Blackout b-1
Page 5
Her room was small—a tiny space with thin walls and a linoleum floor—but she felt safe for the first time that night. It was the one place in the entire town where she didn’t have to put on a show, where she didn’t have to be someone else.
Sometimes, in her room, she didn’t even feel like her dad’s caretaker. In her room—she was free.
She took off the heavy sheepskin coat and inspected her dress in front of the mirror on her closet door. It was a complete loss. Aside from the mud stains, which were everywhere, the satin was snagged and scratched from every time she’d pushed through bushes or waded through alfalfa. Even if she could get it cleaned, it would look terrible. She slipped it off and tossed it in a pile in the corner.
First dance, over.
She wondered where she was going, what clothes she should wear. Her wardrobe was extensive now—all stolen from the mall in the city—but most of what Nicole had talked Aubrey into getting was too delicate for the uncertainty that lay ahead. The expensive jeans, the loose, thin tops, the cute sandals. Aubrey didn’t know where she was going, but she knew she’d be on her own, and that the few times she’d be around people she’d be invisible.
She picked a pair of jeans that, while still expensive, seemed durable, like they could handle the outdoors. She layered her tops—a T-shirt, a long-sleeve button-up plaid, and a sweater. She didn’t have nice hiking boots, so she pulled on a recently acquired pair of cross trainers.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t the old worn-out Aubrey she used to be, but she wasn’t the stylish popular girl Nicole had helped her become, either. She was half and half. She wasn’t anyone.
Aubrey plopped down on the bed and put her head in her hands. What was she going to do? She could take her .22 with her, but she couldn’t live off the land, not forever. And going into the city wouldn’t help: sure, she’d have access to food and clothes that she could steal on a whim, but she’d be homeless. She couldn’t stay invisible forever.
She wanted to cry, but stopped herself. It wouldn’t help anything, and she had cried enough that night.
Jack was on the edge of his seat, staring at the TV when Aubrey came back out of her room. He didn’t look up.
“What’s the news?” she asked, sitting on the arm of the couch.
“Roundups,” he said. “It’s not just here.”
Aubrey’s stomach turned, and she slid down onto the seat next to him.
“Apparently it started a couple days ago,” he said, giving her a quick glance. “They’ve been keeping it quiet. It’s mostly rumors at this point, but it’s happening all over the place. The official word is that it’s for protection, but others say it’s for some kind of testing. The National Guard has been going door to door.”
“Testing,” she repeated. Her chest felt hollow, as if she were collapsing in on herself.
“Maybe the terrorists spread poison or something,” Jack said.
Aubrey nodded, though she knew he was wrong. She didn’t know what her invisibility had to do with terrorists, but she knew—she just knew—they were after her.
Jack met her gaze. “We should turn ourselves in.”
She was suddenly panicked. “What? No.”
“What if we’ve been poisoned? If they’re testing for something, what if we have it?”
“We don’t,” she said, standing up. She nervously ran a hand through her hair. Everything was falling apart.
“Here, look.” Jack pointed to the TV. “This is up by Salt Lake.”
It was a helicopter view of a dark road. Below them was a long convoy of vehicles. The news anchors were speculating about the destination of the convoy, listing half a dozen military installations in Utah and Idaho. They weren’t explaining anything about who was in the buses or why.
“Why would they be testing people somewhere else?” Aubrey asked, trying to breathe calmly. “Why not just do it here, in the high school gym or something?”
“Maybe we’re contagious?”
“No,” she said.
“I really think we need to turn ourselves in,” he said. “What if we’re making your dad sick?”
“No,” Aubrey repeated, and suddenly realized that her dad was gone. “Where did he go?”
Jack’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “He said he was going outside for a smoke.”
“Great.” Her voice was quiet and angry.
“Listen,” Jack said, muting the TV and turning to face her. His voice was even, but nervous. “I know that tonight was crazy. I know you and Nate were close.”
“We weren’t close,” she snapped, pacing into the kitchen.
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever. This sucks, but the important thing is that we don’t get into more trouble.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, moving her hands like she couldn’t figure out where to put them—from her hips to her face to her hair.
“What is going on?”
She was on the other side of the kitchen counter from him, and grabbed onto the edge for support. She didn’t want to tell him. She couldn’t.
She had to.
“Turn off the TV for a second,” she said.
Jack fumbled with the remote and then clicked it off. “What’s going on?” he repeated.
She was hyperventilating. She and Nicole had sworn that neither of them would tell another soul. But now Nicole was on a bus heading who-knows-where.
Aubrey stepped out from behind the counter, her knees feeling weak.
“Look at me.”
“What?”
“Just watch.” And then she disappeared. She saw the look on his face that she’d seen on so many others as she’d practiced. In their minds, she hadn’t just blinked out of sight, but she wasn’t there anymore. Confusion spread across his face.
“Where did you go?” he asked.
She reappeared, and his eyes slowly focused back on her.
She spoke before he could. “Tell me what you saw.”
