Monument 14 (7 page)

I heard this weird whine. A panicky whine.

It was coming from Brayden.

“What is he?” Brayden said. His upper lip was curled back in an expression of disgust. “What is he? What is he made of?”

“What are you talking about?” Jake said, still struggling to keep me pinned.

Jake must have weighed two hundred pounds. I was flattened against the cold cement floor.

“Look at him!” Brayden cried. “There’s smoke coming off him. He’s straight from hell!”

“What are you talking about?” Alex said. He sounded scared. He sounded like he was crying but I couldn’t see him from where I was pinned.

Brayden was pulling at his hair, looking all around.

“It’s everywhere!” he cried. “Smoke from hell.”

He backed away from us and huddled against a stack of giant boxes.

“Brayden, there’s no smoke,” Niko said. “Everything’s okay.”

“There is evil everywhere!” Brayden wailed.

“Dude, you’re flipping out,” Jake said.

Niko went over to Brayden.

“Don’t touch me!” Brayden screamed.

“Look,” Niko said to Jake. “His pupils are completely dilated.”

“Get away from me,” Brayden said.

“It must be the air.” Niko came over to look at me. “The air went all green. We must have been breathing in the chemicals. Some kind of psychotic agent in the air.”

Niko looked funny, too, though I wasn’t quite up to saying so.

He had blisters around his eyes, like a raccoon mask. And his hands, when he touched me, were covered with tiny blood blisters, like he was wearing red lace gloves.

He started to cough. It sounded wet in there.

He coughed into his hand and came up with a blob of red phlegm. Then he caught sight of his hands and he looked at them with this expression of puzzlement so exaggerated I started to laugh.

Not a cool, ironic laugh but kind of a mad cackle.

I’m telling it like it happened, okay?

Brayden was seated on the floor, curled in a little ball, sobbing hard, jagged sobs.

Good.

I closed my eyes and listened to my heart beating. It was loud, like I had the heart of a gorilla.

All I could say was “Agghrr…”

I was trying to say Alex. But it didn’t come out.

“We’ve got to get cleaned up,” Niko said. He had his shirt off and was examining his skin. A tapestry of blisters was developing over his skin. It followed the underlying veins. He was starting to look like a biology class illustration of the circulatory system.

I tried again. “Agghhrr…” I wanted to say I was sorry.

“We need soap and water,” Niko said. “And I think I should take some Benadryl.”

“I’ll get it,” Alex offered.

“Sahalia, you should change, too,” Niko said. Sahalia looked freaked out. Her makeup was running down her cheeks. She headed toward the doors back into the store, giving Brayden a wide berth.

“Hey, would you mind getting us some clothes, too?” Niko asked.

She looked back at all of us.

“Sure,” she said. “Whatever.”

I tried to say, Let me up, I’m fine. But what came out was
grrrrag
. I strained against Jake’s bulk.

“Chill out, Dean!” Jake shouted in my face.

Alex skirted by. He glanced at me, then looked away. He had welts across his face where I had clawed him and there was blood caked near his nose. His eyes were red.

“Hey, little man, do me a favor,” Jake said to my brother. “Get me some rope so I can tie up the Hulk over here.”

*   *   *

There is something very wrong with being tied up with rope your own brother brings from the Sporting Goods section.

*   *   *

After they tied me up, Jake took Brayden back into the store. He and Niko thought maybe the air in the storeroom was still polluted.

Niko stripped off his clothes and threw them in a trash can. He told Alex to do the same. They took the antibacterial soap and spring water that Alex had brought, and stripped and washed down. They just stood there on the cement floor and scrubbed down together.

“Are you okay?” Niko asked Alex.

“I think so,” Alex said.

“That was pretty scary.”

“Yeah.”

*   *   *

I hated hearing that. I hated hearing Niko comforting him. He was my brother. I should be the one comforting him. Only I had attacked him, you see.

*   *   *

“Here!” came Sahalia’s voice, and some garments came flying through the door.

She had picked out pink tracksuits for us, complete with fluffy pink slippers.

I was starting to feel like myself again.

“Guys,” I croaked, my voice horse and scratchy. “Guys…”

Niko stopped dressing to cough into the trash can.

“Are you okay?” Alex asked Niko.

