Hungry (19 page)

“What’s wrong?” Basil asks, but he follows my finger pointing up and sees our faces looming large above everything with the words:
MISSING PERSON ALERT.
Thalia Apple. Age 17. My photo is a portrait my dad took a few months ago on a family trip. Basil’s is a blurry image probably caught on tape at the Analog meeting.

I spin around. To our left a small group of men and women in matching burgundy shirts march toward us, talking into their Gizmos. I spin the other way. Behind us, more adults in matching shirts walk quickly through the parking lot, heading straight toward us. “Oh god,” I say. “This is bad.” I grab Basil’s hand and pull to the right.

“No!” He motions toward a cadre coming from that direction, too. “Security agents.”

“What now?”

“Get lost in the crowd!” he shouts and pulls me through the front doors.

As we pass Yaz, I grab her arm. “What the…?” she shouts, but when she sees my face on every screen, she shouts “Holy crapoly!” and follows us into the crush of humanity.

Yaz trips along beside me as we thread our way through the bodies moving en masse in the main hall. Smell blasters assault us with the fragrance of meadows, oceans, and the acrid smoke of simulated war. Anything and everything to stimulate the senses and entice people inside the game rooms to frolick, or surf, or fight in the virtual worlds created solely for our pleasure.

“You better start talking fast, Thalia Apple,” Yaz says, her grip tight on my forearm. “Who is that guy and why are we running from those people?”

“That’s Basil,” I say pointing ahead of us. “And those are security agents.” I look over my shoulder at a burly bald-headed guy leading the guards. “Basil and I went to a corporate resistance meeting that got raided. My mom went ballistic and committed me to rehab, but Basil busted me out.”

“Dang!” Yaz says. “I thought you were home text chatting with Dynasaurs.”

“Not this time!” I look back at the blockhead gaining on us. We skirt around a gaggle of tween girls who’ve stopped to ogle themselves with virtual celebrities on a giant Smarty Party Fun Pants screen. “If we don’t get out of here, we’ll be in deep trouble.” My words are lost under the high-pitched shrieks of the tweenies in a frenzy over the appearance of the Jiminy Jim Jam Twins. The girls jostle and push to get on camera and see themselves onstage, bopping along with the computer-generated twosome tricked out with green hair, yellow eyes, and nearly alabaster skin covered with bright swirling tattoos under their fake-fur bikinis.

“Please help me, Yaz,” I beg as we continue to snake our way toward Basil.

Every personality test Yaz has ever taken revealed loyalty as her strongest characteristic. Of course, One World likes this because she’ll stay true to a brand she loves, but since Yaz’s second strongest trait is empathy, it also means she’ll do anything for the people she loves. And so Yaz, my friend since we were tiny, takes my hand. While the big guy is tangled in the girl frenzy, she yells, “Grab Basil!”

I catch Basil’s wrist as Yaz yanks us hard to the left.

“What are you doing?” Basil yells. “We have to get lost in the crowd!”

“Trust her!” I say as she pulls us through the entrance of Hedgy’s World.

We round a corner and are suddenly inside the gargantuan animated world of the dancing pink hedgehog. I feel like a tiny mouse inside the pages of a children’s novel as we dash behind a giant red-and-white polka-dotted mushroom to hide. All around us flowers soar, green grass glimmers, and the air smells fresh and clean. Within seconds, the bald-headed goon bursts through the entrance. He is red-faced and panting, staring down at his Gizmo screen.

“They must be following your Gizmo signal,” I whisper at Yaz. I snatch her Gizmo and command the locator off, making us virtually invisible crouching behind the mushroom.

“Huh?” says the bald guy as three more agents run through the entrance. “Where’d they go? They disappeared off my screen right there!” He jabs at his screen

“Go! Go! Go!” Basil yells, pushing us from behind.

The agents look up just as we scurry beneath the lush leaves and twisting brown vines of the hedgerow. We tear through the thicket, ducking branches, skirting bugs and other critters ambling along the path. Yaz scrambles over a rock the size of my Smaurto, and we pop through a hole onto the main path, where a group of kids our age chase after a giant automaton mouse. But the bald guy has a bead on us. He pushes past everything in his path, determination on his face.

