Flowertown (20 page)

“But he’s been helping me.”

“How?” Bing coughed out a laugh. “By bringing your phone back so he can tap your room? By not taking a rubber hose to you when he interrogated you?”

“He also let me get away when they were busting the secret meeting.” Ellie flinched.

“Oh really? You failed to mention that part. Guy was in on that bust?” He snubbed the joint on the bottom of his sneaker. “Well then, that certainly makes him trustworthy.”

“Don’t start. I don’t know what to think.”

“You do know what to think, Ellie. You just don’t want to think it.”

“But why is this happening? What does he think I’m doing?” Ellie lay back on the floor and stared at the dark
ceiling. “I’ve been invisible for almost seven years, and all of a sudden I’m a person of interest. Everyone’s watching me.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far.”

“Really, Bing? Then why did Mr. Carpenter come to my office and try to arrest me? Why did they put a guard on me?” Even the small hit of the joint was making her thoughts jumble and scatter, popping up out of order. “And how did he know I wasn’t in the building when the bomb went off?”

“You told him.”

“No.” She shook her head, feeling the familiar softness of her thoughts. “I told him I was inside. I told the clerk I was inside. You told me to say I was in the building and to lie about my med check.”

“Oh, so this is my fault now?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, Bing. I’m saying that…” She rubbed her eyes, her thoughts running together. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m tired.”

He braced himself on her shoulder as he unfolded himself from the floor. “I know how you feel. I’m tired too. I’m tired of bleeding and feeling my pulse under my eye, thanks to your boyfriend and his buddies punching on me. I’m tired of having my shirt glued to me with my own blood.” He pulled the shirt over his head with effort, and even by candlelight Ellie could see dark bruises coming up on his ribs.

“That looks painful.”

“Another keen observation from you.” He struggled to pull a black T-shirt over his head. “How do I look now?”

“Stealthy.”

“Excellent. How about you? Do you want to change?” He shook his head. “Let me rephrase that. Why don’t you change your shirt? You want one of mine?”

“What?” Ellie gave a mock gasp. “And get Ellie funk on it? Never. Let’s go.”

She led him back down the darkened stairwell, and by the time they made it to the third floor, the power was flickering back on. Down the hallway, people had their doors open to let the breeze blow through their rooms. As they passed, several people saw Ellie and ducked inside. Word of the arrest had traveled quickly. Just before the bathrooms, two teenage boys gawked at her as if she were carrying damning evidence in her arms. They didn’t avert their eyes until Ellie stopped and challenged them with a hard glare. Then they turned and found something much more interesting in the toilet closets to discuss.

“Nosy little fuckers.” Ellie didn’t think to check if anyone was waiting inside her room. She threw open the door with a bang and flipped on the light, hardly noticing Rachel’s absence. She was about to continue her opinion of intrusive neighbors when Bing held his hand up to silence her. He pointed to the ceiling and mouthed the word “bug.” Ellie nodded, suddenly aware that she was being recorded. She couldn’t believe Guy would bug her room, but if they found a bug it would be hard to deny.

Bing ran his fingers along the bed frame and underneath her nightstand. Ellie joined the search, her only knowledge of finding hidden bugs coming from watching cop shows on television. She worked her way across her nightstand, checking under dirty ashtrays and empty cans. She almost hated to search Rachel’s nightstand for fear of toppling the impossible pile of papers and magazines. Leaning back against the wall was a broken lamp Rachel insisted on keeping. Ellie turned it up, looking under the base like the cops did on
TV. And just like the cops on TV, she saw a small wire with a microphone on the end.

Ellie ripped the thin wire from the base and showed it to Bing. He held up his hands to say “I told you so” as Ellie crushed the device under an ashtray. Not satisfied with that, she held the frayed wire over her lighter until it began to smoke, then dropped it into a half-empty can of old soda.

“I think you got it,” Bing said as she hurled the can out the open window. Ellie gripped the windowsill, feeling her fingers tingle once again with the black rage that never seemed far from the surface. Bing put his hand on her shoulder, and she shook him off.

“What if it wasn’t Guy who put that there?”

“Jesus, Ellie, you can’t be serious.”

“What if it’s Rachel?”

Bing stared at her, blinking. “That’s impossible.”

“Is it? Why is that more impossible than Guy?”

“Because…” He waved his hands, looking for words. “Because Rachel’s a kid. Rachel doesn’t work for Feno.”

“Rachel said it herself—she’s worked everywhere in this place. She knew the code for the meeting. She’s on the tape with the confession and she didn’t get arrested. The wire was under her lamp, a lamp that’s never worked, that she insists on keeping.” Ellie could feel sweat on her upper lip as the hot logic of this impossible idea took root.

