Plague

it.”
    “Stay inside unless absolutely necessary,” Edilio shouted into the megaphone. Using up precious batteries. Albert had not wanted to give up the batteries. But he really didn’t care what Albert wanted or didn’t want.
    He walked down San Pablo, shouting through the mega-phone. “We have flu going around and it’s dangerous. Stay inside unless absolutely necessary! Work is canceled today. Mall is closed.”
    Flu. Yeah. A flu that makes you cough up your insides.
    It was unreal, Edilio thought as he walked halfway down the street and repeated the loudspeaker warning.
    Epidemic. The so-called hospital was full. All through the morning, feverish, coughing kids had dragged themselves to the hospital. The disease was spreading like fire and Lana was useless.
    No way to know how many it would kill.
    Maybe everyone who got it.
    Maybe everyone, period.
    “Quarantine,” Dahra had said, pounding her fist into her palm. “You have to shut everything down.”
    “Kids have almost no food or water in their homes,” Edilio had protested.
    “You think I don’t know that?” Dahra had cried in a shrill voice tinged with panic. “If we don’t stop this epidemic, no one will be thirsty, they’ll be dead. Like Pookie. Like that Jennifer girl.”
    Kids poked their heads out of windows or stepped out onto the darkening streets. Which was kind of the opposite of what he was going for.
    “I already had the flu,” kids would yell.
    “Yeah, well, no one is immune,” Edilio would shout back.
    “How am I supposed to eat?”
    “I guess you’ll be hungry for a day. Give us time to work things out.”
    “Is this the thing with bugs coming out of your body?”
    How had that news spread so fast? Everyone knew about Roscoe being locked up. No phones, no texts, no email, nothing, and still kids heard things almost instantly.
    “No, no, this is just flu,” Edilio said, stretching the truth almost to the breaking point. “Coughing and fever. One kid’s already died, so just do what I’m asking, okay?”
    In fact, three kids had died. Pookie and a girl named Melissa and Jennifer H. Three, not one. And maybe more than that, no way to know what was happening in every house in this ghost town. No point in spreading more panic than was necessary.
    One death should be enough to get their attention. Three deaths, on top of the bugs some kids were nicknaming maggots and others were calling gut-roaches, that was enough to create panic.
    Edilio had no idea if a quarantine would work. He would get his guys to try and enforce it: the sheriffs at least would still be on the street. But what were they supposed to do if kids decided to ignore it? Shoot them to save them?
    He couldn’t tell people to wash their hands: no one had washing water in their home. He couldn’t tell them to use hand sanitizer: not enough to go around and what they had was just for the so-called hospital.
    Nothing they could do but ask kids to stay home.
    Probably too late.
    Three dead. So far.
    Edilio thought of Roscoe locked in his prison. Were the bugs eating him from the inside yet?
    He thought of Brianna—Lana’s healing touch had fixed her, but the Breeze was shaken up. Scared.
    He thought of the monstrous thing that was both Drake and Brittney.
    He thought of Orc. No one had seen him. Plenty had heard him, and there were a few smashed cars testifying to his previous presence.
    He thought of Howard, out walking the streets looking for Orc, refusing to stop, even when Edilio ordered him to get to some shelter and stay inside.
    And he thought of the two people who had held his job before him: Sam and Astrid. Both beaten into despair by trying to hold this group of kids together in the face of one disaster after another. Both of them now happy to let Edilio handle it.
    “No wonder,” Edilio muttered.
    “Stay inside unless absolutely necessary,” Edilio shouted, and not for the first or last time wished he was still just Sam’s faithful sidekick.

Chapter Sixteen
33 HOURS, 40 MINUTES

    BLAZING SUNLIGHT, DIRECTLY overhead, woke Orc.
    It took him quite a while to sort out where he was. There were desks. The kind they had in school. He was on the floor, a cold linoleum-tile floor, and the desks were tossed and piled around him. Like someone had tossed them all around in a rage.
    Someone had.
    There was a chalkboard. Something was written on it, but Orc’s eyes wouldn’t focus well enough to read it.
    The really confusing thing was the hole in the