The Fall of Crazy House, page 12
“Do you know how to get into the city?” I asked abruptly.
He nodded. “I told you so. I know how my squad was going to get in.”
I scanned the faces of the team. “What do you guys say? Does Ansel stay or go?”
Jolie pointed at him, then swirled her hand to show “All of us.” She wanted him to stay.
“Yeah, sure,” Mills said. “If he’s a traitor, we’ll kill him, but you know.”
“Yeah,” Bunny said, shrugging.
I looked at Nate in the driver’s seat. “Yeah,” he said, staring right at Ansel, then repeated what Mills had said. “If he’s a traitor, we’ll kill him, but you know.”
“Okay, that’s settled,” I said, and leaned in the front window, my feet balanced precariously on a crossbeam. “When I give you the signal,” I told Nate, “it means the last strap is cut, and you need to step on the gas.”
“Got it,” Nate said, and gave me an intense look. “Be careful.”
66
“I’M ALWAYS CAREFUL,” I SAID, and climbed down. I heard Nate snort above me. The straps were, like, bulletproof fabric about three inches wide. They’d been ratcheted tight and I didn’t have a hex wrench on me. I pretty much had to be beneath the car to do this, and I slid sideways, trying to stay out of the way of the wheels, which would be very crushy if they rolled over me.
Pulling my big knife from its sheath, I started sawing away at the first strap. I’d decided to start in the front. The real trick would be when three straps were cut. The last one could pop by itself, severing some part of me, or the trailer could hit a bump, causing the car to slide off sideways, which would not be optimal or even survivable.
If the car started sliding around while I was still working underneath, I could get knocked off the truck, or worse.
The first strap finally gave. It had taken three times the effort that I’d imagined. Holding my breath, I slid sideways to the other front strap. My arms were already tired, having to reach up, and the rest of me was as tightly wound as the straps.
Second one down. I scooched toward the back of the car and angled myself to start cutting on the third. This was where it really got scary, and I could hardly breathe. This was where my whole plan would either work brilliantly… or kill us all.
My arms shook as I sawed at the last strap. I kept my body right in the middle of the chassis so if it rolled off without me, at least it wouldn’t smush me. Then the last strap was done. I waited a bit to see if the car moved, but it didn’t. The angle it was at was keeping it in place.
Finally I slithered out and stood up. I gave Nate the signal and grabbed the edge of the trunk, which was popped open.
Nate saw me and gunned the engine. I wasn’t as ready as I thought and the car jumping forward almost dislocated my shoulder. Without thinking, I threw myself into the trunk right as the car left the trailer. Time slowed as we sailed through the air, and I grabbed the trunk lid and slammed it shut. Immediately I was in tiny, total darkness. In the next second the car slammed down on the road with all of its ton of weight. I cried out as my head hit the roof of the trunk with a jaw-crunching bounce. It made me bite my tongue and my mouth filled with blood.
Had the fall broken the car? Were we moving?
As I swallowed blood, my head ringing, I felt the minimal vibration of the car’s electric engine. I braced myself against the trunk’s walls as the car reversed quickly, then made a sharp turn that threw me against the side wall.
It felt like a long time before the car stopped and someone opened the trunk lid. It was Nate, and he stared at me, hyped up by the plan’s success.
“You alive?” he asked.
“Almost,” I said, feeling the huge lump on my head. I climbed out shakily, cradling my wrist. My mouth was still full of blood and I spit it out on the road. Nate automatically kicked dust over it.
I pushed in next to Bunny in the front seat. The team was shaken, their necks hurt, but nothing too serious. It didn’t matter, anyway—we had wheels.
“Where to?” Nate asked, looking at me.
“East,” I said. “The big city in the east.”
67
CASSIE
THE DOOR SWUNG OPEN EASILY and then we were in the small, run-down bathroom. We slipped out into Ms. Strepp’s office, every muscle tensed.
