The Lost (12 page)

“Sure. Let’s go with that.”

I’m not reassured. “Really?”

“I thought no one would find this place. I was wrong. So here I am, guarding you, in case I’m wrong again.”

That, oddly, does reassure me. “Why me and not Claire?”

He’s silent for a moment. “The Missing Man refused you,” he says at last, and for once, I don’t hear the mocking tone to his voice. “I’d rather no one kills you until I figure out why. If this is what it takes to keep you safe, then this is what I’ll do.”

“Oh. Good. That’s good.”

“So far, you don’t seem any different from any other lost person.” His voice is louder, less muffled. I turn my head. He’s left the closet and is standing next to my bed, silhouetted against the window. “You aren’t overwhelmingly clever or witty or funny or strong or fast or...”

“I get it. You don’t like me. Thanks for keeping me alive anyway.”

He shrugs. I see the movement of his shoulders, though I can’t see the expression on his face. “Claire likes you.”

“That’s because I gave her a rabbit.”

“You did do that.” He falls silent, and I don’t know what to say. I wonder how long he plans to stand there, looking down at me.

A few minutes pass.

A few more.

Strangely, I don’t feel afraid. In fact, I feel tired for the first time since I lay in bed. My limbs feel heavy, and my eyes feel thick. As weird and freaky as it is that a strange, overly handsome man is sleeping in my closet, I feel...oddly better that he’s here. I’m not alone, even if he doesn’t think much of me. I’m a tool, or at least a potential tool, in his personal vendetta. It helps that I now understand why he’s helping me. My muscles are finally unknotting. My eyelids feel like cement sealing shut. “Maybe that makes me like you more, too.” His voice is soft, and I’m not certain that I hear him correctly.

After a minute, the closet door opens and shuts.

I don’t dream this time.

Chapter Ten

The closet door is open when I wake.

I sit up and squint at the window. Blurred by the dirt and dust that streaks the panes, sunlight glares into the bedroom. Definitely morning. I feel caked in dust, and my lungs feel constricted and clogged. I know I slept, but still I ache in every muscle. My legs feel as though they’ve been stretched and pulled like dough.

There are voices outside my room, and I suddenly remember the thief. Pushing away my sheets, I creep to the door and press my ear against it. Peter and Claire. I can’t hear their words, but I think they’re in the dining room. From the tone, it sounds like an ordinary conversation. It should be okay if I shower before I face today.

I fetch the summer dress I found—it’s still in its dry cleaner plastic wrap, and it’s nearly my size. I also have fresh underwear and sandals, courtesy of a lost gym bag that Claire discovered in a junk heap. I carry them with me to the bathroom and drape the clothes over the towel racks next to a mismatched set of hotel towels that Peter found. As I turn on the shower and step in, I think that Mom would like the sandals.

It’s a casual thought, but it hits me with such force that I can’t breathe. I sag against the shower wall. I feel the slick soapy tile on my side. Home. Mom. Sinking to the floor of the shower, I let the water fall over me. It cascades down my face and off my chin. I can’t tell if I’m crying or not, but my shoulders are shaking, and I’m hiccupping in air and droplets as water sprays in my face.

After a while, I reach up and turn the water off. “Enough,” I say.

I say it again just to hear my voice. “Enough.”

Stepping out of the shower, I dry myself with the (nonmoldy) towel and dress in the (clean) summer dress and wish that I hadn’t spent the time hunting for either when I should have been finding my way home. Today, that will change. I drag a half-broken brush through my wet hair. Today, no lessons. No scavenging. It doesn’t help me to balance on a roof better or to learn to ignore a dead man on a couch.

I think about yesterday’s shower. I’d been so certain I’d find a way home quickly. I’d said my affirmations, like Mom—and I’d failed to come any closer to a way out.

I won’t fail today. But I also won’t delude myself. It might not be quick or easy to find a way home. So from now on, I will have only two goals: don’t die, and develop a plan to find a way home.

Squaring my shoulders, I walk into the dining room. Peter and Claire are both perched on chairs—one foot on the back of the chair, the other on the front of the seat. The chairs are tilted to balance on the back legs only. Whatever I was going to say dies in my throat.

“I’m not going to ask what you’re doing.” I walk to the backpacks. I carry mine over to the table, unzip it, and pull out a can of pineapple. “Knife?”

Claire hands me her knife. She doesn’t lose her balance.

I contemplate the can, the knife, the can again, and then I stab the top of the can with the knife. I twist it in a circle, widening the hole. I hand the knife back to Claire. She cleans and sheaths it as I tilt the can to my lips and drink. “Want some?” I hold it out to Claire.

She takes it, sips, and passes it to Peter. He widens the hole with his knife and plucks out a chunk of pineapple, and then he passes it back to me. We eat that way, the two of them perched, inexplicably balancing on chairs, until the can is empty and drained.

