No Safety in Numbers (25 page)

S
he woke with a start in the darkness, heart racing. A body pressed against her side—was she under some pile? She remembered a wave of people screaming as they rushed toward her.

Her eyes adjusted and she saw the red lettering of an exit sign far down the hall. So she was not stuck under a pile of bodies. She was in some hallway. Her breathing slowed.

She guessed that the body next to her was Marco’s—at least, she hoped that was true. She shuffled out from under him. He shifted in his sleep and readjusted against the wall, but did not wake.

Shay’s purse was still slung around her body. She fished inside the bag and took out her keys—one of them had a tiny LED light on it. Her father had given it to her as a safety measure. “In case you’re ever trying to get home in the dark,” he’d said, pressing the bulky red key into
her hand. Remembering his words brought tears to her eyes.
I’m trying to get home, Bapuji
. All she wanted was to be home.

Given the almost total darkness of the hallway, her tiny lamp illuminated the walls with what seemed like a brilliant white light. The sleeper was indeed Marco. He sat slumped in a corner at the end of a long, white hallway. Shay flashed the light to her left and saw two large doors, one of which had “PaperClips” printed in block type on it.

They were in the service hallway outside the medical center. Marco must have dragged her down here from the food court. She touched her fingers to her temple, remembering suddenly being knocked over and blacking out. A loose band of gauze was wrapped around her head. She winced at the size of the goose egg under the skin above her right ear. Her head throbbed, but the darkness kept the pain from feeling too bad.

Why, though, were they in the hallway and not in the actual medical ward? Worry oozed through her belly. Had the stampede that ran over her in the food court spread throughout the mall?

Preeti.

The doors to the PaperClips were barred on the service hallway side by a crowbar. Shay stood and pulled the rod of metal from between the handles.

The stockroom was as dark as the service hallway. Shining her small light in front of her, Shay saw smashed boxes, cases of pens dumped across the floor, broken plastic and glass. She walked carefully toward where the loading dock should have been—where she’d guessed the hazmat people had their passage to the real world.
The door was closed—not a ray of light pierced the black. It must have been walled over like the exits.

The medical teams had left, sealed them in. But what about all the patients? Had they taken Preeti and Nani with them?
Please…

Shay navigated through the debris on the stockroom floor to the doors that led into the main part of the store. What had once been the emergency medical center was a disaster zone.

The maze of curtains had collapsed, creating tents in some places; while in other areas, the fabric was shredded, tangled amidst the rods of the metal frames that had held the curtains up. The glass of the front wall to the PaperClips was completely smashed and beyond that, the plywood barrier lay in pieces against the wall in the corridor.

Something groaned off to Shay’s left. Lifting a piece of curtain-wall still in its frame, Shay found a woman lying on the floor beside a toppled gurney.

The medical teams had left the patients. Had left them here to be crushed.

“Preeti!” she screamed.

“Help!” a voice cried. Then another. Violent coughs erupted from beneath a pile near the wall. Shay began digging through the mess. Hot tears ran down her face.
I’m coming, Preeti…
Her head throbbed. The piles of wreckage moved as bodies writhed beneath them. Shay stepped into a clear patch of ground. A bluish hand shot out and grabbed her ankle. Shay kicked the hand off. She had to find Preeti. She lifted a wall of fabric and found a person in a hazmat suit curled over a toppled bed.

Shay touched the suit. The person started, rolled over.

“Is it over?” the person asked. He wasn’t wearing a face mask.

“Shouldn’t you be outside with the rest of them?” Shay said, voice dripping with venom.

The man stood. “My suit was torn in the evacuation. I was deemed exposed and had to stay behind.”

Shay recognized him from earlier with Nani—
Dr. Chen
. “Have you seen my sister?”

He shook his head. “She should be where you left her.” He scanned the disaster zone. “What have we done?” He sounded humbled.

