Sky on Fire Read online

Then he grabbed

  me by the coat.

  And he proclaimed:

  The pain is good,

  the pain will burn

  and make you strong.

  But needless sufferin’,

  that’s for the weak.

  And then he made

  me sing his song.

  I said: Get up, get up, get up. I will!

  Get up now, I’ll get up!

  She’s gone for good, I’m sad to say.

  But I’ll not die today, today.

  No, I’ll not die today.

  She repeated the chorus and I sang with her and so did a couple of the others. We sang softly so our voices didn’t carry very far in the black air—I don’t think.

  It was a catchy song. Kind of uplifting, and at the same time sad.

  Sahalia seemed to have a talent for picking the right songs for the right moments. That’s something I could never do.

  I thought about that for a while as we walked. I thought about Sahalia. She had changed a lot since I had known her. A lot of change, it seemed to me, in a short amount of time. Maybe I had changed, too. That was certainly possible. But I liked this Sahalia much better than I had liked the old one.

  “How much farther?” Max or Batiste or Ulysses would still ask every so often.

  “Awhile,” Niko would still say.

  After that happened, like, maybe 50 more times, Sahalia hissed, “Niko.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Behind us,” she whispered.

  There was a little dot of light behind us. Maybe a quarter mile away.

  Someone else was on the road.

  “Keep an eye on them, okay?” Niko asked.

  But then, maybe 10 minutes later, we saw another group of travelers ahead of us. They came off the highway and down to our road.

  They had 3 flashlights and were shining them all around. Not very inconspicuous. Kind of stupid.

  But they seemed to be moving quickly and soon they were quite a ways ahead of us.

  “Who are they?” Max whispered.

  “They’re travelers,” Niko answered. “Just like us.”

  I looked at Sahalia and we smiled.

  “They’re trying to get to the airport. Just like us,” Niko repeated.

  I cannot say how far we walked, that last march. If we had been closer to the highway, I could have calculated it with the mile markers. I imagine we could walk a mile in 30–40 minutes.

  When we left Mario’s, it was 8:32 a.m. We stopped for protein shakes and water at 11:15. Then we walked again until 1:30.

  Maybe 5 miles?

  Well, let’s say 5 miles +/− 2 miles from Mario’s we saw a light in the distance. Much brighter than the emergency lights on the side of the highway. This one was shining in a circle, spinning its head around, like a lighthouse light.

  It was a beacon.

  “What is that?” Max asked. “Are we there? Is that the airport? Are we there?”

  “I don’t know,” Niko said.

  We picked up the pace.

  Sahalia smiled at me. A big, real smile.

  Batiste squeezed my hand.

  We could hear a man’s voice on a loudspeaker. We couldn’t make out the words, but you could hear that it was some kind of a message, because the cadence repeated.

  As we drew closer, we saw people gathered around the light. They stood a ways apart from one another, in small groups. Some groups were just couples and some groups had as many as 8–10 people. Most of them wore layers and face masks. There were a few people raving and acting dodgy—they must have been type AB.

  We made our way up to the group. Slowly, edging forward. Niko had Sahalia push Max. I guess he wanted his hands free in case we needed to fight. He was probably wishing he still had our gun, but I didn’t say anything.

  No one moved toward us or anything.

  The other people looked as ragged and filthy as we had before Mario’s. We definitely looked the best out of everyone. Relatively clean, with the two cool orange Army face masks (no one else had those).

  I felt like if Mario could have seen us, he would have been proud.

  The message came on again: “You have reached an assembly point for the emergency evacuation of the Four Points area. Remain here until the next bus arrives. Buses will arrive every hour on the hour.”

  I was so dazed, hearing that.

  We had made it.

  Sahalia let out a big whoop of joy. She hugged me and kissed me right on the mouth!

  Ulysses went to Max and hugged him and they cried together, and Batiste was hugging me from behind as Sahalia, now with her arm draped around my shoulders, gave another big whoop!

  The other people joined in with her. Maybe it took her elation to set them off, but suddenly everyone was laughing, crying, and hugging one another, where before Sahalia had made that sound, they were reserved and defensive.

  And then I saw Niko. He had sunk down to his knees and had his face in his hands.

  I went over to him.

  “You did it,” I said. “You saved us.”

  “Yeah,” he moaned. “But I lost her.”

  * * *

  The bus came, just like it said it would, on the hour. Okay, it was 12 minutes late but who cared!

  It was a school bus. But painted Army green.

  The door opened up and the driver (not Mrs. Wooly, of course not) was a soldier wearing an Army air mask.

  “Welcome aboard,” he said with his metallic-sounding voice. “We’ll have you safe and inside in no time.”

  We filed onto the bus. Somehow Sahalia had broken the ice and the people from the different groups were starting to talk to one another.

  A man with a beard asked me where we were from. When I said Monument, he couldn’t believe it.

  “That’s over 60 miles away!” he exclaimed. “We had a hell of a time and we’re just from Castle Rock.”

  I shrugged. But I was happy inside.

  “How’d you do it?” he asked.

  “It was Niko,” I said. I pointed to Niko, who had Max on his lap in the seat across from me.

