All Good Children - Catherine Austen [61]
She looks away from me to the faces I painted on the walls of my tent—Tyler, Xavier, Pepper. I turn up the volume on my RIG.
There’s a knock at the door. We stare at each other, wide-eyed and paranoid. I peek through the tent window while she answers.
It’s Dallas, vacant-eyed but chewing. “Hello, Mrs. Connors. How are you?”
Mom holds her hand over her mouth.
“It’s okay, Mom. Shut the door.”
Dallas smiles. “I’m good, aren’t I?”
Mom nods. “You’ve always been good. Goodnight, boys. Do your homework.”
Dallas sits beside me on the couch, and I stream the show on the big screen. He looks around the tent walls. “Wow. You’re taking a risk.”
“I take a risk every time I leave the house.”
“I take a risk every time I stay home.”
I give him that one. “How’d you escape?”
“I told my dad I was going to the Christmas Ball planning session. I couldn’t miss the final Freakshow, and there’s no way I could watch it with Austin. It stinks in here.” He points to my wall of throwaways—the Asian kid skating for his life while Tyler and Washington leer over a railing. “Those were good days.” He blows out a big breath. He looks exhausted. His hands shake. He holds them over his face and swears aimlessly.
“Have you lost weight?”
He shrugs. “I have diarrhea every day so I just stopped eating.”
“You have to eat, man. Want some nachos?”
He looks at my paint-spattered plate and shudders.
“Want something else? We have apples and cheese.”
“Maybe an apple.”
He takes one bite of a Red Delicious and chews for forty seconds before he can swallow. “I’m tired, Max,” he says. He lays the apple on my nacho plate. “I can’t take this smell.”
We close the flaps and sit in front of the tent on the carpet, four feet from the big screen. We scrunch our legs and lean back on our elbows, craning our necks. “This is better,” Dallas says.
He cracks a smile. “This is so much better than home. I can’t even fall asleep anymore because I’m afraid my dad’s got surveillance on me and I’ll give myself away in a dream.”
“You have to sleep, man.”
He rolls his eyes. “Easy for you to say.”
They show the gruesome freak tryouts for next season. I turn up the volume to mask my laughter in case Lucas is below us with a glass to his ceiling. I relax for the first time in days. “I’m so tense lately. I feel like ripping someone’s head off.”
Dallas nods. “I’m suffering withdrawal from fighting with Austin. I have too much adrenaline flooding through me now. I’ll probably die of a heart attack before the zombies get me.” He smiles briefly. “Which would you rather be? A brain-eating zombie or the kind at school?”
“Brain-eater.”
“Me too.”
The show comes back on. Because it’s the final episode with this batch of freaks, they spotlight the last two contestants’ families in Freaktown. They show the place before the leaks—lush forests and fertile fields, buxom women and rugged men, vague urban vistas of crowded sidewalks, money and success. Then they show the place now—buildings boarded up and crumbling down, soup kitchen lineups, blankets draped over lumpy bodies, kids with warped eyeballs and exposed jaw bones drooling over drugs.
“My father was there before the spill,” Dallas says. “He has photos on his website.”
“Has he gone back since?”
“No. Why would anyone go there?”
I shrug. “Criminals might. To get away from the ids. Or maybe to get to Canada. There’s still a border crossing there. I heard terrorists sneak into the country that way.”
“I’d go south to get away from the ids,” Dallas says. “Just hop in a car and keep driving. Wouldn’t you? It could take years before anyone found me. Don’t you think?”
I nod. “I want to go back to Atlanta.”
“I don’t know much about Atlanta,” he says. “Is it big enough to get lost in?”
“I think so.”
There’s a closeup of Zipperhead’s scars and sorrows.
“I wonder if he was happier when his brother was still attached to him,” Dallas says. “It’s hard to believe there was a whole person there once and now there’s just a scar.” His face