The Invisible (22 page)

I unzip my jacket and push the jumble of syringes into her hands. There are six. “Keep one of these on you. Stash the rest. Tremorga. Some kind of high-powered tranquilizers. They’d take out an elephant, supposedly. You probably won’t need them, but just in case.”

“Okay.” Jax nods, her lips pursed. She is calm and steely now “Go. Get your friend. I’ll be fine.” She smiles to reassure me. “I do my best work under pressure.”

“He doesn’t deserve to walk. He’s a killer,” I whisper, leaning in to give her a tight hug.

She shakes her head, mouth open to respond, but I put a hand on her arm to stop her because Dr. I is approaching us.

“Time is short, speedy girl. You should go to your friend.”

“Your turn to give me what I need,” I say. “The address.”

He hands me a lined index card with an address chicken-scratched onto it—
351 Azalea Ln.

“Go with God.”

“God has nothing to do with this,” I spit back.

“Very good, very good.” He smiles, infuriatingly polite. “Now is not the time for theological debating, I suppose.”

One last look at Jax and I’ve got my hand on the door.

“See you soon, okay?” I say, too loudly, as I turn the handle, my heart spasming, a ticking clock inside my chest. I close the lab door behind me and despite what I just said about God, bow my head for a moment and put the flat of my palm on the peeling door. “Please let her be okay,” I whisper.

Then I bolt eastward along the back alleys of the South Side, toward Azalea Lane.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

When I get to 348 Azalea, I cross the street and locate the number on the sidewalk, 351. But instead of a house, all I find is a slab of concrete foundation with wires sticking up at various spots, a few metal pipes sprouting from its corners. And sitting on the metal slab, three boys my age, two holding paper bags, a third dealing playing cards in the pink light of sunset.

One of them has streaks of black shoe polish around his mouth, his eyes entirely red under a curtain of scraggly brown hair hanging limply to his shoulders. The other two have that peppy, manic look I’ve come to associate with Invisible’s posse. Slightly unhinged on their cocktail, their eyes glassy but their movements precise, their smiles—always smiles, it seems—creepily smug.

One of them notices me, elbows the one with polish streaks. “She’s here.” He’s got an Invisible patch on his ragged red hunting jacket. The eye stares at me, unblinking, rage-inducing.

“He said she would come, and she did,” Streaks replies, looking up at me with that glazed SoftServe stare. The others nod sagely as if this is religious wisdom.

“Take me to her.” I cross my arms and wait, anger surging through me at how stupid and drugged they are. “Now.”

“Calm down,” the biggest one says, his frizzy red hair matching mine. He’s stooped over, gathering up his playing cards. “It’s this way.”

We walk down the street that way, past 351, 353, 355. At 357, a house that was once nice but now has trash in its scabby lawn and a car on blocks in its driveway, they turn and walk along the gravel side path to a wooden fence marked with a few tags in metallic pen. One reads
INVIS
; another is just an elaborate
I
. The ink looks fresh.

Streaks lifts the lock on the other side of the fence and the gate creaks open. In back there’s a wooden skate ramp flanked by two lemon trees, an above-ground pool that smells like something died in it. And a little cinderblock shed. My throat constricts as we move toward it. Zahra must be inside.

The one with the Invisible patch on his shoulder produces an enormous set of keys, the kind of keys a janitor would have, and starts leafing through them. I check my phone again. Twenty-one minutes until the timer winds down. At which point I assume the dynamite will blow the shed to bits.

“Hurry,” I bark.

I look around the bald lawn for anything I can use as self-defense if I need it. A dozen beer bottles are scattered to one side of the skate ramp. There’s nothing else here.

At last Patch seems to have found the key he wants, and he moves toward the padlock, the door and roof made of corrugated metal, the rest of the shed made of poured concrete.

I hear the barrel click inside the lock and I sprint toward the shed.

“Zahra!” I’m yelling, not thinking about the drugged-out boys outside, yanking open the door and falling forward, missing the two additional steps downward into the shed. I land on my palms and they sing with pain.

“Anthem?” She sounds shocked and scared. “They’ve got you too!”

