Struck

by Jennifer Bosworth

  “Only he keeps trying to invade our territory.” Katrina’s lip curled in a silent snarl.

  “Why use a school, then? Why not set up your own tent on the beach? Lure people in with granola bars or whatever.”

  “That’s not the way we work. We don’t bribe people to join us.”

  “But you do blackmail them.”

  Katrina frowned. “That was a one-time thing. And I said I’m sorry.”

  “Uh-huh. So how many Seekers are there, exactly? Was the whole gang present, you know … this morning?” I felt awkward bringing up my failed initiation. I didn’t want to think about it, much less talk about it.

  “Not all of them,” she said vaguely. “There are others. In other schools. Young people make the best Seekers. Our senses are more awake, and our minds are more open, for the most part.” She glanced at me. “There are always exceptions, though usually not among people who have the Spark.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. She was obviously referring to me.

  “What about Mr. Kale?” I asked. “Is he cult president?”

  “More like our general,” Katrina said. “He’s had the Spark the longest—ever since he was our age—and he’s the most powerful. In our circle, the leader is the one with the most power. Before Uncle Kale, it was—” Katrina lowered her chin and stared at her hands. “It was someone else, but she’s gone now.”

  “Gone?” Then it was possible for someone to check out of the Circle of Seekers.

  “Dead,” Katrina said flatly, and I gulped.

  Katrina’s eyes went blank for a moment, as though she were trying to figure something out. “I guess if you were to join us for real, you’d take Uncle Kale’s place.”

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. But Katrina didn’t even smile.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re not serious.”

  “Those are the rules,” she said, her tone somber.

  My laughter tapered off. “I hate to break it to you, but I only play by one set of rules.”

  “Let me guess. Yours?”

  “Pretty much.”

  She studied the ground. “It won’t matter anyway. You wouldn’t become our leader, not if the prophecy—” She bit her lip and shook her head. “Never mind.”

  Part of me wanted to hear what Katrina was holding back. But I’d been the focus of our conversation for all of thirty seconds, and already I was anxious to change the subject.

  “So is Rachel like you?” I asked. “Does she sense the Spark in people and report them to Prophet?”

  “I’m sure she would if she could, but she doesn’t have a direct line to Prophet. He has too many Followers at this point to give individual attention to each of them. My guess is she has some knack for sensing the Spark, but that doesn’t do her any good unless she can convince people to attend one of Prophet’s revivals and receive his blessing, like she tried to do with you yesterday.”

  I shuddered at the memory of the intensity in Rachel’s eyes, her strong hand squeezing my arm. I was surprised she hadn’t left bruises.

  “As long as you stay away from the White Tent, you’re safe,” Katrina said. “The only people Prophet trusts to do his recruiting are his Apostles, and they have their hands full recruiting the Displaced in Tentville.”

  I remembered the headline I read on Schiz’s blog about the missing Apostle, and wondered if the twelfth was lurking around some high school, searching for people like … well, like me.

  “By the way,” Katrina said, “you haven’t seen that guy around today, have you? Uncle Kale checked up on him. There’s no Jeremy Parish registered at Skyline.”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t seen him today.” I decided not to mention that I’d seen quite a bit of him yesterday, or that he’d been in my room the night before that with a knife pointed at my heart.

  “You’ll let me know if he comes around.”

  “Sure,” I lied. I didn’t trust Katrina any more than I trusted Jeremy. “I should get to class.”

  “Mia?” Katrina said hesitantly. “Can I … can I ask a favor?”

  I wanted to say no, but Katrina looked so pathetic with her choppy, shorn hair, I decided to cut her some slack. “You can ask.”

  “I want you to go somewhere with me tonight. I need your help. If you’ll do this one thing for me, I won’t bother you anymore. Or your brother. The Seekers will leave you both completely alone forever.”

  I was about to ask specifics and then turn Katrina down flat, but then two aid workers in their orange polo shirts pushed through the lounge door. Their eyebrows rose high when they caught sight of Katrina’s hair.

