The Well's End (22 page)

“Duly noted.”

They're kids,
I think. Or maybe they've been trapped in a cave for almost seventy-two hours. Heck, who knows how long they've been here.

“So, guys.” Veronica leans forward, studying us all. She seems the most businesslike of them all, even my dad. Her eyebrows are thin and carefully tended, and she's wearing pretty hefty diamond studs, probably her default keep-the-holes-open pair. She's not always here, I think—I can see her in a ballroom; her face is regal enough. Or behind a podium. “You fled Westbrook on Friday, and it's early Sunday now. We have an inkling about what's been going on out there during that time, but why don't you tell us in your own words, okay?”

“But that's not fair,” Rob complains. “You know all the answers and haven't told us anything.”

Veronica pats Rob's hand, a gesture I think would normally piss him off, but for some reason, he seems mollified. He crosses his arms over his chest and waits.

“The thing is,” Chuck says, “we
do
have answers, but we'll have more when we know all the facts. Like detectives.” I don't like that he condescends to us. Odessa snorts from behind her mound of eggs. “And with that crazy man trying to get in here, we need more facts fast. So who's going to tell the tale?”

We exchange looks. They expect me to answer, I'm the bridge here. But that doesn't seem fair, and I look to Jo for help. Jo's mouth is set, and I realize that things have changed since Westbrook, when I'd always wait for her to take the lead. Now she's waiting for me. They all are.

• • •

I run my tongue back and forth on my teeth, trying to get the taste of the tale out of my mouth. The adults appear shaken; my dad especially so when I talked about Wilkins's death, even though that's old news. He must have felt the same way about Wilkins as I did.

“Jo, sweetie,” Veronica finally says. “Can you tell us a little more about your father's death? Are you up for that?” Her voice is firm, but slow, like she's carefully controlling each word, trying to be sensitive. While I was storytelling she pulled her hair out of the bun and ran her fingers through it, like an involuntary habit. Now she's tied it back up, all business.

Jo takes a deep, rattling breath. “Later that first night. One of the kids who tried to escape told us about the dead teachers, and we investigated. That's how we found Dad.” Her voice catches, and I rub her back, which hunches in on itself. “He was alive, but died right there. He got really old and died.”

Chuck leans forward. “I just want to be clear for the sake of certainty—I'm not trying to rub salt into the wound. Did your father have a long beard, wrinkles and rheumy eyes?”

“Chuck!” Veronica barks. He backs into his seat like a chastened dog. Everyone else gets some of the same feeling, ducking their head down to their plates. I grab Jo's hand under the table. No one speaks, until Veronica looks at Jo and says softly, “I'm sorry—we're scientists. It's in our nature to be thorough.”

Jo, though, doesn't look like she's up to speaking anymore. Her lower lip, pale without lipstick, quivers uncontrollably. She's having this crazy seesaw life right now. I realize she's been able to put her grief aside, only now to be brought right back to the moment.

“He's right,” I say, taking up Jo's slack. “Down to the detail. It was like everyone turned ninety in a few hours.”

“For an adult male in his fifties, fourteen hours,” corrects Chuck. Jo's hand squeezes mine to the point of pain, but I'm not going to pull away.

“What did you say?” Brayden pipes up in disbelief.

“Yeah, fourteen hours, based on what we can extrapolate from our live-specimen research. That's how long it takes for someone that far into their life span to age to death. Though there are bound to be some anomalies to that estimate.”

“A few of you didn't age at all,” Dad says, smiling brightly. “Which means you hadn't yet contracted the virus.”

“Well, aren't we lucky,” I reply, feeling annoyed at both of them for being so insensitive to Jo. We don't need statistics right now. We need a plan.

Dad's face glooms up, and he squints at me, gauging how to respond. When he squints like that, he looks like he's blind, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes web all the way to his hairline.

Chuck, though, has taken offense at my snide remark. “You
should
feel lucky, missy. Your friends wouldn't have made it until morning.” There's a blankness to his features now that seems in direct contradiction to the food-bearing kindness we saw before, and I get the feeling that this is the real Chuck.

