Jacked (7 page)

“Yeah.” Tar moved to the front of the alley and peeked down the street where the Black Shirts had gone. “What’re you doing way down here? They figure out that you’re 404 from school and your dad will be mad as hell.”

“Forget that. I was looking for you.”

“For me?” Tar said with a frown. “Why did you come looking for me? You knew I was coming back to the school today.”

Toby leaned against the brick wall and let out a sigh like some moan of despair.

“I fell back asleep after Pop left for work and woke up late. By the time I got to school, the Black Shirts were already there. They had the whole building surrounded, Tar.” The boy opened his eyes and looked at his friend. “I was scared.”

Tar blinked but said nothing. He had never known Toby or Shovel to be scared of anything.

“They were bringing the other kids out of the school and lining them up,” Toby continued. “I came to find you so you didn’t wander in there without seeing them. I was only about half a block away when a bunch of them hopped on their horses and took off in every direction.”

“What do they want?”

“I don’t know.”

Tar walked back into the full dark of the alley. Black Shirts were around all the time but never like this. Usually it was just two or three in a group and they never went far from the government offices downtown. In fact, most locals barely paid attention to them since Black Shirts were lazy and didn’t care about anything.

But these men were a long way from downtown, and evidently they did care about
something
. Tar would have bet a piece of fixed tech against three bricks that these Black Shirts were from the capital. They looked hard and ready for a fight and he wanted nothing to do with them.

But what he wanted did not matter.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to see what they’re doing at the school.”

“Are you crazy?” Toby’s voice echoed off the walls and both boys crouched down. When he spoke again, he dropped to a whisper. “What? Are you going to automagically just walk into the schoolyard and back out again? I figured you wouldn’t want anything to do with those guys.”

Tar shook his head.

“I don’t. I want to run but I can’t. I’ve got to know what they are doing, what they are looking for.” Tar took a deep breath. “You don’t have to come.”

Toby screwed his face into a look of disbelief.

“And when you’re 404 I’m going to tell people that I let my best book go back to the school by himself. No chance.” Toby stood up. “I’ll go with you.”

Tar smiled.

“Thanks. Let’s cut through the back of this alley and down the next block. I’ve got an idea how we can get close.”

The two boys trotted into the dark with Tar in the lead. He led them on a twisting course, first left, then right, but always southwest. After a few minutes they reached the end of another alley and stood just out of the sunlight. Across the street was a massive building, the gray of the sky reflected off the dirty white and rust walls.

“The old mall? We’ll never get in there,” said Toby. “It’s been boarded up for years.”

“Yes, we can. Down that side street are the places where the trucks used to bring in stuff. We can get in those doors. Just follow me.”

Tar led the way under an overcast sky with Toby just a step behind. He was scared. Only Toby being there kept him going forward because he did not want to look like a wimp. Tar kept thinking every step could be his last. He would have much rather ran all the way back home, pulled the covers over his head, and cried himself to sleep.

They made it across the street and hurried down the side of the building until they came to a point where it swung away from the street. The sidewalk angled down into shallow pits, while over-sized metal doors looked out from the walls like the bug eyes of a monster.

“See, I told you,” hissed Toby. “There’s no way in.”

Tar only motioned for his friend to follow as he jogged past the four doors to the far side of the setback. There, a set of metal stairs snaked up against the concrete wall. At the top was a black door.

“There,” said Tar.

The two boys walked carefully up the steps but, even so, the metal rattled on each riser and sounded against the bare walls.

“We gotta hurry, Tar. Somebody’s going to hear that.”

Tar nodded. In fact, he thought he heard hooves on the street already but he was not sure. His heart pounded so hard in his ears he was having trouble hearing anything. He put his hand against the metal box next to the door. A second later the latch clicked.

“Chilly,” said Toby.

They stepped into the dark building and Tar shut the door behind them. He waited until it locked before he took off his backpack and rummaged in one of the side pockets. He brought out two little boxes, barely wider than his hand, and felt in the dark for the switch. One of the flashlights lit up and he used it to turn on the other one and hand it to Toby.

