Blackout: Book 0

by Alexandria Clarke

  “I said let her go,” I repeated.

  “She’s my little sister,” the man said, smirking.

  “No, I’m not!” the girl shrieked, kicking out at the man’s shins. The other, who had recovered from her crotch shot, wrapped her up in a bear hug.

  Jacob stepped forward, closing the distance between us and the trio. “I would do what my fiancee asks of you.”

  The ringleader stepped forward too. “Or what? It’s three against one, buddy. You really think you can take all of us?”

  He planted his hands against Jacob’s chest, but before he could shove him away, Jacob trapped the man’s hands against his body and yanked him forward, pulling him off of his feet. It triggered an immediate response from the other two, who sprang into action. They jumped Jacob in a flurry of fists. I drew the gun. I aimed at the sky. I fired a shot.

  There was a beat of silence before screams echoed from around the block. The men disengaged from Jacob, pulling each other out of the fight. They stumbled backward, eyeing the gun in my hand.

  “Take it easy, lady!” the ringleader called. “We’re leaving, all right? Take the brat. I don’t give a shit.”

  “Let’s go, man. She’s nuts!”

  The trio ran off, leaping over cars and trash until they disappeared down a side street. I lowered the gun and tucked it out of sight then ran over to Jacob, who was doubled over on the ground.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, running my hands over his arms and chest to check for injuries. The fight had lasted for less than fifteen seconds, but the men had had enough time to paint a black eye on Jacob’s usually flawless face. “Jacob?”

  “I’m fine,” he gasped, catching his breath. “Where did you get a gun?”

  “At the station,” I admitted. “It’s a long story.”

  “You’re full of surprises, Georgie.”

  “Yeah, but that’s why you love me, right?”

  He didn’t reply. His eye was beginning to swell shut. As I helped him to his feet, I noticed that the little girl watched us closely. Once Jacob was standing, I went over to her and knelt down to be on her level.

  “What’s your name?”

  She eyed me warily but held her ground. “Ivy.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ivy. I’m Georgie. Did those men hurt you?”

  “No.”

  Slowly, I reached out to give her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “You were really brave to stand up to them.”

  A dark shadow crossed Ivy’s expression. “They’re not the worst I’ve had to deal with.”

  “During the blackout?”

  “Ever.”

  I frowned, resisting the urge to hug the little girl. She was well-spoken and unusually self-aware for her age, a personality fit for someone who was forced to grow up faster than she should have. “Listen, Ivy. Those jerks won’t be the only people looking for trouble out here. You should go home where it’s safe.”

  Ivy looked down at her shoes. The white sneakers were gray with grime, and they appeared to be too small for her feet. A long, ropey scar stretched across her forehead. “I can’t go home. Not yet.”

  “Why not?” I asked her quietly.

  Her muddy brown eyes lifted to meet mine. She studied my face as if gauging whether or not to trust me. “Can you help me find something?”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Jacob. He shook his head.

  “What do you need us to find?” I asked Ivy. Behind me, Jacob let out a gusty sigh.

  “A bottle of alcohol. It can be anything,” she added hastily after reading my alarmed expression. “Rum, tequila, vodka. I can’t go home without something.”

  “Ivy, why do you need alcohol?”

  “It’s for my dad.”

  “He sent you out to find booze?” I asked her, incredulous. “In this? Does he know how unsafe it is out here?”

  She lifted her shoulders. “I’d rather be out here than with him. If I don’t find something to bring back, he’ll start throwing things at me again.”

  “Okay, you know what?” I stood up and took Ivy’s hand in mine. To my surprise, she didn’t resist. Her cold fingers curled around the back of my hand as if she had been starved of affection for years. “You’re coming with us.”

  “Georgie, are you serious?” Jacob asked. Though he kept his voice to a whisper, Ivy looked up between us. “We can’t take her with us. We have enough on our plates already.”

  “I can’t leave her behind,” I told him. “Don’t try to argue with me.”

