Strange Days

by Constantine J. Singer

  She nods like I’m wasting time. “How’re we doing this?” She’s calm. Efficient. No longer unsure. She’s making me calmer, too.

  “We walk out like it’s a normal day. I don’t think anybody’s looking for us yet.”

  We walk back down the hallway together.

  I pick up the pace, but Corina puts her hand on my arm to slow me down. Rushing won’t help. It’ll just make everybody wonder what happened.

  We make it into the Long Hall without anybody wondering.

  “That door,” I tell her as we pass the alcove. “He took me through there and attached a Live-Tech to me that made it hurt so bad that I nearly blacked out. I dived down to the Jungle to try and find him to stop him.”

  “You stopped him from underneath?” She’s skeptical.

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  “How’d you get away, though?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I look over my shoulder back at where his office is. “It’s like he had a heart attack or something. When I got back up, he was on the floor and I ran.”

  “Is he, like . . . dead?”

  Yes. “I don’t know.” I tell myself it’s true. I didn’t take his pulse. I didn’t listen for breath. He could’ve been passed out. He could’ve been asleep.

  Maybe I didn’t actually kill him.

  We reach the driveway door. We look at each other. When we open the door, we’re officially outlaws.

  Corina opens the door. We look out at the driveway, slick with rain. The gray sky stretches out above the trees in a uniform low-hanging sheet.

  “God this city is depressing,” I mutter.

  “Yeah,” Corina agrees, whispering softly.

  There’s noise behind us. A siren. Shouts.

  We’re blown. “Run!”

  Forty-Seven

  We’re down the driveway and nearly to the street when the big gate in front of us starts to close.

  Corina’s lagging a couple steps behind me. “Faster!” I yell, but it’s not going to help. I dive for the narrow hole between the gate and the fence, and feel the gate brush my backpack as I pull through, but now it’s closed and Corina is still on the wrong side.

  “Hold on,” she tells me before tossing her pack over and backing up ten feet.

  A bunch of men start running down the driveway toward her. “They’re coming behind you!”

  Instead of turning, she runs toward the gate. She jumps and gets amazing air, grabbing it above the top rail just below the spikes, then flips her left leg up and over.

  “Catch me,” she calls as she straddles the top between the spikes and lets herself fall to my side of the gate.

  I get there just in time and she lands on me. We fall to the ground in a heap. “High jump. Track team,” she explains. We can’t stay there. The gate is opening again and the guys coming after us are seconds away. She’s up and off me almost instantly. I’m up right after her.

  We tear down the street. They’re coming after us in cars and on foot and I don’t know where we are or where to go. Corina knows the area better than me and she takes the lead, running out across the street and down another. There’s a park ahead of us and it looks like it has a forest in it. Corina makes a line for it and I follow close behind.

  I can sense the men behind us getting closer. Corina dashes across the street and sends a passing car into a skid that nearly hits me. I slap against the fender as I jump over the back of it to warn it to watch out. By the time I’m across, Corina’s already in the woods.

  The followers are shouting after us. Cars are skidding to a stop and doors are slamming. Corina’s left the trail and I’m falling behind. I thought I was faster than her back at the compound, but she just wasn’t giving it her all.

  Now that she is, I can barely keep up.

  We’re going through all sorts of bushes and I’m getting scraped up on my arms. My breath is becoming ragged and I can’t believe how many plants there are up here. I’ve run through the woods in Elysian Park hundreds of times, but there, almost nothing gets in your way. Here, it’s crowded with plants, and they all seem to be out to get you.

  We’re gaining some distance, because even though this is hard for us, it’s even harder for them. They’re old and wearing suits.

  The woods break in front of us and there’s another street, with a school on its other side.

  “Hurry!” Corina shouts back at me.

  I understand her plan—we’re kids and we’ll blend. The security team won’t be able to cross onto campus without getting stopped.

  We make it to the school grounds just as the first guy behind us breaks out of the bushes. He stops short when he sees that we’re in a crowd of other kids and taps his pod. Just then, one of the others comes into view. He sees us and starts across the street, but the first guy calls him back.

  “C’mon.” Corina yanks my arm and I turn back around. Together we walk through campus.

  It’s a break or lunch and there are kids everywhere. They’re all white and Asian so Corina and I stand out like neon lights. “We’re not exactly hidden,” I mutter to her as I smile at a group of girls who are staring at us. When we pass them, I hear giggles and I imagine myself through their eyes.

  She nods at two girls who’re giving her the eye. “We just need to find a way off this campus without getting stopped.”

  There’s a parking lot on the other side of the school. It’s not like I’ve stolen a car before, but I know how to do it. I watched a bunch of videos about it when I was younger and I thought it might be useful. I’m pretty sure I can do it even without tools if I can find a gas car old enough to still have a mechanical key ignition.

  I scan the lot. There’s an old Honda Accord parked about halfway back.

  The bell sounds and we move with the crowds as they all head toward the doors, but we peel off before we go inside and jog down to the car.

