Blackout (5 page)

“Aubrey!”

It was Jack’s voice but she couldn’t see anything. Her vision was blurry, trails of the brilliant-white floodlights seared into her eyes.

Something flew through the window in a spray of glass.

She screamed. Jack was yelling. He couldn’t hear her while she was invisible.

The room began to fill with a glowing white light.

Jack bumped into her and knocked her down without knowing he’d done it.

She couldn’t breathe.

Her eyes stung and she wiped at them wildly as tears flowed down her face.

Was the trailer on fire? She couldn’t get any air.

Jack wasn’t yelling for her anymore. She couldn’t see him.

This was her fault. He had wanted to turn himself in.

She reappeared, sucked in a draft of burning air. “Jack!” she called out.

In a moment he was there, grabbing her hand, pulling her from the trailer, away from the bright, stinging smoke.

He twisted her arm behind her back, and the two of them stumbled down the stairs to where she landed, face down in the dirt.

He grabbed her other hand.

She could barely open her swollen eyes.

“Aubrey,” a choking voice said.

She cracked one bleary eye. Jack was beside her, pinned to the ground, his arms bound behind his back.

She felt the tug of cuffs being tightened on her wrists.

“Stay here,” Jack said.

Every impulse in her urged Aubrey to disappear, to slip away from the soldiers and run. But it was too much. She was handcuffed. Her dad had turned her in—sold his own daughter out for beer money.

And as tough as she was—or pretended to be—there was something in Jack’s insistence that he stay with her that she’d liked. They would have been on the run together. A friend who wasn’t using her.

She’d stay.

NINE

DAN WAS STILL CRAWLING OUT
of the car as Laura hurried to the edge of the cliff, excited about Alec’s unexpected new goal. She peered over the rim of the canyon, into what looked like a black river of darkness. “It says here,” Alec said, shining a flashlight on a plaque next to the rest stop parking lot, “that they named it Eagle Canyon because pioneers thought it was so deep not even an eagle could fly out of it.”

Laura looked down again, at the pitch-black bottom, and at the enormous steel beams that held up the short bridge.

It wasn’t a big target. No one was guarding it, which made it even more perfect. She guessed that most of the people who drove over this bridge never realized they were crossing such a deep gorge. It was maybe eighty yards wide, in a stretch of canyon country called the San Rafael Swell. Interstate 70 swerved and climbed through the rugged terrain, and even Laura hadn’t noticed the bridge when she passed over it. Alec had to point out the turnoff.

“There are two bridges,” Alec said to Dan, who still looked exhausted. “The eastbound and westbound are separate, maybe forty feet between them. The plaque says the rocks are limestone and sandstone.”

Dan stood up and stretched. “Now you’re talking.”

Laura climbed over the edge of the cliff, testing the strength of the notoriously grainy and brittle rock. She slipped her hand into a fissure and clenched a fist, creating an ironlike anchor point.

This was what she loved: using her strength for something real. She’d spent the last month doing nothing but hauling an exhausted Dan over her shoulder like a rag doll. Her parts of the plans were never any fun.

Alec didn’t help. He thought she was stupid, just because she was the lowest-ranking member of the group. She wasn’t even the youngest—she was nineteen, only three months younger than Alec—but he treated her like she was a little kid, like she didn’t know how to do anything.

She leapt sideways, hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, and caught another outcrop of stone. She wished she wasn’t wearing shoes—they only slowed her down. Her feet and toes were just as tough and unbreakable as the rest of her.

“Can you climb from here?” Alec asked impatiently.

“Sure,” she said, leaping again to the side and catching herself deftly. She couldn’t even see her landing spot clearly—it was just a craggy outline in the darkness—but she knew she could grab hold of it. It was like a playground, like a circus high-wire act.

“You look like an orangutan,” Dan said, a smile in his voice.

Laura laughed, and swung with one arm, leaping up to where the boys stood.

“You done?” Alec said, the snide frown on his face illuminated only by moonlight.

“We can climb down here easy,” she said. “Lots of hand holds. Dan, are you strong enough to hang on?”

He held up his wrists. There was a rope tied between them. “Alec already helped out with that.”

Laura smiled. Alec probably thought it was ingenious. He thought everything he did was brilliant.

“Try to just crack the supports,” Alec said. “Leave it on a hair trigger for the next eighteen-wheeler that drives over it.”

Dan nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He put his arms, tied together at the wrists, over Laura’s head. He’d ride on her back all the way down the cliff.

“Dan,” Alec said, his tone more serious. “For your mother and mine.”

“Yeah,” Dan answered quietly.

With that, Laura hunched over, lifting Dan off the ground so she could move freely. He smelled of sweat, but she probably did too. They’d been on the run for hours, and sitting in an old car.

She stepped down to a ledge.

“Try not to choke me,” she said, and leapt toward another rock.

TEN

JACK SAT BESIDE AUBREY, BUT
neither of them talked. Two soldiers were behind them in the bus, and Jack was sure he didn’t have to warn Aubrey to be quiet about her—was it invisibility? She was an expert at keeping secrets. At lying.

