There was a moment of silence. Jonathan heard someone gulp. Colin realized he was still touching the dead Admiral and yanked his hand back and stood up straight.
“Are they all dead?” Tony asked.
“Check ’em, Colin,” Sebastian demanded.
“No way, Thebathtian. I did mine. Thomebody elth’th turn.” Colin hopped out from between the bodies and rejoined the group.
Sebastian grunted in frustration.
“Fine. Tony, you check those two,” he said, pointing at Mr. Warwick and another body. “Benny, those two. And … you, Johnny or whatever, you do those ones.” He pointed at Jonathan and then at Mr. Mongley and the man who’d bellowed out their names during Muster.
“It’s Jonathan, and I—”
“Whatever. Just do it. Now.”
Jonathan could tell that arguing wasn’t going to work. He wiped his hands on his pant legs and stepped forward.
He checked the roll caller first. The man’s eyes were closed, but his mouth was open. Steam was rising off his jacket. Jonathan pressed two fingers against the man’s neck. His fingers were half-numb from the cold. He pressed them in harder. It felt like touching a warm steak.
He felt nothing. He waited, quietly. Nothing.
He looked up. “Dead,” he said, and stepped over to Mr. Mongley. He heard Tony and Benny reporting the same thing from their dead grown-ups.
Without thinking or pausing, he shoved his fingers into Mr. Mongley’s throat. He remembered the man’s raspy, haunting breath. Raindrops were running down the old man’s bald, flaky scalp. His head was to the side, his eyes both open, staring at the distant gray wall. They were actually kind of a beautiful shade of blue. Jonathan gritted his teeth and tried not to throw up.
The man’s neck was still and pulseless.
“Mr. Mongley’s dead, too.”
He remembered the night before and his whispered conversation with Walter, before the bucket. Mongley hears everything, Walter had said. He looked up at Walter.
“Well,” Jonathan said hoarsely. “He’s not hearing anything now.”
Walter’s Adam’s apple bobbed in a dry swallow.
“Maybe he’th hearing the choirth of angelth thinging,” Colin offered.
Walter’s eyes were still on the dead man. He shook his head and frowned. “I seriously doubt that, man.”
Jonathan straightened up and stepped back into the quiet, watching circle.
“All the grown-ups are dead,” Tony said in a hollow, wondering voice.
“Is this all of them?” Jonathan asked, his voice rising. “There’s no one else inside? A janitor, or a guard, or something?”
Walter shook his head. “It was Morning Muster. This is all the grown-ups, man. The whole Slabhenge staff.”
“Why’d they all die?” Miguel asked.
“The Admiral was holding that sword,” Jonathan said.
“And they were all touching,” Sebastian added.
“Thtanding in that puddle,” Colin finished.
Tony sniffed and looked back at the stone blocks they’d been balancing on when the lightning struck.
“We were on the blocks, up out of the puddles,” he said in a trembling voice. “We’d all be dead, too, if we’d-a been standing on the ground.”
Jonathan looked at Mr. Warwick’s one glassy, dead eye staring sightlessly up at the storm clouds. “Which we weren’t, thank the devil,” he whispered.
There was a sudden, gusting blast of wind that whipped their hair and clothes around. Thunder cracked and the somber scene of wet children looking at a pile of dead bodies was lit by a long flash of lightning. The rain doubled in strength, rolling up to a real downpour. Suddenly, they each seemed to realize that they themselves were now standing together in a puddle, with the lightning still flashing. One by one, and then all at once, without anyone saying anything, they scurried over to the cover of the big gated doorway that led out to the boat landing. It was cold in the shadows of the stone archway, but it was out of the wind and rain and, most important, the bolts of lightning that darted across the sky.
They huddled together in the near-darkness, looking out at the corpses getting soggy in the courtyard. A couple of the smaller kids were crying. Not because they were sad, Jonathan thought, just scared.
“We’re in so much trouble,” Benny said.
“What?” Sebastian’s voice was harsh and scornful. “What for? We didn’t do anything!”
“Still,” Miguel said. “Here we are. You know, us … the ‘scabs’ and all that. And all the grown-ups end up dead? I mean, my folks sent me here just for skipping school a few times, you know? I’m definitely gonna get grounded for at least a week for this when I get home.”
His last word hung in the air between them. The wind couldn’t blow it away. Home. It dawned on them at the same time.
“We get to go home,” Walter said quietly.
“We get to go home,” another kid echoed.
“We get to go home!” two or three kids cried. Someone cheered. A few kids clapped. Jonathan bit his bottom lip and frowned. Sebastian cracked his knuckles and furrowed his brow.