What was left was probably more useful for me, anyway. It didn’t look like anyone had touched one of the boxes—it was still three-fourths full of beef jerky, Slim Jims, and, at the bottom, small packages of crackers.
I grabbed as much as I thought I could carry, making a pile on the table. If I was going to be escaping—whether it was hiking out to the road or following the trucks—I was going to need supplies.
There weren’t any more little boxes like Lily and Jane had, so I walked to the back of the kitchen to find something to carry my food.
It didn’t look like they did a lot of cooking here. There were two big ovens and a long grill, but I doubted it was feasible for feeding eighty people. Each day’s food came up through the elevators, just like at the school.
I opened a cabinet and saw huge packs of plastic forks, napkins, and paper plates. Nothing was organized. No one had jobs here. The few real tasks that people did were voluntary, or ordered by Birdman. Jane milked the cows because she liked the animals. The guys who’d been working on the barracks were doing it because they didn’t want to share with the newcomers. But it looked like no one ever volunteered to straighten the kitchen or sweep the floors.
I opened the elevator, just to look inside. It wasn’t disguised like the closets back at the school. This was obviously something unusual—a metal door about four feet tall and three feet wide. Inside it was a dull gray, but clean, and I could feel a breeze coming from the quarter-inch gap at the threshold.
I stretched my foot inside it, giving a little shove on the floor to test its strength. The elevator bobbled slightly.
I had an idea.
The barrack was full, and the chatter quieted as I stepped through the broken doorway. No one seemed to be doing anything special—just twenty people massed around the small fireplace, blankets draped over them while they talked and played cards.
At the far end of the building, Becky sat with her back to me, talking to Curtis and Carrie and taking notes in her journal.
Someone touched my arm before I’d made it five steps in. Shelly.
“What do you want?”
“I need to talk to Becky,” I said.
“She’s busy.”
“I’ll wait.”
Shelly folded her arms. “I’ll send someone to get you when she’s ready to talk.”
“This is important.”
“And you’re a jackass.”
“I know.”
Shelly pulled me to the corner of the room. Her voice was hushed.
“She heard about Jane.”
“I was going to talk to her about that, too.”
“It’s a little late.”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
Shelly took an annoyed breath, looking over at Becky.
“Listen,” I said. “I know that you’re taking care of her because I was being a jerk—I was. But you don’t have to protect her from me.”
Shelly was obviously ready to unleash a tirade. I stopped her, holding up my hands and taking a step back.
“I’m terrible. I know. But I need you to know that there’s no one on this earth that I care about more than her.”
“Tell that to Jane.”
“I think she already knows,” I said. “But I’m not here to talk to Becky about that—I’m not here to apologize or beg her to take me back or anything.”
Shelly raised an eyebrow. “You’re not here to apologize?”
I smiled. “There will be a lot of apologizing, I’m sure. But I’m here to talk about something else.”
Shelly looked back at the crowd around the fire. It was too loud for anyone to hear us.
“You’re leaving?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“You can’t take her with you.”
“I know.”
“So you’re just saying good-bye?”
I shook my head. “I need her help. She’s smarter than me. I need your help, too, if you’re willing.”
Shelly sighed. “Okay. But she’s in the middle of something. Let her finish.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Interviewing,” Shelly said. “You know, like Birdman used to do. We do it, too. Curtis just got here, and we want to know what he saw.”
I nodded, and sat on the floor to wait.
I had so much to tell Becky. Maybe she’d hate me because of Jane. I could understand that. But sitting here, watching her, I promised myself that I was going to do everything I could to make it right.
Shelly sat across from me.
“It’s over, you know,” she said.
“What is?”
“Our escape attempts.”
“So you were trying?”
“I was. But that ended long before you got here.”
“Why?”
Shelly sighed. “Nothing worked. We’ve got these things in our heads, and we can’t cross the perimeter. We tried everything. We made a helmet, worked on it for months, trying to get the densest metal we could find—”
I chuckled. “Like Magneto.”
“Exactly,” she said. “But it didn’t do a thing. It still hurt when we went into the forest, and they could still track us—a four-wheeler was out patrolling ten minutes after we crossed the border.”
“What if it is like Harvard said?” I asked. “What if there’s a transmitter out there, and if you get too close to it, then it hurts? Couldn’t you just get past the transmitter—deal with the pain—and then it would hurt less the farther you went?”
“Tried that, too,” she said tiredly. “But you can’t just deal with the pain. You go too far into the woods and you pass out.” She crossed her arms and stood up. “Trust me. If you can think of something, we’ve done it. You know why the Basement is called the Basement? Because we have an underground bunker—a real basement that we dug, trying to tunnel out of here.”
I sat back, stunned. “Seriously?”
“So we named the thing in the fort the Basement to throw them off.”
“Why didn’t Birdman hide us in the real basement?”
“Probably because he wanted to keep an eye on you.”
“So the tunnel didn’t work?”
She shrugged. “It’s deep. I seriously doubt they can track us down there. But we got a few hundred yards and ran out of materials.”
“Materials?”
“For supporting the roof so it doesn’t cave in. We steal stuff when we can—we skimmed some of the lumber from the new barracks and told them they didn’t send enough—but we have no idea how far we have to go. A mile? Fifty? And we kept running into bedrock. Heck, we even ran into the cement ceiling of the underground complex.”
“So it’s just a big cave.”
She was annoyed. “Yeah. Not much good.”
“So you have nothing else? No secret plans? Ever thought of starting a forest fire to get attention?”
“Tried and failed.” Shelly shook her head. “We’re out of ideas, unless you know how to build a radio or something.”
“Then I’m going to go,” I said. “But I need help.”
She looked at Becky. “And you’ve come to get it from her? A lot of nerve.”