Immortal City

CHAPTER THIRTY

Maddy woke in utter darkness. A few moments passed before she remembered where she was. The gym. Angel City High. She was hiding with Jacks, and they both must have fallen asleep. Something was different from when they went to sleep. Then she realized it: all the lights were off. Reaching for Jacks, she discovered, with sudden panic, he wasn’t there. The air around her suddenly felt harder to breathe.

Her hands groped in the darkness. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, she felt a finger press delicately, but firmly, to her mouth.

It was Jacks. Silencing her.

She could just barely see him now in the dim light that crept in from the cracks under the gym doors. He was sitting up and utterly still. Something was wrong. In that same moment Maddy realized it hadn’t just been her panic — the air around her really was harder to breathe. It scorched her lungs as she sucked it in. The entire gym had grown blisteringly hot while they slept. It was stifling. What was going on? A bead of sweat rolled down Maddy’s forehead and splattered against the mat. Her hair was damp and sticky. She turned to Jacks.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“I’m not sure,” Jacks whispered back. “Something’s in here with us. I turned the lights off, but it knows we’re in here.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never felt anything like it. It’s like pure evil. It’s not friendly,” Jacks said.

Maddy began to tremble. Taking her hands, Jacks wrapped them around the ring on her neck.

“We’re going to go into the hall together, and then I want you to run. Don’t look back. No matter what you hear, just keep running.”

“What? What are you going to do?”

Jacks was silent.

“You’re saying goodbye, aren’t you? You’re going to try and fight it.”

“Whatever it is, it knows we’re in here. It will never let us just walk down the hallway and out of here. It’s our only chance.”

“What if there’s another way out?”

“A way we can go without using the halls?”

Maddy willed her terrified mind to think logically. Rationally. Then she saw it.

“Yes. Some of the classrooms connect. If we go out through the locker room, we could cut through the classrooms to get to the other side of the school. Once we’re there, let’s just hope the gate is open.”

She could barely see the silhouette of his face in the darkness.

“Which way is it?”

Maddy led them silently toward the girls’ locker room door. When they had passed through it, she made sure the latch reengaged without making any noise.

In the dark, the silent rows of lockers seemed alive and menacing, like some kind of horrific, hallucinatory maze. Fog covered all the mirrors. Condensation dripped down the glass, reminding Maddy of rivulets of blood. Could something be hiding in this labyrinth, waiting for them? She looked at the lockers hanging open, the few towels left on the ground. Everything was utterly still. Maddy took Jacks by the hand and led him down one of the rows. They passed the coach’s office.

A voice called out to them from the darkness.

Maddy felt Jacks’s hand crush down on hers. He turned to shield her from whatever might leap out at them from the darkness.

“Baby, when I think of you-ou-ou, I get so blue-ue-ue.”

It was the gym coach’s radio, no doubt left on by a custodian after cleaning up the locker room. Jacks relaxed his grip on her hand.

“Ain’t gonna just stand around while you run off with somebody new-ew-ew.”

Then, from the opposite side of the gym, they heard the click of the door latch. This was no radio, no TV. Something was trying to get into the locker room.

Maddy pulled Jacks through the dry showers.

She could see, for the first time, a glint of fear in his eyes.

The door to the gymnasium began to open. Whatever was out there, in another second, it would be in the room with them. They rounded the shower stalls and Maddy spotted the door at the end of the short corridor. It had a small, square window in it, which let in light from the hallway outside. They were close. And that’s when Maddy heard it.

Footsteps in the locker room behind them. Panic surged up her throat. Whatever it was, it had feet. There was a thump, followed by two clicking sounds, like knife blades against the linoleum tile.

Step, click click. Step, click click.

Jacks squeezed her hand and mouthed a single word.

“Go.”

They glided over the floor in silence. Maddy reached the door and applied just enough pressure on the handle to check the lock. The handle depressed and the door moved effortlessly out of the jamb. It was unlocked. She swung the door open and they slipped through, leaving whatever it was — the thing— behind them in the locker room. They emerged into the hallway next to the vending machines. The whir of the refrigerators made it impossible to hear behind them. Maddy scanned down the stifling hall. The heat and humidity had fogged the windows to the classrooms. There was no way of seeing inside them.

“Come on,” she whispered, moving to the nearest door. “I have class in this room. I think it connects to the bio lab. The lab goes to a hall that can take us to the other side of the school.”

“Go, go,” Jacks whispered urgently. They went.

Maddy put a hand on the door handle and steadied her trembling heart. Cracking it open, she peered inside. Silent. Nothing. She swung the classroom door open. The empty desks cast long shadows in the light from the hallway. It was her AP History class. On the board the assign-ment for the weekend was still written there: Read New History of Angels, pages 220–256.

They moved into the classroom and Jacks shut the door silently behind them. Maddy could almost hear the chatter of her classmates as she moved through the desks and the drone of Mr. Rankin at the board. They were the sounds of safety, the sounds of wonderfully commonplace well-being. If she ever got out of this alive, she promised never to take those mundane sounds for granted again.

They passed Mr. Rankin’s desk and suddenly Jacks grabbed Maddy by the hoodie and yanked her down to the floor. His eyes darted to the window, where a black silhouette moved across the light. It was large, taller than the windows. Big. Maddy held her breath as it passed the classroom. Her heart was pounding. Then it stopped and came back, shadowing the windows again. It was smelling, Maddy thought. Hunting. The latch on the door began to turn.

“Don’t look back,” Jacks whispered as they moved toward the door at the far end of the classroom. Jacks pulled the door shut behind them just as the entrance to the hallway swung open.

It knew where they were now, Maddy thought. It was closing in.

Jacks pulled Maddy down behind a long counter. She listened to the sound of her shallow, quick breaths, trying to control them. The lab was divided by four counters running the length of the room, bordered by narrow alleys on either side. Test tubes, beakers, and other glassware sat atop the tables awaiting next week’s use. Maddy peered at the far door, across the room. She could see the hallway through the door’s square window. The hallway, she knew, led directly out the school’s side entrance to the street.

“Let’s go,” Maddy said. “We can make it if we run.”

Jacks held her arm with an iron grip.

“No. We can’t,” he said quietly.

“Why not?” she whispered, almost pleading.

“Because it’s in here with us.”

Maddy heard the door to the classroom click shut.