Gone Series: Plague Part 22

It wasn't a long hallway. Just four doors on each side. Milky light came through a reinforced gla.s.s window in the door at the far end of the hallway.

Sam opened doors, one at a time. The first two opened onto empty private offices. The next opened to a dingy room with a metal table and chairs, facing each other. A screen was on one wall. A clipboard was on the floor.

Sam picked it up. "'Project Ca.s.sandra,'" he read aloud. "'Subject 1-01. Test number GV-788.'"

He placed the clipboard on the table and went to the next room.

He opened this room and instantly knew someone was inside. Even before he saw anyone.

This room had a window of regular gla.s.s and suns.h.i.+ne poured in. There was a bed, a desk, a large blank TV mounted on one wall. Game players lay dusty beneath the screen.

Books were piled high on a side table.

And one book was in the hands of a boy who sat in a reclining chair with his feet up on the desk. He was maybe twelve. His black hair hung down his back almost to his waist. He would probably be tall when he stood up. Thin. Dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a black-and-white Hollywood Undead T-s.h.i.+rt.

"Hi," Sam said. He frowned.

The boy barely reacted.

"Don't I know you?" Sam pressed.

The boy looked at him with eyes narrowed to slits. He smiled a little. He seemed to want to go back to his book.

"Dude," Sam said. "Aren't you Toto?"

The boy's eyebrows went up. His lip quivered. He said, "Is he real?"

He was speaking to a life-sized Styrofoam head of Spider-Man, complete with blue and red cowl, that rested on a shelf.

"I'm real," Sam said. Then he yelled, "Dekka! Jack!"

"Why is he yelling?" Toto asked Spidey. "He could be a Decepticon."

"I'm not a Decepticon," Sam said, feeling a bit ridiculous.

"It's the truth," Toto told Spidey. "He's not a Decepticon. But maybe he works for the Dementors, for Sauron, for the demon."

"What are you talking about, Toto?" Sam asked.

Jack and Dekka came rus.h.i.+ng up. "Whoa," Dekka said.

"He knows what I'm talking about," Toto told Spider-Man. "He guesses, he's testing. 'What are you talking about, Toto?' he says. Right. He knows. He knows the demon."

"I don't work for anyone," Sam said.

"Liar, liar, pants on fire. Someone sent you."

"Albert, but-"

"They always try to lie, but it never works, does it?" Toto said.

Sam turned to Dekka. "I think our boy here has been alone for a long time."

"He means I'm crazy." Toto addressed Dekka directly, not Spider-Man, though he glanced back at the Spidey head and seemed torn between Dekka and the web slinger. "The truth teller, truth teller Toto."

"Are you test subject 1-01?" Jack asked.

Toto didn't seem to hear. But now tears were welling in his eyes. "One zero one. Yes. One zero two, what happened to her, do you want to hear?"

"Yes," Sam answered.

"Should we say, Spidey?" Toto bared his teeth and snarled, "She used to live across the hall. Darla. She was eight. All her stuff was h.e.l.lo Kitty. She could walk through walls. She didn't want to stay, she wanted to go home, so she tried to just walk right through the wall to the outside and the guards tased her as she was going through and you know what happened?"

"Tell us."

"He doesn't want to know, not really, does he?" Toto asked Spidey. "He's seen too many bad things, hasn't he? But I'll tell him anyway, which is that the Taser froze her halfway through the wall. She died. They had to bust out the whole wall to get her out of there."

"Albert's cat," Jack said.

Sam nodded. They'd all heard the story of the teleporting cat that misjudged and solidified with a book inside it.

"They aren't surprised," Toto said. He tilted his head and shook it back and forth, vastly amused by some secret joke. "They know, don't they?" he asked Spidey.

"Yeah, we know," Sam said. He raised his hand, palm out, and fired a brilliant green beam at Spider-Man's head. The fabric of the cowl caught fire and the Styrofoam within melted.

Toto's pale face went paler. He swallowed hard and looked directly at Sam for the first time.

"Sorry, man," Sam said. "But honestly we have all the crazy we can stand. And we don't have all day."

"Yes, he's telling the truth, he's in a hurry."

"He's still talking to Spider-Man," Dekka pointed out. "He's nuts."

"Yeah, well, we're all a little nuts, Dekka," Sam said.

"No, he's not nuts, the Sam boy," Toto said and he shook his head back and forth. Then, slyly, he added, "Anyway, he doesn't think he is."

"We're looking for a big lake. Lake Tramonto. You know how to get there?"

"We don't know how to get anywhere," Toto said. Suddenly he looked as if he might cry. "Where's Spidey?"

