World-Mart (24 page)

He thought that perhaps Virginia might secretly try to see the kids, and if she did, somewhere close to school would be the logical place for her to camp out.  She could find them through the crowds and watch them from a distance, disappearing quickly if she was spotted.  She also had access to food and water here, but unfortunately, unlike in the immediate Food-Corp area, the garages were not heated.  Unless she had on layers of heavy clothes, she wouldn’t be able to survive the freezing nighttime temperatures for long.

George knew that the chances were slim he would spot her there, but his assumption that she would join the small homeless population in the hallways outside Food-Mart had proved incorrect and he was running out of ideas.  Where else would she go?  Where else could she go?

Having lost his shuttle pass sometime during the night, likely to a sly homeless person who pretended to be interested in Virginia’s photo, George took the pedestrian tunnels across the district.  The walk from the central area to the Corp Education System’s buildings took him the better part of the morning.

Because of the time and the day, the garage had a comfortable flow of people moving through it.  George approached every person he passed with Virginia’s picture, but no one seemed to recognize her.  He checked the restrooms, but they were cold and empty.  He checked every bench, every adjacent hallway, and with every security associate, with no indication whatsoever that Virginia had been in the area anytime recently.  Unsure where to turn next, George sat down on a bench to rest his weary feet.

He considered turning back early, weighing the slim possibility of actually finding Virginia against the threat of frostbite and neglecting his children.  Determined to spend at least the weekend searching, reminding himself that Shelley was a capable babysitter, he got back to his feet and began walking toward a random hall.

George just cleared the garage as a security associate happened to look behind the trashcans, finding Kurt’s body.  The associate radioed for backup, also calling for a Medical-Corp manager to call the death and a Records-Corp associate to get an identification file started.  George turned around and glanced through the hall, seeing that a panicked crowd was beginning to form in the far end of the garage.

“Move along!” The security associates began to shout, doing their best to keep onlookers away from the scene.

George tried to get a look, but the crowd became dense and a security associate quickly blocked the hall.  “Nothing to see here!” the associate said, directing George and others near him to a side tunnel.  George thought to protest, unsure where the new tunnel led, but the tunnel gate shut and locked before he could say anything.  He searched for the security associate, but he had fallen out of sight.

As he continued to wander through the pedestrian tunnels, he had to wonder more and more: had he simply gone out of his mind?  Did he actually think he could find one person in a district of
tens of
thousand
s
, on foot, within two days?  The only two areas he really knew well were those around Law-Corp and Housing, as he normally didn’t have much of an incentive to travel any further.  He knew that it was time to face reality.  He was venturing into unknown territory now, but he moved more to satisfy his resolve than to find Virginia at this point.  He was looking for something else now, although he did not yet know what it was. 

He walked for miles, stopping to rest as he found himself in an unfamiliar shuttle garage.  A few of the shuttles had snow on them, and cold gusts of air flew through the expanse as outbound shuttles left and incoming ones rolled in.  George crossed the garage, continuing through to another random tunnel.

About a mile down the way, George noticed that the lights overhead were flickering, which confirmed his fears that the weather was getting worse.  Just as he mused that the lights might actually go out for
ever
, every single light in the tunnel flickered out.  He froze, the total darkness creating a sheet of black nothingness before him.  He carefully felt for the nearest wall and slowly continued forward.

He made it through most of the tunnel when he saw a tiny light far off in the distance.  The frozen air rushing in toward him told him that the tunnel led to an outdoor path.  The cold bit at his nose and cheeks, and he lowered a ski mask over his face before wrapping a thick scarf over his mouth and neck.  He noticed the stench of rotting trash as he got closer to the end of the tunnel.  He stopped, frozen in indecision for a moment, and then decided to turn around.

George suddenly froze as he heard someone running from the other direction.  “Hello?” George called out, bracing himself for the potential impact.

“Out of my way!” a young man yelled.

George flew to his back as the young man ran into him running full speed.  “What’s your problem?”

“Don’t go that way!” the young man warned, out of breath.  “Something . . . flooding the garage . . . through the ventilation system!  I think it’s that disease!”

George quickly turned around, more willing to face the cold and the smell than the prospects that came with HD-1 infection.  Even with his face covered, and even though he saw no glitter floating in from the distance, the fear of becoming a statistic alongside Virginia was enough to make him feel vulnerable and anxious.  He reached the mouth of the tunnel, bracing himself for both the stench and the cold as he entered the blizzard.

He gagged as he realized he was at the border of what appeared to be acres upon acres of trash.  Plumes of smoke rose in the distance, likely from several fires that smoldered from deep within the various piles of junk.  He spotted the young man and followed him, dragging his feet through knee-high snow, down a path between the massive trash heaps.