Bing grabbed her by the shoulders. “Listen to yourself, Ellie. You think Rachel is trying to get you arrested? Rachel? Who next? Me? The lady down the hall with the snot-nose kids? Annabeth Dingle? It’s Guy, Ellie. It’s Guy. It’s always been Guy. Face it.”

Ellie folded her arms over her chest, not meeting Bing’s eyes. “It’s just that…I don’t know. I mean, why? Why would Guy do that?”

He softened his tone and rubbed his hands over her arms. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on or why he would use you like that, but you have to listen to me. Are you listening?” He lifted her chin until she looked up at him. “Do you trust me?” She nodded. “Something is going on, and you may be in a lot of trouble. I really need you to pull it together.”

“I’m together.”

“Are you? Are you sure?” He brushed her hair out of her eyes. “I’ve known you a long time, Ellie. I knew you way back when, remember? I know you don’t always like to face things the way they are.”

Ellie turned her face from his hands and stepped back. “I’m fine. I told you that. I’m fine. Now shut up and let me find something to wear that doesn’t have your blood all over it.” She tossed her dirty shirt onto the growing heap of ruined clothes and knelt down beside the bed to find a cleaner one.

“Shit, you still have Guy’s gun?”

She pulled another shirt from the pile under the bed and pulled it down over the gun in her waistband. “Hell yes, I do. You think I’m going to give it back to him?”

“No, I think you should get rid of it. I think you should leave it here.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you getting pissed at me and shooting me.”

Ellie stepped up close to Bing. “Then don’t piss me off.”

The power was on at Dingle’s Market, and Ellie pushed open the door with force. She didn’t bother to check if anyone else was in the store. She marched, with Bing in tow, to the back of the store where Annabeth’s stool stood empty. Ellie banged on the counter.

“Annabeth? Are you here? It’s Ellie Cauley.” Bing put his hand on her shoulder to quiet her, but she glared at him and he drew back. “I need to talk with you.”

The curtains parted and Annabeth stepped through. “Ellie? And Bing? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, Bing. I didn’t expect to see you here. What’s going on?” Ellie gripped the counter, struggling to find the words to express the enormity of what she was feeling. Before she could utter a sound, the curtain parted again.

“Rachel.” Ellie could hardly say the word.

“Oh my gosh, Ellie, are you okay?”

She could feel Bing move in more closely behind her. “Okay is probably not the word I would use,” she said. “Did you know our room was bugged?” Rachel said nothing. “Yeah, they have a recording of you and me talking about
the stolen files and yet, oddly, Bing and I got arrested. They walked right past you.”

“Do you think I—”

“I don’t know, Rachel. You tell me. You told us about the code for the meeting and those people all got arrested too. How does that happen?”

Rachel’s pale cheeks mottled with red as she stepped up to meet Ellie across the counter. “I don’t know, Ellie. I don’t know what you think I’m doing, but if you think I have any kind of pull in this shit hole,” she spit the profanity out, “you are very, very mistaken. Want proof?”

She slammed a wrinkled sheet of paper on the counter.

When Ellie didn’t move, Bing reached past her for the sheet. “What is it?”

“It’s my test results.” Rachel spoke only to Ellie. “I’m not clear to go.”

“That’s impossible.” Bing scanned the sheet.

Annabeth put her arm around the girl, but she shook her off and leaned in closer to Ellie. “Nope, it’s all there. So whatever you think I did to you, however fucked you think you are, I assure you, I am ten times more fucked.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Bing said.

“Shut up, Bing. I can talk any way I want. I can use every fucking dirty word I know, and why not? It’s not like I’m ever getting out of this filthy, stinking shit hole. All I have to look forward to now is turning into another greasy, lazy, burned-out stoner nut job like my roommate.”

Ellie stepped behind the counter and came close to her. Neither woman spoke. They stared at each other, Rachel bracing herself for whatever Ellie might say, but Ellie didn’t speak. She reached out and pulled Rachel tight in her
arms, where the younger woman broke into hard, gasping sobs. Ellie cradled her, stroking her hair and whispering in her ear, letting Rachel cling to her until she couldn’t cry another tear.

Annabeth waited until they had drawn apart to speak. “I think it’s time for all of you to learn what’s really going on in the zone. We need to be in this together or none of us will make it. I was just getting ready to show Rachel. Ellie, Bing, from what I’m hearing, I think you need to know as well. Lock the front door and come with me.”

Bing hurried to the door and threw the bolt, then slipped through the curtain to join the rest in the crowded storeroom at the back of Dingle’s Market. The tiny space was cramped with cardboard boxes and loading pallets. Annabeth waited until Bing pulled the curtain, then headed back behind a wooden shelf holding cleaning supplies. On the floor, at the base of the shelf, was a pallet stacked with plastic-wrapped cases of canned vegetables.

