by Katie French
“I'm sure you're right.” She won't meet my eyes.
I shake my head, a wave of nausea settling over me. “That goddamn baby.”
She frowns. “Now, Riley—”
“No, really, it's killing you. If there was a way…a way to get it out without hurting you, I'd do it.” I whip around and look at her. “Is there? Could Rayburn do it?”
She shakes her head.
“How do you know?” I lean forward, gripping the table. “There could be a chance. There has to be.”
“Please,” she says, tears welling in her eyes. “Seeing you upset just makes this worse for me.” A tear traces down her burned cheek, trailing past the rippled skin like a river over rocks. “I hate that you're always the one to take on all our troubles. I'm your mama. I should be the one.” She swipes her hand across her nose. “Why can't I be the one to save you?” She turns her face away, leaving me looking at her scar. The scar she carries because she once ran into a burning house to save me.
I touch her fire-ravaged cheek. She turns to me. “I love you,” she whispers. “I know you'll watch out for your brother.” Another tear. “He’ll need you. Already he looks to you as his mother.”
No. No, no, no. I’m shaking. The sounds of the cafeteria dims to a buzz. The heat in the room doubles and sweat trails down my back. The boys walk this way, laughing, but I can't take it. I stumble away. Where can I go? The bathroom. I nearly run. Once in a stall, I sit on the cool toilet seat and put my head in my hands. Mama cannot be dying. After all we did, after all we went through to get her out of the Breeders' hospital and she's going to die here with these freaks? I brush away tears with the back of my hand. No, I refuse to believe it. There has to be a way to save her. I'll talk to Rayburn. If he can't help, I'll go back to the Messiah. I'll offer myself up in exchange. I made a promise when I lost her the first time that if I ever found her, I'd never lose her again. I don't break promises.
I walk out into the food court, wiping my face on my sleeve. Mage and Ethan sit on the faded plastic fruit in the center. Mage hands him a folded paper flower in bright lemon yellow. He takes it, a smile breaking onto his face that I know all too well. A smile that says “here's my heart in my hands, take it and do with it what you will.” Before I can stop myself I'm tromping over.
“Ethan, we gotta go,” I say, my voice a razor's edge.
His eyes snap up. “Ri, Mage and I were just—”
“Mama needs to get back to her room.” I reach for Ethan's hand. He leans away from me, anger seeping into his features.
“They already took her,” Mage says, pointing. Our table's empty. I didn't even get to say goodbye.
“Well, then I need you for...” I grab his hand, “something else.”
“Riley, stop.” He eyes me angrily beneath his wave of dark hair. “What're you—”
“Come on.” I tug him away. He tugs back, but not hard enough considering my brain's on fire. He protests as I drag him behind me. When we get to a quiet part of the hallway, I let him go. He pushes away from me.
“What the hell do you think you're doing?” he yells. He tosses his thin arms up in frustration, a spitting image of Arn.
“Saving you from heartache,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. I lean in and whisper angrily. “We're leaving here and that girl,” I shoot a finger toward the food court, “is not coming with us.”
He flashes his teeth. “Stop bullying me. Who says you can drag me outta there like that? You're not Mama.”
His words are meant to cut me and they do, but not for the reasons he thinks. If Mama dies, he'll— I stare up at the ceiling, feeling gut-punched. “I'm not your mama, but you'll listen to me all the same.” I lay a hand on his shoulder and take the steel out of my voice. “It's for your own good.”
He shrugs my hand off. “You used to hate when Daddy said that to you.”
His words feel like a slap. I rub my hands over my face and blow out a breath. “Ethan, getting close to someone who might not be on our side is only gonna get your heart kicked in.” I peer into his brown eyes. “The only people we can trust is our own.”
He studies me through the dark slash of hair, his mouth working. “So, what about Clay then?”
I pull back, feeling a prickle of pain around my heart. I force the words out, though they feel less true today than they did yesterday. “Clay's family now.”
Garage duty is a welcome distraction and I fall into my work with the men and the cars. My second day I sort through rusting bins until my fingers ache. After an hour, I stand up, stretching my back. Crank looks over at me from where he lies on the ground, staring up into the underbelly of a car.