  Corina keeps watch while I try to remember how to do this. In the videos, there weren’t a whole bunch of people possibly looking through windows, and there weren’t bad guys giving chase. Also, I could watch them again if I missed something.

  Here, if I screw up, we’re done. I stand next to the car with my back next to the driver’s side window, trying to look casual.

  “Here goes.” I pull my arm forward, ready to bring my elbow back against the window as hard as I can.

  “What are you doing?” Corina whispers.

  “Breaking the window.” I slam my elbow backward into the glass, but the window doesn’t break. The pain is incredible. The videos don’t show you how much it hurts to whack your elbow into something as solid as a safety-glass car window. It hurts like hell. “Oh, fuck,” I say, teeth gritted against the pain. I’m not going to be able to do that again without needing my arm in a sling for a week. “Can’t do it.”

  “Not with your bare elbow.” Corina digs into her backpack for something and comes out with a folding knife. She hands it to me. “Use this.”

  I look at it and then at her. I don’t know what she wants me to cut. “How?”

  She shakes her head and pushes me aside again. She takes my place at the door and, with the knife in her hand, the handle exposed, pulls back and slams it against the window. The glass shatters into a million pieces. “Only an idiot uses his elbow,” she says before stepping out of the way.

  The alarm is a deafening whoop whoop whoop. I dive inside and reach under the dashboard for the box. It’s right where the videos said it would be, so I grab the orange wire that comes out of one side and the white wire that comes out the other, and pull.

  The alarm dies and I yank the housing off the base of the steering wheel so I can see the ignition system.

  I take the white wire from the alarm and connect it with the orange wire and the red wire and black wire that I find under the wheel. They spark when I twist them
together and I slam on the gas.

  The combustion engine revs to life, loud as hell, and my chest fills with hope.

  Corina’s already in the passenger seat by the time I’ve got the door closed. As I pull away, I see school security and a bunch of students running toward us. They won’t catch us unless they have a car waiting at the end of the lot.

  They don’t. I watch the cop radio it in from the rearview.

  “Alex,” Corina says, getting my attention. She points at the street in front of me. There’s a black Ford Interceptor moving in to block the exit from the school.

  I look around. The end of the parking lot is approaching quickly. There are security guards closing in on foot from either side of the drive and there’s a school police car with its siren blaring coming up behind us.

  I yank the wheel hard to the left and hit the gas. The Accord rumbles forward. It hits the curb and jumps, landing on the grass. The wheels spin for a minute when we land, throwing dirt a hundred feet behind us and I’m sure that we’re going to get stuck in the mud, but we find traction, whip-tailing for a moment before getting forward motion.

  It’s a bumpy ride but we clear the grass and jump the curb onto the street, leaving the cop car in the lot. I jam the gas and pull out into oncoming traffic to clear the Volvo in front of me, then hang a hard left onto a busy street against the light.

  “Holy shit!!” Corina yells. And then we’re out and away from Seattle.

  Forty-Eight

  It feels weird driving something so loud, so we ditch the car in a parking lot in Tacoma. We got away, but even while we’re driving, I’m growing more and more sure that our patches will allow them to find us.

  Corina inventories our resources while I drive. We have about $320 in cash between us. She finds my notebook while digging through my pack. “What’s this?”

  I glance over from the driver’s seat, and my breath catches. “Nothing.” Somehow having her in my heart isn’t nearly as scary as having her in my notebook.

  “Can I look?” She starts to open it.

  “No.” It comes out harsher than I mean it to. “Not yet.” I soften it. “It’s personal.”

  She side-eyes me. “Plugzer, I have literally felt every feeling you have . . .”

  I shake my head. “It’s . . .” I can feel her judgment and it’s making it hard for me to talk. She feels my embarrassment, too.

  “Someday?” she asks.

  “Yeah.” I breathe out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

  We spend eighteen of our dollars at a downtown Subway. Over sandwiches I tell her what I know. I tell her about Cassandra and my self-witness, but I don’t mention being in bed with her. The not-saying part is easy compared to keeping Corina’s absence out of my heart where she can feel it. I tell her about the freezing and the killing, about the Gentry being here to destroy us. I tell her that the Gentry created the Locusts, about how I saw them suck the meat and bones out of a woman, and that Sabazios is going to help them unleash the Locusts on our world.

  I tell her about Live-Tech being a beacon that shows the way to the Locusts after it’s paired with a person, and that by helping get Live-Tech everywhere we’ve been locking in the apocalypse. I explain that the Locusts are just pretending to be afraid of Live-Tech so people all over the world will get it, ensuring a successful invasion.

  By the time I’m finished, Corina looks defeated. She feels defeated, too, but she sounds strong when she asks me where we’re going.

  “We’re supposed to find someone named Sybil.” I try to make my voice deep and confident so she doesn’t ask me any questions about who Sybil is. “She’s on our side.”

  Corina nods. “And where are we going to find this Sybil?”

  You already know where to go. I nod like I know what I’m talking about. “Can I show you something?” I pull up my backpack and reach into the lining. My fingers graze something hard and plastic—the key chain. I feel better knowing it’s still with me, but I don’t pull it out. Now’s not the time to look at it.