  He gaped, looking between me and Ivy, then threw his hands up in the air as he walked away. “This is fucking ridiculous.”

  I let him widen the gap between us then followed along with Ivy for the remaining blocks to the school.

  “Is he mad?” Ivy whispered up to me.

  “Yeah, but it’s not your fault,” I assured her.

  Up ahead, Jacob had stopped short of the school’s gates, waiting behind a parked delivery van. Ivy and I met him there.

  “What’s up?” I whispered, peeking out from behind the van.

  “Looters.”

  The wrought-iron gates of Saint Mark’s were chained and locked shut, but that hadn’t dissuaded a mob of frenzied people from trying to get into the school. The reasoning was sound. Saint Mark’s was a large Christian private school. They fed several hundred students each day, which meant that they probably had a ton of food in storage. In addition, the school would be a relatively safe space to buckle down as long as everybody agreed to cooperate with each other, but by the the looks of the mob outside, no one wanted to share.

  “At least we know Pippa’s probably safe,” I muttered, watching as one of the looters attempted to climb the iron gate only to fall into the crowd below. “No one’s getting through that padlock.”

  Jacob banged his fist on the side of the van in a perfect imitation of his father. “Goddamn it! What the hell are we supposed to do?”

  “You need to get into the school?” Ivy piped up.

  Jacob looked down at the little girl. “Yes. My sister’s inside.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Ivy marched off, leaving Jacob and me to stare blankly at each other. Then we rushed after the preteen. Thankfully, she wasn’t joining the throng at the gates. Instead, she led us away from the chaos, slipping into a skinny alley that led us toward the back of the school.

  “Um, Ivy?” I asked, squeezing between the brick buildings. “What exactly are we doing?”

  “You said you had to get inside,” Ivy called over her shoulder. “Obviously, we’re not going through the front gates, so we’re going to find another way in. Here.”

  She pointed to the iron rods driven into the red brick base that encircled the entire campus. One of the rods was missing, leaving an opening in the gate just large enough for a full-grown person to squeeze through. From here, we could enter the back door of the school.

  “Did you already know that was there?” I asked her.

  “Nope. I’m just good at looking for details.” She slipped through the space and stepped onto the perfect green grass of Saint Mark’s lawn. “You guys coming?”

  I maneuvered myself through the gap and turned to help Jacob. His broad shoulders almost didn’t clear the space, and the iron rod on either side scraped against his sweatshirt, but he managed to worm his way through. Together, the three of us sprinted across the lawns toward the school. I tugged on the handle of the back door.

  “It’s locked,” I said, planting my hands on my knees and panting.

  “Should we knock?” Ivy suggested, not out of breath at all.

  “There’s no point,” Jacob said. “The school’s on lockdown for a reason. No one in or out. It’s a safety measure. We’re screwed.”

  “There’s an open window down there,” Ivy said.

  We all looked. Sure enough, one the basement windows, level with the ground, was propped open.

  “It’s too small,” I said. “I won’t be able to fit through there.”
>
  Ivy sat on the ground and dangled her feet through the window. “I can definitely fit through. Wait here. I’ll go around and open the door.”

  “Ivy, no—”

  But she slipped out of sight, landing with a soft thud in the school’s basement. “Be right back!” she called through the window before the pitter-patter of her sneakers faded out of earshot.

  “I guess we should go wait by the door then,” I said to Jacob. He turned without a word and leaned by the back door, his arms crossed over his chest. I took a deep breath. “Is this how it’s going to be? Are you going to huff and puff because I wouldn’t leave a little girl all alone out there? She’s already been a huge help, Jacob.”

  “It’s not just the kid, Georgie,” he replied.

  “Then what is it?”

  “You put yourself in danger to rescue a complete stranger,” Jacob said. “Now we have one more person to look after. You won’t tell me where we’re going. I’m supposed to convince my parents to leave their apartment and head to some no-name cabin in the woods because you say so.”