There’s a single red lightbulb hanging above her, and in the almost-pitch-darkness I make out her shape as she moves toward me and helps me up. I search her face. She looks terrified, but unharmed. Thank goodness.

“No, no,” I say, hugging her hard. “We’re leaving here. Let’s go. You’re not hurt, are you? I’ll explain everything—”

But her eyes widen. She shakes her head slightly and pulls me behind her.

I whirl around just as the door slams shut. The click of the bolt when they lock it is like a nail in a coffin. “We’re dead,” Zahra says flatly. “They’re about to kill us both.”

I shake my head. “Don’t worry.”

I look around at the concrete walls, then focus on the ceiling. Above the hanging sticks of dynamite, it’s just corrugated tin.

I go into that space where all I hear is static. Then I jump up and tell myself
feet first
. I flip in the air, my feet over my head, and kick as hard as I possibly can. The edge of the shed’s roof pops off, the opening letting in a narrow sliver of light. Zahra shrieks. “Anthem! What was
that
?”

Then I do it again, and the roof opens up enough so that a third jump might let me through it.

But the red-haired boy’s face is there, as is his gun. The air vibrates between me and my target. And this time when I jump, I kick him in the head and manage to grab his gun before he falls off the roof.

When I land inside the shed, I aim at the metal door. It takes two bullets to shoot the lock off.

It swings open, and I pull Zahra out of the shed.

She stands there squinting even in the mellow light of sunset. How many hours has she been inside this bunker?

The red-haired boy is on the grass, clutching his head and gasping, but Patch is coming at us, gun raised.

Zahra’s scream is shrill and deafening in the dead air of the backyard.

I lunge at him, spinning around until my foot makes contact with his chin with an audible snap that breaks through the static rushing of blood in my ears. He flies onto the grass twenty feet away and his gun clatters against the concrete wall of the shed.

I leap to grab it, aiming both guns at Streaks. He looks unsure of what he wants to do, but decides to come at me. I shoot, aiming for and hitting his arm.

Streaks clutches his arm and moans, but continues running toward me. I look away from the blood pouring through his fingers and move to shoot him in the foot this time, but there are no more bullets in the chamber. “Of
course
you don’t have enough ammo,” I spit, tossing the gun into the grass.

I grab two bottles by their necks, break the wide parts against the wooden corner of the ramp, and hold them in front of me. “Want your faces all cut up?” I shout at all three of them. “Is Invisible worth hundreds of stitches to you?”

“Oh. My. God,” I hear Zahra say under her breath. I turn to make sure she’s okay, and she’s staring at me, eyes wide. A hand over her mouth. “You’re
her
.”

Streaks looks from me to Zahra for a minute, deciding. Then he backs away and moves to sit against the wall of the house. Judging by how white his face is, he’s about to pass out.

I hear moaning in the grass. The redhead is moving to stand up.

I race down there and pull him away from the shed, because even though I will kill him if necessary, I don’t want him blowing up from his own dynamite. I drag him up, hoisting him from under his armpits, then using all my strength to throw him against the skate ramp.

“Get out of here!” I yell. But he somersaults the ramp and recovers enough to launch himself at me. All 200 pounds of him. I jump in midair and direct both legs at him, kicking him so hard in the chest that he goes flying twenty feet or so up in the air, landing smack on top of an anemic-looking lemon tree. I hear branches crack as he falls against them. A few lemons roll out from behind him after he falls.

“Bedlam’s balls!” I hear Zahra yell behind me. “How could you not tell me this?”

I turn and grin at her, shrugging my shoulders. She smiles back, and a bit of the Zahra I’ve always known comes alive in her eyes.

“I’ll explain everything. Soon as we get out of here.” I spot a garden hose in the grass and move toward him again, this time punching him in the side of his head, hard, in the knockout spot Ford taught me about, just above the ear. Pain explodes into my hand, but the punch hurts him even more.

I take a close look to make sure the redhead is passed out. His eyes rolled back in his head, he’s unconscious, but his chest still rises and falls.

As quickly as I can, I start to wrap him in the hose, but then I hear a crash.

I whip around and see Patch.

