A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(94)

“What?” said Apple Girl. “I don’t get it.”

“It was like”—his voice dropped even more—“the dark was eating the light.”

I was about to bring up the not-quite explosion in the bathroom that had happened later that same day when I felt a hard tap on my shoulder. I turned to see the vice-principal-ish man from yesterday and a frowning woman with short hair and cold blue eyes.

“Excuse me,” said the man. “I need you both to come with us.”

Emma held up one hand and turned away. “Go away, we’re in the middle of a conversation.”

The kids at our table looked impressed. “Damn,” whispered Pink Hair.

“That wasn’t a request.” The cold-eyed lady grabbed Emma’s shoulder.

Emma shrugged her hand off. “Don’t touch me!”

Then things got ugly. It seemed like everyone in the cafeteria had stopped talking to stare at us. The lady went for Emma with both hands, and the man grabbed my arm. I flipped my tray of food at the man, who let me go long enough for me to jump up from the table, and Emma must have burned the lady because she shouted and leapt backward. And then we were running, together, toward the closest exit. The lady was down for the count, but the man was chasing us and shouting for other people to help stop us. A few tried, but we dodged them. Then, up ahead, a half-dozen athletes in basketball shirts blocked the exit we were running toward.

We stopped short of them and faced off.

“What now?” I said.

“We burn our way through,” Emma said, but I caught her hands before she could raise them.

“Don’t,” I hissed. I could see people aiming their phones at us, recording everything. “Not while everyone’s looking.”

I resigned myself to getting caught and started thinking of ways to talk our way out of this, but then the exit doors burst open behind the athletes. A throng of girls ran in screaming bloody murder. And I mean screaming—their faces contorted with horror and streaked with tears—and the focus of the athletes and the vice principal-ish man and the whole room shifted immediately to them. I didn’t even think about what might have made them scream like that; I just thanked the angels that it had happened. Emma and I plowed through the distracted jocks and out the open doors.

We skidded to a stop in the hallway, looking around and trying to remember which way the main entrance was, when I caught sight of something bizarre running down the hall toward us.

A pack of cats.

They were dripping wet and lurching in a stiff, very un-catlike way, and then I heard Enoch cackling and Bronwyn yelling as she chased him out of a science lab across the hall. He was doubled over laughing.

“I’m sorry! I couldn’t resist!”

As the cats wobbled around our legs, a bitter smell hit my nose—formaldehyde.

“Enoch, you idiot!” Bronwyn was shouting. “You’ve ruined everything!”

He had created perhaps the only distraction powerful enough to save us: a herd of zombie cats.

“I never thought I’d say this,” Emma said, “but thank the birds for that little weirdo.”

The yelling in the cafeteria seemed to be dying down. It wouldn’t be long before all those people remembered to chase us.

“We’ll thank him later,” I said, and I ran to the wall and pulled the fire alarm.



* * *



? ? ?

“You turned them into zombies?”

Emma was trying to seem angry, but was closer to laughing. We were in the courtyard, hidden for the moment among a surge of evacuating high school students.

“It was such a waste of dead cats!” said Enoch. “They were just going to slice them up.”

“For science,” Bronwyn said.

“Sure.” Enoch made air quotes with his fingers. “Science.”

“You were supposed to be in the PE fields,” I said.

“Nobody would talk to us,” said Enoch.

“To you, you mean,” said Bronwyn. “And he got bored and wandered off.”

“I smelled sweet, sweet embalming fluid wafting through an open window, and I couldn’t help myself . . .”

I nearly gagged.

“Lucky for you, I actually accomplished something while he was playing with dead animals,” said Bronwyn. “I spoke to a very helpful young man who was in the school when the bathroom fire happened. He said there was a loud sound and a bright light, and he saw a girl running through the hall afterward, chased by a couple of adults.”

“What did they look like?” I said.

“The girl had brown skin and long dark hair, and the adults had red skin from burns and their clothes were smoking, and they were really mad.”

“Did they get her?” I asked.

“No. She got away.”

“What was her name?” I asked.

Bronwyn shook her head. “I don’t know.”

I felt a hard tug at my sleeve. “There you are!” It was Millard, whispering because we were among so many normals. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Damn difficult. Some dolt pulled the fire alarm!”

“That was us,” Emma said. “We needed to get out of there.”

“We still do,” I said. At several points around the courtyard and the front steps were administrator types in polo shirts scanning the crowd, looking for us.