No Safety in Numbers (7 page)

This was worse than the zombie apocalypse. This was actually happening.

Lexi bolted out of the PaperClips the second she had the chance. The Senator wasn’t overreacting. She wasn’t just trying to avoid her daughter. This was not all the Senator’s fault.

She ran down the hall, not stopping until she hit the main corridor. She rested a hand on the edge of the central fountain. Strangers crowded around her. A thousand voices echoed through the cavernous space. A woman lugging a bag fat with purchases shoved Lexi’s hips, nearly knocking her into the rippling water. Her head began to spin. Too many people. Too loud.

Her feet steered her up the escalator toward Abercrombie & Fitch. There were a bunch of high school kids there. Crowds of them hovered near the entrance, whispering and texting and laughing.

Ginger appeared. Not Lexi’s Ginger, but the other Ginger. Maddie’s Ginger. She was laughing little yips like a neurotic terrier. Maddie had her fingers wrapped around the thick arm of a giant dude in a football jersey. Another jerseyed hunk hovered behind Ginger, eyes peeling the layers of clothing from her body.

They did not look like they were interested in discussing dirty bombs and triage units. These were not her people.

Before Lexi could turn tail, Ginger spotted her and waved hysterically, like she was actually happy to see her.
When Lexi failed to move closer, Ginger trotted toward her. The hunk followed.

“How many sexy friends does Maddie have?” he said, lips curling into a snarl. “That ass looks good enough to eat.”

It took Lexi a second to realize that the ass to which he was referring was her own.

Ginger smacked the guy on the arm and giggled. “Mi-
ike,
” she cooed.

Lexi had no idea how to respond to this guy. The lupine look on his face made her want to vomit. And why was Ginger hanging on him? The floor tilted. She needed to sit down.

“I’m looking for my dad,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

“Okay,” Ginger said, tugging her boy in Maddie’s direction.

“Later,” the guy said, voice dripping with slime.

Lexi unlocked her phone and tried Darren again. All circuits were still busy. She had to find a landline. But there was a crowd by the pay phones at the exit. Probably all the public phones were mobbed.

Then it came to her: There was another way—
Wi-Fi
. Lexi ran back to the Apple Store. Glancing around to make sure no one was looking, she picked up an iPad. (If only she hadn’t lost her iPhone, a crime for which the Senator had sentenced her to wireless purgatory on a cheap iKnockoff.) She turned off its security settings, opened the app store, and searched for WebPhone. She typed that yes, she wanted to try WebPhone for free, confirmed that she was over eighteen, got a login under her father’s name, and downloaded the program.

When the icon appeared on the screen, she opened the program and dialed in Darren’s home phone number. His mom picked up. Lexi guessed that she didn’t know about her being trapped in the mall, because she simply screamed to Darren that he had a call.

“Lexi?” Darren said when he got on the line.

“Like anyone else knows your number,” Lexi said. A flood of relief poured through her body talking to him. She felt like crying.

“What is going on over there?” he said. Lexi could hear him shuffling back to his room. “Every news station keeps showing the same stock footage of the mall. There’s no live coverage.”

“I don’t know,” Lexi said. “Some people in hazmat suits said something about triage.”

“Some people in
what
?” Darren yelped.

“Hey!” a saleswoman yelled from the back of the store. “Put that tablet down! There’s no public Internet use!” She began to make her way toward Lexi.

“I’ll call back later,” she said to Darren, then tapped the icon, ending the call, and trashed the program, deleting it from the tablet.

The woman reached her. “I saw you talking. You downloaded a program.”

“No, I didn’t,” Lexi said calmly, casually, like lying and hacking were part of her daily routine. She walked out of the store as if she hadn’t a care in the world, then, upon reaching a bench, crumpled onto the seat.

Alone again. A hacker, a criminal. A bad daughter. And threatened by something in this mall that required the employment of hazmat suits.

A hand dropped onto her shoulder.

