by Raelyn Drake
“Agreed,” said Luis. “I vote that we bust out of here and try to find our parents.”
“We don’t know what sort of dangers are out there,” Sanjay protested. “We can’t prepare if we don’t know what we’ll face.”
“The CAPPers lied about the teachers,” Chloe pointed out. “Maybe they lied about what’s going on out there too.”
“They didn’t lie about the alien attack,” Sanjay snapped.
Chloe fell silent and dropped her arms to her side, sticking her hands in her pockets. “I’m willing to risk anything if it means finding my aunt and uncle,” she said softly.
Sanjay couldn’t blame her. He would be willing to face even aliens if it meant getting to his mom.
He sighed. Though he still wanted to find out what had happened to the teachers, he knew it would be smarter for the three of them to stick together.
“Okay,” he said. “We start with getting out of here and finding our families. Then we all can come back and help the teachers and the rest of the students.”
The other two nodded.
“How are we going to get out of the school though?” Now that they’d decided on a course of action, his mind was already whirring with potential plans. “The CAPPers have this place on lockdown. It was hard enough to sneak down here—we got lucky.”
Chloe tiptoed back through the main office and peeked around the door into the hallway. After a moment, she quickly gestured for them to join her.
“The main doors are just a few feet away,” she whispered. “No one is around right now. What if we just … slip out?”
It was true. Sanjay glanced down the hallway—no sign of CAPPers coming in their direction. He didn’t hear any voices or footsteps in the distance either. The school’s front doors were maybe ten steps away from the main office.
He looked to Luis, who shrugged and said, “I’m in if you guys are in.”
It would be risky, but they just might be able to make it unnoticed.
Sanjay nodded. “Let’s do it.”
After one last check to make sure no one seemed to be heading down the hall, the three of them sprinted toward the school’s front entrance. Chloe pulled ahead of the boys, reaching out her arms for one of the doors.
And then Sanjay saw it.
There was a small black box wedged on the top of the door frame, and a thin wire that snaked down until it met the door’s push bar.
Most importantly he noticed the small red light that was blinking, even when everything else was dead.
“Chloe, wait!” he hissed, but it was too late. Chloe turned her head when she heard Sanjay, but she had already shoved on the push bar.
A high-pitched beeping filled the air.
Chapter 7
They stared up at the box with wide eyes. Apparently the CAPPers had rigged up some kind of alarm using old electronics. Chloe pushed at the door again, but it wouldn’t budge more than a few inches. She groaned. “It won’t open! I think they’ve blocked it from the outside. I’m so sorry, guys!”
“Never mind that now,” Luis hissed. “We need to hide! Quick!”
There was nothing in the front entrance that could hide them, so they raced back into the main office. Sanjay dove under the couch in the waiting area. He just fit if he stretched out on his stomach, and it was low enough that he hoped no one would be able to see him unless they bent down to check underneath. From his vantage point, he saw Chloe scramble under the secretary’s desk. He couldn’t see Luis and hoped that he had found cover.
Only seconds later, they heard several pairs of quick footsteps in the hallway. After a moment, the alarm went silent.
“What set off the alarm, John?” someone asked. Sanjay recognized the voice—it was Paula, one of the other CAPPers they’d spoken with before.
“Don’t know,” John said. “It doesn’t look like anyone is out here.”
The door to the main office flung open. Sanjay couldn’t see their faces from this position, but he saw that there were three CAPPers holding candles. He tried to breathe as quietly as possible, his face pressed against the carpet.
The candlelight passed through the room in slow arcs, and Sanjay worried his frantic heartbeat would be loud enough that everyone would be able to hear it.
He saw feet moving. The doors to the teachers’ lounge and the private offices opened and closed one by one as the CAPPers checked them.
“Doesn’t look like anyone is in here either,” Paula said.
“And you’re sure that the alarm couldn’t just glitch and go off on its own?” a third CAPPer asked. Sanjay froze. It was Max.
