The Secret of Zoom (28 page)

“Barney!” she shouted, putting her mouth to the crack in the corner. “BAAAARRNEY!”

Her voice echoed hollowly. The truck jolted as if Barney had jumped a foot and fallen back on the seat.

“Who—who's there?” Barney's voice quavered.

Christina was struck by a sudden thought. Barney sounded
afraid
.

“Baaaaaarrney!” she cried again, making her voice lower, more ghostly. “Don't doooooo this, Baaaarney!”

There was a long silence. “Who
are
you?” Barney said at last, his voice cracking.

This was better. As long as she could keep him talking, he wouldn't be pushing buttons. “Whooooo do you thiiiiink I am, Barney?”

Barney gasped.
“Momma?”

Christina felt an almost uncontrollable urge to laugh out loud, but she squashed it back down. This was no time to get hysterical. Let's see—what would a real mother say? Danny moved restlessly under her hand, and she patted his shoulder.

“You were such a
good
boy, once, Barney.”

There was a sound of sniffling from the cab. “I was, I
was
! Momma, I always tried hard!”

Christina had a moment of sympathy. Barney
did
try hard. But trying hard wasn't good enough, no matter what the dancing chickens on her computer liked to say. You had to get it
right
. “So why are you mashing children, Barney? Couldn't you find something better to do with your time?”

“Now, listen, Momma, you don't understand. It's nothing personal—it's just business.”

The small bit of sympathy Christina had felt instantly drained away. “It's personal to the kids getting mashed, Barney.”

The truck moved a little, as if Barney was shifting his weight. “Well, the mashing is really a very small part of it, Momma.”

Danny leaned against Christina's side. She smoothed his rough hair and felt a growing anger, like a live coal in her stomach. “Sure, Barney, I know. There's also the part where you starve them and scream at them and keep them working like slaves all day and all night—”

“Oh, Momma, I'm sorry!” Blubbering sounds came from the cab.

This was more like it. “It's not too late to be a good person, Barney. Get away from Lenny Loompski and find a different job. But first, I want you to push the green button. No, wait—”

Christina concentrated. The green was to close the ram panel. What opened it? The brown button, perhaps? Yes. After it scooped, the panel went back to an open position. But Barney kept getting the buttons mixed up. And she couldn't risk him pushing the red button. Barney didn't seem to know his colors very well. The vision test she had taken on her computer only two days ago probably would have said he was color-blind.

Christina was suddenly alert.
That
was Barney's problem! And red and green color blindness was the most common kind. The two colors just looked like shades of brown.

No wonder Barney kept pushing the wrong buttons. They all looked exactly the same to him.

“Momma?” said Barney anxiously. “You said you wanted me to find some different work. What should I do?”

“
Don't
fix traffic lights,” Christina said instantly. “You're color-blind.”

“I am?” Barney's voice scaled up in surprise. “I thought I was just dumb!”

“Well, that too . . . no, no, I didn't mean that. Listen, I want you to press—” Christina thought of the panel of buttons. She could see them in her mind's eye—green on the left, then brown, then red. “Press the middle button, Barney.”

The truck jolted. Danny began to whimper.

“Shh, shh, shh,” Christina whispered in his ear, over and over, like a lullaby. “It's okay, I'm right here with you . . .”

The ram panel scooped and grated and clanked back into position. A puff of air wafted in through the open slot.

“Momma? Did I do that right?”

Christina thought of the dancing chickens. “Good
effort
! Nice
job
! Now, though, you've got to try harder, son. Go do something that helps people instead of hurting them.”

“Okay. Like what?”

“Um . . .” Christina thought. Barney had seemed to enjoy polishing the mirrors and glass the day before. “Washing windows, maybe?”

“I like washing windows.” Barney's tone brightened. “I'll make you proud, Momma!”

“I hooope so, Baaaaarney . . .” Christina let her voice drift off.

All was still. Barney's footsteps had faded away in the distance. “Time to get out of here,” Christina whispered. “Crawl over—okay, now get down, flat on your stomach.”

“It's yucky,” said Danny, sniffling.

“I know. I won't let you go. Put one leg through the opening—then the other—”

“I'm stuck!” Danny's whisper was terrified.

“No, you're not. Turn your head sideways. That's right, now you've got it—”

Danny was out. His hand, still gripping Christina's tightly, yanked her bruised shoulder down and out before she was ready. Her head banged against steel.

Christina swallowed a cry of pain. Her face felt greasy and slick. She shut her eyes, hung on to Danny's hand, and slithered out into the hopper and the fresh, free air.

They crossed the grounds hand in hand, keeping to the shadows, moving slowly. The guards were mostly there to keep the orphans working, Christina realized—they were so sure that the shock collars would keep the children on the ridge, they hardly bothered to set any kind of guard at night. But that didn't mean she could be careless. Especially when they were this close to freedom.

A thin thread of melody drifted to her ears, faint and rising in the dark. Christina paused. Was an orphan singing? Dorset should stop that at once. They couldn't afford any noise at all—

No. It was coming from behind her. Christina turned and saw the cone-shaped mound and the moon shining down from a starlit sky. It was her mother's voice.

