Blackout (12 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

AUBREY LAY IN HER BUNK,
watching the door. Breakfast had come and gone, and Aubrey had eaten as much as she could. The food wasn’t anything special—some generic brand of Froot Loops with reconstituted powdered milk, and canned peaches—but she filled up on it. She had big plans for the day, and she’d need calories. She was going to try to find Jack.

She’d spent hours talking to Alec yesterday. He’d only been in Mount Pleasant for two years, but once she reminded him of what the school was like he’d been able to remember a lot of it—and after talking to him she could recall a lot of the things they used to do together. In the fourth grade she’d played his wife in the very abridged version of
Macbeth
that the class put on—he was Macduff and she Lady Macduff. She’d been to a birthday party at his house, and they both were in the highest-level reading group both years.

The whole thing bothered Kara, but it shouldn’t have. It was nice to have Alec there, like a security blanket, but Aubrey wasn’t interested in him. Kara would have known that if Aubrey dared to tell anyone what she was planning for that day.

After breakfast, Aubrey had gone to the supply shelves and asked for a bottle of water, but the soldier told her she had to get water from the main spigot—they didn’t have bottles they could give out. Fortunately, she’d been able to talk him out of a few granola bars, which she hoped would help her stay on her feet. She was going to be invisible for a long time.

At nearly nine in the morning, the sergeant arrived for morning roll call. Aubrey climbed down from the bunk and dug through her small pile of clothes for her towel.

The sergeant read through the teens’ names, and as they were called out, the teens went forward to have their bracelets checked against their picture. There were twenty people in Tent 209 now—every bunk was full—but the process didn’t take too long. Aubrey threw her towel over her shoulder and waited.

Finally, the soldier read “Aubrey Parsons” and she hurried up to the door. They checked her bracelet twice, matching her with a picture in a notebook, and then marked her off the list.

“I want to run to the showers,” Aubrey said. “Can I go now?”

The bored sergeant nodded, and Aubrey slipped past him outside. One of the tents near the fence was entirely dedicated to girls’ showers, but she still had to wait in a short line for a stall to open up. No one she talked to had a good estimate of how many people were in the camp, but even Aubrey’s crude calculations put the number enormously high. She’d seen tents with numbers up in the three hundreds, and her tent was smaller than some—she guessed many of the others were twice as big, if not more. So, assuming there were at least three hundred bunkers with maybe thirty in each—and she figured that was a low estimate—that still put at least nine thousand people in the camp.

And that meant there had to be other camps elsewhere. Aubrey had no idea how many teens were in the state, but there had to be way more than this. There were probably quarantine camps all over Utah—all over the country. For all she knew, this wasn’t even the only camp at Dugway.

After a few minutes a girl left a stall and Aubrey hurried into it. They were only allowed one shower every other day, and the showers were timed so she needed to hurry. With only a few minutes left she poured out the entire bottle of shampoo—it was a military-grade kind that she hated—and then rinsed the empty bottle as best she could. In the remaining seconds before the water shut off, she filled the bottle and closed the cap.

When she emerged from the shower tent a few minutes later she felt refreshed and clean, and she had a water bottle hidden under her towel.

Aubrey headed south toward the fence.

It was going to be risky. Granted, it had been days since she’d disappeared and she felt fairly well rested and healthy, but what she was doing today was daunting. It would take longer than she wanted, and so much was unknown.

Upon reaching the fence, Aubrey turned right and began walking to the decontamination tents.

The first one that she reached appeared to be in use; a bus was stopped on the far side, and two freshly washed girls were sitting outside the door, waiting for their ride. They looked almost identical, except one was a little older than the other. They had to be sisters.

Wouldn’t that be nice?
Aubrey was enjoying the company of her new roommates—Kara and Betsy were friendly—but she longed for the company of people she really knew. Even Nicole, with her many faults, would have been comforting. In all of Aubrey’s searching, she hadn’t found Nicole’s tent.

But Nicole wasn’t Jack. He had been a better friend to Aubrey than Nicole or anyone had ever been. Jack had been more like family than her dad.

