But these seem creepier. Spending so much time around Val has made me feel like the only good cage is a full cage, and seeing an empty one—let alone a row of them—makes me feel very creeped out indeed.
My sneakers screech as I stop—or try to. It’s like one of those cheesy tween TV shows with their canned laugh tracks and bright colors, where two friends are dragging the cool kid on a blind date where he just knows the girl is going to have braces and pigtails and freckles and glasses and he does everything in his power to stop from being delivered to his doom, like he’s some kind of catch and that would be just so horrible or something, hanging on to open locker doors and clinging to the water fountain and . . . hilarity ensues.
You know the type.
But there are no locker doors or even water fountains to cling to, and we just keep streaming ahead, the Sentinels yanking my arms as I struggle to lean back, knowing there can be only one reason for the cages.
“What . . . Where are you taking me?”
In reply, the Sentinel to my left pulls me faster down the hall. The one on the right goes even quicker, more gung ho than the first, so I get a little turned around like when you’re rowing a boat and your right hand rows faster than your left and you keep going in circles just a little bit until you get the hang of it.
The short one pulls out a jingling keychain and opens one of the cages. They toss me in face-first, slamming the door before I can turn around and press them for answers.
“Wait! Please. Just . . . just tell me what’s going on.”
They don’t even look at me, clomping down the hallway and leaving me in the cage, fuming, worried now because what the hell kind of drill is this where they not only strap your hands behind your back but throw your butt in a cage?
I pace, looking to my left, farther down the long, dark hall. Nothing but cages as far as I can see, and I look pretty far. To my right, a few more cages, all of them empty.
My Eliminator is in one of my front pockets, heavy on my calf. There’s no way I can reach it with my hands behind my back or I’d use it to cut myself loose right now. The cages are built of heavy wire mesh, stiff and sharp. It might work if I backed against one side and ran the plastic tie up and down, but I could take off half my wrist in the process and, really, what’s the use? There’s no way I’m getting out even with my hands free. If Val hasn’t been able to do it in all these months, as ticked off and full of Zerker rage as she is, how am I supposed to do it on my first try?
Why couldn’t they have sent Dane to get me? He’s an actual Sentinel now. At least he would have told me something. Possibly. Or not. I don’t know anymore. Maybe being a Sentinel is more important than being a boyfriend. Hell, more important than being a friend. I hear more footsteps at the other end of the hall, crane my neck, and see a field of blue: Vera!
She’s followed by two more Sentinels. No, one Sentinel Support in her black-and-gray uniform and one Sentinel in black, clattering battle gear.
Dane! At last! And Courtney, of course. What is this? Some elaborate prank? Hey, yeah. Sorry. Dane didn’t break up with you badly enough the first time, so now we’re going to include all of Sentinel City in it, ’kay, thanks, bye!
“Vera! What’s going on?” My voice is high and harsh in the long, echoey hall.
Vera looks paler than usual, which is saying something. Her expression is tighter than usual, which, again, is saying something. “Maddy, listen to me. Before you say anything, listen to what I’m saying first. Can you do that?”
“Not if you keep talking in riddles,” I half joke, but the awkward pause that follows and her no-nonsense zombie librarian face make me swallow. Hard. “Okay, yes, of course. Just . . . tell me something!”
I flash a helpless look to Dane, but he’s gazing at the ground or his shoes or something cute Courtney wrote on them (like maybe Snuggles to my Sugar Bear) while she was shining them this morning.
I glance at Vera, who inches forward as if she knows Dane is distracting me, forcing me to look into her deep eyes. Finally, she speaks, and what she says makes me wish she’d kept her mouth shut: “Val is missing. And your father.”
I crouch at the very back of my cage, rocking to and fro as shaky images flicker before my eyes. “Not again,” I hear my squeaky voice say. “Not . . .” I focus on Vera’s face, which looks slightly angry, slightly sad.
I rush toward the front of the cage. “How could this happen? She’s locked up 24/7/365.”
