gone.
She stayed there, staring. Will touched her arm.
“You should sit down. Rest,” Will said. “We’re gonna need our energy, and we can’t go in there for another hour.” The tears still flowed, as heavily as the water from the ceiling.
“You wouldn’t believe whose ass I had to kick to get David here,” Will said.
Lucy couldn’t wait an hour. It felt impossible. She ran to the hole in the wall and peered through. She just had to see him one last time. It was a labyrinth of wreckage inside. The plink-plink of dripping water resonated through the tunnel. It wasn’t a tunnel as much as it was the empty space left between the piled chunks of wall, ceiling, and floor. The chunks rested precariously on one another like a stack of dominoes. She caught the glow of David’s phone, then she saw his silhouette.
“David!”
He turned. The glow of the phone illuminated his face. It was swollen and bloodied, but his good eye sparkled. Was that a smile?
A second later, a chunk of ceiling in front of him fell, pulling an avalanche of rubble down with it.
She screamed. Her legs buckled beneath her; she collapsed into a puddle.
Will ran to her.
The tunnel was gone.
40
David was shaking from adrenaline.
He’d almost been crushed. Pain throbbed, everywhere. He cast the light of his phone back at the passage he had just crawled through. It wasn’t there. Dust and dirt, kicked up by the collapse, still spun in the air. He pressed his full weight against the blockage in several places. Nothing gave. It was solid, through and through.
“Lucy!” he shouted. “Will!”
He pressed his ear to the wall of rock. He could hear faint shouts on the other side, but he couldn’t make out the words.
He heard a whimper behind him. David turned and faced the path ahead. He held up his phone. It was littered with dogs.
Doberman pinschers with broken backs lay limp over jagged hunks of debris in front of him. They dangled out of holes and crannies. They were sandwiched between blocks of wall.
David knew they were a manifestation of his fear, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
This school had taken everything from him. His bones felt hollow. His muscles felt like they were slipping off his bones.
He didn’t want to leave Will and Lucy behind. He wanted to bash against the obstruction behind him until it was dust. It wasn’t fair. These fallen rocks had made a liar out of him. He told them that he would get them all out, and now they were trapped again. They would all die of starvation.
He had to get the food drops started again. Graduation too. If he could get out, he could let the world know what was happening inside these walls. He had to try-it was his only chance to keep Lucy and Will alive.
David stumbled away from the obstruction. The dogs were still there. He heard the sound of a thousand dogs, panting in unison. Each dog he passed bared its teeth as he neared. He saw one dried-blood paw print and then another. He hoped the trail would lead him outside.
David careened off jutting rocks, avoiding scratching claws and snapping teeth. He could only see two feet in front of him by the phone’s anemic light. He followed the blood trail wherever it led, sometimes having to crawl on his stomach. He lost track of the trail at times and crawled into cramped passages that came to dead ends.
It could’ve been minutes or hours since the tunnel’s collapse. He had no way of telling the difference. He might have been traveling in circles, he couldn’t tell. He kept going.
His vision was savaged by more things that weren’t there.
They couldn’t be there. He saw all the rubble as acne-scarred flesh. He saw his own arms as eels, black and wet and squirm-ing. For a good fifty feet Sam silently followed close behind him, with his arms outstretched, wanting a hug.
But gradually, the hallucinations faded. In time, he didn’t feel like his brain was evaporating anymore. He didn’t feel that nuggets of lungs were rising up in his throat. He just felt like he’d been beaten up by the whole football team, which he had been. It was a good feeling.
David turned a jagged corner. He crawled into a slim space between two horizontal slabs of wall. If whatever was holding those two slabs apart gave way, David would be squashed flat. As he slithered through, David’s phone died. The battery was done.
David threw the phone aside and continued on, blind. His hands were his eyes. He felt his way through rocky crevices and disjointed passages. He saw light ahead, a dark gray shimmer in the blackness. He moved toward it as fast as he could. The light forced him to squint. A short tunnel of debris extended above him like a chimney, and beyond it, he saw the gray material of the canopy, just like in the quad. It glowed from the moonlight shining through. He climbed-one final effort. Something scurried down the rocks by him. It was a rat.
David pulled himself out of the tunnel and onto a slanting hill of rubble. He realized that he was on top of what once was the East Wing. The heavy synthetic material of the canopy was in his face; it covered the entire hill of rubble. He could almost see the moon beyond it, a crinkled blur of white.
He caught just a whiff of cold, fresh air, but after a year of breathing the recycled, dead air in the school, that whiff was like a spoonful of sugar. He turned his head when he heard a flutter, and he saw a tattered hole in the canopy above him. It was being blown about by a chilly winter breeze. He crawled up to it, grabbed the gnawed and torn edges of the hole, and pulled his head through. A limitless night sky was above him.
The stars were sharp and brilliant pinholes, and the silver moon was nearly full. He breathed deeply. The air was rich, like biting into a tomato off the vine.
I did it, he thought. I got out.
David climbed out from underneath the canopy. The material sloped up and up above him, over the hill of craggy ruins, all the way to the roof of the remaining building. He looked below him. The canopy ended at the ground, twenty feet down, and beyond it, he saw trees. Real trees. He didn’t realize how much he’d missed them until he saw them. He half slid, half climbed down the rest of the canopied rubble hill and stepped onto grass. It was soft under his shoes. The lawn of the campus stretched out before him. He ran to a nearby tree. He just had to touch it. The bark was aged and rough and natural. He savored another gust of fragrant air. It smelled of leaves and grass and rain. He never wanted to be inside again.
Thirty yards away, there was a double line of chain-link fence. It surrounded the entire campus, and razor wire was spooled along its top edge. He saw a guard tower. He saw parked jeeps. Moonlight shimmered across the lawn. There were prefabricated buildings across the campus that he didn’t remember. When he looked at the school itself, he saw that the canopy covered the entire massive building, like the school was undergoing a permanent fumigation.
He had to get off this campus. The world needed to know what was happening in McKinley, and it was up to him to tell them all. He couldn’t afford to screw it up. He knew he should wait, survey the scene, make sure no one was around, but he couldn’t. He had to move.
David ran for the fence.
41
Sam trundled down a pitch-black hall.
It had been two weeks, and the lights still hadn’t come back on. He couldn’t see a thing. His muscles spasmed with each step, and his legs wobbled underneath him. His belly twisted and growled. He could taste his own bile on his tongue. The food was gone. His food. The rest of the school had devoured it all.
