Untaken (22 page)

“Come on, buddy, we talked about this,” I told him. “You promised you’d step up and be brave so’s we can get supplies.”

“You don’t have to come all the way in yet,” said Gracie. “Just sit here by the door. You can be lookout.”

Jake stepped gingerly through the shattered door panel and squatted on the floor, right by the door, where any hostile force could see him clear as day. His head was hanging low, the lucky quarter turning over and over in his dirty little fingers. I guessed it was a start.

“Stay right there,” I ordered. “If you see anything, come get us, but be quiet.”

As if the kid was ever anything
but
quiet.

The lobby of the restaurant was dim, but the big windows let in enough light to see by. Frolicking clown decals made dark silhouettes on the glass. The chairs were still stacked neatly on the tables. A mop rested in a bucket, long dried up. The registers were closed and shrouded in plastic covers. No sign of anyone being here since the shit hit the fan, which was A-okay with me.

The back room was darker than a tomb, and Gracie had to flick the lighter before we could go in.

The grills yawned open like mouths, and the scent of spoiled meat hung in the air. The little hopper freezers in the kitchen dripped greasy water onto the cheerful yellow and red tiled floor. The big walk-in freezer was locked shut and most likely anything edible had gone over long ago with the power outage. Nothing useful here unless we fancied eating ketchup for the rest of our lives, but no Drones either.

It would be a safe place to spend the night, so long as we were careful. We couldn’t camp out in the lobby where we’d be easily visible to anyone who cared to look in through the big floor-to-ceiling windows, and there was no way I was spending the night in that creepy—not to mention stinky—kitchen, so we dumped our shit in the narrow strip of floor behind the counter.

The floor was kind of gross back here where the customers couldn’t see. I had to sweep withered French fries and greasy dust bunnies aside so we’d have a clean spot to lay out our sleeping rolls.

A portrait of employee of the month, “Dean Blanco” stared down reproachfully from the wall.

“Don’t look at me like that, Dean, old buddy,” I muttered “You need to keep things cleaner in here if you want to make manager.”

Jake didn’t want to come any further into the restaurant at first, but Gracie found a carton of Happy Burger toys in a corner. Jake didn’t give a crap about toys, but one of the figures was a robot in shiny silver plastic, and when we set up a silvery kick-line of robots on top of the counter, Jake couldn’t resist coming over to rearrange them into a better pattern, adding bullet casings and dimes, ring pulls off soda cans, and other junk, until he’d created a strange grid of boxes and circles that wound around the three cash registers from one end of the counter to the other. I was pleased to see that he kept the lucky quarter tucked away in his pocket. He’d check it was still there every now and then, but he didn’t add it to the rest of the junk on the counter.

The kid looked up to me, maybe. I wasn’t doing such a bad job.

Jake

he sun went down and a fat silver moon came up. Brandon fell asleep first, Gracie an hour or so later. Their sleep wasn’t easy and both of them tossed and turned on the hard floor.

Jake watched and waited.

Gracie had tried to talk to him about the Shinys she called “Robots.” Jake had wanted to answer her, but the sounds got tangled somewhere between his tongue and his lips. If he did it wrong, the talking, then what would they think? Would they still take him with them? Until Jake knew he could do it right, it was better to be silent. To watch.

The lobby was lit up blue with moonlight. The Shinys on the counter gleamed like a galaxy.

When he was sure the Big Kids were sound asleep, Jake gathered up the Shinys and crept out through the broken door panel, stooping low to avoid the wicked little splinters of glass that clung to the door frame like crooked teeth in a gaping mouth. The landscaping around the Happy Burger consisted of a few thin hedges, too dry and stunted to have grown wild in the months they’d been left untended.

The tan bark around the bushes was easy to dig through, but the soil beneath was hard and grudging, and snarled through with roots. Jake’s fingers were ragged and throbbing by the time the hole was large enough.

The robots were the nicest Shinys, so they went in the hole first, then the bullet shells, the twists of foil, the coins, the ring pulls, and a handful of push pins. Soon, the Massachusetts quarter was all that was left.

Jake put it in the hole, then took it out again.

He rubbed the metal with his thumb. There was a picture of a man with a gun on the quarter. Sometimes bad guys had guns, but the Big Kids weren’t bad guys. They wouldn’t have given him a bad guy Shiny. The quarter made Jake think of something but he didn’t know what, the same way he didn’t know why he needed to see the sky, why he needed to make the patterns of the shapes he saw when he closed his eyes, or why he needed to hide the Shinys afterwards.

Something to remember.

Something to keep secret.

Jake didn’t know what it was yet, but perhaps it would come back to him in time. Lately, he’d begun to sense that it wasn’t the Shinys themselves he needed to hide, but the patterns. Until he remembered all the way, though, it was safest to keep doing what felt right.

Jake pushed dirt over the Shinys until the hole was filled, then raked bark over the dirt. When he was done patting it down, the patch where the secret was buried looked no different to the flat bark around it.

The only sound was the song of what Brandon called “Crickets singing.” Jake didn’t know who Crickets was, or why he sang all night, but since Crickets never came closer, Jake didn’t think he had to fear him. Jake cocked his head to one side at a new sound, coming from the bushes beside the big building Brandon and Gracie said was called the “mall.”

A whispery, metallic sound.

There was something moving over there. A shape, both strange and familiar; a squat, bobbing body with a cluster of black arms trailing beneath. Jake watched it, and it watched him, then it turned and drifted away into the night.

Jake fell asleep under one of the stunted hedges, the quarter closed in his muddy fist.

Gracie

he first thing I did when I woke up was look for Jake, whose sleeping bag was empty as usual. Luckily, Brandon was still snoring away, so this morning, at least, there would be time to find the crazy kid before Brandon woke up and got mad.

Brandon was kind of right—Jake shouldn’t just go on sleeping outdoors like he did.

Even though it was only September, it was already pretty cold at night. One morning we were going to wake up and find a Jake-flavored Popsicle outside.

It took a while to spot him, but eventually, I caught sight of a small, sneaker-clad foot poking out from under a bush near the drive-thru lane. I gave the foot a yank, and Jake was awake all at once, making the whistling voice in the back of his throat which is the closest he gets to a yell.

“It’s okay, Jake, I didn’t mean to scare you.” I held out a hand, and eventually, he took it, clambering awkwardly to his feet. His fingers were cold, so I rubbed them between mine, the way Mom used to when I came in from playing in the snow. I’d always pull my hand away after a while, remembering I was too grown-up for Mom to baby me, but Jake just watched me, his hand limp in my grip, like a doll’s or a corpse’s. There was dirt under his fingernails—burying treasure again—so it was kind of a surprise when he pulled the quarter from his pocket as I led him back inside the Happy Burger. He’d never held on to a Shiny like that before.

We made a hasty breakfast of tinned fruit and chipped beef. It was a weird thing to have for breakfast, but we were down to our last few tins, and the only other choice was soup, which none of us liked drinking cold, especially the chicken noodle which had the flavor and consistency of a big can of cold boogers.

Once we got to Brandon’s uncle’s cabin, we’d be able to cook without worrying about anyone seeing the smoke, and the thought of a hot breakfast cheered me up.

“Dawn raid,” said Brandon. His eyes flicked to the quarter in Jake’s hand and his hand shot up to his face. He pretended like he was rubbing his mouth, but I was pretty sure he was hiding a smile. “We’ll be back on the road by noon.”