“Sore?” he asks, smiling. A splotch of oil darkens his cheek.
I nod, popping kinks from my shoulders. “You got something I can do to stretch my legs a bit?”
He rolls out on the little dolly and stands. He nods to Rayburn who’s stacking old tires. “You two could hike out to the warehouse and pick up a couple more bins of scavenged parts we haven’t sorted yet. Give you a chance to stretch. It’ll be hotter than fried snot, though.” He squints at me as he wipes his oily hands on a rag. He's cross-eyed, his left eye turning in toward his nose, giving his face an off-kilter appearance. I couldn't care less though. He treats me like a human being.
“I can deal with a little heat. You up for it, Ray?”
Rayburn gives a slow nod. “O-okay.” He pushes the last knobby tire onto the lopsided stack and walks toward me. “It’s the old toy establishment across the lot? The one with the giraffe out front?”
Crank laughs, nodding. “Yep, professor. That's the one.” He points a finger out the garage door and across the sand-strewn parking lot. “Carry back as many bins of parts as you can lift. They’ll be over to the left of the tech bins, I think.” We head out and he hollers after us. “And snag me the best-looking battery in the stack.”
“Will do.” I say.
“And a nudie mag if they got any,” he yells. Donut, behind him, gives a hoot of approval.
I give them a wink.
The sun hits us like a spotlight. It must be at least a hundred degrees, no wind. Rayburn shrinks in the heat like a turtle going into his shell. His sunburn has started to peel on his ears and cheeks. He crouches down and cups his hands over his face.
“Here, look,” I say, digging back behind me to pull my T-shirt up and over my ears and neck. “It might look goddamn ridiculous and the shirt'll chafe under your arms something awful, but it’ll keep your ears and neck from getting sizzled.” I keep forgetting he was hospital grown and never learned to live out in the wild.
He pulls his undershirt up and over his head and neck and looks at me.
I laugh at the sight of him: his big round glasses on his big round face, poking through the hole of his t-shirt. He looks like a cartoon bookworm. I give him a playful shove. “Once you’re outside enough, you’ll brown up. Crisp like bacon, my Auntie used to say. Then you won’t have to worry about it.” I glance down at my arms as an example, but realize my tan, the one I’ve had since before I can remember, is starting to fade. I’ve been indoors too much. For some reason this really bothers me. Maybe it reminds me of being cooped up in the Breeders' hospital. Maybe I see it as weakness. Either way, this place is slowly eroding who I was. Who we all were.
“Those, uh, those men are awful trusting.” Rayburn thumbs back to the garage. “Letting us come out here alone.”
I squint behind me. Crank’s shadow lies under the car and Donut is in the back working on something electrical, wires splayed out in a mess of colors. “Yeah. If the Brotherhood knew we were snooping around unsupervised, they'd pee in their giant panties.” I waggle my eyebrows, realizing what I've just said. “Rayburn, we’ve got to make this trip count. How long d'you think we got 'til those guys expect us back?”
He shrugs, the shirt over his head making him look silly. “Twenty minutes. Thirty at most.”
I pick up my step. “Hustle your bustl
e. We’re gonna search that warehouse for weapons, electronics, anything that could help us get the hell outta dodge.”
He shoots me a worried look. “W-w-won’t they n-n-notice?”
I grin at him. “Not if we’re careful.”
It takes a few minutes to jog across the boiling blacktop to the toy-store-turned-warehouse at the perimeter of the parking lot. The shop looks like it was once painted a rainbow of colors, but now the tile blocks are dulled and sand-blasted. The sign still reads TOYS, but the giant letters R, U, and S lie broken on the concrete, leaving behind faded outlines and twisted metal wiring. There’s a large two-dimensional giraffe standing beside the door. The plastic figure has a goofy grin and round eyes, but time has warped its orange neck until the giraffe bows down in defeat. We step through empty, glassless doorframes and into the shaded stillness.
“Huh,” Rayburn says, squinting into the dark. He pulls the t-shirt off his head and runs a hand over his shaggy curls.
“Huh is right,” I say, walking slowly inside.
