The Burnouts by Lex Thomas

Author:Lex Thomas [Thomas, Lex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-60684-339-0
Publisher: EgmontUSA
Published: 2014-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

15

DAVID OPENED HIS EYE TO THE BRUSHED steel wall of the elevator. He’d had nightmares on the outside that had started like this. Back in school again. But this was no dream. He reached up to wipe the sleep from his eyes and the drool from his chin, but his fingers hit his face shield. He was still half asleep. His filtered breath echoed in his ears.

He looked at his watch: 9:05 a.m. David scrambled up to a seated position, his back against the wall.

No. That couldn’t be right. He looked at his watch again. He tapped on it with one finger. The digital seconds clicked along without a care for him or his rising panic. David looked over at Will. He was in a heavy sleep.

“Oh shit,” David said and stood. “SHIT!”

Will jumped awake.

“What the fuck?” Will said.

“Get up,” David said.

“I am up.”

“No, I mean, stand up. Let’s go. We gotta go.”

Will blinked a few times and shook his head like a dog. He stared at the floor, confused and groggy.

“Now!” David said and reached down to take his hand. He pulled Will up.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s morning. We slept through the night.”

“What?! You didn’t set an alarm or something?”

“I slept through it. I guess we were more wiped out than we thought. We’ve been running around with no water and …”

“Fuck!” Will said.

David pulled on his backpack. He dragged the milk-crate stepping stool to the middle of the elevator and got up on it. He slid the hatch open, and they made their way out of the elevator. Every movement was sloppy. His mind was moving twice as fast as his body.

“We’ll find her,” Will said when they made it to the hallway.

But they didn’t. As they searched, David watched the hours slip away until noon. Room after room and hallway after hallway, they didn’t find a trace of her, or get anything close to a lead. Eventually the halls started to blend together until it became hard to remember which ones they’d already explored. The time they had to spend hiding from people aggravated David, because they weren’t making progress, but he wasn’t sure that they were making progress the rest of the time either.

The two of them crept down another hall, side by side.

“Did you ever miss it?” Will said after a while.

“Miss what?”

“McKinley.”

David gave Will a look.

“Yeah, I’d write about it in my journal every night.”

“Really?”

“No. Why would I miss being locked up with no daylight and no food?”

Will shrugged. “There’s more going on in here than that. You were a rock star for a while. You aren’t that outside. You’re hanging out with a bunch of fifty-year-olds, shucking corn.”

David passed a decrepit classroom. He remembered what Mort had told him in the Stairs, that sometimes, he would go to the old Loners’ turf when he needed to relive happier times. He’d been moved when he’d heard that, but he didn’t feel that way now. He felt sad.

“I think we were all making the best of a bad—”

Will grabbed David’s arm and pulled him back from the corner they were about to turn.

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