BLAM. BLAM. BLAM.
Everyone cowered and slid to a stop, covering their heads with their arms.
Click. Click.
He wanted them to hear that, and know the gun was useless now, like all the others in the school.
“Are you out of your mind?” Will said.
David ignored him, and tossed the gun into the crowd. A few scrambled for it, but most of the kids understood.
“This quarantine has gone on too long. None of you deserve to be locked up in here,” David said.
“No shit!” someone yelled.
“Nobody wants to hear it, buddy boy,” P-Nut said. “You just threw away the microphone.” The leader of the Skaters sauntered forward from the crowd and smiled. “Skaters, the good times are back. I think we’ve found ourselves some hostages. Grab ’em!”
Skaters charged toward him.
“I know a way out!” David yelled.
The Skaters halted.
“You do?” Will said.
“A possible one,” David said to the crowd. “Isn’t that what you want, to walk out of here, once and for all?” He looked into the eyes of as many people as he could. Hope glinted there.
“It’s time to leave. Things never should have gone this far. I’m not saying it’s going to be a friendly world out there, but you should be free. You deserve the chance to deal with the situation yourselves, make your own choices, not tear each other apart in here. But, if we’re gonna have even a chance of pulling this off …” They clung to his every word. “It’s going to take every single one of us.”
David’s palms pressed against steel. He pushed. Lucy and Will flanked him, pushing hard, and the rest of the school stretched out on either side of him, all pushing on the steel wall in the back foyer. He remembered when this wall of steel plating used to be an inviting glass entryway that looked out to the faculty parking lot. The crowd grunted and strained. The ones who couldn’t fit pushed on the backs of the ones at the wall.
Behind them, the massive old mural that depicted David in front of the Loners, under a blue sky, loomed over the two-story foyer. The squares of butcher paper that illustrated the Loners had fallen away. What remained was most of David’s face, and five small squares of blue, like an 8-bit sky.
David had told them about Sam’s dad’s final solution. A month back, when the school had been damaged by the grenade attack, and the steel plate that sealed up the back foyer had become detached, it had given Sam’s dad an idea. If there was ever a need to evacuate the students inside, if something were threatening their lives, say a fire, they would need an evacuation route that could get the kids out quickly. The detached steel wall had been chosen as that exit. Its immense weight was doing the work of keeping it upright. In the event of a crisis, they’d pull the wall down with the crane, and the kids could escape to safety. A steel rivet had been driven into the concrete of the building to keep the wall attached. The whole school had to be stronger than a single rivet.
“Push harder!” David yelled.
This had to end. They had to be set free. He knew he’d be risking the lives of uninfected adults out there, but things had gotten too savage. It would be a mess having everyone outside, but there was no way to avoid it. This was a messy situation. On the farm, he’d believed the infected were safest inside the school, but he’d forgotten how sick McKinley was, and now he realized that its sickness was terminal. If David didn’t get them out of this place, they’d destroy each other.
“Everyone work with me when I say push!” David shouted.
Hundreds of hands waited for his command.
“PUSH!” David said.
Everyone moved as a unit, shoving with everything they had in them.
“PUSH!”
He heard a pop of metal. The wall jolted forward. A two-inch-wide line of daylight appeared above them, where the plates met the building. A whistling alarm rang out from the outside.
“Keep pushing!” David said.
The crowd pushed harder and the metal creaked. He heard Varsity snarl with effort, he heard the higher-pitched grunts of girls, giving their everything. He saw Skaters piling in with Freaks, Nerds with Geeks, Saints with Sluts, working together, refusing to quit.
Another pop sounded out. Then a few more. The stripe of daylight above them widened, and David felt the wall begin to pull away from his hands. It tipped in what seemed like slow motion at first, then it sped up. He couldn’t help but fall forward with the welded plates, like everyone else. Clouds of dry dirt whooshed into the air as the metal wall hit the ground with a reverberating crash. Daylight flooded the foyer. David had to shut his eye from the sting of the light.
When he opened his eye, he saw the farm in all its glory. Moist, freshly tilled soil. Lush green grass. He saw a wheelbarrow full of ripe heirloom tomatoes. The sky was crowded with cotton ball clouds, each rimmed with golden light. Snow-frosted mountains seemed a million miles away. Cows lumbered away from the noise of the wall’s crash. Goats bleated in protest. Three dogs scampered into view, chasing each other.
He saw the parents. They were clustered together by the compost bins, a hundred feet away, all wearing gas masks or breathing through scuba gear, and they looked nervous. The whistling alarm blared continuously.
The line of McKinley kids stood breathless at the threshold to freedom.
“Mom?” David heard someone say.
Bobby walked out onto the fallen steel wall. Bobby’s mother broke away from the other parents and burst forward.
“Bobby! Baby, come here,” she said.
Bobby sped forward. When they got up to each other, she slowed to a stop. She cocked her head and took in his dull blacked-out skin, his shiny red teeth. Bobby stopped a few feet short of her, trembling, and they stared at each other. The alarm whistled. A gentle wind blew the rich scents of a farm into the foyer.
Bobby’s mother opened her arms to him and they embraced. The hug was like a starter pistol. Everyone sprinted out of the school after that. David ran with them. It was madness, so many people running in different directions. He lost track of Lucy and Will. His old friends and enemies were all around him, smiling, and running in circles. They leapt through the crops, playing. They ran with arms outstretched, kicking up dirt, spreading themselves across the expanse of the thriving farm like it was the first minute of recess. They leapt, they embraced, happy faces glistened with tears. Only a few hesitant ones remained in the commons, slowly inching out, wary of their own liberty.