She’d promised to get Jack out. She’d turned her back on him once, abandoning him for popularity and clothes and parties, but she wouldn’t do it again.

The soldiers at the fence eyed Aubrey cautiously as she passed. She smiled at them and continued on to the next tent, and then turned around the corner. Checking her pockets for the extra food, Aubrey took a deep breath and then vanished.

No one noticed her as she returned to the fence, or as she walked back toward the decontamination tent. There was a third girl on the bench now. All three looked scared and exhausted, and the sisters were holding hands.

Even now she wasn’t exactly sure what the soldiers would notice, but she’d spied so much in the last six months that she guessed opening the wooden door to the tent wouldn’t cause much of a stir. Aubrey still wasn’t sure what they would see while she was invisible. Would they just ignore it? Would they think it was the wind? Would they not even see it open? All she knew for certain was that she’d opened doors before and it had never been a problem.

Inside were a female soldier and two more girls dressing. Aubrey hurried past them, moving quickly through the shower room and into the waiting area. Two more girls and three boys were still waiting for decontamination. Aubrey checked their faces—she tried to do that now with everyone she saw in the camp—but didn’t recognize any of them. Finally, she ducked through the last door and stepped back out into the morning air.

She was outside the fence. Well, outside one of a tangle of dozens of fences.

A boxy-looking armored vehicle sat beside the tent door, and two soldiers were half-visible in the turret. One was talking on what looked like an enormous telephone. Three other soldiers were on the ground, talking and joking with each other.

Aubrey hurried past them. She wanted to run—she felt so free, away from the tents—but knew that she had to conserve her energy. It was at least a mile to the other buildings and maybe more.

Traveling down the hill was easy enough, and she actually found herself enjoying it, recalling the countless hours she’d spent hiking alone in the hills and mountains behind Mount Pleasant. But as she approached the buildings it felt less like home and more like a war zone.

Tanks and armored vehicles surrounded the complex, a few of them motionless but most moving. Soldiers waited behind sandbag gun emplacements, and two massive camouflaged trucks seemed to carry large missiles. Somehow, that actually made Aubrey feel better. Missiles couldn’t be used against the people in the buildings, could they? So at least part of the army’s story was true—they were protecting something. Maybe.

There was a wide flat space in front of the soldiers, and Aubrey jogged across it. Even knowing that they couldn’t see her, it was uncomfortable. They were watching for someone just like her, and ready to shoot any intruder.

There was a sudden roar, and she spun to see a low-flying helicopter zoom up over a ridge and hover almost overheard. She froze.

No, it couldn’t be here for her. She was invisible.

It swept side to side, rotating in midair only a few hundred feet above the ground. Finally, it turned and moved over another small hill.

Aubrey let out a long breath, trying not to panic. It was nothing. It was another vehicle moving. All the military vehicles were moving, all the time. Patrolling, she guessed.

Her chest hurt. It felt like her heart was going to pound through her rib cage. She tried to focus again.

She couldn’t see any side doors to get into the complex—like her camp, it was surrounded by a double fence. Instead, she headed for the large gate guarding the main road in and out. On either side of the gate were watchtowers, and below the towers were squat, sandbag-covered fortifications. She could see the helmeted heads of soldiers peering out through narrow openings, watching for attackers.

The helicopter swooped in again, and she ducked instinctively. It moved away faster this time.

The gate was locked and closed, and she didn’t dare to try to move it. Opening a door was one thing. But this gate was something entirely different: twenty feet tall and thirty feet wide. She’d have to wait for someone else to open it, and then slip inside.

Aubrey slumped down in front of the fortifications and leaned back against the sandbags. She was already feeling tired, but the weariness was still mostly in her joints and limbs, not in her head. Once she started to get dizzy she’d be in trouble, but for now it was mainly an inconvenience.

The water in her bottle had a little chemical aftertaste, but she knew she needed to stay hydrated and so drank it anyway.

