Goodhouse (36 page)

“Did the boys get to the zone?” I asked. He dropped his hand. “How many made it?”

At first I thought he was angry, that he would strike me the way he usually did, holding his body still until he lashed out. But I had merely surprised him.

“That was your voice on the broadcast,” he said. “No fucking way. That was you.”

“How many made it?” I asked.

“A lot,” he said. He glanced at Owen's body and then at me, at the blood on my shirt.

“It was Dr. Cleveland,” I said. “He was one of them. No matter what they say officially. It was him.”

“What do you mean?” Davis said. Smoke from the rubble made a black pillar in the sky. It was wide like a road, a passage into the heavens.

“When the experiment is done,” I said, “you clean the glassware. You incinerate the trash.”

Davis frowned and shook his head. “He wouldn't do this,” he said. It didn't occur to me that he was in shock, too—that anything so human could happen to him, as well.

“I should have known,” I said. “I should have stopped him.” I was still holding Owen's hand. I was talking in fragments, unable to organize my thoughts, unable to think beyond the slack fingers clasped in my own, beyond the sense that I had to leave, that I couldn't leave, that I was trapped. Davis would never let me go.

But then I looked more closely at him. Davis was tugging at the torn edge of his shirt. His eyes had a wild, confused look. He was himself, but also someone new.

“Who else?” he asked. “Was there anyone else?”

“They were already here,” I said. I thought of all the temporary proctors I'd seen at their orientation. “They've been here for weeks.”

I struggled to stand, but I lost my balance. Davis reached out to me, and I flinched away. “Come on,” he said. “I'm trying to help you.” He pulled me to my feet, and I staggered from him, clutching my arm, colliding with the metal side of the bus. The key automatically unlocked the door and illuminated the interior. There was a terrible moment when I saw Davis contemplating this new piece of information.

“You drove through campus?” he said. “In that?”

“Let me go,” I said.

Davis wanted to know how I made the announcement. I gave him the Zero's handheld. “It's all there, probably,” I said. He wanted more explanation, but Owen lay dead on the side of the pathway and boys were stepping over him as if he were merely a pile of clothes. Another helicopter passed overhead, a silver sheriff's star painted on its belly. “I have to go,” I said. “Just stay back.”

But Davis was quick. One moment he appeared motionless and the next he was behind me. He reset my arm, lifted and rotated it so that the shoulder joint slipped back into the socket. The pain was electric at first, overriding all my senses, flooding every interior circuit. But then it subsided.

“Go on,” Davis said. He stepped back as I sagged against the bus. “I didn't see you,” he added.

I moved my hurt arm, wiggled my fingers. It was sore but functional. “No,” I said.

He looked startled. “Just go,” he said. “I'm letting you leave.”

“It's too late for that.” I unclipped the key from my belt loop and passed it to him. “You're going to drive me.”

*   *   *

I rode in the dark luggage compartment, bracing myself against a wheel well. The thrum of the engine ricocheted off the metal sides, an endless, moaning growl. I had Owen's painting with me. I picked the staples from the wooden frame, using the stiff canvas to lever them out, tearing the fabric slightly until it came free. Then I threw the frame aside and rolled the canvas. Before we'd left, I'd tucked Owen's body more fully against the T-4, where no one would trample it. I'd tried to make a purposeful memory of my friend, to absorb the details this time—the slight chipping of his front tooth, the way one ear sat a little higher than the other.

Every time the bus slowed, I was sure that Davis was being stopped, that I was going to be found and arrested. I could also hear the others when he slowed—the boys whom he'd packed into the seats. They were students with broken bones and contusions. Many had left the dorm without shoes and had torn their feet as they ran. Davis was driving them to the Red Cross center outside the tent city. We'd agreed on this. At Ione there was too much chaos, too many critically injured. I knew all the boys onboard would receive better and faster care off campus.

In the following months I'd watch Davis become something of a folk hero. In the media he'd be hailed as a compassionate leader, an independent thinker. Because of him, hundreds of boys had found refuge in the Exclusion Zone. The Mule Creek guards in their towers had been able to protect them. I'd go on to watch dozens of interviews with Davis. I'd see him tell and retell his story—my story—and wonder at how he was able to be bashful but resolute, brave but personable. The Vice President of the United States would eventually pin a National Service Medal to his chest. If anybody at Goodhouse suspected that Davis's story was untrue, they didn't want to say so. Nobody reprimanded him for leaving campus. The busload of students he'd driven to the Red Cross center became part of his legend.

