The Darkest Minds (33 page)

Everyone will know.

And no one would be willing to have me after that.

“Turn around,” the woman barked. Her eyes flickered over to where her partner was still hidden behind a tangle of picnic tables. I saw her grip relax ever so slightly on her handgun with her focus torn, and I took my chance.

My knee flew up, nailing her just under her chest. The gun clattered to the ground, and I heard Liam take two running steps in my direction, but somehow I was faster. Blood was alive and warm on my face, dripping from my chin. The woman’s eyes widened as my hand closed over her exposed throat, slamming her back against Betty’s door. When her gaze met mine, I knew I had her. The pain that exploded behind my eyes told me so.

Slipping into her head was as easy as releasing a sigh. Seeing her pupils shrink and explode back out to their normal size, it felt as though someone had wrapped a line of barbed wire around my brain and was tightening it with every passing second.

Chubs’s face appeared at the corner of my vision, eyes wide. When he tried to stand, I knocked him back down with my foot. No. It wasn’t safe. Not yet.

The woman looked around, her eyes wide and unfocused. That’s when the pounding began in my ears.
Da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, da-duh…
I couldn’t tell if it was my heart or hers.

“Hand him your gun,” I said, tilting my head toward the place I knew Liam was standing. When she didn’t move, I pushed the image of her doing it through the bubbling black shapes of her mind. I couldn’t bring myself to look at his reaction as the black weapon was placed in his outstretched hand.

“Listen to me very carefully,” I said. The blood was bitter in my mouth. “You are going to turn and walk back across the highway. You are…going to walk into that forest and keep walking until an hour passes…and you are going to sit down in the middle of it and not move. You’re not going to eat…or sleep…or drink, no matter how much you want to. You’re not going to move.”

Imagining that into her mind, pushing the thought of her doing exactly that, was becoming more difficult. Not because my grip on her was slipping, but because my grip on consciousness was.

You can do this, I told myself. It didn’t matter that no one had ever taught me, or that I had never practiced. In the end, it was all instinct. Like I had known all along.

I closed my eyes and went to work sorting through the darkened memories bubbling up behind her eyes. I found myself driving down the highway, one hand on the wheel, the other pointing to the rest stop up ahead. I parked the car a ways back, half hidden by the trees, and began to walk toward the lone black van in the parking lot. I stayed with this memory, taking in the scent of rain and grass, feeling the light breeze, until her partner reached the van, his rifle up and ready to fire.

I forced the memory out of her mind, imagining nothing but air where Black Betty had been in the parking lot. I traced the line of memories back to the boys at Walmart, to the secret they had revealed about East River. The images slipped away in smears of light, like raindrops racing down a car window.

“Now, you’re…you won’t remember any of this, or any of us.”

“I won’t remember any of this.…” she parroted, as though the thought had just occurred to her.

I let go of her neck, but my pain didn’t go away. Her eyes regained some of their focus. The pain didn’t go away. She turned sharply on her heel and started to make her way toward the deserted highway.

The pain didn’t go away.

No, it got worse. A trickle of sweat began at my temple and worked its way down the length of my spine. I was drenched. My hair clung to my face. My shirt was a second skin. I dropped into a crouch. If I was going to faint, it was better to stay close to the ground.

God, I don’t want to faint. Don’t faint. Do. Not. Faint
.…

I heard Liam say something. His foot came into my line of sight, and I leaned away.

“Don’t—” I began.
Don’t touch me. Not right now.

And it was strange, because the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes wasn’t the old asphalt, it wasn’t the sky, or even my reflection in Betty’s panels. It was a glimmering memory of my own. Of a few days before, when Liam had been in the driver’s seat, singing along to Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” at the top of his lungs, so off-key that it had even Chubs laughing. Zu had been sitting right behind him, moving in time with the music, her entire body rocking out to the wailing electric guitar. And it had been so easy then, to laugh and pretend, even if just for a second, that we would be okay. That I belonged with them.

Because they hadn’t known—none of them had known, and now that they did, it was over. It was all over now, and I would never have that back.

I wished that I had gone for the panic button. I wished that Cate could come and take me away from them, back to the only people who would ever embrace me for the monster I was.

NINETEEN

W
HEN
I
WAS ABOUT TO TURN
ten years old, the most significant thing about that number was that it was double-digits. It didn’t really feel much like a birthday, anyway. At dinner, I sat bookended by my parents at the table, moving peas around my plate, trying to ignore the fact that neither of them were speaking—to each other, or to me. Mom’s eyes were rimmed with red and glassy because of the argument they’d had a half hour before; she was still valiantly trying to gather up kids for a surprise birthday party for me, but Dad forced her to call and cancel. Said it wasn’t the kind of year to be celebrating, and, as the last kid alive on my block, it would be cruel of us to hang the birthday banner and tie up the usual cluster of balloons outside. I heard the whole thing from the top of the stairs.

I didn’t really care about the birthday either way. It wasn’t like I had anyone left I really wanted to invite. What was more important to me was the fact that, at ten, I was suddenly
old
—or rather, would be old
soon
. I’d start to look like the girls in the magazines, be forced to wear dresses and high heels and makeup—go to
high school
.

“In ten years from tomorrow, I’ll be twenty.” I don’t know why I said it out loud. It was just this profound realization, and it had to be shared.

The silence that followed was actually painful. Mom sat straight up and pressed her napkin to her mouth. For a moment I thought she might stand up and leave, but Dad’s hand came down to rest on top of hers, settling her like an anchor.

Dad finished chewing on his barbecued chicken before giving me a smile that quivered at the edges. He leaned down a ways so our identical green eyes met. “That’s right, Little Bee. And how old will you be ten years after that?”