  “No,” interrupted Batiste, who was sitting with me. “It was God.”

  * * *

  The bus went so fast, Dean! The road was entirely cleared. We were in a military zone now and everything was different.

  When we passed through the places with big stores and office buildings, it looked like there had been a war. There was bullet spray on the walls, and burned out Jeeps and some of the buildings were on fire.

  I saw bodies stacked into a great, long pile. For burial, I hope, not burning. Though I guess at this point, nobody cared.

  The closer we got to the airport, the more cars there were. All the fields around the airport were just filled with cars. Cars parked at crazy angles, not like a tidy parking lot, but like a jigsaw puzzle. Crammed in every which way.

  Large drifts of the white moss-mold enveloped the cars in places. The moss grew in waves, up and down, ebbing and flowing through the cars. It looked like an art installation, actually. An ocean of car bodies and mold.

  And there was Denver International Airport, its white peaks lit up from inside. Rising up out of the car field like a castle.

  Everybody cheered. Well, not everybody. There were people like Niko who seemed terribly sad or deeply in shock. But Sahalia and the kids and I cheered and many other people joined in.

  We pulled up to a set of glass double doors. We had made it, Dean. We made it to DIA.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  DEAN

  DAY 15

  I woke up on a satiny bedspread on the floor.

  Around me came the snores of the other cadets.

  I tried to sit up and my body protested plenty, but the screaming, brain-hole-drilling shoulder pain of the day before was gone.

  I couldn’t figure out what time it was. Was it morning? Night?

  From across the space there was a light shining. I squinted. It was Kildow, I thought. He see
med to be reading something.

  I closed my eyes, just to rest them for a second.

  * * *

  And then I was being nudged awake by a boot.

  Payton looked down at me. He carried a mug of water and was brushing his teeth.

  “How’s the shoulder, Deano?”

  “Better,” I said.

  “Better, sir!”

  “Better, sir!” I repeated. I groaned, sitting up. But it was better.

  The cadets were eating Pop-Tarts and drinking iced teas for breakfast.

  “Show us where the batteries and lights are. We want to get a little more light going. Don’t they have any generators in here? You know, like those portable ones?”

  “Not that we’ve found,” I said.

  I could lead them to the aisle with the lights but they’d see that all the Christmas lights and the lanterns were missing. Aargh.

  “I thought I saw a generator,” Jake said.

  “No,” I answered. “We don’t have any.”

  “Yeah, near the leaf blowers and stuff.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ladies, ladies, figure it out,” Payton said. “We’re doing physical conditioning in thirty and I want as much light as possible. Then we do a total inventory on this place. I want it listed down to the tampon.”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” shouted Jake.

  “Sir, yes, sir!” I echoed, late and sounding lame.

  “Dismissed, doolies,” Payton said with a fond chuckle.

  Jake led me toward Home Improvement.

  “Why did you say we have a generator?” I hissed as soon as we were out of earshot. “They’re gonna be disappointed!”

  “I was just trying to get you alone for a second,” he answered. “Look, we’re going to have to kill them.… It’s the only way to keep Astrid and the kids safe.”

  “We can’t kill five guys, Jake,” I protested.

  “We just need to get that semiautomatic from the black kid.”

  “I don’t want to kill five guys, Jake! You don’t know what it’s like!”

  Jake gave me a hard look.

  “They killed Brayden. My best friend. They killed him! You think we should just forget about that?” Jake snapped.

  “Jake, you’re not thinking clearly,” I protested.

  “They killed him and I’m going to make them pay.”

  “It won’t make you feel better,” I said.

  “No, I know that. Nothing will ever make me feel better,” he said. He shrugged his shoulders. “But we have to keep Astrid safe. So we’re going to kill those cadets.”

  “No, Jake,” I said. “We just need to get our hands on Anna. We get her as a hostage, maybe we can make them leave!”

  Jake looked at me, chewing the side of his mouth.

  “All right. Shoot. Yeah, that’s a better plan,” he said.

  “Hey!” Zarember came at a run. “Don’t make Payton wait! That’s the first thing you need to know!”

  * * *

  In the space where the bus had sat, Payton had had his cadets make a little gym.

  They had brought over the weights from the Sports aisle, and they had laid down a bunch of rubber mats—the kind you lock together.

  Jake had snatched some of the battery-powered lanterns from the House.

  We should have just told them about it at the beginning. It was like a time bomb—when Payton found that House hidden away, he was going to lose it.

  Jake set up the lanterns and I brought some car batteries and clip-on desk lamps in their boxes. I told Payton I thought there must be a way to jerry-rig them to the car batteries.

  “Now there’s some resourcefulness. Look at that!” Payton commanded the cadets.

  “Thank you, sir!” I yelled.

  Every time I did that I felt like a phony and a fraud.

  Because of my arm, my “gimpy arm” as Payton put it, I was excused from physical conditioning.

  I worked on getting the lights set up while Payton put Jake and the others through a grueling routine of weight lifting and cardio.

  “That’s it, Simonsen!” he hollered. “Get under it. Come on, Zarember, push, push, push!”

  Jake actually seemed to be enjoying it.

