okay with Avery. He was only ten, but now he had to be a grownup, and grownups didn’t play with toy soldiers.
Only I can’t do it alone, he thought.
He remembered Christmas, the year before. It hurt to think about that, but he thought about it, anyway. He had gotten the Lego castle he’d asked for, but when the pieces were spread out before him, he didn’t know how to get from that scatter to the beautiful castle on the box, with its turrets and gates and the drawbridge that went up and down. He’d started to cry. Then his father (dead now, he was sure of it) knelt down beside him and said, We’ll follow the instructions and do it together. One step at a time. And they had. The castle had stayed on his bureau in his room with his G.I. Joes guarding it, and that castle was one thing they hadn’t been able to duplicate when he woke up in Front Half.
Now he lay on the cot in this barren room, dressed in dry clothes, thinking of how fine the castle had looked when it was done. And feeling the hum. It was constant here in Back Half. Loud in the rooms, louder in the halls, loudest of all down past the cafeteria, where a double-locked door beyond the caretakers’ break room led to the back half of Back Half. The caretakers often called that part Gorky Park, because the kids who lived there (if you could call it living) were gorks. Hummers. But they were useful, Avery supposed. The way the wrapper your Hershey bar came in was useful, until you licked it clean. Then you could throw it away.
The doors here had locks. Avery concentrated, trying to turn his. Not that there was anywhere to go except for the hallway with its blue carpet, but it was an interesting experiment. He could feel the lock trying to turn, but he couldn’t quite manage it. He wondered if George Iles would be able to, because George had been a strong TK-pos to begin with. Avery guessed he could, with a little help. He thought again about what his father had said: We’ll do it together. One step at a time.
At five o’clock, the door opened and a red-clad caretaker poked his unsmiling face in. They didn’t wear nametags here, but Avery didn’t need a nametag. This was Jacob, known to his colleagues as Jake the Snake. He was ex-Navy. You tried to be a SEAL, Avery thought, but you couldn’t make it. They kicked you out. I think maybe you liked hurting people too much.
“Dinner,” Jake the Snake said. “If you want it, come on. If you don’t, I’ll lock you in until movie time.”
“I want it.”
“All right. You like movies, kiddo?”
“Yes,” Avery said, and thought, But I won’t like these. These movies kill people.
“You’ll like these,” Jake said. “There’s always a cartoon to start with. Caff’s right down there on your left. And quit lollygagging.” Jake gave him a hefty swat on the ass to get him going.
In the cafeteria—a dreary room painted the same dark green as the residence corridor in Front Half—about a dozen kids sat eating what smelled to Avery like Dinty Moore Beef Stew. His mom served it at least twice a week back home, because his little sister liked it. She was probably dead, too. Most of the kids looked like zombies, and there was a lot of slobbering. He saw one kid, a girl, who was smoking a cigarette as she ate. As Avery watched, she tapped ash into her bowl, looked around vacantly, and began eating from it again.
He had felt Kalisha even down in the tunnel and now he saw her, sitting at a table near the back. He had to restrain an urge to run to her and throw his arms around her neck. That would attract attention, and Avery didn’t want to do that. Just the opposite. Helen Simms was sitting next to Sha, hands lying limply on either side of her bowl. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Her hair, so razzily colored when she showed up in Front Half, was now dull and dank, hanging around her face—her much thinner face—in clumps. Kalisha was feeding her, or trying to.
“Come on, Hel, come on, Hell on Wheels, here we go.” Sha got a spoonful of the stew into Helen’s mouth. When a brown lump of mystery meat tried to come out over Helen’s lower