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  They are.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you awake. I said your name a few times before I shook your shoulder.” He runs his tongue over his teeth. “And just for the record, I do floss.”

  My mouth falls open but no words come out.

  He puts his callused finger beneath my chin and chuckles when my teeth snap shut. “You talk in your sleep, featherweight. There’s floss in the cabinet above the bathroom sink—behind the spare toothbrushes—if you want some. You can use whatever you need while you’re here. I get a few hours of accumulated solar power every day, so the stove and microwave will work for a hot meal or two.”

  He stands up and my eyes move over his hiking boots, jeans, and button-down shirt that probably used to be green plaid but is more like tan plaid now. There’s a backpack on his back and a knife on his belt. And a gun—a Glock—the twin to my dad’s gun, except his is fitted with a scratched and worn silencer. Silencers are used only when you want to kill someone without alerting others to your presence. A twinge of fear shudders through me.

  Kevin takes a camouflage baseball cap from the table beside him and pulls it over his hair, which is in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. I jump from the sofa and let the sleeping bag slither down to my feet. “Are we leaving already?” I look at my watch. It’s almost seven a.m. Stepping from the sleeping bag, I look around for my shoes and socks. They’re where I left them, right beside the sofa.

  “Jack.”

  “What?” I start pulling on my socks.

  “I’m leaving. You are staying here.”

  I have put on both of my socks and shoved one of my feet into a shoe before his words sink in. Dropping my shoelaces, I look at him. “What did you say?”

  “You can’t come. I’m going alone.”

  “What?”

  “To find your friends. I’m going alone. That”—he gestures toward the exit—“is no place for a . . .” He studies me for a long moment. “For a twelve-year-old.”

  I glare at him and yank my shoelaces tight, then get my other shoe, pulling it onto my foot.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Help yourself to whatever you want to eat,” Kevin says, walking to the exit.

  “I’m coming with you,” I insist, tying my other shoe.

  “Bye, Jack.” His eyes meet mine for a brief second, and then he steps out the door, shutting it behind him. I stand and run into the kitchen for my backpack—there’s no way I’m sitting here alone while he goes out looking for my friends. I’ll follow him if I have to. I loop the backpack over one shoulder, sprint to the exit, twist the doorknob, and tug. My hand flies off of the handle and I stumble backward. I twist the knob again and realize it won’t twist. Putting both my hands on the knob and bracing a foot on the doorframe, I pull as hard as I can. The door stays firmly shut.

  “Kevin!” I scream. Balling my hands into fists, I pound on the door and scream his name again, but the door stays shut, and Kevin never answers.

  I twist the metal key on the side of the kerosene lamp and the flame dies. Dim sunlight filters into the shelter, making it unnecessary to use the kerosene lamp during the day. The light comes from several round glass circles in the ceiling—skylights of some sort.

  The lock on the exit is completely unpickable, though not for a lack of trying. I’ve read books on lock-picking and even learned how to pick the locks on my house. The shelter door won’t unlock.

  When I resign myself to the fact that I’m a prisoner, I give in to my Kevin-induced fury and start going through all of his stuff. Total revenge. I sort through a small chest of drawers in the main room. It’s filled with a few pairs of boxer shorts, jeans, a couple of torn shirts, and ball caps. Boring.

  Next I rummage through all his metal sculpting stuff. Tools. Tools. Leather gloves. Tools. Even more boring.

  I take the cushions from the sofa and look under them, and I find some stale popcorn, a handful of pennies, a single bullet, and lots of lint. I examine the chairs, look under the rug for a nonexistent secret door, and rummage through the bathroom cabinet again (and borrow some floss for my teeth). Kevin says he lives here, but it’s not like he really lives here. Aside from the wire sculptures and his underwear, there’s nothing personal here, nothing that really tells me more about him.

  My stomach rumbles, so I go to the kitchen and take out the buttermilk pancake mix and powdered eggs. While my breakfast is cooking, I mix a cup of powdered milk. In a matter of minutes I am sitting at the small round table nestled in the kitchen’s corner, eating steaming pancakes and eggs. Dad always says hunger is the best spice. He’s right. I have never tasted anything so delicious. After two pancakes, I get a container of powdered sugar and sprinkle it onto the remaining two pancakes. As the sugar melts onto my tongue, I melt against my chair.

