Sky on Fire (2 page)

“Well, now we're not like that. We're real nice.”

“Sorry,” Astrid said. She patted the plywood and nodded for me to nail it.

“Come on!” he yelled. “We're thirsty and hungry. People are dying out here! Let us in.”

“Sorry,” I yelled.

I shot a staple in.

Scott and Jeff rattled the gate some and cursed a fair amount, but by the time we got the rest of the plywood back up, we could hardly hear them.

I was examining the wall, and had made up my mind to add another layer of plastic sheeting, after we got the purifiers running, when Astrid tugged on my arm.

“While we're all geared up, let's go throw some food down to that guy from the roof.”

“What?” I asked.

“Let's throw them down some food and water!” she yelled.

“Why?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“We have so much and they have nothing. We should help them.”

Aargh, I didn't want to go up on the roof. Not at all.

I was exhausted and I wanted to get the air purifiers set up.

But Astrid stood there looking at me like it was obviously a good idea. Like it was obviously the right thing to do.

“I want to get air purifiers set up first,” I argued.

“Me and the kids will do that,” she yelled through her mask. “You should take the food up while the guys are still outside.”

“But—”

I couldn't think straight enough to tell her why it wasn't a good idea. Maybe she'd think I was lazy or scared to go on the roof or something.

“All right,” I said. “I'll do it.”

She turned toward the kids without even, I don't know, saying thanks.

“Caroline and Henry,” she called. “Grab a cart and come with me.”

“Wait,” I said. “First we get the purifiers running. Then I take the food.”

Astrid looked at me and sighed.

Okay, it's hard to read expressions through the plastic visor of an industrial face mask, but what I read in her expression went something like:

Ah, this dumb kid feels like he's getting pushed around so he's taking a stand on a small, insignificant detail. But I guess if he needs to win this little victory for the sake of his pride, then I will give in.

Then she said, “Fine, but let's hurry.”

*   *   *

We had eight different models of air purifiers in the Greenway and four to six units of each. Astrid and I set up the larger ones, and Caroline and Henry were in charge of putting the smaller ones around the store.

We used a lot of extension cords, as most of the outlets were on the walls.

*   *   *

I headed to the Pizza Shack. We had moved all the food into the big refrigerators there when we realized we'd be staying for a while.

I grabbed some EZ cans of tuna and a bunch of old bread and some fiber breakfast bars no one liked and some horrible Popsicles not even the least discriminating of our kids would eat. And a couple gallons of store-brand lemonade.

I threw the stuff into an empty plastic storage bin that was sitting around from before and carried it back to the storeroom.

We'd been alone in the store for all of two hours and already she was bossing me around as if I were some little kid or something. Not good.

*   *   *

Holding the tub in my arms, I entered the storeroom backward, nudging the doors open with my back.

I turned and nearly dropped the tub.

I was so wrapped up in thinking about Astrid I had forgotten about the bodies.

It was bloody back there. Robbie's body lay half off the air mattress. The air had mostly gone out of the mattress, so his bloody corpse was just lying on a flattish rubber mat. The blanket we'd thrown over top of him was saturated with blood in a couple of places.

Just beyond him lay Mr. Appleton, who had died in his sleep. A more peaceful way to go, to be sure. As if to prove it, his air mattress was still pleasantly inflated.

The outsiders who had come and torn our group apart were now dead in the storeroom.

I hadn't had time to really think about Robbie and the way he betrayed us.

He and Mr. Appleton had come to the store and we had let them in. But when it came time for them to leave, Robbie hadn't wanted to. Mr. Appleton fell ill and then, later that night, we had found Robbie with Sahalia.

In the scuffle, Brayden had been shot and Robbie had been killed.

Mr. Appleton died later in the night. There wasn't much we could have done to change that, I don't think.

But Robbie …

I could have looked at Robbie there and been angry. As far as I understood it, he had tried to get Sahalia to sleep with him. Whether by force or by manipulation, I'm not sure. But he showed his true colors and they were disgusting. A, like, fifty-year-old man with a thirteen-year-old? Disgusting. We thought he was a loving father-type guy and he turned out to be a letch.

And if Robbie hadn't assaulted Sahalia, Brayden would still be okay. Niko and Alex and the rest wouldn't have had to try to make it to Denver.

But I just felt sad.

Robbie and Mr. Appleton were just two more people dead from this chain of disasters.

The little kids knew nothing about what had happened and I had to keep it that way.

I added “Hide the bodies” to my mental list of things to do.

After I fed the stupid strangers outside the store.

*   *   *

The hatch to the roof was easy to unlock. Niko had fixed sheeting over it with Velcro, so you could just rip it open and it would hang off to the side. And the padlock had the key right in it.

I set the bin down on the step in front of me and pushed the hatch up and open.

The last time I'd been on this roof we hadn't known anything about the compounds. We had watched the cloud going up from NORAD, thirty miles away.

The last time I'd been on this roof I tried to kill my brother.

It was dark now. The air seemed to absorb the light seeping out from the hatch. The sky above was opaque black. No stars. No clouds. Just black mud suspended in the air.

I cursed myself for not bringing a flashlight.

I didn't want to go all the way back for one, though, so what I did was set the box down on the roof and scooted it toward the edge, crawling behind it.

I sure as hell didn't want to fall off the roof in the dark.

After a minute of undignified crawling and scooting, the bin came up against the edge of the roof. I tipped it up and over and listened to it come crashing down.

“Hey!” I heard Scott Fisher yell.

“You're welcome!” I hollered.

They'd find the loot. And I'd be inside by the time they did.

They were lucky Astrid had a nice streak in her and that I was such a pushover.

I edged my way back toward the light coming from the hatch. I couldn't wait to take the air mask off.

