The Night Children

by Kit Reed

  “OK then,” Jule says. Play with the team. She sighs. “Right.”

  Mag finishes, “. . . the prisoners.”

  This makes Jule gasp. “Prisoners! Prisoners?”

  Mag doesn’t stop to explain; she rushes on to the important news. “Do you know there’s an underground river?”

  Tick says, “A river?”

  But Jule is hung up on what Mag just said. She presses, “What prisoners?”

  “Yeah,” Mag tells Tick, “you know the river in Castertown? It starts underneath this place.”

  Jule murmurs, “Prisoners,” but the other two have moved on.

  “A river!” Tick’s eyes catch fire. “Where does it go?”

  “That’s the whole thing! I found it my first night out on my own. When you’re alone,” Mag says, scowling, “when you don’t have a hideout you can’t sleep days, like normal kids. You have to spend all day running around the mall. So you sleep nights instead. I sleep underneath a bench in the Hall of Beauty, you know, the one with all the hair weaving and makeup and mini face-lift shops? Burt would never look for me there. My first night on the floor I heard water. I thought I heard water rushing under there.”

  “It’s a river, or you only think it’s a river?”

  Glowering, Mag shoves a wet sleeve into Tick’s face. “I know it is.

  “That night I just listened. Then I started tracing it, you know, to the loudest point? Tonight I found it and I went down.” Mag’s eyes are so wide that even Jule knows she’s telling the truth. “That river starts underneath this place, and it’s humongous. I think it’s the secret to everything. It’s how certain things get to town and how certain people get out of here—you know, when you stop seeing them, and it might be why when bad stuff happens, nobody in Castertown complains.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She rushes on, “But that isn’t the important thing.”

  Jule’s mind is still running after the prisoners, but she knows better than to interrupt. She is listening intently now.

  Mag finishes. “Look. I know how to get down.”

  “Ten years.” Tick is shaking his head. “Ten years and I never knew.”

  “The Hall of Beauty, get it? It’s not like guys would go there in a million years. I heard water running and went down a ladder to explore.” Mag shakes herself like a dog. “I fell in.”

  “How . . .”

  “I moved the right trash barrel and lifted the right grate.”

  “A grate!” Jule looks at Tick. Why is he surprised?

  “You know about the grates under the trash barrels, right?”

  Tick shakes his head.

  Jule says, “I do.”

  Mag grins at her. “Now tell me you ran into Lance.”

  “Ski mask, camo jacket? He rescued me!”

  “Me too.” Mag says mysteriously, “He lives down there.”

  “In the service corridors,” Tick says.

  “No. On the river.”

  Tick rubs his head, bemused. “All these years and he never told me.”

  Mag turns. “You didn’t know?”

  “No.” After some thought Tick says, “You can live here ten years and not know a lot of things.”

  “Tell me about it.” Mag grins. “I didn’t know there was a river, and I’ve only been here for a month.”

  Jule is beginning to like Mag in spite of herself. “How did you get here?”

  “Ran away from the State Home with Burt and them.”

  “State Home!”

  “We ended up here.”

  “What were you doing in the State Home?”

  Mag gives Jule a dark look. “That’s where they put you when you don’t have anybody to take care of you.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Mag is saying, “But you wouldn’t know.”

  Jule shudders. “Oh yes I would.”

  “Would not.”

  Tick’s hand chops the air between them. “Stop that! OK, Mag. Tell us what you found.”

  “Right.” Mag is talking directly to Tick. “OK, so. It was dark down there; none of those tramway lights. No tram tracks!”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Turned out the ladder ran straight down to the river, but I didn’t know until too late. I fell in. It was awful. I floated for, like, hours.” The memory pulls Mag’s face apart. “If it hadn’t been for Lance . . . Lance pulled me out of the water and took me back to his cave.”

  “Cave!”

  “Sort of. Hideout, I think. He built it out of leftover stuff. He fed me and while I was eating, he told me a couple of things.” She turns to Tick. “He told me to tell you.”

  “Like what?”

