Vanished (19 page)

              “There is no ebay,” Madison says in a sing-song voice.

              Zayn’s face crumples and he hangs the gun back on the rack.

              The room with the bow and arrow on the door is the same as the shooting range except in this room there’s a selection of bows, including crossbows, instead of guns.  On the wall there’s a giant wood cabinet with probably fifty small drawers, each one containing at least a hundred of every kind of arrow you can think of.  “We can
never
show Collin this room,” Madison says, glancing at her watch when she says his name.

              It’s impossible to tell if its day or night down here, “What time is it?” I ask her.

              She purses her lips, “almost four, they have an hour.”

              I nod, and we follow Zayn out to inspect the room with the bomb on the door.  I notice the walls of this room are substantially thicker than the other two and so is the door.  Inside are three huge plastic cubes big enough to hold one or two people standing side by side.  Each cube is made of six inch thick plastic and each has a door and a table inside. “So they trained with explosives in here,” Madison says, looking at the wall behind us. Rows and rows of metals boxes with labels are lined up on shelves.  Cautiously we check some of them out. Each box holds a different type of explosive material. “Why would they need,” Zayn looks down at the label on the box he’s holding open, “tank detonators?” He looks up at us like he’s expecting us to know the answer.

              Madison takes a step back, “I don’t know but you’re making me nervous. Put those up.”

              “Considering how old this stuff is, maybe we shouldn’t be touching it.” I say, sliding the box of C4 I was about to open gently back into place on the shelf.

              “This room creeps me out,” Madison says and I can’t help agreeing with her.

              “What’s next,” Zayn asks, putting the box of tank detonators back on the shelf and holding the door open for us.

              Madison points at the only door we haven’t explored. It’s another reinforced steel door with a red button beside it and the words
Level B4
-
Living Quarters & Mess Hall
printed on its surface. 

We get to the door and I reach out to press the red button.

An explosion smashes me into the wall, followed by a wave of heat and the smell of burning hair.  I feel someone grab onto my shirt-sleeve and shove me into Madison. We hit the ground and something heavy lands on top of us.  There must be another explosion that I don’t hear because the floor underneath me vibrates.  Zayn yells something but it’s drowned out by the sound of another loud explosion. I realize he was the heavy thing that landed on us.  He staggers to his feet, grabs me by my shirt, somehow gets a hold of Madison too and pushes us toward the girders underneath the boxing rink.  Thick black smoke makes my eyes burn as Madison and I crouch down and wedge ourselves into the space where the girders meet the floor.  There’s another explosion and Zayn throws himself down on top of us again. I have to move my face to keep from suffocating on his corduroy jacket. 

              Once we’ve gone a full minute without another explosion, Zayn rolls off of us and onto his back.  Madison moans and sits up beside me, holding her head.   I stay where I am, lying on my back, panting, and watching little flakes of burnt paper floating down around us, like charred snowflakes, “Oops,” Zayn says, and for some reason all three of us start giggling hysterically.  

Chapter Sixteen

Logan

              Celia leads us past two kids, our age, a skinny boy and an overweight girl with braces, standing sentry at the door to a two-story house.  They are both holding guns.  “Back here,” she says, gesturing with her head and leads us into a shabby living room lit with candles.  There’s a map spread out on the coffee table.  A big guy and a kid, that looks younger than me, both dressed like Celia with camo and Kevlar, hover over the map. “Give us a minute,” she tells them. They get up and walk into the next room, which I assume is a kitchen. “Have a seat, I’ll be right back.”

              She hurries out of the room. Jasmine and Collin sit on either side of me. Josh stands by the window and peeks out the curtains before turning back to us. “So,” Collin says, “this is weird.”

              Jasmine turns to us, “I can’t believe all these people were living so close and we never ran into them until yesterday.” 

              I remember the shadow and movement I saw yesterday when Trin and I returned to Madison’s apartment. 

              Celia comes back in pushing a stainless-steel cart covered with medical supplies. She pulls out the coffee table, rolls up the map, and sits down on in front of me, our knees touching. Her grey eyes meet mine and I realize I don’t trust her at all. Something about her icy demeanor makes me wish I was holding my gun.

              “Was he telling the truth?” I ask her, remembering the look on her face when she asked me to take my gun off her dad’s head.  No wonder she’s so icy.  

              He frowns, “What he understands of it.  His version is a little less complicated than mine.” 

              “How so?” Jasmine asks, watching Celia prepare to sew up my wound, her brown eyes anxiously locked on the needles.

              “For starters, I know why the buses were at the Towers. I was listening while the soldiers were talking. One of them was scared that they brought all of us, mentioned something about that not being in their orders.  The others were reassuring him that no one would ever know. As long as they retrieved your buddy Colin’s dad,” she points at Collin but doesn’t stop looking at me, “and several other VIPs before
the event, no one would care if they helped some innocent people on the street, after all they had plenty of room on the buses.”

              “What?” Collin and I say at the same time. Collin’s dad is the CEO of a major transportation company.  He’s from Ireland and came over to the states when he was just a kid. Collin is always telling stories about his grandfather being a key member of the Irish Republican Army.  According to Collin his grandfather was at Belfast in the seventies when the Irish took it.

              “Sit still,” Celia says and starts cleaning the wound with a q-tip.

              She glances over at Collin. “You are Collin O’Neal right? Your dad is Quinn O’Neal? Carrot-top head like yours, graduated from St. Raphael’s?”