“Thirty,” I said. “And you’ll be…fifty-two!”

He chuckled. “That’s right! Halfway to the—”

Grave
, my mind whispered.
Halfway to the grave.
Dad realized his mistake before the word fully left his mouth, but it didn’t matter. All three of us knew what he meant.

Grave.

I knew what death was. I knew what happened after you died. At school, they brought in special visitors to talk to the kids that came back. The one assigned to our room, Miss Finch, gave her presentation two weeks before Christmas, wearing a bright pink turtleneck and glasses that covered half of her face. She wrote everything out on the whiteboard, in thick, capital letters.
DEATH IS NOT SLEEPING. IT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE. IT COULD HAPPEN AT ANY TIME. YOU DO NOT COME BACK
.

When people die, she explained, they stop breathing. They do not have to eat, they no longer speak, and they cannot think or miss us like we miss them. They do not, ever,
ever
wake up. She kept giving us more examples, like we were too stupid or little to understand—like the six of us left hadn’t sat there and watched Grace’s lights go out. Dead cats cannot purr, and dead dogs cannot play. Dead flowers—Miss Finch pointed to the bundle of dried flowers on my teacher’s desk—do not grow or bloom anymore. Hours of this. Hours of being asked,
Do you understand?
But for all of her answers, she never got around to the one question I had wanted to ask.

“What does it feel like?”

Dad looked up sharply. “What does what feel like?”

I looked down at my plate. “To die. Do you feel it? I know that it’s not the same for everyone, and that you stop breathing and your heart stops beating, but what does that feel like?”

“Ruby!” I could hear the horror in Mom’s voice.

“It’s okay if it hurts,” I said, “but are you still in your body after things stop working? Do you know that you’ve died?”

“Ruby!”

Dad’s bushy eyebrows drew together as his shoulders slumped. “Well…”

“Don’t you dare,” Mom said, using her free hand to try to pry his big one off her other trembling fingers. “Jacob, don’t you
dare
—”

I kept my hands clenched together under the table, trying not to stare at Mom’s face as it paled from a deep red to a stark white.

“No one…” Dad began. “No one knows, sweetheart. I can’t give you an answer. Everyone finds out when it’s their time. I guess it probably depends—”

“Stop it!”
Mom said, slapping her other hand down on the table. Our plates jumped in time with her palm. “Ruby, go to your room!”

“Calm down,” Dad told her in a stern voice. “This is important to talk about.”

“It is not! It absolutely is not! How dare you? First you cancel the party, and when I told you—” She strained against his grip. I watched, my lips parting, as she picked up her water glass and threw it at his head. In ducking, he lifted his hand from the table, just enough for her to wrench away and stand. Her chair clattered to the ground a second after the glass shattered against the wall behind Dad’s head.

I screamed—I didn’t mean to, but it slipped out. Mom came around to my side of the table and grabbed me by the elbow, hauling me up, nearly taking the tablecloth with me.

“Cut it out,” I heard Dad say. “
Stop!
We have to talk to her about it! The doctors said we needed to prepare her!”

“You’re hurting me,” I managed to choke out. Mom startled at the sound of my voice, looking down at where her nails were digging into the soft skin of my upper arm.

“Oh my God…” she said, but I was already in the hallway, flying up the stairs, slamming my bedroom door shut and locking it behind me, closing out the sound of my parents screaming at each other.

I dove under my heavy purple bedcovers, knocking the row of carefully arranged stuffed animals to the ground. I didn’t bother to change out of the clothes I had worn to school, or turn off the lights, not until I was sure my parents were still in the kitchen, and far away from me.

An hour later, breathing the same hot air under the comforter in and out, listening to the rattle of the air vent, I thought about the other significant thing about turning ten.

Grace had been ten. So had Frankie, and Peter, and Mario, and Ramona. So had half of my class, the half that never came back after Christmas.
Ten is the most common age for IAAN to manifest
, I had overheard a newscaster saying,
but the affliction can claim anyone between the ages of eight and fourteen.

I straightened my legs out and pressed my arms in at my sides. I held my breath and shut my eyes, staying as still as possible.
Dead
. Miss Finch had described it like a series of stops and nots. Stopped breathing. Not moving. Stopped heart. Not sleeping. It didn’t seem like it should have been that simple.

“When a loved one dies, they don’t get to wake up,” she had said. “There are no comebacks or do-overs. You may wish they could come back, but it’s important that you understand they can’t, and they won’t.”

Tears slipped down the side of my face, dripping into my ears and hair. I turned to the side, smashing a pillow over my face, trying to block out the screaming match downstairs. Were they coming up to my room to yell at me? Once or twice I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, but then Dad’s voice would float up to me, booming and terrible, yelling words I didn’t like or understand. Mom sounded like she was being gutted.

I drew my legs up to my chest and pressed my face against my knees. For every two breaths I was taking in, I was lucky to get one out. Inside my chest, my heart had been racing for what felt like hours, jumping with every shatter or thud from downstairs. I stuck my head over the covers just once, to make sure that I had locked the door. That would make them even angrier if they tried it, but I didn’t care.

My head felt light and heavy all at once, but worst of all was the pounding. The
dum-dum-dum
at the back of my head, like something was inside of me knocking against my skull, trying to break out.

“Stop it,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut against the pain. My hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t keep them over my ears. “Please, please
stop
!”

Hours later, when my feet carried me downstairs, I found them in their dark bedroom, deep into sleep. I stood in the sliver of light coming through their open doorway, waiting to see if they would wake up. I had half a mind to climb into bed between them like I used to do, into that small space between them that I knew was warm and safe. But Dad had told me I was too big to be doing such silly things.