But she’s not. Even as I say the words, I know they’re a lie. Just the other night, during my rebirthday party, Dad had her out, muzzled and chained and shackled and all. Sure, there were three Sentinels guarding her, but she was still out of her cage. How many times did he do that a day, a week, a month?
I think back to my rebirthday and how she acted while I was there. So quiet, so docile, her yellow Zerker eyes on me the whole time, even as they led her away into the back room. Had she been plotting something all along? Watching me?
Warning me?
I’m staring past Vera, at the off-white wall over her head, when she rattles some keys and opens the cage. I start forward and she puts a firm hand on my chest.
“I need you to behave, Maddy. The Sentinels are on high alert, and they’re blaming your father for what happened. I’d tread carefully if I were you.”
So that’s why every Sentinel has been giving me major stink eye.
“Dad? Why?”
I guess I push forward a little, jutting my chest out, not even realizing it until she slips the electric pen from her top pocket.
“I said behave. We can do this the hard way, you know.” She waves the pen, and I freeze. “But I’d rather you be conscious for this.”
“Okay, okay.” I back away instinctively, having been on the pen’s receiving end one too many times. “I’m sorry. I just . . . Why Dad?”
We start walking, right past Dane and his concubine.
“He’s been in charge of Val since the day we brought her back here,” Vera explains, leading me through a sea of Sentinels, all going in the opposite direction. “Who else would they blame?”
She has a point. Why the Sentinels—or the Keepers, for that matter—trusted a mortal, the only Normal in all of Sentinel City, with the proper care, feeding, and study of a Zerker-killing machine with spiky hair and the worst attitude on the planet is beyond me. I guess it wasn’t such a great idea. And of course no one’s going to blame the folks at the top, just the guy with the heartbeat.
We head toward Dad’s lab. My hands are still tied tight behind my back, making it awkward to walk, especially with Sentinels flying by at the speed of sound and joyously bumping into me every few feet.
A group of Keepers approaches, waving Vera down. She pauses, partly ignoring me for 6.2 milliseconds, and I bolt toward Dad’s lab.
Dane catches up, putting a hand on my shoulder. Strange that after all we’ve been through together in the last year, it already feels so unfamiliar. “Careful,” he says, looking back at Vera, making a phony smiley face in her general direction, waving a fraudulent it’s-okay-all’s-well hand. “You don’t want to give her a reason to use that pen.”
“What do you care?”
He ignores me. “Listen, before she gets back, there’s something you should know . . .” He inches close.
Courtney’s off to one side, looking nervous or jealous or both or neither—but who cares?
“What? Hurry, Dane. What?”
“Your dad’s not exactly missing. Not. Exactly.”
“Where is he?”
“They don’t know for sure.” His eyes are wide but sympathetic, which scares me because he kind of only looks that way when something has gone horribly wrong and he’s powerless to stop or fix it. “They’re taking you . . . to identify his body—”
“Or what’s left of it,” Courtney interrupts.
He shoots her a look, but it’s not half as hard as the laser beams I’m shooting her from my searing eye holes. “Shut up,”
we both shout.
It takes all of Dane to stop me from head butting her into the next afterlife or the nearest wall, whichever comes first.
Vera comes up then, yanking me away by one arm. “Here now, what’s all this?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about my dad?” I huff, following her toward the lab.
She glares at Dane.
He glares at me.
But what’s the difference? Normal dads who might be corpses trump all the living dead, period, ad infinitum.
“You didn’t give me time,” she sputters.
We’re almost at the lab now, Sentinels filtering in and out like they know what the hell they’re doing.
The lab door is off the hinges, hanging half in, half out of the hallway.
Vera wades in, says a few words from her tight lips, and the Sentinels scram, just like that.
Dane and I look at each other, impressed, until I notice half of his face is covered by Courtney’s wilted blonde hair since they’re standing so flippin’ close together.
I step into the lab, not wanting to.
