Untaken (18 page)

Gracie looked at me, then down at the ground.

“What?”

“Was he acting kind of sick? Like, out of it and stuff?”

I thought of the way Dad went crazy every time the ships went over, how he seemed not really to be himself when that happened.

“He got a flu or something, that’s what they thought. That’s why they sent him to the sick bay. Just flu.”

“Flu. Right. That’s what they said about Stephie.”

Mona stirred at the sound of her daughter’s name. “They took her!”

“I’m done listening to this,” I told Gracie. “I’m going to talk to Lou and get some straight answers.”

I got up off the bed and stalked over to the double doors. Heads swiveled in my direction.
Screw them
. Let them all enjoy the show.

I hammered on the doors. “Lou? Hey, Lou, it’s Brandon. Hey, Lou? You there?”

“We tried that,” said the bossy woman, Mrs. Ostrinsky. “They’re not going to let you out.”

“I don’t want letting out, I just want to know where my Dad is.”

“They’ll have to feed us sooner or later,” said the woman who’d been reading the story to the kids. “They will, right?” she added, hopefully, but no one answered her.

I hammered on the door some more. Didn’t even budge. After a while, the people who watched me lay back down again. I went on knocking until my knuckles were red and sore, but no one came.

“Get some sleep, kid,” said Mrs. Ostrinsky. “They’re not gonna leave us here forever.”

I didn’t want it to seem like I was giving up, but it was pointless banging on the doors all night. The cops were probably all sleeping by now anyway. I lay down on my bed and tried to sleep, but my mind was still too jumbled.

I wished that Dad was with me. There was no way Dad would have put up with being locked in like this. Only the girl, Gracie, was still awake. She kind of smiled at me when I looked over, but I ignored her and pulled my blankets up over my head.

I didn’t need her pity.

Brandon

opened my eyes to almost complete darkness. Someone shook my shoulder, and a flashlight beam flickered across my face, making me blink.

“Dad?”

“Brandon, it’s Lou.”

“Ha! She said you’d gone, but I knew you hadn’t. Is it Dad? Is he okay?”

“Keep it down. It’s not about him. Listen, you got to be quiet now. We need to get you all out of here, and we need to be real quiet.”

I glanced around the warehouse, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness. The other cops—Gracie had said their names were Jean and Frank—gently shook people awake, one by one.

One of the kids started to cry and was hushed by about ten different people all at once.

“What are you talking about?” I asked Lou “Where’s Dad? I’m not going anywhere without Dad.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

I grabbed Lou by the front of his shirt.

“No, simmer down, son. There isn’t time. They’re shutting this place down.”

“So they’re going to chuck us out? Big deal. We’ll find someplace else to go.”

“It’s not that simple. Seems that the Military are taking over, and that’s got Treen acting real crazy. He’s been…well, he hasn’t been playing by the rules here. Things could get ugly. That woman, Mona? She’s been blabbing, ain’t she? They thought if they kept her sedated, it would be okay. But the Military Brass are going to ask questions, and now Frank says that Treen’s got it in his head that you all are gonna spill the beans.”

“Wait, who’s Treen?” I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying.

“The suit guy with the glasses, right?” whispered Gracie, appearing at Lou’s shoulder. Trust her to butt in on a private conversation.

“That’s him.” Lou nodded.

“We got to get Dad,” I said. “I don’t know what the hell you folks are talking about, but I’m not going anywhere without my dad.”

“I’ll go back in for Carl, Scout’s honor, Brandon, but we got to get you folks out first, while Treen and his buddies are still tucked away in the labs.”

“No offense, Lou, but I want to get him myself. I’m not letting him down again.”

“Brandon, you won’t be able to help him if they—”

“If they what?” Gracie interrupted. “What are they gonna do to us? What about Mona? I don’t know if she can walk.” Her voice came out as a high-pitched squeak.

Scared little bunny.

“Look, kids, there isn’t time for this. Either you go now or you take your chances here. We’re taking the buses and splitting. I’m real sorry, Brandon, I didn’t know what the situation was here. You’ve got to believe me.”

People gathered over by the warehouse loading bay, yawning and rubbing their eyes. The little boy started to cry again, and the lady holding him rocked and shushed him until he simmered down to a soft whine.

I felt like crying too. We were supposed to be safe here. What in the hell was happening?

“You coming?” asked Gracie. She’d fetched a backpack from under her bed, and stuffed extra blankets from the abandoned cots into it.

“My dad is back there. I can’t go until I find him.”

“That cop said they’d go back in for him. You don’t even know where they’re keeping him.”

The woman cop, Jean, unlocked the loading bay doors. Lou was with Mona, trying to haul her to her feet. Other than them, me and Gracie were the only ones not lined up by the doors. Gracie kept looking over there, eager to join them, like a good little girl scout. I didn’t know why she felt she had to stay and bug me. I guessed some people were just born to interfere.

“I can’t,” I told her. “Seriously. If
you
want to go, go.”

“You’re not going to find him locked up in here,” she said. “At least, let’s get out of the warehouse.”

