The Fall of Crazy House (Crazy House 2)

“We’re not dead,” I said, and took a bite of sandwich.

“Any symptoms?” she asked.

I looked over to see Tim starting to sit up. “Nope.”

“I hope your theory is wrong,” she said. “It’s quite possible that any plague spores are long dead. Tell me what you’ve found out.”

“Well, weirdly, reports about the plague stop abruptly,” I said. “It was plague, plague, plague for about three months, then no papers at all, and then suddenly the papers were back, looking different, with no mention of any plague.”

“Are there any numbers anywhere of how many people died?” she asked.

“Between October 2037 and March 2038—I mean, this sounds crazy,” I said. “But everything added up, it’s about two hundred million people, dead.”

There was a long silence and finally I said, “Hello?”

“I’m here.” Her voice sounded flat, quiet. “Then the newspapers suddenly stopped?”

“Yeah. They start again in May 2038. But get this—in the early stacks I’ve got newspapers from all over, all these weird places: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC. And they’re all separate, like different companies or whatever. After May, all the newspapers say New World News, New York edition, or Chicago edition, or whatever. The news got centralized by one company.”

“This is amazing information, Cassie,” Ms. Strepp said. “You’ve done remarkably well in putting clues together and forming theories.”

“But what does it mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Ms. Strepp said. “It looks like the New World party killed vast numbers of people to be able to control the relative few who were left. To divide them up into cells.”

“So the New World party became the United?”

“I don’t know. Keep digging,” she said, and hung up.

I finished my sandwich and glumly looked around the attic. We still had untold piles of crap to wade through. Piles of possible clues. We had to sift through it all, as long as we were able.

He shook his head and rubbed his neck, scowling at me. “Wish you were Becca,” he said out of the blue, sounding mean.

“Wish you were Nate,” I snapped back.

As if realizing he’d been a jerk, he muttered, “I have a headache.” Like that was an excuse.

I realized I had a headache, too. “Eat something,” I said, pointing to the basket.

We had to keep going—I didn’t know how much time we had.

50

BECCA

WE DIDN’T STOP AFTER THE sun came up. We needed to leave wolf country and get to a cell or safer place to rest. The last fifteen miles had been one horror show after another, with the sea of tombstones, the skeletons hanging from trees, and rabid wolves.

The land had changed to small, flattened hills and then to rocky, thickly forested woods. We hadn’t seen anything of note since four a.m., which was how I liked it.

I kept Nate ahead of me so I could watch him. He was matching our pace, but it was costing him. He moved stiffly in his torn, bloody coat, and his face was grim and pale, his lips pressed together so hard they were surrounded by white. Every so often I noticed him putting a hand up to the bandage at his neck, which was becoming splotched with blood. Maybe I should have added more staples.

The rest of the team was unusually silent and subdued, but more alert. We each jumped with every cracking twig, every odd birdcall, every rustle in the undergrowth. I was remembering to scan up as well as all around, and Bunny and Jolie had been ordered to look out for traps, trip wires, and sudden pits of doom. Anything was possible.

It was on one of my three-sixty sweeps that I noticed an old, rusted metal rung stuck into a tree trunk—almost entirely grown over. I stopped and peered upward. The rung was about a third of the way up the tree, maybe twenty feet in the air.

“Hang on,” I said softly, and the team stopped. I pointed at the rung, then peeled off my backpack and rummaged in it for my rope. I tossed the rope over a branch and climbed up while Mills and Jolie belayed me. There were more rungs, some of them only slightly visible, deeply embedded in the tree’s bark. But they were climbable. After twelve feet I saw a small platform way at the top of the tree’s crown. Now the branches were thinner and closer together, which was good because the rungs had either stopped or been swallowed completely.

I had to squirm through a narrow spot to get up to the actual metal platform, which had been bolted to the tree who knew how long ago. A rotted canvas tarp was thrown over something lumpy. I gritted my teeth, sure this would be some horrible dead body, maybe more than one. Holding my breath, I yanked the tarp off to reveal…