  “I thought we were over this—”

  “And you have a gun!” he went on. “The cherry on top. Not once have you ever mentioned to me that you knew how to shoot a gun. Not once! It’s like I don’t even know you, Georgie!”

  “Someone’s going to hear you if you don’t quiet down.”

  He glared at me, and for once, his eyes did not exude their usual coffee-like warmth. They were cold and hard like a polluted river. “Tell me one true thing about yourself, Georgie.”

  “Jacob, this is stupid.”

  “Just one thing. Tell me what your parents’ names are.” When I didn’t reply immediately, he shook his head in disappointment. “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can marry someone who won’t share the basic details of her life with me.”

  “Amos and Amelia.”

  “What?”

  “Those are my parents’ names,” I clarified, unable to look him in the eye. “My mother died when I was ten. She was stabbed. One night, I wanted to make cookies, but we didn’t have any eggs, so she went to the corner store to go buy a carton. While she was there, someone came in and told the cashier to give him all of the money in the register. My mother tried to reason with him. He had a knife. You don’t reason with someone who has a knife and a purpose.”

  Tears threatened to fall over my eyelashes, but I refused to let them. Jacob watched me in stunned silence as I spoke, the pity obvious in the sad angle of his lips. I went on. If he wanted to know about my parents, then I would finally tell him.

  “Her death ruined my father,” I said. “He pulled me out of school, stopped talking to our family, to her family. We moved out to the middle of nowhere, some piece of land that he’d inherited from his grandfather. He built a house for us. He refused to go anywhere, not even the grocery store. He knew how to hunt and fish and pickle vegetables. He learned how to reduce the amount of waste we produced. He wired a satellite dish for an Internet connection and home-schooled me himself. I didn’t see anything but the fifteen acres of our property for almost eight years. Never met anyone new either.”

  “Georgie—”

  “The trauma of my mother’s death made him agoraphobic, and I was too young to realize that he needed help,” I said, speaking over him. If I didn’t get this out now, it would get bottled up again. “When I told him I wanted to go to college in the city, he looked at me like I was crazy. Said he wouldn’t let me go, that it wasn’t safe. By that time, he had built a bunker underneath our house for who knows what reason. I didn’t listen. I had to get out of there, so when I was eighteen, I snuck out in the middle of the night and made a break for the city. I’ve been here ever since, making my own way. I haven’t spoken to my father in nine years.”

  Silence fell. The wind whispered through the blades of grass. Jacob’s breath whooshed in and out of his lungs.

  “Georgie,” he said quietly. “I had no idea.”

  I was saved from having to answer when the door to the school wobbled and Ivy pushed it open from the inside.

  “Come on,” she whispered, waving us in.

  The three of us crept inside. I had never seen the interior of a private school before, but the cold, stuffy design made me glad that I hadn’t attended one. Aluminum lockers lined the hallways, creating the illusion of rows of tiny jail cells. The marble floor picked up every single sound and bounced it up to the high ceilings. No matter how lightly I stepped, the squeak of my boots across the floor echoed from the rafters like a bird’s morning call. The only light came from the stained-glass windows set high above us. We moved cautiously through a kaleidoscope of colors as the saints watched us from their glass thrones.

  “There’s no one around,” Jacob muttered.

  “Or they’re hiding,” Ivy whispered back.

  It seemed inappropriate to speak above a certain volume. The school mimicked the holy mustiness of a church. The air was thick and smelled faintly of incense. In the darkened corridors, I half expected the ghosts of past students to float in from the open doors of the adjoining classrooms.

  “Let’s just try to find Pippa and get out of here as quickly as possible,” I said. Chills erupted on the back of my neck as we passed a dark science lab with glowing specimens in glass jars. “This place is giving me the creeps.”

