Authors: Jo Treggiari
Tags: #Fantasy, #Young Adult, #Romance, #Science Fiction, #Dystopian & Post-apocalyptic
The doctor’s choked voice haulted the Sweepers in their tracks. She clawed at something around her throat. “Stop!” she gasped.
Then the Sweepers were falling back. And Lucy, Aidan, and Sammy found themselves in the middle of the floor, with empty space around them. They circled, keeping their tight huddle, wary.
D
el constricted her arm around the woman’s throat and stepped out from behind her. Two small kids, wrapped in blankets, shivered at the base of the stairs. Their faces were pinched and gray, like they’d been hungry for a long time. Lucy remembered all the other children who’d disappeared from the shelter, taken away in the white vans. Who knew what had happened to them and the older scavengers who’d been taken against their will? They’d probably all died here. Somehow she’d forgotten those truths.
Del transferred her grip to Dr. Lessing’s arm and held it twisted behind her back. She stepped forward and the Sweepers fell back. Simmons raised his hand and they froze in formation. They were now clustered before the front door. Lucy narrowed her eyes. She was pretty sure there were even fewer of them than before. Had some fled during the night?
“We’re all leaving,” Del said.
“Delfina. You’re safe here,” Dr. Lessing pleaded. Her voice was strained and high. “If you go back out into the world, you’ll be in danger. You can’t do that to the children.”
Del’s arm jerked and tightened. Dr. Lessing’s eyes bulged. “Just shut up,” Del screamed. “Stop pretending! Don’t act like you know me.”
“But you understand the work we’re doing here.”
“You lied to me. You used me to bring my friends here. You murdered Leo.” The tears were pouring down her face. Dr. Lessing writhed, but Del’s grip was too strong.
“I’m a doctor,” she said, “and a scientist.” She looked at Lucy with a pleading expression. “It’s your duty. You’ve been given this gift.”
“You were going to bleed me until I died!” Lucy said. Finally her mind felt crystal clear. “I read your report.” She stepped forward and lowered her knife. “Did you infect Leo with the plague?”
Dr. Lessing’s face contorted with rage. She ripped at Del’s hands with her nails, but Del held on with a fierce expression. The doctor whipped her head backward suddenly. Her skull caught Del across the mouth, mashing her lips against her teeth. Del fell backward, her arms pinwheeling as she tried to regain her balance. She dropped to her knees, and blood gushed from her mouth.
The children wailed and shrank against the banister.
Dr. Lessing staggered to her feet. Her lab coat was speckled with Del’s blood.
Simmons looked from the doctor to Del. He seemed unsure of how to act. Behind him, the Sweepers shifted uneasily.
“Del!” Sammy shouted. He ran toward her. No one stopped him. He reached her, put his arm around her shoulders, and helped her up.
Uttering a wild scream, Dr. Lessing sprang at him. Her fingers were hooked like claws, her hair streamed over her shoulders. She looked nothing like the calm, composed person who had greeted them hours earlier. Her forward motion threw Sammy off balance and Del was knocked backward. Sammy’s boots skidded on the polished floor. His legs gave way and he hit the ground hard. The billhook dropped from his hand and skittered across the floor out of reach. He rolled away, arms wrapped around his stomach.
Del was tearing at her sweatshirt pouch. She pulled her slingshot free, fitted a smooth pebble into the socket, and extended her arm. She tracked Dr. Lessing as the woman attacked Sammy again with a flurry of blows. Lucy could see the frown of concentration on her face. But Dr. Lessing and Sammy were struggling together, a jumble of arms and legs, and Del couldn’t risk hitting Sammy instead.
The doctor’s breath came in loud gasps. Sammy tried to protect himself, but Dr. Lessing struck out wildly with the length of her forearm. The savage blow rocked his head to the side. The mask was ripped loose and skidded across the floor. Lucy could hear the murmurs as the Sweepers caught sight of his charred face and flaming eyes, the trickle of blood seeping from a wound on his forehead.
In an instant, Simmons tackled the doctor, pinning her arms behind her body, and dragged her away from Sammy. She struggled, then abruptly went limp. He held her wrists in his broad hands.
