And I was.
* * *
I went to my berth and climbed in my hammock and slept and slept and slept.
Through lunch. Through dinner.
In the middle of the night, I thought I was dreaming that Astrid was in my room.
I was dreaming that Astrid was in my little berth, standing at my side, looking down at me.
Then I got a whiff of her and I jerked awake for real.
Astrid was in my berth. And she smelled rank.
She looked beautiful in the iridescent glow of my crappy alarm clock. But she really did reek.
Stupidly, my first thought was that I was glad Jake had helped me take out the last cotton wads from my nose before I crashed.
There’s vanity for you.
She grabbed my hair and wrenched my head up so I was looking in her face.
“Don’t you ever spy on me again!” she spat at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“A-hole.”
She let go of my hair and turned to go. The space was so small that her body was basically wedged against mine.
“And no more pain pills. They’ll ruin you. They’ll make you into an idiot.”
“Astrid, please,” I said.
“What?”
“I am really, really sorry.”
I sat up, awkwardly, swinging one leg over the side on my hammock. My leg brushed her thigh and she didn’t pull away.
“I was going to get my journal and I saw you two and … It was wrong. It was so wrong. Especially because…”
“Because what?” she said.
My mouth was dry. My heart was pounding.
“Because I … I care about you.” I said, then I backtracked some. “I want you to feel better. I want you to come back and be with us.”
In the glow from my clock, I couldn’t see her that well. But I thought I caught a glimpse of a streak of tears on her face.
“Save it,” she said. “Spying on me. Getting high. Scaring Max. It’s not okay.”
I felt so low. Like a worm.
“I need you to stay one of the good guys,” she said softly.
And then she left.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE HATCH
At seven a.m., I didn’t wake up Chloe. She was supposed to be my helper for the day. I bumped her and instead I woke up Max.
“Max,” I whispered into the nest where he lay curled up with Ulysses and Batiste. The little kids didn’t have hammocks. They slept on crib mattresses set side to side.
The three boys looked both feral and adorable, like wolf puppies in a den. Their hair was messed up, and the sheets and blankets were all twisted up. They looked like the wild boys from Peter Pan.
“Max,” I said, shaking him gently.
“Yeah?”
“Will you be my helper today?”
“Again?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I owe you.”
“Two days in a row, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Heck, yeah, I will!” he said as he lurched, still half asleep, to his feet.
* * *
As we walked to the Kitchen, he pulled on a fleece jacket. It seemed to be getting colder day by day. Maybe that’s what happened when the sun’s rays are blocked out by a giant metallic cloud.
“So, what’s for breakfast?” I asked him.
“Sundaes.”
“Like ice cream sundaes?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
“Max, I don’t think that’s a good idea. We need food, real food, to start the day.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But still. You do owe me, like you said.”
“Well, Max…”
“You were awful mean to me yesterday and you did make me cry…”
I should have said no. But I shrugged. “Okay.”
Why not? We could serve nuts to put on top, or something …
We loaded the shopping cart with sundae accoutrements.
“You know who has the best sundaes? The Village Inn,” Max said.
“Really?” I murmured. My head was aching again. The bruises, from what I’d seen, were even more brutal than the day before. There was some blood in my left eye.
To tell the truth, I thought I looked kind of tough.
But my head—I needed coffee and Advil.
“Once we was eating at the Village Inn and my mom went off to the bathroom,” Max said as he tossed a bottle of strawberry syrup into the cart. “My mom took forever and then my dad went off to see what was taking her so long and they did not come back for the longest time. And I sat there and waited and waited and the waitress asked me if we wanted dessert and I said sure. So then she brought me a banana split, like I had asked for, and I ate it. And I was going to share it with my mom and dad but they took so terrible long I decided to eat the whole thing up and then I didn’t feel so hot and I went to the bathroom to look for my dad and he wasn’t even there so I just went back to the booth and then the waitress woke me up and she made me tell her my phone number and she called my mom and it turned out they had just plumb forgot me there and they had gone on home without me.”
“Jeez, Max,” I said. “That’s terrible.”
