“I’m used to having three square meals a day.”
“If the house has been untouched for years—and it looks like it has been—I doubt anything is usable.” I moved around the L-shaped kitchen counter to the window that looked out on the garage. “Have you been out there yet?”
“No. But I’m game for an adventure. What do ya say?”
I grinned. “Game.”
The others were in the living room, inspecting the fireplace and the chimney. Cas let Sam know where we were headed before we eased out the back door. We ran from the porch to the door at the side of the garage. A kiss of rain hit my face and I shielded my eyes with one hand. Cas rammed his shoulder against the door and it swung open, scraping against the concrete floor. Poor light stole through the two small windows, but it was enough to see what we were dealing with.
“Look.” I hurried to the far left corner. “A grill. We could barbecue.”
Cas’s expression was nothing short of ecstasy as he caressed the black steel dome that made up the grill’s hood. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I had a grilled steak? Or a barbecued chicken leg?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Um… a long time?”
He ignored me. “All those damn barbecue commercials on TV. Dangling it right in front of my face like a frickin’ carrot in front of a donkey.”
“How do you even know what barbecue sauce tastes like? You never had it in the lab.”
“A man never forgets the taste of barbecue. I probably had it before the lab.” He hoisted the grill hood and took a whiff. “Oh, God—it still smells like charcoal and sizzling meat.”
“It’s amazing you don’t weigh three hundred pounds.”
He pushed up the sleeve of his sweaty, muddy shirt and flexed his biceps. “All that food gave me this svelte figure, I’ll have you know.”
I eyed the bulkiness of his arm, the broadness of his shoulders. “Svelte means ‘slender.’ ”
“But it also means to have clean lines. Which obviously I do.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I left him to drool over the grill while I surveyed what else might be useful. Some yard tools had been organized on rubber-coated hooks on the far wall. Different-sized boards were stacked up below the tools. Directly across from that, I spotted a power box and a bulky contraption on the floor beneath it. “What is that?”
“That’s a generator.”
I looked over my shoulder to find Cas rummaging around a loft area built beneath the peak of the roof.
“How did you get up there?”
He nodded at the stack of boards. “I jumped.”
“You are such a monkey. Now come look at this.”
He hung over the edge of the loft headfirst, flipped and then dangled there for a second in a backhanded pull-up, the threads of muscle tightening in his forearms before he let go. “Whoa. Am I badass or what? I didn’t even know I could do that.”
I stood there, mouth hanging open. “Then why did you? You could have been hurt!”
“Because I felt like it.” He nudged the boxy generator with his foot. “Looks like it’s been wired into the power box. Good to know.” He twisted off the gas cap. “Not much juice, though, and considering we’re broke…”
“We’ll have to get by without it,” I guessed.
He nodded, but shot the grill another meaningful look. “At least we have that beauty.”
“Do you want me to help cart it out? We could put it on the back porch.”
“Are you kidding me? I got this.” He positioned his hands on the underside of the grill and picked it up without much effort. More evidence that he was stronger than any boy his age and size should be.
We spent the next hour scrubbing the grill with an old wire brush we found in the kitchen. Sam built a fire in the fireplace. Nick and Trev gathered wood in the surrounding forest. No one mentioned how long we planned to stay, but judging by the firewood now stacked along the back porch, we could survive at least a week without having to worry about warmth. Food was an issue, though. We had no money, no provisions.
We gathered in the living room to discuss strategy after dusk.
Sam stood near the fireplace, arms crossed tightly in front of himself. He was still covered in dirt from the cemetery. As far as I could tell, we had no running water to clean up with.
Cas sat on the arm of one of the easy chairs, a foot propped where his butt should have been. “You didn’t happen to find any money lying around here, did you?”
Sam shook his head. “If I left anything, it wouldn’t be easy to find. It might take some time.”
“I’d stand on the street corner to score a steak,” Cas said.
I couldn’t help laughing. “You know, you might be flooded with business.”