“Maybe,” John said. “We were barely able to rig this thing together in the first place.”
The CAPPers were quiet for a moment, and then John made a sound like he was blowing into his hands.
“We need to start thinking about how we’re going to stay warm if we want to last through the winter,” Max said. “You think winters are cold around here now, just wait until we’re trying to keep this building warm without electric heat when the temperature dips into the negatives.”
Winter? thought Sanjay in alarm. It’s only October. How long do they plan to be here?
“We found some old metal trash cans in the basement,” Paula said. “If we break down some of the desks for firewood, we could get some fires going.”
Max laughed humorlessly. “That would be a great idea, except the desks in this school are all plastic and metal. I doubt there’s any real wood in them.”
“We could burn the books?” John suggested.
“I don’t think we’re that desperate yet. And I’d rather deal with a whole bunch of aliens than the wrath of Mr. O’Donnell if you try to burn his books.”
“Well do you have any ideas?” Paula asked sullenly.
“There’s a bunch of trees just outside the perimeter fence of the school,” Max said. “We have axes, so that’s where we can get firewood.”
“Outside?” Paula blurted. “But what about the Visitors?”
“I’m not going out there,” John said quickly. “I’m not risking my life for some stupid kids.”
“Look,” Max said through gritted teeth. “If those kids freeze or starve or get hurt in any way, then they’re useless to us and our plan, got it? And besides, if the aliens have an attack force on the ground, you can bet that they’re currently focused on the major cities and military bases. They’re not going to be wasting the early days of their attack lurking in the woods behind a suburban high school.”
“Fine,” Paula said. Sanjay could almost hear her glaring at Max.
“I’m gonna do a head count on the kids in the library,” Max said, “and make sure everyone’s all right.”
Sanjay heard Max leave the room. But that still left the two other CAPPers standing near the door to the hallway.
“Be careful if you go down to the basement,” Paula said. “While I was down there looking for supplies, she nearly escaped.”
“Which one?” John asked.
“Who do you think?” Paula said sarcastically.
John didn’t laugh. “I told you she was tough. Don’t underestimate her.”
“Why do we even have to spend time and resources keeping her down there?”
“Because,” John said coldly, “if she escapes—if she’s able to make contact—then our whole plan is ruined.”
Sanjay watched the two CAPPers leave the main office, pulling the door shut behind them. He waited another minute before allowing himself to breathe freely again. He rolled out from under the couch as Chloe crawled out from under the desk.
She peered around the corner of the desk toward the hallway.
“That was way too close,” she whispered before straightening.
Sanjay brushed the dust off his jeans. “Where’s Luis?”
The door to the teachers’ lounge opened slowly. Sanjay felt his heart make a panicked leap before he realized it was just Luis.
“Didn’t they check the
teachers’ lounge?” Sanjay asked.
“Not right away,” Luis said. “I had time to hide in the supply closet. Luckily they didn’t check that closely.”
“We got lucky,” Sanjay said. “Now, let’s get back to the library before it’s too late. If they’ve already started the head count of students, we’re in big trouble.”
“We can’t go back yet,” Chloe said. “Now that the alarm’s gone off, they’ll be even more on their guard. It won’t be as easy to sneak out of the library a second time.”
“Besides, now we know for sure that the teachers and Officer Mendoza are locked up in the basement.”
Sanjay’s heart sank. “Yeah—who do you think they’re so worried about her contacting?”
“The aliens?” Chloe said.
Luis snorted. “Why would she do that?”
She shrugged. “It happens in movies all the time. There are always some people who decide that humans are on the losing team and try to team up with the aliens.”
“Officer Mendoza would never do that,” Luis said. “I could totally see her leading a resistance force against the aliens. She would be one of the last ones fighting.”
“We know that,” Chloe said. “But maybe they don’t.”
