Founder

Chapter 6

6

It was disorienting, approaching the entrance of a place Adam had spent so much of the first twelve years of his life but hadn’t set foot inside since. The school in Cold Springs served kindergarten through junior high. Local students attended a consolidated county high school when they reached ninth grade. The structure had been built around the same time as the War Memorial Building down the street, and it showed. Pale, concrete steps practically glowed against the brick backdrop, red in daylight but dark at night. The steps led directly onto an asphalt basketball court, crowded with cars Adam had circled around, not trusting himself to negotiate such close quarters. Just a little farther.

A man bumped Adam’s shoulder hard as he passed, and Adam stumbled, dropping to his knees on the asphalt under a wave of intense nausea. The bright steps left an afterimage on his retina, fuzzy white lines superimposed over everything that passed in front of his eyes. When he stood and turned to get a better look at the man, he’d vanished. Which, in Adam’s current state, merely meant the man was more than six feet away.

Wide, concrete-topped, brick sections bookended the steps. A few young couples sat there, nuzzled close enough to provoke parents, while far enough apart in the bits that mattered to suggest intervention was unreasonable. Adam nearly tripped over one young man’s lazy leg as he walked past; only his crawling pace saved him.

Once inside, the hall lights that had seemed so promising from afar made Adam squint. His legs responded on a peculiar delay, but he kept walking, past classrooms with closed doors on both sides, past an emergency exit on the left, past—wait, water fountain. Its shiny reflection was a sliver of glass in his brain, and the button was worn to a tarnished roughness. The icy water felt so good sluicing down his throat, Adam could have cried. If only he could fill his belly with gallons and gallons…

A sudden pressure reminded him why he’d come in the building in the first place. There—up ahead. Please, God, don’t let there be a line.

The door swung inward so easily, Adam nearly fell into the bathroom. Of its four painted plywood stalls, the nearest was the only one occupied. Adam headed for the last one, snugged against the wall and across from the urinals. He made it inside, slid the bolt home with shaking hands, and got his pants down just in time.

It was not pretty, but at least there was plenty of toilet paper.

The person on the far end had departed, and a few more had come and gone by the time Adam began considering whether it was safe for him to leave. There was something comforting about being there, something beyond the reassurance that he wouldn’t have an accident in public.

And then he remembered. He’d spent a lot of time in these bathroom stalls after Danny was kidnapped. When it got to be too much—that sense of his classmates’ eyes upon him—he’d ask for a bathroom pass and just sit in a stall, until someone came to get him or he heard the sounds of the bell to change classes. He wasn’t sure how he’d passed the time. Maybe sleeping, since he hadn’t done a lot of that then. An involuntary smile snuck onto his exhausted face. Some things never change.

He pulled his pants up and made his way to the sink, fingers shaking almost as badly as when he’d entered. After washing his hands, he splashed water on his face and held it against his forehead in cupped hands. He wiped the drops from his eyes with the heels of his hands and felt heat radiating from his forehead. Even through blurry eyes, the sight of his face in the mirror—white, chapped lips and sallow skin drawn tightly across his skull—was shocking. It was time to go home.

Adam extended a hand in the hallway, tracing the wall with two fingers to keep oriented while his vision fuzzed out. He felt the surfaces change beneath his fingertips: painted wall, doorframe and door, painted wall, poster paper, painted wall… water fountain!

Even walking slowly, the impact bent him double over the low-hung fixture and his left, tracing arm flung forward, settling in the wet, metal catchment. Adam stared at the floor, concentrating on a small puddle until its edges became clear. Maybe he should just stop here, sit right here and wait to see if JJ found him. She’d yell at him, call him a doofus, or something worse if Evie wasn’t with her.

Adam stood as straight as his aching guts would allow. She’d do that anyway, wherever they found each other. He followed the lights to the exit.

Pushing the door open and stepping carefully down the stairs, Adam found himself on an empty sidewalk. Facing a flagpole. What the hell? He must have gone out the side exit. At least he hadn’t set off an alarm. He looked around. The traffic on Main Street had cleared, and although there were a few scattered figures elsewhere, the crowds had gathered in the fields far off to his left where the games were set up. He could not face the press of people again. Physically, he couldn’t handle it, and mentally… it was undoubtedly a side effect of his sickness, but he had a strange feeling, just short of paranoia, that someone was watching him. It’d be better to wait for JJ at her car. Too bad he didn’t know where she’d parked it.

Adam sighed and put his hand to an ache in his head. I can do this. JJ was the type of person to park far away and be done with it rather than circling. She’d been heading toward the center of town when she’d dropped off him and Evie, so Adam would walk in that direction until he found her Bronco. He felt cool metal beneath his hands as he picked his way through parked cars and crossed the street to the empty side.

Trees clung to the steep embankment, creating a narrow, now leafless fringe at the edge of the road. Adam knew a river ran far below him, but he couldn’t see it in the dark. He couldn’t hear it, either—no matter how much he strained—over a white noise that filled his head. The low metal guardrail was at trip-the-human-and-toss-him-to-his-death height. Adam stepped onto the edge of the road when his calf bumped the guardrail, preferring to take his chances with slow-moving cars. A dirt lane lay ahead on the right, across from the school property boundary, and cut back and forth to reach the floodplain below. Beyond that, the earth filled in again, hosting a small cemetery. It was buffered from the road by an old, iron fence and a stretch of trees, with a shoulder once again wide enough to allow cars to park alongside the road.

Adam made it as far as the cemetery property when he began to feel truly awful. This time, he needed to vomit. Trailing a hand on the cars as he had the wall of the hallway, he told himself that was something to be grateful for, not having to drop his trousers next to someone’s plastic carnations. This close to Halloween, people would get upset and think it was a prank, never knowing—

He shuffled quickly into the trees, falling to his knees as he began to heave. Tears filled his eyes as he went past the point of having anything to purge. He fell onto his side and curled his knees to his chest, trying to soothe aching, cramping muscles. It was dark here, but a streetlight glowed in the distance. Darkness began to swallow that glow, starting at his peripheral vision and working its way toward the center.

Just before he lost consciousness, he thought someone stood over him, that a figure said his name in a vaguely familiar but oddly singsong voice. Adam… Oh, Adam…