              “Um, yeah” he answers. 

              She holds my face steady with one cold hand on my chin, “I saw him. They put him on the bus first and several soldiers stayed with him the whole time we were down there.  When they dropped us back off at the Towers, your dad went with them.”

              Celia puts her hand on the crown of my head to steady it and dabs at my wound with a q-tip. Occasionally she uses tweezers and drops little slivers of pavement into a bowl on the tray.  “But what would they want with my dad?” Collin says.

              She shakes her head a tiny bit, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.  All I know is he was there and he was the one the buses came for in the first place.”

              I can feel Collin trembling beside me, “Well, at least I know he’s alive.” He mutters.

“Don’t move, Logan,” she tells me, “this is going to hurt.”  

“Here,” Jaz says and grabs my hand.

              “I’ve had stitches before. Keep talking,” I tell Celia, “Do you know what the ringing sound was? Do you know what happened to everyone else?”

              She shakes her head and I bite down hard as she draws the thread through, “When the ringing stopped they left us at the Towers. Everyone but O’Neal, that is. They gave us some gear, these vests,” and I get a moments reprieve as she sits back to gesture to the Kevlar she’s wearing, “and that map,” she points to the map on the table beside her. “The soldier who gave it to me said we should leave as soon as possible. He told me
something
is coming and the city wouldn’t be safe anymore. When we came out, I expected to see a warzone.  They evacuated us deep underground and we all thought it was because the city was getting bombed or something but everything seemed normal until we turned on our TV, radios and phones and they didn’t work.” She shrugs, “It didn’t take us long to figure out that we were the only ones left.”  She sits forward and starts to stitch again. 

White hot pain shoots through my head and I need to bite, squeeze or punch something. I look down and realize Jasmine dropped my hand, her big eyes locked on Celia. “Hey,” I yell, jabbing my open palm at her.

              “Oh sorry,” she says and takes my hand again.

              “Stop moving,” Celia orders in a dangerously calm voice.

              “If he told you the city isn’t going to be safe anymore, why are you still here?” Collin asks and he sounds far away, like he’s in a tunnel or something.  My eyes start stinging and I struggle to focus on her response. 

              “We planned to leave the next day but that night while we were sleeping men in masks snuck into our houses and…and…” she looks like she’s about to cry and turns her face away from us, “they raped my mother and tried to rape me.  I stabbed one of them in the eye and the other one ran away.  The next morning several guys from our group – guys that went down into the shelter with us – were gone.  They stole a bunch of the guns and equipment and raped a bunch of our women before they left.”

              “That’s awful,” Jasmine says, “Is she okay, your mom, I mean?”

              Celia stiffens and a harsh slice of pain stabs through my forehead.  I feel her slowly pull the thread taut, “Owwww,” I say, drawing it out and giving her a bewildered look. 

              “She’s dead,” Celia says, in a glacial voice, “And I’m not leaving the city until I track those bastards down and make them pay for it.”

              The needle pierces my skin again and it feels like someone is bouncing a basketball behind my forehead, keeping rhythm with my thumping pulse.  “They killed her?” Collin asks in an uncharacteristically gentle tone. 

              She cuts the thread with a tiny pair of scissors and sits back to survey her work. “No, she took her own life.  I found her in the bath-tub. We buried her in the rose garden at Loose Park six days ago. Since then, we’ve buried two more women. Both suicides. 

Chapter Seventeen

Logan

              “What was that?” Collin asks, putting his long white fingers on the dashboard and leaning forward to look out the windshield.

              I take a left into St. Raphael’s parking lot. Another booming sound emits from somewhere around us and I slam on my brakes and shove the Expedition into park noticing puffs of smoke coming up from a vent in the ground.  As I open the door and step out the ground vibrates beneath me.

Trin.

             
I break into a run. “Wait up,” Collin shouts and I hear a car door slam and footsteps behind me.  There’s a crow-bar lying on the ground near the front doors and I see one of them is still partly ajar. I yank the door open and run inside. My shoes squeak on the floors as I hurdle towards the first floor broom closet and skid to a stop in front of the open door. A pile of mops and brooms prevent me from bolting down the little hole at the back of the closet. I kick them out of the way.

              “Here,” Collin says, catching up and handing me a flashlight.  I flip the switch. Jasmine reaches us and looks at the hole. 

              “Were going…” she swallows, her brown eyes round and watery, “down there.”

              The smell of smoke is wafting up from the stairs, “We have to. Those were explosions.”

              Her face contorts and she shakes her head, letting out a little whimper, “Jaz,” Collin says, “Zayn’s down there.”

              Her eyes dart over to him and she puts her hand on her chest taking a deep breath, “OTrin, oTrin,” she says, “just give me a flashlight.”

              I turn and head down the stairs. The first thing I notice is that it’s a tight squeeze. My shoulders barely fit and a mild claustrophobic feeling mixed with extreme anxiety to make sure everyone is oTrin drives me down with urgency.

“Oh, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this,” Jaz chants behind us.

              “We’re almost there,” I tell her seeing a door in my path. We get to it and I growl in frustration when my flash-light beam lights up a key-pad.
What now?
I think.

My hand is pressed against my body, against something hard and plastic. The radio!

              Wedging myself sideways I fumble getting it off my belt and up to my mouth. “Trin? Zayn? Come in,” I yell into it.

              I open the channel and listen.  Nothing.  Static.

              “Maddie, Trin!” I yell into the radio.