“Through here.”

Rachel made a sound of surprise as the old woman lifted the loaded pallet as easily as if it weighed nothing. Annabeth laughed.

“The cans are empty. My son made the hatch.” Beneath the pallet were steep, narrow steps to the basement of the market. Annabeth went first, tapping on the side of the step three times before entering. She waited until she heard three taps from within before stepping down. “This way.”

The visitors were all wide-eyed as they followed the old woman into the cellar. At first there was nothing to see, just old beams and shelves stacked with more cans of food. Bing had to duck as they stepped through a small door and came
out into a wide, low-ceilinged room strewn with cables and car batteries. On one wall hung two televisions, and beside them a young man scrolled through a computer screen. Two walls were covered in large sheets of paper, full of notes and newspaper clippings and photographs, and on the final wall, the wall the door led through, hung gun racks loaded with shotguns and pistols of every size, over boxes of bullets of every caliber.

Annabeth held her hands out toward the scene. “Welcome to All You Want.”

The three fanned out, still gaping. Ellie stood before the television sets, which were on with no volume. “What is this?”

The kid at the computer didn’t look up from his screen. “This is everything you haven’t been seeing in Flowertown for the last three years.”

“I told you they were censoring information.” Bing punched Ellie’s arm as they stared at the screens. “You said I was crazy.”

“I stand corrected.”

Annabeth stood beside them. “Oh, it’s more than censorship. We’re being fed quite a show. We don’t know how long it’s been going on, but we’ve been onto it for about two and a half years now. Remember when the cable went out for a couple of months and we lost all the upper channels?”

“I remember,” Rachel said. “We used to get HBO and Showtime, and then it was nothing but home shopping and sports.”

“It wasn’t just the movie channels we lost,” Annabeth said, and Bing nodded.

“We lost the news channels too.”

“That’s right, Bing. Nobody thought much of it at the time. But then we couldn’t even get the Sioux City news. It started coming in from Fort Dodge. Or so we thought.” Annabeth shook her head. “Turns out you can only hold twenty pounds of cow shit in a ten-pound bag for so long. Mistakes started happening. News bulletins would break in with different newspeople than we were seeing on the six o’clock broadcast. Different channel logos would flash on and off. Hell, even some sports scores were wrong.” Annabeth put her hand on the shoulders of the boy at the computer.

“You all know my grandson, Matt, right?” He looked up. In his late teens, his eyes immediately went to Rachel. “Well, it was Matt and the Clark twins who figured out what to do. You know that Mindy Clark has never yet met a tree she couldn’t climb, and they managed to get up that cable pole and split that signal. They put some kind of gizmo on it that unscrambles the scramble. I never asked them to explain. All I know is that suddenly we’re watching a whole different set of newscasts than everybody else in Flowertown.”

Bing stared at the boy as if he had become a unicorn. “You knew how to do that?”

The boy shrugged. “Yeah. Wasn’t that hard once you knew what to look for. They scramble the signal every couple of months, you know, an automated security feature, but it usually only takes me a couple of hours to unscramble it.”

Ellie stared at the screen, watching highlights from a basketball game. “So what is it we weren’t seeing? What were they blocking?”

“That was the kicker,” Annabeth said, taking a seat on a bench near her grandson. “At first we didn’t see anything.
We watched those newscasts side by side, night after night, and there was hardly any difference, except for the reporters, of course, and a few local stories. The commercials were different a lot of the times, but that’s to be expected. We thought maybe we had just gotten paranoid. It happens. And then the Senate hearings started.”

Bing spoke up. “About the army funding. I saw it online one day in the morning. Of course, the Internet didn’t stay on long enough to actually read it.”

“People thought it was costing too much to keep the army here. There were hearings, protests, special elections. And we never heard a word about it.”

“Wait a minute,” Ellie said, holding up her hand. “What about the newspapers? Mr. MacDonald gets all the papers, even the
New York Times
.” Matt Dingle snickered, and Annabeth shushed him as she rose to her feet once again.

“You know that chili of mine you like so much, Ellie?” Ellie nodded and followed Annabeth to the first wall of notes and clippings. “Well, I order that special from Culvert’s Meats in Council Bluffs. And one day, in one of the boxes, I see that the packers lined the carton with a
USA Today
. I didn’t recognize the headline, and I read all the papers whenever I get a chance. Turns out this particular edition was one that didn’t get delivered to Mr. MacDonald.”

“And? So we didn’t get a paper one day.”

“Not just one day, Ellie. And not just one paper. This paper had a story in it about Feno Chemical coming close to filing bankruptcy. Well, I asked the folks at Culvert’s Meat real nicely if they wouldn’t mind to keep packing the chili the way they did, and wouldn’t you know, every time we got
a paper in a carton that we hadn’t gotten at the newsstand, there was some sort of story about Feno or Barlay or the protests about the army being in Flowertown.”

