The Burnouts (2 page)

Will chuckled, and felt better, but his smile soon faded. There was something else he wanted to ask.

“Is Dad out there?”

David blinked a lot but his mouth remained still.

“I never got out of the infected zone. Once I got word the parents were here, I made my way back. I figured maybe Dad would be here.”

“Was he?” Will said. He felt a rush of hope.

“No. But I’m sure he’s alive. Somewhere. We’ll find him eventually.”

“Sure,” Will said, already reburying that hope, deep, back where it belonged.

Will searched for another joke to fill the silence but came up empty.

“Everything’s going to be okay now, Will. We’re together. I think the bad part is over.”

It had been longer than he could remember since anyone had told him that things would be okay, and he hadn’t known how much he needed to hear it. Will lost his battle to keep from crying. Tears blurred the world, and spilled from his eyes, but David didn’t notice. He walked over to the window in the door of the trailer and he peered through the glass, because people had started screaming outside.

David threw open the door to the night outside. A strange orange light flooded in and made David into a silhouette.

“Come on! We have to help,” David said as he bounded out the door.

The farm was ablaze.

THERE WERE CHICKENS ON FIRE. LITTLE TUFTS
of flame screaming and squawking for mercy. They raced around on the dark lawn, weaving between each other, until they flopped over and died. Beyond the smoldering chickens was a blazing structure. Flames licked the night from its roof, and a crowd of parents was gathered around it, trying to put out the fire. They hucked buckets of water at it. Shoveled dirt. The fire only grew.

It was hot. The air stuck to Will. It made his clothes heavy.

“Distraction …,” David muttered from beside Will. Then he yelled at the crowd, “It’s a distraction! We’re under attack!”

No one by the fire turned. They didn’t hear. Will looked where David was looking, easily three hundred yards from the fire, to a section of the two-story wall of stacked tractor trailers that surrounded the farm. There were people there, dropping down from a ladder leaned against the wall. Will
could see maybe three or four of them in the full moonlight, but his eyes were still adjusting.

“Come on,” David said, and tugged Will away from the fence that encircled the Airstream.

Will followed David’s lead as they sprinted in a zigzag through a waist-high crop of tomatoes. David’s agility surprised Will, considering his brother was blind in one eye. The last time he’d seen David run, the guy had been as steady as an unmanned bicycle. David leapt over a row of plants and kept running.

They were getting closer to the people who had dropped down from the wall. There were five of them now, running across a lumpy, tilled lawn toward the school. Bearded men with beer bellies that shook when they ran. One, with a dark mesh baseball cap, pointed in Will’s direction and threw something at the brothers.

Will heard a
plunk
in the dirt nearby.

“Move!” David yelled. David bounded away, yanking Will by the shirt. A cracking
boom
blasted them off their feet. He landed facedown in a pile of cold earth. Dirt and stems and burned leaves rained down on him. David pulled him up.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Will said, even though he wasn’t.

David swallowed. “They’ve got grenades.”

Will thought,
He must be joking
.

The bearded men pulled grenades out of the hefty duffel
bags they carried and hurled them at the school. The parents handling the fire heard the blasts that followed, and they went into a panic, grabbing weapons and scurrying around. The night lit up with explosions. Dirt sprayed into the air. Cows burst into pieces.

“This way!” David shouted.

Will ran after David to the ladder against the farm wall. His brother was already halfway up it. It jolted and clanged with every rung David climbed. Will followed. The thunderclap of an explosion behind Will made him jerk and freeze up.

“Don’t stop,” David said from above. “You’re okay.”

Will looked up to see his brother standing on the ledge of the wall, reaching down for him. The moon encircled David’s head like it was an emblem. Will continued up. At the top David grabbed him by the arm and helped him the rest of the way. As Will rose up, his view expanded past the wall.

Will stopped breathing. Pale Ridge spread out in front of him. The world he remembered, the town where he’d lived for his entire life, was right there beneath the shimmering white-caps of the Rockies. Home. He’d been born in Sisters of Mercy Hospital right in the middle of town and had lived his whole life at 335 Butterfield Lane, playing in Mint Creek, walking to Frontier Elementary. His whole life whooshed through his brain, and it felt real, instead of a pale, distant memory.

