Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (6 page)

Jesus, I can’t stand criers. I turn my back as her face crumples, just for a second. And I wonder, in a way that pisses me off all over again, if she was crying in the bathroom because of what I was going to do or what happened to her friends. Not knowing for sure what happened to them, really.

Why were they all traveling together like that, anyway? I swipe the handbook off the nightstand and bend the soft cover between my hands. That other Asian girl—was that her sister? Did her sister really just leave her there to save her own ass? Cold, man. Is that what these abilities do to them? Turn them into animals that know it’s all about survival of the fittest—

STOP. IT.

Because the situation already isn’t uncomfortable enough, 2A, the neighbor to my right, apparently has a guest of his own for the evening. I can feel the bedpost knocking against mine through the wall and scramble to grab the TV remote before the moaning starts. Static, static, static, news, game show rerun…I settle on
The Price Is Right
and turn the volume way up. This damn freak—I should have just left her, hoped to find one closer to Phoenix. She’s pricked every last one of my nerves with this act of hers, trying to pretend she’s all innocent and sweet to work me over, to put me in this exact place where I feel like I have to make sure she doesn’t have to deal with an ugly thing like that.

There has to be something in the handbook about PSFs being willing to pick up a kid instead of me having to drive to Prescott to drop her off. I don’t like the way my brain keeps circling back to wondering if I should give her one of the pillows or a blanket or if she can send an electric charge through the bed frame and kill me while I’m sleeping.

There’s a brief description in the book about what each color represents, but nothing about the theories of what caused the “mutation,” as they so eloquently put it.
Abilities fluctuate in strength and precision depending on the individual Psi
. Great. Of course life hands me the one that’s
strong
and
precise
enough to KO a car.

It’s sort of amazing to think that for as long as this has been going on, they’re still not any closer to figuring out what caused it or how to fix it. The rest of us would love if Gray would remember he’s supposed to be fixing the economy, too, not just pouring money into research for this supposed virus. What does it matter if we save the “next generation of Americans” when we can barely keep the current one going on what little we have? Nobody wants to have kids these days, not when it means potentially losing them a few years later. Birth rates are way down; there’s no immigration into or emigration out of the country because they’re terrified of the virus’s spreading. The future is all they want to talk about these days, not the present. Not how we fix things
now
.
How will America move forward after losing an entire generation?
the radio broadcasters want to know.
If the Psi can be rehabilitated, how will they handle being reintroduced to society?
asks the
New York Times
.
Is this the end of days?
cries the televangelist.

Maybe we all die out and the freaks inherit the world. No one seems to want to suggest that possibility, though.

There’s nothing about a PSF pickup in the handbook, of course, though there’s this:
If you feel like you are in imminent danger and the Psi you are pursuing is classified as Red, Orange, or Yellow you can request backup from nearby skip tracers through the network. The Psi Special Forces unit and the United States government are not responsible for any reward disputes that may follow.

So…that’s ruled out, seeing as I still have zero access to the skip tracer network.

I roll off the bed, walking the long way around the freak to get to my food hoard and mini-fridge. As I slather peanut butter on the stale bread, I tell myself,
Tomorrow you’ll be eating steak. Pizza. Whatever you want.
Right now, though, I just feel exhausted at the thought of having to deal with all this again tomorrow. I can’t even psych myself up with the mental image of throwing the bills in the air as I jump on Phyllis’s crappy-ass bed, letting them shower down around me.

The beer might as well have been NyQuil. Gone are the glory days of high school, when I could down bottle after bottle after the Friday-night football games and then stay up late enough to watch the sun rise from the roof of my buddy Ryan’s house. One and done.

I don’t want to think about Ryan, though, or any of them. They left me behind, vanished into a world of black uniforms and secrets. It’s fine. I swear it is. Sometimes, though, I just wish one of them had fought to take me with them. It’s hard to be the person who gets left behind, and never the person who gets to do the leaving.

I’m just starting to drift off to sleep, the handbook open across my chest, when the game show ends. At some point, I must have dozed off, because the next things I’m aware of are Judy Garland’s unmistakable crooning and her big brown eyes meeting mine as I squint at the screen. It’s that famous song about the rainbow—lemon drops, birds, all those nice things. She’s flanked by her little dog and a sepia-toned Midwest sky. The next time my eyelids flutter open, the house is in the tornado, crashing down.

I pat around the bed, searching for the remote just as Dorothy opens the door of her house to the Technicolor world of Oz.

It’s…somehow nicer than I remembered. My dad forced me to watch it with him when I was a little kid, maybe seven or eight, and all I remember thinking was how stupid the special effects were compared to those in the action movie I’d just seen in the theater the night before. I hated everything, even the way Dorothy’s voice seemed to wobble when she talked.

And I swear, the minute that big pink bubble appears and the good witch, whatever her name is, appears in that froufrou dress, I feel the bed jerk as the freak handcuffed to it twists to get closer to the screen.

I prop myself up on my elbows, peering down at her in the dark. She’s rearranged herself so she’s sitting awkwardly on her knees. I know the handcuff must be digging into her skin, but she doesn’t seem bothered by it. Her face is reflected in the TV’s glass face, and even before the Munchkins start singing and parading around, I see her eyes go wide and her lips part in a silent gasp. She’s riveted, like she’s never seen anything like it before. That seems impossible. Who hasn’t watched
The Wizard of Oz
?