Good.
Shay pushed past him and began digging through the junk once again. He worked next to her, helped her lift the heavy pieces. He paused to check the people they found; Shay kept going.

Lifting a panel of curtain, Shay found her.

“Dr. Chen!” she screamed.

Preeti was beside her gurney, which lay on its side. She wasn’t moving.
Why isn’t she moving?

Dr. Chen took Shay’s arm and held her steady. “Let me take a look.”

The whole world was blurry. Shay rubbed her fist across her eyes. Her contacts were so dry.

“She’s asleep,” Dr. Chen said from somewhere below. “Her fever has broken. She’s going to be okay.”

Shay dropped to her knees and hugged Dr. Chen. He patted her back awkwardly, like he was not used to comforting. As Shay remembered, his bedside manner had been nonexistent.

They righted Preeti’s gurney and Dr. Chen laid her on the mattress. Shay took off one of her T-shirts and dabbed Preeti’s sweaty face.

Her eyes fluttered. “Is it morning?” she asked. She must have slept through the riots. Preeti had all the luck.

“You’re better,” Shay said, her words choked by a sob.

Preeti smiled, then curled her knees up. “Tired,” she said.

Shay kissed her forehead.

“Where’s Nani?” Preeti mumbled.

Nani.

Shay tugged on Dr. Chen’s shoulder. He helped a man back onto his cot, then turned to Shay. “Glad to see your sister made it,” he said.

“Where’s the ICU?” she asked.

Dr. Chen seemed surprised she knew about it. “I’m not sure it’s safe to go back there.”

“Just tell me where it is.”

He led her to the back corner of the sales floor, opposite the windows. As they walked, Shay noticed a high-pitched whine that grew louder. A hole had been cut in the wall leading into the neighboring store. Thick plastic hung where a door should have been.

“We needed to keep the facility separate,” Dr. Chen said, pushing aside the doorway.

The whine became a shriek and it was coming from the machines: the sound of flatlining. Shay covered her ears. There were rows of patients, all with tubes in their mouths like Nani. Shay couldn’t tell which machines were making the noise.

Shay ran to the closest one. An old man. His machine wailed. Air pumped into him, but his chest didn’t move. He was dead, his body cold.

Shay checked the next bed. Another corpse. And another. And another. Nani wasn’t like them. She was alive. The faces were blue-black. Each suck of air from the machines forced a froth of blood up the tubes. Nani couldn’t be like them.

One of the blue faces was familiar. No. She was asleep. Not dead. Sleeping.

Dr. Chen grabbed Shay’s shoulders. “You shouldn’t have to see this.”

Shay wanted to scream. But she was cold, frozen. Her eyes burned, dry as paper.

“Is she dead?”

Dr. Chen wrapped his arm around her, pulled her away. “Let’s get you back to your sister.”

Her legs gave way first, stumbling out from under her. The room went black. She felt Dr. Chen grab her, keep her from hitting the floor. But all she heard was the shrieking of the machines, the screams of the dead.

L
ight shone red through Ryan’s eyelids. He was alive.

He opened his eyes slowly. His lips felt dry and cracked.

“He’s awake,” Mr. Reynolds said from off to Ryan’s right.

Ryan tried to move his arms, but found them pinned to his chest by the sleeping bag he was packed in. He pushed up onto his elbows. Mike knelt at his side and looked like he might cry.

“I knew you’d make it,” he said, though for Mike to be near tears, Ryan feared his survival had seemed a long shot at some point in the night.

Drew came over with something that smelled like chicken soup. “From the employees’ locker,” he said. “Cup o’ crap.” He spooned some into Ryan’s mouth.

Ryan sputtered at the hot liquid. “I think I can feed myself,” he said.

Drew feigned offense. “Oh, look who’s the big man now.”

Taking the hot cup in his hands, Ryan wondered at the gift of this morning. He was alive.