David grabbed his arm. “Will, what are you doing?”

“Sorry.” Will shook it off and faced his brother.

David stood next to a folding lawn chair with a pickax leaning against it. He snatched up the pickax and handed it to Will. Grenades blasted behind them.

“There’s more people coming. I need you to keep them off the wall. Can you do that?”

“I … guess.”

“Not ‘you guess.’ Yes.”

“Yes. I got it. But who are these guys?”

“Hunters,” David said. “Watch the wall.” He turned away but stopped. “And, Will—” He locked onto Will with his one serious eye. “Don’t die, okay? I just got you back.”

Never in his life had David spoken to him with this much trust. The David he remembered never would have let him from his sight. He would have told him to run and hide while he took care of things. Not now.

“I’ll be okay. What are you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna help put out that fire,” David said, and he took off down the length of the wall, toward the blazing building.

Another explosion rocked the night. Then a cluster of them like a fireworks finale. Will looked down at the farm. The tractor-trailer barrier ran like the Great Wall of China around a patchwork of crops, outbuildings, and smaller fenced-in areas, hugging them close to the school, which for the first time didn’t seem titanic to Will.

A flash of light burst out from a third-floor ledge after a grenade didn’t reach the roof. The hunters had reached the
school. On the next throw, they might get it right, and the parents defending the school were in high gear to stop it.

Three parents on the school’s roof dared to rise over the ledge with rifles and fired down at the hunters. They missed. The hunters were working their way toward the industrial elevator that provided roof access. A parent in work overalls and an orange bandanna headband sent a hatchet flying at the hunters. It sunk into the hip of the hunter in the dark baseball cap and the man shrieked. Another hunter raised up a grenade to throw at the parents, but an arrow cut through the dark and planted itself in his thigh. He fell to the ground with his gym bag. The live grenade tumbled into the dark dirt nearby. Everyone scattered.

A blast of white fire. The bags of grenades detonated. The resulting blast lit up the whole school and forced Will to close his eyes to keep from being blinded. His ears rang. Nothing remained of the two hunters. Will looked to the roofline where two of the parents cheered while the third, a tubby one with a compound bow, stared at the carnage he’d sparked.

A clang sounded off behind Will, on the outer farm wall. Then, the aluminum rattle of a ladder. Two more hunters were climbing up a ladder twenty feet from Will, onto the wall. They had guns strapped to their backs.

Will tightened up on his pickax and ran at them. The pounding of his feet on the hollow metal trailers was like church
bells, alerting the hunters to climb faster. As the highest hunter reached the top of the ladder, Will swung his pickax at him.

“Yagh!” The hunter slid down a few rungs.

“Stay off!” Will said.

The hunter reached to his back with one hand, where his rifle was. Will dropped the pickax and grabbed the ladder with both hands. Will strained, drawing on all the strength in his thighs and arms. The ladder lifted away from the wall. The second hunter cut his losses and scrambled down to the ground. The first hunter leveled his rifle at Will.

David wouldn’t be coming to save him. This was on him. If he died, there was a chance the school would be sacked and the kids inside murdered. In a flash he understood why the parents had been doing things the way they’d been doing them.

Will shoved the ladder away from the wall, and the hunter’s gun fired up into the air.

The ladder dropped, screeching the whole way down. Will turned toward the school, heaving breath. He saw that the parents had finally gained the advantage. All of the hunters were fleeing toward the gate out of the farm. All but one.

“You’re gonna die, rat lover,” a voice said from below Will.

“I’ll take you with me, prick,” another voice said.

Will crept to the farm-side ladder with his pickax. A stocky hunter with a bowie knife shuffled toward a silver-haired
parent with an athletic build. The parent was on the ground, clutching his ankle. His only weapon was a motorcycle helmet. Black.

Sam’s dad.

Will was fast onto the ladder. At the bottom in seconds. The hunter lunged at Sam’s dad with the bowie knife, but he got a pickax through his own shoulder instead. The hunter screamed and fell to the ground beside Sam’s father.