I hold up the can. “We need to find string. Or twine. Or an electrical cord. Or something. Plus more cans. We’ll string them together and put them where someone will have to trip over them if they want to reach the house. I want an alarm system.” First step to not dying: secure the little yellow house.

Claire’s chair tips down. Agile as a cat, she leaps onto the table before the chair crashes to the floor. “I’ll find string!”

Peter’s lips are twitching as if he wants to smile. “And what happens when someone or something sets off your high-tech alarm system?”

“Booby traps,” I say confidently and firmly.

Claire sighs. “I love her.”

I look in each of the backpacks. “Anyone keep any paper and— Never mind. Found it.” I pull out a pencil case and a notebook. Flipping the notebook open, I sit on one of the dining room chairs. I sketch the house, add in the windows, lightly catch the shadows around it as the sun hits in the dusk...

Claire peers over my shoulder. “Wow.”

I stop sketching. I didn’t mean to get carried away. Still, the roof needs a bit more texture. I add the hatching to indicate the shingles. “We need a way to lock the front door and secure the windows when we leave. And we need a way to discourage people from breaking in.” I make
X
’s where I think we need to add traps.

Leaving his precarious perch on a chair, Peter joins Claire and peers over my other shoulder. I’m suddenly self-conscious about my sketch. I should have done it in a different perspective, gotten a feel for the expanse of the desert, plus the angles on the porch aren’t right... “Hmm,” he says. I don’t know if this is approval or a critique.

“The tricky part is that we need to make it look like we aren’t hiding anything,” I say. “It has to be casually inaccessible. What would keep someone from entering a house?”

“Rabid dinosaurs,” Peter says immediately.

“Seriously.”

“I am serious. If I saw a rabid dinosaur, I’d skip that house.” He winks at Claire, and she giggles. He then mimes roaring like a dinosaur, and she laughs out loud.

I tap the notebook with the pencil. “Anything that exists? Like, say the windows were all surrounded by boards with nails sticking up?”

“Yeah, I’d skip that house, too.”

“Good. What else?”

He shrugs. “If it looked empty.”

I could paint the shades on the windows to look like empty rooms. It wouldn’t fool anyone close up but might dissuade someone passing by from taking a closer look. But I don’t have the paint, and it would take too much time. I need the house to be safe but not at the expense of my other goal.
Don’t die, and find a way home.
My new mantra. “Something fast and easy to do.”

“Plague!” Claire pipes up cheerfully.

Peter nods in agreement.

I hold up my pencil to halt discussion for a moment. “Just to be clear, there aren’t really rabid dinosaurs here, are there?”

Claire giggles again.

“Just checking. Okay, what about plague?”

Peter draws a symbol in the dust on the dining room table: a circle with three linking circles on top of it. A biohazard symbol. “Scavengers paint them on the doors of houses with diseased bodies inside or other kinds of contamination. Happens sometimes. Everyone calls it the plague.”

“Great! I mean, not great about the diseased bodies, of course.”

Peter smiles, and it’s as if his face blossoms. But I can’t let this distract me. I twist the white strip in my hair as I think. “So...we need paint, bright for the biohazard sign,” I say. “Red, preferably. Nails and hammer, which we have. String and cans and other loud items for the alarm system.”

“Forks and spoons?” Claire suggests.

“Yeah, that would be fine. Anything that makes a loud clatter.”

“Feral dogs,” Peter says.

Both Claire and I spin to look at the window. I retreat behind a chair. Claire whips her knife out and drops to a crouch. I don’t hear howls or barks, but...

Peter rolls his eyes at both of us. “Relax. What I meant is— if a house had feral dogs, then I wouldn’t enter.”

“I don’t want dogs in the house,” Claire says. Her lower lip juts out in a pout. She doesn’t put the knife away.

Coming out from behind the chair and sitting again, I think about it, tapping my pen again on the notebook. “If we had a tape recorder, we could record the howl, maybe a few other sounds, and then play it while we’re gone. Kind of like leaving the radio on when you go on vacation.”

“What’s a tape recorder?” Claire asks.

Peter nods. “I may have one.”

“Then we’ll just have to get close enough for some good recordings...” I try to say this like it’s no big deal. Saunter up to feral dogs that would rather munch your face off. Sure. Right after breakfast. “Okay, so here’s our plan. Peter, you get the tape recorder. Claire, try to find red paint, string, and anything metal and loud we can put on the string. I’ll start on hammering the nails near the windows until Claire returns with the paint.”

Claire hops off the table. “Yay!”

Saluting, Peter steps off the back of the chair. It neatly drops onto its four legs. “Yes, ma’am.” I notice he isn’t talking about leaving anymore. I don’t know if it’s because of the intruder, or if he’s decided I’m interesting again.

