’s limbs that made Jake think he was hurt. If the Big Kids got scared, would they run away and leave him lost again?

Jake’s sneakers skirted a pool of dried blood. He saw a person, stiff and blue hanging on a rope, but it meant no more to him than the empty fountain or the upturned benches.

Gracie’s hand was cold when he took it, like the hand of a fake person might be, but Jake willed himself to keep holding it.

“It’s okay,” Jake told her, carefully. He laughed. It was odd to hear his mouth making words happen. Gracie seemed to think so too, because her she gawked at Jake with the same horror she’d regarded the Drones with.

“It’s okay,” Jake said again, more loudly this time, savoring the feeling of the words in his mouth. “Don’t be scared, Gracie. If you want, I’ll tell them to go away.”

She nodded slowly, eyes so wide she looked like a little kid herself.

Jake looked up at the Drones as they drifted downward.

“
Go away
,” he told them, not in the new “out loud” voice, but in the secret one that came from the place where the silver patterns swirled.

“
Go away. It’s over for you here
.”

Brandon

ou got to slow down ‘til you know what you’re doing,” I told Gracie, for the hundredth time.

“I do know what I’m doing. I always thought driving was such a big deal, but it’s so easy!”

I couldn’t drive myself yet, not until the headaches eased off. The sick fluttery feeling in my stomach and the ringing in my ears had stopped yesterday, but the Fall sunlight streaming in through the windshield still sent my head hammering until the world started to blur and pitch. There was too much shit on the roads to drive safely at night, so we traveled by day.

After the accident at the mall, I’d been sure we were screwed, but Gracie had picked up the knack of driving the big SUV pretty well. Of course she thought it was a breeze, and put her foot down whenever I wasn’t paying attention. Nothing seemed to faze that girl. She just took it for granted that she was good at everything and always right.

Jake was in his usual spot, kneeling up on the back seat with his head hanging out the window like a dog. He’d gotten back to the car on his own, was there waiting when Gracie dragged me out of the mall. She wouldn’t talk about what happened, and was likely scared I’d get mad at Jake for running off and causing all that trouble for nothing.

And I had been kind of mad at first. Getting my ass beat by a Drone. Ending up with what Gracie said was a concussion. It would make anyone mad! But the pounding of my head was all I’d had the energy to focus on at first, and now that I could keep my eyes open for more than five minutes without feeling like my brain was going to burst, I was too happy to hear Jake talking to be mad. Not that Jake had much to say. A couple of words a day if we were lucky, but it still showed that we were doing good. The kid was getting better.

The driving was tough on Jake at first, with no stopping to pick up Shinys along the way. When we stopped to siphon gas the first time—which even perfect Gracie admitted was harder than we’d thought it would be—Gracie had found a pad of paper and a pencil for him.

At first, Jake didn’t seem to know what to do with the pencil and paper, but after Gracie drew a few doodles for him, he’d gotten the picture, so to speak.

Now Jake drew the crazy patterns he used to make with the Shinys on the notepad. He’d wanted to bury the pages at the end of the day, but after what’d happened at the mall, we’d been keeping him close. No more sneaky midnight adventures. For once, Gracie didn’t want to argue with me, about
that
, anyways. We’d been sleeping locked in the car at night. After a few shitty nights for all three of us, Jake had accepted it. Maybe there was hope for the little freakazoid yet.

I thought that we’d likely make it to the cabin by the end of the week. The going was slow because of the pileups and craters in the road, and in some places, we’d had to ditch the highway and backtrack until we could get on surface streets, but we were getting there.

I rubbed my aching head as Gracie guided the SUV through huge drifts of fall leaves. The leaves were pretty deep in places; with no one around to rake them, they piled up against the empty buildings.

In a year from now, the trees and the weeds would grow up right through these houses, and in fifty years, maybe there would be nothing left at all of all these shitty little towns.

Dumb way to think. The soldiers would come. Order would be restored. Maybe we’d have to get through this winter alone, but it wouldn’t take much longer than that, surely.

The weather was colder already, so it was good to have the new clothes and shit. I hadn’t let Gracie put on the car heater yet, not when we could bundle up, but if it got any cooler, we’d have to suck it up and use the gas. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too tough to keep the cabin warm. Bob had been up there in the winter a couple times, so there must have been a generator or something. Generators needed gas too, though. The throb in my head worsened. There was no point stressing about gas right now. I’d just make myself sick again. “Borrowing trouble,” Grammy used to say. Meaning, you don’t get stressed over shit that hasn’t happened yet.

“We should stop soon,” Gracie said, interrupting my thoughts. “Sun’s going down earlier every day.”

I looked at the map. Reading anything made me sick and dizzy, but I didn’t intend to be completely useless. I was forced to read slower like this anyway, and I made fewer mistakes—especially with Gracie concentrating on the road, instead of poised to snatch the map away the second she thought I was about to screw up.

“Town coming up. Marlborough. We’ll get through that, then park for the night.”

The sun sank slowly as we drove into Marlborough, and the sky blazed as orange and yellow as the trees. We drove down a short Main Street, with a post office, a pharmacy, and a couple of other stores of the kind you find in towns like this, selling a little of nothing much, but somehow staying in business year after year. All of them were closed up for good now.

The residential area wasn’t much more to look at. A few blocks of statelier old houses huddled close to what passed for a downtown, followed by a straggle of smaller, newer houses getting shabbier and more spaced out as we drove out toward the open country again.

I yawned, pinching my own cheek to banish the heavy waves of tiredness which threatened to drag me under into sleep. I found it hard to keep my eyes open more than a few hours at a stretch since my accident. In a few nights from now, I could be sleeping in a real honest-to-goodness bed again. If we made good time tomorrow…

Gracie shook my arm.

“Brandon? There’s a truck in the road.”

“So drive round it,” I mumbled.

“Just wake up already!” She poked me hard in the ribs and I sat up rubbing my eyes.

The truck parked across the road was an army truck. I sat bolt upright in my seat, more awake than I’d been in weeks. “It’s the cavalry!” I told Gracie.

I didn’t exactly expect her to whoop, but I thought she’d do more than glower for a change. What a killjoy! Better even than the truck were the windows of the tumble down ranch house at the side of the road. Each one of them blazed with the unfamiliar brilliance of electric light.

Jake

racie and Brandon were talking to the men. Brandon looked happy. Gracie did not. But she wasn’t screaming or running away either. There were two men. One was very skinny with crazy black hair and a weird smell coming from the little stick he had in his mouth. A cigarette, that was the word for it.