But at the time, as I sat huddled in the dark luggage compartment of the bus, my legs aching as I used them to brace myself against the constant motion, it was all just a hunch, a gamble. Davis and I had agreed that I'd climb out when we were close to the tent city. I was waiting for a quick blast from the horn, that was our signal. And it seemed like I was waiting a long time. Just when I'd decided to lift the latch on the compartment door, I heard it—a single, sharp note. Davis didn't fully stop. I had to jump, and the landing was hard, the ground unyielding. The bus sped past me, generating a cloud of dust in its wake.

It took me a moment to orient myself. I was within sight of the east gate. I could just make out the crowd waiting at the entrance. In the distance, the two nuclear cooling towers darkened the horizon, their massive hourglass shapes like hefty tombstones. Sagebrush grew in fragrant clumps. Manzanita trees rose out of the dry earth with their smooth bark and clawlike canopies.

I wasn't a stranger to this land anymore. I got to my feet. For the first time in days, I knew exactly what would happen next. I knew that I would vault the fence and head to West Market. I knew I would knock on Javier's door and find it open. It felt predetermined, like I was being guided and protected, a notion that I've retained over the years. I'm not sure who I saw standing in the night, leading me forward. But I saw something—an indistinct shape—a person, a shadow. I had the impression that I was not alone. I began to run. I breathed in the smell of this once-foreign desert. I felt powerfully alive, in motion, connected. All the boys who had once called me a friend seemed to be walking with me, in lockstep. I felt that they were forming a bright shield around me—and that I belonged exactly where I stood.

 

EPILOGUE

In January I returned to La Pine. The school was boarded up, and everything familiar was blanketed in snow. I was a fugitive now. My newly grafted irises were overwhelmed by the bright light, and my brown eyes burned with a chemical ferocity. I'd brought flowers—a dozen purple and white asters. I'd clutched them close to me as I rode the bus north, riding it through Klamath Falls, past the old Saddle Dam, staring at my own reflection, ghostly and half-visible in the glass of the bus window.

It had been almost a year, exactly, since the fire at La Pine, and the first building I visited was the old dormitory. It had partially collapsed. I walked up and touched its siding. The paint had melted and cooled in sagging ripples. Little climbing vines had now threaded their way upward—thin brown stalks that would leaf after the thaw. Campus was unnervingly quiet—no bells for classes, no droning PA announcements, no proctors issuing directives. Western hemlock swayed and creaked in the breeze. A blue jay scolded somewhere in the forest. I put my hand on the front door of the dormitory. It was ajar, but I couldn't bring myself to push it open.

I walked over to the chapel instead. The building was tiny and antiquated-looking, with its green clapboard siding and its yellow trim. It seemed dwarfed by the landscape that surrounded it, by the tall, swaying trees, by the swell of the Cascade Range in the near distance. A sudden gust of wind blew clumps of wet snow from the treetops. I went inside, surprised to find it unlocked.

Half the pews were gone, and the others were disordered. The harpsichord was missing, as was the podium. Even the cross over the altar had been removed. Mice skittered across the wooden rafters overhead, and a sloppy bird's nest filled a tiny alcove where a saint had once stood. I walked toward the altar. I pulled off my gloves.
Here
, I thought,
I'll leave the asters here
. But when I stepped forward, I saw that there were already flowers on the riser—white lilies with vermillion streaks and pink-spotted throats, a clutch of them, arranged in a porcelain vase. They seemed fresh.

These were expensive flowers, more beautiful than anything I could afford. They smelled like summer. They were bright and unblemished. My asters were dog-eared and hadn't kept well over the journey. And, after a long hesitation, several deep, cold breaths, I stuffed them into the open mouth of my bag. I turned and walked out the front door.

“Are you ready?” Bethany asked. She was waiting for me in the shadow of the church. We'd traveled here together, but I'd wanted to see the campus alone. She wore a thick white parka with a fur-lined hood. She glanced down at the flowers. “What happened?”