Every night, her mother had said—every night for years, she had stood below the opening to the sky and sung this song for Christina, knowing that her daughter couldn't hear it, but singing it for her just the same.

Only tonight, she
knew
Christina was above her. Taft would have told her what had happened, and Beth Adnoid was hoping that Christina would hear and take courage from it.

Christina tightened her grip on Danny's hand and smiled. He was a mess—slimy bits hanging from his shirt, matted sticky hair, smudges on his cheeks that showed up even in moonlight. She probably looked even worse, and Christina was sure that they both smelled horrible, though after being in the garbage truck so long, she had almost lost the ability to tell.

But Danny was here, and alive, and that was what mattered. She could listen to her mother singing, and feel happy, instead of being crushed with guilt. Maybe the decision to rescue him would turn out to be a good one after all.

They crept quietly into the orphan camp and stopped next to Dorset. All around, the children lay flat, watching them with shining eyes.

“Did you remember to hang on to Bubby?” Christina whispered to Danny.

Danny reached in his pocket and squeezed. The cow gave a tiny squeak.

Christina grinned. “All right, then, we've got everybody. Come on, let's go.”

S
ILENTLY,
quickly, the children moved down the stair-stepped terraces. The moonlight cast strong, black shadows down one half of the mine, and the small figures kept to the dark side, slipping carefully from one level to the next.

The flat terraces did not go all the way around. Perhaps there was more zoom on the near side, or maybe the far side had been kept rough to discourage thoughts of escape. Whatever the reason, Christina saw they would have to go all the way down to the bottom of the mines and then pick their way up through the rugged terrain to get over the far rim and off the ridge.

Well, at least they were outside in the fresh air. She took deep breaths—she couldn't seem to get enough—and realized, to her dismay, that her sense of smell was coming back. And she really, really stank.

She tripped over a small pile of stones in the dark: Joey's cairn. She stopped to stack them up again—at least the ones she could find by feel—and was bumped into from behind.

“Pee-ew,” said a voice. “No offense, but would you mind staying downwind?”

Christina held on to Danny's sleeve as the orphans filed past. In the dark she couldn't see if they were holding their noses, but she thought they'd be crazy not to.

“I don't want to smell bad, Steena.” Danny's voice was troubled. “Can I wash?”

There was a trickle of water running through the rock at their feet. Christina shrugged. How could it hurt? He could splash some water on his face and hands, and it might make him feel better.

“Sure, Danny. But be quick, all right?”

“Okay!” Danny pulled off his shirt with enthusiasm and rubbed it diligently in the water.

Christina hadn't thought he'd try to wash his
clothes
—and without soap, it wouldn't do much good anyway—but it was too late to stop him now. She wrinkled her nose. Getting the shirt damp only intensified the odor, unfortunately.

She looked back the way they had come, to the lip of rock five terraces up. No guards, no lights, no cries of alarm. They were safe so far. She turned to follow as the last orphan passed. “Okay, Danny, come on, and bring your shir—”

“Let them go! Let the orphans GO!”

The cry came from somewhere above. The children stopped dead as
“GO! Go! Go!”
echoed from the rocks all around.

“Shut
up
, Barney! You're waking everybody!”

The orphans melted into the shadow of the rock wall, motionless. Above them, silhouetted on the mine's high rim, was a man. He was waving his arms.

“I
want
to wake up everyone!” shouted Barney. “It's not too late! We can still be good people!”

Christina smacked herself on the forehead. This was unbelievable.

There were two silhouettes on the rim. One was shaking the other. “What is wrong with you? Have you gone nuts?”

Three silhouettes, now. No, four. Christina stared with dread and fascination, the way she might watch a train wreck that she could do absolutely nothing about.

“I started to go away,” cried Barney, “but I had to come back. I don't want to hurt orphans, I want to help them! I want to make Momma
proud
!”

Oh, no, no . . . Christina grabbed her hair with both hands. All she'd had to do was tell Barney to go away and never come back, but no, she had to try to
inspire
him. She glanced up at the rocky hill they had yet to climb. If a hundred orphans moved now, they would almost certainly be seen. But if they stayed still, they would be caught for sure—

“Hey, look! The orphans! They're gone!”

Christina's heart sank as more guards massed at the edge of the rim, looking down. One had a flashlight—no, two. The beams shone down into the mine, moving back and forth, crisscrossing on the first terrace.

It wouldn't be long now. Should they run like rabbits? Or try to hide?

The guards could outrun children. But there was nowhere to hide in the open bowl of the mines, unless . . .

“Pass the word,” Christina whispered to the closest orphan. “Follow me. Don't make a sound.”

She turned back the way she had come, feeling her way with careful feet. There! She bent down by the cairn of stones—Joey's memorial—and patted around until she found the box with candles and matches, left for anyone the guards sent into the underground mine, the lava tube that had been blasted open by an explosion of zoom.

Shuffling, bumping, trailing roughened fingers along the stony wall, Christina led one hundred orphans into the mine. If she looked back through the crumbling entrance, she could see moonlit terraces in the distance, and the pencil-thin beams of moving flashlights.