Lucy forced herself to move toward her friends. The marble floor stretched ahead of her. Her attention was fixed on the drops of blood, some of which had fallen onto the polished stone of the stairs. She wondered if it was Sammy’s or Del’s. How badly were they hurt? Dr. Lessing was sprawled, half sitting, on the floor, with Mrs. Reynolds and Simmons bent over her. She seemed really out of it. And the Sweepers.
What were they waiting for
? she wondered.
Suddenly Aidan gripped her arm so hard it hurt, and she heard a
pop pop pop
, and they were plunged into darkness.
“Del shot the lights out with her slingshot,” Aidan whispered. He was so close, his breath tickled her ear. “Get up against the wall. She’s going to lay down covering fire.” Before Lucy had time to ask what that was, something hard whizzed past, inches from her face. She couldn’t see it, but she felt the movement of air, and she heard a yelp of pain from someone behind her.
Lucy remembered the small, neat holes Del had made in the rabbits. The speed with which she’d killed four of them. The girl was lethal. She squinted, but the dark was absolute. They could feel their way along the wall, but in what direction?
Aidan pressed her against the wall, shielding her with his body. He whistled, a low warbling sound that was barely audible over the yells of pain and the sharp sounds of impact as stone after stone hit helmet, walls, and, most often it seemed, human flesh. Simmons bellowed orders, but from what Lucy could tell, no one was listening. Someone ran by. She felt clothing brush against her arm.
A second later, Aidan’s signal was answered by another whistle. This one more like a trill. “Keep left,” Aidan murmured. “Move!”
Lucy could barely see, but Aidan was pushing her into a run toward a deeper darkness, away from the ruckus. She thought they were heading for the short hallway she’d glimpsed before. She stumbled on, and just ahead she could hear Del and Sammy and the kids. One of the little ones was weeping. Small, feeble cries, like he didn’t have the strength to bawl. She ran into a solid body and stifled a gasp. Felt the drape of a cloak—
Sammy
—and heard the sound of him fumbling with a doorknob.
“Locked,” he said.
Del’s low voice came from farther up the hallway. “This one, too.”
They moved as quickly as they could through the darkness. Lucy shuffled her feet, expecting irrationally to fall into a hole at any moment.
And then, a little way past where the corridor made an acute turn, there was a recessed light, and she could see again. She looked back in the direction of the foyer. “They’ll be on us in a heartbeat,” Aidan said.
“Mrs. Reynolds said the outer doors would all be locked,” she said. “Or they’ll be rooms with no exit.”
“There’s a door to the basement somewhere here,” Del said. “I remember it from before. Here.” She threw it open and groped for the light switch. A bare bulb was set in the sloped ceiling. Old wooden stairs led steeply down, releasing the eye-watering smell of must and mold.
“We’re going down there?” Lucy said. She couldn’t help thinking of all those old slasher flicks. What was the foremost rule? Don’t go into the cellar….
“No choice, right?” Del said.
Lucy reluctantly agreed.
“There’s always a way out of a basement,” Sammy said. “A window or a coal chute or storm doors—something most people don’t think about it.” He started going down the narrow steps.
Lucy put out her hand and grabbed hold of his cloak. She looked at the scared kids clinging to Del’s fingers and put her lips to his ear so they couldn’t hear her. “Aren’t the dogs down there?”
She could hear whining, excited yaps. The barks echoed wildly.
“Yeah, I guess—but like Del said, no choice.”
Still Lucy hesitated. They didn’t know what to expect. It could be a dead end, and they had no way of protecting themselves except for her knife, Aidan’s hammer, and Del’s slingshot. Aidan pushed urgently against her back. “Hate to tell you, but the Sweepers are coming.”
And now she heard hoarse shouts and the scuffling of boots on the hard floors.
She hurried onto the stairs, grabbing a wooden railing, which bent under her weight. Behind her, Aidan pulled the door closed.
“Lock?” Del asked.
“Bolt, but one good kick will break it,” he said.
On the first step down, Lucy slipped. The railing pulled away from the wall with a screech of nails. Del’s hand shot out and gripped her elbow, saving her from a nasty spill. As soon as Lucy had regained her footing, the girl released her arm.
“Thanks,” Lucy said.
“Don’t mention it.” She held one kid firmly by the wrist. Lucy thought it was the girl, but she couldn’t be sure. The other one stumbled ahead with his arms outstretched. Both of them wore baggy gray pajamas and slippers. Both badly needed their hair washed.
