The Trap (20 page)

But something halts me. I close my eyes, searching for the answer. It’s somewhere in the dark of my mind, some—

It’s already too late. That’s what I realize. They’re too many bodies clumped around us. There’s no way the two of us—even armed—can blaze our way out of
here. Even if every fired bullet inflicted a fatal wound, we’d be able to plug a dozen of them at most. Leaving thousands on the floor still alive, and tens of thousands more in the
arena.

If we want to live, this plan can’t be
now
. It has to be
never
.

There has to be another plan.

I swing my gaze to the stage. Nothing there to help us. Left and right, nothing. Look up. Only the flotilla of balloons assembled above us. Nothing. There’s nothing.

A wail breaks out from balconies on the higher levels. Our odor rising, spreading. Heinous screams of hunger fling out. From the luxury suites. From the upper crust of society. They’re not
used to being deprived of choice action, and they want in. I see dark shapes, men in suits, women in upscale dresses, scaling down the walls like ribbons of saliva drooling from the luxury
suites.

Sissy turns to me. Her hand is pulling up her shirt, revealing a glint of metal from the handgun. She’s pulling off the Visor now for better vision, her bangs arching over her forehead
like a pulled bow. She’s ready. To go down fighting, to cut holes into as many as she can on her way down.

The TextTrans buzzes manically in my pocket. So hot, it’s burning a hole into my thigh.

Sissy starts pulling out the gun.

It comes to me, right then. The plan. An imperfect, deeply flawed plan. But the only one we have.

Sissy is cocking the handgun. And I’m reaching out, snatching it away. Her eyes widen with surprise as I aim it toward the roof.

And fire off six quick rounds.

T
HE FLASHES OF
light—six in quick succession—sear through even my shut eyelids. White splats of blinding brightness. Again. And
again. With each flash, the gun recoils in my hand, the violent jolt felt all along my upright arm and shoulder. By the sixth shot, the handle of the gun is hot enough to brand my palm.

Fully discharged, I fling the gun away. It sails over the crowd; they lie collapsed like windswept grass completely flattened. Screams and cries of pain. Their corneas are burning.

Sissy grabs my arm. “Now,” she says. “While they’re all down.”

But she’s wrong. Only the people closest to us are incapacitated. The majority of the people, especially those on the outer rim who were shielded from the bright flashes, are already
pressing forward. Toward us.

Instead of taking off, I grab her, pull her to the ground. “Not yet!”

“What? We’ve got—”

“Wait for it, wait for it!”

“Gene! For what?”

Then I hear it. The most glorious crack of glass, the sound of a thousand ice cubes thrown into boiling water.

“Duck!” I shout, and pull her into a crouch. Shards of glass rain down. As do massive plates of glass, slicing down and penetrating bodies like an axe head into wood.

Don’t get cut,
I think. One tiny slice and blood will pour out. It’ll send this arena into a suicidal rampage.

Thousands of balloons drift down. Red, white, yellow, and green orbs floating down in slow motion. Thousands of discrete moving parts. The kind of cover we need.

Sissy starts to move.

I grab her arm. “A few more seconds, let the balloons reach us.”

“
They
will reach us before the balloons,” she spits out, pointing at the dark tide of people. “Damn it, Gene!”

“Wait for it. . . .”

The thousands of balloons flow down, spread along the arena floor. And then. An unexpected gift. Moonlight, no longer impeded by the thousands of balloons, or, more important, the tinted glass,
cascades into the arena, flooding the floor with light.

The effect is immediate. Every eye in the arena shuts, every arm is flung across every face, every mouth cries out in pain. The sudden flush of moonlight is more startling than dangerous. But
it’s bought us cover, distraction, and maybe fifteen, twenty seconds.

We move.

Not back the way we came. The entranceways are too clogged with people rushing in from other levels. But forward, toward the stage, Sissy in the lead. Balloons still falling, bouncing every
which way. We shove people aside. Our odor, our sweat, our fear, our desperation, wiped full bore on them. But we’re past caring. A few swing back, arms slashing through the air, hoping to
catch us with one swipe. But still blinded by the bright glare of moonlight, their aim is off.