“Blackberries!” Basil yells and shoves me hard to the right. I grab for Yaz and pull her with me. We stumble off the path into a tangle of thorny stems hanging heavy with globular purple fruit. My shirt snags on one of the pointy spines, spinning me around. Basil unleashes me and we keep running. I remember my grandmother telling me something about blackberries. How she’d pick them warm off the vine and pop them juicy in her mouth. My stomach rumbles, and I feel an almost visceral urge to stop and gorge myself on those berries. Then Basil stops and grabs a stem as thick around as my upper arm.

“What are you doing?” I scream, thinking he’s lost his mind with hunger. “It’s not real! You can’t eat it!”

“Keep going!” Basil shouts as he runs, still holding the barbed branch which bends so far I think it will break. Over my shoulder, I see the bald guy crash through the sticks and sprint toward us, then Basil lets go of the stem. It whips forward. The man raises his arms to protect his face as the giant thorns careen toward him. The branch catches him across the chest and sends him reeling backward as we slip on through the brambles.

“Over here,” Yaz shouts. We round the corner and race beneath a huge hologram rose-covered trellis into Hedgy’s Fun Time Dance Party, where a long line of kids snakes through the arena. “Get onstage!” Yaz yells.

“They’ll see us!” Basil hisses.

“It’s the only way out.” She points to four burgundy shirted guards positioned near the exits, scanning the crowd. “We have to go now!” We sprint toward the steps, plowing past the people waiting patiently for their turns.

Basil follows us onto the stage, where a throbbing beat and synthesizer riff has started. The Hedgy hologram, decked out like a Klub Kid in a padded iridescent jumpsuit with little wings across the back, descends from the ceiling to a platform front and center. “Are you ready to dance?” Hedgy shouts in her booming squeaky voice. All the contestants scramble to bright pulsating flowers on the stage floor as music fills the room. The guards storm up the steps, two on each side. The bald brute hurdles himself over the front end, taking out a couple of little kids as he rolls then scrambles to his feet again. He’s tattered and scratched from the brambles, his face nearly as purple as the berries, he’s so enraged. Then Hedgy begins to dance.

All around us arms and legs fly as contestants bust their moves, following Hedgy’s complicated choreography. I see a guard’s head snap back as a girl does a roundhouse kick into a lunge. One of the women trips and gets tangled with a dancer. When we hit the back corner of the stage with no place else to go, Yaz screams, “Get on a flower!” She pushes a kid off a purple spot on the floor and pulls me next to her. “Dance!” she shouts in my ear.

“What? Why?” I scream back, but as soon as I flail my arms and legs, the floor beneath my feet opens and I plunge through a gaping hole, screaming, “Basil!” as I slide away.

I scream his name over and over, clawing at the stainless steel chute, trying to stop myself from sliding down three stories into the underbelly of the arena, but the surface is too slick and I’m moving too fast, my legs entangled with Yaz as we hurtle down, down, down. I look up, hoping I’ll see Basil cascading above us, but the chute is empty except for the echoes of my voice.

Yaz and I land in a heap on a giant pillowy surface, our bodies twisted together like the vines of the hedgerow up above. I thrash around the soft folds of the mat, still trying to find a way back up the chute to Basil. All around us, bodies thwump on landing mats, as kids scramble up, laughing, calling to one another, “Let’s go again!” They run for the glass elevators that will whisk them back upstairs.

“Come on,” Yaz says, pulling me free from the deep pocket of the mat. “We have to get out of here.”

I resist, digging my feet into the ground. “We have to find Basil. We have to go back up.”

“It’s too late,” she says. “The slides under the flowers go all over the place. He could be anywhere.”

“No!” I whimper. I feel like I’m caught in one of my dreams where I’ve finally found that elusive thing that will fill the hole in my gut, but it’s fallen through me, and once again I’m hollow inside.

“Come,” Yaz says gently, but she tugs firmly on my arm. “We have to go.”

Just as we turn to leave, there is a loud thwump beside us. Basil. I run to him, sinking into the embrace of the landing pad. “I thought I lost you!” I scan his face, making sure it’s really him. “I thought I’d never see you again!”

Yaz grabs my ankle. “Let him up,” she commands. “We have to get out of here.”

Another thwump. This time a burgundy shirt hits the mat beside us. The bald man thrashes and Basil shoves me onto the floor. Then he scoops his hands beneath our mat and yells, “Push!” I shove as hard as I can. We lift the edge of the mat and throw it onto the guard, whose arms and legs wriggle from between the puffy layers.