  I hand Corina the photo. “That’s Cassandra.”

  She examines the picture. “That looks like you.”

  “It is me.”

  “I thought you didn’t know her.” She looks at me. “You said you met this girl, Cassandra, when you witnessed your future.”

  I nod. “I did. I met her for the first time today. The picture, though, I’ve had since before all this started.” I tell her the story of how I got the picture and the trouble with the time capsule. “I’m guessing we’ll get some answers once we find where this was taken.”

  She nods. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

  I look at the picture again, not at me, but at the beach, the water, the faint brown mountains that are across from it. “It could be SoCal . . .”

  She looks at me and waits. “But?”

  “I don’t know any place in Southern California that has mountains that start so close to the shore.”

  She studies the picture some more. “It looks like a lake to me.”

  “Maybe.”

  She sighs and starts wadding up our trash. “We’d better find it, though.”

  “Corina?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m wanted for murder down there.”

  She turns back and studies me for a moment. “We’re going to have to do something to change how you look, then.”

  When we’re ready to go, I bring up the other thing that I’ve been thinking about. “We’ve got to lose the patches. I think they can use them to track us.”

  She looks grim. “Yeah. Sure. How?”

  I remember how much it hurt when Damon pinched my patch and I get a little sick when I think about how much it’s going to hurt if I try to take it off. “I think we just have to do it.”

  I lead her outside around to the back of the restaurant. “I’ll go first.”

  I lift up my sleeve and touch my patch. I feel around the edge for a place to get a grip. It’s hard because it’s fused to my skin. I find a gap. I take a deep breath, nod once at Corina, who’s looking at me like I’m crazy, and pull.

  The pain is blinding, but it’s not as bad as what the truth-seeking Live-Tech did to me. It’s the blood that I’m not expecting. It’s as though the patch has created new arteries and veins and I’m suddenly bleeding like I’ve sliced my wrists.

  “Holy hell,” I whisper through the pain. I’m starting to feel weak, and my knees buckle, but I keep pulling even though I’m falling over. I close my eyes and pull harder. There’s movement, but I think I’m dying. I feel the world fade and then there’s a sudden explosion. The insides of my eyelids are painted white and it feels like somebody’s lit a firecracker in my forehead.

  Everything goes black.

  Forty-Nine

  “WAKE UP!

  “Wake up! Wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup.

  “Patchless Alex, run away!” The Voice is in my ears. Ghostly and hollow. She’s whisper-loud again like when I first heard her. She’s talking over a steady rumble of guitars that leak out of the Jungle under me.

  YOU’RE BACK?

  “Days are still strange. I’m back up your patchless drain and in your brain.”

  “Wake up!” I hear it again, but it sounds different, more real. “Jesus, Alex, wake the hell up!”

  I open my eyes. It’s too bright at first but things fade almost immediately to gray and then the pain starts again, this time behind my eyes and I squeeze them shut.

  Corina’s standing over me.

  “Hi,” I manage. The guitars are loud inside in a way they never were before the patch. Constant noise, a gathering storm.

  “The patch is gone and your drain’s unplugged, Plugz, brace yourself. Patch made changes to you and the Silly Juice’ll be closer than ever before.”

  “Jesus, man, you scared
the hell out of me,” she whispers. “I thought you were dead.”

  I shake my head. It’s not clearing up. It’s not getting easier to think.

  “My patch is off, isn’t it?”

  Corina shakes her head. “It’s off, but you don’t wanna look.”

  I look. My upper arm is wrapped tight in one of my shirts, but the blood is already starting to soak through. There’s something on the ground next to me. It looks like a sickly gray Pop-Tart with tentacles. It’s the patch. I feel sick. I know I’m going to vomit, so I turn to the other side and manage to spray the dumpster and not Corina.

  “Girl’s got a patch, boy. Got to get her patch—get her patch off, boy. Snatch her patch!” I can barely hear her over the noise.

  I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Your turn.”

  My voice is hoarse.

  Corina shakes her head wildly. “Nuh-uh. They can have me before I let you do that.”

  I shake my head. It needs to come off.

  “Patch got your tongue? Girl’s patch has got to go. Snatch the patch!”

  “Girl’s patch has got to go.” I look at Corina. “I have to snatch your patch.”

  “Snatch her patch!”

  “I’m going to,” I tell the Voice. “Shut up for a minute.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Corina asks softly. I look at her. She’s scared of me. I try and flood her with reassurance, but nothing happens. I reach for her in my mind, but there’s nothing to reach for.

  Without the patch, we aren’t connected.

  I shake my head. “The patch has to come off, Corina.”

  She pulls the knife from her pack, opens it. “Get back.”

  “Silly girl. Use knife girl. Slice the top and the patch falls off. Slice the top and off it falls. Tell her, scared boy.”

  I nod my head. “Corina, listen to me.” I try to sound as calm as I can, but my adrenaline is pumping. I hope my Voice isn’t screwing with me. “Don’t pull at the patch. Just take the knife and cut across the top—not deep or anything—just a line across the top.”