His mouth stretched into a lecherous grin. “If you come with me, we could be rich by morning.”
“Very funny.”
“Cas and I will head into town,” Trev said. “We’ll see what we can come up with.”
“And what am I supposed to do, boss?” Instead of joining us, Nick leaned in the doorway between the living room and dining room.
“You’re on watch.”
While Sam ran Cas and Trev through the specifics—which sounded an awful lot like “Steal whatever you can get your hands on without getting caught,” but not in those words—I went to inspect the kitchen.
Sam had mentioned earlier that there was a pantry, but half the food had expired. I wanted to see for myself what was inside. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do.
The pantry was a large walk-in tucked beneath the staircase. Enough light spilled in from the kitchen windows that I didn’t need a flashlight to start taking inventory. Gallons of water lined the baseboards. The lower shelves were stocked full of medical and emergency supplies, like batteries, matches, and rubbing alcohol.
The other shelves held hard grains, beans, and pasta. There were vacuum-sealed bags of salt, sugar, and freeze-dried food. Boxes of powdered milk, dried soup mixes, and cereal.
I started checking expiration dates. The cereal and beans had gone bad a while ago, but I thought we might be able to get away with eating the pasta and soup mixes.
It was just like Sam to be prepared for anything. He could probably survive an apocalypse.
The doorway darkened behind me. “Find anything useful?” Sam asked.
I turned around and pressed my back against the shelves. “Yeah.”
He stepped inside with me, and suddenly the pantry didn’t seem as big as it had before. He reached for a bag of rolled oats, grazing my arm as he did. Heat rippled out from where he’d touched me, even though it wasn’t on purpose and there were layers of clothing between us.
I slid aside, but it took every ounce of self-control I had to do it. “Anything come back to you yet?” I asked. “The house seem familiar?”
He set the oats down. “I’m having a hard time deciphering what’s real and what’s merely a sense of déjà vu.”
“Trev would say there’s no such thing, that it’s the mind recalling something from the past.”
“Trev thinks there’s a deeper meaning to everything.”
“True.” I clasped my hands behind me. “What was it that triggered the déjà vu?”
I could make out only one side of his face in the filtered daylight as he looked over at me. “There’s a dent in the wall on the other side of the refrigerator, like something smashed into it.” Worry lines ran across his forehead. “I thought I could remember doing it myself.”
I took a step toward him. “Do you remember anything else?”
The worry disappeared, replaced by some other emotion. A moment of discomfort, or misgiving, or maybe both. “No. That was it.” He pushed away from the corner. “I’ll be upstairs if you need me,” he said and escaped before I could ask anything more.
I might not have the ability to read Sam as well as he did me, but I knew enough to know there’d been a secret there, one he wasn’t willing to part with yet. And I wanted to find out what it was.
14
I DIDN’T TALK TO SAM MUCH FOR THE next few days. He was too preoccupied with turning the house inside out looking for clues. I played a lot of Connect Four with Cas after he found the game stuffed in a kitchen cabinet. Shockingly, even though I was not genetically altered for greatness, I won almost every round. It probably had more to do with the fact that Cas couldn’t focus on a game long enough to strategize, but I figured I’d take what I could get.
Trev and I inventoried a few of the closets downstairs and found a cache of dusty novels and moth-eaten blankets. I didn’t see a lot of Nick. When he wasn’t tending to the fire or collecting kindling, he was helping Sam. While those two didn’t always agree, they worked well together because they didn’t waste time with idle chat.
On our third afternoon at the cabin, in one of the rooms upstairs, I lay on my stomach listening to Trev read passages from The Duke’s Plight. He was propped up against the headboard, the book open in his left hand. The cover showed a girl in a big flowy dress, wrapped in the arms of a long-haired, brooding duke.
Trev let out a sound that was somewhere between a breath and a laugh. “You’ll like this one.”
“Let’s hear it.”
