No Dawn without Darkness: No Safety In Numbers: Book 3 (8 page)

S
H
A
Y

ON THE WAY TO THE MALL OFFICES

O
ne more flight,” Ryan says as I meet him on the landing. He’s smiling like this is a group date and we’re about to get our first moment alone.

I nod, let him kiss my cheek as he hops ahead of the lumbering crowd. We’re now one floor up and at the opposite end of the mall from where I was supposed to be. But this is Preeti. This is Ryan. These aren’t just strangers begging for my help.

Joe has Preeti, and Kris carries the two girls I abandoned on his shoulders. The two other guys drag themselves along, and Claire is with the little boy, Silas. I stay back to guard our rear.

Claire helps Silas onto the escalator. As she follows, two guys lurch from the shadows and grab her.

“Give us your light!” one shouts.

I whack them both in the head, and, thankfully, they scatter.

“We are so lucky we found you,” Claire says, gasping.

“I can help you with him,” I say, and hook an arm around Silas.

We make it up the last flight of steps, and down the hall to the mall offices. Kris clips his book light to the frame of the drop ceiling in the central hallway. When we open the doors to the actual offices, it’s clear someone has already been through. The floor of the surveillance room—who knew there were cameras all over the mall?—is coated in shattered glass and cut wires. But at least the place is empty, and the offices themselves are mostly intact.

There are even some beds in a back room. I open Dr. Chen’s laptop and place it in the middle of the floor to give us light.

Kris brings Preeti in first, and I kneel next to her cot.

“You came back,” she whispers.

“I had to find you,” I lie.

“No, I mean from the flu,” she says, somehow able to sound annoyed even though her voice is vapor thin.

“Well, so did you,” I say, and quickly correct myself, “
will
you, I mean. So will you.”

She coughs, then reaches into her waistband and pulls out Nana’s book of Tagore’s poems. “My bag got taken,” she says, “but I took this out first.”

It’s missing its cover now and is so rumpled, it can barely be called a book. But my eyes water feeling those pages, seeing the notes written by my innocent self, the girl whose biggest problem was that her friends hadn’t called. Nani’s favorite poems are dog-eared from before she gave the book to me, and Nana’s too, from before he died. A whole history in curled, brown paper.

“Can you hold it?” she wheezes.

“Let me get you some water,” I say, and tuck the book into the bag beside Chen’s notebook.

Ryan finds me sobbing over the sink.

“We have flu medicine,” he says. “She’ll get better.”

I drop my forehead against his chest, feel his arm wrap around my shoulders. Could it really be so easy?

Kris’s silhouette appears in the doorway. “Staff meeting,” he says. “Back office.”

Claire and Joe sit in the chairs opposite the desk. Kris drops into the swiveling seat behind it, and starts rifling through the drawers. “We’ve got vitamin pills in here,” he says, laying everything on the desktop, “and some crayons. Computer cable. A floppy disk.” He pulls out a flat black square. “God, no one’s cleaned this thing out in a decade.”

“Vitamin pills,” Ryan says, picking up the bottle. “With that and the medicine we got, we’re golden.” He sounds so happy, triumphant, like he’s beaten all the odds.

“We’d be golden if it weren’t for the impending probability of starvation,” Kris says. “Claire and Joe haven’t eaten in days, nor have any of the others, I’m guessing.”

“There’s dog food in the pet store,” Ryan offers. “Shay and me, we can go down.”

We’d be on the first floor. So close. He could help me get to the HomeMart.

Ryan and Kris talk like family, skipping the unnecessary words as they hash out whether dog food is worth the risk traveling to the first floor. Not just the risk to us, but to these others, to Preeti—if we fail.

What am I thinking, abandoning my sister for this notebook? It’s just another excuse, this week’s distraction. Even if I get through the HomeMart’s locked gates, get the notebook to the senator, assuming she even has a way to talk to the people on the outside, what will that be worth if Preeti dies alone, in the dark, like Nani?

The pet store plan is scrapped as too risky.

“There’s a chance the madeleine cookies I left in Baxter’s are still there,” Kris says.

Ryan volunteers us.

Claire puts a hand on my arm. “I’ll watch Preeti,” she says. “We’re all family in here.”

“Thanks,” I say, still staring at Preeti’s shadow in the other room.