  “I’ll pick you up at midnight,” Katrina said. Her eyes scanned my outfit. “Wear something else, okay?”

  “Like what?”

  “Just show some skin for once.”

  “Hold on, I haven’t even agreed to anything.”

  But Katrina was already on her way out the door. “Midnight,” she called over her shoulder.

  20

  INCREDIBLY, THE REST of the day passed like any other school day, which is to say it dragged along as though it had two broken legs. Parker met me at my locker after school, right on time. We got our rations—this time we had a couple cans of fruit cocktail and a chocolate bar—and carried them to my car. Parker didn’t say a word to me the whole time, and he didn’t meet my eyes once.

  I had never felt so alone in my life, and that was saying something.

  Parker and I arrived home to the whiny roar of the vacuum. Mom was in the living room, using the hose to suck up the bits of plaster chips and dust that kept coming loose from the cracked ceiling. Her back was to us, and she didn’t hear us come in.

  Parker and I shared a glance. Neither of us had dared vacuum anything since the earthquake. Loud noises tended to lead to panic attacks. Now, in a single day, everything was different again. I had no idea what to expect from Mom anymore.

  “Mom,” Parker called over the drone of the vacuum. “Mom!”

  On impulse, I reached behind me and swung the door shut. The slam it made reverberated through the house. I hadn’t slammed a door in our house in a month, and it felt better than I’d ever imagined slamming a door could feel.

  Mom dropped the vacuum attachment and whirled around, clutching her heart.

  “Oh!” she said. “You’re home.” She punched the power button on the vacuum.

  Parker and I stared at her. The slamming door had startled her, but it hadn’t terrified her. I hated to admit it, but maybe Parker was right. Maybe the medications I’d had her on only slowed her recovery.

  Now that I really thought about it, keeping Mom in a drugged-up, dreamlike state during the last month, while she watched Prophet proselytize three times a day on The Hour of Light, might account for why his sermons had affected her so much.

  Oh God, I thought. It’s my fault. It really is.

  My fault it took Mom so long to recover.

  My fault she’s obsessed with Prophet.

  “Mia,” Mom said, brows furrowing as she looked at my eyes, which were suddenly swimming. Or drowning. “Are you okay?”

  I swallowed what felt like a shard of glass in my throat and eked out, “Uh-huh.” I turned away quickly. “I’m just going to”—I caught sight of the overflowing trash can in the kitchen—“take out the trash.” It was a dumb excuse to escape. Our trash hadn’t been collected since the quake. We could barely fit Mom’s car in the garage with all the bags piling up, and it was really starting to stink in there.

  The vacuum roared to life again and I went from room to room, gathering trash cans two by two and removing them to the garage. We were out of big trash bags, so I’d started pouring the garbage directly into the city container.

  I held my breath as I ventured into the reeking garage and opened the city trash container. I tipped the trash can from Mom’s bathroom upside down and watched as what looked like tiny white mints hailed down amid wadded-up tissues. It wasn’t until the white pe
llets were at the bottom of the city container that I realized what they were.

  My brain went numb.

  “Mia?”

  I turned to find Mom in the garage doorway. She came down the steps and stopped in front of me. I realized I was hugging the trash can from her bathroom. I forgot about holding my breath and inhaled the rotten stench coming from the bins. I almost gagged, and not because of the smell.

  “I want to apologize to you for this morning,” Mom said, seeming not to notice the disgusted look on my face. “I shouldn’t have asked you to say that prayer. I can’t force you to believe the way I do, but I’d like you to try. Maybe we could watch The Hour of Light together tonight. Or maybe we could go to a revival, as a family, to see what they’re like.”

  Her words barely registered. “You threw them away. The pills …”

  She blinked for a moment, as though confused. Then she nodded. “Yes, I had to.”

  “Why?”

  “Prophet says no person who partakes of addictive substances and mind-altering drugs will be saved when the storm comes. Our blood and our minds and our souls have to be clean.”

  “Do you have any idea what I went through to get those pills for you?”