“That ever happen to you?” he asked me.
“Not really,” I said.
“Yeah,” Max said. “It’s ’cause your folks probly don’t drink like my folks do.”“No, not so much,” I agreed.
“But you know what the upside was,” Max said. “They forgot to charge us for the banana split!”
I had to hand it to him. That kid could really tell a story.
* * *
So we laid out the sundae bar. It was pretty impressive. We had nine flavors of ice cream, from vanilla to Chocolate Moose Tracks. Hot fudge, caramel, butterscotch, pineapple, strawberry. Every type of topping: crushed Oreos, gummy bears, gummy worms, all the nuts, chocolate chips, butterscotch morsels, white chocolate chips.
“They’re gonna flip!” Max said.
“I agree. Hey, Max—”
“They’re not going to believe it!”
“I know,” I said. “Max, about yesterday. I’m sorry that I yelled at you. That wasn’t a nice thing to do.”
“Pshaw, yesterday’s over. I never think about yesterday. If I did, I’d be dead meat.”
He took a maraschino cherry out of the open jar and popped it in his mouth.
It seemed to me a pretty good life philosophy, actually.
Especially with the state of the world ruined as it was.
“Can you tie the stem in a knot?” he asked me. “There was this stripper named Bingo I met at Emerald’s. She could tie a cherry stem in a knot around the handle of a plastic sword! All with her tongue!”
I shook my head no.
“But she had these buck teeth so maybe that was her secret weapon.”
The ice cream was getting soft. I looked at the clock.
“When are they coming? Can I go get them?” Max asked.
It was eight thirty.
Where were they?
Suddenly I realized that the store was completely quiet.
We could hear no distant voices.
No early-morning quarrels among the little ones.
No husky laughing from Jake or Brayden.
No movement.
I started to run.
“What is it? Where are they?” Max yelled as he followed me.
The Train was completely empty.
I spun around.
Max ran up to me.
“Where is everybody?” he cried.
“Shhhhh!” I said.
And I heard, faintly, sounds coming from the storage room.
“They’re in the back,” I told Max. “Come on.”
* * *
Just as we reached the doors, Alex came out.
“Dean,” he said. “I was coming for you. There’s people at the door!”
I pushed my way through the little kids to the front of the group, near the intercom.
The screen was a dull gray, with two shapes standing a bit off.
Niko: “They could be dangerous!”
Josie: “They need our help!”
Jake: “We can not trust them!”
Brayden: “But they know Mrs. Wooly!”
It was the last one that caught my attention.
“What?” I yelled. “They know Mrs. Wooly?”
“We’re going to vote,” Niko declared.
“WAIT!” I shouted. “Somebody tell me what’s going on!”
“We were taking the trash to the Dump when Henry heard a voice,” Josie told me. “I came back here and a man was asking us to let him in. Craig Appleton is his name.”
“And he has a friend,” Niko interrupted. “There’s two of them.”
“The friend knew Mrs. Wooly,” Brayden added. “He’s the maintenance guy from the grammar school.”
“Yeah,” said Chloe. “He fixed the buses and snowblower and stuff.”
“How did they get through the guy?” I asked Niko. He looked at me blankly. “The guy guarding the store.”
Now the little kids started asking what guy guarding the store and Niko shrugged.
“I didn’t ask.”
“Well, shoot,” Jake said. “Let’s ask them now.”
So Niko stepped up to the intercom.
“Excuse me, sir, we have a question for you.”
One of the shapes stepped up to the intercom. His face was wrapped in layers of some kind of plaid material. Maybe a wool throw rug?
“Yes, Niko, what’s the question?”
“Well … There was a man. Who was deranged from the compounds. As we understood it, he had sort of decided the store was his and he wasn’t letting anyone get—”
“Yes,” said Craig Appleton. “We had to shoot him.”
* * *
Niko told Josie to take the little kids, including Sahalia and Alex, back to the Living Room. Josie refused.
“I’m not going to be left out of this decision,” she argued.
“Me either,” said Sahalia.
Niko took a deep breath.