Goodhouse (33 page)

“Excuse me,” I said, but the man beside me didn't move. I was just shifting my weight, preparing to force my way through the crowd when I glimpsed Montero—standing less than twenty feet away.

He stood near the altar. Thick, wavy hair framed his face. He, too, wore a suit with a rosebud in the lapel, but he looked uncomfortable in it, uneasy. He was part of a line of men that created a sort of human barrier between Tim and the crowd. And a few feet from Montero was the giant, with his thick neck, the black undulating tattoos staining the skin of his cheeks. My first thought was that they must have escaped after all. Tim must have known them, he must have helped them, gotten them a print. But that wasn't right. If they were fugitives, they wouldn't be here, out in the open, so bold, so unafraid.

“Let me,” Tim said, “be a tool in your hand, a hammer brought down. We are fighting for the destiny of a planet. And you can step away. You can abdicate, claim it's too hard. You're free to do that.” He paused. “Or you can acknowledge that it
is
a fight, that it has come to you, and that you didn't ask for it, but you will stand up with your God. You will link arms on this battlefield.”

As his voice rose, the people around me began to shout their encouragement. An organ started playing and a hymn broke out, the lyrics projected in the air above Tim, tall white letters, the words
verse
and
chorus
blinking like a warning. I was cold with shock, and whenever Montero swept the crowd with his gaze, I bowed my head as if overcome by prayer.

I had to get out of there. I said, “Excuse me,” again to the man beside me, but he didn't hear, or didn't want to. The crowd was packed too tight. Everyone's mouth was opening and closing, creating a river of noise. And then I realized that I was thinking about it all wrong. That I had been stupid to believe that Mule Creek inmates were wandering around the factory, sneaking over to our side, their absence going unnoticed and unreported.

Someone opened the door. That was the pattern of the Goodhouse attacks. The Zeros appeared like a virus, multiplying and overwhelming, and always—someone opened the door. And that was when I knew what Montero was not. He was not an inmate, not a convict. He was not breaking out of the Ione campus. He was breaking in.

 

TWENTY

I had just turned and started toward the exit when a dozen civilian police officers poured through the entryway. All of them wore black helmets and body armor. They were faceless human shapes, cutting through the crowd with the confidence of training and the aggression of purpose. I saw them as if they were all connected—some tentacle unfurling, reaching. I was briefly certain that they were headed toward me, that I had been identified, and I felt again the magnitude of my error.

“Illegal search,” someone yelled. “Illegal search!”

An officer told everyone to remain calm. “Stay in your seats,” he said. “Stay where you are.” But this had the opposite effect. The crowd surged in all directions as people pushed for the exits. It felt like we'd all taken a step closer together. My arms were actually pinned to my sides now, and I was struggling to free myself, pushing against the woman with the purse. Tim alone seemed composed. He remained at the altar, standing behind a shield of flowers.

“Welcome, brothers,” he called. “This is a peaceful gathering.”

“We need everyone to sit down,” one of the officers said. Another one held something that looked like a gun with a large boxy nozzle. He swept it over the crowd, searching.

“We have nothing to hide,” Tim said. “We are happy to comply.”

One woman near the back of the church screamed, “Get your hands off me.” She appeared to be struggling. “Don't touch me!”

“This is private property,” someone else said. “Come back with a warrant.”

The crowd was bearing me toward the hallway that led to the restrooms. I felt the hands of those behind me clutching my shirt, and I was actually holding on to other people, trying not to be pulled down. We were all fused in this moment, some unwieldy animal, and I promised myself that if I survived, I would never go back into a crowd—never willingly.

I had to push hard to get into the hallway. The lady with the purse was still in front of me, and we moved together into the room with the green towers. The far wall had a large panel of canvas that had been drawn to one side, revealing a wide gap. A mass of people shoved their way through it, out into the clear morning light. I could tell there were police nearby. I heard shouting. I felt the crowd resist as if they were one organism absorbing a blow. “Stay where you are,” an officer called, and his voice was very close, alarmingly so. “Stay where you are.”