  Mag isn’t ready to answer. “Then he rowed me back to the ladder where I fell in. Now, Lance and I are friends, at least as good as it gets with Lance, but at the top of the ladder he opened this trap and . . .” Her face tightens in an angry glare. “He kicked me out. Then he slammed it on me and bolted it shut. And here I thought we were friends.”

  Tick prods her. “And he wanted me to know . . .”

  At last she tells him in a rush of words. “The river comes out of the ground underneath the Dark Hall.”

  Tick looks at Jule and Jule looks at Tick but neither says what’s running through their heads in neon block letters: WHERE I THINK MY PARENTS ARE. They could be. They could! Tick prompts, “And it goes . . .”

  “Straight to Castertown. And there’s another thing.”

  They wait for what seems like forever for Mag to finish.

  When she has their full attention, Mag says, “They’ve been putting something in the water.”

  Jule whispers, “You mean in our river?”

  “Barrels of stuff that they pour in. It’s doing something to the people.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, he just said tell you he can’t do it alone and it has to stop. He said tell you they’re getting rid of the prisoners, and . . .”

  “OK.” Tick flips open his phone. He is texting Willie, James. “OK!”

  “We have to hurry.” Mag’s face squinches up. “He says something awful is coming down. Hurry,” Mag says, moving off before they can ask questions or get answers.

  “Wait!”

  But Mag is running. “Come on.” All this and finally she gets to the point. “They got Burt.”

  SIXTEEN

  AMOS IS IN THE inmost, secret command module, tapping the master screen as though he can pick up the shoppers captured by the cameras yesterday and move them around in the box. He’s so excited he is singing, “Spring and summer, winter, fall. Cool kids shop at the MegaMall.”

  Soon this jingle will be playing in all the major cities of the world. Amos is poised to move on, into Phase Two.

  “Spring and summer, winter, fall. Cool kids shop at the MegaMall.” The warped tycoon knows better than anyone that when you control people’s wallets, you control them. Money speaks louder than all the bombs and artillery in the world.

  “Spring and summer . . .”

  With the commercials, he lured them, and now . . . Plastered to his walls are years’ worth of missing posters, piled layer upon layer—pictures and details on adults, children, all reported missing in the countless sectors of the MegaMall. These are the old man’s trophies. Gleefully, he sings, “Spring and summer . . .”

  At his back, Isabella clears her throat.

  Amos jumps. Caught in the act! Quickly, he claps on the gray mask that he wears to meet family. “You took long enough.”

  Full of self-importance, she says, “Something came up. It’s seriously grave,” and then stands there, waiting for Amos to ask.

  When you get right down to it, he doesn’t much like Isabella. He never did. She is a necessary evil, at least until this part of the operation is done. He put her in power because the last thing Amos Zozz wants to do is meet the public looking the way he does. What if somebody ripped off his mask? Dozens of years and millions of
dollars’ worth of plastic surgery and he looks worse than ever. His lumps are bigger. His bumpy head is just as bald. He can still hear the children’s ugly laughter. The wasps and the glue he had to use after the Galt twins ripped off his wig all those years ago destroyed his scalp. He can’t stand anything on his head.

  He will get even with them, he is in the process. He has people working around the clock. He has the ultimate checklist in place. The big day is approaching and all his fool daughter can talk about is this wretched meeting she just had.

  Right now, Isabella is boasting. “I’m a very motivational speaker, Dad. I had them eating out of my hand! And then. And then!” Preening, she buffs her fingernails on her gold stripes. “You’ll never guess what happened, Dad.”

  “Don’t call me Dad.”

  Her proud face hardens. “But, Dad!”

  “Stop that. You came out of a test tube.” He only had Isabella to carry on the family name, and look how that turned out. His daughter is so vain that he had to pay her to get married and double the amount to lose her figure long enough to give him an heir.

  “Father, it’s important.”

