70
ANSON
Shouts and screams came from everywhere, panic and cries. I shielded my eyes as best I could and scurried under a table against the wall, pulling the Kid with me. On the phone, Hillburn’s voice remained calm.
“This is what you’re going to do,” he said.
“Everybody over the age of twenty needs to go to the cafeteria and stay put. No heroics. No crazy stuff. Nice and orderly. I want everyone under the age of twenty to line up on the north stairs. No weapons. Leave those. Anyone comes down with a weapon, we not only kill them, we kill the person standing in front of them and the person behind them. Three deaths for one fuck-up. Don’t make me do it. Tell them. Make sure they understand.”
Beside me, the Kid was huddled under the table, furiously typing away at the laptop. Every few seconds, he paused, took a quick glance at the hallway, then went back to it. Gasoline soaked everything. It had been running for under a minute, and puddles were already forming on the hardwood floor.
“I’m going to give you ten minutes,” Hillburn continued.
“If we open that north door and I don’t see a line as instructed, I light a match and this entire building goes up.
I’ll make you one more guarantee. If that happens, the pain you’ll feel burning alive will be nothing compared to what I’ll do to Libby and those other two girls. They will wish for death.”
The Kid tilted his head, pressed one more key, then froze, looking out from under the table.
A gurgle came from above. A rattle of pipes. And the rain of gasoline stopped.
“Got it.” He beamed.
Hillburn cleared his throat. “That’s impressive, but do you think it really matters? Ten minutes, Anson. Get it done.”
He hung up.
The phone immediately rang again. The display said, “Carmichael.” Moss’s partner.
I quickly answered. “Hello?”
“Where’s Moss?”
“She’s trying to reach you on the radio. She gave me her phone.”
“Someone’s jamming signals. We’re running countermeasures. Jamming their jammer. I don’t know how long it will work. Tell her Murdock is down. He got one of their snipers, then took a direct hit. Through and through his neck. He’s gone. They breached the north end. We’re pulling back and—”
The line went dead.
“Are you there?” I knew he wasn’t, though. They were jamming again.
More gunfire erupted downstairs.
Chaotic.
Random.
The phone vibrated with an incoming text.
Nine minutes.
My heart was pounding like a jackhammer. I wanted Father to tell me what to do, but he was silent.
“Come on,” I told the Kid, stuffing the phone in my pocket. “If Hillburn’s coming up the north end, we need to warm Pudge and the others.”
I helped him out from under the table.
Everything was soaked.
The smell of gasoline hung in the air like an acidic fog. His eyes were red and teary; mine were no better. We couldn’t wipe them, either—it was all over our hands and clothes, too.
“Oh, no.”
The Kid’s face went pale. He keyed something into the laptop. Paused, then typed again. He was hitting the keys hard.
“What’s wrong?”
“The laptop’s dead. I think some of the gas got inside.”
“Leave it,” I told him. “It will just slow us down.”
The screaming and shouting had died away, replaced with coughing. The cafeteria was nearly empty; everyone was either in the kitchen or the bathroom, trying to get to the water.
We were halfway to the north entrance when Vincent came out of a storage room on the right and found us in the hallway.
He grabbed us both by our shirts and pulled us back through the door.
The second we were inside, he slammed the door behind us.
I started to tell him about Hillburn and Carmichael, but he wasn’t listening.
He twisted me around, pointed me toward the corner of the room.
Meagan’s lifeless body was half-buried behind some boxes of cleaning supplies. Her vacant eyes stared out at us from the inside of a clear plastic bag still on her head, cinched tight around her neck.