  It was easier said than done. The school was huge. The hallways branched off in a confusing maze, which meant that we couldn’t split up to hurry along the process. Jacob was the only person who knew his way around since he had also attended Saint Mark’s in his younger years, so the three of us stuck together as he led the way. We checked each classroom, squinting through the gloom for any signs of life. We crept through the library, where the scent of old pages made camp in my lungs and the stacks of books seemed to watch us from their lofty shelves. We even checked the chapel in the hopes that someone might be attempting to pray away the chaos that had rained down on us in the last day.

  “Nothing,” Jacob said. He balled his hands into shaking fists as though trying to stop himself from punching a hole in the wall. I had never seen him like this before, so full of raw anger. He was usually so passive and unresponsive, quick to pacify or placate for the sake of staving off an argument.

  I took one of his hands, rolled out his clenched fingers, and massaged the knots of tension in his palm. “Hey, look at me. We’re going to find her, okay?” Jacob’s eyes shone in the warped light of an orange and blue glass window. “Let’s think about this. The blast hit in the evening, around seven or seven-thirty, right?” Jacob and Ivy both nodded. “That’s way past regular school hours. Did Pippa have a reason to stay here that late? Did she have something to do after class, any extracurricular activities?”

  “I don’t know.” Jacob blotted his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. He never cried in front of me, and he was furiously trying to stop himself from doing so now. “She used to play field hockey, but obviously she doesn’t anymore.”

  “What days does the team practice?” I asked him. “She might still go to them just for the sake of it.”

  “I don’t know,” Jacob said again, his voice ricocheting off the stone walls and echoing back to us like a ghostly choir. He tore his fingers from mine to run them through his hair instead. For once, he had not had the time to tame it with gel or mousse, but the man in front of me with the tousled locks, red-rimmed eyes, and a shadowy jaw line was not the same one that I woke up to every morning. “I don’t know, I don’t know! I see her once a week, Georgie. I should know this stuff!”

  At a loss for what to do, I went with instinct and pinned Jacob to the wall, forcing his hands to his sides. Our chests pressed together, my heart thumping against his. His entire body tensed, and I thought he might throw me off, but I took his face between my hands and brought our foreheads together to touch. Right away, he slackened beneath me.

  “You can’t do this,” I murmured. His breath tickled my lips. He sme
lled like peppermint, as if he had managed to sneak away to the bathroom and brush his teeth in between breakfast and heading out for the school. “You can’t panic for nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing. Pippa—”

  “We don’t know what happened to Pippa yet,” I said, squeezing his cheeks to make him listen to me. “That doesn’t mean she’s hurt. Calm yourself down. Look at this rationally. We’ll do another sweep of the school, and if we still haven’t found her, then we’ll walk along her route home and search there. But you can’t freak out like this. It’s only going to cause us trouble.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” I told him. “I understand. You’re not used to this kind of thing, but listen to me. The sooner you start letting the panic take over, the sooner we lose an advantage over everyone else. We have to stay grounded and be practical, especially under pressure. Do you understand me?”

  Jacob nodded, the rough stubble of his cheeks scratching against my palms. I pressed my lips to his, and he kissed back before drawing away and opening his eyes. He looked up and down the hallway. “Where’s the kid?”

  Ivy was gone. There was no sign of her in either direction.

  “Ivy?” I called. No answer. “What the hell? She was just here.”

  We prowled along the corridor, peeking into classrooms for a glimpse of the little girl. Around the corner, near the school’s massive entry hall, I noticed a door to a supply closet was ajar. I inched toward it and nudged it open. A shaft of light illuminated a collection of cleaning supplies, brooms, buckets, and mops. Behind a big floor polisher, I caught a glimpse of a keen brown eye.

  “Ivy, what are you doing in here?” I asked, kneeling down to get a better look at the girl. “Why did you run away?”

  She hugged her knees into her chest, shaking like a leaf, but she wouldn’t look at me. She kept her eyes trained on something behind me, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Jacob standing in the door of the closet too.

  “Babe, could you wait in the hallway?” I asked him. “If you hear something or someone, let me know.”