Chapter 22

“Mr. Messina?”

Mike looked up from his desk to see Layla Sanders standing in the doorway, with Zoe Peterson and Ashley Hendricks behind her.

After leading back to back meetings at Leavitt Hall in as many days, Mike reclaimed his windowed office so that he could work in the light of day, reviewing notes and preparing figures, rather than waste precious battery power working in the darkness of his basement lab. With so much activity and data to manage now, he found himself increasingly bogged down in the minutia of their survival operations.

The emergency food mission had been a resounding success, and far easier than he imagined it would be. After unloading the big green Army truck of whatever supplies Charmagne had brought back with her the previous night into a small auxiliary building behind Leavitt Hall, she sent Sgt. Chapman and Cpl. Ibarra in the “deuce” as she called it, to retrieve the rest of the MREs they’d left behind at the armory.

It turned out to be a horde. Two hundred thirty-seven cases. Two thousand eight hundred forty-four meals. Enough food to feed the fifty-four students, teachers, and nurses, three meals per day for seventeen days. But they could stretch that to twenty-six days if they limited themselves to just two meals per day, which is exactly what Mike suggested they do.

Including the food they still had in the pantry at Overton House, there was now enough to get them to their thirty-day goal, and Mike couldn’t have been more relieved.

“Yeah, what’s up?” he asked, waving the three girls inside.

Now that all the students understood the dangers of prolonged exposure to the sun, they were given more freedom to move around outside, as long as they took precautions, and reported back to Overton every two hours for headcount. Linda objected to this loosening of the rules, of course, arguing that it was too dangerous for them to be outside without adult supervision, but she was overruled by everyone else. There was simply too much work to be done securing their survival to babysit dozens of teenage girls, twenty-four hours a day. They would simply have to trust them to be mature, responsible young women from now on.

The three girls crowded around his desk. Even though it was almost ninety degrees outside, they were dressed as if for cold weather. Pants, and long-sleeved shirts or hoodies. They all wore hats too, to shade their eyes and protect their faces.

“We wanted to ask if you’d be willing to drive us down to Morgan Creek today,” Layla said.

“What for?”

“We’ve all got family down there. We wanted to see if anyone made it.”

Mike leaned back in his chair. Chapman and Ibarra had told the faculty about the roadblocks leading into Morgan Creek, and how access to the town was now limited to town residents, and that information had been passed down to the students as well.

“Are you girls from there?” he asked.

“No,” Layla said, pulling something from her pocket. “Not technically. But we have these.”

She set her student ID down on his desk. The campus itself was located outside the municipal boundaries of Morgan Creek, in an unincorporated part of the county, but the legal entity that operated Scirewood Academy was located inside the town itself. Thus, the mailing address on everyone’s school IDs said Morgan Creek. Technically speaking, these girls were residents of the town.

Mike pulled out his wallet and checked his school ID as well. All students and faculty carried them. They functioned as keycards, allowing them to swipe in and out of Overton House after hours. At least, they did before the blackout. He flipped the card around between his fingers several times, mulling it over.

“Did you ask permission from Ms. Linda first?” he asked, and the look they shared told him they had.

“She said it’s too dangerous for anyone to leave campus,” Zoe finally admitted.

“She’s probably right,” he said.

Despite her irrational attitude, and the danger that had placed them in, Linda took her duty of care for the safety of her students very seriously. And although he no longer considered himself her employee, and therefore wasn’t bound to her authority, it didn’t sit well with him to go against her wishes on this particular matter. Not when it concerned the safety of the students.

“I don’t think I can do that,” he said at last, returning his ID to his wallet. “Not unless you get permission from her first.”

“Please, Mr. Messina,” Ashley begged. “You know her. She’ll never say yes. It’s been a week, and we haven’t heard anything about what’s going on outside the school. We can’t call, we can’t text, we can’t email. We’re totally cut off from everyone! I have to know if my aunt or uncle or any of my cousins are still alive.” Her chin trembled and she fought back tears. “I don’t know if I have any family left.”

Her heartbreaking plea moved him. He’d barely allowed himself to think about his own family, back in California. Were any of them still alive? Knowing that a continent separated them made knowledge of their fates an abstract concept, rather than something that could ever be known. But these girls potentially had living relatives just a few miles down the hill, and to be so close and not know for sure must have been tearing them up inside.

“Alright,” he said to their grateful smiles. “After the next headcount, meet me down by the barn. I can at least take you to the roadblock. There’s no guarantee that these cards are going to work, though, but I guess it won’t hurt to try.”

“Thank you, Mr. Messina! Thank you!” Ashley gushed, and the three girls scurried out of his office, full of hope.

When he stopped the Aspen and opened the passenger door, the three girls sprinted from the barn and quickly piled inside. For a moment, he considered whether this was such a good idea, but their excitement for the opportunity to see their families again pushed aside his doubts.