  I saw Anna drifting toward the Girls’ clothing section.

  I put the light down.

  I would follow her into the aisle and I would grab her.

  The thought made me sick to my stomach.

  But to save Astrid?

  I could do it.

  “Where you going?” Payton demanded.

  “No-nowhere,” I stammered.

  Payton crossed to me in three strides. He grabbed me by the shirtfront.

  “Anna’s off-limits, you hear me? No one touches her. No one thinks about her. Got that?” He got up so close that spit from his mouth sprayed me in the face. His teeth were yellow and his breath minty fresh.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, sir!”

  “I tell you what, you have so much time on your hands, why don’t you make us some lunch?!”

  What is it about me that screams “cook”?

  I went to the Food aisles, in the exact opposite direction of where Anna had headed.

  What could I make these idiots? And what could I cook over a brass fire pit?

  Soup, I decided. Chunky soup—the kind with those little hamburgers in it. Payton would like that.

  We had some saltines, too.

  I didn’t even hear her coming.

  She touched me on the shoulder and I turned and Astrid was in my arms, kissing me hard, holding me to her.

  “Where are you hiding?” I whispered when our kiss ended. “It’s not safe.”

  Astrid pointed up.

  “I just … I had to give you these.”

  She pressed three foil packs into my hand. The sleeping pills. The EZ-melt ones. The ones that had knocked Chloe out for a day and a half.

  “We used one on Luna and I thought…”

  Of course. Sleeping pills.

  “It’s brilliant,” I said. “Now go.”

  She took my hand and led me to the next aisle and I saw the tile ajar in the ceiling.

  I could see Caroline and Henry and Chloe peeking out. They looked tired and scared and grimy.

  Caroline gave a little wave.

  Astrid brought her face close to my ear and whispered, “Look, I want you to know that you’re—you’re the one for me. In case we die. I want you to know.”

  And as lightly as a cat, she climbed back up the shelves and up into her nest in the ceiling.

  * * *

  I rushed into the next aisle.

  I had to get the pills into something. And fast. But not the soup. It would be hot and, no, they might not all eat it.

  Juice.

  There it was.

  That kind with the carrots and vegetables in it. Yes, yes, yes. It was sweet, really sweet, but had veggies so if it tasted a little off …

  I grabbed two large bottles and took them to the back of the aisle.

  I hoped that if someone came looking for me, I’d have time to hide the pills.

  I unscrewed the tops off the two bottles and started pressing the sleeping pills out of the packs. There were eight pills in each pack and I had three packs. Well, two pills were out of one of the packs but it was still a lot of pills.

  My heart hammered in my chest as I popped the pills into the juice.

  Twenty-two sleeping pills. Eleven in each bottle.

  Twenty-two sleeping pills to fell five cadets and to save our lives.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ALEX

  10–0 MILES

  It’s hard to describe how huge the operation at the airport was.

  First, we went into a waiting area for all new arrivals. There were about 200 other people when we got there, and every 10 minutes or so, another busload would arrive, adding 5–20 people.

  They had taken seats from the airport gates and put them in there. They weren’
t bolted to the floor so they wobbled, but they’d basically made a big waiting area.

  Everywhere there were signs: EVERYONE MUST WEAR A MASK AT ALL TIMES.

  There were air masks piled on the tables. Some were used, some were new. There weren’t any Army ones, like our two, available, but there was a different kind, like an Army-issue mask for civilians. I found one for me, and for Sahalia and Batiste. I put mine on and there was a distinct smell of some kind of fruit. I hated that smell but I couldn’t remember what fruit it was.

  “Ugh,” Sahalia groaned. “Why do we need these? The damage has been done, for God’s sake.”

  But we wore them. Everyone did. Because if you didn’t, an Army guy with a rifle would come over and shove one into your hands.

  I think that they made us wear them for the sake of the type ABs. Obviously the type Os and As knew to keep their masks on.

  But I had seen some ABs, paranoid and wild-eyed, on the bus. I guess some ABs were functional enough to get themselves to safety, but not rational enough to keep a mask on. With a mask on, those same crazy people looked sedate. Exhausted and worn-out, but sedate.

  * * *

  It was an unreasonable assumption for me to make, but in some part of my brain, I thought that as soon as we got to DIA, I would find our parents. Like they’d be waiting right by the door or something.

  But I scanned every masked face in that waiting room. Each of us did, except Max, who was asleep in his stroller.

  “They’re not here,” Batiste said, voicing exactly what I’d been thinking.

  “I know,” I said. “But maybe inside. Maybe inside…”

  * * *

  Our little group all sat together in some chairs.

  A team of soldiers in hazmat suits with, get this, pads and paper wrote down our names, addresses, and social security numbers, if we knew them.

  “Is there some kind of list?” I asked the man who took my information. “Of the survivors? Of the people who are here now?”

  “We’re putting it together, kid,” he said. I couldn’t really see his face, but he sounded tired.

  He put a bracelet on my wrist. It had a number. He wrote the number down on the pad, next to my name, and he also had an old-fashioned handheld scanner, which he used to scan the barcode on my bracelet.

  That was good. I was in the system now. All of us were. That would help our parents find us, it had to.