“Angela,” I whisper. “Are you okay? Say something.”

Her lips slowly curve up into a smile.

“Geez,” she says. “Who died and made you boss?”

We stare at her. She jumps to her feet. “Let’s go.”

No time to celebrate. We slip into the hallway, back to the deserted waiting room. It takes all of two seconds flat for us to be out the door and down the street, staying close together, Christian leading us north, toward the train station, followed by me close behind him, trying to walk in step to keep some kind of subtle physical contact between us, trailed by Angela. In this chain we make our way past a row of dingy, falling-down apartments and onto Palo Alto Street, which on earth has a charming, hometown-America feel but in hell is like something out of a Hitchcock film, lined with twisted, leafless black trees that seem to claw at us as we pass, the houses decaying, the windows broken or boarded over, the paint peeling in gray flakes. We pass a woman standing in the middle of a yard, holding a hose, watering a patch of grassless, muddy ground, mumbling something about her flowers. We see a man beating a dog. But we don’t stop. We can’t stop.

The rundown neighborhood gives way to more open city, commercial buildings, restaurants, and offices. Angela’s looking around like she’s never seen this place before, which I find odd, considering she’s the one who’s been here for almost two weeks. We pop out on Mercy Street near the library, and city hall looms over us, a huge granite building with lots of blackened windows, and suddenly the street is flooded with the gray people again, groaning and crying and tearing at their skin. It’s hard going, since the lost souls on the sidewalk are mostly moving south, the wrong direction. We’re like fish pushing our way upstream against the current, but at least we’re getting there, step by slow step. It feels like we’ve been walking for hours, but we can’t have been gone longer than five or ten minutes.

Very, very soon, they’re going to notice we’re gone.

We’re just going to walk out of here? Angela thinks incredulously.

That’s the plan. I give her a tiny nod, not sure that she can hear me. There are no locks in this place. It’s not a prison. They could all leave, I tell her, glancing at the people walking by, if they chose to. I’m suddenly overcome by the urge to grab one of these gray people by the shoulders and say, Come with us, and lead them out of here single file.

But I can’t. It would break the rule Samjeeza laid out for us very plainly. Don’t speak to anyone.

At last we turn onto Castro, the main drag. We’re in the heart of downtown Mountain View, the street lined with restaurants and coffee shops and sushi bars. My eyes go straight to a building that on earth was my favorite bookstore: Books Inc., a place Mom and I used to go to simply hang out and drink coffee and sit in the comfy chairs. But here something has scratched away the word Books from above the door, leaving deep gouges in the stone like the building was set upon by an enormous beast. The black awnings are tattered and hanging in shreds, and smoke pours out from the shattered windows from a fire burning somewhere in the back.

We trudge on about another two blocks, keeping our heads down as much as we can, like we are walking into the wind, until the black wrought-iron archway that marks the entrance to the train station comes into view. My heart lifts at the sight of it.

Almost there, Christian says. I hope we don’t need a coin or something to get out of here, because Sam didn’t give us anything for a return trip.

We start moving faster. One block to go. One block and we’re home free. Of course, I know it’s not over. Getting out is only the first step, and then we’ll have to run, hide, and stay hidden, leave everything behind for good. But at least we’re all alive. I don’t know if, deep down, I really expected to survive this journey in one piece. It turned out to be so simple. Almost—dare I say it?—easy.

But then I see the pizza place.

I stop so suddenly that Angela bumps into me from behind. Christian yelps as I jerk on his arm. The gray souls jostle into us, moaning, shouting, but I stay for a minute with my feet planted and stare across the street at the small, boxlike building where my brother used to work.

Don’t tell me you want pizza at a time like this, Angela says.

Christian mentally shushes her. Clara?

He stopped showing up, I think.

I step off the curb and into the empty street.

Clara, Jeffrey’s not in there, Christian says urgently. Come back on the sidewalk.

How do you know? I have a horrible, aching feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Because he’s not dead. He doesn’t belong here.

We’re not dead. Angela wasn’t dead, I say, and take another step, pulling them into the street with me.

We have to go, Christian says, glancing wildly toward the black arch. We can’t get off course now.

I have to check, I say at the same time, and then I let go and pull away from their hands.

Clara, no!

But I’m going. The emotions of the souls wash over me all at once, now that I don’t have Christian’s added strength to help me block them out, but I grit my teeth and move quickly across the street, onto the opposite sidewalk. Toward the pizza place. Each step draws me closer to the front window, which has a long, horizontal crack in the glass, like it might collapse into a thousand shards at any moment, but through the hazy pane I see Jeffrey, his head down, a filthy dish towel in his hand, swiping at a table in absent circles.

It’s worse than I thought.

My brother’s in hell.

20

ZOMBIELAND

I don’t take time to think. I burst through the door and go to him, knowing that any second now Kokabel and Samjeeza and who knows who else could be after us, painfully aware that I promised Samjeeza I wouldn’t talk to anybody but Angela, but I don’t care. He’s my brother. In that moment it occurs to me that maybe my purpose in coming to hell wasn’t all about Angela, after all. Maybe I was meant to save Jeffrey.

He does a double take when I approach him, then scowls. “Clara, what are you doing here?”

I guess I shouldn’t expect him to be happy to see me.

There’s no time for small talk, no time for explanations. I spot Angela and Christian on the sidewalk right outside the window, their mouths open in horror that I was right. “I need you to do what I tell you, just this once,” I say quietly, glancing around at the gray people in the restaurant, one person to a table, but none of them look up. Yet. I grab his hand and tug him toward the door. “Come with me, Jeffrey. Now.”

He jerks away from me. “You can’t show up here and order me around. This is my job, Clara. My meal ticket. It sucks, but one of the things about having a job is that I can’t exactly come and go whenever I please. Bosses tend to frown on that.”

He doesn’t know where he is. He thinks this is his normal life. I don’t have time to ruminate about how depressing it is that my brother can’t tell the difference between normalcy and eternal damnation.

“This is not your job,” I say, trying to keep calm. “Come on. Please.”

“No,” he says. “Why should I listen to you? Last time you were really freaking rude to me, and you yelled at me, and then you didn’t come back for all this time, and now you expect me to—”

“I didn’t know you were here,” I interrupt. “I would have come sooner if I’d known.”

“What are you talking about?” He tosses his dishcloth down on a nearby table and glares at me. “Have you gone mental or something?”

Oh, I’m on my way. Already the barrier I’ve erected between me and the emotions of all these people around me is corroding, and little whispers are getting through.