A Humvee looked like it was approaching, and Aubrey stood, ready to sneak inside as it drove through the gate, but it turned and headed to the east instead.

She looked up at the sun, trying to guess the time. It couldn’t have been more than forty-five minutes since she’d snuck out of camp, but the fatigue in her legs made it feel like hours.

A soldier left the other sandbag emplacement and crossed the road toward hers.

“You get the news?” he called out, ducking under the low roof and entering the fortification. Aubrey followed, standing at the door and looking in. There were two men already inside, one sitting on the ground, looking half-asleep, and the other looking out the small window.

“What’s up?” the sleepy man said.

“Golden Gate Bridge,” the first answered. “They knocked it into the bay.”

The man at the window swore. “And we’re here babysitting a bunch of kids.”

Aubrey took a step back from the door. She’d never been to the bridge, only seen it in pictures, but the thought of it gone made her sick. “That’s the other thing,” the first man said. “There was a breakout at Relocation Seven.”

“Which one’s that?”

The first soldier leaned against the wall. “Amarillo. We’re supposed to get briefed on it tonight, but Cummings works in the comm station and he said that the whole training facility got blown to hell. They don’t know if it came from the outside or the inside, but everybody took off. I heard that they had some freak down there—took out a Black Hawk. Just jumped up and grabbed the thing and yanked it out of the air.”

The other soldier shook his head and muttered something under his breath as he turned back to the window. “Hang on,” he said, and pulled his radio mouthpiece down in front of his face. “We’ve got two inbound. Over.”

Aubrey glanced back out toward the road and saw two olive-green tractor trailers approaching. Stepping away from the fortification, Aubrey stumbled on her weak legs. She moved out of the road and to the side of the gate.

It seemed to take forever for the two trucks to get approved to enter the complex, and Aubrey squatted down beside the gate, trying to save her energy. It felt like she had weights strapped to her wrists and ankles, and even pulling her hand up to wipe sweat from her forehead seemed like a chore. While she waited, she took another drink from the bottle.

The helicopter was back, holding steady over the trucks, like it was escorting them. One side of the helicopter was open, and a soldier leaned out, looking down. She tried to ignore him.

Finally, the gate was opened and Aubrey slipped inside, pushing herself to walk alongside the slow-moving trucks. There were fences in every direction, and she didn’t know if she’d have to use the trucks to get back out through the gate again. She was breathing heavily as she walked, and her legs had begun to burn. This wasn’t like her—she’d been hiking in the mountains for years and had always been in great health. She’d even planned on running for the cross-country team this year, before Nicole had steered her toward cheerleading instead.

The truck approached a second set of gates but as Aubrey prepared to follow it, a sign caught her eye: “Intake Station Two.” She jogged to the fence to get a better view, and saw all the places she remembered—the intake station, the small annex where they’d had their cheeks swabbed, the warehouse where they’d waited, and the long walkway that led to judgment.

From the cage where their statuses had been announced, Jack would have gone to the right. She could see a short cinder-block building with no windows. There was no way for her to get inside; there only appeared to be two doors and they were both accessed through the chain-link-enclosed walkways.

So
, Aubrey reasoned,
if the walkway from the judgment cage is the entrance to the building, then the other walkway has to be the exit.
Her eyes followed that walkway toward a second cinder-block building—a much larger one. The steel door was stenciled with the words “Assessment Facility.”

Aubrey hurried toward that building, barely able to keep her balance over the uneven ground. She needed to find someplace where she could reappear and rest.

The helicopter was back, lower now. Sand blew in her eyes and mouth, and she shielded her face with one arm while she ran forward on shaky feet.

The steel door was just thirty feet away when a Humvee came tearing up across the dirt field behind her.

She ignored it. There was too much going on, and she didn’t know how much longer she could stay on her feet. Stumbling toward the door, she saw there was an electronic keypad next to the doorknob, and her heart sank—all of this effort was a waste. But just as she almost gave in to the urge to cry, she saw someone had put a fist-sized rock in the door, holding it open.