  “Don’t.” The boy was his living image, a proper figurehead for the corporation. Beautiful hair, Amos had such hopes. Well, look how that turned out. With his designated heir a disgrace to the family, he’s stuck with Isabella here. “No more babies,” she told him, although he promised billions if she’d give him a backup grandson. With a sniff she said, “I have my figure to think about.” How can he expect this woman to run a corporation when her looks are all she cares about? But Isabella doesn’t know what he is thinking.

  “Really important.”

  “Think of yourself as the family logo,” he says sourly. “The face of Zozzco . . .”

  “Sure, Father,” Isabella says. “But wait’ll I tell you . . .”

  Amos adds, just loud enough for Isabella to hear, “. . . for now.” That silences her. He needs this daughter, but he doesn’t like her. When this is done, he’ll have to dispose of her. To think that he had the most beautiful mask in his office made in the image of that grandson, the ungrateful little toad. He looked like me, he thinks. No. His throat fills with the same old bitterness, as if a million hornets are boiling in his brain. The way I would have looked. Now that the boy is out of the picture, there’s not a lot of family feeling left in Amos Zozz. “Isabella, the checklist.”

  “But this is important.”

  “Later. The checklist.” Stupid girl. She married a handsome man as ordered and, as ordered, she let Amos kick him out when he’d done his part. Then she dropped the ball. She didn’t care about the baby, she cared about getting her figure back. The woman was so focused on the mirror, so focused on her looks, Amos thinks resentfully, that she fell down on the job. She should have taught that child to love the corporation, to follow Amos without question; she should have taught him that power is everything, and that power comes from control.

  “But Da—Father—Mr. Zozz!”

  If only the boy . . . Don’t ask him about the boy. “Isabella, focus! We’re going over the checklist now.”

  “Please!”

  He hates that he has to stand on his toes to glare into her face. If Amos is a little bit jealous of Isabella’s looks, he won’t admit it. Not even to himself. Isabella is efficient but foolish, he thinks bitterly. All vanity—that lovely hair . . . Never mind. He needs her, at least until the Phase Two launch. He taps the clipboard, ready to take her down the To-Do list. “Item one!”

  “All right,” Isabella says grudgingly. Her tone says, All right for yooouuuu.

  Amos ticks off the first item. “Prisoners.”

  Isabella says vaguely, “Working on it.”

  “Construction.”

  “Working on it.”

  They go down the items one by one. Isabella’s answers are unsatisfactory, every one. Everything has to be done according to the plan Amos started laying as a boy, the plan he has honed and perfected and brooded over day and night ever since. The MegaMall is his triumph, but it’s only Phase One. Certain key people know about Phase Two, but the final, delicious touch, Amos keeps secret. He has stored up the details all his life until now, hoarding them like gold.

  His Zozzpeople don’t know it, but they’ve been working toward the old man’s biggest moment for years. Still, his idiot daughter is half-listening, half-answering. She seems to be more interested in whatever fool thing she was trying to tell him. This won’t do!

  To bring her into line Amos barks, “Now. About the employee fitness reports.”

  Just when he thinks he’s cowed her, Isabella falls silent.

  “I said, What about the fitness reports?”

  Instead of answering like a good girl, she rocks on the wedges of her tall gold shoes, swelling with importance. “Father, there’s something you really have to know.”

  True ruler of the MegaMall, king of the jungle in any world, the outraged Amos snarls, “There’s nothing I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know this.” Isabella bends down so she is breathing directly in his face. As Amos draws back, she whispers as if telling an awful secret, “There are feral children in the MegaMall.”

  She knows. But she doesn’t know everything. Amos produces a showy yawn. “Don’t waste my time.”

  “Father!” Isabella is huffing with excitement. “We caught one.”

  His head comes up. Never mind, he thinks. She’ll find out the truth anyway, when I reveal the master plan. He tries not to let her know that he’s excited. “And?”

  “What shall I do with him?”

  “Bring him to me. And don’t call me Father!” In his thoughts, Amos is running on ahead. The minute Isabella leaves here, he’ll organize the roundup, but the mean, secret part of him doesn’t want Isabella to know what he’s up to until the last minute. Knowledge is power. Clearing his throat, he says, “Now, about your to-do list. Isabella, These things must be done.”