“I’m not sure how long we have with these batteries but there’s too much stuff in here to trip over,” he said.

“You’ve been in here before?” Toby asked.

“Yeah.”

That was his only answer. Tar was not ready to admit that when he was younger he would sneak down here and watch the school kids through the mall windows on the south side. When Uncle Jahn had found out about his trips he had beat Tar’s butt until he had trouble sitting still during supper but he had come back again and again. Tar needed to see other kids, even if he could not sit with them in some boring class or run yelling through the schoolyard during playtime. When Jahn realized the beatings would not stop him his uncle gave up trying to keep him away from the others and preached instead about knowing who Tar could and could not trust.

The pair walked through the loading dock, the area clear except for a half-dozen tow motors and piles of wood skids. It had been a couple of years since the last time Tar had been in the building and it took him three tries before he finally found the door he was looking for. When he did he and Toby stepped through into a wide open area with tables and chairs spread all over. Along the far wall were a long line of places where food was served at one time—he had described it to Jahn and his uncle had told him the place had been called a Food Court—but in the middle of the area was the thing that made Toby suck in his breath and stumble on the dusty tile.

A large circular machine rose from the floor and traveled up the height of two flights of stairs. Gold and silver shined back from the flashlights’ glare, as did the painted eyes of all kinds of animals. Tar had seen picture books of zoos in Mr. Keisler’s apartment so he knew what some of the animals were called; birds and lions and elephants were there, mixed in with others he did not know. One looked like a long-necked lizard with wings, another was a horse with a large horn sticking out of its head. There were also little cars and two-wheeled vehicles that had seats on the inside, along with benches like the ones that sat in the old park.

“What is that?” asked Toby.

“Uncle Jahn called it a Mary Round,” answered Tar. “But he never told me who Mary was. He said it would play loud music and go in circles while little kids rode on the animals. It sounded like a big deal.”

“I’ll bet it was pretty chilly,” Toby breathed. “You know, if you were a little kid.”

“Come on. Let’s go see what the Black Shirts want.”

Tar led them across the open area and into a wide hallway on the far side. This quickly opened up into an even bigger area that carried a little echo no matter how quiet the two of them tried to be. Tar shined his flashlight straight up and the glow barely reached the glass and metal roof over their heads, three floors above them.

“Why doesn’t the sky shine through?” asked Toby.

“There are metal pieces that roll down over the glass,” answered Tar. “I fixed one a long time ago but when it opened it made an awful sound and I was afraid people would know I was inside so I closed it and never opened them again.” He turned his light toward a silver and black stairway at the other end of the open area. “We need to get up on the second floor to see the school.”

The air smelled stale as the boys moved toward the stairs. The last time he had been in the building Tar needed to wait before he could leave because some older boys were hanging around outside the loading area. He had been afraid they had found their own way in and he did not want to get caught in the dark with them. But everything inside still looked untouched with a layer of dust over the floor and the benches.

Toby wandered off right and stopped just short of a shop front. A flexible barred gate hung about six feet from the floor, leaving the store open to anyone who wanted to go inside. But there was no reason to. Not anymore.

“Not much left,” he said, staring at the empty shelves. “Wonder what happened to everything?”

Tar shrugged.

“After The Crash people got desperate. They grepped everything they could—clothes, paper, food—it was a real mess. There were fights in the streets and people got killed. There was nobody to stop them. The police all went hard boot because they were hooked into the Mind.”

“Our teachers don’t really talk about it a lot,” said Toby. “But most of them aren’t much older than us so they probably don’t remember the before time. When I was little there were still a couple of older ones around but they just seemed…sad. They just never talked about it.”

