The Burnouts (8 page)

Will stared at David, wondering how long his brother had been judging him for what he’d done with the Saints inside. He wondered how long David had watched him from above and done nothing to help.

“At least I know how to do the right thing even when I’m
scared,” Will said. “Which is something you must’a forgotten.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, fuck you,” Will said and turned. He stomped away from the minivan. The distant rumble of thunder echoed the snort of pigs nearby. Will looked up. The clouds above were darker and more knotted than before.

He didn’t know where he was going, but he wanted to get away from David before he said something worse. They should’ve been on the road by now, but the idea of spending days in the van with David seemed impossible. Each scrape of his shoes through the grass was loud. There was another crack of thunder, and with it the truth of his situation fully sank in for the first time.

“… holy shit,” Will muttered, his eyes wandering as his mind reeled.

He was going to be a father.

He felt dizzy. The sky swirled. The distant mountain range looked like a row of dog teeth. That was where Gonzalo was headed, into the Rockies, in search of Sasha. His love for her was relentless. Nothing could stop him from holding her again.

Will breathed deep. The air was crisp and fragrant, and Will wanted to remember how it smelled. He wanted to remember every detail of what it felt like out here.

He was going back in.

THE STORM HAD PULLED ITS CLOAK OVER
the farm. It was almost eight o’clock. The sun had sunk, and the winds had risen. David walked the pasture fence, and swept the campus with a flashlight.

“Will!” he called out, but his voice was whisked away by a sudden gust. The steady rumble of wind was the only response.

Will had gone missing, and David couldn’t convince anyone that it was worth worrying about. All the parents were too busy rushing to prep for the storm, getting animals and equipment under cover and battening down every hatch. David tried to stay calm by convincing himself Will had gotten swept up in helping. But given their argument, that didn’t sound like Will. David cursed himself. He should’ve kept his mouth shut, but his brother had always been an expert at driving him crazy. It was as if Will was allergic to rational thought.

“Come on …,” he said to himself.

David hated being out after sunset. It reminded him just how blind he was. Darkness wrapped around his field of vision and squeezed. His Cyclops sight forced him to scan his surroundings like a security camera. In his travels through the infected zone, he’d trained himself to be a creature of the day because night felt as vast as the ocean. In the dark, everything had the drop on him.

He’d never gotten over being mauled by Hilary. She’d taken a piece of him when she’d taken his eye. It had been Lucy who’d helped him feel like a human being again. He’d never forget that. Not that it mattered. She’d already forgotten him. She’d had to, he supposed. He was a ghost as far as McKinley was concerned. Life in there had gone on without him. And it hurt. Far worse than he’d ever imagined it would. He felt like an idiot, thinking of her as this angel who’d nursed him back to health. Lucy had someone else’s baby inside her. She was forever connected to whoever that was. She probably didn’t even think about David.

A gust assaulted him, and for a moment the pressure of the wind felt more real than the ground underneath his feet. His jean jacket had a sheepskin lining but even so, the cold wind slithered in through the neck, through the wrist holes, between the buttons, up his back, and threatened to make the light perspiration on his skin frost over.

“Will!” he shouted again, passing his flashlight beam
across the wheat field. The wheat whipped in a panic.

Will didn’t understand how afraid he should be of McKinley. Out in the infected zone it was open space. At least there you could run away. In McKinley they’d be trapped. Completely at the mercy of the infected. Maybe if he’d told Will exactly what he’d seen out there, he’d get it. But David had never found the strength to talk about it, let alone think about it.

He could still hear the screaming.