“Come on!” Yaz runs away from the elevators and pushes us through a silver door. As it slams behind us, lights sweep down a ramp ahead, and I realize that we’re deep inside the bowels of the parking garage.

“Now what?” I shout.

“Run!” Yaz yells as she skitters between sleeping Smaurtos.

Behind me, faint footsteps echo toward the door. I turn and leap in front of the Smaurto coming down the ramp and wave my arms at its anticollision sensor. The car turns sharply and rams sideways into the door, jamming it shut. The car’s airbags deploy while the security goons yell from the other side.

As I’m running away, I hear a human voice come over the speakers inside the car. “Is anyone injured?”

The automated Smaurto voice answers, “No persons are on board.”

The human voice commands, “Power off,” and the Smaurto complies.

In the distance we hear the low whine of a siren as we run willy-nilly through the lot.

“Hide!” I whisper hoarsely and duck behind a line of parked Smaurtos. We press ourselves between the cold concrete wall and the rubber of the tires.

“They know we’re here,” Basil whispers.

A red light flashes across the walls and we all duck, but I get a glimpse of the vehicle reflected in the side mirror of a blue car in front of me. “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s just an auto-tow. There’s no one in it.”

“We have to keep moving!” Basil insists.

“I’ll call my Smuarto.” Yaz reaches for her Gizmo.

“No!” Basil and I both bark at her.

“Jeez,” she says. “I’m only trying to help.”

“See?” says Basil. “We can’t trust her.”

“Hey,” says Yaz. “Who just got you out of there?”

“Shut up, both of you,” I snap. Basil and Yaz glare at one another. “Let me think.” I stare down at Yaz’s Gizmo. “We can use this to our advantage.”

“How?” they ask at the same time.

“We’ll send Yaz’s Smaurto to a different exit,” I explain as I access her Smaurto and tell it to head for the south side of the parking garage.

“Like the decoys in Revenge of the Trojans: Horses from Hades,” Yaz says.

“Something like that,” I say. “Hopefully security will think we’re inside of it.”

From the distance, we hear the slow whining siren again. We all crouch down as traces of a red light flash across the walls of the garage. Then we see the automated tow truck slowly round the corner dragging the smashed-up Smaurto I sent into the door.

“That’s our way out,” says Basil. He runs hunched over between the wall and the cars toward the auto-tow. Yaz and I hesitate, but when he swings open the passenger-side door of the Smaurto, I grab Yaz’s hand and pull her after him. We all three scramble inside and cover ourselves with the deflated airbags.

When we get to the top of the parking garage, the tow truck stops and the door swings open. We gasp. A man in blue coveralls jumps back and shouts, “What the…!”

Not missing a beat, Yaz climbs out of the car, huffing. “Are you with car recovery services?” she demands of the startled man, then she motions for us to follow her. Basil and I climb out slowly, not sure what to do.

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “But my report said there was no one on board. Who are you?”

“Didn’t you hear us calling you?” she asks, hands on hips as if she’s super annoyed. “We’ve been stuck down there for five minutes!”

“Sorry about that, miss … uh … uh … Sauconiss,” the man mutters as he looks over the info on his Gizmo. “But the system said…”

She grabs his Gizmo from him. “That’s not even me!” she shouts, poking her finger at the photo of a different girl on the screen. “You better tell your supervisor to get that system checked! What are we paying you for? We could have been stuck down there for hours!”

“I don’t understand this,” the man says. “I apologize. I’ll call you a medical transport.”

“No!” we all three say at the same time.

Just then, a commotion begins as burgundy shirts converge on a Yaz’s green Smaurto leaving the parking garage a few exits over.

“What’s going on over there?” the man says.

Yaz flinches when she sees the bald guard disable her car’s door and dive in.

“We better go find your mom,” I say to Yaz. “She’ll be worried sick.” I turn to the man. “Thank you for your help.”

“Sure thing,” he mumbles as he continues to watch swarms of guards tear apart Yaz’s Smaurto looking for us, while Basil, Yaz, and I slip away in the opposite direction.

*   *   *

“My poor baby!” Yaz moans after we hide in the dimly lit edge of the parking garage. We press ourselves against the side of the concrete structure so no external cameras will be able to see us. “How am I going to get around?”

“I’m so sorry,” I tell her. “I promise when this is over I’ll make sure you get a new Smaurto. You can have mine. I swear.”