The bookstore is just down the hall. Ryan and I will run there, race back. Claire will watch her, and Kris will, too, and when Ryan and I return, we’ll have food. Preeti will get better.

But then what?

“Take the book light,” Kris says, walking Ryan and me to the front.

“No need,” Ryan says, pulling the Taser from his waistband. “This thing has a flashlight.” He clicks on a bright, white beam. “Tried to zap a guy and blinded him instead.”

“Whatever works,” Kris says. “Just come back.”

• • •

We head out into the darkness, Ryan’s fingers entwined with mine.

“You look pretty badass with the pole strapped to your back,” he says as we move down the hall.

“Don’t let the costume fool you,” I say.

“Fool me?” he says. “I’ve seen you throw down. You’re the most badass person I know.”

Now he’s just brown-nosing. “You’re forgetting Mike.”

“Mike’s just an ass,” he says, completely serious. “Bad-ass is reserved for people with a code. You have to be good to be badass.”

I squeeze his fingers. He might be the first and only person ever to call a five-foot-one, ninety-pound Indian girl “badass” and really mean it.

Ryan steps over an obstacle that turns out to be a person: a hand shoots out, grabs his crutch.

“Please!” a voice begs.

I whip out my pole to whack the arm, but Ryan blocks my swing. The Taser’s light reveals a boy and girl, two regular kids, curled one around the other.

“I think she’s sick,” the guy says, holding her gaunt face up to the light.

“Here,” Ryan says, and hands him a few pills, ibuprofen. “It’s all I’ve got.”

I go to check my pockets and my hand pats the messenger bag. I guess I never took it off. But inside, there’s only Tagore’s poems, and the notebook.

• • •

Baxter’s is not as abandoned as we’d hoped. Five candles sit atop bookcases at strategic points around the store. They give off enough light for us to see the shadows of four people holed up in the coffee bar.

Ryan shifts on his crutch. “I say we sneak in, and just take them with the Taser.”

“And if its battery dies?” I ask.

“I think we can take a few bookstore guards.”

“Normally? Yes. With half your limbs out of action? Less sure.”

The candles spawn wide swaths of flickering shadow. “What if I create a distraction?” I say. “I can burn a book with one of those candles, get them to come after me, then run out of the store. You can get into the back, grab the cookies, and head out through the service halls.”

“You’re serious?”

“My badass self can handle making one little distraction.”

“I just never imagined you setting fire to a book.”

“Let’s consider these special circumstances.”

He takes my hand. “We should stick together,” he says, eyeing my other hand, which grips the bag with the notebook inside. “You burn the book,” he continues, “then meet me here and we both sneak back, together.”

How do I tell him that I can’t go back? “If I wait, I’m a target,” I say. “And you’ll be safer peg-legging it out through the service halls.”

He half smiles. “Yeah, no,” he says. “You’re right.”

“I can hold my own against a couple of bookstore guards.”

“I know you can.” He leans toward me, places a palm on my cheek. “These guys won’t know what hit them.”

My lips find his. The kiss starts small and grows.

“See you back home,” he says, not letting go of my hand.

I kiss his fingers and then crawl across the hallway.

The candle is a cup of molten wax. I pour some out onto Nana’s book, keeping a few pages dry to act as a wick.
I burn this book as an offering, Nani. Watch over me. And over Ryan, Kris, and the others. Help them take care of Preeti, while I take care of them.

R
Y
A
N

INSIDE BAXTER’S BOOKS

T
he food is right where Kris said it would be. I’m safer going through the service halls like Shay planned, but I grab the box and head back into the coffee bar. I want to let her go, but I can’t.

I slip down the steps and duck behind a stack of magazines. There’s no sign of the guards. Shay’s idea worked. But the other side of the store is hidden now by a large cloud of smoke. Maybe it worked too well.

I sneak through the stacks, maintaining cover until I hit wall. The smoke isn’t from the book Shay burned. A part of the rug is on fire, and the rest is catching fast. The guards smack the flames with a poster.

“Over here!” one says, and points to a patch of rug that just caught.

The one with the poster whips it toward the new branch of the fire. Behind him, the flap of wind feeds the flames. They spread like water across the rug.

“Shay,” I whisper, sneaking around the entry wall into the dark corner we’d started at.

She’s already gone. For a second, I let myself pretend she’s headed back to the mall offices, but I know that’s not where she went. That kiss was her saying good-bye.