It was empty and dark with the shades drawn; we didn’t dare turn on the light. Tim did a quick perimeter check while I looked for some kind of clue. Her desk had papers on it, things needing her signature, a full in-box. It was a little messy but didn’t look like it had been ransacked.
Without speaking we headed to the door to the outside and I reached for his hand. At the last second I remembered he wasn’t Nate and pulled my hand back. Outside, we pressed ourselves against the building, moving soundlessly toward the booted feet, ready to flee if this was a trap. Ms. Strepp was famous for her gut-wrenching tests.
We peeked around the corner and I clapped my hand over my mouth. If this was a test, it was a really, really bad one. The girl was obviously dead, on her back, open eyes staring glassily at the sky. Her face had large open sores on it, her hands were covered with blackened bumps. What skin we could see was pale and greenish, and a thin trickle of blood marked one ear.
“What the hell?” he whispered.
Leaving the victim we couldn’t help, we went to find the hand we’d seen. It belonged to Yui, a kid we both knew, a good fighter. He, too, was covered with awful, bloody pustules and sores.
As I stared at him, it came to me. “Tim—it’s the plague. They died of the plague. We were the ones supposedly infected, but they all got sick instead.”
Yui had been the guard to one of the arsenals, so we weaponed up and moved cautiously through the rest of the compound, stretching the necks of our shirts up over our mouth and nose. There wasn’t a living soul. Every single person in the camp was dead, covered with the telltale sores of plague. Everyone except me and Tim.
And Ms. Strepp. We couldn’t find her anywhere.
68
OUR TRAINING HAD PREPARED US for everything. We knew how to fight in a hundred different ways, and to the death, if necessary. We could survive in the wild, besiege enemy camps, and easily march fifteen miles in one night.
All of this flew through my head like mosquitos while I processed the situation.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shitty, shittiest shit!”
Tim rested his automatic rifle on the ground, his eyes bleak. “Yeah.”
Still on high alert, we checked the entire training compound again. We counted dozens and dozens of bodies in various stages of decomposition; kids we’d hung out with, drank with, danced with, trained with.
“Thank God Becca and Nate aren’t here,” I said, and Tim nodded.
“We have to load up and bug out,” he said, his voice muffled by his T-shirt. “Gather food, weapons, whatever, grab one of the transports and go!”
“Yeah,” I agreed quickly. “Maybe you could load up while I search Ms. Strepp’s office for answers?”
“Got it,” Tim said, “but don’t take too long. I want us out of here ASAP.”
I ran to Ms. Strepp’s office and opened her computer. To my shock, it wasn’t locked. I started scrolling rapidly through files, not even knowing what I was looking for. Making a quick decision, I printed every file that had certain key words in it: my name, Tim’s name, the word plague, and the word plan. The machine was still spitting out pages when Tim burst through the door.
“Let’s go,” he said urgently. “I don’t want to be breathing this air!”
“Okay, okay,” I said, grabbing handfuls of printouts. I scrolled through the last files and saw one with Becca’s name on it. I hit Print, snatched it up, and ran outside. Tim was already in the driver’s seat of one of our All-Terrain Transports.
I threw my stuff in the back, then leaped into the passenger seat. Tim punched the gas and we roared off, watching the compound of death get smaller in the rearview mirror.
69
BECCA
“I GOTTA PEE,” BUNNY SAID.
We hadn’t driven that far. I was silently cataloguing my various injuries and bruises now that the extreme adrenaline of the car theft was waning. Other than where my body hurt (everywhere), my only thought was getting Ansel to explain the secret of how to get into the city. The capital of the United was a high-value target, and I knew that Strepp would want us to scout it at all costs. Who knows what we could learn. What damage we could do.
Jolie wrote, I-P-2 in my hand.
“Nate, find a place for a pit stop,” I directed him.
It took a few minutes, but Nate found a dirt road that was almost totally overgrown. He turned in and we crunched through the woods until we couldn’t be seen from the highway. Each of us wandered a couple yards off and took care of business, and then I heard Mills say, “Hey, guys, come look at this!”
