Trapped (14 page)

“Not Les,” she said. “Les.”

At first, it made no sense to me. It was like listening to a baby babble. Then I figured it out: “Not Les,” she was saying. “Less.” As in less light than she thought, less heat, less air. Julie had gotten lost down there in the dark. She caught her jacket on something and got scared. Then things got worse, another wrong turn, maybe a trip or two, and she’d lost it. I thought the same thing was going to happen to me down there once or twice.

So I was putting this together in my head and then I remembered: Pete!

I took off out the door and along the hallway and started down the stairs. But you can’t run in the dark. Or I guess you can, but it’s not a good idea, and I wasn’t going to be breaking up any fights with a broken leg.

I slowed down, but even then my mind was racing ahead. I took what I thought was the last step but there was one more. I stumbled forward and slammed my shoulder into the edge of the door frame. I swore loudly and heard it echo in the dark, empty hallway in front of me.

I made my way toward the shop at what I guess you’d call a brisk walk, definitely not quite a jog. I was feeling my way along the wall the whole time, smacking my fingers on locker handles and window frames. The nail of my middle finger caught in
something and nearly pulled free. The pain was sharp and liquid and the darkness lit up with a pattern of white-yellow stars. I broke stride but then shifted over and started along the opposite wall using my other hand to guide me.

“Pete,” I called out. “Don’t! Stop!”

And that was stupid, because he could hear that and think: Pete, don’t stop! Ambiguity was not my friend today.

“Pete,” I tried again. “Don’t do anything!”

That seemed clear enough. But I didn’t hear anything. No response, no footsteps in front of me, nothing. It’s kind of funny, because when Pete had taken the blanket and snuck away with Julie he’d used this trip as an excuse. He said he’d gotten lost on the way to the shop. I sort of hoped it was true this time, that he’d taken off like a rocket down the wrong hallway and right now he was wondering why there was a wall where there should’ve been a door. I hoped that was the case, but I sort of knew it wasn’t.

I picked up my pace, as much as I thought I could. I really, truly did not want to lose another fingernail, though. My right hand throbbed and my left barely skimmed the wall. And, of course, I got there too late. Jason had to tell me later how it’d gone down.

Pete had thrown the door open, calling Les a son of a few different things, none of them good. He was yelling that Les had attacked Julie.
Molested
was the word he’d used, apparently, though I don’t even know where he got that idea. Jealousy, possessiveness, whatever you want to call it, it can make guys pretty stupid.

Les said he hadn’t done any such thing. That was good enough for Jason, because Les looked so genuinely surprised by the whole thing and had been in the shop for half an hour anyway. It wasn’t good enough for Pete, though. He took the first swing, which I guess is how he landed it. Then Les had just dismantled him. He hurt practically every part of him. “It was like watching someone take apart a drum kit,” Jason said.

Finally, Jason had been able to wade into all of the swinging limbs and pull Les off. Jason was a pretty tough kid himself, but what that really meant was that Les was ready to be pulled off.

By the time I got there, Pete was lying on his side on the floor, holding his hand up to his nose or his right eye or maybe both. Jason had Les in the opposite corner and was trying to calm him down.

“I know, man. I know,” he was saying.

Then they all looked over at me: Jason over his shoulder, Pete out of his one good eye, and Les straight at me. I think maybe Les thought I was there to fight him too, because he took a step out into the open floor and you could see his shoulders were tensed up.

“No,” I said, and put both my hands up. “No, no, no.”

Then I knelt down next to Pete. I was mad at him, but he was my friend and he looked horrible. I brought him some snow from outside the window, and as cold as it was in there, he still cupped it in his hands and put it right on his face. The blood seeped in immediately, and after a few seconds it looked like he was holding a cherry snow cone.

Pete had thrown his gloves off at some point, and it took me
forever to find the left one. It was darker in the room today. The snow was finally climbing the back wall, painted against the glass by the wind and layering on. There were a lot of shadows and dark corners, and Jason didn’t help me look for the glove because he didn’t want to leave Les alone. It seemed like even as messed up as Pete was, he might say something to Les, and Les would start kicking him again.