He’s climbed on top of the shed, so big on the tiny structure that he’s almost caving in the tin roof. He holds a long knife he must have taken from the kitchen of this dilapidated house. And beneath him, not running away fast enough, is Zahra.

“Run!” I scream. And just as he jumps down, she does. He grabs at her ankle, tripping her. She lunges at him, her eyes wild. She looks like she’s going to rip his head off, but he’s still got the knife in his hand.

I’m there in a quarter-second, stamping hard on his wrist until he lets the knife go. I toss it into the grass ten feet away and struggle to get both of his arms behind his back. I use all my strength to pick him up and toss him toward his unconscious friend by the lemon tree. He goes flying at least ten feet into the air and lands with a thud and a yelp. He puts his hands up and cowers on the ground as I move toward him.

“Watch him,” I say to Zahra, handing her the knife. Then I go to where Streaks is, his arm soaked in blood. He’s still conscious. “On your feet,” I tell him.

When he doesn’t move, I twist the hand of his shot arm just slightly, and he yelps. Instantly, he gets up. “Come with me,” I say, leading him toward the tree where his friends are. When he reaches the tree, he almost collapses against it.

I grab the garden hose and wrap it around the three of them again and again, tying them to the tree.

“Let me help,” Zahra says, moving behind me. Of the three of them, only Patch is fully conscious at this point. He watches us mutely. We loop the hose around and around, knotting it tight.

She grins when we make the last knot. “So
this
is why I’ve always felt like you’re keeping something from me.”

I nod, distracted by what still needs to be done. “We need to get rid of that shed,” I say. “The cameras. They’ve been taping you in there. I don’t want them hiding anyone else in there. It’s supposed to blow in . . .”—I check my watch—“in a little over two minutes. He could be watching the cameras right now, though. He probably is.”

“Okay,” Z says, though her voice doesn’t sound so sure.

“Got a light?”

Zahra shakes her head. I search Patch’s pockets. “Leave me alone,” he growls.

“It’s this or I make you unconscious like your friend,” I say.

He falls silent after that and just stares straight ahead of him into space.

I find a book of matches in a low pocket on his crusty jeans. It’s smeared with shoe polish, but it will do. I grab a couple of smashed cardboard beer cartons from behind the skate ramp and rip them up a bit. Then I open the door to the shed and light a match, then the whole matchbook, on fire. The cardboard from the beer carton smokes for a few seconds before it catches. In a minute this should be a good-sized fire. I pull one of the sticks of dynamite from the ceiling and arrange its wick end a few inches from the fire, near a strip of cardboard that’s about to catch.

I close the door behind me. Z’s waiting a few feet away.

“Let’s bolt,” I say. She nods, speechless for once in her life.

And then we tear through the yard and out the gate, running down the street as the last orange rays of sunset die away, two ordinary girls again, like old times. Like it always used to be for us, laughing about something nobody else would ever understand.

When we get to the end of the block, the shed explodes with a metallic pop. We turn around to watch a gray cloud of debris expand in the sky, a whorl of orange smoke eight feet high spreading over the house.

“Do you think those boys will be okay?” I ask her. “They were kind of close to the shed.”

“Those people are like roaches. Indestructible. They’ll outlive our entire civilization,” Z assures me. “But if not . . .” She shrugs. “I wouldn’t shed a tear.”

“I’m so glad you’re all right. And I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

We walk quietly for a few minutes, arm in arm, one or the other of us turning to check out the smoke now and again.

“I was sure I was going to die in there. My life flashed before my eyes,” Zahra says, visibly shaken at the memory. “And then there you were.”

“You can’t tell anyone, you know.”

Z nods. “Clearly.”

I get out my phone and call the tip line, reporting Invisible activity and giving the Azalea Lane address.

“Ant. It’s time to tell me everything,” Z says when I hang up.

I nod. She’s right. It’s time. I open my mouth, searching for the right words. And then I begin at the beginning.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

After I get Zahra home and make an appearance at my apartment, I wait for my parents to go to sleep, then head back to Jax’s lab to make sure Dr. I kept his promise. It’s after midnight when I arrive.