UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,38

it with his palm, wishing them Godspeed.

“Excuse me . . . ,” asks a timid voice. “Can you help me?”

He turns to find a pigtailed girl in a ragged dress, wearing a frayed backpack, approaching the firehouse. She looks hungry, dirty, and tired. Sebastian wonders how far she’s traveled to reach them. He also wonders how she managed to get past the perimeter and enter their secret compound without being noticed or confronted. I’ll have to look into that. . . .

“Please,” she says. “I’m an unwind, or I was supposed to be. I’ve been hiding out, and I heard you help unwinds. Please, can you help me?”

“Of course we can,” he says, smiling. “You’re welcome here.”

“Thanks so much.”

Sebastian waves as the bus pulls out, then turns back to the pigtailed girl. “What’s your name?”

But he never finds out—because she spreads her hands and powerfully claps them together, changing Centralia’s geography.

9 • Blast

The clapper’s blast is far more powerful than even the architects of the explosion expected. It splits the ground and strikes a pool of stagnant methane gas that has quietly accumulated over a period of decades beneath the poisoned town. The resulting detonation hollows out the fire station in a blowtorch-hot column of Old Testament flame.

Sebastian is barbecued in the first instant of the explosion. The bus flies off the roadbed like a toy tossed by a child, its frame buckling, tires and windows exploding from the heat. Buildings crumple; abandoned houses are blown off their foundations. Blazing shrapnel flies in all directions, casting a debris field the size of a stadium. Droplets of molten glass fall like rain. A road sign reading WELCOME TO CENTRALIA is flung skyward, falling to earth four miles from the post it was nailed to. The green growth overwhelming the streets is burned back, like the scene of a battle.

Those who can, flee for their lives as the inferno blossoms and rages, engulfing the town.

10 • Jobe

Jobe is sitting near the back of the bus when the clapper detonates. The bus heaves and lurches, flipping on its side, with everyone screaming and the glass windows melting (is he really seeing that?) and the whole world turned red as paint, just for a moment, like a modern version of Dante’s Inferno.

He’s thrown headlong into the rear emergency door, which snaps open under his weight. Jobe is catapulted onto the pavement, landing too hard, feeling bones break. The street burns to the touch, like a griddle, but he can’t get up and run because he’s broken his leg, maybe both legs. Maybe his spine. He can only crawl, trying to reach the grass, though that’s burning too; he’s trapped in a waking nightmare.

But even in the middle of this disaster, a part of him marvels that surprise is still possible, even for the dying, because his path to oblivion has taken a startling turn.

Heath said that Jobe would be helping more people than he could imagine. Instead, he’s helping no one. He feels the bitterness of disappointment, almost worse than his injuries. His death will not count. He’s become the failure his father always said he was.

Until he hears a faint voice yelling, “Help!”

11 • Anissa

Anissa is sitting in her makeshift cell when the wall splits open, like the shell of a melon. Miraculously, she’s shielded from the blast wave by a bank of lockers, which crumples like tinfoil but saves her life. She staggers into the burning garage and is nearly crushed when the heatsuit topples on her. Then, before she can squirm out from under it, a beam comes down, pinning her beneath it.

I’m trapped here, she realizes, by a machine designed to protect people from fire. It seems the cruelest of ironies. Worse, the building is heating up around her, as the garage is consumed by flame.

She yells, “Help!” again and again, not really expecting an answer, because if Dad’s death taught her anything, it’s that prayers rarely get answered, miracles seldom happen, and no one’s coming to save her. She can only be brave like he was and wait for the end, probably a bad one. It’s already searingly hot in here and getting harder to breathe.

Then something moves.

Someone’s coming toward her through the collapsed wall of the garage, crawling with painful slowness. She squints and recognizes him: Jobe, the multiple-cancer victim, the very last person she’d expect to be mounting a rescue mission. “Hang on,” he says, and Anissa wonders if he’s taking to her or himself.

“You’re hurt,” she