Alive Read Online Free

where I found the weapon.
    “That lid isn’t shut all the way. Was that one yours?”
    I point to my right, to the last coffin in our row. I see my path of footsteps through the dust.
    “I was in that one,” I say.
    Spingate stares down the aisle for a few moments. Her mouth moves a little again. When she does that, it’s like she doesn’t even know I’m there.
    She looks me up and down.
    “How did you get all bloody?”
    Other than smears of dust, her shirt is clean and white.
    “There was a tube in my coffin,” I say. “It stabbed me with a needle. That’s what woke me up.”
    Her expression darkens. Maybe she realizes that if I hadn’t broken out of my coffin, she would still be in hers.
    “But how did you get out? There’s no one else here.”
    I shrug. “I got myself out.”
    She gives me a strange look, as if the concept is unthinkable.
    Spingate’s hands reach to her shoulders, rub slowly up and down like she’s hugging herself against the chill. She walks across the aisle, wobbling a bit but standing on her own, then kneels at the foot of the coffin with the slightly open lid. She brushes off the nameplate.
    “It says
B. Brewer
. The stones are purple. Maybe we can use the tool to open it and see if someone is inside?”
    We’ve been sitting here talking, and I never thought that there might be others trapped like Spingate was, like I was. All these coffins…maybe one of them holds a person who knows what this place is and how we got here.
    I walk across the aisle and jam the heavy bar’s forked end into the small crack, the lid closest to me under the bar, the forked end under the lid farthest away. I push down.
    The lid doesn’t budge.
    I rise to my toes, put all my weight on the bar.
    “Em, I can help with—”
    “I’ve got it,”
I say, my effort turning the words into grunts. I hear a slow creaking coming from the lid. I rise up a little more, then push down as hard as I can, all at once—there is a loud
bang
from the coffin as something gives way.
    The lid halves suddenly tilt up, hum as they slide to the sides. Sheets of gray spill off their smooth, carved surfaces.
    We look inside: a wave of fear pushes my body a step backward.
    Spingate reacts differently—instead of stepping away, she leans forward.
    “Maybe you were right,” she says. “If that’s B. Brewer, I guess in his case it really is a coffin.”

FIVE
    B rewer is a dead little boy.
    A thin line of dust runs up his tiny, shriveled body, dust that fell through the crack between the lids.
    The coffin is the same size as mine and Spingate’s, but it looks huge surrounding such a small corpse. The skin of his face is dried so tightly to his skull that it’s cracked in some places, showing the bone beneath. His eyes are empty sockets. His lips have shrunken back, showing two rows of discolored teeth; it looks like he’s smiling.
    I feel sick to my stomach.
    Brewer is wearing a white shirt and an embroidered red tie. Black pants and a black belt instead of a plaid skirt. Even if he wasn’t all dried up, the outfit would have been too big for his little body. Pitted, crimson-spotted bars hold down his hips, ankles and wrists, even though his feet and hands are hidden inside his pants and sleeves.
    Spingate points to his tiny forehead, to a symbol—just as black as ours—embedded in his dried skin. It is a circle with one line down the middle and one running from side to side.
    “A cross,” she says.
    “Or a
T
.”
    She shrugs. “Maybe a plus sign?”
    “Maybe.”
    A tooth-girl, a circle-girl, a cross-boy…and we have no idea what any of it means.
    I’m staring at a corpse. That could have been me. These are coffins after all, so why is he dead while I am alive? Looking at him makes me cold in a different way than the temperature and my scant excuse for clothing.
    I’d be so much warmer with pants. Did he get to wear pants because he’s a boy? If so, that’s not fair.
    Spingate slowly extends a finger toward