Astrid came striding over, trailing little kids. They swarmed past the bus and looked at our makeshift wall.
“Not bad,” Astrid said.
“It’ll do the trick,” Jake said.
He grabbed Astrid and got her head under his arm.
“Hey, kids,” he said. “Free tickles!”
The kids chirped and crowed, trying to tickle her.
“Let me go, you jerk!” she said, but with a laugh.
She pulled away from Jake, pushing the kids away.
“Get off me, you little monsters!” she shouted good-naturedly.
Her shirt rode up during the scuffle and I caught sight of her lower back. Tan, muscled, gorgeous.
She was in better shape than me. By far.
“Let’s get more blankets,” Niko said. “And do another layer. Then I want to see if there’s some plywood and make it more sturdy.”
I wiped the sweat off my head and the air felt nice and cool on my forehead. It made me realize something and the something hit me like a fist in my gut.
“The AC,” I whispered. Then I shouted, “The AC!”
The AC was on. The huge industrial AC unit was sucking in the air from outside. It was why we all felt so nice and cool after working so hard.
“Son of a bitch,” Niko said.
CHAPTER FIVE
INK
“Where’s the main controls?” Niko asked Astrid. “Do you know from when you worked here?”
“There’s some kind of security office in the back,” she stammered. “In the storeroom.”
The little kids clung to Astrid so she stayed behind while the rest of us raced with Niko toward the back of the store.
We headed through two giant metal double doors into the storeroom.
It was dark back there. Most of the storeroom was filled with crashed-over boxes and toppled shelving units. Lots of smells mixed together: fruit juice, ammonia, electricity, dog food.
Set into the back wall were two giant loading bays, each with two huge metal doors.
I hadn’t even considered that there would be loading bays but of course there would be. Safety gates had come down over the huge doors, just like up front.
To one side of the big, cavernous space was a booth with the words Operations Center on the door. It had had glass walls before the earthquake, but now it just had glass debris scattered everywhere.
“Bingo,” said Brayden, king of stating the obvious.
The door to the Operations Center was locked but since the glass in the door had been smashed to pieces, Niko just ducked through the jagged-edged door.
There was a row of security cameras, seeing into every corner of the store, though most looked focused on the Media Department.
“This is awesome,” Brayden murmured. He pointed. “Look, you can see into the women’s changing rooms!”
“Focus, Brayden,” said Jake. “We need the controls for the AC.”
Alex pointed. There were four panels, built into the wall. One controlled the solar harvest system on the roof. The function lights were steady green, which confirmed what we already knew: We had power.
One was about the gates. A flashing override message read, “Remote Trigger—Riot Gates.” And one had to do with water pressure. That seemed fine.
And there was the one we needed: AC.
We all scanned the panel.
It was all numbers and zones. Percentages and lots of icons that were impossible to decipher. One looked like a lightning bolt. Another looked like an upside-down smiley face. One looked like someone mooning you, I’m not kidding. It was a totally indecipherable.
“Oh man,” Alex said anxiously.
Brayden started pressing elements on the flat screen randomly.
“Don’t—” Alex started, but Brayden cut him off.
“One of these buttons will turn it off!”
“But you can’t just press them all like that,” Niko objected. “You could just be—”
As if on cue, the AC picked up intensity, blasting us with cold air.
“Making it worse.”
Brayden threw up his hands.
“We’re going to have to find the unit and shut it off manually,” Niko said. “That’s the fastest way.”
“It’s probably on the roof,” Alex said.
We all looked at him blankly for a moment.
“I’ll go,” Niko said.
“Me, too,” Alex added.
I couldn’t let my little brother go and not go myself.
“Me, too,” I said.
“I’ll be right back,” Jake said. “Wait!” He ran off into the store for something.
“How do we get on the roof?” Alex asked.
“Up there,” Niko said, pointing.
A perforated metal staircase ran up a wall and led to a hatch in the ceiling.
The hatch was open and yellowish sky shone through.
“What the—?” I stammered.
“Sahalia,” Niko answered. “She must have found the hatch.”
I was about halfway up the stairs when Jake came bounding toward me.
“Here,” he said, handing me three industrial-strength air masks. He’d gotten them from the Home Improvement Department.
“Thanks,” I said and looped their straps over my shoulder.
“I guess you better get some for you guys,” I suggested. “Just in case.”
Jake raised an eyebrow at me giving him a direction, no matter how gently put.
“Already on it, man,” he said.
* * *
I stepped through the hatch, up onto the roof.
How can I describe what I saw?
First off, the roof was covered in hail and the surface had huge pits in places.
More importantly, there was Sahalia. She was sitting on the ledge of the roof, looking out at the sky. She had a box next to her. A home safety fire-escape ladder. It was still unopened.
Sahalia was staring straight ahead.
Niko and Alex were standing behind her, staring in the same direction.
I stopped in my tracks and the masks slipped from my fingers when I saw what they were seeing.
In the distance, near the mountains, a thick streak of pitch-black rose up, twisting like a ribbon through the air. It went up in a line, up until it reached cloud level, and then it gradually expanded out, shaped like a funnel.
