“I can’t move my arms and legs,” Megan said. She looked down at her legs, as if to make sure they were still attached. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Muscle atrophy,” Lara said, “from lying down for too long without moving. It’s going to take time, and you’ll need to do physical therapy to get strength back into them. For now, just sit back and let your body do what it needs to, which is get used to being up again.”
Megan nodded slightly, her control over her head the only real power she possessed at the moment. Her eyes roamed the hallway. “Is this a school?”
“You’re in a high school. In a town called Dansby.”
“Dansby? How did I get to Dansby?”
“Where was the last place you remember?” Danny asked.
Megan seemed to think about it, trying to clear the fog that Lara guessed was currently swelling inside her head. After a while, Megan shook her head slightly. “I was in Cleveland. There were four of us, hiding in town, going from place to place. Then they finally caught us and… I don’t remember the rest. They brought me to Dansby?”
“It could be a hub for them,” Danny said to Lara. “A central location where they’re bringing people from the surrounding areas. So there’s probably one in Houston. Or two, or three. Bigger population centers mean bigger, well, farms, right?”
“Farms?” Megan said.
“You need to rest,” Lara said. “Save your strength.”
She nodded to Danny, who leaned over and gave Megan more water. The woman drank it like someone who had never tasted water in her life.
Their radio squawked with Will’s voice: “Lara, I’m sending Davies back out there. I need you to come over to me. First room to the right after you enter the doors. Boys’ locker room.”
“On my way.”
She stood up and waited for Davies, who showed up about ten seconds later. She hurried past him, back through the auditorium doors and along the right side of the room, where there was a lot of space and she didn’t have to worry about stepping on one of the sleepers. She turned right and headed down a smaller hallway that split up into two locker rooms.
Lara turned toward the boys’, pushing through the swinging door. Will was inside, standing with his back to her.
“Did you find her?” she asked.
Will took a sideways step to reveal an eight-year-old girl cowering in the corner. Covered in a thick layer of dirt and grime, there was maybe a month’s worth of cobwebs in her hair. She wore a plain white dress that was probably the apple of her eye months ago, but was now dirty and torn in places, strands from the hem drifting lazily off the bottom.
Immediately, Lara flashed back to those two nightmarish weeks in the Sundays’ cabin and the filthy dress they had made her wear. Was this what she had looked like when Will found her? She marveled that he could ever find her attractive after that first impression.
The girl in front of her looked like a feral animal with dirty blonde hair, but there was no mistaking those big blue eyes and trembling, small lips as belonging to a scared little girl.
“There’s a grate in the back corner,” Will said. “Probably some kind of unused vent. She must have crawled all the way over here then pushed her way up. Chances are the brother knew about it and taught her how to get to it, in case of emergencies.”
“Did you find Todd?” Lara asked.
“No signs of him. My guess is he went somewhere between yesterday and today, maybe to get that medicine he needed, and didn’t come back, and she was scared and ran off through the passageway.”
Elise looked catatonic, and it was only her darting eyes that convinced Lara she was even alert and conscious at all. Each time Will talked, Elise’s eyes went to him, and each time Lara said anything, those blue eyes sought her out.
“Elise?” Lara took a slow step toward the girl, who stiffened, her eyes darting from Will to her and back again. “It’s okay. It’s me. It’s Lara. Do you remember? We talked on the radio?”
Recognition slowly spread across her face. “Lara?” she whispered.
Lara smiled. It was the same voice that had spoken to her on the ham radio last night. Small and soft and afraid. “Yes. It’s me. I’ve been looking for you. You didn’t stay in the basement like we agreed.”
“I had to leave…” Her voice cracked.
“What happened?”
“Todd left and didn’t come back. He said I had to go if he didn’t come back, so I did.”
She nodded. “I understand. You did what you had to do.”
The girl began to cry. Lara moved toward her and was surprised when Elise leaped forward and into her arms. She hugged the girl to her body and Elise’s arms tightened around her, as if she were never going to let go.
“It’s okay now,” Lara whispered. “You’re safe, and you’re going to stay that way. We’ll find Todd, and then we’ll all leave together. I’ll take you some place where there are no monsters.”
“Promise?” Elise said between sobs.
“Promise,” she said. She glanced up at Will, who was checking his watch again. “How are we doing for time?”
“We’re still good,” he said.
“What about Todd?”
“Where would we start looking?”
“I don’t know. Maybe—”
Gunfire, loud and sudden, cut her off.
She grabbed onto Elise tightly, lowering both of them to the tiled floors, expecting the bathroom walls to shatter around her at any second. But they didn’t. Instead, she heard the rolling sounds of gunfire continuing unabated, coming from outside the school.
“What’s happening?” she asked, looking over, expecting to see Will crouched next to her, but he was gone.
His footsteps echoed through the locker room as he ran, his voice calm on the radio: “Danny, talk to me.”
Danny’s voice, replying through gunfire crackling in the background: “We only brought two trucks, right?”
“Yeah, why?” Will asked.
“I think we’re gonna need new trucks…”
There were ten of them, standing in the school parking lot, surrounding the Tacoma and Ram trucks and firing on the vehicles until there was nothing left but smoking wreckages, steam flooding out from underneath the hoods and broken windows. She noticed they had been careful not to shoot the gas tanks.
When they were done, they moved behind the trucks and took up fighting positions.
At first she thought they were just big men, but as she moved closer toward the window, it became clear they were wearing suits. Black and green full-body hazmat suits with black gas masks over their faces. The suits weren’t the bulky kind, but slimmer versions, the type she had seen soldiers wear, that allowed them to still fight like soldiers while being protected. Tactical suits, she remembered someone telling her. They wore some kind of web belts around their waists, with gun holsters slung low and bulky pouches on their hips. Like Will and Danny, but…not.
“They showed up and began firing on the trucks,” Danny said, sounding almost amused by what he was seeing.
She stood on one side of the window, Will on the other. Danny and Davies were peering out through the opened front doors a few yards to their right, keeping their profiles as small as possible. The sun reflected off the lenses of the gas masks peering out from behind the trucks.
“Why didn’t you shoot them?” Will asked.
“Seriously?” Danny said.
“Yeah, why not?”
“I dunno. Seems kind of weird to just start shooting people without a reason.”
“They just shot up our transportation.”
“Yeah, but they weren’t doing that when they first showed up. They did that after they showed up. It never occurred to me to shoot them before they started in on the vandalizing. Seemed kind of knee-jerk.”