“Uncle Jahn doesn’t like to, either. Mr. Keisler told me once that after all the troubles started, that’s when the Black Shirts came around. They made the fighting stop and took care of the ones that went hard boot.” Tar walked toward the stairs again and Toby followed. “When I let it slip that he was telling me stuff about the Before Uncle Jahn got mad and Mr. Keisler stopped saying as much.”

The stairs were strange. The steps had bar-shaped treads that were made of cracked rubber with a rounded handrail to match. But the sides were shiny metal and the risers were solid so they quickly made it to the second floor.

Tar turned left and headed into an even darker hallway. Their lights showed the walls closing in and a ceiling appeared over their heads. The echoes of their steps were louder and when Toby stumbled over a small metal bar, sending it clanging off into the black, the noise echoed and made them both jump.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“It’s okay,” Tar said. “The shop is right up here around the corner.”

They walked on for another hundred feet before a wall of glass loomed up in front of them. Tar led them to the right for a few strides before he turned left again, ducking under where the security gate had been cut open and bent back.

“We won’t be able to hear what they are saying,” Tar said. It made him feel better that the Black Shirts would not be able to hear them either. “But as long as they are outside in the play area we should be able to see what they are doing.”

They had taken another few steps when Toby suddenly leaped sideways and swung his light around.

“Frag me!” he exclaimed.

His light wavered on a mannequin, its white plastic cover shining back at them.

Tar smiled but he did not laugh out loud. The first time he had come into the store the plastic people had scared him, too. So much, in fact, he had fallen to the floor and stayed there several minutes until realizing it was not some person who was going to walk over and grab him.

“That’s my fault,” he said. “I should’ve warned you.” He shined his light behind the mannequin. Torsos and smaller body parts were scattered over the floor.

Toby took a tentative step forward.

“Whoa. It’s a woman,” he said, “and she’s naked.”

“They all are. People must have taken their clothes.” Tar shined his light toward the far wall. “Come on. Do you want to stare at plastic boobs all day or see what the Black Shirts are doing?” He didn’t wait for an answer but Toby’s light appeared on the floor beside him as he walked away.

“Shovel’s gonna be sorry he missed that,” his friend said with a laugh. “We’ll have to bring him here some time.”

Tar nodded in the dark but kept weaving his way through the store’s debris. When they reached the outside wall he turned off his light and waited until Toby did the same, then he slowly pulled back the floor-to-ceiling curtain that blocked out the sunlight.

He saw another reason why Shovel would have wanted to be with them, and not just to see naked, plastic women.

Shovel knelt shirtless in the middle of the schoolyard, his dark skin glistening with sweat. Black Shirts were formed up in two rows and at the far end stood a man, sunlight shining off his bald head. The man was talking, maybe shouting, and Shovel was slowly shaking his head from side to side.

“Oh no! What are they doing to him?” asked Toby.

The other students were lined up against the school’s brick walls in an L-shaped theater around the action. Most of the girls were crying, even some of the boys, while those too stunned to react only stared in horror at what was happening.

The bald man beckoned Devin over to him. In the student’s hand was the little machine he had tossed to Tar, the one that played music. The Black Shirt leader took the app and waved it back and forth. He yelled at Shovel but the boy never looked up. The man finally stopped, his chest heaving from the tirade, and gestured to the men at the far end of the lane. They jerked Shovel to his feet.

Then Tar noticed the sheen on his friend’s body was not all sweat. Some of the shine was blood and when Shovel looked up they could see his face was cut and his eyes were swelling shut.

Every Black Shirt raised an arm. Some held short riding whips, others held pieces of wood or metal. The bald man shouted and the two men on the end struck Shovel across the back with their weapons.

He lurched into a run, protecting his head with his hands as much as possible. Tar watched him lurch to one side when a wooden stick landed hard on a rib, and then nearly go down when a metal bar struck across his thigh. The boy continued on, however, even when one of the Black Shirts swung from low to high, striking him with a crop across the face. When he reached the end of the lines he collapsed to the ground at the bald man’s feet. Devin, who had been standing just behind the man, took a small step back.