  A deep line formed between her brows. She shook her head, and I realized she wouldn’t know, because I had done everything I could to keep that secret from her. Just like, when I was growing up, I had done everything I could not to let her find out what a pariah I was at school, or how people in Lake Havasu City avoided me, walked on the other side of the street when they saw me coming. I hadn’t wanted her to worry. I never wanted her to worry about me. I wanted her and Parker to live normal lives, despite my presence in those lives.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t want to take them anymore?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Mia.” Mom shook her head. “I’ve been so confused.”

  “Mom, you have to stop watching The Hour of Light. You have to stop listening to Prophet. He’s screwing up your mind.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No, Mia. He’s helped me to see things clearly for the first time in my life. It’s not just what happened during the earthquake. It’s everything. I’ve been living all wrong.”

  “Listen to yourself! He has you completely brainwashed!”

  Her mouth tightened, like someone had pulled a drawstring on it. “Watch your tone.”

  Suddenly I understood how an earthquake felt, pressure building up along a fault line, needing to be released. The pressure inside me had been building for a long time, and with everything that had happened that day it was too much.

  “You watch your tone.” I threw her trash can at the wall, knocking over a jar of nails that shattered as it hit the cement floor, scattering nails and glass everywhere. “You know who’s been holding this family together for weeks now? Me. I get that you’ve been through something terrible. I know you lost someone you cared about, and you’re confused and scared right now, but Parker and I need you. We’re scared, too!”

  Mom’s face went a deep shade of red and her shoulders began to tremble. “You are not allowed to speak to me this way. Children must respect their parents. Prophet says—”

  “I don’t care what he says! Parker and I are the ones who’ve been here for you, not him. Not Prophet. We’re your family.”

  For a moment, Mom’s eyes seemed to soften, as though my words had finally penetrated. Then she grimaced, and her hands curled into tiny fists at her sides. “You. Don’t. Understand.” She spit the words out one by one. “I’ve been so lost … I feel like I’ve been wandering through a fog, just … blind. And I’ve finally found my way free. I can see again. I understand why it happened, why God saved me when I should have died like the others. So he could show me the way and the truth. So I could change.”

  I stared at her. “What’s the truth, Mom?”

  “That if we’re not saved, then we are damned. My children are damned.” She lowered herself slowly to her knees on the grimy cement floor of the garage, amid the nails and broken glass and the stink of garbage. “Kneel with me,” she implored. “Let’s pray for forgiveness. Pray that our sins will be lifted.”

  “What’s going on?” Parker had appeared in the doorway.

  Mom had her head down, praying under her breath as I pushed past my brother into the house.

  I hesitated in the kitchen, wanting to turn back, to say something, do something that would change Mom’s mind. But her mind didn’t belong to her anymore. It belonged to Prophet.

  21

  I SPENT THE rest of the afternoon and evening locked in my bedroom. I didn’t come down for dinner, even though I heard someone banging around in the kitchen. I thought Parker or Mom might knock on my door with a peace offering of a bowl of soup, but that didn’t happen.

  At five minutes to midnight, I stood in the dark on the curb outside our house. I kept expecting Jeremy to step out of the shadows and try to stop me from going anywhere, but he didn’t. Maybe I really had seen the last of him.

  Katrina arrived right on time. I heard her door locks disengage with a click, and I got in.

  It took an effort on my part not to stare when I saw her. Katrina did not look like Audrey Hepburn, but she had embraced her new haircut and had styled it in jagged, punk-rock spikes. Paired with her smoky eye makeup and her stripper ensemble—her boobs were near to busting out of her red silk corset, and her leather hot pants barely covered her butt—the haircut worked for her.

  “What do you think?” Katrina studied her hair in the rearview.

  “It’s you,” I told her. It was as much of a compliment as I was willing to give. “So where are we going?”

  “You’ll know when we get there.”

  I sighed and buckled my seat belt. “Whatever. Can we hit the road before someone realizes I’m gone?”

  Katrina screeched away from the curb and cackled like a maniac.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Very inconspicuous.”

  She fished around in her purse and withdrew a silver flask. She unscrewed the cap and handed it to me. “You need to relax.”