* * *

Alone, I hammer nails through thin boards and then hammer the boards to windowsills. I wince every time the head of the hammer strikes the wood. The strikes seem to reverberate across the desert. I imagine the sound traveling across the sand and dirt, through the houses, and into town where the people who want me dead will hear it as an invitation.
Come to the little yellow house to kill Lauren. BYOB.

I finished downstairs and am working on the upstairs attic room window. I’m placing the nails askew so they’ll look natural, as if a sloppy handyman chose to rip out a chunk of the window frame and didn’t flatten the nails afterward—or at least that’s what I hope it looks like. I’ve never done much construction. Regardless, the nails are long and vicious, and I pound them through the sill so they’ll point upward. Anyone who grabs the sill to hoist themselves inside will have a nasty surprise and hopefully reconsider the whole endeavor in favor of breaking into a less prickly house.

By the time I finish, I’m sweating and my clothes are sticking to me. I look out the window at the haze on the horizon—the manifestation of the void.

Suddenly, I want to see it again. It’s my jailer. My prison wall.

I am walking before I’ve decided to: down the stairs, out the door, around the junk pile and out the gate. The air is hot but not unbearable. The sun pricks the back of my neck, and I sweep my hair up into a twist on the top of my head. On the other side of the fence, I see a pair of chopsticks on the ground, still in their Chinese restaurant wrapper. I pull them out, break them apart, and use them to hold my hair in place. Then I walk into the desert.

The wind whispers across the reddish sand. It’s a soft musical sound, like a whisk in a bowl. The low scrub brush trembles as it blows. I feel the sand on my skin.

Ahead of me, the dust storm—the void—is spread across the horizon. It blots out the thin distinction between the land and the sky, an amorphous but massive wall. Closer, I expect to feel wind. But I don’t. The dust hangs in the air, motionless, a wall of dust. It’s evenly thick, as if it were a mass of reddish-beige cotton, not dust particles suspended in the air.

I stop and study it. It looks endless. Impenetrable. But maybe that’s only here. I turn east and walk, the void to my left. It must end somewhere. No storm lasts forever. There must be a break in it, or at least a weak point.

I
will
find a way out.

I won’t be trapped here.

I can’t be.

I keep walking until my throat feels dry. I wish I’d brought water. I didn’t plan for this properly—or at all. I can’t circumnavigate Lost on foot, not without water. I’m still near the eastern outskirts. There could be a break in the dust to the west or the south, but at this rate, it would take me hours to reach it.

Ahead, the dust swirls. It’s only moving in one section—a whirlpool in the center of an otherwise-undisturbed beige lake. Continuing to walk alongside the storm, I watch it swirl. The whirlpool darkens, and the dark-light shadows swirl together as if stirred faster and faster. I slow, and then I halt. Maybe I shouldn’t be so close.

The shadows suck in, the spiral turns inward, and then it shoots out, a tornado-like arm of dust extending over my head. Instinctively, I duck. A car tire is propelled out of the dust tornado. The tire shoots over me and lands between the houses nearly a mile away.

“What the hell,” I say out loud.

I look at the void again as the tornado shrinks back, and the spiral slows. Soon, it’s placid again, as if the eruption had never occurred.
This
is how items end up in Lost? The void...expels them? Violently. Like a...leviathan burp. Eyeing the dust, I back away from it. There’s nothing normal about this dust storm. Nothing normal about this place. Nothing normal about any of this.

I shouldn’t be here.

I don’t belong here.

Enough,
I think again. This is the plan: I will find a break or weakness in the dust storm, and then I’m going to cross it, leave, and never look back. For now, though, I’ve walked as far as I can. I turn back and head for the little yellow house.

Maybe I walked too far. My side is cramped, and my breath rakes over my dry throat. Sweat beads and then is wicked away by the heat of the sun. A few minutes later, I begin to feel dizzy and see black spots speckled over my vision.

Claire and Peter are on the porch waiting for me when I arrive at a walk-stumble into the yard. Running to me, Claire hugs my waist. Peter hands me a soda bottle. It’s filled with only slightly murky water. I drink it anyway. My muscles are shaking, and I lean against Claire harder than I should. Soon, I feel a little stronger.

It was stupid to walk into the desert unprepared. But other than that, it’s not a terrible plan. Somewhere, out in the desert, away from the highway, there must be a way around the void. Somehow, I’ll find it. Finishing the soda, I smile at Peter and Claire. I am taking steps toward my goals, and that makes me feel better. Mom would approve.

“I found red paint!” Claire says. “And string.”

Peter waves an ’80s tape recorder in the air. “I have this.”

I nod. Neither asks where I have been or why I went or what I saw.

I find a cloth and wrap it around a stick. Dipping it in the red paint, I paint the biohazard symbol on the front door. For good measure, I also add it to each side of the house. By the time I’ve circled the house, I’m splattered with red paint, and I feel as if I’ve won a battle, as if the act of slathering paint on the house were a direct attack against the horror of the void.