The warehouse looks like a roadside swap meet on steroids. Boxes, shelves, and bins run in rows as far as the eye can see. The far left wall is lined with blue plastic shopping carts filled to the brim. To my right, cracked monitor screens and keyboards with half the letters missing are stacked on top of each other. A bin at my feet is stuffed full of wires that twist and jut out like a basket of snakes. We walk through slowly, touching copper piping, old wrenches, screwdrivers, a rusted saw with missing teeth.
“Geez,” I say, lifting a telephone with a cracked screen. I press dusty buttons. “What do they do with all this stuff?”
Rayburn sifts through a bin of medical equipment, his hand resting on one of those heart-listeners the doctors wore around their necks. He puts it on and then takes it off just as quickly. “They piece it out. Use, uh, use it for parts and the like. No wonder they, uh, have things running so smoothly. They have every spare part they could ever need.”
I pass a bookshelf chock full of yellowed books and try to read their spines. “I've never seen so much stuff in one place. Most of the buildings we find have been gutted to the gills.”
He nods, picking up a broken syringe. “Genius, really, to collect as much as p-p-possible. It’s not like this stuff is, uh, is being produced anymore.” He pushes up his glasses, hunches down, and peers deep into a suitcase on the floor.
I gaze around. The stacks and piles go on forever. How can we find anything useful in twenty minutes?
“We need to split up. No more window-shopping. You go left. I’ll go right. We look for weapons, anything that could help us escape and get out of this place.” Remembering Mama’s situation, a tightness encircles my heart. “Look for medications, too. Anything that might help Mama survive on the road.”
Rayburn offers me a sympathetic look. “I’ll work on that. You look for the, uh, weapons.”
I smirk, taking off into the dimly lit interior. Rayburn knows me too well.
I jog, scan, jog, scan. Bins of warped silverware. Cracked plastic tubs of clothes and shoes. Everything has a fine layer of dust. It's like searching through a museum. If I had the time, I’d rifle through each bin and touch each relic, turning it over with gentle fingers. A baby doll peeks at me from under a table, one eye gooed shut, the other staring at me behind her black lashes. So many treasures, yet I can't find what I'm looking for. I don’t know if I expected a shelf full of guns and racks of bullets, but I find nothing. Not even a usable kitchen knife.
At the bottom of one bin, I find little brown cylinders the size of my finger tied in a line. At each end a little wick dangles. I lift them to my nose. They smell faintly of gunpowder. Mini explosives? I pocket them, along with two soggy packets of matches. They could come in handy if they still light.
“Rayburn!” I call from my end of the warehouse. He's hunched form the door, bent over a tub. “How much time?”
“Not much!” His voice echoes back to me.
Panicked, I run faster. When I get to the back wall, my heart sinks. This is our one chance.
To my right I spy a door. Gripping the worn handle, I tug it. Locked. Locked doors mean big prizes.
I run back, grab a couple small screwdrivers and some thin pieces of stiff copper wire. Then I set about picking the lock. It's the second time today that I'm glad I had Arn around growing up.
When the lock clicks, I'm sweating and my heart is pounding, but the door sliding open sends a shiver of joy through me. I'm greeted by darkness. Slowly, my eyes piece together a storage room. I feel around, hands extended until I bump into something at waist level. My hands fumble into a round drum big as a water barrel. It's heavy. Gripping the sides I drag it through the doorway. Liquid sloshes inside. When I make it out of the storage room, I’m sweating.
Rayburn appears behind me. “What is it?” He leans over my shoulder.
“Don’t know.” The off-white opaque plastic holds liquid. Water, or something else? I twist off the round white plug. The chemical fumes that escape nearly knock me off my feet. I stagger back, coughing, my eyes burning.
“Cover it up!” Rayburn shouts, fumbling for the lid.
“What is it?” I ask.
“A caustic chemical. Some sort of hydrochloric acid maybe, or bleach.” He looks up at me with worried eyes. “Whatever it is, we should l-l-leave it alone.”
Symbols are scrawled across the sealed lid in a smudgy charcoal.
“What does it say?” I lean in.