The young man was not suitably dressed to face the extreme weather conditions, and he slowed down quickly.  Shivering and breathing hard, he desperately gathered up a small pile of trash and attempted to light it with matches produced from his pocket.  The wind blew out every match he lit, however, no matter how much he tried to shield it, and he began to cry.  He turned to George just as he attempted to pass the boy.  “I’ll give you whatever you want for your jacket!”

George brushed past him.  “Sorry.  It’s not for sale.”

The young man tackled George, sending him into a frozen pile of trash.  He pinned him down, threatening to punch him.  “All I want is the jacket!”

George grabbed both the young man’s arms, shifted his weight, and wrestled his attacker onto his back.  “I don’t want to fight you,” George said as he attempted to back off peacefully. 
With
a quick knee in his gut,
George
dropped to the ground, balling up.

The young man fought to remove George’s jacket from him, tugging and kicking with an abject, rabid fervor.  George froze for the moment, clinging to his jacket, unsure how to get away.  After a minute, however, the young man backed away, stumbling in a panic over his numbing extremities.

“Help me!” the young man cried out, his throat going hoarse from the cold air.

George continued down the trail, ignoring the young man’s cries until they faded into the wind.

The trail went straight for a while, and then it forked off into two trails angling about forty-five degrees in either direction.  George contemplated the two directions, wondering if there was any significance to the simple choice laid out before him: should he go right or left?

The wind howled and the snow continued to whip through the air.  George kicked a heap of accumulated snow off each heavy boot, wiggling his toes to make sure they still could move.  He began to shiver, despite his many layers, and he quickly chose the left path, for no other reason than the fact that he had to make a choice.  He had to keep moving.

The snow suddenly came down in sheets, and the path quickly became even more difficult.  The heavy gusts slowed his steps, and every layer of clothing on him soon grew wet and cold.  The air bit at his throat, despite the cover he had over his face, and his eyes threatened to freeze shut every time he blinked.  Shielding his face with his arms, he continued.  The smell of smoke began to grow as he
moved
down the snow-covered path, and a new sense of hope arose in him with the prospect of a nearby fire.  If he could warm himself up for just a few minutes, he thought to himself, he would surely have the strength to
reach
the other side.

George stopped, feeling overwhelmed as he came up to what appeared to be a dead end.  Smoke rose from the top of the massive trash pile ahead of him.  Deciding to make a path of his own to the fire, George began to climb the pile.  His foot sunk into something mushy and his gloves quickly became covered with remnants of decayed food and other unidentifiable muck.  He slipped through the trash, unable to gain a foothold beyond a yard or so up in the pile.  It was
simply
too unstable to climb.

He sat down in the snow, his situation suddenly feeling hopeless.  He could try to turn around, but how far would he get going the other direction?  How many more forks and dead ends were there for him to negotiate before he finally reached the other side?  And what was on the other side?  Was it worth going through all of this trouble?  If he backtracked toward the pedestrian tunnel, would he be able to avoid the HD-1 threat?

George became frozen in his indecision, his thoughts feeling clouded and dulled.  The cold stiffened up his joints, and they ached as he tried to get back to his numbing feet.  His mind reeled, the cold becoming close to unbearable.  He fell back, too tired to continue.

“Help!” George called out, knowing that he was succumbing to hypothermia. 

George tried once more to get to his feet, but he was only able to stumble another step before he collapsed onto the side of the towering trash heap.  He closed his eyes, and darkness came as the blizzard offered to provide him a blanket of fresh snow.

Chapter Twenty-Two

SHELLEY
thought she had caught a glimpse of George before the security associates closed off the garage to all foot traffic. 
She had called to him, waving her arms, but h
e
had been detoured with the rest of the crowd, the connecting halls immediately closed off.

“That was my dad!” she cried to one of the police associates.  “You have to get him back!”

“I’ll see what I can do,” the associate said, then disappeared down the hall.

Shelley waited for the man to return, frozen in her grief, her mind locked on the thought that she had left Kurt here to die.  She had done this.  Had she continued to search through the night instead of waiting until morning, he might have survived.
  Something had told her he was there.

Something
had told her.

Medical-Corp took Kurt’s body away, leaving her a crumpled, crying mass on the garage floor.  The shuttle disappeared down the south exit hall, sparks of electricity dragging behind it, and Shelley stared as if it might come back again, just long enough for her to say one more final “goodbye.”  No one returned, however, and so she sat, alone in the crowded garage, trying to decide whether to bother going back home.

Her father
had invested everything he had left in Kurt.  How was he going to react when he found out that his only son, his legacy, the Irwin name, froze to death while in her care?  Granted, he had abandoned them for the weekend,
but
Shelley knew that wouldn’t make a difference
. 
He might even accuse her of killing him on purpose in some crazed, jealous rage over of the boy’s education.