  I contemplated the flask in my hands. I’d tried wine before, maybe gotten a little buzzed, but I’d never tasted hard liquor. “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s good. Try it.”

  Alcohol … one more thing that was in short supply in the city. I bet Prophet was happy about that.

  I tilted the bottle to my lips, filled my mouth, and swallowed. I winced at the alcohol taste, but it wasn’t too bad and left a nice warm trail down to my stomach.

  Katrina stared at me with wide eyes, paying no attention to the road. “You drank that like it was water.” She sounded mystified. “You didn’t even cough!”

  I shook my head. “Was I supposed to?”

  “That was white lightning, Mia.”

  I shifted uncomfortably, as I did whenever the word “lightning” was spoken in my presence. “Why do you call it that?”

  “Because it burns like you swallowed fire, that’s why. It’s homemade whiskey. Moonshine. You know what moonshine is?”

  “Of course. I’m not an idiot. Why did you tell me it was good?”

  “Because it is good, for hooch. You’re a lot more hard-core than I thought you’d be. Maybe I misjudged you.”

  To accentuate her point, I took another couple of hearty swallows from the flask. They went down smoother with each hit. I was used to feeling like there was fire inside me. “White lightning” was nothing compared to my own special brand of “red lightning.” Still, I did feel like kind of a badass. That was, until the alcohol hit my bloodstream. Apparently I was only immune to the burn of white lightning, not its other effects.

  I tilted my head back to stare at the ceiling of Katrina’s car, feeling suddenly woozy.

  “I think you’ve had enough.” Katrina took her flask back and swigged, grimacing.

  “Hey! Can you not do that? I don’t want to die in a fiery car crash tonight.”

 
“I can handle it,” she said calmly, putting the flask away.

  “Yeah, and what if we’re pulled over. This stuff smells like rubbing alcohol. We’d get busted and thrown in jail or something.”

  “Jails are full. The cops have bigger problems to deal with than a couple of mildly inebriated teenagers.”

  As though our conversation had summoned them, a parade of police cars, lights flashing, raced past us on the road, going the opposite direction at full speed and obviously uninterested in us.

  “Like I said, you need to relax.” Katrina glanced at me, smiling. Then she noticed my outfit and her smile disappeared. “You’re wearing the exact same thing you wore to school.”

  I glanced down at my clothes, but everything was starting to blur. “Oh … right, I forgot, you wanted me to ‘show some skin.’” The mere idea of this made me crack up. No one wanted to see my skin.

  Katrina scowled. “Put a stocking on your head and you could rob a bank.”

  I turned to look out the window, even though the city rushing past made my head spin. “So, what’s the favor? Why do you need my help?”

  Katrina was quiet for a long time before answering. “Because you can sense the Spark.”

  I looked at her. Both of her. Damn white lightning. No more homemade whiskey on an empty stomach for me.

  “We’re running out of time,” Katrina went on. “Prophet is recruiting at a pace the Seekers can’t match. I need you to help me play catch-up.”

  “But I’m not even one of you.”

  “Consider yourself an honorary Seeker. Just for tonight.”

  “I’m honored,” I said.

  “Is that sarcasm?”

  “Very perceptive of you.”

  Traffic was light as we entered Koreatown, nearing the dark patch of nothingness that was the Waste. Only the white column of a single skyscraper remained standing, bright white in the center of that darkness, the last visible remnant of the downtown skyline. The Tower.

  K-town was several miles west of the epicenter of destruction, but the area had sustained major damage. Cracks veined the outer walls of many of the buildings we passed and the streets were split open in places, like gaping wounds waiting to be stitched back together. But what struck me most was the vacant feel of the area. Before the quake, K-town had teemed with people. Now many of the businesses had turned off their signs and pulled metal gates across their doors. The dark lake of the Waste was spreading to consume everything around it. I wondered if, in a few more months, when the world didn’t end as Prophet said it would, people’s fear would fade and they would begin to trickle back into Los Angeles until the city was once again bursting at the seams.