“Now can we get out of here?” Mr. Reynolds said, glancing out Shep’s entrance. “Of course, it’s too quiet to drill.” He picked up a tennis ball and chucked it at the wall. The bong of the ball against the paint seemed to echo throughout the post-riot silence.

They’d lost their chance of escape via jackhammer because of him. But Ryan couldn’t feel guilty. He hadn’t choked on his own blood, his fingers were still pinkish white—he was alive. The morning sunlight fought its way through a thin layer of clouds to shine on the tile in the hall. How long since he’d really appreciated the sky?

The skylights.

He slurped a steaming mouthful from the cup. “I know a way out,” he said.

It didn’t take long to get the guys into harnesses— companies made them practically idiot-proof at this point. Ryan pulled two lengths of rope from the rack and collected a bunch of quickdraws and regular carabiners, and a belay device.

The plan was for Ryan to free-climb the column closest to the central skylight. The columns, which stretched from the first floor all the way to the ceiling, were essentially colorfully painted scaffolding. Four thick poles formed a square, between which diagonally placed metal beams formed irregular triangles. Every few yards, there was a neon sign or artsy metal thing strapped to the poles. But up by the ceiling, the scaffold was clear.

Once at the top, Ryan would belay the others as they climbed. When all three reached the ceiling, they would use an ice ax to bust open the skylight and escape onto the roof.

The only problem was that Ryan still felt like crap. The soup and two bottles of Sportade helped, but they only went so far. He’d washed the fever-sweat from his body in the little staff bathroom in the back and changed into some climbing shorts and a T-shirt. In one of the bathroom closets, he’d found some Tylenol and pounded two. He felt a little better, but not one hundred percent.

Ryan hung the ropes from his harness and tied on his climbing shoes. The others hovered nearby. They’d all judged his plan to be a winner. “That’s QB thinking,” Drew had said. Mike had merely clapped him on the shoulder like a proud father. Mr. Reynolds had begrudgingly agreed to the plan after bitching about having to engage in physical activity. Mike had told him he was free to stay behind.

They walked cautiously up to the third floor. The halls were oddly empty, like the riot had cleared all the people from the mall. But every once in a while they heard coughing or crying, betraying the people still camped out in the stores.

Ryan planned to climb without a safety rope, but when Mike stood at the base of the column and took in the height of the climb that remained coupled with the drop to the first floor courtyard, he’d strapped on the belay device and asked Ryan what to do.

“No way I’m letting you die after saving your ass all this time,” Mike said, smirking.

Ryan showed him the basics of belaying a person—there wasn’t much to show and Mike was a fast learner. When he finished, he took Mike’s hand.

“I owe you,” he said, pulling Mike in for a shoulder bump. Funny how a guy could completely freak you out, but also be the only person you trusted.

Mike patted Ryan’s arm, almost hugging him. “Thad’s always had my back, and I will always have yours.”

The first few feet were easy, but once Ryan got halfway to the ceiling, his hands began to sweat from nerves. Patting chalk powder from his pouch onto his palms, he tried to think of anything but the plash of the central fountain some forty feet below. He fastened a ’biner to the scaffold around his belay rope—at least he’d only fall so far.

The last time he climbed, he’d been with Shay. He wondered where she was, why she hadn’t met him in the parking garage, though now he was grateful that she hadn’t. He didn’t want her to know about the cops he’d bulldozed.

Thinking about the cops didn’t help his sweat problem.

So he thought of Shay falling toward him, the way the harness had wrapped around her waist, the smoothness of her skin when he’d touched her.

And he was at the top. With a hard-on. But at the top. Sixty feet stretched between him and the first floor, but he was mere inches from the skylight and freedom. He pressed his fingers to the cold glass, then clipped himself to the column with a quickdraw. He arranged the rope through the bottom carabiners of two other quickdraws, attached to two points on the scaffold, and signaled Mike to release the belay device. Ryan pulled it up, hooked
the belay device to his harness, and threaded the other end of the rope back down to Mike.