Untaken (19 page)

“Wait. I’m going with you.”

“Go away,” I hissed at her, but she shook her head.

“No way. If you really have to do this, then you’re less likely to get killed with another set of eyes.”

“I don’t need your help no more.”

“You really are an idiot,” she said, then we both froze. The sound of boots clattered up the staircase behind us.

Our eyes met, and then we took off running as quietly as we could up the stairs. The footsteps below us grew louder. As soon as whoever it was turned the next dog-leg of the stairs, they’d surely see us. Gracie crammed key after key into the door on next floor we came to, but the footsteps kept coming, and we had to run up another floor and start over.

We struck lucky with the third key, and I shoved Gracie through the door and shut it softly behind us. Gracie started fumbling with the key again.

“What are you doing?” I hissed.

“If we leave it open they’ll know someone was here,” she whispered.

We were in another corridor. This one was cool, and smelled of floor cleaner and something sweet and rotten that made my stomach churn. The light from the fire exit sign was the only light we had. We crouched there by the door, waiting to see if those footsteps would pass us by, but instead, whoever they belonged to stopped on our landing.

Someone fumbled with a key in the lock above our heads.

I grabbed Gracie’s arm, feeling it was my turn to do the hauling for a change. We ran down the main corridor, and off into a side room. In the darkness, I could just make out a kind of a bench thing. There was no time to look for a better hiding place, so I pulled Gracie down behind it.

The door swung open out in the corridor, and the flick of a light switch followed, flooding the hallway with amber light. I laid my cheek against the chilly tile floor, squinting through the gap under the bench just in time to see a pair of shiny shoes walk into view.

Shiny Shoes whistled as the fluorescent lights flickered on. I wondered if he didn’t know what his buddies were doing to all those people downstairs, or if he just didn’t care.

I glanced around the room, looking for a better place to hide. The light spilling in from the corridor illuminated metal file cabinets and a small desk with a dark computer. There was a sink with a trashcan next to it marked with a yellow biohazard decal. The bench we were crouched behind was made of steel. Heavy leather straps dangled from it.
Stained
leather straps.

“They cut her up!”
Mona’s words forced their way into my mind, sending a prickle of goose bumps over my skin. I wondered if she’d been as crazy as I’d thought.

I pushed that happy notion away; I couldn’t lose my nerve if I was going to find Dad. Shiny Shoes paced up and down the corridor, his rubber-soled boots squeaking on the linoleum. A bleep and a hiss of static made me jump, followed by a man’s voice coming in fuzzy over a radio.

“Okay, we’re done here. Are they loaded yet?”

“Yeah, the samples are on the truck,” said Shiny Shoes. “What about the six-seventy-sixes? You still want them alive? ‘Cause that will take longer.”

“We ran out of time on that one an hour ago. The keystone cops held us up.” The man on the radio laughed. “Trying to let the geese out of the pen. Naughty, naughty. We have to wrap it up now.”

“I know it, Treen,” said Shiny Shoes. “You guys coming up here?”

“No. You take care of it.”

Shiny Shoes sighed. “I got to haul them downstairs on my own, too?”

“Quit bitching or you’ll be hauled out with ‘em.”

“You guys took all the guns.”

“Improvise. They’ll be here in fifteen minutes tops.”

“Shit, I thought we had hours!”

“So did I. But they know, and they’re coming now. Get it done. If you’re not on the truck, we leave without you.”

The radio crackled, then went silent.

“Asshole,” said Shiny Shoes.

Gracie tugged at my shirt, but all I could think about was what shiny shoes had said.

“
Do you want them alive?”

There could still be time to save Dad.

I crawled toward the door of the medical suite. Gracie grabbed at my ankle but I kicked free of her. I knew I was acting crazy, but I also knew that Treen and his buddies weren’t the only ones running out of time. I heard those shiny shoes pacing off down the corridor back the way we’d come in, then a heavy door opening and closing.

“Come on, we’ve got to go
now
,” I whispered to Gracie, ducking out into the corridor before she could argue or my nerve could fail me. The first door I tried opened on another medical suite. The next an office. The desk drawers and file cabinets gaped open like empty mouths, stripped bare of files. I reached for the doorknob of the last door on the right—

A scream shattered the silence, and I froze and Gracie gasped for my hand. As we spun toward the sound, a woman came stumbling out of one of the rooms back by the stairs. She was naked, and so thin that every bone was visible under her sickly, bruised flesh. Her head was a mess of crudely stitched incisions. Her left arm dangled awkwardly at her side as though the bones in it were broken. A fresh red cut gaped across her chest, spilling little streams of blood down her body that dripped on the floor at her feet. She saw us, met my gaze, eyes wide, then started to stagger in our direction.

Shiny Shoes appeared in the doorway behind her. “Pain in the ass bitch,” he muttered.

