There was the tune, his breath, and then—as his heart leapt—very softly: “Uh-huh?”
“Right, so I was in marching band,” Michael went on, his throat feeling stiff and unpracticed. “What it should be called is, The Club Where Sweaty Dorks Collectively Undress. Well, I don’t love doing that, so I wait till everybody else is gone and even then I dress in the stalls, which works great except that sometimes I forget to lock the stall. And that is the reason that my band director, Mr. Green, who has a mullet and is awesomely awkward, opened the door, wanting nothing more in this world than to take a dump, and instead saw me with nothing on but a pair of socks and a marching helmet.”
He pushed on in the silence. “I was literally putting the plume in when we started screaming.”
The door moved between them as the girl laughed; Michael realized that she was leaning against it on the other side. Michael closed his eyes, spontaneously grinning: laughing, a new person laughing.
“That was . . . humorous,” she said. “So, you should come down and eat with everyone. That is, if your brother saved you any food.” Michael’s heart lit with relief and excitement and a thousand other emotions that just jittered together.
“Just make sure you keep your clothes on. There’s no dress code, but naked asses? They’re frowned upon.”
Michael laughed and was about to say something, but he heard footsteps echoing away.
The girl had gone, and the joke deflated behind her.
But still, Michael leaned back, roughing his hands through his hair in relief. The Safe Zone, he thought. He didn’t think he’d be able to eat—his stomach felt like a home for ADD butterflies. But he looked for shoes at the cot he’d been sleeping on, and he found his old clothes, neatly piled under the cot, slit raggedly up the middle, and he felt an unexpected pang. When he went to shrug a camo jacket on, he heard a soft brushing sound, and his fingers went to his neck. He winced at the tenderness he found. He looked at his pale reflection in the windows and saw the clean, tan square taped there. The scratch had been bandaged. Which made him think of the Bellow from the church. Which made him think of the phone. Mom’s number was floating in his head as he grabbed the cell from his old pants and pushed the power button down, wondering if he could actually place a call now that he was in the Safe Zone. But he hadn’t turned the phone off after using it with Rulon; it was dead.
He thought about Mom being in the same city as him . . . maybe the same building. I. Made. It. Just like I knew I would—just like the Game Master, ha-ha, said I could. I saved Patrick and myself, and soon Mom’s going to understand how I saved her, too.
And the butterflies in his belly did backflips.
Wow. So. This level is a little nicer.
The Capitol halls evoked an almost eerie sense of dignity. It was like a brass-work, marble palace—except the palace was also interspersed with the accessories of crisis.
Bracketed lanterns and a series of chandeliers hung on the walls and ceiling, but tripod-mounted banks of fluorescents—tethered to squat, silent generators by thick cables—rested on the floors. Columns soared to ceiling arches, but countless dozens of cots jammed the floor. Daylight filtered through metallic mesh that protected the windows lacing the dome, and it cast prison-diamonds of shadow. Life-size statues of West Virginia’s governors—the Bosses, Michael thought giddily—stood on their pedestals, their eyes darkly eternal. The governors had been mustached, ninja-masked, pirate-patched, and navel-pierced. A politician Michael vaguely recognized had a thought sprayed on the wall above his bald head: DAMN KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN.
The hall, though currently uninhabited, smelled overcrowded, like too much skin. It was a human smell, and shockingly, powerfully nostalgic.
Michael stood there, in borrowed socks, and a kind of awe curled over him. For three weeks, he’d fought the dead, traveling alone except for a fragile five-year-old. But he had never let despair overtake himself, for he’d been always aiming for now, for here, for this endgame moment. He had felt not hope, but certainty: yes-yes. And now here he stood, in the cold/sweaty/majestic/chaotic promised land.
So the fact that the halls were so quiet simply didn’t quite register with him right then.