Dark Inside by Jeyn Roberts Page B

random.
    Then there were the earthquakes, six of them all over the world. Each of them measured at least 9.5 on the Richter scale. The West Coast was utterly destroyed. The quakes caused tsunamis. Rumor had it that most of Hawaii was gone and the casualties in Asia were in the millions.
    The television networks were no longer scheduling regular programming. A thousand channels around the world were broadcasting nothing but news.
    None of that mattered to Mason as he clung tightly to the cooling hand of his mother.
    His friends were all dead. Only a handful had made it out of the school alive. His teachers were dead, even Mr. Yan with his dented Honda Civic.
    Something horrible was happening, but Mason was too numb to truly care.
    Earlier the taxi dropped him off by the 7-Eleven and he walked over to the school. The situation was surreal; he spent a bit of time wondering if he’d stumbled into someone else’s dream. The sky overhead was thick and dark. Above his school was a continuous murky mountain of ash and smoke that sucked up all the scenery. The air burned his throat when he inhaled. It made him light-headed and he tripped over the sidewalk twice until his lungs and brain grew accustomed to the lack of oxygen.
    The remains of his high school lay out before him, a pile of rubble and fire. No one even noticed as he crossed over the barriers set out for crowd control and moved toward the gymnasium. The firemen were busy and the police officers were over by the growing crowd of panicky parents and curious onlookers. Ambulances and paramedics rushed about, butthere didn’t seem to be many survivors left to take to the overcrowded hospital.
    Chaos.
    There was already a memorial section, and he moved among the lit candles, flowers, and pictures of his former fellow students and friends. He saw Tom’s dad talking to another parent while his mother sobbed uncontrollably. Quickly, he moved on before anyone noticed him. He didn’t want to have to explain why he was still alive.
    The gymnasium was at the rear of the building, and Mason slipped away from the noise, ignoring the heat waves cascading from the destruction. What was he looking for? He couldn’t answer that. Maybe there was some tiny bit of hope that a few of his friends might have escaped. But was he really expecting to see them being pulled, miraculously alive, from the rubble?
    “I just need to see,” he spoke out loud.
    The parking lot at the back of the building was eerily empty of people. Hundreds of cars, his own somewhere in that sea of metal and concrete. If someone stopped him he’d say he was there to pick it up. Holding his car keys in the open for evidence, he moved as close to the school as possible, searching for any signs of life.
    There were no bloodstains on the sidewalks. No bodies piled on one another for morgue removal. No half-burned books or personal items that might have been thrown through the air during the explosion. Had he been expecting that?
    There was nothing to suggest that beneath the debris, hundreds of bodies waited. No proof at all that his school had become a tomb.
    He methodically checked around the gymnasium doors to see if there might be a way to slip inside and take a look. Butthe entire back wall had collapsed, and the only way in were a few cracks big enough for a small animal. Heat poured off the building, burning his face, and the back of his neck grew wet with sweat. Getting down on his knees, he poked through the remains, hoping to find something that might have belonged to one of his friends. Eventually he found a pencil case, bright blue with pink flowers, that looked familiar. Inside were a few pens, an eraser, and a folded note. He opened it.
    SEE YOU AT THE MALL AT
FIVE.
    Yeah, nope.
    No one was meeting anyone at five.
    He held the note tightly and reread it several times.
I must be in shock,
he thought.
I’ve lost all feeling in my body. This is what they mean when they say we go numb inside. Everyone’s dead