In his hand, he held a dripping scalpel. His fingertips were covered in blood, and he wiped them off on a wad of paper towels in a fussy sort of way.

Gracie took a step toward the woman.

“Stephie? Oh God!”

Shiny Shoes’ head snapped up. “What in the hell?”

“Run!” I screamed at Gracie. Shiny Shoes fumbled his radio out of the pocket of his lab coat.

“Red! Red! We got a code red up here. Treen? Get your guys up here now!”

I grabbed Gracie by the arm and yanked her down the passageway. Shiny Shoes made a lunge in our direction, but the pale broken woman was between us and him, and she got in his way. I didn’t know if it was something she did on purpose, but I thought I’d never forget the look in her eyes as shiny shoes grabbed her pale skull in his hand, spun her around and slashed his scalpel across her throat.

“The door,” panted Gracie. I knew what she was trying to say; we were running the wrong way—Shiny Shoes was between us and the stairwell we’d come up.

His radio spit static as he yelled into it. “Yeah, they’re heading for the North stairs.”

I wanted to tell Gracie that I was sorry I’d dragged her into this when she’d worked so hard to save our asses, but I barely had enough breath to keep running.

The corridor ended at another door, and we burst through it into yet another stairwell, filled with the clatter of heavy footsteps coming from above and below.

I was about ready to give up when Gracie grabbed my wrist, her hand slick with sweat. “Window.”

I stared where she pointed. Sure enough, there was a narrow window set in the wall of the landing above us.

“Are you crazy? We’re twenty feet up! At least!”

Gracie ignored me, pelting up the steps. I had no choice but to follow her, and the two of us strained to shove the window open. I groaned and closed my eyes at the sight of the hard concrete parking lot so far below us.

“I don’t think I can—”

“There’s a drainpipe. Hurry it up!”

Gracie’s backpack caught in the window and I had to give her a shove. She slung her arms round the drainpipe, which swayed and creaked under her weight. She slid down about halfway before she dropped to the ground, landing neatly as though she’d been sliding down drainpipes her whole damn life. I clambered onto the window ledge, my arms shaking. I leaned into space and made a grab for the pipe. The slippery plastic shot through my sweating hands and the toes of my sneakers scraped on the brick wall as it flashed by me. A loud snapping noise sent a knife of fear through my belly. The drainpipe gave a final groan, and before I knew it I was falling. I fully expected to break my legs, but my body seemed to know what to do, and I found myself rolling over on the asphalt of the parking lot with nothing worse than a pair of grazed knees, the wreckage of the busted drainpipe lying around me. I couldn’t believe we were outside just like that, but I didn’t have the luxury of enjoying it. Windows above us shattered and a machine gun roared to life, peppering the parking lot around us with skittering bullets.

“Now where?”

“The gates,” Gracie panted, but she was cut off by the rumble of truck engines.

I thought that was it. That we were surely going to buy it now, but as truck after truck came screaming into the parking lot, I realized that the men piling out of them were dressed in green.

The army guys had come for us at last.

They shot Treen.

Shiny Shoes too.

After the fighting was done, they made them kneel down in the parking lot and put bullets in the backs of their heads. Shiny Shoes cried and begged them for his life, but Treen didn’t. It should have felt good to see that happen, but all I felt was numb. The other suits they put into the back of one of those big green trucks, which peeled out of there.

There was no one left from the warehouse. We saw them hauling the bodies out, and stacking them in a big pile: Lou, Frank, and Jean, who might have been a bitch, but had been a stone-cold gunslinger when it came down to it. Marty, Mrs. Ostrinsky, even the three little kids.

It took them until dawn to clear the building. The Captain let us look through the body bags they’d found loaded up on Treen’s truck, even though it was against the rules.

The first one I opened was a girl, one eye open, one eye shut, her skin blue with little veins. The top of her head was gone, where the brain should have been there was nothing but a raw socket. The next one was a man, then a little girl.

“Brandon, I swear to God I’m going,” Gracie told me for the hundredth time.

The bags were stacked like cordwood, and I shoved at the pile, opening faster.

I almost didn’t recognize him.

He looked smaller. Older. His skull was cut open, and it made his face look different. They must have worked quickly; they hadn’t even bothered to fix him up the way they had some of the others. I tried to pull him out of the crackling black bag, but his arms wouldn’t unbend. He was cold. I needed to get him warm. If I could just get him warm…

I tried to stop crying, because I knew Dad would have hated to see me sniveling.

The army guys sealed the Center doors with yellow tape and started to get back into their trucks. I ran over to the Captain, but when he saw me coming he shook his head before I could even ask the question. They had to move out that day. The Captain couldn’t take me with them; they were in the middle of a pretty big operation.

He said he was sorry.

Jake

efore He was anyone else, He was Robbie.