Contain (28 page)

“
Come on,” Missus Abramson
says. She gives my shirt a tug.

We reach the end a moment before
Mister Abramson appears. He shakes his head once as he passes us to
indicate that he's seen nothing. He doesn't look as relieved as I
feel. I sure as hell wouldn't have wanted to walk the length of the
room by myself.

We switch sides and head back up
toward the front, this time moving more swiftly. When we arrive, we
find Jonah pacing near the door. He looks like he can't wait to
leave.

Mister Abramson sweeps his eyes over
the room one last time, and his gaze comes to a stop at a spot on
the floor beneath the repaired pipe. Stepping over, he pulls a
screwdriver out of his pocket, kneels down, and begins to remove
the floor panel.

Jonah helps lift the grate up,
straining against the weight. As soon as they've levered it up,
Mister Abramson reaches in and pulls something out.

“
What is it?” Kaleagh
asks.

He shrugs. “Just a piece of wire. I
thought it was something else.” He holds it up for everyone to see,
then discards it into the corner by the door.

I'm the last to leave, and as I do I
retrieve the wire from the floor, wrap it into a loop around my
hand and stuff it into my pocket. The others may not have
recognized it, but I do. And its presence there beneath the floor
is the proof I need that Stephen Largent was right.

The pipe break wasn't an
accident.

We finish our search late that evening, meeting my father's group
on Level Seven in the middle of the long skyway separating the main
dam structure and the power plant. It had taken us so long to
finish up our search of the turbines that they worried we'd met
with trouble. When Dad sees us, he gives me an unhappy look, but
doesn't say a word.

“
Anything?” he asks Mister
Abramson.

It turns out that no one has found any
sign of Eddie anywhere, no forced doors, no blood trail,
nothing.

While they're conferring, I notice
Jack Resnick standing with the other group, and my blood
immediately boils. Dad must see it in my eyes, because he warns me
to let it go. “We needed the manpower,” he simply explains. But I
wonder if he wanted Jack close by so he could keep an eye on
him.

Jonah and his dad also exchange dark
looks, but neither makes any attempt to speak to the
other.

As we trudge wearily back upstairs,
Bix hangs back to walk beside me. “The plot thickens,” he whispers
dramatically, trying hard for humor.

It falls flat. Nobody feels like
joking, not after Doc Cavanaugh's brutal murder, and it surprises
me that he would even think it's okay to crack a joke. But maybe he
just can't turn it off.

I'm so full of pain and fear and anger
that I've grown numb. All I keep thinking is that none of this had
to happen. I can't understand why any of it did.

“
Yo, earth to
Finn.”

My fingers worry the looped wire in my
pocket. I run my thumbnail over the fine ridges used to slice
through the metal pipe.

“
Dude, why the cold
shoulder?”

Why?
I wonder. Why would anyone want to hurt anyone else? And if
injury wasn't intended, then why make life difficult for us inside
the bunker?

I watch Jack Resnick walking near the
front, his cut hand bandaged and hanging limply by his side. He
looks like a man broken. What did Dad say to him?

I could totally see Jack doing it,
messing with the lights, cutting the pipe. After all, he was the
one who wanted out of the bunker in the first place. But the
evidence in my pocket tells me he didn't do it.

“
Yo, Finn.
Finnnnn finnfinnfinnfinn
.”

Dad is talking to Mister Blakeley and
Seth Abramson. They're trying to work out our next move. I hear Dad
say something about the cameras, and that he thinks they might hold
some clues to what happened. “I meant to check them earlier, but
never got the chance.”

This piques my curiosity, but when I
hasten my pace to catch up to them, Bix holds me back.

“
Dude, did you even hear
me?”

I turn and blink at him, and when he
reaches for me again, I shrink away. I don't want him touching me.
I don't want anyone touching me.

“
Finn?”

“
Not right now,” I
mumble.

He frowns, but doesn't push. After
three years, he knows my moods. He knows when to shut up. He knows
when to leave me alone.

By the time I've caught up with the
head of the pack we've emerged onto Level Three. Jack has regained
some of his lost confidence. He starts trying to tell people what
to do. Like Bix, he just can't help it. I hear him telling Dad what
he thinks needs to be done next. The man has no shame.

I glare at him as I pass, but he
ignores me. I hear him tell the others that we need to station a
couple people at the stairs, in the event that Eddie tries to come
back. It's actually a reasonable request, and Stephen Largent adds
that we should keep the lift locked on our level with the doors
propped open so it can't be called.

“
At least until someone
checks the shaft,” he says, “we can't be certain Eddie's not in
there. In fact, given that we've ruled everywhere else out, my
money says that's where he is.”

But nobody volunteers to check. The
risk is too great. So we end up stationing two people outside the
lift and one just inside the stairs. Jack struts around, acting as
if these decisions validate his authority.