It keeps her quiet and occupied—and to be honest, I’m too lazy to get the remote from where it’s fallen on the floor. So I leave it on and switch off the light on the nightstand. I try to sleep, but I can’t. And it’s not that the TV is on too loud, or that it’s too bright—I actually want to watch this. My brain wants to puzzle out why my dad was so hell-bent on getting me to sit through the whole thing. Like with everything he else loved, I’m searching for him in it. A line he borrowed, some kind of philosophy he gleaned from it…and really, all I can see is how this candy-colored world must have made him happy on the days he could barely bring himself to get out of bed.

I don’t want to think about this—to bring Dad into it now, when I’m already feeling this low. The virus-disease-whatever hit these kids at a young age, but my dad carried his sickness with him his whole sixty years of life, through the good years and the bad ones, and the terrible ones after he lost his restaurant. Until the weight of it finally sank him.

I want to laugh when all the characters start delivering the moral of the story, that all these things they’re looking for have been inside them all along—that that’s where goodness and strength live. They want you to think that darkness or evil is only something that gets inflicted on you by the outside world, but I know better, and I think the freak does, too. Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.

“Now I know I’ve got a heart,” the Tin Man says as I shut my eyes and roll away from the screen, “because it’s breaking.”

The girl has nightmares. It’s the only time I hear her talking, and it scares the shit out of me. I sit straight up in bed, fumbling in the dark for the knife I left on the nightstand. I think a wild dog’s broken in, or one of those feral cats I always see lurking around the motel’s Dumpsters. My brain is still half asleep—well, three-quarters asleep. I don’t remember about the kid sleeping on the floor until I’m basically stepping on her. I don’t even assume the noise is human, because it can’t be. No way. The words that come crawling out of her mouth aren’t words at all, but these gut-wrenching, god-awful moans.

“Nooooo, pleassssssse…nooooooo…”

I stand over her, and stand there and stand there and stand there, and I think,
Wake her up, Gabe, just do it,
but that feels like a line that shouldn’t be crossed. That means I care.

I don’t. No matter what she does or doesn’t do, no matter how hard she makes this for me, I won’t ever care.

The bed creaks as my weight sinks back down into it. I half hope the noise will wake her and get me out of having to make the decision. One hour drives into the next, and I lie there, as still as I can force myself to be. I listen to her cry all night, and it feels like a punishment I deserve.

M
ORNING COMES IN A BLINDING
burst of white light as the thick motel curtains are thrown aside, their metal rings screeching in protest. The flood of sun into the dark, musty room is so sudden that my body reacts before my brain does. I drop off the side of the bed and stagger onto my feet, throwing up a hand to shield my eyes.

Shit—
shit
! I slept too long, what time is it, where’s the—

A few things come into focus quickly. First the pile of clean laundry sitting on top of my duffel bag, just to the left of the door. I can smell the fresh scent from here and take a step toward it, confused. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a small form at the desk, sitting in front of two plates of food—powdered doughnuts, some fruit snacks, and pretzels—with my jar of peanut butter open between them. Clear plastic wrappers are dangling over the edge of the room’s small trash can, caught on the lip. I know exactly where they came from: the vending machines in the laundry room.

Carefully coating each pretzel on her plate with a delicate dab of peanut butter, she keeps her back to me as I walk to the table. The zip tie is gone, and so are the handcuffs. She’s changed, too, out of her dirty, bloodied clothes into a baggy pink Route 66 T-shirt and jeans she’s had to roll up a few times at the ankles. I stare at them until I remember there’s a donation box in the laundry room that no one’s ever done anything with, filled mostly with kid stuff.

With the exception of the bed I just fell out of, the room is impeccably tidy. The trash is gone, and she’s even cracked the window open slightly to get fresh, cool air flowing in. I storm to the window and throw the curtains shut. The room is pitched into darkness, but I don’t care. It makes it easier somehow.

“Are you
stupid
?” I yell. “You think this is going to work on me? That if you play nice with me, I’ll be nice right back? Are you really that big of an idiot that you think I want to
help
you?”

She shrinks a tiny bit in her chair, but she doesn’t look away. She doesn’t even blink, and I can’t help it—I know she’s a freak, I know that I shouldn’t be talking to her at all, or acknowledging this, or letting her get me this worked up, but it all explodes inside me until I feel anger making a mess of every other thought in my head.

Even if she wasn’t trying to play that game, she obviously thought I couldn’t take care of myself, let alone her. And this was her way of throwing it back in my face, wasn’t it? Mocking me. Why else wouldn’t she have run when she had the chance? Clearly I don’t know how to latch the handcuffs, I don’t know how to restrain her, and I can’t even keep myself alert enough to know when she’s left the goddamn room.

Why did I think I could do this? The freak won’t say a word, but I just look at her and I know the dialogue running through her head.
He sucks, he’s dumb as roadkill, he’s better off scrubbing trailers.
Same script as everybody else.

But I’m not. I’m not. I swear I’m not.

I can be better than this. I know I can be. These freaks, they all know the right way to mess with your thoughts, make you doubt yourself, but I won’t let her. Not anymore. The clock says that it’s only eight in the morning. They’ll be open. I can get rid of her now and be done with this. Get the ten-ton weight off where it’s caving my chest in.

“This isn’t Kansas, Dorothy,” I snap at her. “People here aren’t nice. They aren’t your friends.
I’m
not your friend.”

She ignores me, swinging her legs back and forth on the desk chair as she chows down on her breakfast. I get the look—the one I’m starting to think of as
that look
—in return. One eyebrow raised, lips pursed, eyes blazing with
Give me a break, buddy
.

I leave the food there and take her arm, ignoring her wince as I yank her up from her seat. I fasten two zip ties around her wrists this time, not caring when she makes a small noise of surprised pain. We’re leaving. Right now. I’m going to show her how serious I am. She’ll finally see she should have run when she had a chance.