Sissy slaps her palms on the stage, swings her legs sideways, up and over, clearing it easily. I’m right behind her, hoisting myself up. I glance back. What I see from this higher vantage
point turns my insides cold. The whole floor is churning with the turbulence of thousands of shifting bodies, balloons bobbing in their midst. Pale moonlight layered on everything, casting
everything in a sickly glow. And thousands of people streaming toward us like a turbulent river.

We stay low on the stage, and duck under the heavy train of the velvet curtains. The heavy, suffocating weight of the compressed folds pushes down on us as we crawl, disoriented, in the murky
black.

And then we’re through, on the other side of the curtains, backstage. It’s empty, everyone having rushed out onto the stage moments before the moonlight poured down. Sissy is up and
out first, turns to help me to my feet. No longer needing to pretend to be a dusker and allowed to be herself, she’s in her element.

“Quick,” she whispers. Already the stage is beginning to shift and move. The masses. They’re climbing onto it. The curtain begins to stretch and pull from the other side.

“Where to?” I ask.

She looks left and right, her eyes burning with panic. She doesn’t know. We have to move, to create distance. No, we need more than distance. We need bottlenecks and barriers. We need
doors that open pull-ways, that lead to narrow corridors. We need a bottlenecking network of capillaries and valves of more doors and intersecting corridors and stairwells. A dozen duskers chasing
us down would be logjammed by these doors and intersecting corridors; a horde of thousands would become clumped into impassable clots. “This way,” I say, leading us through the nearest
door.

Sissy gets it, immediately. Every doorway we run through, she’s slamming the door shut behind us, locking it. The walls tremble as we run. Despite our best efforts, they’re still
coming at us. Right on our heels come the sounds of doors smashed in, wails and howls. The clatter of claws.

We stop. Chests heaving, legs burning. Sweat pouring down our faces. We stink. We absolutely reek.

“We’re too easy to find,” I say between pants.

Sissy sucks in air. “C’mon, we got to go faster.”

I feel suddenly tired. It’s not just a physical exhaustion from all the running, but something deeper, something wedged between the chambers of my heart. “Or not.”

She looks at me. “What?”

“Maybe it’s over, Sissy. Maybe it’s finally over. We can’t keep playing this cat-and-mouse game. They’ll catch up with us. Within a minute at most. It’s
inevitable.”

She shakes her head adamantly. “No, Gene. We keep running. We find a way out to the streets, we find a horse.”

“A horse, even at full gallop, will be too slow. You know that.”

Her face hardens with anger. “Okay, so what’s your plan?”

“Maybe we just give up. Stop the running—”

She reaches forward. I think she’s going to do something tender, like brush my bangs to the side, or caress my cheek, or touch my arm. Instead, her hand smacks me on the side of the
face.

“What the—”

“Save the
feel sorry for me while I gallantly commit suicide
speech for someone else.” She thumps me in the chest with her fists. “Stop thinking about only yourself!
Think about Epap! Think about David!” Her eyes blaze hot. “Think about
me
!”

“Sissy—”

“We fight, Gene! We fight to the end. We
never
give in. Not while there are others depending on us. Not while there’s still a chance.”

“There is no chance! Okay? Even if we escape out to the streets, what then? Where do we go—”

“We’ll figure it out! We’ll improvise. We think quick on our feet, you and me together. That’s what we’ve always done, Gene. We go down fighting!” And now she
grabs my arm, but there’s no tenderness in her grip. There’s only resiliency and determination.

“Okay,” I say to her.
Let’s get out to the street,
I’m about to say, but she’s already turned and is sprinting down the corridor.

———

It’s easier than we think to find an exit. At the end of the next corridor, we come across an exit sign. From that point on, it’s cake. We follow the arrows from one exit sign to the
next until we’re jetting down a stairwell, then out a side exit that spills us onto the street.

It’s quiet, almost peaceful out here beneath the full moon. Everyone’s inside for the big show. The only sound is the faint music piped through the fountain speakers for the ongoing
water show.

I think the unexpected tranquility catches Sissy by surprise as well. She stops, stares up at the sky, breathing hard. But only for a moment.