I don't like the real Chuck.

“You shouldn't act like you're superior here,” I say quietly, surprised at my own vehemence. “You know details about the virus. You have an antidote!” I look at my father, ignore the sadness that's creeping onto his face. “I was right all along.
You
made it here.
You killed all those people.
”

“No, honey, I promise—”

But I don't care, I'm too angry, and I storm on. “Not just all those people. You killed Jo's DAD! You endangered the school and the town. And now the virus is spreading. It's even killing soldiers in hazmat suits. What does it matter if you have the antidote if you're sitting on your asses in a cave?”

Jo swallows hard at my comment. The others look shocked too, but in a good way. I feel strong, my breath heaving, like I'm on the block about to dive deep into the water, except this time it's clear I've already jumped. The adults eye each other, genuinely surprised. Veronica almost gets up to leave, as if she now has something dreadfully important to take care of.

“Sit down!” I scream. Veronica inches herself back to her chair. “You're not going anywhere. No one is until you explain yourselves!” I see the others watching me with approval. Brayden has a grin on his face, and I think he's proud of me. My heart beats so fast that I'm almost dizzy.

“Dad,” I say, my voice more even. He looks chastised. So does Veronica. But not Chuck. Little lab rats. “What did you do? What is this place?”

“What's the Map Room?”

Dad pauses; so do I. Everyone turns to Brayden, who's wearing a curious smile, looking at my father. Chuck and Veronica grow perfectly still, as if maybe the question won't see them and will pass them by.

“Where did you hear that?” Dad asks, his voice dangerous. He leans forward on his chair, his eyes flashing. I can't help but wonder the same thing.

“When I was sneaking through Furbish,” Brayden says, “when I was in a secret tunnel in the wall, I heard a soldier say, ‘They aren't as important as the Map Room.' I assume he was talking about something you have here. Something they want. What's the Map Room?”

It's so obvious from their reactions that the adults know what he's talking about, enough so that Odessa blurts out, “Yeah, what's the Map Room?” I want to know as well, but I also want other answers, not some new mystery. Including the one where Brayden overheard information at Furbish and why he didn't tell us about it.

The adults eye each other; apparently their tempers are in check. Dad raises his eyebrows and doesn't say anything until Chuck and Veronica give their grudging nods.

“Okay, kids. You're right. We owe you a full explanation. But in order to do so, no more arguments and interruptions. You need to understand what's going on to be of any good help to us and to Fenton, but time is short. Let's go see the Map Room.”

We all file out of the cafeteria, Veronica and Chuck taking the rear as if we might run off or something. The hallways all look the same, and I'm soon lost. At first the halls are small, big enough for two people to walk side by side, but suddenly they widen, becoming large enough to drive a car through. I haven't seen a door in a while, but then I see two sets, directly across from each other. We approach the one on the right, which looks more similar to the bank vault of the Cave's rear entrance than the submarine hatch of the aqueduct. Dad uses a key card on this door, the first I've seen, swiping it against a magnetic detector and then entering a number of digits.

“Ten numbers,” Rob whispers behind me. I throw him a look.

The crank of gears within the door is loud. It opens with a
hiss
and swings heavily toward us, its innards reminding me of the inside of a gigantic clock; this is a serious door. I think that the keypad, even with ten digits, feels inadequate for a door like this. There should be voice recognition, a thumb pad, and two separate keyholes that must be turned by two separate keys at the same time.

As soon as Dad crosses the threshold of the room, lights switch on with an audible
clunk
, the way they would at a sports stadium, the way they do at Westbrook's football field. We're all gathered tight around the entrance, even the other adults, and for a moment, we just stare. I literally cannot connect this place, this room, with my dad, with Veronica or Chuck, with anything but silly movies about the CIA or buried vault rooms. They should make more movies about the kids of superspies so I can know how I'm supposed to be feeling.