Eventually, I found the glove and we got Les out of there. Then we spent half an hour cleaning Pete up and getting him ready to head back upstairs. It didn’t seem like anything was broken, just very badly bruised and a little bloody here and there. The mood lightened once we knew everything still worked, so I spent thirty seconds or so explaining to Pete the mistake he’d just made. Ambiguity was no friend of his either.

“Less,” I said, “as in, You have less blood than you used to.”

“As in, I look less pretty,” he said, but it hurt him too much to laugh.

Things were bad after the fight. There was no option but to stay in the same room. With all of us in there, it could heat up by, like, ten degrees. Plus, that’s where the radio and the food were, and the fire was right across the hall. We broke up into three groups, like we had in the beginning. The girls were in the back; Jason, Pete, and I were in the middle; and Elijah and Les were in the front near the door, as close to their old, abandoned room as they could get without being in the hallway.

We felt trapped in every way: in the school, in the room, in between the rising snow and the buckling roof…. It just didn’t seem like we could last much longer like this.

Julie was quiet, except for her sneezes and coughs. Across the room, Pete was coughing and blowing his swollen nose now, too. In a weird way, it was almost like they were talking. But they weren’t talking, not at all. Julie thought Pete was a violent jerk, a typical boy, whatever. She’d told him as much once things had settled down a bit. And Pete was too beaten down to try to talk himself out of the doghouse.

Every now and then, one of those two would get up to get another wad of toilet paper. Someone had put a roll on the windowsill, and it was the closest thing we had to Kleenex. But they never went up at the same time. Julie walked with an annoyed chop to her steps. Maybe she was embarrassed
about getting lost and crying and being the cause of all this. Maybe she was embarrassed about the choice she’d made with Pete. Maybe she just thought we had enough problems without beating the crap out of each other, and she was right about that.

Whatever the case, she’d walk over to the sill in crisp, quick steps, tug some paper free, and wait till she was back in her seat to blow her nose. Pete would walk up there with a big limp on the right side and blow his nose on the way back. Les glared at him the whole way, a shiner forming around his left eye from the one clean punch Pete’d landed.

Jason and I weren’t too happy with Pete either, but he was in bad shape. He was beaten up and sick and humiliated and it really didn’t seem like we had any choice but to let it slide and sit with him. His stuff was right next to ours anyway.

We didn’t talk to him much, though. We’d support him because he was our friend, but we’d do it more or less silently. Really, Les was the one who had the reason to be mad. Pete just assumed he’d, what, assaulted Julie? And then Pete had just run with it and gone after him, swinging. I sort of felt bad for Les. I would’ve felt worse for him if he hadn’t completely demolished Pete.

We were all just sitting there, listening to the radio. None of us cared much about the batteries at the moment. Andy was back on and he started talking about rescue operations, about what the National Guard was planning if the storm stopped soon and what they were planning if it didn’t. Everyone sort of perked up.

“Turn it up,” said Krista, and I got up and did it.

But the announcement was over before I even got back to my chair. There really hadn’t been much to it: “Hardest hit areas first” … focus on “at-risk populations” like the elderly … “single-story residences a priority.”

We were trying to figure out what that meant for us and our families. Were teens an “at-risk population"? And that’s when Les told the room what Elijah had told him, what Elijah had told me. That no one knew we were here.

I don’t know why he did it. I think maybe he was just mad. Because Pete had just attacked him for no good reason, and now he was sitting with his friends in the center of the room. I’m sure it looked to Les like we were protecting Pete. I suppose we were, if it came to that.

Krista started crying and Jason got angry. He stood up fast and sent his chair skidding backwards across the floor. That was pretty much it, though. No one had the energy for another fight. Jason just said, “That’s bull, my dad’s not dead. He found some place to be.” Then he went and got his chair and sat back down.

All the familiar thoughts bounced through my head, the ones I’d been picking at privately, like a scab. My mom was home. Her office would’ve sent everyone home early, and it was only like a mile from the house. The car could make it that far. Even if it only made it most of the way, what would that leave, like, a quarter mile? That’s only once around the track. She could make that, so she was home. The house was a sturdy little block, and there was food there.

I’d run through these same calculations several times a day
since this had started. I’m pretty sure we all had, in some version or other. That was small picture, though. The big picture had shifted now. It sort of seemed more real now that everyone had heard.

