Free Jake and the Other Girl: A Tor.Com Original by Emmy Laybourne

 
    Missing toddler, please help!
    Grandma, I went to Denver. God save us all.
    Doreen, I am sorry—I couldn’t wait no more.
    And photographs. Photos of the missing and the found and the dead.
    The Lewis Palmer Hospital of Monument, Colorado, was papered in flyers.
    He got upset, looking at those walls. Anyone would. It was a small town and there were people he knew up there.
    Jake saw a kid from the JV team. His biology teacher in a photo with her small children. That suspiciously cheerful waitress from the Village Inn. There was Dean and Alex’s family: We didn’t die. Stay safe or get to Denver.
    And there was Lindsay Morrow.
    There she was, in a family snapshot, taken at the beach. A 5 x 7 pulled out of a frame, taped onto a piece of notebook paper. Along the bottom was Lindsay’s handwriting with an arrow pointing to the middle-aged woman in the center of the shot: If you see this woman please call —then her phone number. And: Mommy, come home!
    He shouldn’t linger on the photo like this. Alex had strapped a video walkie-talkie to his chest and all the kids were watching his every move and listening to his voice.
    Astrid could be watching.
    The kids were all watching “Jake TV” and waiting for him to come back to the Greenway, where they’d been holed up since the spill.
    They’d given him a mission—find out if the hospital was open. It wasn’t.
    Nothing was open.
    The town had been divided and conquered. If the government wanted any proof that the chemical warfare compounds they’d been cooking up at NORAD worked, well, here it was, papered on the walls of the hospital.
    The compounds attacked people differently depending on their blood types. Type As blistered and died, Os turned into bloodthirsty savages, ABs suffered from paranoid delusions and Bs, like Jake, were fine. Showed no effects. Except that they became impotent and infertile.
    Thanks, NORAD.
    *   *   *
    Jake brought Lindsay chocolate every time. It was their thing. Not like payment, of course. That would be gross. It was just a little gesture, is all.
    He’d leave school at the lunch bell, or maybe a little before, and stop at Walgreens. A Hershey’s King Size, or, even better, something seasonal—a Cadbury Creme Egg or a marshmallow Santa or a Valentine’s assortment with Timmy Traindawg on it or something. He’d bring the chocolate to her house and she’d take the chocolate and they’d do it.
    Lindsay was only a sophomore, but he didn’t feel like he was taking advantage. She was the one in charge, no question. She was in control at lunchtime.
    Sometimes she’d smoke, after, which he found kind of shocking, actually.
    “Ever heard of lung cancer?” he’d joked once.
    “Ever heard of loser?” she had shot back, one eyebrow arched in a way that made him feel stupid and little-boyish.
    Her fifteen was a lot more jaded than his eighteen. Well, so what, let her be cooler than him—he was getting laid. He’d put up with any amount of drama or scorn, if a girl would let him in.
    He remembered laying on her bed, it covered with some kind of white cotton material with these little designs in it, punched out and in a pattern. Real pretty.
    She was pretty too, really pretty, with her long black-brown hair falling all over the pillow and her shoulders and on the creamy lines of her neck and bare chest.
    *   *   *
    He was supposed to turn around now and go back to the Greenway.
    The thought of trudging back there, crossing the black parking lot with the car corpses rusted and molded over, climbing back up the chintzy metal home fire escape ladder, trudging back into the store to tell the bad news to their small, tense, dirty faces—it made Jake feel like cutting his wrists.
    Their disappointed faces. Always disappointed.
    No.
    Jake removed the video walkie-talkie and dropped it on the ground.
    “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, guys,” he told them.
    He started ripping off the wires from the front of his jacket.
    “I’m