Z 2134 (24 page)

And if so, was Adam also in danger?

**

In Jonah’s dream, Molly was walking
toward him. Her footsteps echoed in the halls of his memory, each one
triggering a new flash of their past, which came and went in a flash as
memories are wont to do in dreams.

Then the footsteps crossed into reality,
and he woke to find he wasn’t alone.

He looked up, the light blurring his eyes
and hurting his head. It took him a minute before both were working well enough
to focus on the girl, Calla, standing three feet away, waiting to feed him.

Jonah’s lids had barely lifted before
Calla was roughly shoving bread between his lips, then pouring water down his
throat, her smile just shy of laughter as he tried not to choke. Liquid
dribbled down his chin.

“Doncha like?” she said in her odd
accent.

Jonah tried to shed his guilt, forcing
himself to stare into her angry eyes.

He was responsible for the loss of her
mother.

For Egan’s wife.

He was no better than the monster Keller.
And no less responsible than Keller was for Molly’s death.

“Thank you,” he said, chewing the bread.
“It’s quite good. Did you bake it?”

“I helped, yes,” she said, her eyes
softening a bit.

Jonah said, “I know you hate me.”

Calla stared, less angry looking than
curious. His voice fell an octave, moving from pleasant to compassionate,
hoping she could hear the honesty in his words and maybe understand that he
never meant her or her family harm.

He was one of the good guys, even if it
had taken him too long to get there.

“You have every right to hate me. Your
father too. What I did was wrong. But I only did it because my boss told me
your father was bad, and I was stupid enough to believe it.” He dropped his
eyes along with his head. “They lied to me so I would hurt your family, but I
never would’ve done it if — ”

The door burst open, and Egan stormed
into the room, yelling at Calla. “Don’t listen to this liar!”

Calla turned to Egan, startled, her eyes
wide and watery with a million things at once. Calla squealed, making noise
with no words, like a tiny wounded animal. Jonah’s food and drink fell from her
hand and crashed on the floor. Calla took off running from the room.

Egan stared after Calla, then turned and
glared at Jonah for several seconds before curling his fingers around the metal
bar at the top of an ancient crimson chair. He dragged it over to Jonah and
sat.

“What kind of lies are you telling my
little girl?”

“I was apologizing.” Jonah explained. “So
she wouldn’t keep trying to kill me.”

Jonah figured it was better to portray
the girl as being mean to him rather than kind; otherwise Egan might send
someone else to feed him.

Egan looked down at the food and water on
the front of his coveralls, then laughed.

Jonah asked, “What happened? Why is Ana
in The Games?”

Egan smiled. “Tell you what, Watchman,
how about you answer
my
questions first?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“Sure,” Jonah said. “I’ve nothing to
hide. Like I said, I’m on your side. But please, just tell me, is Ana alive?”

The words burned from his throat.

 “You talk,” Egan said. “Then maybe I
answer.” Egan paused, drew a flask from his coat and put it to his lips, then
started. “Tell me why you don’t take responsibility for your crimes.”

“That’s not true,” Jonah said, fighting
his anger. “I
do
take responsibility. I know things I did as a Watchman
were wrong, horrible, unconscionable, unforgivable. But I never did anything I
thought
was wrong, and once I knew I was being lied to, I stopped and did all I could
to make amends. I didn’t know you were innocent, Egan.” Jonah shook his head.
“I had no idea who the good guys were.”

Egan stared.

“You’re part of the reason I joined the
Underground.” Jonah’s admission was relieving but awful on his tongue, betrayal
and honor sharing space in his mouth. “It was only years later when I finally
saw the State’s lies for what they were. But once I knew the truth, I started
helping from the inside and never stopped until I was sent outside The Wall.”

“You?” Egan laughed. “Underground? Yeah,
right!”

“I was,” Jonah said, holding his stare.
“I trafficked intel so the Underground knew when armory and food shipments were
arriving from City 1. I also helped citizens flee the City through the
tunnels.”

“You got them past The Wall?”

“No,” Jonah said. “Not directly. But I
made sure they knew when sectors were thin, and I had the right guards posted,
with orbs rerouted along the tunnels for two years straight.”

Egan slapped his leg, cackling loud
enough to turn his laugh into a scream. “Well, fuck me, Lovecraft. That’s some
real irony. You and your fellow fuckers at City Watch set
me
up for
being Underground, even though I wasn’t, and now here you are, City Watch
and
Underground scum!”

Jonah was suddenly, and rather stupidly,
terrified that Egan was about to announce he was in fact a City Watch spy, that
Jonah’s confession had been recorded, and that now he was
really
in
trouble — though Jonah couldn’t imagine deeper shit than what he, or Ana, were
already in.

“Please,” he begged. “Please let me go. I
have to find my daughter. She’s not cut out for The Darwins.”

Egan sneered at his prisoner. “Are you
hoping for my sympathy? Did you want me to feel sorry for you because you
finally saw the light and did a few good things after ruining so many lives?
How THE FUCK does that bring my wife back? My son? TELL ME!”

Egan raged, screaming loud, his spittle
spraying across Jonah’s shrinking face. Egan’s fists hovered, clenched at his
side, shaking for nearly a minute before Egan finally lost it, lashing out and
launching a right hook hard into Jonah’s jaw, just under his eye. The first
shot sent splintering pain through his cheekbone. The next, and every one
after, unleashed a fury to Jonah’s chest and head, leaving Jonah bloodied and
battered and barely able to breathe.

“Fuck you, Lovecraft. You don’t get a
second chance! You’re going on trial, and unlike the Cities, we don’t banish
you. We put you to death and bake a fucking cake when we’re done.”

A
dam stared at the monitors in Chimney
Rock’s TV hall from the same spot he’d sat in since he and his friends had
robbed the kitchen. While The Games were holding everyone else’s attention, all
Adam could think about was the looming threat of being caught.