The cops slid the loading bay doors up slowly so they wouldn’t rattle too much.

The crowd started to file forward, then suddenly surged back. Some people fell, trampled on as the others continued backing up. The people on the floor cried out in pain and the lady cop swore before the silence was torn apart by the roar of gunfire.

The people at the front of the crowd jerked and fell. Others ran back into the warehouse, slipping and sliding in what I realized was blood. Some of them tipped the camp beds over and tried to hide behind them.

Lou let Mona fall to the floor, then drew his service revolver. “Get back!”

The suit guys flooded in though the loading bay doors, the rattle of their guns echoing loudly in the cavernous warehouse. The stink of smoke and blood made me dizzy. Two women darted to the left of me and were cut down by bullets. As I gaped, Lou clipped one of the gunners who fell to the floor with his hand clamped over his arm. Lou fumbled for his belt, reloading his gun. Spent casings dropped to his feet. “Brandon, what are you still doing here—” his sentence was cut in two as a bullet caught him right in the side of the neck, tearing his throat apart. The hot spray of his blood misted my skin, and I gasped, too shocked to summon a scream.

Someone tugged my hand. “Get up! Move!” Gracie’s face was white, and seemed like the only bright thing in that whole warehouse. “We’re gonna stay low. We’re gonna stay by the walls, where it’s dark.”

I stared at her, too numb to understand what she was even saying. She shook her head impatiently, then yanked me off my bed. My ears rang from the shotgun blasts, dulling out the sound of the chaos around me. I tried to focus on Gracie’s back.
Just keep going, one foot in front of the other.

A little knot of people slumped up against the wall in front of us. One of them moaned, his arm hanging from a shred of gristle and bone. It was Marty, I realized. The climber. Blood pumped out of his arm onto the floor, like a special effect from a movie.

Even as I walked through Marty’s blood, the carnage didn’t seem real, but I knew that smell. That sick scent of gore made me think of Dad, gutting his deer, chopping it up into pieces for the Beidermanns. My stomach rolled and I bent over, heaving up strings of bile.

Jean had the suits pinned near the door. She was crouched behind a support girder and she shot with steely calm whenever one of them tried to move forward. It felt good to have her between us and them, but I knew it was only a matter of time ‘til she ran out of bullets.

“Stay there,” Gracie snapped shoving me against the wall. She started sneaking out across the open space of the warehouse, staying low, but still a sitting duck if any of the suits happened to look her way. I wanted to tell her to come back, but I couldn’t risk drawing attention to either one of us. She stooped over one of the bodies, and as she turned it over, a badge glinted in the moonlight.

Frank.

Gracie tugged at his belt. What the hell? Was she after the gun? I waited as she crawled back to where I crouched, sure that I’d see bullets rip into her flesh at any second, but the guys in suits had pulled back for now, none of them wanting to risk Jean putting a bullet in their heads, I guessed.

“I got the keys,” hissed Gracie.

I ran behind her along the back wall of the warehouse, expecting a flashlight to find me, to hear the rattle of machine guns, but we made it to the door. Gracie slipped key after key into the lock, trying to find one that would fit. I was beginning to think she’d grabbed the wrong set altogether when the lock finally clicked and we stumbled through into a dark corridor.

“Shit, this is the wrong door,” said Gracie.

“What do you mean ‘the wrong door?’ “ I panted.

“I thought we’d come out near the lobby. I don’t know where we are.”

“So what do we do?”

“We find a way out.”

The walls of the corridor were solid brick. No windows to climb out of. We crept toward a dim light at the far end, stopping every now and then to listen for any people who might be lurking in the shadows.

Gracie grabbed my arm again and gave it a tug, but I pulled myself free.

“You don’t have to drag me along.”

“Fine,” she whispered. “But keep up, okay? If you start freaking out, I’m going to leave you.”

“Suits me,” I told her. She’d gotten lucky so far, but that didn’t mean I needed her help.

The corridor opened out into a lit stairwell, and in it, there was a big double door, propped open to reveal a sliver of starry sky. The night smelled like grass, and crickets shrilled—a sane, soothing noise to my ringing ears.

“Yes!” whispered Gracie. “There might be more of them out there, so just stick with me and—”

“I already told you I’m not going.”

Gracie’s eyes widened and she opened her mouth like she had something to say, only nothing came out. Then she sighed. “Your dad?”

I would have liked to have walked through those doors, into that sweet-smelling night more than anything else in the whole world, but how could I leave him behind?

“You go,” I whispered. “You saved my life back there, I guess, but
he
once saved my life too, and that’s the whole reason he’s stuck in this mess. I can’t go without him.”

“How are you going to find him?” she asked. “You don’t even know where they’re keeping them. You don’t know if he’s still alive.”

“I’ll believe he’s dead when I see it with my own eyes,” I told her. But I knew he couldn’t be dead.

I turned my back on the night sky and started up the stairs, forcing my wobbly legs to climb one after the other. I had just turned onto the first landing when Gracie appeared at the bottom of the stairwell.