Bing nodded. “They’re controlling the information we get about the zone.”

“But why?” Ellie asked. “It’s not like we can do anything about it. No matter what happens, we’re stuck here.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Annabeth said. “We started stockpiling supplies. Of course, most of us hadn’t turned over all of our weapons. You know how it is on a farm, Rachel. There’s usually a secret stash of the necessities under the floorboards, right?” Rachel nodded. “And we all took to being very careful in our communications with each other and with our families on the outside. It stood to reason that if the news was being censored, our mail was being read.”

Bing punched Ellie once more on the arm in triumph. Her complaint was shushed when they heard the door to the cellar opening. Annabeth’s grandson reached for the pistol sitting beside the computer until they all heard three soft raps. Everyone relaxed as Matt tapped three times on the floor, then someone came down the steps. Annabeth smiled when she saw who it was.

“Ellie, I believe you know Olivia.” The med tech with the strawberry birthmark cleared the low door and stopped at the sight of the small crowd. Annabeth made introductions.

Olivia didn’t bother with a greeting. “You haven’t been taking the pills, have you?”

Ellie shook her head, too surprised to speak, and Bing nudged her. “You’re not taking your meds? Since when?”

“Since my med check yesterday. The one that got me arrested.” Ellie pointed at Olivia. “The one that happened when the med center was closed. What was that?”

Olivia moved past them to the wall of notes and tacked a set of prescription pages to the board. “I had to get a blood sample from you. I couldn’t do it through the regular channels, so I paged you using another tech’s code, one of Feno’s boys. We had to contact all of you, to see if the H had changed. Oh, and Marianne wanted me to apologize to you for being such a bitch. It’s the easiest way to tell if you’ve got it.”

Ellie stared at her. “Am I supposed to understand what you’re talking about?”

Olivia turned to Annabeth. “I’ve only got about fifteen minutes before I’ve got to get back. The timetable has been moved up. They’re making an announcement about the release. It’s the Es, just like I thought.”

Annabeth folded her arms, a worried line on her forehead. “Could we be wrong about this? If it’s the Es, that’s an awful lot of people.”

Olivia nodded. “It’s sixty-five percent of the locals. Ninety-eight percent of Feno. That doesn’t leave a lot of people behind. I think we’ve been right all along.”

Rachel stepped closer to Olivia. “Are you talking QEH? The file codes? I’m a Q; what does that mean?”

Olivia and Annabeth shared a serious look. “It means you’re staying here with the rest of us. The word is Saturday Feno is releasing everyone on the E with a clean bill of health.”

Bing’s eyes grew wide as Olivia spoke. “You said ‘on the E.’ What does that mean?”

“The E program. Equilibrium. It’s the name of the third phase of medications. Obviously the most successful.” She looked at Rachel. “You’re on Quantum, along with about sixteen percent of us, including me, Annabeth, and Matt. There are only a few Hs.”

“Like me, right?” Ellie asked, and Olivia nodded. “Let me guess. Horizon.”

“How did you know?”

Ellie looked at Bing. “A very reliable source told me. He also mentioned that something is going down tomorrow, not Saturday.”

“That’s the press conference.” Annabeth looked at a calendar taped to the wall. “In the clean rooms. They’re bringing in the national media. Now we know why, to announce the release of the Es.”

“Well, according to Guy, something is going to happen on Thursday, and it sounded more serious than a press conference. And it sounded like I was going to be involved. Why would Horizon be singled out?”

Olivia pulled out her phone and started texting while she spoke. “I’m going to be late. I’m calling in. I need to know everything you heard about tomorrow and I’ll tell you what I can.” She slid the phone back in her pocket and headed to the second wall of notes. She pulled a box out from a pile and rifled through looking for a folder.

“How much do you know about the BTM scale?”

“I’m a two,” Rachel said, and Olivia cracked her first smile.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me? What about you?”

Bing answered quickly. “Four.”

“Me too.”

Ellie looked around the group. “What am I?” Olivia looked at her in disbelief.

Rachel shook her head. “Ellie never pays attention to anything.”

“Well, you’d better pay attention to this.” Olivia opened the file. “You’re a six on the BTM scale, Ellie. That’s a scale of one to seven. None of us knew exactly what that meant when we got classified, and we still don’t know everything. It was a psychological profiling tool named after Byrd, Tabor, and Marcum, the three doctors Feno brought in when quarantine turned long-term.”

“Classifying people by their psychological profiles,” Bing said. “Like they do in hostage situations or prisoner of war interrogations. I’ve read about this.”