“Oh, good,” she said. “I was worried that wouldn’t be fast enough for you. But it is?”
Niko gave an indistinct nod. “If that’s the fastest way…”
“It is, short of you and me driving down there and getting her out ourselves!” she joked.
Alex and I exchanged a look.
“Let me get you the forms,” Helene said and she scurried out of the room.
Niko looked at us.
“Captain McKinley,” he said.
* * *
As it happened, the shuttle to the Air Force base was done for the day.
“Sleep on it, Niko,” Alex advised him as we walked toward the dining hall. “That’s what you always tell me. You need to make a careful plan. Don’t go rushing off.”
“She’s alive, Alex. All this time I thought she was dead. I want to see her. I want to tell her—”
Niko choked up, then corrected his course, getting back to the issue at hand: “Here’s my plan—I’m going to go see Captain McKinley and I’m not going to leave his side until he says he’ll fly me out of here. When I get to the States, I’ll hitchhike.”
The hitchhiking was actually the only good part of the plan. It wasn’t as dangerous as it used to be. With the gas shortages, it was actually against the law to drive your car with less than three people in it.
Not that we knew, since we were only allowed off the camp in the shuttle bus, but from what I’d read in the papers, it was making for some very weird car rides stateside.
“I’m going to need an air mask,” Niko said, thinking. “Do you guys know anyone who has one for barter?”
“Why? For the drifts?” Alex asked, shocked. “Niko, do you think they’re real?”
This was the biggest source of gossip and rumor in the camp.
In the last weekly radio address from whatever undisclosed secure location the government of the United States of America was operating out of, President Booker had assured us that as far as he knew, the drifts were just rumors. He said that the military had assured him that the clean-up of the compounds was completed and the Four Corners area was safe. (Burned and bombed into a giant, black desert, but safe.) He promised that if he ever comes to find out there’s been some sort of cover-up, he will take swift action.
But then he went back to talking about the efforts to house and feed and clothe the seven million displaced victims of the megatsunami up and down the East Coast, and I got the feeling he just wishes the Four Corners would disappear.
“I can’t afford to gamble,” Niko told Alex. “I don’t know what route I’m going to take. I could get close to the area.”
“You don’t need to get anywhere near the Four Corners,” I broke in. “You stay north, way north, and then dip down to Missouri. They put the camps in those Midwestern cities to keep them far away from the Four Corners. There’s no reason for you to—”
“If the drifts are real, and if I run into them, I’m dead meat,” Niko said. “So, I’m going to find a mask. It’s part of the careful plan I’m making.”
Niko cast Alex a pointed look and walked away.
“He’s not the same,” Alex said. “He never used to be like that. Sarcastic?”
I shrugged. “A lot of us are different now.”
CHAPTER FOUR
JOSIE
DAY 31
As hungry as they are, the kids are skittish at mealtimes. They’re scared to go to the dining hall for breakfast. It’s called Plaza 900. I don’t know why it has the fancy name of Plaza 900. Maybe it’s a Missouri in-joke. I’m not from here. I don’t know.
“Quiet! Quiet down now!” Mario shouts today. It’s Freddy who gets them riled up. Always Freddy, who is sort of unhinged and shrill. Can’t settle down. He’s like a flea, always jumping and even biting sometimes.
“Settle down, here we go,” Mario tells the kids.
Once, of course, Excellence had been a nice dorm. Color scheme of cream and aqua. Flecked carpet and artful paintings on the walls. Like a nice hotel chain.
Now everything that could be pried off the walls has been. There are stains on the walls and the floor—coffee, blood, tobacco spit, urine, who knows.
The men are out already. Now we pass through their hall on the way to the front door.
Design flaw.
We have to go through the first-floor Men’s hall to get into the front hall and get outside. The Men’s hall is a zoo, these men being more animal now than they ever thought they’d be.
We walk, single file, down the Men’s hall, along with the seventy other women, children, and old people from the second floor.
“Stick together now,” Mario says, more to offer reassurance to Heather and Aidan than instruction.
“Sssstick together,” says a wild-eyed creep, lurching from his room.
Heather screams and the man laughs.
He’s smelly and skinny with just a few wisps of hair.
“Back off,” I growl.
He sticks his tongue out at me and I can smell his stanky breath. God-awful.
“All right, all right,” Mario says. “Out we go.”
We step out into the cold, clean morning air and cross the courtyard.
Autumn’s in effect and it’s getting cold. I feel it as we walk across the deadland stretch of dried grass and cement that is the courtyard.
None of us have real winter clothes. I gave my jacket to Freddy, in a moment of softheartedness, so I now wear the two shirts I have at all times. Along with my dirty jeans and the EZ-on mules that used to belong to Mario’s wife. They fit me, almost.
Mario gave his sweater to Lori, perhaps more for safety than for warmth. She’s chesty and had only her one paperweight thermal top. She was a little nipply.
I think of all the clothes we used to donate through our church. Where are the cast-off clothes of the free citizens of America? Do they feel no pity for us?
We’d wear anything—doesn’t have to fit. Doesn’t have to be clean. People would kill, truly kill, for a change of underwear.
The guards give clothing to their favorites. We are nobody’s favorites.
So now Mario and I feel the cold, as we head to Plaza 900 for breakfast.
The sky is the color of silt, with a creamy peach band at the horizon. It’s the prettiest thing we’ll see today, no doubt.