Will couldn’t bear to look her in the eye.
“No.”
2
THIS ISN’T REAL, LUCY THOUGHT.
“Are you okay?” Will said to her.
She was still on the floor. She stared at the mangled grille of the bus. It was one with the building now. Kids had given up trying to move the stubborn, concrete slabs that covered its front.
“I’m—” Lucy said.
She didn’t know what to say. To say something would be to acknowledge that this was actually happening, that she’d seen nearly her entire gang escape McKinley before she could, and that the only way out of the school had been destroyed.
Everybody else was furious. McKinley kids had the outsiders backed up against the bus. They were screaming at them, asking desperate questions, with so many shouting at once that all Lucy could hear was one long, unintelligible blast of anger and confusion. The outsiders looked frightened. They had their rifles and pistols drawn and pointed at the McKinley kids.
The boy with the red eye stepped out in front of the other outsiders.
“Everyone, shut up!” the red-eyed boy said.
His voice carried, and the screaming subsided.
“We aren’t the bad guys,” the red-eyed boy said to the crowd. “We didn’t drive this fuckin’ bus in here.”
Will squeezed Lucy’s hand. She hadn’t realized he was holding it, but of course he was. In the last two weeks, as the food had run out, as they began to starve, as death became a certainty for them, Will had always been there, holding her hand.
“Can you walk?” Will asked Lucy. He was looking at the outsiders, like he didn’t want to miss a word of what they had to say. Lucy didn’t either. She nodded.
Will helped her up, and they shuffled over to the teeming crowd around the outsiders. The room was hot with their breath. Anguished faces and torches extended back through the room, and down the hall beyond.
“Who are you?” a Varsity yelled.
“My name’s Gates,” the red-eyed boy said. “Look, just calm down. We’re infected just like you. And we were trying to get you out of here.”
“Bullshit!” a Freak shouted.
Gates’s red eye flared. “It’s not bullshit! You think we want to be trapped in this place?”
“Who was in that bus?” a Geek yelled.
“How the hell should I know?”
“Gates?” a Freak girl next to Lucy said in a trembling voice. Gates calmed at the sight of her worried face. She held a torch, and firelight licked the thin lines of scar tissue that stood out in sharp relief all down her forearm.
“Yeah?” he said to her.
“What’s out there?” she said.
The crowd went quiet. It was what they’d all wanted to know for the last year and a half.
“Well… what exactly do you know?” Gates said.
“The military told us that the virus was spreading, and they were working on fixing it and we haven’t heard anything since,” Belinda said from the back of the room.
He blinked his way through what Belinda had just said, his red eye blinking much more than the other.
“Shit, I don’t know where to start,” Gates said. “Uh…”
The room waited patiently for any information he could give them. Gates seemed surprised by just how captivated they all were. A minute ago, they were a vicious, barking mob.
“Let’s see,” Gates went on. “The infection hit us about three weeks after you. Most of us went to St. Patrick’s Academy down in Denton.”
“The private school?” Will said.
“Yeah,” Gates said, brightening a bit when he saw that it was Will asking. “We’d heard there was a quarantined school in Pale Ridge and all these people had died, but Denton is fifty miles south of here, and the news said we had nothing to worry about.” His eyes unfocused as he got lost in the memory. “The day it hit us, it was school spirit day. All our parents were there. We were all out on the lacrosse field. One second it was fine, the next, parents were vomiting blood all around me. My mom—”
Gates cleared his throat and stopped talking. He looked out at the crowd of McKinley kids again.
“I’m sure this stuff is nothing new to you. Must have been the same here,” he said. “But when the soldiers came for us, they didn’t try to quarantine us, or capture us. They started shooting. Two hundred and thirty-two of us eventually made it out of there alive. We hid anywhere we could, and we stayed on the move. They were evacuating the whole state, and they were having a hard time. People driving over each other’s lawns, and cars crashing into each other and shit. It was nuts. The virus was spreading so fast. The more kids caught it, the more adults died. Parents with teenagers were trying to get their kids out of the state before they caught the virus. It got real messy. Any soldier that saw a teenager with a bald head, they’d kill you. And it wasn’t just the soldiers either. Everybody had guns. Fuckin’ grandmas were shooting at us.”
Lucy could hear the crowd get sick. Her stomach sank too. She thought of her own family trying to leave Colorado, scared they were going to die. Somewhere along the way she’d convinced herself not to think about whether her parents had died. She thought most kids in here had done the same. Now, those feelings took hold of her again.
“We ate what we could steal or what we could hunt,” Gates continued. “We hid wherever we could. In the mountains, in the sewers. Empty barns. But we were never safe. They murdered so many of us. Some were lucky enough to phase out. There’s only forty-two of our original group now.”
“Are our families out there?” a sunken-chested Nerd boy said.
Gates looked at him, perplexed. “Were you listening?”
The Nerd boy continued to stare at Gates, like he hadn’t answered him yet.
“No, they’re not,” Gates said.
The Nerd turned and walked back into the crowd.
Gates took a deep breath. “Since the evacuation, the only adults around have been military search squads. I take that back… there are a few nut-jobs out there that refused to move out, and every once in a while you’ll get some angry bastards who come back to Colorado, wanting to kill any infected they can. That’s probably who was driving this bus. But mostly, it’s been soldiers and infected.”
“They didn’t let you turn yourself in?” Lucy said.
A flicker of a snarl upset Gates’s somber face.
“No, they did,” he said. “They drove these giant armored trucks around. They’d blast the same announcement over and over, that we wouldn’t be harmed if we came forward and got into the back of the truck. They said they had a facility for the infected where they would be taking us, and we’d be safe there. A lot of other kids did turn themselves over.”
Emotion choked Gates to a stop again. One of the outsiders, a girl with short white hair, walked to Gates and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. He cleared his throat and dug his knuckle into his red eye, then started up again.
“But it was all bullshit,” Gates said, and shook his head. “You can be sure they drove those kids straight to a gas chamber.”
This boy is a liar, Lucy thought. He was playing with their heads with all this talk of murderous adults on the outside. He had to be a liar. Please let him be a liar.
“And then, you’ll love this… that offer to turn ourselves in had an expiration date. They let us know that if we didn’t turn ourselves over by their deadline, our refusal to come forward would be viewed as a hostile action. That’s what they called it. Like we were the bad guys. They said that we would be considered ‘deadly threats with intent to do harm.’ Basically, turn yourself in or we’re going to come kill you. And that’s the way it’s been since then; we run, they hunt us. Well, it was until about a month ago.”