It looked like a stream of ink being poured up, pooling in the sky.
Cold water from the hail was seeping into my sneakers and wetting the bottoms of my pant legs. I didn’t care.
The black cloud was growing and growing, this ball of nighttime spreading out over the horizon.
“What is it?” Alex murmured.
“Ask Brayden,” Niko answered.
Sahalia murmured, “They made something evil over at NORAD.”
The ink cloud was now as big in the sky as the mountain range behind it. It looked like an inverted mountain, tethered to the ground by its long black plume.
“AC units,” Niko said. “Now.”
Brave Hunter Man had spoken.
We scrambled to obey.
* * *
The units were easy to find. They stood right in the middle of the roof. Four giant, van-size boxes. They had slits in the sides to let in the clean air and then metal ducts branching out from each machine and connecting into one giant duct. The giant one went in through the roof of the Greenway.
“Shoot,” Niko said. “The ducts.”
The ducts were the problem. They had taken a major beating in the hail. They were battered and perforated. They had big holes in them and were sucking in the regular air along with the processed air from the units.
“Even if we shut off the unit, the bad air will come in through the broken duct,” Alex said. There was panic rising in his voice. He was getting scared.
“We gotta seal off the vent,” Niko said. He turned to Sahalia. “Go get a sledgehammer. If it’s too heavy to carry, get Jake to bring it up.”
“I can carry a stupid sledgehammer,” she sassed.
“Well, go get it then!” Niko yelled.
She hurried to the hatch.
Niko stepped over to the giant duct, about four feet away from where it went into the roof. He shimmied up on top and jumped up and down. BOOM. The metal echoed. BOOM. And it gave, just a little.
“Help me,” he said to me and Alex.
My brother and I got up there and we started jumping on that duct together. It might have been fun, if we weren’t watching a black cloud spread like an oil spill over the sky.
We jumped and together the three of us started to make a dent in it. (Pun unintentional, I promise.)
Sahalia came dragging the sledgehammer. We got off the duct.
Niko took it and WHAM. He started beating down the metal. The sledgehammer was much more effective than our jumping. The muscles in his back were straining and I really had to respect the guy. Niko was strong and tough.
The light went very, very green. Everything looked alien and underwater.
BAM. BAM. BAM, went the sledgehammer, denting down the air vent.
The chemical cloud was sweeping the air along in front of it like a summer rainstorm. Only this air was bitter and my eyes began to sting.
“You guys, go,” Niko shouted. “I’ll be right there.”
“No!” I said. “You need our help—”
Suddenly I realized I’d left the masks by the hatch.
I ran to get them.
I guess Alex and Sahalia thought I was making a run for it. They followed me.
I grabbed the masks, and Alex and Sahalia slipped past me and into the hatch. They started down the stairs, coughing and cursing.
“I’ll be right there,” I shouted.
I turned to start back to Niko …
When I felt sick.
Sick in my throat and body and mind. I felt like my blood was on fire. I was so scratchy and irritated I wanted to kill someone. I really did. I wanted to kill somebody and the somebody I wanted to kill was Niko.
I saw him there, hitting the vent with that sledgehammer and I wanted to throttle him. End his whole noble, heroic no-sense-of-humor thing.
I lurched at him with the mask.
I roared at him.
Then I fell over, facedown in the hail. I’d been tripped.
Someone had me by the foot and I was furious. It was my brother. He had an air mask on and he was pulling me into the hatch.
I swung at him. I’d kill him. Tripping me like that. I’d rip his head off.
I grabbed handfuls of hail and I threw them at him.
He dragged me toward the hatch and pulled me in.
I started beating him with the mask I was still holding. He wouldn’t let go of my leg and was dragging me down the stairs.
I swung at him, wanting him to lose his balance. I tried to get his mask off. I grabbed his hair and pulled. I bit my brother on the arm and drew blood.
I saw red, like people say they do. A sheet of blood red was over my eyes and I couldn’t think. Just pummel. Pound, tear, destroy.
We reached the bottom of the staircase and Alex tried to squirm away from me. I launched myself at him.
Jake tackled me.
I hit the cold cement and I cursed him and raked at his face.
“Jesus Christ!” Jake cursed. “What happened up there?”
I roared at him. I had no words.
“What happened to your brother?” Jake demanded of Alex.
Alex was crying. I had made him cry.
“He’s an animal!” Jake said, pinning me to the ground with his knee in my stomach. My arms were behind my back, somehow. In addition to football, Jake had also been on the wrestling team. And he had maybe fifty pounds on me—I was pinned.
We didn’t hear Niko until he was standing right beside us.
“I sealed it,” he said. “It’s done. But we’re gonna need to cover the hatch with plastic sheeting and the loading-bay doors back here, too. I’ll get the staple guns if you guys get the—”
I must have growled or barked or something.
He gestured to me.
“What’s wrong with Dean?”
I swear to God, I wanted to rip his throat out.