“Couldn’t find Ginger?” Her dad sat beside her.

Tears amassed along the borders of Lexi’s eyes. She looked at her father’s blithe, smiling face.

“Do you know what Mom’s doing in the PaperClips?”

Her father swore under his breath; the man who yelled at her for taking the Lord’s name in vain had just muttered “shit.”

“If you saw that place, you know how serious this situation is,” he said.

She had no idea about anything, but it felt good to lean against her dad. Even if he clearly didn’t plan to tell her anything about what was really going on.

“Are we gonna be okay?” she asked him.

“Your mom is taking care of things.”

And this is supposed to be a comfort?

He hugged her to him. “You want to get something to eat?” he asked. Dad was a big believer in the healing power of food, as one could tell from the slight paunch hanging over his belt.

“I could really use some pancakes,” Lexi admitted.

“I know just the place,” he said.

They stood, two Rosses against the insane horror show that the CommerceDome had become, and strolled toward the massive line streaming into the Pancake Palace.

I
t took Ryan an hour and a half to get through the line to go to the bathroom. By the time he reached the stall, he had composed his apology to Shay for being such a coward yesterday afternoon. All night, he had replayed their good-bye through his mind, run through various heroic scenarios in which he tackled the one cop while toppling the vending machine onto the other cop, creating an opening for her to bust out of the mall. Or he took her hand and dashed with her up the escalator and she kissed him and said he was awesome. Anything but him pretending she didn’t exist and shuffling, head down, into the PaperClips.

While constructing these scenarios, he flipped through the book Shay had given him—normally, if he read anything, he read magazines, and then mostly just the tags under the pictures, but last night was far from normal. Shay’s book was full of weird, long poems, a bunch of
them love poems. Some of the love stuff was kind of, well, how else could he put it, sexy. He kept looking over his shoulder at the other people camped out in the PaperClips like he was afraid of being caught reading it, like old-timey poetry from India was the equivalent of one of Thad’s porno mags. But he couldn’t put it down.

In reading it, he felt like he was seeing a part of Shay that maybe he shouldn’t. He didn’t know her well enough to know that she had also read these poems. He wondered if she found them sexy. He wondered if she knew what Tagore was talking about when he said, “I offered you my youth’s foaming wine,” and did it mean what Ryan thought it meant?

Ryan needed to know the answers to these questions. He had to find Shay. And the first thing he needed to do when he found her was apologize for being such a loser. This Tagore guy would never have left her standing in the hallway to fend for herself. The man who had the guts to write to some girl, “I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age, forever” (Like you’d ever tell a girl something like that! Like she wouldn’t laugh in your face!) was not a man who’d have run away from a couple of mall cops.

Ryan decided he would check out the food court first. That was where Shay had been headed and she might not have left yet.

It was close to ten in the morning and the mall seemed strangely calm. The people who weren’t waiting to get into one of the restaurants were window-shopping or actually going into the stores to buy stuff, maybe with their gift certificates. Families were camped out in the open spaces
on the first floor, and children screamed and laughed and chased each other around the benches. Ryan could almost pretend that there wasn’t some vague security situation holding them all hostage.

Figuring he should check in with his mom to let her know he’d survived the night, Ryan felt around for his phone and realized he’d left it in his jacket—which he’d left in the PaperClips. He bolted back down the corridor, turned the corner, and saw that the PaperClips was gone. It was now a plywood wall.
What the hell?
He’d only been gone an hour and a half.

He walked up to the wall and found that there was a door cut into it with a small hole for a doorknob. Ryan peered through the hole. The whole place was covered with plastic tarps and blue curtains. And then a woman in a hazmat suit stepped through the swinging doors from the stockroom.

“We’re going to need air samples from the affected areas.” The woman’s voice was raspy like a machine’s.