The whole mask/glasses combo was driving me crazy. The mask was large enough to fit over my glasses, but it made them cut into the bridge of my nose. And my nose was still battered from when Jake had beat me up, so that hurt. A lot.

And I wanted to get my layers off. The layers were starting to bunch up under my arms and behind my knees.

Again, I tried not to think about Alex and Niko and the rest.

They had sixty miles to cover, wearing their layers and air masks, on a half-fixed school bus on a dangerous and dark highway. And I was whining to myself about a couple of hours in layers and a mask.

I got to my feet and started to make my way, slowly, back toward the hatch. In a dark world, that leaked light looked really bright, I tell you.

But I went slowly, because the roof was uneven and dented in places from the hailstorm a million years ago that had landed us safely in the Greenway.

I was thinking about the hailstorm and about how lucky we were that the grade-school bus driver, Mrs. Wooly, had not only thought to drive the bus into the store to get the little kids out of the hail, but had then returned to rescue us high school kids. I was thinking about Mrs. Wooly and wondering what had happened to her in the end. Had she made it to safety? Had she even thought about returning for us, as she promised, or had she just decided to fend for herself?

I was thinking about Mrs. Wooly when the light from the hatch went out.

I was alone, on the roof, in the dark.

 

CHAPTER TWO

ALEX

 

61 MILES

This is slow going.

In 3 hours, we have gone approximately 8 miles.

Denver International Airport is more than 60 miles away.

This is going to take longer than I had hoped. It took us 20 minutes just to get from the Greenway parking lot onto I-25.

It's hard to see out of the windows because of the Plexiglas, which is not clear like regular glass. It's like driving through fog.

The highway is cracked in places. Sometimes there are gaps and craters in the asphalt. But so far there's been nothing the bus couldn't make it over.

Every 200 yards or so, there are big, battery-powered floodlights. These are good:

1. They lead the way.

2. They help us to see better as we pass.

3. They give us hope that there's someone looking out for us.

There are cars densely packed on each side of the highway and just one lane going through the middle. My best guess is that the military came along and cleared a path through. In some places, cars have just been lifted up and pushed on their sides to make room.

The cars are not what is scary, of course. Nobody would just get scared in a long, weird parking lot like the I-25.

It's the bodies.

We see them, dead where they were crawling out of their cars.

Some are just bloody messes—they must have been type A, like Niko and Max.

In some cars, as we pass by, our headlights shine on slick, black liquid splashed all over the inside of the car. It's blood. I guess those people were type A, too. Or maybe those cars had two people in them, a type O and something else, and the O just ripped them apart or something.

The other thing that's scary is the white mold.

There is a kind of white foamy substance growing up over the car tires and up onto the bodies of the cars.

It looks almost like the car tires have frozen, with snowdrifts of ice particles covering them, but we had to drive through some of it at one point and it didn't seem like ice when we drove through. It seemed wet and dense, like mold.

I think it's a rubber-eating fungus.

Anyway, it explains why we're not seeing more cars out driving.

Only tires that have been kept out of the air aren't covered in the mold.

We just drove over a body lying right in the road. The thumps were sick and though we couldn't
hear
them over the engine, we could
feel
them. The body had a heavy give to it as we went over it.

A meaty, heavy give, if that even makes sense.

These are the kinds of things I get to think about, Dean, while you are lazing about in the Greenway, eating Whitman's Sampler chocolates with Astrid and Chloe and the twins.

Max, Ulysses, and Batiste are sitting crammed together in one double seat. It's a funny sight to me—behind them there are all these containers filled with food, boxes with gallons of water—all these supplies jammed in a big jumble, and then in front of the mess are these three boys, all padded up, wearing masks. And they're playing Matchbox cars.

I guess one of them (probably Max) stashed the cars in his backpack. And now they're having races on the seat back in front of them and crashing the cars and making those car-driving noises little boys make.

Sahalia is with Brayden in the front seat.

He's in bad shape.

Sahalia keeps saying urgent things to Niko and Josie and me about Brayden. Probably things like,
He's weak. He's gray. He looks like he's going to die.
But we can't really hear her.

That's because of the air masks. They make it almost impossible to hear, over the engine noise and the sound of our own heartbeats hammering in our ears.

I think Sahalia's crying under her mask.

*   *   *

(later)

Right before Castle Rock, there was a long stretch of open highway (“open” meaning that there was one clear lane with no obstacles to go around).

We got up to 20 miles an hour, which felt like flying.

I laughed and I think Niko was grinning under his mask, but I could only tell by the corner of his eye that I could see.

Josie was smiling and she turned and gave me a big thumbs-up. She looked funny—we all did—with her five layers of sweatpants and sweatshirts and then a large orange slicker on top of it all. But she looked hopeful and I smiled at her and gave her thumbs-up back.

When Josie was happy, it made everyone happy. And this made sense, because she was like the mom of the group. Everyone depended on her for her good, easy way of being.

Max came up and asked Josie to make him some lunch.

“We're hungry!” he shouted.

“You'll have to wait, honey!” Josie shouted back.

“But we're hungry!”

Josie took Max by the hand and led him to the back of the bus. She was trying to tell him it was too dangerous to remove his mask to eat when Sahalia screamed.

Brayden had slumped to the floor.

Sahalia was screaming his name and pulling at his body, trying to lug him back onto the seat, I guess.

Josie came back up the aisle.

“How long has he been unconscious?” Josie asked Sahalia.

Sahalia said something back but I couldn't hear what it was.

“Brayden, Brayden! You've got to stick with us!” Josie yelled. “We're trying to get you—”

“He knows all that. I've been telling him that but then he fell asleep and you have to help him!” Sahalia was freaking out.

“Sahalia, listen to me—” Josie pleaded.

“We have to pull off and get help!” Sahalia was screeching.