Rayburn reads the dark, ominous letters. “'Caution: HF. Do not Open. For 14:13.'”
Chapter 15
As the sun sinks low in the west, my mind whirs. I roll the black, slashed words around: Caution: HF. Do not Open. For 14:13. The Caution is simple enough. For 14:13 tightens my insides. Why would they keep a huge barrel of caustic chemicals locked in a room? What is 14:13? A time? A date? They’ve already been tampering with the water. Then I remember Mage telling me her father said it would be better to die than to go with the Breeders. Will they use this poison on us? How long do I have to figure it out until these lunatics dump it in our water and wipe us all out?
I point at the black scrawl, the smell of chemicals still hanging in the air. “What d’you think this is?”
He swallows hard and looks down at the barrel. “I…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What do you think about the number 14:13? A certain time of day? Some sort of code?” I stare at his face in the dim light of the warehouse.
He blinks uncomfortably, pushing up his glasses. “Riley, I really, uh, don’t know.”
“Rayburn, seriously. This is important.” I hit my hand against the barrel. The plastic vibrates and the liquid sloshes inside.
“Is it?” he says, dropping his eyes to the floor.
“Yeah,” I say slowly. “I think it is.”
He blows out a frustrated breath. “It could mean absolutely nothing, Riley. It could be someone's favorite number or their shoe size.”
“Their shoe size?”
“You know what I mean.” His eyebrows fold down and his stammer is nearly gone. His next words come out forcefully. “You are so busy looking for a way out maybe you haven’t considered that we just stay.”
I blink, taking in his words. This was the last thing I expected him to say. “Stay? Stay here? Rayburn, we can't—”
“Can't we?” he says, gripping the sides of the barrel. “We have food here. Shelter. I have meaningful employment. No one tries to shoot us. There are…” His eyes lock on a stack of hardcover books. “There are many benefits to becoming a member of this, uh, this well-formed society.”
“Well-formed society?! I…I can't believe what I'm hearing.” I nearly spit the words. “Why would you say this?”
“Why? Because I have so much to look forward to on the r-r-road?”
I stare at him, my mouth open. “What about Clay?”
Rayburn won’t look at me. “Clay can take care of himself.”
My ang
er flares hotter. “You’ve never liked him.”
His head jerks up. “W-w-wait a minute. He never liked me. Not the other way around.”
“That doesn’t mean we let them take him.” I shake my head, frustration building. We are running out of time. Crank and Donut will start missing us soon.
He turns and begins striding back to the warehouse front doors. “Good luck with your wild goose chase, Riley. Let me know when you g-g-get us excommunicated.”
I grit my teeth and watch him leave. Then I shove the barrel back into the closet and lock the door. I don’t care what he says; I have a bad feeling about that barrel. Above me, the giant metal beams, once shiny and new, have given over to rust and erosion. How long after I'm dead will those beams still be here, providing homes to birds? Generations? How can I keep fighting when the people I’m fighting for turn against me?
Our garage shift ends as the sun is trailing thick orange fingers over the parking lot. Rayburn and I walk together, our long shadows leading us in. We haven’t spoken since our fight. Crank, Donut, and Lance crunch behind us too close for us to speak anyway. I look over at him and he drops his head. I kick at a rock in our path and watch it skitter into the weeds. Why does everything I do have to be so hard?
Inside, we split up and wash up in different bathrooms. Then we walk to the cafeteria, the throng joining us, making it impossible to talk. We stand in line, elbow to sweaty elbow, and receive our trays of stringy, boiled beans and a deflated wheat roll. Andrew wasn’t kidding when he said they were rationing. My heart sinks at the small portion. After all that hard labor, I’m starving.
When I look up, I spot Ethan and Clay at a table not far from mine. The boys wave, but I don't move. Instead I look out across the bustling food court. It's easy to see why Rayburn wants to stay. He has a real chance at a life here and the road has been awful for him. He could work and make friends. For a moment I consider it, creating a life with these people. But then I think of Stephen, of Kemuel, of Andrew and his goggle-covered stare. I think of the sore already forming on Clay's lip. And the moaning in the hole. Rayburn might not believe me, but I know this place is poison.
