Her head was bowed and it was all a blur of blond hair and purple sweater until the tremors stopped.
She looked up at me and there was this moment of plainness between us. Like she saw me and I saw her. She looked scared and young, like a little girl, and there were tears in her eyes.
I don’t know what she read on my face. Probably that I was totally hers. That I loved her with everything worthy inside me.
I guess she didn’t like what she saw, because she brushed away tears with the back of her hand and turned away from me. Her jaw was clenched and she looked like she wanted to punch me in the throat. That’s the truth.
I got out from under her table.
“Screw this,” Sahalia said. “I’m going home.”
“No, you’re not, Sahalia,” Jake said. “Mrs. Wooly told us all to stay here and stay together and we’re gonna do exactly that.”
“Are you kidding?” Sahalia said. “Mrs. Wooly’s not coming back. We’re on our own. And frankly I’d rather take my chances out there than stay here with you losers.”
Alex spoke up. “How are you going to get out? The gate is down.”
Sahalia pointed to the wall, past the Pizza Shack, near the Grocery section.
Duh.
There was a door with a red, illuminated Exit sign above it.
How had we missed it until now?
“They have to have emergency exits,” she said.
Then she walked over and pushed it.
“Let me,” Brayden said.
“Bray!” Jake yelled, but Brayden had already sprinted over.
He bashed his weight against it.
“No good,” he said. “It’s locked.”
“Like I said,” Jake repeated, eyeing his friend. “We’re staying here until Mrs. Wooly comes back.”
“I’ll find a way out,” Sahalia said. She stomped off.
“Excuse me, but Sahalia is my neighbor,” said Chloe. “If she’s going home, I’m going with her.”
“Me, too,” said Max. “I can hitch a ride.”
Jake was losing patience.
“You heard what Mrs. Wooly said! We stay here until she comes for us. It’s simple.”
“But why does Sahalia get to go?” whined Chloe.
“Sahalia’s not going anywhere,” Jake answered. “The doors are locked!”
“But I want my nana!”
Jake bent down and got up in her grill.
“Stop talking about going home. There is no going home until Mrs. Wooly gets back.”
“But I want—”
He poked Chloe in the chest.
“Stop it.”
“My nana—”
He poked her again. “Stop.”
She stopped. Then she rubbed the spot on her chest where he’d poked her and glared at him.
So we were lucky that the Greenway was solidly built, but, man, the mess was incredible. Almost everything had been tossed from the shelves. The shelving units themselves hadn’t fallen over, since they were bolted down. That was nice. But everything was a mess and most things made of glass were history.
We all picked our way through the merchandise, headed back to our sleeping-bag “home” in the Media Department.
“Gonna be a big cleanup,” Alex said to me.
“It’ll be good,” I said. “Something to keep us busy until they come for us.”
Alex shrugged.
The bigtabs that had been on the walls of the Media Department were now on the floor of the Media Department.
Pretty much everything in the Media Department was now on the floor of the Media Department.
The display wall itself was hanging partially off the concrete wall behind it.
The bigtabs were lying facedown on the floor, overlapping like roof shingles. Bits of black glass and plastic framing were scattered all over the place.
Everyone was standing around, forlorn and crestfallen, looking at the debris as Alex and I walked up.
“We just had the one crappy television,” Brayden complained. “And now it’s toast. We have no way of knowing what’s going on outside!”
“I think we need to start thinking about an exit strategy,” Astrid said.
“Shhh!” Alex interrupted her.
“No, I really do,” she continued, surprised that Alex would cut her off.
“I hear the TV,” Alex said.
We all shut up. If you listened very closely, there was a buzz, a hum. A tiny, tiny hum.
Brayden and Jake stepped forward and began digging through the bigtabs.
“Careful,” Alex said. “You could get a shock!”
Jake found the TV.
He stepped back over the mound of dead bigtabs, holding the TV carefully at its sides.
The screen was smashed. Strange, glowing inkblots of color surged over the monitor helter-skelter.
Alex took the set and placed it on the floor.
He pushed along the lower edge of the frame. That was how you changed the channel—something I didn’t remember since we’d switched out our TV for a bigtab when I was, like, seven.
Alex made some adjustments and the static got louder and louder.
Then a voice came on.