He was plainly puzzled. “I’m not sure. Did you go back behind the counter?”
“Nope,” she said. “Right here the whole time.”
“But . . .” he started.
“Jack,” she said, taking an anxious step toward him. “This is why I can’t turn myself in. I’m like Nate.”
He just stared, more confused than scared, which Aubrey considered a small victory. “You’re not like Nate,” he finally said.
“I don’t know what Nate was,” she said. “But he was different. And I’m different, too. I think they’re testing to find us.”
Now Jack stood up. “What are you?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m Aubrey, same as I’ve always been.”
Jack shook his head. “The Aubrey I knew couldn’t do . . . what did you do again?”
“I can disappear,” she said, her voice shaking. “I can’t explain it, so don’t ask me to.”
“It wasn’t like you disappeared,” he said.
“I know. Here, watch again.”
A second time she vanished, and once again Jack stared, flustered. He reached an arm out, swiping through the air. She grabbed his hand and reappeared.
He flinched as she came back, and pulled his hand away. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t want him to be like this. She wanted him to be impressed, amazed. That’s how Nicole had been. She’d immediately seen how valuable Aubrey could be.
“How do you do . . . that?” he asked.
“I just do,” she said. “Now do you see why I can’t turn myself in? This has to be what they’re testing for.”
Jack nodded blankly.
She couldn’t stand the strange way he was watching her. He was her oldest friend and he was looking at her like she was someone—something—foreign and strange. Like she was a freak.
He was right.
Her fingers clutched the edge of the counter.
After a long pause, Jack spoke. “The Pattens’ cabin.”
“What?”
She tilted her head slightly toward him. “What do you mean ‘we’? You should turn yourself in.”
“Yeah, right.”
Aubrey turned around again. He looked tired, but he was standing firm, rubbing the back of his neck while he thought.
“If they’re testing for . . . whatever it is you can do, then that means they aren’t searching for me. If I get caught then I’ll just say I was afraid and running.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not going to leave you.”
Suddenly she was less scared of him than for him. Nate had been killed. What would happen if they found out Jack was helping her? “I can take care of myself. You’re not the only one who knows how to fish and hunt.”
His head was down, staring at the cluttered mess as he rubbed his neck.
“I’ve been to the Pattens’ cabin,” Aubrey continued. “I can find it. They have food storage there.” She didn’t add that she could steal anything else she needed from the grocery store.
Jack still gazed at the floor, not responding.
“I’m going to pack,” she said, and took a step toward her bedroom.
“I thought your dad stopped smoking.”
“Huh? Well, he did for a while.” She hadn’t seen him smoke in a long time. The little spare money he had usually went for cheap beer.
Jack bent over and picked up a paper from the floor. It was wrinkled, with torn corners where it had been taped to something. He handed it to her.
The font was bold and simple, with an official seal top and center.
WE NEED YOUR HELP
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified a highly contagious virus in your area. By order of the President of the United States and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, all persons between the ages of 13 and 20 are to be tested and quarantined for the protection of both themselves and others.
We appreciate your cooperation with this action. Because of the major threat this poses to public health and national security, it is of utmost importance that all citizens comply. Financial compensation will be granted for any help rendered in fulfillment of this request.
Aubrey’s hands began to shake before she got to the bottom of the letter. Finally, she looked up at Jack. “Financial compensation?”
“There’s a bounty on you—on us both. That’s why we kept seeing those roadblocks. Lance and Ian—they were trying to get reward money.”
She ran to the front door. For the first time in her life she hoped her dad was sitting on the front porch smoking. She twisted the knob, then peered outside.
Darkness. No one was there.
Not even her dad.
A blazing light filled her eyes. For an instant she felt Jack’s hand on her arm, pulling her back, but she disappeared, slipping out of his grip. She stumbled through the trailer, blindly forcing herself to the back door. Before she got there a foot kicked it in.
“Aubrey!”
It was Jack’s voice but she couldn’t see anything. Her vision was blurry, trails of the brilliant-white floodlights seared into her eyes.
Something flew through the window in a spray of glass.
She screamed. Jack was yelling. He couldn’t hear her while she was invisible.
The room began to fill with a glowing white light.
Jack bumped into her and knocked her down without knowing he’d done it.
She couldn’t breathe.
Her eyes stung and she wiped at them wildly as tears flowed down her face.
Was the trailer on fire? She couldn’t get any air.
Jack wasn’t yelling for her anymore. She couldn’t see him.
This was her fault. He had wanted to turn himself in.
She reappeared, sucked in a draft of burning air. “Jack!” she called out.
In a moment he was there, grabbing her hand, pulling her from the trailer, away from the bright, stinging smoke.
He twisted her arm behind her back, and the two of them stumbled down the stairs to where she landed, face down in the dirt.
He grabbed her other hand.
She could barely open her swollen eyes.
“Aubrey,” a choking voice said.
She cracked one bleary eye. Jack was beside her, pinned to the ground, his arms bound behind his back.