Once Will had been identified by Sam and the parents as Gates’s right-hand man, things had gotten tense for David on the farm. He’d had to go the extra mile on everything to prove his loyalty, especially when it came to delivering on Gates’s demands. When the Saints leader had pushed Sam’s dad’s limits and requested a pool for the quad, David had put himself first in line to retrieve it. He and two other parents traveled forty miles to the Pool Liquidators in Bristol. There was trouble along the way, but nothing like they found at the store. When they’d discovered an aboveground pool in the parking lot filled with a red stew of blood and bodies of hunters, it was already too late. They should have turned around when they saw the buzzards overhead. Instead, they’d been surrounded by a ragged crew of infected. There were eleven of them, more boys than girls, none of them over thirteen years old, the youngest infected David had ever seen, but by far the most frightening. They had attacked like a pack of coyotes. All eleven had rushed Deb Winchester, a proud
mother of three with the most boisterous, wonderful laugh David had ever heard. The pack had climbed on her and had crushed her down to the ground in seconds. They had torn off her mask, and her frantic screams had become a low roar as lung sludge had erupted from her mouth.

David dug his hands down into his jacket pockets and turned to head back to the minivan. The wind surged. A speck of something hit David in the eye and he stopped dead in his tracks. He rubbed, frantically. It was only a fleck of dirt or hay, but anything getting in that eye turned him to jelly. When he had nightmares now, they were black.

Rain began to fall and created a thick wall of sound. It pelted his face, forcing him to squint his one good eye. David slowed his search. Will would come back to the minivan eventually. Then, they could go. This was wasted energy.

David heard an odd noise on his blind side. A clap of metal on metal. He listened for it again but heard only the huff of the wind and the rhythm of rain.
Clap
. There it was again.
Clap-clap
. David’s eye followed his flashlight beam. The sound didn’t match anything he knew on the farm. It came at random, a few claps in a row, then nothing, then one, and on and on, like a blind kid trying to play with a paddleball.

He went toward the sound, and his flashlight guided him to the crane. The base of it was a vehicle the size of a Greyhound bus, and four massive arms stretched out, planting it in the ground to give it a wider base. At the rear of the vehicle
was the operating booth for the crane arm itself.

Clap-clap
. The door to the booth was wide open, flapping in the wind.

David quickened his pace. Something wasn’t right. The crane was always locked up at night. David stepped on something hard; it tripped him up. He looked down. A crowbar in the grass.

He clambered up the short ladder into the operating booth. He dropped into the plush orange seat. The control board arced and filled the dash in front of him, below the wraparound windshield. His seat rumbled underneath him. The motor was still on.

David hadn’t heard its chugging over the sound of the wind and pelting rain until he’d gotten close. He prayed for some sensible explanation for this. He looked at the wall behind the operator’s seat, where the crane operator’s gas mask hung. It was gone.

David looked up through the broad windshield and up the tall crane arm that extended up into the sky. Someone was climbing the crane arm and they were almost to the tip. David burst out of the booth and strained to get a better look. He saw the person wore a gas mask and a backpack. He saw he was male.

He saw it was Will.

“Stop!” David screamed up. Rain peppered his mouth. Will didn’t hear, or he didn’t want to listen. Will lowered himself
onto the metal cable that hung from the crane, and he zipped down it, past the roofline, to where David couldn’t see, but he knew where he was going. The crane’s tip was over the quad.

David’s heart punched at his ribs. Will didn’t just do that. David’s world caved in on him. How could Will be so stupid? He waited for the parents on watch to sound an alarm. There was only howling wind and slapping rain. How could Will go in with only a gas mask to …

Oh dear God.

He knew which gas mask Will was wearing, the one from the crane. David had worn it too. That mask had seen heavy use, and the filter hadn’t been replaced in a while. A fresh filter was guaranteed for forty-eight hours of continuous use. After that, you were pushing your luck.

Will’s filter might not last him until morning.

David cursed Will with every foul word he could think of because it was the only resistance he could summon. His feet were already moving. He’d already turned off the crane’s motor so that no one would hear. He’d already grabbed a gas mask with a fresh filter for himself from the van, and was shoving other essentials into a backpack. A fresh filter for Will and the crane remote. It was big and orange, and it could move the arm and lower and raise the cable. He’d use it to pull them back out. He stuffed in a hatchet and an energy bar that he had no idea how he’d eat with a mask on his head.

He was wasting time. Will was getting farther into the
school by the second. The longer David took, the harder it would be to find him and replace his filter. The more infected he might run into. He wanted this over within ten minutes, in and out.