When we joined him, he was pointing to a natural shelter, flicking his flashlight around its opening.
“Oh good, a cave,” Nate said flatly. “Probably a popular wolf takeout place. I’m going back to the car. Try not to get eaten.”
I couldn’t blame him—other than poor Levi, he’d suffered the most in the wolf attack. “I’ll be there in a second,” I called after him as he stalked off.
Jolie clicked her flashlight and the first thing it shone on was a grinning skull. She made an odd noise, not really human-sounding, and dropped her flashlight. The rest of us shone our lights around and saw that this cave was deep, going into its rocky hill about a hundred feet. Besides the skull, still attached to its body, there were eight other skeletons, and they reminded me of the ones I’d found in the ghost town—dressed, sort of a matching group, apparently living here. They were lying on the ground, and two of them still had their skeletal hands entwined.
“So gross,” Ansel said with a shiver. He hung out by the cave’s entrance while Bunny went farther back.
“Look at this,” she said, showing us some ancient, pathetically small food stores and a pile of plastic water jugs, some still full.
Had these people been hiding? From what? Everything we’d found so far had pointed to a war of some kind, but these people weren’t set up for a siege.
A sudden crack of thunder made us jump, and then the cave was sealed off by torrents of rain that looked like a waterfall.
“Crap. Let’s make a run for the car,” I said.
Mills sighed.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, putting a bit of ice into my voice.
“I’m just beat, man,” he said. “It’s almost one in the morning. I say we just stay here, rest for a couple of hours, then hit the road toward dawn.”
“If they’re searching for us, they’ll assume that we went away from them,” Bunny pointed out. “Backward. But the truck went south; we’re going east.”
I mulled it over. “Yeah, okay. We can crash in the car for a couple hours.”
“I’m crashing right here.” Mills dropped to his knees and shut off his flashlight. “Car will be too crowded.”
“Ready to be a wolf snack?” I asked tartly.
“Not in this rain,” Bunny said, also sinking onto the dirt cave floor. “And we have our guns. We won’t be surprised this time.”
Jolie nodded, looking at me sympathetically, then lay down close to Bunny.
I jerked my head at Ansel, motioning toward the car, but he made an apologetic face and lay down also, as close to the entrance of the cave as he could.
I considered joining them rather than tramping through pouring rain to a fancy car full of legitimately paranoid Nate. With a sigh I pulled my hood over my head and left the cave.
The bastard had locked the car doors, and I smacked on his window to wake him up. I was soaked and shivering as I slid into the backseat. Nate rubbed his eyes and peered through the windshield.
“Where’s everyone else?”
“They’re crashing in the cave for a couple hours,” I said, snuggling down into the leather seat that was like the cushioned desk chair in the Provost’s office.
“Take off your coat,” Nate said. “It’s wet.” He got out of his own coat, clumsily because of the steering wheel, and then climbed in the back with me. “Press that button there.” He pointed, and I pressed the button on the center console in front of me. Seat warmers! Nate grinned at my wonder as he draped his dry coat over me.
We smiled at each other in the dark as we listened to the rain pounding on the car’s roof. It felt cozy and… almost safe.
70
I WOKE BEFORE FIRST LIGHT and found that I was coiled around Nate like a pea vine on a string. I must have been cold, I told myself. I must have thought he was Tim.
Or maybe I was just crazy. That was becoming more and more a likely possibility as the stress of our mission weighed on my shoulders.
Quietly I got out of the car and walked on sodden leaves to the cave. The squad was already awake and I prayed heartily that none of them had come to the car and seen me with Nate.
“Hey,” Bunny said, looking up. “We’ve been opening these supplies, and really there’s nothing worth taking.”
“Any idea how old they are?” I asked, kneeling down to see the split cans of beans, the dried-out jerky.
“This label says it’s good until 2041,” Mills reported.
“Okay, so we’re well past that date,” I said drily.