So much for the hot baths Dr. Lessing mentioned
, she thought.
The stairs were steep but short. They found themselves in a large, concrete-floored space. Thick drifts of dust lay on the floor, tracked over by countless footprints. Steel-encased wiring stretched out in a lattice across the low ceilings, as did rusty pipes as thick as Lucy’s arm. She could hear the trickle of water pumped down from the cistern. Pink insulation puffed out of crumbling plaster board like masses of cotton candy. Stacks of soggy boxes lined the water-stained walls. It smelled of damp and mushrooms, and overwhelmingly of animals: mouse droppings, but also the close, thick smell of many dogs kept inside, the tang of urine and dander and fur.
Numerous corridors led off in different directions, each poorly lit and dusty. Lucy tried to orient herself, but she’d lost her sense of direction. She thought she could pinpoint where the dogs were kenneled, even though the echoing barks confused her.
“Any idea what’s down here?” Sammy asked Del. He’d lifted the little girl onto his back. She clung to him, her hair straggling in her face. Her eyelids drooped.
Del shook her head. “Besides canned goods and bulk food items? The dogs. A bunch of old boxes. Stuff left over from before the plague, I guess.”
Aidan, who had been hanging back near the stairs listening for the Sweepers, looked excited. “If they were getting big deliveries of food, then there’s probably a loading dock or something down here. We should head in that direction.”
Del shrugged helplessly. “Your guess is as good as mine. It’s as big as a football field. I wandered down here for a couple of hours before Dr. Lessing—” She broke off, her cheeks reddening.
Before Dr. Lessing convinced you to rat me out
, Lucy thought, and then was a little ashamed of herself. They’d still be fighting a losing battle if it weren’t for Del.
She cleared her throat. She hated to say it, but it seemed only rational. “If they trucked in mass amounts of dog food, then they probably stockpiled it near the dog kennels. We can follow the sound of their barks.” She turned slowly, tracking the sound. They were subdued now, but in her mind she could see the dogs. She remembered the rottweiler leaping at her legs as she struggled to climb the tree, the thick froth of spit at the corners of its jaws. Three narrow halls stretched in front of her. They were lit with dim bulbs.
“Look down on the ground,” Aidan said. A jumbled trail of muddy footsteps led down the central one. “The middle way gets used a lot.” He squeezed Lucy’s hand. She moved into the hollow of his arm. A series of sharp
thuds
jolted them apart. Someone was trying to kick in the cellar door.
Exchanging panicked glances, the group crept down the narrow hall, moving as quickly as possible. Del soothed the kids with soft murmurs. The air was very still and dank. The acrid odor of urine and sawdust grew stronger, and the yelps of the dogs increased in volume.
They hurried toward the sound. Sammy ran ahead. His cloaked shadow leapt across the walls. The kid was attached to his back like a monkey.
They’d come a few hundred yards down the passageway, and still Lucy could heard the sound of wood splintering behind them and the buzz of voices. How many were there? Three or four? All of them?
Another volley of barks, louder and more excited.
They can smell us
, Lucy thought with a thrill of fear. And then her mouth suddenly turned dry.
They can smell me
.
“Nearly there,” Aidan said.
The corridor twisted and then opened up. Wire cages lined one long wall. Dogs of every shape and size pressed against the mesh. Some threw their bodies against the doors or clawed frantically, hard enough to rip at their paws. The yelping was deafening.
“Can you see a door out?” Lucy yelled. She was transfixed by a large dog that was staring at her. She flicked her eyes away, trying not to challenge the animal. Its black lips lifted away from sharp white teeth and the dog began to howl. At once the rest of the dogs lifted up their snouts and began to howl, too.
Aidan pulled at her arm and she realized she’d been standing still. “Come on,” he said.
She tore her eyes away from the dog and moved across the room as quickly as she could, keeping her gaze on the ground under her feet and ignoring the rumble of growls, the clanging of dogs pushing against their metal doors to get to her.
The space narrowed into two corridors. Sammy hurried down one and almost immediately doubled back. “Locked door,” he said. They all ran down the other way. The passage was lined with stacks of cardboard boxes. The dogs had quieted again, except for a few excited yips. Lucy heard the dull thud of running feet against the concrete.