I step out into the hall so I can see where she started the fire. The guards have cleared out. Their shadows move up to the coffee bar, then into the kitchen I just left. The rug’s catching like it’s made of gasoline, out of control fast.

I tuck the box under my good arm and start back to the offices. Across the mall, a shadow darts through a patch of light shining up from the lower floors. It could be Shay. I could go after her.

But Kris is expecting this food. So are the people we promised to help. I’m not going to let them—

A headlamp flashes on near the top of an escalator catching Shay in its light.

“Hey, Mike!” I scream, taking a chance it’s him. “Over here!”

Shay runs into the darkness. The headlamp follows her. Have I made things worse? And then I see Mike down the hall, lit orange by the fire that’s spreading behind me.

Crap.

“I told you I’d kill you if I saw you again,” Mike yells.

I spin on my crutch and hobble into the part of the bookstore that’s not on fire.

“Teammates don’t cut and run,” he says from behind a bookcase. He’s followed me in. “What would your brother say? Leaving your team for some girl.” His words compete with the roar of the fire.

“Thad wouldn’t hurt people,” I say, winding around a wall of shelving. The flames climb up the nearest bookcase. Smoke blows right in my face and I drop, coughing.

“Thad would do what he had to,” Mike says from the other side of the bookcase. “He would take out any opponent to save a friend.”

I dare rolling over the fire, then turn the corner into another row. “You don’t have to do what you do,” I say. “You just
like
doing it.”

The bookcase beside me creaks and leans. Books rain down on my head. I scramble away from it, down the aisle, then turn up toward the coffee bar.

“I like
surviving,
” Mike says, climbing over the toppled bookshelf.

“Surviving is easy,” I yell, pushing a rack of magazines between us.

He grabs my good leg and I fall on my face. I flip onto my back, and he crawls over me.

“Survival isn’t easy,” he says. A rack of newspapers behind him catches and shoots flaming bits of paper into the air. “But it’s all we have left.”

“This isn’t survival,” I say, not even trying to block whatever’s coming. “This is kicking ass for sport. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Caring about someone else, trying to help them survive? That’s hard.”

“You let your girlfriend go out there alone,” Mike says, grinning. “How’s that helping her to survive?”

“Shay doesn’t need any help,” I say. His eyes stand out from the smeared black that coats his skin. “But you do.”

And I nail him in the gut with the Taser.

• • •

It takes all my strength to get Mike up the steps and into the kitchen behind the coffee bar, dragging him behind me, his ankles pinned between my good arm and my hip so I can use the crutch. By now, the whole bookstore is on fire and the smoke is choking thick. I pull my shirt over my mouth and crawl out to get the box of cookies, then set them on Mike’s chest.

The smooth tile is easier to pull him along. I get him out of the store and down the service hall before he starts to twitch.

“What the hell?” he shouts. His feet are still limp in my hands.

“Hold still, dickhead. I’m saving your life.”

“You had a Taser?” he asks after I drag him a few more yards.

“Kris took it off Goldman.”

“We wondered where his went.”

We’ve come far enough to have cleared the fire.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” I say, dropping his legs and grabbing my box. “You and Marco could stop being assholes and actually help people.”

“It is how it is,” he says. He moves his shoulders, an arm.

“See you on the outside, then,” I say, hopping down the hall.

He doesn’t say anything more. He doesn’t come after me either.

• • •

“Where’s Shay?” Kris asks when I come into the offices, which now have better lighting. Little candles that turn out to be crayons are stuck to the corners of all the desktops.

“She left,” I say, holding out the box.

He sits in a desk chair. He rests his forehead on his hands. “I hope she makes it,” he says, finally.

“You okay?” I ask.

Instead of answering, he coughs blood across the desk’s blotter. I lift him, lay him down on the floor.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have surrounded ourselves with sick people,” he says. His voice is pinched. His head’s burning hot.

“We don’t leave people behind,” I say, unrolling the canvas from my crutch and shoving it under his head.

He coughs blood onto the rug. “Our team needs a new motto,” he says.

“How about ‘No dying’?” I grab his water bottle off the desk and pour a sip into his mouth.

He swallows. “You print the T-shirts,” he says. “I’ll make a sign.” He closes his eyes.

“Kris?” I shout.

His eyelids crack open. “I’m not dead yet,” he says in that stupid voice.

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Counterproductive,” he grunts, and falls asleep.