Ryan stumbled backward and landed on his butt. Why was a lady in a hazmat suit in the PaperClips? His heart raced, the ceiling pressed down—he had to get away. He loped down the hall, forgetting about his jacket, his phone, desperate to find Shay.

“Whoa!” shouted a familiar voice. “Where you running to, Jumbo Shrimp?”

The walls retreated; his pulse slowed. Ryan turned and saw two guys from the team, Mike Richter and Drew Bonner, strolling down the main hall toward him. They’d dubbed him Jumbo Shrimp when he was a frosh for being bigger than half the JV team and younger than most of them
by a year. It wasn’t the greatest nickname, but Ryan was just happy to get one. Thad said that not every guy did.

Ryan held out his hand for a shoulder bump, which was how these guys said hello. “Where’d you guys get stuck last night?” he asked. He was a regular guy on the football team, not some freaked-out kid who just saw something out of a sci-fi nightmare.

Richter punched Bonner’s arm. “Bright Light here wanted to check out the chicks in Abercrombie and so we had to sleep on a pile of winter coats.”

“With a bunch of hot chicks.” Bonner mimed smacking an ass and humping it. He snatched the book from Ryan’s back pocket. “What fine reading material do we have here?”

Ryan’s pulse sped up a notch. These were not the kind of guys you discussed your lyrical soul with. “Just something I found in PaperClips,” he said, covering. “I got stuck sleeping on a stack of printer paper.”

Drew flipped through the pages. “Dude, this book looks lame.” He shoved it back at Ryan. “You might want to upgrade to something that isn’t falling apart.”

“Right,” Ryan said, shoving the book back into his pocket, saying a small prayer.

Mike threw an arm around Ryan’s shoulders. “Thad’s like a brother to me, J. Shrimp,” he said. “He would kill me if I didn’t watch your back in this place.” Mike ran his fist over Ryan’s skull. “So stick with us!”

Ryan ducked out of Mike’s attack, laughing. “All right!” he cried. “I’m sure my brother will be grateful.”

“You bet your ass he’ll be grateful.” Mike began walking again; Drew and Ryan followed.

They headed up to the Chop House on the third floor, where they got on line to grab some breakfast. Ryan fingered the two bills in his wallet: a twenty, which was for his zombie makeup, and the gift certificate, which he figured he should save for dinner. But he
was
hungry, and breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Then again, he’d be hungrier later. He kept going back and forth as they snaked through the line. When they finally reached the registers, Ryan didn’t order anything.

Mike gave him a stern look. “Lose any weight and I’m downgrading you to plain Shrimp,” he said.

“I’m short on cash,” Ryan mumbled, hoping he didn’t sound as lame as he felt.

Mike shoved one of his burgers at Ryan. “Thad’s going to owe me huge, I can tell.”

After the three devoured their meals, Mike and Drew leaned against the railing in the corridor.

“There’s nothing to
do
,” Drew grumbled. He hacked up some phlegm and spat it at the nearest trash can, missing by a foot.

“Gross, dude,” Mike said.

Drew burped. “No,
that
was gross,” he said. “Burger is so foul coming up.”

“We should be at practice,” Ryan said, noticing the time. It was now half past ten.

Mike kicked the glass wall. “Coach is going to go ballistic.” He stared out at the mall, then swept his hair from his face and squinted his eyes. “You guys feel like a game of touch?”

“Two on Shrimp?” Drew asked, punching Ryan in the shoulder.

“No,” Mike said, a snarky smile twisting his lips. “Three on Tarrytown’s offensive linemen.” He pointed to the first-floor fountain, where there sat four guys from the Tarrytown varsity team. Tarrytown had defeated West Nyack in a squeaker Friday night—part of the reason Ryan had come to the mall was to avoid his brother; Thad was no fun to be around after a loss.

Drew punched his fists on the metal tube of the railing. “Yes!” He lurched down the walkway toward the escalator. “Time for Jumbo Shrimp to man up.”

Ryan could not wait to man up with these two.