No time to celebrate. We slip into the hallway, back to the deserted waiting room. It takes all of two seconds flat for us to be out the door and down the street, staying close together, Christian leading us north, toward the train station, followed by me close behind him, trying to walk in step to keep some kind of subtle physical contact between us, trailed by Angela. In this chain we make our way past a row of dingy, falling-down apartments and onto Palo Alto Street, which on earth has a charming, hometown-America feel but in hell is like something out of a Hitchcock film, lined with twisted, leafless black trees that seem to claw at us as we pass, the houses decaying, the windows broken or boarded over, the paint peeling in gray flakes. We pass a woman standing in the middle of a yard, holding a hose, watering a patch of grassless, muddy ground, mumbling something about her flowers. We see a man beating a dog. But we don’t stop. We can’t stop.
The rundown neighborhood gives way to more open city, commercial buildings, restaurants, and offices. Angela’s looking around like she’s never seen this place before, which I find odd, considering she’s the one who’s been here for almost two weeks. We pop out on Mercy Street near the library, and city hall looms over us, a huge granite building with lots of blackened windows, and suddenly the street is flooded with the gray people again, groaning and crying and tearing at their skin. It’s hard going, since the lost souls on the sidewalk are mostly moving south, the wrong direction. We’re like fish pushing our way upstream against the current, but at least we’re getting there, step by slow step. It feels like we’ve been walking for hours, but we can’t have been gone longer than five or ten minutes.
Very, very soon, they’re going to notice we’re gone.
We’re just going to walk out of here? Angela thinks incredulously.
That’s the plan. I give her a tiny nod, not sure that she can hear me. There are no locks in this place. It’s not a prison. They could all leave, I tell her, glancing at the people walking by, if they chose to. I’m suddenly overcome by the urge to grab one of these gray people by the shoulders and say, Come with us, and lead them out of here single file.
But I can’t. It would break the rule Samjeeza laid out for us very plainly. Don’t speak to anyone.
At last we turn onto Castro, the main drag. We’re in the heart of downtown Mountain View, the street lined with restaurants and coffee shops and sushi bars. My eyes go straight to a building that on earth was my favorite bookstore: Books Inc., a place Mom and I used to go to simply hang out and drink coffee and sit in the comfy chairs. But here something has scratched away the word Books from above the door, leaving deep gouges in the stone like the building was set upon by an enormous beast. The black awnings are tattered and hanging in shreds, and smoke pours out from the shattered windows from a fire burning somewhere in the back.
We trudge on about another two blocks, keeping our heads down as much as we can, like we are walking into the wind, until the black wrought-iron archway that marks the entrance to the train station comes into view. My heart lifts at the sight of it.
Almost there, Christian says. I hope we don’t need a coin or something to get out of here, because Sam didn’t give us anything for a return trip.
We start moving faster. One block to go. One block and we’re home free. Of course, I know it’s not over. Getting out is only the first step, and then we’ll have to run, hide, and stay hidden, leave everything behind for good. But at least we’re all alive. I don’t know if, deep down, I really expected to survive this journey in one piece. It turned out to be so simple. Almost—dare I say it?—easy.
But then I see the pizza place.
I stop so suddenly that Angela bumps into me from behind. Christian yelps as I jerk on his arm. The gray souls jostle into us, moaning, shouting, but I stay for a minute with my feet planted and stare across the street at the small, boxlike building where my brother used to work.
Don’t tell me you want pizza at a time like this, Angela says.
Christian mentally shushes her. Clara?
He stopped showing up, I think.
I step off the curb and into the empty street.
Clara, Jeffrey’s not in there, Christian says urgently. Come back on the sidewalk.
How do you know? I have a horrible, aching feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Because he’s not dead. He doesn’t belong here.
We’re not dead. Angela wasn’t dead, I say, and take another step, pulling them into the street with me.
We have to go, Christian says, glancing wildly toward the black arch. We can’t get off course now.
I have to check, I say at the same time, and then I let go and pull away from their hands.