She felt the tug of cuffs being tightened on her wrists.
“Stay here,” Jack said.
Every impulse in her urged Aubrey to disappear, to slip away from the soldiers and run. But it was too much. She was handcuffed. Her dad had turned her in—sold his own daughter out for beer money.
And as tough as she was—or pretended to be—there was something in Jack’s insistence that he stay with her that she’d liked. They would have been on the run together. A friend who wasn’t using her.
She’d stay.
NINE
DAN WAS STILL CRAWLING OUT of the car as Laura hurried to the edge of the cliff, excited about Alec’s unexpected new goal. She peered over the rim of the canyon, into what looked like a black river of darkness. “It says here,” Alec said, shining a flashlight on a plaque next to the rest stop parking lot, “that they named it Eagle Canyon because pioneers thought it was so deep not even an eagle could fly out of it.”
Laura looked down again, at the pitch-black bottom, and at the enormous steel beams that held up the short bridge.
It wasn’t a big target. No one was guarding it, which made it even more perfect. She guessed that most of the people who drove over this bridge never realized they were crossing such a deep gorge. It was maybe eighty yards wide, in a stretch of canyon country called the San Rafael Swell. Interstate 70 swerved and climbed through the rugged terrain, and even Laura hadn’t noticed the bridge when she passed over it. Alec had to point out the turnoff.
“There are two bridges,” Alec said to Dan, who still looked exhausted. “The eastbound and westbound are separate, maybe forty feet between them. The plaque says the rocks are limestone and sandstone.”
Dan stood up and stretched. “Now you’re talking.”
Laura climbed over the edge of the cliff, testing the strength of the notoriously grainy and brittle rock. She slipped her hand into a fissure and clenched a fist, creating an ironlike anchor point.
This was what she loved: using her strength for something real. She’d spent the last month doing nothing but hauling an exhausted Dan over her shoulder like a rag doll. Her parts of the plans were never any fun.
Alec didn’t help. He thought she was stupid, just because she was the lowest-ranking member of the group. She wasn’t even the youngest—she was nineteen, only three months younger than Alec—but he treated her like she was a little kid, like she didn’t know how to do anything.
She leapt sideways, hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, and caught another outcrop of stone. She wished she wasn’t wearing shoes—they only slowed her down. Her feet and toes were just as tough and unbreakable as the rest of her.
“Can you climb from here?” Alec asked impatiently.
“Sure,” she said, leaping again to the side and catching herself deftly. She couldn’t even see her landing spot clearly—it was just a craggy outline in the darkness—but she knew she could grab hold of it. It was like a playground, like a circus high-wire act.
“You look like an orangutan,” Dan said, a smile in his voice.
Laura laughed, and swung with one arm, leaping up to where the boys stood.
“You done?” Alec said, the snide frown on his face illuminated only by moonlight.
“We can climb down here easy,” she said. “Lots of hand holds. Dan, are you strong enough to hang on?”
He held up his wrists. There was a rope tied between them. “Alec already helped out with that.”
Laura smiled. Alec probably thought it was ingenious. He thought everything he did was br
illiant.
“Try to just crack the supports,” Alec said. “Leave it on a hair trigger for the next eighteen-wheeler that drives over it.”
Dan nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He put his arms, tied together at the wrists, over Laura’s head. He’d ride on her back all the way down the cliff.
“Dan,” Alec said, his tone more serious. “For your mother and mine.”
“Yeah,” Dan answered quietly.
With that, Laura hunched over, lifting Dan off the ground so she could move freely. He smelled of sweat, but she probably did too. They’d been on the run for hours, and sitting in an old car.
She stepped down to a ledge.
“Try not to choke me,” she said, and leapt toward another rock.
TEN
JACK SAT BESIDE AUBREY, BUT neither of them talked. Two soldiers were behind them in the bus, and Jack was sure he didn’t have to warn Aubrey to be quiet about her—was it invisibility? She was an expert at keeping secrets. At lying.
The two of them had cooperated at her dad’s trailer. They’d given their names and ages, and her dad had confirmed them—with a constant request for extra financial compensation. The man had tried everything: claimed that Aubrey’s job was his only source of income; claimed that she helped him with his handyman jobs around the trailer park; claimed that he was disabled and needed her to help him around the house.
The army had given Jack and Aubrey bracelets, just like the ones they’d used at the Gunderson Barn. They also got plastic handcuffs because they had tried to run. They were considered dangerous.
Jack still didn’t know what to think about Aubrey. It was true—she was exactly what the army was looking for. If it was anyone else, he thought he’d just urge them to tell the truth, to turn themselves in. But this was Aubrey.
She’d lied to him. She’d ditched him. She’d given up a lifelong friendship in favor of parties, malls, convertibles, and dresses. And it wasn’t like he’d forgiven her for any of that. The truth was, when the black ops guys burst into the trailer with tear gas and machine guns, she’d disappeared. She’d tried to escape on her own, to leave Jack by himself yet again. Even in the chaos and the smoke, he’d known.