He licked his lips. “ ‘He tried desperately to look at Margaret with an expression of hard contempt, but she appeared so vulnerable, so sad before him, that he went to her immediately. They embraced, her bosom heaving against him.’ ”
I rolled onto my back and laughed. “Oh, God, I can’t take any more.”
The book thumped closed. A second later, Trev eased down next to me. We both stared at the wide plank ceiling. Downstairs, the fire crackled and snapped as someone poked at it. Cas, probably. Nick and Sam were in the garage rummaging through the loft as far as I knew.
“Did you ever imagine you’d escape the lab?” I asked.
Trev clasped his hands together over his stomach. “Not the way it happened. Sometimes I thought it’d be you who would let us out. I never could decide if that would be a good or bad thing. Bad for you, maybe.”
Citrine sunlight blazed through the window and shone across his face. His eyes seemed to glow when I turned to him. “I wanted to, if that’s any consolation. I thought about it all the time.”
“I know you did.”
I leaned on my elbow. “Really?”
“Sam was working his way into your subconscious. Whether you knew it or not. Whether he meant to or not. If he hadn’t planned to escape, eventually you would have done it yourself. For him.”
Long threads of my hair tickled my arm as I hung my head back. “For you, too. For all of you.”
He smiled when he looked at me, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Thanks, but I think you’re lying.”
“I am not.” I picked at a loose thread in the blanket. “So when this is all over, whatever this is, what do you think you’ll do?”
“If I have a choice, you mean?”
“Yeah. If you could do anything.”
He considered the question. “Well, I guess I’d like to go to New York City. I want to study lit somewhere, though I suppose having no identification or school records might pose a problem.”
I’d been so focused on Sam and what my life would be like without him that I hadn’t taken the time to consider what it’d feel like to lose Trev, too. The sorrow was immediate, and pressing. “I’ll miss you, if you go.”
He waved the idea away. “I’m not going anywhere. No matter how much I want to.”
“Come on. Someday, you’ll be free. Just promise me you won’t leave me for good.”
“If the house has been untouched for years—and it looks like it has been—I doubt anything is usable.” I moved around the L-shaped kitchen counter to the window that looked out on the garage. “Have you been out there yet?”
“No. But I’m game for an adventure. What do ya say?”
I grinned. “Game.”
The others were in the living room, inspecting the fireplace and the chimney. Cas let Sam know where we were headed before we eased out the back door. We ran from the porch to the door at the side of the garage. A kiss of rain hit my face and I shielded my eyes with one hand. Cas rammed his shoulder against the door and it swung open, scraping against the concrete floor. Poor light stole through the two small windows, but it was enough to see what we were dealing with.
“Look.” I hurried to the far left corner. “A grill. We could barbecue.”
Cas’s expression was nothing short of ecstasy as he caressed the black steel dome that made up the grill’s hood. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I had a grilled steak? Or a barbecued chicken leg?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Um… a long time?”
He ignored me. “All those damn barbecue commercials on TV. Dangling it right in front of my face like a frickin’ carrot in front of a donkey.”
“How do you even know what barbecue sauce tastes like? You never had it in the lab.”
“A man never forgets the taste of barbecue. I probably had it before the lab.” He hoisted the grill hood and took a whiff. “Oh, God—it still smells like charcoal and sizzling meat.”
“It’s amazing you don’t weigh three hundred pounds.”
He pushed up the sleeve of his sweaty, muddy shirt and flexed his biceps. “All that food gave me this svelte figure, I’ll have you know.”
I eyed the bulkiness of his arm, the broadness of his shoulders. “Svelte means ‘slender.’ ”
“But it also means to have clean lines. Which obviously I do.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I left him to drool over the grill while I surveyed what else might be useful. Some yard tools had been organized on rubber-coated hooks on the far wall. Different-sized boards were stacked up below the tools. Directly across from that, I spotted a power box and a bulky contraption on the floor beneath it. “What is that?”
“That’s a generator.”
