Chapter 17 - The Girl in Green

Back in our room, Ava crawled under the desk and replaced my phone in the hiding place.

I pulled off my sweater, T-shirt, and jeans and collapsed on my bed in my underwear. The adrenaline rush had worn off, leaving me shaky and tired.

“What if that was Layla?” I said.

Ava shook her head, her mouth pursed into a grim line.

“That wasn’t Layla,” Ava insisted again.

“How can you be so sure?”

“You saw those eyes,” she said. “They weren’t human.”

I knew that she was right. I’d only seen eyes for a flash of an instant, but I shuddered at the memory. There was something in the tunnel. Something horrible.

I thought about that too-clean operating room, the hair Ava had found on the floor.

“Then what happened to Layla?” I said. “That was her hair, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” Ava said softly. “We were right. Layla had been down there.”

She stripped down and pulled on one of the dark blue school-provided bathrobes.

“Where do you think she is now?” I asked.

“I think she’s dead,” Ava said. “I think they did some kind of surgery on her, and it went wrong.”

I shuddered, thinking of Gay-Lynne Sims strapped to the gurney. I couldn’t believe that anyone was still using that room, but it was hard to deny.

“What kind of surgery?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But they did something to her. I’m sure of it.”

Ava gathered up her clothes and mine from the floor.

“I’m going to throw our clothes in the wash,” she said. “So that no one sees all the dust. I don’t want anyone knowing that we were down there.”

“What about Kenzie?” I asked.

“Especially not Kenzie,” she replied. “I don’t want to scare her.”

“She knew where we were going,” I said. “You have to tell her something.”

“We’ll tell her about finding the operating room, nothing more.”

Ava had a grim look around her mouth and red eyes. I knew what she was going to do. She was going to take a long shower and cry. Ava kept her larger emotions to herself, but I could tell she was shaken to the core, and more than that—angry. With the school, with the world, with herself. She’d thought we would find Layla alive. She’d really believed that we would save her.

I don’t know what Ava had planned to do if we found Layla. We were still trapped here.

Ava gathered up the laundry and left. I stayed put, wanting to give Ava a moment alone, but I was beyond itchy. I felt like little shards of bone had lodged in my skin and were working their way down through the outer layers to my more tender flesh. Nothing was okay.

After a few minutes, I put on my bathrobe, gathered up my ziplock bag of toiletries, and went to take a shower.

As I stepped in the shower, I heard the faucet of the shower in the next stall squeak off.

When I got back to the room, Ava was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her plaid pajama bottoms and a black camisole, her hair wet. She had a look that I’d come to recognize as her planning face.

“We have to go back,” she said resolutely.

That wasn’t what I’d expected. Ava had been the one to run first.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Why?”

I shuddered, thinking of another crawl through the bone dust and dried waste of dozens, maybe hundreds, of dead people. The hospital felt—haunted. There was something deeply wrong with that place, and it wasn’t just the operating theater. I’d wanted to find the service tunnel and the way out, but with what we’d seen . . .

I’d be a fool to try to leave through the tunnel.

I had to find another way out.

“We need to prove what’s going on here,” Ava said. “We need to take a video of the operating room.”

“And do what with it?” I said.

“Send it to the police?” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. “The whole town loves Burton,” I said. “They’re not going to believe—”

“Okay, so we post it online,” she said quickly. “Burton said Layla left, but we know she didn’t. That hair is evidence.”

Layla’s hair by the surgical table. Maybe Ava was right, and that piece of Layla’s hair and scalp was the smoking gun. That whole place was a crime scene.

Emphasis on crime.

I ruffled my hair with my towel, in a vain effort to get it to dry. If I was back home, I’d let my hair dry in the heat of the day, but here it didn’t seem like it would dry. I didn’t feel like getting up and finding a hair dryer.

“How are we supposed to post it online?” I said. “There’s no internet here.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “We just need to go back down there.”

I leaned back against the headboard, feeling a heaviness in my chest.

“We just need to get out of here,” I murmured, more to myself than to Ava.

“I’m not leaving without proof,” she said.

I stared at Ava, taking in the firm set of her jaw, the decisive look in her eyes. She was on a collision course, determined to push the issue until the headmaster noticed. For all I knew, the headmaster already knew about her—and me.

And then there was the matter of the thing in the tunnel—mountain lion, bear, Bigfoot, whatever. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t want to find out.

“I don’t want to go back there,” I said.

“Fine,” Ava said, her voice clipped. “Then don’t.”

“How would we even get down there?” I said. “You were the one who said Sunday morning was the only time we could go.”

In response, Ava picked up a nearby paperback and began reading, solely for the purpose of stagily ignoring me. She held the book up, completely blocking her face from view.

“Fine,” I said.

I was done with her crazy schemes. All I wanted to do was to survive until I could get out of this place.

* * *

“It’s a knitting needle,” the man said. “Not an ice pick.”

He was wearing plaid. Everyone was wearing plaid. But no, he was wearing a white lab coat. At first I thought it was plaid, but then definitely a white lab coat.

I could tell he wanted me to ask what the needle was for, but I didn’t want to.

“I’m going to leave now,” I said.

But I didn’t.

I couldn’t move.

It was like I was strapped down, but no. That wasn’t right. We were by the dark tunnel.

There was something in the tunnel, something terrible.

Mom was there. I had to go in and find her, but I couldn’t move.

But when I looked down into the tunnel, it wasn’t Mom. It was Ava.

“It’s painless really,” the man said. “We go in through the left nostril, reach for the brain and pull out the feral.”

“Like a mummy?” I said.

“Don’t talk to him,” Ava said from the darkened tunnel.

“You’re only making it worse,” Mom said.

The man in the white coat laughed.

“Oh, silly,” he said. “But look—it’s already done!”

He held a purple knitting needle in front of my face. On the end of the needle was a quivering, gelatinous bloody lump the size of a peach pit.

The pain in my forehead was blinding.

“Delicious!” he said.

The man in the white coat opened his jaw, wider than humanly possible. But he wasn’t really human, was he? I’d known that all along.

I watched as he held the quivering lump of my brain over his huge mouth like an oyster he planned to shoot, over an ever-widening dark tunnel. . . .

* * *

I woke in the dark to a terrible sense of wrongness and a feeling that I was not alone. Someone was searching for me out there in the pitch black. There were not even stars in the night sky to cushion my fall into the bleak, no sound from across the room.

I got out of bed and went to the window. I stared out across the open field, willing the lights to come on.

“Show yourself,” I whispered to the dark.

Nothing.