All these days of waiting for someone to come and rescue us when maybe no one even knew we were here. Even after the storm stopped, how long would it take them to find us? We didn’t know what was wrong with the phones or how long it would take to fix, but reopening the schools wouldn’t exactly be priority number one. By the time they got to us, as likely as not, they’d be digging us out of the collapsed wreckage.

I didn’t say it, but I didn’t need to. Everyone was quiet, doing the math themselves.

Everyone was quiet, and I guess that’s why we could hear the low whine above us. It wasn’t a big rumble like before. It lasted maybe five seconds. It was a small, high-pitched whine, and it ended with a quick, sharp click. It sounded almost alive, though we knew it wasn’t. It was something above us, some beam or brace. It was the sound of something giving up.

The day crawled by, and as early as it got dark, it still seemed sort of overdue. Over the last few days, we’d begun gathering around in one big group to eat our meals. Without anyone saying anything about it, that ended now. We sat there in our little groups eating in deep gray silence.

“It’s slowing down,” said Elijah, returning from the window.

And it was. It had been all day. No one had said anything about it because A) it had done this before, only to come back as strong as ever a few hours later, and B) it seemed like even one more flake could do it. Some tiny fraction of an ounce would turn out to be one tiny fraction of an ounce too many and it would all come down on us. Or it could stop dead, and the air could warm up, and the melting would trigger a collapse.

By nine o’clock, it was pitch-dark, inside and out, and we had no idea what the snow was doing. The radio still sounded OK, but the light behind the dial was gone, so we shut it off.

Nine o’clock, with no light and nothing to do. It was like being a little kid and being sent to bed at seven. It sucked. We all climbed under our blankets, though. At least I assume we all did. The only sounds were coughs and sneezes and noses blown in the dark.

By now, Jason and Krista had joined the sick list. I didn’t think they’d be in the mood to pray, but I was wrong. I got out
from under my blanket and, a few feet away, Jason did too. I started up, quieter now, really just murmuring, and I heard Krista making her way up to us.

I prayed to Gabriel again. I figured God and Jesus were hearing from a lot of people at this time of night. But who else was praying to the less glamorous of the two archangels, the one with the trumpet instead of the sword?

If I could’ve I would’ve asked him to put down that trumpet and pick up a snow shovel to clear off the roof for us but to step light when he did it. I didn’t know a lot about angels, just what everyone knows plus what I’d learned the one year I went to Sunday school, but I knew they didn’t do yard work. I prayed for him to keep my mom safe instead, though if I’m being honest, I was sort of hoping he’d be impressed by my selflessness. Another thing about angels, though, I’m pretty sure they don’t fall for dumb tricks like that.

And then everyone was back under their blankets and there was nothing to do but wait for sleep. Is it better to die in your sleep? I stayed awake for hours and thought about that.

I don’t know what time I got to sleep, maybe a little after midnight, but I know it was very early in the morning when the noise woke me up. For the record: Waking up in your high school on a Saturday sucks. I heard a sharp scratching sound and my eyes popped open instantly. The light in the room was still dim. The roof is coming down, I thought. This is it!

But it wasn’t the roof. I got my bearings, adjusted a little, and I could tell that the sound wasn’t coming from above me. It was coming from, where, beside me? I looked over. There was nothing there, just Pete’s empty blanket and beyond that the door, slightly open. My brain worked slowly: The noise was coming from the hallway, and Pete wasn’t in the room…. Pete was out in the hallway, making the noise.

The sound was getting closer, louder, and other people were starting to stir under their blankets now. I could’ve waited for Pete to make it to the room, since I was pretty sure that’s where he was headed, but I climbed out from under my blanket and stood up. I was stiff and sore and could only imagine what Pete must’ve felt like: stiff and sore and bruised and clotted. But he was out there, dragging Lord knows what down the hallway.

On some level, I guess I did know what it was, because I
remember thinking that I’d better get to him before Jason woke up. I moved as quietly as I could, and once I was out in the hallway, I closed the door behind me. Pete had left it open and our pathetic store of breath and body heat was escaping into the hall.