Considering the virus, I expected a room with petri dishes and hazmat suits hanging from the wall. But this is something different. There's almost nothing here. Just a dim, smooth-domed room, like an Imax theater or a planetarium. Ten yards in, directly in front of us, stand two black computer consoles on podiums facing a large flat chunk of rock, which is suspended right in the center of the room by wires hanging from the curved ceiling.

The large chunk is rectangular and bigger than Rob's forty-four-inch Samsung. Small, pleasant lights from the dome illuminate the surface of the rock, which is covered with ancient cave drawings, what must be a map. This is the Map Room, after all.

We've all taken world history at Westbrook. We've all seen images of the cave drawings around the world, art of the early civilizations in the hilly Dordogne region of France or the Anasazi in the dry rocks of the Southwestern United States. Those are bare walls with pigment etched in, rough drawings, and our ancient ancestors' rough-minded, rough-handed, doing the best they can. We were all suitably impressed, but think of them as lesser humans, as the original beta male.

This, though . . . this is something different.

“Well,” Chuck says from behind us, not without some reservation. He's still unsure whether we should be here. “Go have a look.”

We move forward, and I take Brayden's hand, almost involuntarily. He winks at me. We stand in the dark and look at the paintings together. This isn't about crude sticks. There are no red deer figures and buffalo, no spear drawings and fire pits. This is intricate, advanced. Similar to the sophistication of hieroglyphics, except clearly not the Egyptian style we all know and love, with large painted god-eyeballs and sideways facing bird- or dog-headed men.

There's also a depth here, a sense of a third dimension that's missing until the past five hundred years in art history. Trees are vibrant, fish and water glisten. There are carefully etched pathways and images of tall, imposing, muscular humanlike figures. There's a golden tower and a cascading fountain, and when I move the slightest bit, it all seems to shimmer and glow, like it's a hologram or something.

“It's amazing,” Rob says, his voice given to awe. He tugs at his sideburns.

“It's beautiful,” Odessa adds. For some reason, I'm surprised. Maybe the virus has left her more sensitive.

“What is this?” I ask.

“The map, Baby,” Jimmy replies matter-of-factly.

I let that go. So does my dad. “But where did it come from?”

“About a half mile down, actually, in a hole three times this size,” says my dad. Veronica shoots him a look, but he just shrugs.

“What's it a map of?” asks Brayden, who's really taking the map in. His eyes roam all over the place, and the scar on his chin is as white as I've seen. I squeeze his hand, and he returns the squeeze, but doesn't look over at me.

“We're not really sure.” Dad pauses. “Run analysis B-two,” he commands, speaking into the air, and immediately a small red dot appears in the center of the map. It looks like a laser pointer. The dot expands into a rectangle, perfectly covering the map, creating the lines of a grid that crisscrosses the surface. Three rows down, six images per row, each image in a contained red laser square. The computer seems to run for a moment and then beeps. The grid on the map disappears like nothing has happened, but suddenly the bare walls around the room are splashed with magnified images of the map, close-ups of individual grid pieces and drawings.

“Chuck,” my dad says over his shoulder, “want to take this one?”

Chuck seems less confident than he did back in the cafeteria. He's bent, his posture bad, and he appears cold and distant. I remember the coffee stains on his teeth. The offhand tone he took with Jo. I think I can safely say he's not my favorite person here.

“Well,” he begins with the air of a professor, “we think this map is a primer. The first note.” He points to the wall behind him, which now holds a blown-up version of the map. “Do you see the bottom-right image on the map? The last image? It's pretty complicated. We assigned each image on the map a number, and that one is eighteen. Enhance image eighteen,” he calls into the air, and instantly we zoom in on the corner drawing. I get this weird sense of déjà vu, though, because suddenly we're staring at the entire map again. “You see?” Chuck says, his voice triumphant. “The final image on the map is a miniaturized repetition of the
entire map.
And, using our advanced imaging, we can see that somehow whoever painted this made
another
replica on that map, and so on. Enhance image analysis B-two,” he says. We zoom again, and now I'm dizzy, but we're still staring at the entire map.