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hours: 10:35 PM . How had it gotten so late, so fast?
    I sat on the sagging cot to think, staring at the empty room and the four numbers.
    “It’s us,” I said, leaning back on my elbows, feeling the weight of sleep edging closer. “Seven numbers, seven patients. G for girls, B for boys, M for main room.”
    I was certain of this in the same way that I knew I could return any face burner Keith fired across our air hockey table back home. These numbers were us. These rooms meant something.
    I put my arms behind my head and laid back, a heavy feeling on my eyelids.
    So quiet. So very, very quiet, like a silent torture chamber that was sucking my will to live.
    Keith’s voice appeared at the last edge of wakefulness.
    Change the channel, Will. This show is ultralame.
    And then I was asleep.
     
    The slick floor of the hallway is cold on my body, but I’m so weak I can’t get up. The hall is white and long. I am alone, then there’s a shadow, far away and moving toward me: a rolling gurney with a body on top, the sound of its wheels rattling. It’s close now, the white sheet stained with blood. I want to get up as the cart moves past, but I can’t.
    Will?
    It’s Marisa on the gurney, smiling vacantly.
    I wanna be adored.
    Get up, Will. Get up.
    Intruder alert! Intruder alert!
     
    I was off the cot and on my feet, my mind caught between alertness and sleep. Where was I? The van, the path, Fort Eden, the Bunker, the basement.
    I was lying on a cot in a bomb shelter, not sitting on a white floor watching Marisa roll by. And yet, in the deep silence of the basement, the wheels of the gurney were there. One of the wheels was flapping back and forth as if it was attached to a bad grocery cart.
    There was no time to hide and no point in turning off the light in the bomb shelter. Whoever had come into the basement had turned on the main lights, so turning off mine wasn’t going to make any difference. I saw shadows roll by through the crack I’d left in the door. The gurney was not only real, it was moving through the basement.
    It stopped where they kept the dry goods. I remembered the closed door I’d seen there, the one I hadn’t gone back to and opened.
    That must be where they keep the bodies.
    This thought circled through my brain until the sound of the wheels faded and then almost disappeared entirely.
    I looked at my watch: 10:58 PM . I’d only slept for about twenty minutes. Opening the heavy bomb shelter door another inch, I peered into the lit basement and found it empty. From my vantage point I could see that the door leading back upstairs had been left wide-open. I could escape into the woods, or at least into the kitchen. But who would I meet there: Mrs. Goring, standing in the Bunker with a meat cleaver?
    I talked myself off the madhouse ledge I’d crawled onto and stepped out into the basement. Whoever had been down here was gone now, through the door I hadn’t bothered to open. I went quickly for the ramp that led upstairs, peeking around the corner. No one up there, or so it seemed, but I’d left my backpack in the bomb shelter. I turned to go back and saw light coming from under the door of the room where the gurney had gone. And something more than that—I heard voices. A small cheer, in fact, or something like one, far off down a hallway I couldn’t see.
    I crept to the door and looked around its edge, hopelessly confused.
    “Hands off the cart!”
    It was Mrs. Goring’s voice, at the top of a much longer ramp. A tunnel, slanting up like the one from the basement to the Bunker, stretched thirty yards or more between two buildings. She was in Fort Eden. And it wasn’t a hospital gurney she was pushing but a food cart filled with late-night snacks.
    “That’s it for tonight. Make the most of it.” Mrs. Goring’s mouselike voice glided down the tunnel. A door at the far end was slammed shut, and the cart was rolling toward me once more. She passed under the first of five grimy lightbulbs, one