“Yes!” Jake said.
The little kids cheered.
“Quiet,” Niko said.
“Shhh, you guys!” Astrid added.
It was a man’s voice. Sounded like an interview.
“Entirely unexpected as this area is not on a fault line. It’s unthinkable, really. And a quake of this magnitude is unprecedented. There is no doubt in my mind that it was triggered by yesterday’s megatsunami.”
Alex sat down in front of the TV. We all just took random places nearby, except for Chloe, who said she was going to get some food.
The voice on the TV changed.
“Excuse me, Professor. We have breaking news. There are reports coming in of a leak. A chemical leak. Chemical warfare compounds.
“There are reports that several chemical warfare agents may be leaking from NORAD’s storage facilities.”
“Quiet! Quiet everyone”—the voice was yelling to people in the studio, it seemed—“This is from NORAD: Attention, residents of Colorado and neighboring states. At 8:36 a.m. today, Wednesday, September 18, 2024, chemical weapon storage facilities at the North American Aerospace Defense Command Department have been breeched. Residents in a five-hundred-mile radius of NORAD are urged to get indoors and seal all windows immediately.”
Niko stood up. He looked wired, flushed. Panicked almost.
“Guys, we have to cover the front gates.” Niko said. “Right now.”
We zigged and zagged through the store, cutting our way through the fallen boxes and crashed-up merchandise. Niko started giving orders left and right.
“Jake, get plastic sheeting. Brayden and Dean, get duct tape.”
“Plastic sheeting, like what?” Jake asked, panic in his voice.
“Shower curtains could work,” Alex suggested. “Or plastic drop cloths, like painters use.”
“Alex, help Jake. Figure it out. Astrid, keep the little kids out of the way.”
“Don’t stick me with the kids,” she protested. “I’m just as strong as you guys are!”
“Just do what I say!” Niko hollered.
She did.
Brayden and I found the duct tape and cursed that we didn’t have anything to carry it in, like a cart or a basket. The most either of us could carry in our hands was, like, ten rolls.
“I have an idea,” I said. I stripped off my rugby shirt.
“What are you doing, Geraldine?” Brayden asked. His voice was flustered. “Screw you, I’m going.”
He took off with his ten rolls.
I made knots in the sleeves and started loading the tape into it. Maybe it would have taken as long to find a bucket or a bag or something but I got at least thirty rolls in my shirt.
When I made it to the gate, Niko and Jake were trying to push the bus back from the gate, to make more space to work in. It didn’t budge.
“Forget it,” Niko said. “We’ll work around it.”
Brayden was ripping open the packets of plastic sheeting.
“I’ll do that,” Niko said. “Go back for more tape. We’re going to need lots more—”
I arrived and dumped out the rolls of tape.
“Excellent,” Niko said. “Open ’em up.”
I started to tear the plastic wrappers off the rolls when Brayden elbowed me in the ribs.
“Nice abs, man,” Brayden said. “You work out?”
He started to laugh. Jake stopped unfolding the sheeting and was on Brayden in about two strides. He shook him. Hard.
“We’re gonna die from friggin’ NORAD and you’re busting on the booker about his friggin’ physique? What’s wrong with you? Come on, man!” Jake let go and Brayden stumbled backward.
I struggled to untie the stupid knots from my shirt.
Now I knew what Jake thought of me. The booker. Okay. Whatever that meant.
Meanwhile, we had sheeting to put up.
“This is going to be much faster,” came my brother’s voice. He came sliding over to us on the linoleum, holding two staple guns and a box of industrial-size staples.
Jake and Niko manned the staple guns. Me, Brayden, and Alex held the sheeting taut.
Two layers of shower curtains. One layer of wool blankets (Alex’s idea). Then three layers of plastic drop cloths. The whole thing sealed along the edge with multiple layers of duct tape.
Astrid came striding over, trailing little kids. They swarmed past the bus and looked at our makeshift wall.
“Not bad,” Astrid said.
“It’ll do the trick,” Jake said.
He grabbed Astrid and got her head under his arm.
“Hey, kids,” he said. “Free tickles!”
The kids chirped and crowed, trying to tickle her.
“Let me go, you jerk!” she said, but with a laugh.
She pulled away from Jake, pushing the kids away.