Sanjay shook his head. “That’s not it. Why don’t you just come out and say it? I was wrong about Max. Officer Mendoza was right to be suspicious of CAPP, and now they’ve got her locked in the basement because they know that if she escapes, she’ll expose them. This is all my fault.”
Chloe sighed. “It’s all right, Sanjay. I wanted to trust Max too.”
“She could have been trying to contact the emergency shelter,” Luis said.
Sanjay nodded grimly. “Yeah, I bet she was trying to find our families before CAPP caught her.”
“We need to get down to the basement.”
“I thought we agreed to just get out of here!” Chloe protested.
Sanjay clenched his jaw, his mind made up. “We already tried that. The CAPPers have probably rigged all the outside doors with alarms and barricades. Freeing the adults is our best chance of getting out of here.”
They checked to see that the hallway was clear and then hurried toward the stairwell. A moment later they turned the corner and ran right into half a dozen armed CAPPers.
“Hi, guys,” Max said. “What a coincidence,” he gestured at the others standing behind him, “we were just talking about you.”
Chapter 8
When Sanjay had decided to go to the basement, this wasn’t what he’d had in mind. The CAPPers patted down their coat pockets and then herded them downstairs. Without buzzing fluorescent lights or windows, the darkness in the basement was inky black. Sanjay’s mind raced desperately, wondering what the CAPPers were going to do now.
If he and his friends were right about what they had heard, the CAPPers had the teachers and Officer Mendoza down here too. As far as Sanjay could tell, he and his friends had been the only ones to notice Officer Mendoza’s absence and to worry about her. Would anyone notice if they were missing? And even if they did, Max would probably just reassure them with the same sorts of lies he had been telling all along.
Sanjay kept coming back to the same question. Why? How did the students and faculty fit into CAPP’s survival plan? What benefit were a bunch of high schoolers during an alien invasion?
The basement was smaller than Sanjay had thought it would be—only an open square space with two doors and walls made of unpainted cinder blocks. A couple of days ago, this area would have been humming with electricity and the whirring of machinery. Now, it was oppressively quiet, as well as damp and cold.
Max walked ahead of them, head down as though he refused to meet their eyes. Sanjay felt his face flush with anger. The least Max could do was acknowledge that he had betrayed them.
They stopped in front of a door marked storage. Directly across from it was another door marked boiler room.
One of the CAPPers unlocked the storage door and shoved Sanjay, Chloe, and Luis inside.
The room was dark and filled with looming shadowy shapes, which Sanjay realized were extra desks, chairs, folding tables, and other school furniture. Some of them were piled nearly as high at the ceiling.
Max followed them in, silhouetted against the candlelight in the hallway. He leaned on a desk near the door. “You’ll be safer down here. We can’t have you running around the school unsupervised; it’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous for us, or for you?” Chloe snapped.
Max’s face was grim. “I’m here to protect you.”
“You can cut the act,” said Sanjay coldly. “We know you’ve locked up Officer Mendoza and the teachers because they weren’t on board with you being in charge here.”
Max shook his head. “If you’d all just trusted me, things wouldn’t have gotten out of control like this.” With that, Max turned around and left the room, closing the door behind him. They heard the key turn in the lock, and then it was quiet.
It was absolutely dark in the room. Sanjay heard the clatter of a desk followed by Luis complaining about his bruised shins.
And then he heard a sound that gave him hope: the whirring of a hand-crank flashlight.
As the light blossomed, Sanjay and Luis turned with amazement to look at Chloe.
She gave a modest little shrug. “They searched our coat pockets, but they didn’t think to check my sweatshirt.”
“I could totally see you leading the rebellion against the Visitors,” Sanjay said.
Chloe shrugged again. “At least we can see now, but we’re still trapped.”
“Actually,” said Luis, taking the screwdriver out of his boot, “I think I can get us out.”