“I think I crushed them on the bus,” I said. “They're turning brown.”

“Brown's a color, too,” she said. “What's wrong with brown?”

“Let's get out of here,” I said, but there must have been a slight catch to my voice—a rupture—because Bethany snagged the pocket of my jacket and pulled me close against her. We stood there, leaning into each other, two small figures against a vast landscape of winter.

“We'll keep them,” she finally said. “We'll press one.”

We'd been together for seven months now, waiting for Javier's procedures to heal, for my irises to graft and solidify, living in a safe house not far from Ione. It had been possibly the worst and best place to be as the federal manhunt had cast its net across the country, as the reward for my capture had doubled, then tripled. Last week we'd decided that I'd healed enough to go. Javier had injected an organic filler over my cheekbones, into my forehead and my chin. It had slightly altered the planes of my face, but the modifications were temporary. They were already melting away, already unreliable. With all the media coverage of the Ione attack, we'd been forced to change our plans. We couldn't risk the border now, couldn't cross the way we'd hoped. We'd have to go on foot.

We waited for a long time, standing there together in the ruins of La Pine. The cold crept through my boots, through my thermal socks, through the synthetic fabric of my coat. Our breath made clouds of condensation in the air. From where we stood, I could see the gap in the trees where the dormitory had once been, and I felt suddenly that I was exhaling smoke, that the vapor from the fire had somehow been trapped inside me—and here it was, finally expelled, finally dissipating.

Somewhere in the forest a branch snapped. We both started.

“Let's go,” I said.

I grabbed Bethany's hand and we left, following a buried pathway—one that was invisible, except in my memory.

*   *   *

Now, years later, it's easy to order it all: Ione was just the third in a long string of incidents, the beginning of a broader struggle. Goodhouse survived another four years, eleven months, and twenty-seven days. Many boys died before the last school shut its gates. But in those initial confusing weeks, when I was still hidden in a safe room beneath Javier's clinic, the story was only beginning to unfold.

Dr. Cleveland's neighbor was the first to publicly identify me. She had a picture of me on the fence, turning to look at her, my mouth open, my teeth bared like an animal's. There were conflicting reports about my level of involvement in the attack. I was considered a protégé of the vanished Dr. Anthony Josiah Cleveland, possibly an accomplice. My history at La Pine seemed to verify this story. How else could I have survived? And there was more evidence, too.

On campus, we were always on camera. Of course, we knew we were being filmed. But I never realized the full extent of it until I saw my life replayed across a dozen media channels. In this narrative, all my actions were the actions of a criminal: I was a thief; I was unruly and wild in a Disciplinary Committee hearing; I conspired in the factory with Zeros who stood, just off camera, in the shadows. I attacked two of the school's most exemplary students—Creighton Goodhouse and Davis Goodhouse—students who were leaders and mentors for the rest of the boys. The administration had tried its best: pairing me with a model roommate, disciplining me, sending me to confinement. But then, there it was—a video of me destroying the machinery at the factory, of me firing a gun, of me scaling a fence even as the infirmary exploded in the distance.

There was another story, however. One that passed through the Goodhouses, from campus to campus. As the only student to ever escape and remain free, as a boy who had kidnapped a girl and stolen an $800,000 sports car, who'd left his identification chip in a Zero latrine, I became something of a legend. In this version I was not a collaborator, not a cautionary tale. Mine was a story that every student knew, a story of wrong-thinking made right.

I also watched an interview with the boy I'd thought was dead on the floor of the bus. He was a tenor who'd fallen sick on the night of the performance, who had at the last minute stayed behind in the visitors' quarters. He'd been shot in the stomach and yet he'd survived, his voice rich and precise. Three months after the attack the boy would sing at a tribute for Tanner, and for the others who had been inside the pavilion at the time of the explosion. I watched memorials for slain proctors. I met their children through the news programs. I heard their wives speak. I learned things I'd never have guessed otherwise—how constrained they'd felt by their jobs, how they had demerit quotas to fulfill, how they'd monitored each other to minimize friendships with students. We were having strangely parallel experiences. We were pieces of a larger machine, each performing our functions, together but alone, constantly seen but not understood.