Someone grabbed the woman I'd been following and threw her to the ground. I started to run. I glanced behind me and saw a thick line of police moving to cover the back entrance. The white sides of the tent rose above them like a glacier. I passed a narrow alleyway and saw more police advancing at a run. I didn't feel my wound now. Even my legs were numb. I accelerated, and it seemed to take no effort at all. The landscape of the tents sailed past as if the city itself were moving. I didn't know where I was, and most of the shops were closed anyway, some kind of metal webbing drawn down over their entrances. Nothing was familiar, and this only added to my disorientation.

A pedicab shot past, overloaded with people. “This way, kid,” someone called. “This way.” I had no idea who'd spoken. I was running blindly. I felt like I couldn't get a full breath. At last I stumbled onto a road that I recognized. It was the one that cut through the residential tents, the road I'd taken with Bethany. Suddenly the path that I'd memorized snapped into place. I knew where I was.

I hid in the quarantine area. There were no sick people there, of course, only solar generators, canned food, and portable water-treatment kits. It made sense—located deep in the residential section and heavily guarded, it was a sham for the public. I embedded myself among the valuables. I crawled between cans of beans and cooking oil. If the contents shifted I'd be crushed, but there was no way I could get to Javier's tonight, and I was almost too exhausted to care. I located a few jugs of water and broke the seal on one of them. I drank deeply and then poured the rest of the contents over the wound in my belly. I hoped Bethany wasn't on the streets, wasn't running, wasn't risking herself. I willed her to be safe.

I must have fallen asleep, because I lost track of time. I awoke to find the tent blazingly hot, the metal tins around me burning like coils in some larger oven. I drank more of the water, but it did nothing to ease my thirst. I remember pulling the intake form out of my pocket, unfolding the quickpaper. I tried to read it, but I couldn't focus my eyes. I was squinting and straining even though the document was right in front of my face. The tent cooled down rapidly after sunset and I began to shiver, to alternate between hot and cold.

At one point I rolled over and saw Tim lying beside me. He was wearing a student's uniform, a man dressed like a child. “We have to tell somebody,” I said. I started to shake him, to pull at his clothes, but he remained inert and peaceful. “Wake up,” I said. “Tell them you made a mistake. Tell them.” But his clothes started to come apart in my hands. He was melting into the cans, melting into me.

A few times I awoke and remembered to drink—to pour water over the wound, which was now excruciatingly tender and oozing a thick, blood-tinged pus. I wanted to see Owen again, wanted to tell him that our status was nothing, just a preoccupation, a distraction from this, from some deeper river of life. I felt always on the verge of getting up, always on the verge of finding the strength to crawl out, to walk back to Javier's. But soon the water jugs were empty and I was unable to replace them. I was entombed, and I realized for the first time that I might die here, that the poison of the infection might thicken my blood, devour my tissues; that it might fight me, and win.

*   *   *

“She didn't come for you,” a man's voice said. “I'm a little surprised.”

Dr. Cleveland, I thought. That's who it sounded like. I opened my eyes. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle I didn't recognize. A blanket had been tucked around me, but it was unusual, brown and coarse, and there were bits of plastic tape stuck to its surface.

I heard a rasping sound and turned to see Dr. Cleveland kneeling in the back of a cargo van, securing a stack of boxes to the floor, cinching down a strap. I felt nothing at the sight of him, not even surprise. “Well, we tried,” he said. “Didn't we? That's all you can really ask of yourself.”

My fever seemed to be gone, but it had consumed some essential spark of life. I had almost no strength. Through the windshield I saw a row of houses—wood-sided, gray-and-white-painted structures—and a laundry line where clothes shuddered and kicked in the wind.

“Don't worry, James,” Dr. Cleveland said. He clapped me on the shoulder. The contact startled me—it filled me with a kinetic sort of despair, something that seemed to radiate out from his touch. He was real. This was real. “So,” he said, stepping past me to sit sideways in the front seat, “after you allowed my daughter to drive at a high rate of speed, and after you led her into what is essentially a den of drug addicts and thieves, where did you leave her?”