The two of them had cooperated at her dad’s trailer. They’d given their names and ages, and her dad had confirmed them—with a constant request for extra financial compensation. The man had tried everything: claimed that Aubrey’s job was his only source of income; claimed that she helped him with his handyman jobs around the trailer park; claimed that he was disabled and needed her to help him around the house.

The army had given Jack and Aubrey bracelets, just like the ones they’d used at the Gunderson Barn. They also got plastic handcuffs because they had tried to run. They were considered dangerous.

Jack still didn’t know what to think about Aubrey. It was true—she was exactly what the army was looking for. If it was anyone else, he thought he’d just urge them to tell the truth, to turn themselves in. But this was Aubrey.

She’d lied to him. She’d ditched him. She’d given up a lifelong friendship in favor of parties, malls, convertibles, and dresses. And it wasn’t like he’d forgiven her for any of that. The truth was, when the black ops guys burst into the trailer with tear gas and machine guns, she’d disappeared. She’d tried to escape on her own, to leave Jack by himself yet again. Even in the chaos and the smoke, he’d known.

But he wouldn’t turn her in. He couldn’t. He’d seen the look on her face when she’d confessed what she could do, that she had some kind of superpower. It wasn’t a look of guilt, like she’d been caught, and it wasn’t a look of shame, like she was admitting how poorly she’d treated him. It was a look of fear. Fear of what she could do. Fear of who she was.

He didn’t trust her. He didn’t know if he ever could. But he wasn’t going to turn her in.

She was Aubrey Parsons.

The bus pulled into the parking lot of North Sanpete High School, entering a hive of military activity. There were at least eight Humvees and two other buses. Tables were set up on the asphalt and soldiers sat at laptops. Others patrolled the perimeter with M-16s and night-vision goggles.

When their bus parked, an officer told Jack and Aubrey to stay where they were, and then he and all but one of the soldiers left the bus. The last man stood at the door, his focus more on what was going on in the parking lot than on the two teenagers he was guarding.

Aubrey was fidgeting in her seat. “These cuffs are digging in to me.”

“I know,” Jack answered with a nod.

“Where is everyone?” she asked, her voice a whisper so the guard at the front of the bus couldn’t hear.

“Maybe in the school?” Jack said.

“Maybe. But where are the other buses?”

He shrugged, and felt the awkward pain of his twisted arms. “Moved on to the next town? Ephraim or Manti? Mount Pleasant was probably an easy target because we were all at the dance. It’ll be harder to round up the other kids.”

All the more reason for offering a reward,
Jack thought, though he wondered where that money was going to come from. There were a lot of kids, and he still doubted that most parents would give their kids up without a fight.

An idea struck him, and made him sick to his stomach. “What if they’re testing for something different? Something else besides what you’ve got—what you can do.”

“What do you mean?”

He made certain he was talking too quietly for the guard to hear. “There’re terrorists all over the country. And as of today they’re in Utah. What if something was put into our water supply, or our food? What if this has nothing to do with Nate or you? What if it’s a real virus?”

Aubrey let out a long slow breath and then smiled for the first time in hours. “I don’t know whether to be happy about that or horrified.”

Jack chuckled softly.

The guard stepped farther down the steps so he was looking outside.

“So how does it work?” Jack asked. “It’s not invisibility like in the comic books.”

She paused for several seconds and then spoke. “Here’s my best guess. I don’t think I’m actually changing—I don’t think my skin goes transparent or anything like that. I mean, my clothes disappear too, and people can’t hear me when I’m gone. I think, instead—and I know this is going to sound crazy—but I think that my brain talks to your brain and tells you I’m not there. So your brain just ignores any sign of me. Does that sound nuts?”

Jack thought it over for a moment. “Yes. But not any crazier than just turning invisible.”

She smiled again, and then leaned forward to try to take pressure off her bound hands.

“How long have you been able to do it?” he asked.

Aubrey was silent for several seconds, like she was trying to decide what to say. “About six months,” she finally answered. “It was in March. I’d been at a church activity and all of a sudden I couldn’t see.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. So, my leader drove me to the clinic and they were going to do tests, but my eyesight came back. I was sitting in an exam room and someone walked in, and I freaked out—I was just wearing one of those flimsy hospital gowns—and I realized they couldn’t see me. Something about wanting to be hidden made me just disappear.”

“That’s so weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

“How could you tell they couldn’t see you?”

“Because they just stood there and stared, and then started looking all around—in the bathroom, in the hallway—and they couldn’t hear me or see me. They were sure I’d just been there—they just couldn’t figure out where I’d gone. I finally reappeared, by accident. It took a long time to control it.”

“So the hospital knows?”

Aubrey looked instantly uncomfortable, turning to gaze out the window into the darkness. Jack wished he was back with the old Aubrey. They never used to have secrets.

He prodded. “Did they do tests?”

She slumped back in her seat, her weight on her bound hands again. “It wasn’t a doctor.”

“Your dad?” he asked.