  When my food is eaten and my belly feels like it’s on the verge of popping, I go to Kevin’s dresser and get a pair of jeans with tears over both knees and a comfortably worn red hoodie with a torn shoulder and sleeves that completely cover my hands, and is bulky enough to hide any trace of curves. I swap my clothes for his and put mine—everything but the vest—into the sink, scrubbing them with the bar of soap and then laying them on the counter to air-dry. I get Kevin’s bloody shirt from the day before and scrub it next, laying it on the counter beside my shirt.

  While I wait for the clothes to dry, I start going through the kitchen cupboards one by one, already thinking about what I am going to eat for my next meal. If I have to be a prisoner, I suppose this is the way to do it. The cupboards over the sink and stove all contain food—dehydrated beef stew, dehydrated soy meat substitute, potato flakes, biscuit mix, chocolate pudding mix, freeze-dried bananas and strawberries. My mouth waters despite my full belly. Kevin has more food variety than I have seen in three years—since the pesticide destroyed everything that survived the honeybee decline. It makes me wonder about him again. Who is he and how in the world did he find this place?

  The cupboards beneath the sink are loaded with supplies: candles, matches, lighters, batteries, bullets (though no guns), flashlights, flares, rope, needles and thread, sunblock, ponchos, all sorts of different sizes of random shoes—more things than I can remember.

  The cupboards on the other side of the kitchen are filled with more supplies, like gallons and gallons of kerosene and extra blankets. I kneel down for a closer look. There’s a box of diapers in there too.

  I get to the farthest cupboard, nestled behind the table, and open it. This cupboard is different. It has a damp, musty smell. Shiny half-gallon cans of whole wheat flour with tan labels fill this cupboard from top to bottom. Visions of fresh-baked bread fill my imagination, and I wonder if I’ve overlooked any yeast. I take out a can of flour and pause. The musty smell has intensified.

  I take out another can and find more cans of flour behind it. The flour is four cans deep, four cans wide, and three cans high. One by one, I take out all the cans of flour, stacking them onto the cement floor beside me, until the cupboard is empty and there are forty-eight cans of flour taking up most of the kitchen floor. With the cupboard empty, the musty smell is stronger, and the cupboard seems cooler than any other part of the shelter. I stick my head in for a closer look and my hands start to tremble.

  Backing out, I go to a supply cupboard, get a flashlight and insert batteries, and shine it into the depths of the cupboard. At the back is a door handle. I crawl inside. Placing my hand on the doorknob, I twist and yelp with surprise when it turns. The back of the cupboard swings away from me, opening into pitch-blackness.

  Chapter 18

  Let Fear Outweigh Your Curiosity. Mom started sewing that one minutes after she finished stitching a knife wound on Josh’s thigh. He was curious whether or not a Fec would actually cut him if he didn’t give the Fec something to eat. There was still blood under Mom’s fingernails as she jabbed the needle and floss into a stained linen napkin.

  I stand in a narrow cement hallway that smells like soil and rock and moss. The beam
of my flashlight illuminates about thirty feet of darkness in front of me before it is swallowed by black. The hall is utterly silent and I stand still, wondering if I should explore. Wondering if I dare explore. Fear and curiosity are waging a battle inside me.

  Taking a deep breath, I grip the flashlight in one hand, pat the gun at my belt with the other, and then start walking. My mother would be furious.

  My feet scrape on the cement floor, and the damp cement walls throw the sound back at me. In several places, water is seeping through cracks in the walls. I trail my fingers over one of these drippy cracks. The wall is slimy with a nearly invisible sheen of moss. I wipe my slimy-wet hand on Kevin’s pants and smirk. “You totally deserve that, Kevin,” I whisper.

