swoll up from his daddy’s fist and he’d scrubbed away every long-ago morning she turned him out to run wild through Trashtown so she could take her cure.
The box of her things stayed sealed up neat in the closet upstairs. Rattler would drive it to the dump. He would get new clothes for Prairie; her new clothes would hang in the closet just so. Prairie would do woman things to the house, curtains and fancy soap and such. That was not a job for Rattler, but he’d scrubbed until the skin rubbed off his knuckles and he’d split and stacked the wood and beat the rugs and caned the chairs and rubbed the dust from the lamps.
The shirt Prairie wore was too hot for June and she didn’t have nothing else with her. Prairie had come to him with nothing and that was as it should be. Before long, Prairie would shed the city like a king snake sheds its skin; her hair would get long and her green eyes would grow bright again for him.
“Put it on, girl,” Rattler said roughly, holding the worn dress out to her. He hated to see her standing so straight and still in his kitchen in the warm evening, sweat on her brow, her shirt buttoned up to her neck. He would buy a fan. He would buy a fan for every window. “Ain’t much but it’ll keep you cool. We’ll go to town soon and git you things.”
“I don’t need anything,” she said, not looking at him. Crazy talk. This was her home now; she should be looking at her new cups and plates and her new silver chest that had been his mama’s. She should be thinking where did she want the chairs, the dish drainer, the broom. She didn’t look at any of her new things. Didn’t notice the flowers in the jar on the table, the cloth from so long ago Rattler didn’t know who had stitched it, which he took out of the hutch just for her.
Rattler sighed and bunched the old dress in his fist. He would throw out his mother’s things. He would pour Prairie a glass of water. He would tell her to fetch him a shined apple, rub his knotted-up shoulders, sing him one of the old songs. He would make her sit down. He would make her mind him. He would see himself in her wide green eyes.
Rattler looked at Prairie and he didn’t know what to do.
34
SO HE HAD TAKEN HER HOME.
I sat without speaking, thinking about it. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Now that Derek’s family farm had been blown sky-high, Rattler had nowhere else to take her. It was hard to imagine that his house, the house he had grown up in, which had been his father’s before him, was much worse than the abandoned farmhouse-but I knew enough about Trashtown to know that it could be a lot worse.
“He won’t like that,” I said. “That’s going to make him all the more determined to sell the Seers out to Prentiss, so he can afford something nicer for Prairie.”
“He really… loves her?”
I frowned. “I guess you could say that. I mean, if you can call that love.”
“No, I only meant that if she asked him to help us get Chub out, maybe he’d do it.”
“Get
“It’s just a thought, Hailey. We’re sort of running out of options here.”
“Yeah, but-”
Before I could finish the thought, Dr. Grace appeared, checking her watch and holding a sheaf of papers bound by a large clip. “All right, you two,” she said with forced cheer. “We have a couple of hours before we’re done for the night, and I’d like to use it with you, Kaz. Hailey, you can come along if you like. Who knows, maybe you’ll come in handy.”
“You want to start testing me before Prentiss gets back,” Kaz said.
Dr. Grace blinked. “That’s not-”
“Did they find Prairie?” I demanded.
She pressed her lips together and didn’t answer. “Leave your trays. Someone will clean up. Let’s go.”
“Just answer that one question, and we won’t give you any trouble,” I said. “Come on, it doesn’t make a difference. I’ll find out eventually anyway.”
She hesitated, rubbing her temples. “They reported in, and they’ll be back very soon. I’m sure they will find her soon. And her abductor.”
“ ‘Abductor’?” Kaz demanded incredulously. “Seriously? Uh, isn’t that incredibly hypocritical, since you people kidnapped her first?”
“Look,” Dr. Grace said angrily. “I am tired of being forced to defend things that are outside of my purview. I don’t know what is going on up there and I don’t really want to. I have a job to do and I would like to get started, so if you’ll kindly-”
“There’s a reason you want to start now, before they get back,” Kaz said as he and I followed her out of the dining room. Everyone else had finished eating, and the dining room was empty. “You’re afraid that Prentiss won’t let you. Why is that, Dr. Grace?”
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Dr. Grace snapped in a brittle tone that implied he’d come very close to the truth.
My guess was that she had spent the last several hours thinking about what we had told her. About what the zombies were really going to be used for. Maybe she was having a moral crisis, wondering if she could continue working for a man who committed such atrocities. I wanted to believe that.
And maybe, knowing that she wouldn’t be working here much longer, she wanted to spend as much time as possible with her most promising subjects: Chub, and now Kaz.
As we started up the ornate curving stairs to the upper floor, Kaz touched my arm, and I fell back with him. He silently pointed to the stairs that curved above us, and mouthed the word
As we neared the landing between floors, Kaz tackled Dr. Grace around the waist. Her feet swung off the floor and she made an “oof” sound as the air was knocked out of her.
“Do it, Hailey,” Kaz whispered. Before Dr. Grace could recover enough to scream, I put my hand to her neck, closed my eyes and felt the swirling dark sensation as my blood rushed and roiled, and then she went limp.
I’d done it-the same thing I had done to the security guard. I hadn’t injured her; I’d just put her into a deep sleep, my touch acting like a powerful magnet that temporarily blunted her conscious mind.
“What now?” I demanded. “They’re going to-”
“Get her keys. Fast.”
He held her under the armpits and started dragging her across the landing toward a door I’d missed earlier, a plain flat door set into the stretch of wall behind the curving staircase. I scrambled through her pockets for the ring of keys I’d seen her use earlier. I found it and then on an impulse reached for the holster attached to her belt and took her gun, too, surprised at its weight in my hand.
“Jackpot,” I whispered as I slipped the gun into my pocket and jammed one of the two keys on the heavy silver ring into the lock. It worked. I guessed it was a master key, one that would open many different rooms in the complex. One of the perks of seniority.
Kaz shouldered the door open and I slipped into the darkness behind him and pulled the door shut, plunging us into total darkness. My knees struck something sharp and hard and I went down, landing on a cold floor.
Then I was still-as still as I could be-listening to the metallic echo of my impact, and our breathing. After what seemed like a long time, Kaz whispered, “I’m going to set her down, okay?”
“Where are we?”
“Janitor’s closet, I think. I noticed it at lunch, the way the stairway curves. They have cameras at the bottom and the top, but they missed this one spot.”
I reached blindly for the object I’d tripped on, and felt the shape of a wheeled mop bucket. I backed up on my hands and knees until I found the wall behind me. I leaned back against brooms hanging from hooks, pulling my knees up to my chest. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but there was no light, not even a slim crack coming from under the door.