I looked over my shoulder to find Cas rummaging around a loft area built beneath the peak of the roof.
“How did you get up there?”
He nodded at the stack of boards. “I jumped.”
“You are such a monkey. Now come look at this.”
He hung over the edge of the loft headfirst, flipped and then dangled there for a second in a backhanded pull-up, the threads of muscle tightening in his forearms before he let go. “Whoa. Am I badass or what? I didn’t even know I could do that.”
I stood there, mouth hanging open. “Then why did you? You could have been hurt!”
“Because I felt like it.” He nudged the boxy generator with his foot. “Looks like it’s been wired into the power box. Good to know.” He twisted off the gas cap. “Not much juice, though, and considering we’re broke…”
“We’ll have to get by without it,” I guessed.
He nodded, but shot the grill another meaningful look. “At least we have that beauty.”
“Do you want me to help cart it out? We could put it on the back porch.”
“Are you kidding me? I got this.” He positioned his hands on the underside of the grill and picked it up without much effort. More evidence that he was stronger than any boy his age and size should be.
We spent the next hour scrubbing the grill with an old wire brush we found in the kitchen. Sam built a fire in the fireplace. Nick and Trev gathered wood in the surrounding forest. No one mentioned how long we planned to stay, but judging by the firewood now stacked along the back porch, we could survive at least a week without having to worry about warmth. Food was an issue, though. We had no money, no provisions.
We gathered in the living room to discuss strategy after dusk.
Sam stood near the fireplace, arms crossed tightly in front of himself. He was still covered in dirt from the cemetery. As far as I could tell, we had no running water to clean up with.
Cas sat on the arm of one of the easy chairs, a foot propped where his butt should have been. “You didn’t happen to find any money lying around here, did you?”
Sam shook his head. “If I left anything, it wouldn’t be easy to find. It might take some time.”
“I’d stand on the street corner to score a steak,” Cas said.
I couldn’t help laughing. “You know, you might be flooded with business.”
His mouth stretched into a lecherous grin. “If you come with me, we could be rich by morning.”
“Very funny.”
“Cas and I will head into town,” Trev said. “We’ll see what we can come up with.”
“And what am I supposed to do, boss?” Instead of joining us, Nick leaned in the doorway between the living room and dining room.
“You’re on watch.”
While Sam ran Cas and Trev through the specifics—which sounded an awful lot like “Steal whatever you can get your hands on without getting caught,” but not in those words—I went to inspect the kitchen.
Sam had mentioned earlier that there was a pantry, but half the food had expired. I wanted to see for myself what was inside. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do.
The pantry was a large walk-in tucked beneath the staircase. Enough light spilled in from the kitchen windows that I didn’t need a flashlight to start taking inventory. Gallons of water lined the baseboards. The lower shelves were stocked full of medical and emergency supplies, like batteries, matches, and rubbing alcohol.
The other shelves held hard grains, beans, and pasta. There were vacuum-sealed bags of salt, sugar, and freeze-dried food. Boxes of powdered milk, dried soup mixes, and cereal.
I started checking expiration dates. The cereal and beans had gone bad a while ago, but I thought we might be able to get away with eating the pasta and soup mixes.
It was just like Sam to be prepared for anything. He could probably survive an apocalypse.
The doorway darkened behind me. “Find anything useful?” Sam asked.
I turned around and pressed my back against the shelves. “Yeah.”
He stepped inside with me, and suddenly the pantry didn’t seem as big as it had before. He reached for a bag of rolled oats, grazing my arm as he did. Heat rippled out from where he’d touched me, even though it wasn’t on purpose and there were layers of clothing between us.
I slid aside, but it took every ounce of self-control I had to do it. “Anything come back to you yet?” I asked. “The house seem familiar?”
He set the oats down. “I’m having a hard time deciphering what’s real and what’s merely a sense of déjà vu.”
“Trev would say there’s no such thing, that it’s the mind recalling something from the past.”