The first thing I notice is the smell: part chemical, part fleshy rot. The second is the big puddle on the floor. “What is that?” I ask, stepping over it to follow Vera into the lab.
She points to the open door of the tanning booth from Cabana Charly’s. “It used to cover this. Remember?”
The glass door is open, the bottom of it leaking something slimy onto the ground. That’s the smell. Avotoxia. Val used it to turn some poor Zerker into bones and goo back home.
“Why is this open? Who would use it?”
“That’s why you’re here. We think . . .” Vera turns to me, actually putting her hands on my shoulders—and not to zap me with her pen. “We think your father’s in there. We need you to identify the body.”
“What body?” The floor of the tanning booth is covered in white slime, greasy foam dripping down the walls, bone fragments in a heap rising out of the sludge in the bottom.
She has an Eliminator on her and presses one of its buttons, using the switchblade side to snap my bonds. I rub my wrists, even though they don’t hurt. Having watched every single season of Law & Disorder: CVU, I just feel it’s the thing to do. Besides, I’m none too eager to find out what’s in that decomposing guck at the bottom of the tanning booth.
I look around for something long and metal to use and find an old pointer Dad uses to teach his assistant, Hector, about chemicals and cells on the big whiteboard in the corner. (It never really works, but I think it makes Dad feel better to be sharing science with someone again and probably makes Hector feel pretty good to not have Dad yelling at him for a few minutes every day.)
I kneel, and Vera follows, snatching my hand back. “Careful, Maddy. The avotoxia is still strong enough to turn your hand into . . . that.” She nods toward the steaming soup.
I flip the metal pointer up at her. “That’s what this is for.”
She nods but passes me some industrial-strength black rubber gloves just the same. Looking around the room, I see a few Sentinels wearing them as well. I slip them on, then take the pointer and dig around the mush.
It makes smacking noises as I shift the pile, and the smell is overpowering. It’s like the bones have been marinated in hell for six months and then spray painted with skunk funk, a million rotting banana skins, and Dumpster juice. I gag repeatedly on the avotoxia fumes, flashing back to when I was in a booth like this one not so long ago but very far away.
I smear the bones around, looking closely, then stand, sighing.
Vera’s lips are so thin by this point they’re almost nonexistent. It makes me kind of happy to think she’s sad about losing Dad.
“So?” she asks.
“That’s not my dad in there. He had a hip replacement a few years back, pure titanium, about the size of a tennis ball. It’s not in there.”
“Thank God!” Dane blurts, and I don’t even think he realizes he’s doing it, which makes my dead heart do whatever a dead heart can do when it feels like beating out of its chest but can’t.
Vera just puts a hand on my arm, squeezes, and then lets go, her own personal version of Thank God!
The relief is overwhelming. I lean against the long lab counter and let the pointer clang to the ground, quickly followed by the rubbery flop-flop of my gloves.
And I realize as I stand there, smiling, looking at Val’s empty cage, that Stamp is gone. And that I’ve been so worried about Dad, so focused on finding out what happened to him, that I never even stopped to ask Vera where he might be.
It’s not Dane or Vera who ends the celebration.
Courtney clears her throat. “So if that’s not her dad in there, then who is it?”
Chapter 7
Better off Dead
A sudden commotion stops me from almost wringing her neck for a second time as a team of Sentinels wrestles something out of the back supply closet.
I hear that telltale Fourth of July snap-snap-snap of Tasers going off and the whump of a body falling to the ground. Rushing to join them, Vera at my side, I see Dad curled in a fetal position on the floor, a yellow tie shoved in his mouth, his hands secured in front of him with his own belt.
He’s ticked off. I can see it even from halfway across the lab. His forehead is sweaty, and whatever hair he has left is damp and smeared around his high forehead and he’s kicking and shouting through his tie.
“Get him out of there,” I shriek, snatching Vera’s Eliminator and sprinting toward him.
A Sentinel tries to stop me.