“Stop worrying so much!” Morgan punched
Adam on the shoulder. “We’re safe.”

“What if they find the pillowcases?” he
said, still staring at the screen.

Morgan shrugged. “What’re they gonna do,
lift every sheet in the storage room? They won’t find ’em. Even if they do, so
what? Not like they’re gonna know
we
did it.”

A collective “
ewww!”
rolled
through the room. Adam’s eyes went to the monitor and saw the aftermath of some
guy getting torn to pieces by zombies. It wasn’t Liam, and Ana wasn’t part of
the action, so Adam returned his attention to the hallway behind the TV hall’s
large open room, waiting for someone to come and point an accusing finger at
them.

“Would you relax?” Tommy said with a
laugh. “Nothing’s gonna happen. Shit, kid, you’d think we killed someone the
way you’re acting. It’s just some stupid food that nobody’s gonna miss.”

The feast on the monitors grew louder, as
did the cheering. Adam’s friends were glued to every inch of the main monitor.
Zombie strikes were bloody, sudden, and hypnotic. Adam turned his attention
back to the TV so his friends wouldn’t think he was being too scared.

The gore on screen made his stomach
churn. All he could think about was his sister being attacked by the disgusting
monsters. He was so engrossed in thought that he was caught off guard when Miss
Abby, one of the only three grown-ups who were ever nice to him, though only
barely, grabbed him roughly by the collar, then yanked him from his seat and
onto the floor without a word.

Jayla and her friends were in their own
corner of the TV hall, watching. Morgan, Tommy and Daniel all leaped back from
Adam in shock.

“You’re coming with me.” Miss Abby’s
snarl barely sounded like her.

“Where are you taking me?” Adam whined.
“I didn’t do anything!”

Miss Abby dragged him away by the collar,
drawing the attention of every kid in the hall and the laughter of about half
of them. Adam stumbled and nearly tripped trying to keep pace and to prevent
himself from falling flat on his face, which would
really
make everyone
laugh.

They reached the end of the hallway, then
stopped at the elevators. Miss Abby smashed her thumb on the bottom elevator
button, still angry, then turned to Adam, glaring, and pulled the boy to his
feet.

“Where are we going?” Adam asked again.

“To Schoolmaster Barnum’s. You’re in big
trouble. She shook her head and said, “I didn’t expect this from you,
Lovecraft.”

The elevator dinged, the doors parted,
and Miss Abby pulled him roughly into the box and pressed the button for the
ground floor — the schoolmaster’s floor. They rode in a terrifying silence as
the elevator creaked and shook its way down, Adam terrified and wondering what
he was in trouble for. Sure,
he knew
what he had done, but how could
they? And if they did, why hadn’t they grabbed up any of his cohorts?

The elevator was taking forever, making
his first trip to the schoolmaster’s office all the more horrifying as the
minutes stretched, teasing him with a dozen different scenarios, each of them
worse than the prior.

The elevator doors opened and Miss Abby
dragged him forward, past several closed classroom doors to a large red wooden
door at the end of the hall that read, “Schoolmaster Barnum.”

Miss Abby opened the door and pointed to
an empty wooden chair sitting by itself in front of an impossibly large desk — black
as midnight and twice as scary. Beside the large desk, two bookcases stretched
across the walls, stuffed with books.

Adam marveled at the sheer number of
real
books, more than he’d ever seen in his life, all from before the Walling. But
he didn’t want Miss Abby to think he was enjoying his visit, so he hid his
excitement.

“Sit there,” Miss Abby said. “The
schoolmaster will be with you shortly.” A faint note of compassion crept into
her voice as she added, “Good luck, Lovecraft,” then quietly closed the door
behind her.

Adam wasn’t sure if she had left him in
the room all alone so he would feel especially guilty when the schoolmaster
arrived, but that was definitely how he was feeling.

Adam’s heart pounded as he waited. He
whispered to himself, “It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK,” over and over, just how
Michael had taught him.

Adam had heard more scary stories than he
could count since arriving at Chimney Rock, and many of the worst were set
inside this very room. He had no idea which were true and which were false.
Tales of torture ran from simple spankings with wooden paddles, like the neat
dozen hanging in a long row over a short black cabinet in the rear of the room,
to beatings and assorted abuses administered in a small cell on the other side
of the red door at the back of the schoolmaster’s office.

While Adam had never given the stories
much weight beyond the kinds of things that kids said to scare one another, the
stories suddenly felt all too real.

He stared at the freshly painted red
door, remembering one of the worst stories and wondering if it was true. Behind
the red door, so said the story, was a black one. Behind the black one was a
narrow closet’s worth of space, about the size of a coffin. Guilty kids were
forced to stand upright for anywhere from one to three days, depending on their
infraction. Some had even died of fright inside, so legend went.

The longer Adam stared at the red door,
the deeper he fell into full-blown panic. As he was about to lose his
composure, the schoolmaster’s office door flew open, and someone who wasn’t
Barnum stepped inside.

It was City Watch Chief Keller.

Adam had expected a scowling Schoolmaster
Barnum, ready to beat him to within an inch of his life, or maybe take it from
him, starting with three days inside the standing coffin. He certainly hadn’t
expected his father’s old boss — smiling as if he had found a cure for the
zombie virus and was mere weeks from tearing down The Wall.

“Hello, Adam, I’m Chief Keller. You
remember me, right?” the chief said, holding out his hand for Adam to shake.

Adam did so, nodding shyly. “Yes, Mr.
Chief Keller.”

“Just call me Keller,” he said, smiling
broadly. “Wow, you’ve grown so much. I remember when you were three and your
dad brought you to the office. Wow, time sure does fly.”