I looked over at him, looked into his bright blue eyes. She had not been found. She had not turned up in a hospital somewhere, hadn't been caught on the streets—and this gave me hope. I had not failed completely. I could, at least, keep her secrets.

“I saw her collapse,” I told him.

“Where?” he asked.

“In the crowd at the church,” I said, improvising. “But then the police arrived and we got separated.”

Dr. Cleveland leaned forward, and the tension in his face created a wrinkle on his forehead, a deep, vertical fold. “Did she look like she was in cardiac arrest?” he asked.

“She looked bad,” I said. “Really bad.”

Dr. Cleveland didn't react. After an uncomfortably long time he said, “I don't need a heart monitor to know you're lying, and instinctively I want to dismiss this youthful loyalty that you feel toward one another. I want to diminish it in some way, but I think”—and here he paused—“I think I have merely forgotten what it was like.”

He opened the driver's-side door and walked around to my side of the vehicle. I pushed the lock button on the armrest, but it was his van and my door opened at his touch. Fresh air flooded the cab. It was heavy with some kind of sweet fragrance. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I will find her. It's just a matter of time.”

We were parked in a driveway. A high chain-link fence cut through the backyard, and beyond this fence, in the distance, I saw a field of parked cars—a quilt of color. “Where are we?” I asked.

“You don't recognize it?” He gestured for me to climb out. “I guess you've never seen it from this side.”

“Proctors' Quarters,” I said. And I felt hopeless, looking at the familiar landscape, at the orderly flower beds, at this approximation of a civilian residential street.

Dr. Cleveland grabbed and steadied me. I was wearing the same pants, but my shirt was gone. It had been replaced with a black sweatshirt. He tugged its hood over my head, and then he looped an arm under mine, supporting me as we walked toward the back door of a small wooden house. A neighbor was working in a raised garden bed. The doctor waved to her, and she stopped what she was doing, openly staring. “Nosy bitch,” he said under his breath. I was having a hard time staying upright, and he all but dragged me up the back stairs and onto the porch. He opened the door and helped me inside to a little civilian kitchen.

Everything was white—the countertops, the cabinets, even the walls, which were covered with tiny white tiles with an opalescent sheen. I realized that this must be his home. Bethany's home, too. This is where she'd returned to every night, and I'd not even thought to imagine it.

Dr. Cleveland walked me over to the kitchen table and deposited me into a chair. The incision in my side ached. On the wall across from me were dozens of photographs of his daughter. A whole panel had been dedicated to her childhood. I even glimpsed the hated doll head in one of the pictures. It was sitting on a box, under a Christmas tree—a pink-skinned head with yellow hair. A ten-year-old Bethany stood beside it in a fuzzy bathrobe. Her feet were bare and her expression was very serious, almost adultlike in its intensity.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“I took some precautions,” Dr. Cleveland said. He set a plastic storage tub on the table and then began to pull the pictures off the wall, to stack them in the box.

“Another chip?” I asked.

“I sewed it into your back,” he said. “I hope you're not offended. It did save your life.”

With each picture he lifted off the wall, he left a place where the paint was a shade whiter, the opposite of a shadow, a memory of what had once been there. I was starting to feel a little better, a little stronger. I sat up in my chair, but the more awake I was, the more confused I became. “Why am I not in the dormitory?” I asked. “Or Protective Confinement?”

“Because you are still
at large
,” he said.

But it was an unfamiliar term. “I'm where?” I asked.

“Kidnapping,” the doctor said. “Theft. Not to mention a tracking chip found in the latrine of a Zero church. It's quite a story.”

He leaned over and grabbed a quickpaper magazine off the kitchen countertop. He scrolled through something and then tossed it onto the table. I looked at the page. It featured an almost unrecognizable picture of me. I glared at the camera with a malevolent expression on my face, one hand raised. It had been captured from a video feed and was slightly out of focus. Below the headline,
ENDANGERED
, there was another title—
GOODHOUSE STUDENT, 17, ABDUCTS MEDICALLY FRAGILE GIRL.