Quarantine: The Loners by Lex Thomas Page B

punching Brad, but if he ran into any trouble, he hoped the pipe would make up for it.
    The elevator stood at the corner of two perpendicular hallways. David had no idea which way to go. Right now, his brother could have been anywhere. He had no idea where to start looking, and he wanted to panic. David grabbed his forehead as if he was trying to squeeze out a single clear thought.
    The Skaters . . . if Will had been taken, the Skaters might have heard something. They spread gossip at every stop on their trash route. It was a safe assumption that they had already broken the story of Brad’s death over the PA in his sleep. But David could offer them a scoop. He could trade on his side of the story in return for info on Will. He started for the administrative offices, where the Skaters lived.
    He didn’t get far before he was spotted. A white-haired kid was creeping out of a classroom dead ahead of him.
    David accidentally locked eyes with him. He was the Scrap kid with the trampled hand from the quad. The kid’s eyelids peeled back when he saw David’s face. He waved David over with his bent fingers. The kid took off down the hall, limping fast, then stopped and looked back. He waved David forward again, with more urgency this time. What did he want?
    A racket snapped David out of his thoughtshead. It came from the hallway behind him. It sounded like kicking on lockers. Then there was male laughter, a lot of it. It could’ve been a Varsity posse looking for him. He didn’t want to find out.
    David ran toward the Scrap. The kid limped down the long hall and into a math classroom that stank of sour armpits.
    David shut the door behind him as gently as his fear would let him. The room was a dumping ground. There were piles of junk, bloodstained rags, tied-off plastic bags with God knows what inside, and a puddle of oily brown liquid on the floor that David wanted nothing to do with. The Scrap moved an unhinged, ruined door that was resting against the wall and revealed a hole that had been burrowed through the wall.
    “I’m Mort,” he said. “Remember me?” The kid smiled with pride—he was almost giddy. Mort was soaked with sweat, which dripped off his nose and slicked his hands, but he wasn’t the least bit out of breath. “Don’t worry. Come on.” Mort crawled through the wall. David followed, still fearful of the locker kickers in the hallway behind him.
    The room on the other side of the wall had a malfunction-ing fire sprinkler by the ceiling that spit an uneven drizzle of water over the room. The constant flow of water had bubbled the paint on the walls and buckled the floor tiles. One fluorescent bulb in the far corner cast a sickly light on six Scraps before him. Their conversation stopped dead when David stood up.
    David didn’t know the effeminate Korean kid with his eyes cast down. Next to him were a gangly set of twins, one boy and one girl, both with long white hair. David had never seen them before, but they seemed young enough that they couldn’t be more than sophomores. They each kept a finger hooked through the other’s belt loop. They looked like the dirty hillbilly kids you wouldn’t want to meet if you hoofed it too far into the mountains.
    Nelson Bryant was a year below him. He was a ruddy runt of a kid who looked like he was born in the wrong century, like he should be wearing suspenders and knickers. David always felt sorry for Nelson because he was mostly deaf and wore the biggest pair of old-school hearing aids he’d ever seen. Nelson must have ditched the hearing aids when they ran out of batteries because he held a plastic chem lab funnel up to his ear like the ear trumpets David had seen in old Civil War–era photographs.
    The last Scrap was Belinda Max. The ceiling light glared off of her wet scalp. David wondered how much she’d gotten in return for giving Hilary her hair. She bounced over to him.
    “Mort! You found him?” Belinda said.
    “Sure did,” Mort said with a laugh