“No, I did not do that! I went to the bathroom like a human being.” David laughed. “What’s wrong with you? It’s like living with a gorilla. How many of your turds are down there right now?” David said.
“Ballpark? Hmm. Let me think. I’m not great with math.”
“You have to use math?”
“I think I could guess my average weekly total. And if I multiply it out …”
“Jesus Christ, that means like every day. If you have weekly totals, that means pretty much daily.”
Will couldn’t stop laughing from how riled up David was getting. David was laughing in bursts, between stretches of mock outrage.
“No, okay, I’ll be honest,” Will said. “If I really had to put a number on it, conservatively I’d say thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five! Are you being for real?”
Will was being for real. Thirty-five was his best estimate.
“Yeah. About.”
David laughed and shook his head. He threw his hands up in the air. “I give up,” he said. “You are a maniac.”
“I like to be comfortable, that’s all. Hard to relax in the bathrooms when you always have to watch your back.”
David smiled, but he didn’t say anything back. Will didn’t know what to say next either. The jovial mood began to fade, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was normal. Will really was sorry he’d dragged his brother into this, but he couldn’t deny that he was relieved to have him here.
“I hate the idea of Lucy alone in here,” David said.
“It kills me.”
“Let’s go find her,” David said.
“You mean that? With two of us, we can definitely do it.”
“Definitely,” David said, but he didn’t get up.
Will didn’t move either. With David behind him, he felt a renewed confidence, but his body felt like a bag of sludge. He’d been going full throttle for a day straight, and it was taking its toll.
“I just need to catch my breath,” Will said.
“Tell me about it.”
Will closed his eyes for a second.
15
DAVID OPENED HIS EYE TO THE BRUSHED steel wall of the elevator. He’d had nightmares on the outside that had started like this. Back in school again. But this was no dream. He reached up to wipe the sleep from his eyes and the drool from his chin, but his fingers hit his face shield. He was still half asleep. His filtered breath echoed in his ears.
He looked at his watch: 9:05 a.m. David scrambled up to a seated position, his back against the wall.
No. That couldn’t be right. He looked at his watch again. He tapped on it with one finger. The digital seconds clicked along without a care for him or his rising panic. David looked over at Will. He was in a heavy sleep.
“Oh shit,” David said and stood. “SHIT!”
Will jumped awake.
“What the fuck?” Will said.
“Get up,” David said.
“I am up.”
“No, I mean, stand up. Let’s go. We gotta go.”
Will blinked a few times and shook his head like a dog. He stared at the floor, confused and groggy.
“Now!” David said and reached down to take his hand. He pulled Will up.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s morning. We slept through the night.”
“What?! You didn’t set an alarm or something?”
“I slept through it. I guess we were more wiped out than we thought. We’ve been running around with no water and …”
“Fuck!” Will said.
David pulled on his backpack. He dragged the milk-crate stepping stool to the middle of the elevator and got up on it. He slid the hatch open, and they made their way out of the elevator. Every movement was sloppy. His mind was moving twice as fast as his body.
“We’ll find her,” Will said when they made it to the hallway.
But they didn’t. As they searched, David watched the hours slip away until noon. Room after room and hallway after hallway, they didn’t find a trace of her, or get anything close to a lead. Eventually the halls started to blend together until it became hard to remember which ones they’d already explored. The time they had to spend hiding from people aggravated David, because they weren’t making progress, but he wasn’t sure that they were making progress the rest of the time either.
The two of them crept down another hall, side by side.
“Did you ever miss it?” Will said after a while.
“Miss what?”
“McKinley.”
David gave Will a look.
“Yeah, I’d write about it in my journal every night.”
“Really?”
“No. Why would I miss being locked up with no daylight and no food?”
Will shrugged. “There’s more going on in here than that. You were a rock star for a while. You aren’t that outside. You’re hanging out with a bunch of fifty-year-olds, shucking corn.”
David passed a decrepit classroom. He remembered what Mort had told him in the Stairs, that sometimes, he would go to the old Loners’ turf when he needed to relive happier times. He’d been moved when he’d heard that, but he didn’t feel that way now. He felt sad.
“I think we were all making the best of a bad—”
Will grabbed David’s arm and pulled him back from the corner they were about to turn.
“Ssh,” he said. “Look at that.”
Will pointed at the darkened doorways of the two classrooms nearest to them in the long hallway ahead. The classrooms were populated by ghostly figures. Freaks. They all held weapons. They were hiding. Waiting.
Two Nerds walked into the hall at the other end. They each shouldered plump bags from the food drop, and were chatting. He shared a worried look with Will. He was about to witness another mugging. Would he stand by and just let it happen again? But when the Nerds passed the occupied classrooms, the Freaks did nothing. The Nerds walked on, unaware of the danger they’d avoided.
“What’s going on?” Will whispered.
“I don’t get it,” David said.
But then, he did.
A giant group of Skaters rolled into the hall from the same direction the Nerds had. It was nearly the whole gang, fresh from the quad, lugging their gang’s entire food drop ration. This was what the Freaks had been waiting for, a big score.