CHAPTER SIX
THE GATE RATTLER
Jake strained to keep me pinned. Rage hammered in my heart. I wanted up!
I heard this weird whine. A panicky whine.
It was coming from Brayden.
“What is he?” Brayden said. His upper lip was curled back in an expression of disgust. “What is he? What is he made of?”
“What are you talking about?” Jake said, still struggling to keep me pinned.
Jake must have weighed two hundred pounds. I was flattened against the cold cement floor.
“Look at him!” Brayden cried. “There’s smoke coming off him. He’s straight from hell!”
“What are you talking about?” Alex said. He sounded scared. He sounded like he was crying but I couldn’t see him from where I was pinned.
Brayden was pulling at his hair, looking all around.
“It’s everywhere!” he cried. “Smoke from hell.”
He backed away from us and huddled against a stack of giant boxes.
“Brayden, there’s no smoke,” Niko said. “Everything’s okay.”
“There is evil everywhere!” Brayden wailed.
“Dude, you’re flipping out,” Jake said.
Niko went over to Brayden.
“Don’t touch me!” Brayden screamed.
“Look,” Niko said to Jake. “His pupils are completely dilated.”
“Get away from me,” Brayden said.
“It must be the air.” Niko came over to look at me. “The air went all green. We must have been breathing in the chemicals. Some kind of psychotic agent in the air.”
Niko looked funny, too, though I wasn’t quite up to saying so.
He had blisters around his eyes, like a raccoon mask. And his hands, when he touched me, were covered with tiny blood blisters, like he was wearing red lace gloves.
He started to cough. It sounded wet in there.
He coughed into his hand and came up with a blob of red phlegm. Then he caught sight of his hands and he looked at them with this expression of puzzlement so exaggerated I started to laugh.
Not a cool, ironic laugh but kind of a mad cackle.
I’m telling it like it happened, okay?
Brayden was seated on the floor, curled in a little ball, sobbing hard, jagged sobs.
Good.
I closed my eyes and listened to my heart beating. It was loud, like I had the heart of a gorilla.
All I could say was “Agghrr…”
I was trying to say Alex. But it didn’t come out.
“We’ve got to get cleaned up,” Niko said. He had his shirt off and was examining his skin. A tapestry of blisters was developing over his skin. It followed the underlying veins. He was starting to look like a biology class illustration of the circulatory system.
I tried again. “Agghhrr…” I wanted to say I was sorry.
“We need soap and water,” Niko said. “And I think I should take some Benadryl.”
“I’ll get it,” Alex offered.
“Sahalia, you should change, too,” Niko said. Sahalia looked freaked out. Her makeup was running down her cheeks. She headed toward the doors back into the store, giving Brayden a wide berth.
“Hey, would you mind getting us some clothes, too?” Niko asked.
She looked back at all of us.
“Sure,” she said. “Whatever.”
I tried to say, Let me up, I’m fine. But what came out was grrrrag. I strained against Jake’s bulk.
“Chill out, Dean!” Jake shouted in my face.
Alex skirted by. He glanced at me, then looked away. He had welts across his face where I had clawed him and there was blood caked near his nose. His eyes were red.
“Hey, little man, do me a favor,” Ja
ke said to my brother. “Get me some rope so I can tie up the Hulk over here.”
* * *
There is something very wrong with being tied up with rope your own brother brings from the Sporting Goods section.
* * *
After they tied me up, Jake took Brayden back into the store. He and Niko thought maybe the air in the storeroom was still polluted.
Niko stripped off his clothes and threw them in a trash can. He told Alex to do the same. They took the antibacterial soap and spring water that Alex had brought, and stripped and washed down. They just stood there on the cement floor and scrubbed down together.
“Are you okay?” Niko asked Alex.
“I think so,” Alex said.
“That was pretty scary.”
“Yeah.”
* * *
I hated hearing that. I hated hearing Niko comforting him. He was my brother. I should be the one comforting him. Only I had attacked him, you see.
* * *
“Here!” came Sahalia’s voice, and some garments came flying through the door.
She had picked out pink tracksuits for us, complete with fluffy pink slippers.
I was starting to feel like myself again.
“Guys,” I croaked, my voice horse and scratchy. “Guys…”
Niko stopped dressing to cough into the trash can.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked Niko.
Ask me, I wanted to say.
Niko nodded, wiping spit from his chin.
“The blistering is going down. Washing was a good idea. I think if I’d been up there any longer it could have been really bad.”
Alex nodded sympathetically.
“Guys!” I said from the floor.
“Okay, Dean!” Alex snapped at me. “Just wait!”
Niko examined his chest. The blisters were fading away. Vanishing almost.
After they’d both dressed, they came over to look at me.
I saw Alex had my glasses sticking out of his shirt pocket. He must gave grabbed them during our scuffle. Pretty considerate, after I’d tried to tear his scalp off.
“You’re feeling better?” Niko asked me.
“Yeah,” I croaked. “Well, I feel like a buck fifty. But I feel like myself.”
“Who is the president? What day is it? What’s Mom’s favorite flavor of ice cream?” Alex asked me.
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