David looked up through the broad windshield and up the tall crane arm that extended up into the sky. Someone was climbing the crane arm and they were almost to the tip. David burst out of the booth and strained to get a better look. He saw the person wore a gas mask and a backpack. He saw he was male.
He saw it was Will.
“Stop!” David screamed up. Rain peppered his mouth. Will didn’t hear, or he didn’t want to listen. Will lowered himself onto the metal cable that hung from the crane, and he zipped down it, past the roofline, to where David couldn’t see, but he knew where he was going. The crane’s tip was over the quad.
David’s heart punched at his ribs. Will didn’t just do that. David’s world caved in on him. How could Will be so stupid? He waited for the parents on watch to sound an alarm. There was only howling wind and slapping rain. How could Will go in with only a gas mask to …
Oh dear God.
He knew which gas mask Will was wearing, the one from the crane. David had worn it too. That mask had seen heavy use, and the filter hadn’t been replaced in a while. A fresh filter was guaranteed for forty-eight hours of continuous use. After that, you were pushing your luck.
Will’s filter might not last him until morning.
David cursed Will with every foul word he could think of because it was the only resistance he could summon. His feet were already moving. He’d already turned off the crane’s motor so that no one would hear. He’d already grabbed a gas mask with a fresh filter for himself from the van, and was shoving other essentials into a backpack. A fresh filter for Will and the crane remote. It was big and orange, and it could move the arm and lower and raise the cable. He’d use it to pull them back out. He stuffed in a hatchet and an energy bar that he had no idea how he’d eat with a mask on his head.
He was wasting time. Will was getting farther into the school by the second. The longer David took, the harder it would be to find him and replace his filter. The more infected he might run into. He wanted this over within ten minutes, in and out.
“I’m gonna kill him,” he said.
He stood at the base of the crane arm, staring up the long crane arm as it disappeared into the sky. The sky had darkened since he’d gathered his supplies and now the charcoal clouds began to churn. He couldn’t see the tip of the boxy crane arm anymore. The arm just got thinner as it got higher until it seemed to disappear. Another gust blew David’s hair to the side. He heard the stray dogs outside the farm moan in sympathy with the wind.
One foot in front of the other. He moved his arms and legs mechanically, like they were pistons with set paths. He kept his eye focused on each steel cross brace as he grabbed ahold of them. The wind blew the heat right out of his fingers. When David reached the halfway mark of his climb, he could feel the crane’s sway. One misplaced hand, one lean too far to counter the wind, and he’d take a fall that would end him. He looked up the arm. The zigzag ladder ahead looked like nightmare train tracks extending into the clouds. The wind lashed out at him. He hugged close to the crane, wanting to catch as little wind as possible. He looked at the ground and his stomach bobbed up and down like it was suspended from rubber bands. David knew he couldn’t rest too long or the idea of quitting would needle into his brain and slowly leach away his resolve. He took a breath and kept climbing. He refused to look down until, finally, he was there, at the top.
David crooked his elbow around one of the cross braces, and unzipped his bag enough to pull the gas mask out of it. He squeezed it over his head and his first inhale felt like he was sipping peanut butter through a straw. He realized that he had no idea when he would be taking this mask off again. He was locking his head into a jail cell. He lingered there at the peak, trying to regulate his breath, feeling the pull of the filter, like he was at the foothills of emphysema.
The quad waited for him below. The dirt scarred from countless battles. The quad looked almost foreign from this vantage point. The days when he’d fought for food on that gouged dirt down there seemed deep in the past. David made the transition to the cable. A hundred feet of steel wobbled in slow motion between his legs. There was no going back now.
David slid down the line in short bursts, never letting himself drop more than three feet before clamping his legs and fists tight again. The cable swung and twisted in the wind. Rain slapped his face. Near the bottom, he let his grip go loose, and he zipped down the cable, certain that he was making the worst decision of his short life.
David’s feet hit the quad.
He pissed a little bit. He was sure he could feel the virus all around him, coating the skin of his neck and wrists. Fear crushed in on him. David’s breathing went hyperactive. He sucked in breaths harder than the mask would allow. His stomach vacuumed.
David forced himself to relax. Gradually, as he began to draw in longer breaths, the air came easier, and his heart quit having a fit.
He headed for the elevator.
10
THE FIRST THING LUCY WAS AWARE OF WAS pain. Blades of it, skewering her through her side. Then more pain. Stings and aches all over her front. She was lying on a rough, uneven surface. The air smelled like gasoline and feces.
Lucy popped her eyes open and saw that she was in the corner of a room full of rubble, where water streamed down the cracked walls and dripped from the sagging ceiling. She lay on a pile of book bags.
There were other people in the room with her. Burnouts. A boy with long white hair that hung in front of his face sat crumpled against the wall, seemingly unconscious, with a damp piece of yellowed cloth in his limp hand. A lanky girl, with long stretched-out legs and a nose like a beak, lay on his lap, eyes half closed, drool spilling off her lower lip, with her hand down the front of her unbuttoned pants. A boy, with shiny burn scars where most of his scalp should have been, was splayed out on the floor, hand down his sweatpants, masturbating to the sight of the passed-out, tall girl. Lucy jerked her gaze elsewhere.
In another corner, a boy in a Santa hat pissed into a wide-mouth plastic water jug full of shit. He was standing like Godzilla amid a city of other water bottles on the floor, all half full with a brown soup of urine and feces. Each bottle had a latex glove rubber banded to the mouth. Some of the gloves were empty and limp, but most were in various degrees of inflation. There were other kids in the room too, mostly passed out. Dead, sunken eyes in ghastly faces. Greasy snarls of gray hair. Unwashed skin. Stringy muscles stretched over their bones.