“No.” She let out a long breath, and then laughed. “I was about to swear you to secrecy, but who are you going to tell? The army?”

Jack grinned. “If I could reach, I’d cross my heart.”

“Nicole,” Aubrey said. “Probably the best-kept secret in Mount Pleasant is that Nicole Samuelson, the queen bee of North Sanpete, has kidney failure. She’s on dialysis. She walked in thinking it was her room.”

“Seriously?”

She was getting fidgety again, like she’d just realized she’d told some enormous confidential secret.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Aubrey said, making eye contact for the first time since they’d sat down. “She’d kill me.”

Jack opened his mouth, but stopped himself. He carefully considered his words. He didn’t know how much of the old Aubrey was still there, but maybe it didn’t matter. They were tied up, on a bus to who-knows-where, captured by the military for some mysterious testing.

And besides, he’d wanted answers to this for a long time.

“That’s when you became Nicole’s friend,” he said.

“Yeah, you can call it that,” she said. She laughed again, but it was colder, more bitter. “We were never friends. Nicole asked the nurse if she could get her dialysis in that room, and of course they let her because she’s a Samuelson. So we shared it, and she talked to me. And she told me what she’d seen. I was freaking out, and I didn’t know what to say.”

Jack could imagine it all. That was the old Aubrey—the Aubrey Parsons who was too shy to talk during class at all, even though she knew every answer. She was probably as terrified of Nicole as she was of what was happening to her body.

“I didn’t become her friend,” Aubrey said. “I became her spy. In exchange, I got to hang out with her. She invited me to things. She—well, you know the rest.”

The idea made him mad, and he didn’t try to hide it. Aubrey never needed Nicole to make Jack like her. Honestly, Aubrey was prettier than Nicole. She wasn’t the Scandinavian bubbleheaded blonde that Nicole was—the bland generic beauty that the movies tried to convince him was gorgeous. Aubrey was tall, with long, straight brown hair and eyes that were a stark gray, eyes that reminded him of fresh snow on the mountains.

And honestly, he liked her better in jeans and a T-shirt than a fancy ball gown.

There was a noise at the front of the bus, and the soldier snapped to attention. On command, he hopped to the top step and took a clipboard from another man.

A voice shouted at a line of teens outside the bus. Jack strained to hear.

“. . . to take you to the testing and quarantine facilities. The rest of your classmates have already been moved there. You are the last batch from this county.”

“This county,” Jack repeated, but Aubrey hushed him.

“This will not take long, but it will require your participation. Congress has declared martial law. You kids know what that means? It means that we’re the police now. It means that if you have any problems, you will talk to us, and if you cause any problems, you’ll answer to us.”

There was a long pause. Someone was asking something. Aubrey whispered under her breath, but Jack didn’t catch it.

“Listen,” the soldier continued. “We’re on your side. You’re American citizens and we’ll treat you with as much respect as our orders allow. We have kids of our own.”

Jack heard the response to that. “Then why are we in handcuffs?”

“All will be explained when we reach the quarantine area. I’m authorized to tell you two things. First, the virus that we’re testing for—it’s being spread by the terrorists. And second, all known terrorist subjects have been teenagers.”

Six more teens were on the bus now, though Jack didn’t know any of them. Four were from Manti, the town twenty miles to the south, and two others had managed to escape the shooting at the dance. Jack perked up when the seventh was called.

“Name and town?” the officer on the top step barked.

Matt looked terrified. He was the youngest of the group so far, small, thin, and drowned in his dirtied suit and tie. “Matt Ganza,” he said. “I’m from Mount Pleasant.”

“What school?”

“North Sanpete High. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left the dance. I’m really sorry.”

The officer ignored him, and flipped through a thick notebook. Finally, he held it up, comparing a picture to Matt’s face.

“Okay,” the officer said, and another soldier immediately grabbed Matt’s wrist and slipped a plastic bracelet onto it. He cinched it tight and Matt grimaced.

The officer ordered Matt to find a seat. His eyes met Jack’s, but he turned quickly and sat toward the front.

They moved to the next person in line—Nicole. The soldier helped her up much more gently than he’d done with Matt.

Aubrey stared for a moment and then looked down at her lap.

“Name?” the officer asked.

“Nicole Samuelson,” she said. She was still wearing her dress—a skimpy, shimmering thing that looked like it was made out of giant sequins. She was six feet tall normally, and in her heels she towered over the soldier.

How had she managed to escape the dance without a torn dress or broken stilettos?

The officer flipped through the notebook. “Also from North Sanpete?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling happily as though she was excited they were there. “Go Hawks!”

The man smirked. Jack couldn’t believe it. Nicole was flirting with the soldiers.

The other soldier attached her bracelet, so gently it almost looked loose on her wrist.

When she turned to walk down the aisle of the bus and saw Aubrey, Nicole’s face broke into a smile and she gave her a wink. She sat down next to Matt.

Four more students got on, all younger than Jack. They looked scared. Two were in their pajamas; they hadn’t been at the dance—someone had turned them in.

They were all prisoners now.