  “But Father . . .”

  “Don’t call me Father!” Amos takes his voice to a place it’s never been before, at least not in front of anybody, rasping, “Now, finish by Friday or I’ll finish you.”

  “I’M WORKING ON IT!” she shouts angrily, and stamps out on those ridiculous golden shoes.

  Alone, Amos runs from monitor to monitor, touching the surfaces as though he could pluck out the shoppers running like ants and crush them in his hands. Control. The hunger is rising. He is overwhelmed by the need. It takes shape in his mouth and bubbles out in the same words the furious, wounded boy sputtered all those years ago, with his scalp raw and his warped body covered with bumps from a thousand stingers, poisoned by hatred more toxic than the venom of a million hornets.

  Helpless with rage, the richest man in the world makes his threat in the most powerful words he can find for what he is feeling.

  How would he feel if he knew they were the same words used by foolish, bullheaded Burt Arno?

  Because he was trapped and hurt by children, those snide, smelly, heartless little monsters, because he can’t show his face and the top of his naked head still hurts, because they made him look this way, he hates them all.

  He hates children beyond all hating; he despises them beyond reason. He will get even, and now the time is near.

  Frothing with rage, Amos roars, “I WILL MAKE THEM PAY.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “PUPPY.”

  Doakie is lost. He only came down in the tunnels because Puppy ran away. He promised not to leave the new hideout without a big kid along. Nance and Jiggy will be so mad!

  Well foo on them. This is all their fault. He heard Puppy crying so he followed the hrr hrrr and now he is down here.

  “Puppy?”

  Tick says be a good boy and whatever you do stay out of the tunnels, but Doakie isn’t scared. With the little orange lights on the railroad tracks it isn’t so dark in here.

  The only scary part is, he is alone. Plus his baby Scottie is just as black as the c
ement so he might be hard find.

  Never mind, he always comes when Doakie calls. He goes along the ledge in the tunnel, calling, “Puppy?”

  He doesn’t hear Puppy any more.

  He says into the hush, “Puppy?”

  Jiggy and Nance are gonna kill him. Everybody else got to go out tonight, but Nance and Jiggy aren’t allowed. Doakie had the sniffles so Tick told them to keep care of him.

  “Puppy?”

  Jiggy and Nance have to stay back because they got Tick in trouble with the Dingos. So, that was way last week, but Tick is still mad at them! Tick says Jiggy and Nance are under House Arrest until he says so.

  They started saying mean things about Tick as soon as he and that cranky new girl went out the door.

  Doakie wasn’t doing anything, but Nance and Jiggy were mean to him. They said it was his fault they were stuck in here babysitting when they wanted to play. Then they started pinging paper clips at him. Ow. Ow! When he wouldn’t cry they pinged paper clips at Puppy instead. They couldn’t hit Puppy so they used bikkies to call him and, yow, they got the leash on him. Then Nance held him and Jiggy pulled back the rubber band with a great big paper clip aimed at Puppy’s head.

  Doakie yelled, “Don’t hurt him,” but they didn’t care.

  Then Puppy nipped this mean girl Nancy and she hollered and let go. He started yip-yipping and running in circles and Nance and Jiggy laughed and laughed. Then Puppy scooted through their legs and into the back room where the tunnel steps are. Doakie tried to fall on the leash to stop him but Puppy got away.

  Tick told the smalls never to go into the service tunnels without a big kid along, but he has to find Puppy! Doakie tried to pretend Puppy was hiding in the back room, but he wasn’t. He could hear him hrr-hrrring at the bottom of the stairs and he took a deep breath and jumped. Now Doakie is in the tunnel. Poor Puppy, running around down here in the dark, dragging his leash. If anything bad gets Puppy, Doakie will die.

  Now Jiggy and Nance have quit yelling and started hunting him but Doakie doesn’t care. Tick will kill them if they leave the hideout, so they can’t get down here. They wouldn’t dare. Tick will probably kill him too, for running away, but he had to save Puppy, right?