"How long have you been here?" Sam asked impatiently.

It was Jack who answered. "A little more than a year. The start date for subject 1-01 was several months before the FAYZ."

Sam thought it over for a few seconds. Wondering what to do. He couldn't just dump the kid and walk away. Could he? Especially after he'd impatiently burned Spidey.

On the other hand, the very last thing he needed was another person to keep track of. And it didn't look like this kid was going anywhere. Sam could always pick him up later. And in any case, if they found the lake then the whole town would probably be moving, and they'd pa.s.s this way again.

"Listen, Toto, I'm going to pretend you're not completely crazy. I'm going to leave it up to you. So you either come with us and start acting at least a little bit normal, or you stay here. Your choice."

Toto kept glancing back at the brown and black magma that had been the Styrofoam head. But in between he looked at Sam and Dekka and even Jack.

"What do you have to eat?" Toto asked.

"Dried fish. Cabbage. Artichokes."

To Sam's amazement Toto literally licked his lips. "You have some other things, too, but you don't want to share. That's okay. I've only had Nutella. Ever since."

"You must have a whole lot of Nutella," Dekka said, unable to conceal her greedy hope.

"Yes."

"Show us," Sam said. "Show us what you've got. Then we'll go find this lake."

Sam led the way outside. Jack and Dekka fell in beside him. "They knew, didn't they?" he asked Jack.

Jack still had a fistful of papers scooped up from one of the desks.

"Yes," Jack said, still fascinated, reading through printed sheets of data as he walked. "I don't think they knew what, or knew what was causing it. But they knew."

"What did they know?" Dekka asked.

"Whoever was running this place," Sam said angrily. "They knew something was going on with kids in Perdido Beach."

Jack caught up to him, grabbed his shoulder, and handed him a piece of paper. "A list of names."

Sam's eyes went directly to his own name, third on a list of five names. "Toto, Darla, me, Caine, and Taylor." He shoved the paper angrily back at Jack. "Not all of the freaks, but some of us, anyway."

He didn't know what to say or think. It made him angry, but he didn't even know why it should. Of course they would want to learn about kids who suddenly developed supernatural powers.

And of course they would want to keep it secret.

But still it made him angry and uneasy. "This means they know. People on the outside, they've been able to guess some of what happened."

"The real data are on those computers," Jack said. "This printout is just a small file. If the power was back on ..."

Sam glared at the barrier near at hand. And wondered, not for the first time, what kind of welcome they would get if that barrier ever came down.

Chapter Eighteen.

32 HOURS, 36 MINUTES.

TOTO LED THEM from the facility to the train.

It was farther than Sam had thought. It had been a trick of perspective in the desert emptiness that had made the train seem to be right beside the building. In fact, they were a ten-minute walk away.

There were two yellow and black Union Pacific diesel engines. Both still stood upright on the track.

Behind the engines was a rust-colored boxcar, also still on the track.

Behind these came a jumbled mess. There were seven derailed flatbed railcars. Each had spilled two containers- ma.s.sive steel rectangles-onto the dirt and stunted bushes.

At the far end, the barrier had sliced a boxcar in half. The barrier had snapped into place, bisecting the burnt-orange boxcar, and the sudden s.h.i.+ft must have derailed the other cars.

But Sam, Dekka, and Jack were not very interested in such speculation. Dozens of plastic-wrapped pallets had been flung across the tracks and the ground, spilled from the sliced-open boxcar.

Each of the pallets was piled high with flats of Nutella.

"That's, like, hundreds and hundreds of jars," Sam said.

"Thousands," Jack said. "Thousands. We're ... we're rich."

If each jar had been a giant diamond, Sam would still have preferred the Nutella.

"This is the greatest discovery in the history of the FAYZ," Dekka said, sounding like she was witnessing a miracle.

"What is a phase? What do they mean by phase?" Toto asked.

"FAYZ. Fallout Alley Youth Zone," Sam said distractedly. "It's supposed to be funny. Dude: what's in the rest of these containers?"

Toto looked uncomfortable. He squirmed so much he looked like he was dancing. "I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know? Are you lying?" Dekka demanded sharply.

"No lies," Toto said, eyes flas.h.i.+ng. "I'm Toto the truth teller, subject 1-01. Not Toto the liar."

"Then what are you saying? You never looked in any of these containers? There's fourteen containers. Plus that first boxcar. What do you mean you don't know?" Dekka found it outrageous.

Toto did his squirmy dance again. "I couldn't get them open. They're locked. And they're steel. I hit them with chairs, but they wouldn't open."

Sam, Dekka, and Jack all stared at the strange boy.

Then they stared at the containers.