Jolie hadn’t made any gestures toward me—I was starting to recognize certain words and sometimes sentences without her spelling it out. Now I looked at her and saw that she was standing quietly toward the back of the cave, facing the wall.
I walked over to her and made the sign for “What’s up?”
She pointed to the wall. I shook my head and shrugged, so she took my hand and rubbed my fingers against the wall.
I brushed away dirt and dust to see the words scratched into the rock:
BEWARE THE PLAGUE!
TOUCH NOTHING HERE!
SAVE YOURSELVES!
I read the words several times, then looked at Jolie’s solemn face. Her glance moved to where Mills and Bunny were still opening packages, sniffing ancient food.
TOUCH NOTHING HERE!
I read the dire message again, then looked over at the skeletons. None of them had bullet holes. Had they been ill, and died where they lay?
I made sure Jolie could see my face but spoke softly. “They died a long, long time ago. There’s no way there could still be germs here, no way this could be contagious.”
Jolie didn’t nod, just looked at me with her big, expressive blue eyes.
“Okay, people!” I called, clapping my hands. “Time to go! Make sure you have all your gear! And… where’s Ansel?”
Bunny looked up. “He went to take a leak,” she said, then frowned. “Been gone a long time.”
“No one… went with him?” I asked quietly.
No one answered me, but we all left the cave and spread out into the woods as silently as possible. Without calling his name, we searched beneath shrubs and up in branches till we realized it was pointless. The only person I was mad at was me. I’d made the decision to bring him with us, I’d let him off all this time without forcing him to tell me how to get into the capital, I hadn’t bothered to tell anyone in the squad to, hey, keep an eye on him. Which they should have known, of course.
But I was at fault. Because I was the leader.
My jaw set and I was about to start internally screaming at myself when I noticed Jolie scratching at her neck. I stopped her hand and looked closely.
“You have words written on your neck,” I told her, pulling her sweater collar aside. Jolie made a surprised face and wrote “?” on my hand. “To the,” I read, and looked in her eyes. “What is this?”
She shrugged and shook her head, convincingly mystified. She rubbed at the words again and they began to flake off. They were written in blood.
71
CASSIE
I HAD NEVER SAT IN a vehicle’s passenger seat and tried to read anything, so I had no way of knowing that it would make me barfy. After the second time I puked out the window, Tim slammed the All-Terrain Transport to a halt, grabbed my sheaf of papers, and got out to shove them into a box in the back. Then something caught his gaze—he frowned and read a couple sheets.
“This is about Becca,” he said, getting back in the ATT. I reached for the pages but he held them out of my reach, like an asshole. Fine. Be like that. He read them while I rinsed my mouth with a bottle of water and spit out the window.
“Oh, my God,” Tim said. “Oh, my God.”
“What? What?” I cried, lunging for the file.
Again he held it out of my reach. “Becca was sent to the capital,” he said. “She’s on a special, secret mission that not even she knows about—she’ll be told when it’s time.” Tim was a pretty stoic guy—I’d seen him take punches without flinching and hear bad news without flicking an eyelid. But right now he looked like someone had just slammed his head with a baseball bat.
“Sounds… real Strepplike,” I said carefully.
Tim let out a breath, his face pale. He swallowed. “Strepp… Strepp doesn’t expect Becca or anyone on her squad to come back.”
I stared at him, trying to understand.
His voice rough, he said, “Becca’s on a suicide mission—and doesn’t know it.”
“No. No way,” I said, shaking my head. “Even Ms. Strepp—”
Tim tossed the file at me, cranked the starter, and gunned the engine so hard we spit rocks twenty yards behind us. “Look at the part right below that,” Tim directed, wrenching the wheel of the ATT.
I skimmed down a bit, my head swimming with thoughts of Becca. “What?” I said.
“Right below the part about Becca,” Tim said. “Where Strepp says that she’s heading to the capital to carry out the Revolution. Look—there are directions. Don’t you see that little map?”