  As I continue along the narrow hall, my heart starts to pump harder. Every time my shoe scrapes cement, I whirl around and look back the way I’ve come, waiting for Kevin to appear out of the darkness and get me. But I don’t stop walking because, for once, my curiosity outweighs my fear.

  After a few minutes of walking, everything changes. The cement floor turns from a straight walkway to a twisting and turning path, and the cement walls are replaced with jagged rock. The ceiling disappears, and when I shine my flashlight up, it reflects off of rock high, high above.

  I run my fingers over the jagged earth wall as I walk. There’s a new sound here, a gurgling like boiling water. I take a step forward and icy water fills my shoe all the way to the crevasses between my toes and splashes up onto my borrowed pants. A narrow stream crosses the cement path before disappearing down a crack in the rock. I shine my flashlight at the source of the water and see a spring bubbling up out of the ground. Someone has built a small pool around the spring, trapping a decent amount of water, and there are pipes sticking into it.

  “The source of Kevin’s water?” My voice echoes and dances through the cave. I start walking along the cement path again—haven’t taken three steps—when it begins to slant upward and the air loses a bit of its mustiness. I follow the sloped path for a few minutes and then bam. I am up against a wall.

  I shine my flashlight around and discover I’m in front of a wooden door braced with rusty metal, making it look like a metal and wood checkerboard. I place my hand on the knob and turn. It doesn’t move.

  “No!” I glower at the door. “You have to open!” I try the handle again and find it is stuck fast. Shining my light on it, I see a lock, so turn it. The lock clicks, I twist the handle, and the door opens. A gust of warmer, drier, wood-scented air hits me. I step through the door and shine my light around. My jaw drops open.

  I am in a massive warehouse-size room with cement pillars every ten or so feet. They look like immense tree trunks that reach up to the smooth cement ceiling. There are rows and rows of wooden shelves as far as I can see, loaded with half-gallon tin cans labeled with tan stickers. I shine my light on the cans and start walking. There has to be a decade’s worth of food here. At least! Dehydrated beef. Dehydrated chicken. Soy beans. Pinto beans. White beans. Chili. Beef bouillon. Dehydrated clam chowder. The types of food seem limitless. I come to a section of shelves with brick-size vacuum-packed yeast and almost cry. I could make hundreds of loaves of bread with a brick of yeast and the forty-eight cans of flour spread all over the kitchen floor.

  I keep walking to the other end of the room and find a metal door with bright-red words painted on it: ENTERING COMPROMISED ZONE. I unlock it and step into the next room. A blast of even warmer air wraps around me, leeching the dampness from my skin.

  I’ve entered a room filled with empty wooden shelves and broken glass bottles. Fancy, stained paper still clings to some of the shattered bottles. I crouch down and read one of the labels—Chardonnay—and frown. I’m in some freaky, trashed wine cellar and the door I’ve just come through is covered with the same wooden shelves that line the rest of the walls. I never would have known there was a door here if I hadn’t opened it from the other side.

  I take a big chunk of broken wine bottle and prop open the door, then keep going.

  I come to yet another door and open it. I flinch and throw my arm up over my eyes. Sunlight burns against my eyelids. Peering through my lashes, I see a stairway leading up. I’m on the surface of the world again, where everything is wrong. Fear makes my legs heavy, as if they’re trying to keep me underground, trying to warn me. I pause, close my eyes, and listen for any type of human sounds. My heart and my breathing are all I hear. My hand moves to my belt, and I remove my gun. With my finger on the trigger, I go up.

  Chapter 19

  The light is so bright at the top of the stairs that I can’t see anything at first. I press my palms over my watering eyes.

  When my eyes adjust, I am shocked to be standing in a large room with an enormous intact window overlooking half-dead pine trees, and far below, the distant city. I am in a structure built on the side of the Rocky Mountains. The floors are rustic wood, the furniture is rustic wood and cracked leather. Dusty elk, moose, and deer heads are mounted on the walls, and the kitchen, to my left, has dusty granite countertops and stainless-steel appliances. The refrigerator still has scraps of paper stuck to it with magnets.