Ask me, I wanted to say.

Niko nodded, wiping spit from his chin.

“The blistering is going down. Washing was a good idea. I think if I’d been up there any longer it could have been really bad.”

Alex nodded sympathetically.

“Guys!” I said from the floor.

“Okay, Dean!” Alex snapped at me. “Just wait!”

Niko examined his chest. The blisters were fading away. Vanishing almost.

After they’d both dressed, they came over to look at me.

I saw Alex had my glasses sticking out of his shirt pocket. He must gave grabbed them during our scuffle. Pretty considerate, after I’d tried to tear his scalp off.

“You’re feeling better?” Niko asked me.

“Yeah,” I croaked. “Well, I feel like a buck fifty. But I feel like myself.”

“Who is the president? What day is it? What’s Mom’s favorite flavor of ice cream?” Alex asked me.

“Cory Booker. Wednesday. She’s lactose intolerant.”

They let me up.

*   *   *

When we came out of the storeroom and walked back to where the others were waiting, we must have looked really funny in our pink sweatsuits.

Astrid started to ask us if everything was all right, then she burst into laughter.

“Hey, kids, look, it’s the ladies’ track team!” Astrid announced with a flourish, and they all cracked up.

Jake and Brayden joined in laughing. Alex, too.

But I still had some weird stuff happening in my body.

What I wanted was Astrid. She looked so good to me I wanted to take her, in a dark and terrible way.

Pardon my bloodlust. It’s just a little something they whipped up over at NORAD.

I swallowed. Tried to get my breath back.

“We made you guys some pizza,” Max said.

“Then we ate it all so Astrid’s making you some more,” Chloe added.

*   *   *

While Jake, Niko, and Brayden filled Astrid in on what had happened, I took a look at my brother, who I had really done a number on. The shopping cart of medical supplies was still in the Pizza Shack area, so I poked around, but I didn’t see what I wanted.

“Alex, please, come with me,” I said. “So I can fix you up.”

I knew what I needed to do the job right: Bactine. Our mom swore by it. She never used anything else to clean scrapes or cuts or what have you. She even carried it, in a small travel bottle, in her purse.

So I motioned for Alex to follow me and we headed back toward the Pharmacy section.

I felt horrible.

I had clawed him across the face. So brotherly of me. And he had a huge bruise developing along his jaw. Such familial tenderness. His eyes were red from crying. Because of me.

I rummaged through the fallen merchandise until I found the good stuff. I also grabbed a bag of cotton puffs.

“It wasn’t me,” I said, swabbing the first of his many scrapes. “Something in the air made me go crazy. You know I’d never attack you like that.”

Alex nodded, looking at the floor.

“Please,” I begged. “Say you forgive me. I feel so horrible. I couldn’t feel any worse.”

Tears welled up in my little brother’s pale eyes.

“It’s just…,” he said, his voice getting thin. “It’s just that I wasn’t scared before…”

And now he was.

Thanks to me.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he said. “Why you acted like that. Why Niko got those blisters and Brayden started seeing things.”

“We’ll figure it out,” I told him. “And I won’t … I won’t let myself get exposed to the chemicals in the air again. I promise.”

“But, Dean, if you can’t go outside, how are we going to find Mom and Dad? How will we go home?”

I could have lied. But Alex was smarter than me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

*   *   *

After I got him cleaned up we walked back together toward the others. He had forgiven me, but he was still kind of stiff with me. Wary, I guess. Or maybe he was just physically sore from the beating I had given him.

As we approached the Pizza Shack we heard: “I did too go to Emerald’s!” from Max.

There was this big disconnect between what the big kids were dealing with and what the little kids were thinking about. For example, while I was patching up my brother after having tried to rip him apart due to a chemical compound–induced mania, Max, Batiste, Ulysses, and Chloe were discussing Emerald’s, a strip club located near an off-ramp at the outskirts of town.

“He’s lying. You never went to Emerald’s. They don’t let little kids in there,” Chloe protested.

“They do if your uncle’s the bouncer!” Max countered.

“What do they do in there, anyway?” Batiste wanted to know. “Our church is always trying to get those sinners to repent. But I don’t even know what kind of sinning they’re doing.”

“Probably cursing,” offered Chloe.

“Tons of that!” said Max.

