Jack wondered if Laura was like Aubrey—maybe using her ability too much made her tired. Maybe she knew she couldn’t fight long enough to get free.
“No,” Laura said, still smiling, though obviously overwhelmed by the shouts. “Haven’t you guys been listening to what’s happening out there? Think about it for a minute. What if the army isn’t bad? What if they really are locking us up for our protection?”
A girl somewhere down the corridor screamed, “You haven’t been in here! They wouldn’t treat us like this if they cared about us.”
“But we get out, don’t we?” Laura answered. “They don’t just leave us in these cells, right?”
“I’ve been here for days,” the girl answered. “A week, maybe.”
“But they have to take us somewhere eventually. If I escape, they’ll hunt me. They’ll think I’m a terrorist.”
Another voice called out, “They already think we’re terrorists.”
“So you want me to prove them right?” Laura said. “I break us all out and we run—how many of us will get shot? If I punch an infantryman I’ll kill him, and then what does that make me?”
“What if they dissect us?” Matt asked. “What if they cut every one of us open and find out how we do what we do?”
“They already know how we do it,” Laura insisted. “Do you think they developed that cheek swab test without knowing what they’re testing for?”
Matt didn’t respond, and the room was quiet for a moment. Jack watched Laura’s face as she waited for someone else to say something. She didn’t look angry—she looked confident.
“I’m sorry,” Laura said. “I know you’ve probably been waiting for something like this, someone to get you out of here. But I’m not afraid of the army. In fact, if I don’t cause any trouble—if you guys don’t cause any trouble—then maybe they’ll treat us like people instead of prisoners.”
“They already treat us like prisoners,” someone down the corridor muttered. “And none of us have done anything yet.”
Jack thought about the night at the homecoming dance. If Nate had surrendered instead of attacking, would they have let him live? But what about kicking in Aubrey’s door and tackling a teenage girl to the ground? That wasn’t a military that trusted them. No one was giving them the benefit of the doubt.
“I grew up in Colorado,” Laura said. “And the only thing I’ve heard about Colorado in the last week is that these terrorists have screwed things up so much that food can’t get in and out of the city. The interstates are shut down. There are millions of people there. What are they going to do without food?”
“I’m nineteen,” she continued. “I don’t know where we go once they take us out of here, but I’m volunteering. Someone needs to fight these terrorists.”
Jack found himself nodding, though that surprised him. Laura’s speech made a kind of ideological sense, but nothing that he’d seen seemed to back it up. The prison was terrible. The conditions were inhumane. They were treated like criminals, not like people who were being protected and cared for.
On the other hand, the prison had security cameras. Maybe it had microphones listening in on them, too. If so, Laura had just made a friend of the army.
Jack pointed to her water. “That stuff screws up your brain. They say you won’t be able to do stuff while you’re on it.”
She unscrewed the cap and smelled it. “Did it change you?”
“I can’t do anything,” he said. “Never could. I don’t know why I’m here.”
Laura took a swig of the water, and Jack heard someone swear.
TWENTY-FOUR
AUBREY LAY IN HER BUNK, watching the door. Breakfast had come and gone, and Aubrey had eaten as much as she could. The food wasn’t anything special—some generic brand of Froot Loops with reconstituted powdered milk, and canned peaches—but she filled up on it. She had big plans for the day, and she’d need calories. She was going to try to find Jack.
She’d spent hours talking to Alec yesterday. He’d only been in Mount Pleasant for two years, but once she reminded him of what the school was like he’d been able to remember a lot of it—and after talking to him she could recall a lot of the things they used to do together. In the fourth grade she’d played his wife in the very abridged version of
The whole thing bothered Kara, but it shouldn’t have. It was nice to have Alec there, like a security blanket, but Aubrey wasn’t interested in him. Kara would have known that if Aubrey dared to tell anyone what she was planning for that day.
After breakfast, Aubrey had gone to the supply shelves and asked for a bottle of water, but the soldier told her she had to get water from the main spigot—they didn’t have bottles they could give out. Fortunately, she’d been able to talk him out of a few granola bars, which she hoped would help her stay on her feet. She was going to be invisible for a long time.
At nearly nine in the morning, the sergeant arrived for morning roll call. Aubrey climbed down from the bunk and dug through her small pile of clothes for her towel.
The sergeant read through the teens’ names, and as they were called out, the teens went forward to have their bracelets checked against their picture. There were twenty people in Tent 209 now—every bunk was full—but the process didn’t take too long. Aubrey threw her towel over her shoulder and waited.
Finally, the soldier read “Aubrey Parsons” and she hurried up to the door. They checked her bracelet twice, matching her with a picture in a notebook, and then marked her off the list.
“I want to run to the showers,” Aubrey said. “Can I go now?”
The bored sergeant nodded, and Aubrey slipped past him outside. One of the tents near the fence was entirely dedicated to girls’ showers, but she still had to wait in a short line for a stall to open up. No one she talked to had a good estimate of how many people were in the camp, but even Aubrey’s crude calculations put the number enormously high. She’d seen tents with numbers up in the three hundreds, and her tent was smaller than some—she guessed many of the others were twice as big, if not more. So, assuming there were at least three hundred bunkers with maybe thirty in each—and she figured that was a low estimate—that still put at least nine thousand people in the camp.
And that meant there had to be other camps elsewhere. Aubrey had no idea how many teens were in the state, but there had to be way more than this. There were probably quarantine camps all over Utah—all over the country. For all she knew, this wasn’t even the only camp at Dugway.
After a few minutes a girl left a stall and Aubrey hurried into it. They were only allowed one shower every other day, and the showers were timed so she needed to hurry. With only a few minutes left she poured out the entire bottle of shampoo—it was a military-grade kind that she hated—and then rinsed the empty bottle as best she could. In the remaining seconds before the water shut off, she filled the bottle and closed the cap.
When she emerged from the shower tent a few minutes later she felt refreshed and clean, and she had a water bottle hidden under her towel.
Aubrey headed south toward the fence.
It was going to be risky. Granted, it had been days since she’d disappeared and she felt fairly well rested and healthy, but what she was doing today was daunting. It would take longer than she wanted, and so much was unknown.
Upon reaching the fence, Aubrey turned right and began walking to the decontamination tents.
The first one that she reached appeared to be in use; a bus was stopped on the far side, and two freshly washed girls were sitting outside the door, waiting for their ride. They looked almost identical, except one was a little older than the other. They had to be sisters.