  I walk to the fridge and pull a scrap of paper out from under a frog magnet. It’s a grocery list scrawled in faded pencil. I put the list back under the magnet and open the fridge. It is empty, as if someone cleaned it out before the food could rot in it. Same with the cupboards.

  Leaving the kitchen, I find a flight of stairs that leads up. Framed photographs cover the stairwell walls, and I glance at them as I slowly ascend. They’re school photos of a boy and a girl, from kindergarten on up until maybe middle school. And the boy has hair a few shades darker than copper, and eyes the color of the morning sky.

  Upstairs, I find three bedrooms and two bathrooms. I pass the master suite and go into a small bedroom. It’s a girl’s room, with a pale pink quilt on a perfectly made bed, as if the girl who sleeps here is going to come home from school this afternoon, remove the three white throw pillows, and sleep in it. I step up to the bed and run my hand over the quilt, and my fingers leave stripes in the years’ worth of dust that has settled on it.

  The next room has a bed, a dresser, a closet, and a telescope pointing out a window that faces the city. A lacrosse stick hangs on the wall behind the bed’s headboard, surrounded by first-place ribbons, medals, and plaques. I walk up to the wall and study a plaque—the name Kevin Winston Emerson is etched into the tarnished brass.

  “Aha! So here’s the real you,” I whisper, and read every single ribbon, medal, and plaque. They all have his name on them. Apparently he took first place a lot in lacrosse, and for some reason that tiny fact makes me feel like I know him a hundred times better. Like, just maybe, I can trust him. I run my fingers over his bed and pause. It isn’t like the girl’s bed. There is no dust on the faded red quilt.

  I go to the closet and open the door. It’s a deep walk-in closet with shelves on the left and bars with hangers on the right. The hangers hold filthy clothes that desperately need a washing. I run my fingers over a threadbare trench coat that has so much dried mud on it that it is stiff to the touch. Little granules of dirt fall off and sprinkle over the dusty wood floor. On a shelf above the clothes are other things—scarves, hats, and beanies, and grass and twigs from mouse nests.

  I leave the closet and go to the chest of drawers and start going through them, through boys’ socks, through boxer shorts that look way too small for Kevin but have his name written on the waistband in permanent marker. The next drawer holds lacrosse stuff, like cleats, a mouth guard, a jock strap, and grass-stained padding. They still smell faintly of grass and sweat. The bottom drawer isn’t filled with clothes but with newspaper clippings, yellow and faded. I kneel on the hardwood floor and take one out. The headline says:

  Oldest Man to Scale Everest

  Charles Winston Emerson of Denver, Colorado

  I get two more clipped articles:

  Crazy or Genius?

>   Charles Winston Emerson’s Views on the Future

  And:

  Entrepreneur and Adventurer Charles Winston Emerson to Adopt Grandchildren in Aftermath of Son’s Death

  The article has a picture with the text. The boy has auburn hair, bright eyes, and a wide smile. Kevin. The girl has the same hair and eyes but looks several years younger.

  I put the clipped articles back into the drawer and go to the telescope. It isn’t pointed at the sky, the obvious place, but slightly north of the city. I put my eye to the lens, careful not to change its position, and take a look.

  My heart leaps into my throat, and I force myself not to flinch. What I am looking at is miles away, but it still makes me want to run home and hide under my bed. I am staring at raiders. Lots and lots of raiders. They’re gathered in a Walmart parking lot, wearing guns and camouflage, standing around five four-wheelers. Several are holding chains attached to big dogs, as if they’re about to go hunting. But hunting for what?

  I take an unsteady step away from the telescope. I know exactly what they’re going to hunt. Me. And Fo, Bowen, Jonah, Kevin, and the beast-child. We need to get away before they find us, which means right now.

  “Where are you, Fo?” I whisper, glancing at my watch. It is half past three. Kevin has been gone for nearly eight hours. I press my eye back against the telescope and slowly start moving it toward the foothills, toward what I think is the direction of the underground shelter. Slowly, methodically, I move it back and forth, scanning the area. A flash of movement catches my eye and I jump back from the shock of it. Pressing my eye once more to the scope, I brace myself and take a look.