He was about halfway between the top of the stairwell and the room. The light was still dim outside and much dimmer in the hallway. Even at this short distance, Pete was just a shape dragging another shape. He was bent over at the waist and tugging the low, flat thing across the floor. It was Jason’s snow-kart, of course.

As he got closer, I could see that his face was wet with sweat from the effort. The thing had no wheels now, just a tapered metal bottom like a large sled or a miniature boat. It moved like a stubborn animal, digging in and resisting every inch of the way. I’m sure it was leaving long scratches in the tile.

“I thought it would slide a little easier, you know?” he said when he got a little closer.

“Dude, man, what are you doing with it?” I said in a whisper.

“What do you think? I’m going to go for help, let them know we’re here.”

This raised a million questions. They flew up like sparks as my mind revved up, almost fully awake now. Where exactly do you plan to go? Is it gassed up? How do you know it even works? Who is “them"? But first things first: “It’s not even yours.”

“I helped build the stupid thing,” he said. He was whispering now too. It was amazing how much whispering we’d done since we’d been here. Seven kids with the school to ourselves and still we felt we had to whisper.

“A little,” I said. “Back when it was going to be a go-kart.”

“Whatever,” he said, but he stopped and stood up straight, as if he might be open to discussing the matter. While he waited, he wiped his forehead and face with the sleeve of his jacket. Nylon is not really an absorbent material, though, and he mostly just pushed the sweat across in long streaks.

I was selecting between the many counterarguments I could make when he got tired of waiting and said, “It’s the reason I’m stuck in this dump.”

“Maybe,” I said, shrugging a little and giving him that one. We’d all stayed after to work on the thing. “But Jason’s going to blow a fuse.”

“Jason’ll be fine.”

“Did you even ask him?” I said, though it was pretty obvious he hadn’t. Why else would he sneak down to get the thing at the break of dawn?

“Jason’ll be fine,” he repeated.

“I doubt it, that thing is, like —” I started, but Pete cut me off.

“Listen, man, I need to do this,” he said, his voice finally rising above a whisper.

I looked at him now, really looked at him. My eyes had adjusted to the dim light out here and he was just a few feet from me. His face was covered in bruises, with visible swelling and burst blood vessels just beneath the skin. And it was more
than just physical damage. You could see it in his expression: He was defeated, embarrassed.

It was bad enough to attack some guy for no reason, but it was worse to do it and lose so badly. It was bad enough to do it for a girl, but it was worse when she resented you for it. It was bad enough to ignore your friends for that girl for four days, but it was worse to go crawling back to them because you needed their protection.

“Yeah,” I said, “maybe you do. But I don’t know, man. Doesn’t seem safe.”

“Staying here doesn’t seem all that safe either,” he said. He was going to go on, but he had to stop to cough: three quick, hacking barks. When he did, his breath pushed out like tiny clouds in the dim light.

I’d gotten used to seeing everyone’s breath when they talked, but this was different. It looked dangerous, pestilent. I could literally see where the germs were. They were hanging suspended in the spreading mist of his breath, and I stepped back to avoid them.

He went on: “Listen, it’s letting up. They’ll be out soon, looking for people, and they don’t know we’re here.”

“We don’t know that,” I said.

“Makes sense to me.”

Yeah, I thought, to me too.

“So I go out,” he said, “find someone, anyone, maybe even a patrol, and let them know what’s up. About the seven of us here, and the roof and all that. This stuff has got to be eighteen feet deep by now, still blowing and drifting like crazy. It’s not like
we can just march out into it once it stops. And when it starts to melt, it will shift, get denser. The water will find its way in, and then the whole thing’ll come down.”

He’d thought it through, I had to give him that.

“So what are you going to …” I said, finishing the sentence by gesturing toward the snow-kart.

“Gonna launch it out the window. It’s only a few feet down to the snow now.”

“You are one crazy dude,” I said finally. My mind was flying now, considering the plan from different angles, and that was the only thing I could think to say.

“I need to do this, man,” he repeated.

And he did. He needed to do something right. “Yeah,” I said, “OK.”

“Well, pick up the other end,” he said. “This thing makes a racket on the floor.”

I swung around and picked up the back end, because it got me away from the germ clouds of his coughing.