I search for my father. I need to
speak to him about the wire. But he's disappeared. And I'm
certainly not in any mood to talk to anyone else, so I head for our
quarters to wait. I'm too agitated to sit or lie down.

Bix's signature
shave-and-a-haircut
knock
comes a minute later, and he enters before I can tell him to go
away. He holds up a couple cans someone brought down from the
larder and asks if I prefer the cold wienies or the congealed
Spaghetti-Os. “Your choice.”

I'd been holding the wire in my hand.
As soon as he sees it, he frowns. “Why do you have
that?”

“
Oh, you recognize
it?”

“
Of course I do. It's a
guitar string.”

“
We found it in the boiler
room.”

He doesn't speak.

“
Beneath the floor, right
beneath the broken pipe. Mister Abramson found it,
actually.”

Bix's face pales.

“
Your father said it was
broken. He lied.”

“
He didn't lie.” Bix
reaches for it, but I pull it away and shove it back into my
pocket.

“
Your dad cut the
pipe.”

“
What? Don't be ridiculous,
Finn. He didn't. And neither did I.”

Just then, Dad comes in. Bren's father
is with him and they're talking about the security cameras. They're
both surprised to see us, as if they hadn't expected me to be in my
own quarters. Dad suggests that I go over to the Abramson's room to
get something to eat, but then he sees the cans in Bix's hand and
he nods. The four of us stand there in awkward silence for several
seconds before Dad asks us what's going on.

“
Nothing,” Bix and I both
reply.

“
I'll be in my quarters,”
Mister Abramson tells my father. He nods once and excuses
himself.

I pull the string out and begin to
tell Dad where we found it. Bix attempts to interrupt me a couple
times, but I press on until I've finished.

“
You think Harrison
Blakeley cut the pipe?” Dad takes the string from my hand and
studies it for a moment. “What possible reason would he
have?”

“
I don't know! Maybe
they've been planning this all along. I mean, why would their van
be stopped right in the middle of the road like that? We weren't
even supposed to stop!”

“
You think we planned our
van exploding when it did?” Bix cries. “You’re crazy!”

Dad shushes us both. He wraps one end
of the string around his fist, then repeats with the other end
around his other hand until he's got about a twelve-inch length
between his thumbs. Then he points to the wrench I'd thrown onto
the chair and tells us both to hold it up, one on either
end.

“
Hold it steady,” he
instructs, and he begins to saw away at it. Thirty seconds later,
the string breaks. All he's managed to do is leave a shiny silver
mark on the wrench
on top
of the orange paint. “No way this thing cut
through a pipe, Finn.”

“
But—”

“
Finn, Bix is your best
friend. You know him better than anyone else here. You know that
neither he nor his father had anything to do with Eddie's
accident.”

“
Besides,” Bix says, taking
a piece from him and holding it up, “this is the A. It's flat
wound.” He scrapes his nail over the surface. “If I wanted to use a
string to cut with, I'd have chosen the E. It's round wound,
thicker, and is a lot rougher.” He stops and shakes his head. “Not
that I would've cut that pipe.”

“
Then why was this down
there?”

Bix stares at me. “Isn't it obvious?
Jonah had all the time in the world to plant it there. You know how
much he hates me and my father. You told me yourself it's because
we didn't pay to be here.”

Dad gives me a disappointed look. "I
told you that in confidence."

Bix slaps the string back into my
hand. “You want to know who cut that pipe, you need to ask
him.”

He spins around and flings the door
open. But before he steps out, he grabs one of the cans of food
from the chair.

“
Just for that,” he says,
“I’m taking the wieners.”

“It always comes back to the Resnicks.”

“
Not always,” Dad says. He
sounds even more tired than earlier. “I fear it's not as simple as
you want it to be.”

I ask him what he means.

“
I don't believe Eddie
murdered Doctor Cavanaugh.”

“
But the blood,
the . . . the massacre. The absence of a body. Who
else could've done it? And why?”

“
I think it was
staged
to appear like an
attack by someone infected.”

“
Jack Resnick?”

He shakes his head. “Both he and Jonah
have been trying for months to convince us the infected are gone.
Making it look like such an attack wouldn't be consistent with that
message. Besides, Jack and Jonah were with Dominic when the
turbines went down. Someone else tripped the breaker on the master
control panel upstairs.”

“
Why would they do
that?”

“
I presume to cause a
panic, confusion. We were in the middle of questioning Mister
Williams. That, or whoever did it needed an opportunity to isolate
the doctor to kill her.”

“
Is there any way Williams
could’ve been involved?” I ask.

“
Seth and I just returned
from Level Six. I think we can rule him out. Most of the broken
glass is on the floor
inside
the room, which means the window was shattered
from the hallway.”