“You sure? You gotta see how much stuff people gave us at the market, it’s ridiculous. Just come sift through it all.”
“Maybe later.”
“Right…,” Will said. It seemed like he was about to leave, but he paused. “Oh! Also, you know that observation room that looks out to the white room? They just got the control board hooked back up and you can control the sprayer thin-gee on the ceiling. We should get the Skaters to come pick up trash and we’ll nail ’em with it.”
“Eh… nah. Is that all?”
Will slumped, looking a little letdown. He went to leave, then stopped and turned back, looking uncomfortable.
“Listen, uh, I’ve never been one for telling people I appreciate them or whatever, but it’s something… I want to start doing. Ugh, I hate how dumb that sounds. But you get it, we could be dead tomorrow and all. So, uh… anyway, I know I’ve only been a Saint for a week, and that isn’t long, but, one week back was the lowest point in my life. If you hadn’t made me that offer, I don’t know if I would have survived. And like I was saying… today’s like the best day ever. I didn’t think people would ever treat me with that kind of respect again. You gave me a chance to erase the past from people’s memories, man, and I’m going to treat it like a total fresh start. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks.”
Gates’s phone chimed again. He glanced down to its bright screen and saw Colton. He’d forgotten his old wallpaper photo on his phone was a picture of the two of them in their St. Patrick’s uniforms, before the infection. Gates had his arm around his brother. Colton wore his stupid black Ray-Ban sunglasses that he never wanted to take off. He thought his eyes were too close together, and he’d wanted to hide them. Colton’s hair was cropped close, and parted precisely on the side. He always kept it short and neat, even for the year they’d spent on the run together.
Gates’s mind flashed with the last memory he had of Colton alive. His brother was trying to turn himself over to the military. They’d been arguing about it for weeks. Colton believed the military was telling the truth, that there was a facility where the government would take care of them. He didn’t want to run anymore, and he thought Gates was being paranoid. Colton snuck away when he was out scavenging in town with him and Pruitt. Gates ran after him, but he only got to him right as Colton was walking up to the soldier to turn himself in. Colton had his arms up in the air. The soldier raised his pistol and fired a round into Colton’s head. The wind caught the cloud of red mist that puffed out of the back of his brother’s head and carried the blood away. Colton’s dead body flopped to the ground, the back of his head dug out like a ditch.
Gates cringed and tried to make the image go away with how hard he held his eyes shut.
“Hey, are you okay?” Will said.
Gates opened his eyes and clicked the display to sleep without looking at the phone. He turned to Will.
“Did you say I can spray people?” Gates said. Will grinned.
By the time he and Will had made it out of the bus, through the infirmary where they’d found the gurneys, and up the staircase to the observation room, Gates was already regretting leaving the bus. The control panel in the small room didn’t even light up or anything. The observation room was small and long, and was really just a long desk underneath a long window that looked down to the white room. A couple file cabinets that had been emptied out were stacked at the end of the room. There was a black control board in the center of the desk, with loose wires coming out the back, and a microphone jutting out of it like an antenna.
“Here, use the joysticks,” Will said.
Gates sat down in front of the control panel, and Will showed him how to trigger the water from the multi-hosed water sprayer on the ceiling of the white room, beyond the window. As soon as Gates got the hang of it, some people did come walking into the white room and he was able to nail two of them with the water jet. He scared the other one by making all eight of the contraption’s mechanical arms come to life all at once. Will thought it was all hilarious and was laughing so hard that he collapsed onto the control board. Will accidentally ended up pressing a bunch of buttons.
Inside the white room, there was a large, square metal door in the wall that Gates and the others had never managed to get opened. But now, it crept up like an automated garage door. Beyond the door, inside a small room with bare concrete walls, was some sort of clear cube on wheels. Gates felt his first spark of real excitement since the parents had caved to his demands.
Gates whacked Will on the arm to get his attention and pointed at the clear cube. “Hey, guy who knows everything about this place, what the piss is that?”
Will stared in awe.
“No way,” Will said. “I heard about this thing. The soldiers used it when the graduation machine was broken. I wonder if it needs keys.”
Gates grinned. “I know how to hot-wire shit.”
Gates had never driven a clear box before. Just the pure novelty of being inside a transparent cube as it rolled through the halls of McKinley was beginning to lift his spirits. He barely even noticed the sting of his eye.
People were starting to gather in the halls. He and Will had become quite the spectacle. Shocked and psyched faces came popping out of classrooms to ogle the rolling box. Kids started running after them, wanting to hitch a ride. He and Will drank beers as they did a wide loop through the school. Will was driving at the moment and sitting in the only seat inside the cube. It was about the size of a golf cart on wide all-terrain tires. The walls and ceiling were made of half-foot thick slabs of clear plastic. He could see the clear epoxy they had used to seal it together, and the excess had squeezed out of the borders between the slabs and hardened. The only door was in the back, also clear, but the door frame, lock, and knob were all metal. Empty beer bottles rolled around on the diamond cut metal sheeting floor. The electric engine produced a continuous buzzing sound. Gates crouched beside Will, fiddling with the rubber glove that extended into the cube from the outside, so people could evidently test themselves. Gates had turned it inside out, and he was using it to reach out the front of the cube and high-five people they passed.
Will hadn’t lied, the school loved him. Everyone seemed to know his name. When they saw him, they got really excited. They’d call out to him. Sometimes they shouted requests for the next drop. But most of the time they just shouted his name, or started applauding as he passed.
While Will drove, Gates took camera phone photos of the five Skater girls who rode on the top of the cube, their butts pressed into the clear plastic over their heads. The Skater girls were hitching a ride to Geek territory. When Gates started showing Will the pics he’d taken, the cube drifted too close to the wall and hit a few locker handles, jostling the whole thing. The girls squealed above and banged on the plastic.
“Watch the road!” one of the girls shouted.
“Sor-ry!” Will said, and both Will and Gates started laughing.
“You know what, this is good times, man,” Gates said.
“I know. I didn’t even get to see this thing last year. Never thought I’d be inside it!”
“Lemme try driving.”
“Sure.”
Will pulled over, and they switched places. Gates jammed his foot on the tiny gas pedal, while Will eased back to look up at the girls.
“This is what life’s about,” Will said.
“Oh, yeah?” Gates said, keeping his eyes on the hall.
“I think so. Life should always be riding inside a future car with cute girls on top.”
“Ha-ha! Hard to argue with that.”
Gates started weaving the cube from side to side down the hallway. The Skater girls shouted at him and began to hop off.