Rather than fight him, I literally dive past his outstretched arms like I’m sliding into home plate. I land next to Dad, turning over with practiced precision to slice his leather belt in half.
He takes his hands, both of them, and claws at his mouth, dragging the tie out with a gag and a cough and another gag. He rises to one knee, Tasers sputtering all around him. We look up to find ourselves surrounded by just about every Sentinel in the room and some who came in from the hall just to join the fun.
“Get after her,” he shouts, first thing, looking at them. “What are you wasting time on me for? Go. Now! She can’t have gone far.”
“Dad, what happened?”
He slumps onto his rump, breathing heavily, face red. He looks up.
I hiss at the Sentinels, “Give him some room!”
Amazingly, they shrink back a step or two, letting him rest against a set of cabinets. He looks at me and Vera, who’s crouching by my side. “We were taking her out of the cage for some more tests,” he wheezes, sliding an arm across his sweaty forehead.
“Who was?” Vera says.
“Hector and I. We . . .”
“Just Hector and you?” Vera’s eyes narrow.
He flashes her an impatient look. “Yes, we had called for the Sentinels, as always, but when they didn’t show after a few minutes, we decided to move her ourselves.”
Vera shakes her head. “But that’s not protocol.”
Dad and I both look at her.
“Are you kidding me?” he blurts. “Is it protocol for the Sentinels to take so long? Is it protocol for me to have to check with them every time I tie my shoe or zip my pants? I’m doing important work here, and they’ve never respected it. Not once. I can’t test Val properly if she’s in a cage all the time.”
Vera stands, smirking. “Well, she’s not in her cage anymore, Dr. Swift.”
“I know that.” Hand on his scalp, he shakes his head miserably. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Dad,” I say, reaching out to touch his knee, “who is that back there in the tanning booth?”
“Hector,” he moans, looking at me through swollen eyelids. “He tried to put the muzzle on her while I put her handcuffs on, and she bit him, tore his thumb clean off, and swallowed it whole before she had him on the floor, his Taser in hand. She made him take the tarp off the tanning booth and get inside, and the second the door slammed shut, she sprayed him, sizzled
him down to the bones. I thought she’d do the same to me, but she tied me up and shoved me where nobody could see me.”
I look up at Vera. “See, it was an accident.”
“Of course it was an accident,” he sputters, looking from me to her and back at me again. “Who said it wasn’t an accident?”
“Dr. Swift, when exactly did this happen?”
“At 10:17. I noted the time on her chart before we opened her cage.”
Vera turns to the Sentinels.
They snap to attention before she even speaks.
“Alert the border patrols that she’s been gone for over two hours. Clear the halls. I want every available Sentinel after her immediately, no excuses.”
They grumble, and one finds a walkie-talkie and relays the message.
While Vera coordinates, I lean in. “Dad, the other cage. It’s empty. Where’s Stamp?”
He smiles, then nods toward the second supply closet.
I feel another wave of relief shudder through my dead cells, a distant Normal emotion trapped in there somewhere like phantom adrenaline haunting my veins.
I stand and make a move to open the closet.
Vera yanks me back. “Let them do it. When will you get it through your head that he’s still a Zerker?”
“Not as much as he used to be,” Dad croaks. “That’s . . . What do you think I’ve been doing here? Why do you think Val was so important to me, to you, to everyone here? By studying her cellular structure, I’ve been able to isolate some of what makes zombies and Zerkers so different from each other. I’ve been working with Stamp, giving him regular injections at his brain stem to phase out the Zerker cells, healing him, in effect. Not curing him, exactly, but as close as he’ll ever get, I’m afraid.”
He looks at me, almost apologetically, before turning back to Vera. “I think that’s why she left him behind this time. She could tell they had nothing in common and he was of no use to her anymore.”
The Sentinels have the door open and Stamp is there, not tied up, not gagged, just standing quietly in the corner of the supply closet, waiting next to a yellow mop handle. As if he knew we’d be there all along. He looks so shy and sad.
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