“No clouds,” she says. “Good. The moonlight glare will be tough on their eyes.” She starts running toward a row of horses parked street side. “C’mon,
Gene!”

There’s got to be another way. This escape-on-horseback plan is fatally flawed. Anyone can see that. We reek. Our odor will leave a trail for them to easily follow. It’ll be over
before we cover fifteen blocks.

Another way, another way, there’s got to be another way.

“Gene!” Sissy shouts, untethering two horses.

I glance across the street. Looming skyscrapers. Death traps, offering no escape at all. Useless as tombstones.

“Gene!”

But there
is
a way out. I can feel it in my bones. But I just can’t
see
it. Not yet. I need time.

“Get on, Gene!” She’s already sitting in the saddle of her horse, has trotted over another horse for me. “Gene!”

“Wait, give me time—”

“No! Gene, we have to—”

“Damn it!” I yell, and jump onto the horse. We start galloping down the street, the concrete beneath us turning into a blur. Past the corner, past the front of the Convention Center,
past the water show.

“Which way, Gene?” Sissy shouts next to me.

And finally I see.

“Stop, Sissy!” I shout, pulling on the reins. “Do you trust me?” I say as she brings her horse around. I dismount the horse.

“What are you doing?”

“If you trust me, get off your horse.”

“Is this your idea of committing suicide ag—”

“This is my idea of surviving. It’s our only chance of seeing the sun rise tomorrow.”

“What are you—”

“There’s no time, just follow my lead.” And I rub my sweaty face, arms, against the horse, spit gobs of saliva onto it.

“What are you doing?”

“Just do what I do, Sissy!” I shout as I slap the haunches of the horse, sending it galloping away—leaving a trail of my odor. They’ll chase after it. So long as they
don’t actually smell my real trail.

Sissy jumps off her horse and does the same. Sweat, spit, rubbed on. She smacks the horse on the rump. It, too, gallops away, down a different street. Even better.

I start running. My direction takes Sissy by surprise because I’m not heading away from the Convention Center. But right back at it. As I sprint, I break out the handgun, remove the
silencer. I let the handgun drop, clatter behind on the pavement.

“Your silencer, Sissy! Do you still have it?” She blinks, then pulls the silencer from her pocket, confusion and uncertainty written all over her face.

We reach the water fountain. But instead of running around it, I vault over the concrete edge and into the water. The water level reaches up to my shoulders. I spin around. Sissy is staring at
me with incredulous eyes, then down at the silencer. Her mouth drops.

“It’s the only way, Sissy. The only way we hide our scent. They won’t think to look in here. The water splashing, the sprays, the ripples, the reflected moonlight,
they’ll conceal us. As long as we stay submerged underwater.”

And again, she stares down at the silencer. The hollow, cylindrical silencer. About the length of a straw. “Until sunrise?”

I nod. Fine droplets of water mist down on us, soaking us.

“They’ll look here.”

“I don’t think so. This is how this plays out. They’ll chase after the horses, and it’ll be sheer pandemonium. Storefronts smashed in, dozens of injured. The horses will
get ripped apart, their parts splattered across five city blocks. Afterward, nobody’s going to know what really went down. Hundreds are going to claim afterward to have devoured the two
hepers. Or at least tasted a snippet of us. A nose, an ear. After that, everyone’s going to simply assume we’re dead. Nobody will think to look in here.”

“I don’t know.”

Sounds break out of the Convention Center. A rumbling, the smashing of glass, screams.

“No other choice now, Sissy. Here they come.”

She clenches her jaw, leaps over the edge and into the water. She glides right up next to me, takes my hand. Together we wade to the center of the fountain pool. We’re in the very heart of
the network of water propulsion snouts, rows of them lined in front of and behind us, encircling us like digits of a clock. Water plummets onto us like hard rain. Through the curtain of falling
water, I see the crowd bursting out of the Convention Center, smashing through the glass lobby.

Sissy and I look at each other one last time. Her clothes soaked, sticking to her skin in random folds, her plastered hair framing her face. Fear in her eyes. But she blinks and there is in its
stead a determination. I open my mouth, helplessly. I suddenly have so much I need to tell her. So much to confess, to apologize for. But it is all falling apart too fast. There is no time left to
say anything.