Twilight Hunger. Maggie Shayne

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      Maxine sat on the edge of her seat, her head between the two in the front. “You can see the fire from here. Look at that.”

      They did. Stormy shivered, lowered her eyes. Jason stared as if mesmerized for a moment, then snapped out of it, flicking on the radio, turning the dial. “I knew you’d want to go,” he said. “It came over my brother’s scanner. If he wasn’t a volunteer firefighter, I probably still wouldn’t know.”

      “Still nothing about it on the radio, Jay?” Stormy asked. She was nervous; playing with her eyebrow ring was always a sign of that.

      He kept flicking the dial, then gave up, shaking his head slowly. “I expected special reports, crap like that, but there hasn’t been a word.”

      “They report what they’re told to report,” Maxine said. “Despite my mother’s gullible belief in the system, the phrase ‘free press’ is an oxymoron in this country.”

      “I like your mom,” Jason put in.

      Max blinked at him as if he were speaking another language. “I like her, too. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

      “I just don’t think you ought to be calling her gullible. She wouldn’t like it.”

      Maxine closed her eyes, shook her head, then glanced at Stormy for backup.

      “He’s right,” Stormy said. “Your mom is cool. You’re so lucky.”

      “Of course she’s cool! Hell, I would have gotten a dorm room or an apartment or gone to college out of town if she wasn’t cool, instead of staying home and going to a local school. But this has nothing to do with my mother or how cool she may or may not be! I’m talking about the government here. Cover-ups. Covert operations.”

      Stormy shrugged, averting her eyes. Topics like this always made her uncomfortable. But Maxine wasn’t uncomfortable discussing it. She was more uncomfortable having lived practically in the shadow of that huge, fenced in, well-guarded compound all her life, and never once knowing what went on inside.

      She knew only one thing for sure. It wasn’t cancer research. She would have given her eyeteeth for a look beyond the tall, electrified fences of that place. Just one look. Now maybe no one would ever know the truth.

      Jason drove on, pulling the Jeep over onto the right-hand shoulder before they got to the point where emergency vehicles lined both sides of the road. Highway flares lay across the pavement. Orange and white striped sawhorses with red reflectors were lined up behind them, forming a boundary that was supposed to tell them to keep out. They got out of the Jeep. Flames in the distance licked at the night sky, and Max could already taste the smoke in her mouth with every breath.

      “This way.” Maxine walked along the road’s right shoulder, beyond the parked vehicles, and her friends followed. The burning compound was on the left, at the end of a long curving drive. She led the others forward until they were directly across the street from the entrance to the compound. Firefighters were across the street, partway along the drive, facing away from them. They were completely focused on their work, anyway. Maxine crouched near an ambulance, tugging the others down with her.

      The fire trucks had apparently driven straight through the gate at the head of the drive. The guardhouse nearby was empty, the gate itself lying flat. The fence to the left and right of it was buckled and broken. The surveillance cameras that had been mounted on poles lay smashed to bits. Volunteer firefighters in yellow jackets marked with glowing silver reflective tape manned huge hoses attached to tanker trucks in the curving paved drive. Every time they beat the flames down a little, the trucks would roll closer, the men pushing farther into the fury.

      “I don’t know how they can stand it. God, I can feel the heat from here,” Stormy said, pressing a palm to her face.

      “I’m surprised their hoses aren’t melting,” Jason whispered. “If they move any closer …”

      “If they move any closer, we’ll be able to get in.”

      The other two looked at Maxine as if she had sprouted horns.

      “What?” she asked.

      “You gotta be out of your freaking mind, Max,” Jason told her, while Storm just shook her head. “We can’t go in there.”

      “No one’s watching the entrance. They’re all distracted, fighting the fire. We can get in without even trying.”

      “Okay, I’ll rephrase that. We can go in there. But we shouldn’t.”

      Now it was Maxine’s turn to gape. “What are you, crazy? I’ve been dying to get behind those gates since I was old enough to see through that lame cancer research cover story they’ve been using.”

      “Which was when she was about six,” Stormy muttered.

      Max shot her a look but hurried on. “Don’t you guys get it? This is our chance. No guards, nothing. We can finally see something besides the lie.”

      “And just what do you think there’s gonna be left to see, Max?” Jason pointed at the place. “It’s completely engulfed in flames.”

      “I won’t know until I try.”

      He sighed, lowering his shaved head and running a hand over it. No one spoke again for a long time as they crouched and waited and watched. Twenty minutes went by before the firefighters pushed a few yards closer. Max shot to her feet, glanced both ways and ran across the street. Her two friends hesitated, then followed. They crossed the pavement and jogged through the opening, right over the mesh of the toppled gate, past the abandoned guardhouse and into the trees that lined the driveway. There were a lot of them. The better to block the place from the view of casual passersby, Max thought. Pines. Of course they were pines. Year-round-camouflage for whatever went on inside.

      They ducked beneath one of the trees, and Max stared ahead. The fire was being steadily beaten down. Those firefighters were something else, she thought, wondering if Jay’s older brother, Mike, was among them. They never gave up, even though they had to realize by now that it was a lost cause.

      More sirens came, and Max looked back toward the road to see police cars, cops getting out, dispersing some of the curious onlookers who had now begun to gather on the road out front. “We just made it in time,” she whispered.

      “If they catch us in here, our asses will be toast,” Jason said.

      “If we get any closer to that inferno, they might be toast anyway,” Stormy added.

      The firemen ahead fought on, soaking the place down, beating back the flames and pressing ever closer. The trucks rolled forward a little more, and Max urged her unwilling comrades to do the same. “See that flagpole over there?” she asked, pointing. Jason and Storm looked at it, then at her.

      “Once they get up that far, we can cut around the side of the building and make our way to the back.”

      “And then a flaming wall can come down on us, crushing us and roasting us at the same time,” Storm said. Her gaze was fixed on the burning building, and the flames’ reflection danced in her eyes.

      Max swallowed any second thoughts she had about dragging СКАЧАТЬ