Will approached the hunter. The man was squirming in the dirt and trying to reach back to the pickax. He looked over to Sam’s dad, who was studying him with a skeptical face. A stream of profanity kept oozing out of the hunter’s mouth.

“Shut up,” Sam’s father told the man.

Sam’s dad winced in pain as he tried to stand, but his twisted ankle wouldn’t do him any favors.

Seeing the man this close, with no helmet, Will became acutely aware of what an awful thing he’d done. He’d forced this man and his wife to watch their son’s beheading.
He must think I’m a monster
.

“I didn’t kill your son,” Will blurted out.

The hatred in the man’s eyes frightened Will.

“I found him like that. I swear. I know I shouldn’t have pretended he was alive. I know that was messed up. But I just had to get out. I’m—sorry. I so —”

“It was the hog,” Sam’s dad said.

“What?”

“You don’t remember asking for a wild hog for a party?”

Of course Will did. He remembered the moment Gates had come up with the idea. He’d been so excited he’d thrown a champagne bottle against the wall in celebration.

“A kid that graduated yesterday … he told me he saw the hog attack Sam and rip his thr—” The man clamped his jaw shut, choking on emotion. He swallowed hard and continued. “I know it wasn’t you, but I still don’t like you or what you did. If you’re going to stay on this farm, you’re going to have to prove you’re someone worth trusting.”

Sam’s dad stood with a pained grunt and limped off.

Will shouted after him, “I will.”

“Hey,” David said. “Breakfast.”

Will opened his eyes and sat up on his cot. The smell of freshly tilled soil and manure, and trees and flowers, soothed the inside of his nostrils like the steam of a hot bath. The low whirr of summer crickets filled his ears. The day already felt warm, and sunlight had stretched its way to where he’d planted his toes in the grass below. He smiled and looked around. All the other cots under the tarp, in these emergency sleeping quarters, were empty.

“I guess I slept in.”

“We start early around here,” David said. “I just came from a security committee meeting about stepping up our security measures. Last night was a real wake-up call. Sam’s dad
already has plans for how to strengthen our whole operation.”

He placed a wooden bowl in Will’s lap and handed him his daily meds with water in a tin camping cup.

“Thanks,” Will said. He swallowed his meds and set the cup aside.

“Normally I like to start the day with fresh scrambled eggs, but all the chickens are dead. We’ll find new ones though. Just one more thing on the list.”

“Morning, David,” a woman said as she walked by with a pitchfork. Her hands were calloused and respectably filthy.

“Morning, Carol.” When she was gone, David smiled at Will. “That’s Bobby Corning’s mom.”

Will twisted his face. “For real? Does she know her son calls himself Jackal?”

David grinned. “She’s the nicest lady. She makes those corn meal pancakes from scratch. Best thing you’ve ever had.”

Will looked down at the bowl in his lap. Three little yellow pancakes sat snuggled up with each other, glistening with a thin caramel glaze of syrup. His stomach tugged at him. He dug into the pancakes with a fork and began shoveling. Creamy sweetness coated his tongue.

“Oh my God,” Will said.

David arched his eyebrow. “Homemade butter.”

“This is the best thing I’ve ever had in my entire life. Ever in my whole, entire life. How could someone make something as great as this and as awful as Bobby?”

David laughed. Will kept chomping through his breakfast. It was only as he reached the last few bites that he began to soak in what was happening beyond the shadow of the tent. Parents were working diligently everywhere he looked. There weren’t many of them, maybe a couple more than he’d seen the night before, but it seemed like they’d already done the work of a hundred people. As Will’s eyes traveled across the golden expanse of the farm, he could already see the evidence of the previous night’s siege disappearing. Parts of the building had been damaged by grenade blasts. One of the massive steel plates that kept the school sealed up had been detached completely, but a group of fathers was already standing in front of it, trying to figure out how to reattach it. Plants had already been replanted where grenades had made craters. The small herd of cattle and goats, each in their own little pen, seemed content, leisurely chewing grass. The massive vegetable garden, where the parking lot had been torn up, looked unbothered.

“These people are machines,” Will said, licking his fork. He put the bowl aside.