“Trev thinks there’s a deeper meaning to everything.”
“True.” I clasped my hands behind me. “What was it that triggered the déjà vu?”
I could make out only one side of his face in the filtered daylight as he looked over at me. “There’s a dent in the wall on the other side of the refrigerator, like something smashed into it.” Worry lines ran across his forehead. “I thought I could remember doing it myself.”
I took a step toward him. “Do you remember anything else?”
The worry disappeared, replaced by some other emotion. A moment of discomfort, or misgiving, or maybe both. “No. That was it.” He pushed away from the corner. “I’ll be upstairs if you need me,” he said and escaped before I could ask anything more.
I might not have the ability to read Sam as well as he did me, but I knew enough to know there’d been a secret there, one he wasn’t willing to part with yet. And I wanted to find out what it was.
14
I DIDN’T TALK TO SAM MUCH FOR THE next few days. He was too preoccupied with turning the house inside out looking for clues. I played a lot of Connect Four with Cas after he found the game stuffed in a kitchen cabinet. Shockingly, even though I was not genetically altered for greatness, I won almost every round. It probably had more to do with the fact that Cas couldn’t focus on a game long enough to strategize, but I figured I’d take what I could get.
Trev and I inventoried a few of the closets downstairs and found a cache of dusty novels and moth-eaten blankets. I didn’t see a lot of Nick. When he wasn’t tending to the fire or collecting kindling, he was helping Sam. While those two didn’t always agree, they worked well together because they didn’t waste time with idle chat.
On our third afternoon at the cabin, in one of the rooms upstairs, I lay on my stomach listening to Trev read passages from The Duke’s Plight. He was propped up against the headboard, the book open in his left hand. The cover showed a girl in a big flowy dress, wrapped in the arms of a long-haired, brooding duke.
Trev let out a sound that was somewhere between a breath and a laugh. “You’ll like this one.”
“Let’s hear it.”
He licked his lips. “ ‘He tried desperately to look at Margaret with an expression of hard contempt, but she appeared so vulnerable, so sad before him, that he went to her immediately. They embraced, her bosom heaving against him.’ ”
I rolled onto my back and laughed. “Oh, God, I can’t take any more.”
The book thumped closed. A second later, Trev eased down next to me. We both stared at the wide plank ceiling. Downstairs, the fire crackled and snapped as someone poked at it. Cas, probably. Nick and Sam were in the garage rummaging through the loft as far as I knew.
“Did you ever imagine you’d escape the lab?” I asked.
Trev clasped his hands together over his stomach. “Not the way it happened. Sometimes I thought it’d be you who would let us out. I never could decide if that would be a good or bad thing. Bad for you, maybe.”
Citrine sunlight blazed through the window and shone across his face. His eyes seemed to glow when I turned to him. “I wanted to, if that’s any consolation. I thought about it all the time.”
“I know you did.”
I leaned on my elbow. “Really?”
“Sam was working his way into your subconscious. Whether you knew it or not. Whether he meant to or not. If he hadn’t planned to escape, eventually you would have done it yourself. For him.”
Long threads of my hair tickled my arm as I hung my head back. “For you, too. For all of you.”
He smiled when he looked at me, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Thanks, but I think you’re lying.”
“I am not.” I picked at a loose thread in the blanket. “So when this is all over, whatever this is, what do you think you’ll do?”
“If I have a choice, you mean?”
“Yeah. If you could do anything.”
He considered the question. “Well, I guess I’d like to go to New York City. I want to study lit somewhere, though I suppose having no identification or school records might pose a problem.”
I’d been so focused on Sam and what my life would be like without him that I hadn’t taken the time to consider what it’d feel like to lose Trev, too. The sorrow was immediate, and pressing. “I’ll miss you, if you go.”
He waved the idea away. “I’m not going anywhere. No matter how much I want to.”
“Come on. Someday, you’ll be free. Just promise me you won’t leave me for good.”