“I’m gonna kill him,” he said.

He stood at the base of the crane arm, staring up the long crane arm as it disappeared into the sky. The sky had darkened since he’d gathered his supplies and now the charcoal clouds began to churn. He couldn’t see the tip of the boxy crane arm anymore. The arm just got thinner as it got higher until it seemed to disappear. Another gust blew David’s hair to the side. He heard the stray dogs outside the farm moan in sympathy with the wind.

One foot in front of the other. He moved his arms and legs mechanically, like they were pistons with set paths. He kept his eye focused on each steel cross brace as he grabbed ahold of them. The wind blew the heat right out of his fingers. When David reached the halfway mark of his climb, he could feel the crane’s sway. One misplaced hand, one lean too far to counter the wind, and he’d take a fall that would end him. He looked up the arm. The zigzag ladder ahead looked like nightmare train tracks extending into the clouds. The wind lashed out at him. He hugged close to the crane, wanting to catch as little wind as possible. He looked at the ground and his stomach bobbed up and down like it was suspended from rubber bands. David knew he couldn’t rest too long or the idea
of quitting would needle into his brain and slowly leach away his resolve. He took a breath and kept climbing. He refused to look down until, finally, he was there, at the top.

David crooked his elbow around one of the cross braces, and unzipped his bag enough to pull the gas mask out of it. He squeezed it over his head and his first inhale felt like he was sipping peanut butter through a straw. He realized that he had no idea when he would be taking this mask off again. He was locking his head into a jail cell. He lingered there at the peak, trying to regulate his breath, feeling the pull of the filter, like he was at the foothills of emphysema.

The quad waited for him below. The dirt scarred from countless battles. The quad looked almost foreign from this vantage point. The days when he’d fought for food on that gouged dirt down there seemed deep in the past. David made the transition to the cable. A hundred feet of steel wobbled in slow motion between his legs. There was no going back now.

David slid down the line in short bursts, never letting himself drop more than three feet before clamping his legs and fists tight again. The cable swung and twisted in the wind. Rain slapped his face. Near the bottom, he let his grip go loose, and he zipped down the cable, certain that he was making the worst decision of his short life.

David’s feet hit the quad.

He pissed a little bit. He was sure he could feel the virus all around him, coating the skin of his neck and wrists. Fear
crushed in on him. David’s breathing went hyperactive. He sucked in breaths harder than the mask would allow. His stomach vacuumed.

David forced himself to relax. Gradually, as he began to draw in longer breaths, the air came easier, and his heart quit having a fit.

He headed for the elevator.

THE FIRST THING LUCY WAS AWARE OF WAS
pain. Blades of it, skewering her through her side. Then more pain. Stings and aches all over her front. She was lying on a rough, uneven surface. The air smelled like gasoline and feces.

Lucy popped her eyes open and saw that she was in the corner of a room full of rubble, where water streamed down the cracked walls and dripped from the sagging ceiling. She lay on a pile of book bags.

There were other people in the room with her. Burnouts. A boy with long white hair that hung in front of his face sat crumpled against the wall, seemingly unconscious, with a damp piece of yellowed cloth in his limp hand. A lanky girl, with long stretched-out legs and a nose like a beak, lay on his lap, eyes half closed, drool spilling off her lower lip, with her hand down the front of her unbuttoned pants. A boy, with
shiny burn scars where most of his scalp should have been, was splayed out on the floor, hand down his sweatpants, masturbating to the sight of the passed-out, tall girl. Lucy jerked her gaze elsewhere.

In another corner, a boy in a Santa hat pissed into a wide-mouth plastic water jug full of shit. He was standing like Godzilla amid a city of other water bottles on the floor, all half full with a brown soup of urine and feces. Each bottle had a latex glove rubber banded to the mouth. Some of the gloves were empty and limp, but most were in various degrees of inflation. There were other kids in the room too, mostly passed out. Dead, sunken eyes in ghastly faces. Greasy snarls of gray hair. Unwashed skin. Stringy muscles stretched over their bones.