Chapter 9
Luis grabbed the flashlight from Chloe and walked over to the door. “Look at these hinges,” he said, shining the flashlight on them. “They’re secured flat against the wall with screws.”
The screws were wedged in tight, but Luis was eventually able to undo all of them. The last screw fell to the floor with a ting-ting. Sanjay’s breath caught in his throat as he half expected the door to topple over, but nothing happened. It was loose on the hinge side, but the door’s lock kept it attached to the doorframe.
“Here, give me a hand!” Luis said, grabbing the tiny bit of the door’s edge that was exposed. “If we can yank on the hinge side, we should be able to twist it free.”
Chloe helped Luis pull the top corner of the door toward them. As soon as there was a gap, Sanjay stuck a discarded desk leg into the crack and used it as a lever.
With a loud creaking noise of splintered wood and bent metal, the gap in the door widened and the door twisted in its frame until they were able to lift it up and out and set it against a wall. They had made more noise than they’d wanted, but Sanjay hoped it would be hard to hear from the floor above.
Chloe cranked the emergency flashlight a few more times to make sure it had enough charge, and then they stepped out into the hallway. It was still dark, but it was nice to be out of the cluttered storage room.
Chloe and Luis headed for the stairs out of the basement, but Sanjay paused when he heard a strange sound. “Wait, did you guys hear that?”
Usually he would have chalked it up to noise from machinery or a generator, but with those out of order, the noise seemed out of place—almost like … voices.
“I think it’s the teachers!” he whispered to Chloe and Luis.
Sanjay cupped his hands against the boiler room door. “Officer Mendoza?”
There was a pause, and then a muffled voice came through from the other side of the door. “Sanjay?” Officer Mendoza asked then. “Is that you?”
“Yeah! Chloe and Luis are here with me too.”
“They’ve got us locked in here,” Officer Mendoza shouted. “All the faculty.”
“Even Mr. O’Donnell?” Sanjay asked.
“Yes, he’s here too,” she said. “He’s been down here with the others the whole time.”
>
“Max and the other CAPPers caught us, but we’re getting out of here,” Chloe shouted. She turned to Sanjay and hissed, “Or at least we will if we don’t get caught again before we even get out of this basement.”
“We can’t just leave them!” Sanjay said quietly.
Chloe shook her head vigorously. “We already decided—once we escape the school, we can find our families and then come back to rescue everyone. We don’t have a key for this door anyway, and the hinges are on the inside so we can’t use the screwdriver again.”
Sanjay was torn. He didn’t want to leave anyone trapped in this dark, cold basement, especially the person who had warned them about CAPP in the first place. But how were they supposed to get anyone out?
Then they heard a rumble of footsteps coming from upstairs, as if someone were running around. Doors slammed in the distance.
The three of them looked around in a panic. Sanjay’s eyes took in the storage room they had just broken out of, the locked boiler room, and the stairs up to the main floor. There was only one way they could get out of the basement. But if CAPPers came pouring down those stairs any second—and it sounded like they might—then Sanjay and his friends would be right back where they started.
Sanjay looked up at the ceiling and got an idea. “In here!” he said, pulling Chloe and Luis back into the storage room. He ran over to a particularly tall pile of desks against one wall. He doubted the pile was very stable, but there was no other way for this to work.
“Here, steady the desks while I climb up,” Sanjay said.
“What good will that do?” Chloe asked, even as she grabbed a desk leg to attempt to stabilize the pile.
Sanjay scrambled up and pushed on a square ceiling panel, ignoring the dust and plaster that fell in his face. “There’s a crawl space up here, between these panels and the real ceiling.”
“There’s no way those panels will support us,” Luis said.
“True, but the panels are held up by these.” Sanjay pointed to one of the thin metal support beams that formed a checkerboard grid on the ceiling. “We’ll just have to rest most of our weight on the beams.” He pushed off the desk gently and pulled himself up into the cramped crawl space, lying flat and trying to distribute his weight as much as possible.
