Those That Wake Read Online Free Page B

Tommy was actually
gone.
Not missing like he went for an unexpected walk, but missing like he had called for help and there were people after him. At least that would explain why Tommy was blocking locator apps when he made his call to Mal.
    "Okay."
    She looked up at him, letting her guard down just long enough to show him she was frightened, then shut it away again. What did she do about her fear these days? Did she still go on week-long benders, or had George cured her of that? And why should Mal care, really?

    He blew off school for the rest of the day. Would anyone realize he wasn't there? He wasn't good enough or bad enough for teachers to care one way or the other. There were people who knew him, of course, but no one who particularly sought him out, unless it was for a fight, because he had a certain reputation in some circles. He didn't make a habit of ditching, but he did it when he needed to. Sometimes they called his foster parents, sometimes they didn't. What would the Fosters say if they did? He had no idea. They were nothing but a pair of faces to him at this point.
    He sat in Tommy's apartment again. The place was nothing new in the daylight, though the hall outside was noisier. Music played too loud through one of the doors, and two different sets of people yelled at each other in two different languages from behind two other doors. Smells of spicy food filled the hall and seeped into Tommy's place.
    He poked around, embarrassed when he found some condoms and surprised when he came upon a sketchpad filled with rough pencil drawings of things and people. The sketches made something funny happen in Mal's chest. At first they made him feel as if he were seeing something about who Tommy was, but as he flipped through them he started to feel as though he was searching through a stranger's life. He left the rest of the apartment alone and just waited. Pacing, he kept finding himself in front of the picture of Tommy and the girl at the beach. Important enough for Tommy to take a hard image off his cell and put on display. Was Tommy the sentimental sort, or had the girl in the picture made this choice? Was she the reason Tommy had stayed out of George's house without crawling back, had managed to keep an apartment of his own for months? Mal looked at the photo intermittently for minutes until he finally convinced himself he might need it to show their faces around. He removed it from its frame and slipped it into his back pocket.
    He played the last half hour of a movie about an alligator terrorizing a city, beaming it from his cell onto a cracking wall, and was into the last rounds of the week's
Blood Match X-Treme
finals when he started to wonder if he was going to be here forever. When he'd decided to wait, he figured it could be for as much as two or three days, but now, just two or three hours started to seem interminable. He abandoned the ball game and went to the window. Outside, the world looked gray. He felt as if he remembered a time, as a child, when there was a sun and people looked up at it instead of down, embroiled in a conversation on cell, or into the palms of their hands, surfing as they walked, their minds on anything but the gray world around them.
    And there was a knock at the door.
    He limped hard to the door, adjusting to the stiffness that had set into his injured body as he'd been sitting there. He hesitated, remembered looking through the peephole last night and seeing those four faces staring weirdly back, right at him. Cautiously, he checked the peephole again and saw a young face framed by blond hair. It had five thin silver rings in the left ear and a tiny silver stud in the left nostril. It looked worried, and sweeter because of it.
    The door had no functioning lock left. Mal wouldn't have been able to get in if it had. It was pure luck—or something harder to explain—that the place hadn't been cleaned out last night after he'd gone. He pulled the door open, and the girl looked happy,