It took very little time to reach the roadblock, but the reality of it didn’t quite match Chapman’s description. Instead of the police cruiser and pickup he expected, a more permanent emplacement had been erected, constructed of cars with flattened tires, corrugated sheet metal, and barbed wire, stretched between wooden posts that extended beyond the edges of the road to prevent anyone from driving around. And there weren’t just four men manning the roadblock. There were seven. And every one of them was heavily armed.

A bearded man, with a wide brimmed hat, approached Mike’s side of the car with his hand up, while two others covered the vehicle from the other side. Some of the men at the roadblock wore military style gear, but not one of them wore a police uniform.

“Step out of the vehicle and approach with your hands where I can see them,” the bearded man said in a loud, clear voice.

“Stay here,” Mike said to the girls.

He slowly exited the car and raised his hands, shielding his eyes from the bright, midday sun. He wasn’t properly dressed for this, he realized. Like the other teachers, he’d been wearing the same clothes for a week, hand washing them in the shower to keep them clean. He didn’t have a long sleeve shirt or a hat. Just his slacks and a polo shirt.

He recalled how it felt when Chapman and his squad trained their weapons on him and Kali the night they first met, but somehow this felt different. These men weren’t professional soldiers, or even police. They were something else entirely.

When he was instructed to stop, the bearded man slung his weapon over his shoulder and gave Mike a quick pat down, finding his wallet in his back pocket. He opened it and removed his driver’s license.

“What brings you to Morgan Creek, Michaelangelo Messina?”

“We’re just looking in on some family.”

“Oh yeah? You have family here?”

“Well, no. I don’t, but my students do,” he said, gesturing to the car.

The man lowered his sunglasses to look through the windshield at the three girls in the car, then looked at Mike. “Students. That make you a teacher, or something?”

“That’s right. My school ID’s right there in my wallet.”

The man handed it back to him. “Show it to me.”

When Mike found it, he handed it over. “We’re all residents of Morgan Creek,” he said. “The address is right there on the card.”

“Oh yeah, look at that,” he said under his breath. “Skire-wood Academy. What is that?”

“It’s a boarding school. We’re just coming into town to look in on their families.”

The man looked at him over the top of his sunglasses. “Right.” He handed Mike back his license, but held onto the school ID. “What kind of car is that?”

Mike looked back. “Oh, a Dodge Aspen. They stopped making them back in the seventies. It’s kind of a collector’s item.”

“Sounds like it’s got some power under the hood. What kind of engine does it have?”

“That one has a 360 cubic inch LA V8 in it, with a three speed manual transmission.”

The man nodded and smiled. “Nice.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty fun to drive.”

“We don’t have too many cars. Just some old trucks mostly, and a few tractors.”

“I can imagine.”

“Yeah, this one’ll come in handy.”

Mike’s plastered smile faltered. “Handy for what?”

“You said you’re a resident, right? All operating vehicles are property of the town now. Official use only.”

“No ... I hadn’t heard that.”

The guy barely acknowledged him as he waved over one of the other guards. A younger man with a ball cap and a tactical vest.

“Take it down to the station,” he said, handing him Mike’s school ID. “Fuck I know. Some kind of boarding school, or some shit. Reggie’ll figure it out.”

“No, wait!” Mike shouted. “Let me get them out first!”

The bearded man put his hand on Mike’s chest. “Calm down.”

“I am calm,” he said in a shrill voice, as the younger man dropped into the driver’s seat of his car and shut the door. “Wait! Keep the car. Just let me get my students out first.”

“We’ll take it from here,” the bearded man said with his hand still on Mike’s chest.

Mike watched helplessly as his car drove past, with the three girls looking at him through the windows with fearful expressions, yelling at the driver. When they passed through to the other side of the barrier, he tried to follow, but the bearded man pushed him back.

“Wait, please,” Mike said. “Where are you taking them?”

“Are you relations?” the man asked.

“No, but-”

“Then it’s not your concern, is it?”

Mike stared incredulously. “What about me? Are you going to at least let me in?”

“Local residents only.”

“But I am a resident!”

“Your license says Mars Hill.”

“But you just took my car!”

“And we appreciate the donation.”

What had he done? He couldn’t have cared less about the car, but armed men he didn’t know had just driven off with three of his students. And now he was stranded out in the open with no protection from the sun.

“No, no, no, wait a second! Please! I can’t leave here without them!” Mike insisted, trying to move past, but he stopped dead when seven rifle barrels swung to point at his chest. “Please!”

The bearded man considered him for a moment, then squinted up at the sun. “You better get a move on, Michaelangelo. It’s going to be a scorcher today.”

The last time Mike ran three continuous miles was during the Torrey Pines Challenge 5K charity run, last fall, before he moved from California. He’d trained hard for that one, and ended up finishing thirty-seventh, out of almost five hundred runners, with a 20:12 finish time. Just shy of a sub-twenty, and close enough to that prestigious barrier that he considered training harder to finally break through it.

Doing it uphill, under intense UV light, and in the blazing heat of a merciless Sun, nearly killed him. As he dragged himself up the narrow lane leading to Leavitt Hall, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, Theresa, Charmagne, and Ibarra spotted him and sprinted in his direction.