“That’s a sin.” Batiste sighed.

“And drinking liquor?” Chloe asked.

“Totally,” said Max. “They have these little glasses in all kinds of flavors like watermelon and peach passion and hot apple. But they taste horrible. Sweet and horrible. I had three of them one time and then I puked them all up, right on the bar, and my mom said if my uncle ever takes me there again, she’s gonna call the cops.”

“Drinking is a sin,” said Batiste.

“Wow,” Chloe murmured.

“I don’t want to go back, anyways,” Max continued. “Boring. Just a bunch of moms dancing around in their string underwear. Big whoop.”

I stifled a laugh.

“What?” Chloe said. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh … Alex was just telling me a joke,” I said.

“Tell us!” she demanded. “We love jokes.”

Alex shrugged, lost. “I forget.”

“Come on!” they pleaded.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “How do you make a tissue dance?”

“How?” Max said.

“You put a little boogie in it!”

Nothing. Not even a groan.

“That’s the worst joke I ever heard,” said Chloe.

“I don’t even get it,” said Max.

Alex and I left the grade schoolers to discuss the finer points of adult entertainment and went over to where the big kids were gathering. We crossed past Josie, who was sort of slumped in a booth. Still not saying much. Well, anything.

“How are you, Josie?” I asked.

Alex nudged me toward the other big kids. He wanted to hear what they were thinking about the chemicals. I did, too …

“I don’t understand,” Astrid said. “It made Niko blister up, Dean turned into some kind of a monster, and Brayden started having hallucinations. But Sahalia and Alex and Jake were fine?”

“It doesn’t make any sense but, yeah,” Jake said, scratching his head.

“Maybe they attack based on age or something…,” Brayden said.

“I noticed that the effects seemed to wear off very quickly,” Alex piped up. “It makes me think they attack the central nervous system.”

“That anyone could make this kind of poison is just horrible,” Astrid said. “The people at NORAD should be shot.”

“Hey! That’s my dad you’re talking about,” Brayden said.

“But why would they make such awful things?” Astrid asked us. “I mean, a chemical that makes people turn into savages? Or makes them blister up and die? It’s evil.”

“They made them to protect us.”

“Protect us from what? From who?” Astrid demanded.

“From our enemies!” Brayden answered.

“It’s inhumane,” I spoke up. “Just making those compounds violates the Geneva Convention. It’s illegal.”

“Nothing’s illegal if the government itself is doing it,” Brayden asserted, like an idiot.

“That’s just amazingly wrong,” I said.

“Hey, Brayden,” Astrid said. “What exactly does your dad do for NORAD, anyway?”

I’d been wondering that exact thing. I had sort of fantasized that Brayden’s dad was like a janitor.

“That’s classified, Ass-trid,” Brayden replied.

Then we heard some rattling.

Chinka-chinka-chink.

“Hello?” came a distant voice.

We jumped up.

Someone was at the gate!

Beyond the plastic sheeting and the blankets, someone was rattling the gate.

“They came!” shouted one of the little kids. “They’re here for us!”

“Anybody home?” came the voice from outside. “Hello!”

We rushed to the gate. Everyone started clamoring at once: “Hi! Hello! We’re in here! Who are you? Hello! Hello!”

“Open the gate!” the voice shouted. “I hear you in there.”

“Yes, yes! We’re trapped inside, we want to get out! We want to go home!” shouted all the little kids in a big jumble.

Chloe turned to Niko and commanded him. “Take down the plastic. He’s here for us!”

“Don’t you touch it!” Niko growled. I’d never heard him so intense.

“Well? Open up! Come on! I’m hungry!” came the voice from outside.

The little kids were still bouncing with excitement, but I saw the others stiffen.

Listening real attentively. Something about his tone.

“We can’t open the gate,” Jake yelled. “It’s stuck.”

“You can! You can open it if you try! Come on!”

Chinka-chinka-chink.

“We’re locked in,” Jake tried to explain.

“Who’s in there?” the voice shouted.

“We’re kids from Lewis Palmer!” Jake continued. “We took shelter here from the hail and—”

“Open the gate, little kiddos!” the voice shouted.

“We can’t open it, dude!” Jake yelled. “It’s some kind of a security gate. But we want to get a message to our parents—”