Monument 14 Read Free Page A

her feet and led her to a booth.
    Alex and I sat together at one booth. Brayden and Jake and the rest just kind of slumped at their own tables.
    We all started talking. It was all along the lines of I can’t believe what just happened. I can’t believe what just happened. I can’t believe what just happened.
    My brother kept asking me, “Dean, are you sure you’re okay?” I kept saying I was fine.
    But my ears were funny. I heard this rhythmic clattering sound and the boom-boom-boom of the hail was still in my bones.
    Sahalia and the little kids came back with a cart loaded with medicines and first aid stuff.
    Mrs. Wooly came and looked at us one by one and gave us whatever she thought might help.
    Josie took the most of her attention. Mrs. Wooly tut-tutted over the gaping cut on Josie’s forehead.
    The chocolate hue of Josie’s skin made the gash look worse. The red of the blood was brighter, somehow.
    “It’s gonna need stitches, hun,” she told Josie.
    Josie just sat there staring ahead, rocking back and forth.
    Mrs. Wooly poured hydrogen peroxide over the cut. It bubbled up pink and frothed down over Josie’s temple, down her neck.
    Mrs. Wooly blotted the cut with gauze and then coated it with ointment. She put a big square of gauze over it and then wrapped Josie’s head with gauze. Maybe Mrs. Wooly had been a nurse in her youth. I don’t know but it was a professional-looking job.
    Niko returned with some of those silver space blankets hikers use. He wrapped one around Josie and offered me one.
    “I’m not in shock,” I told him.
    He just looked at me calmly, his hand outstretched with the blanket.
    I did seem to be shaking somewhat. Then it occurred to me that the strange sound I was hearing might be the chattering of my own teeth.
    I took the blanket.
    Mrs. Wooly came over to me. She had some baby wipes and she wiped off my face and neck and then felt all over my head.
    Can you imagine letting your grammar school bus driver wipe your face with a baby wipe and look through your hair? It was absurd. But everything had changed and nobody was teasing anybody.
    People had died—we had almost died.
    Nobody was teasing anybody.
    Mrs. Wooly gave me three Advil and some cough syrup. She also gave me a gallon bottle of water and told me to start drinking and not stop until I hit the bottom.
    “How are your legs?” she asked. “Seemed like you were walking funny before.”
    I stood up. My ankle was sore, but I was basically fine.
    “I’m okay.”
    “I’ll get us some clothes,” Niko volunteered. “We can change and get cleaned up.”
    “You sit down,” Mrs. Wooly ordered him.
    He sank slowly into one of the booths, coughing black gunk onto his sleeve.
    She looked Niko over and wiped down his face and neck, just like she’d done for the rest of us.
    “I’m gonna tell the school about what you did back there,” Mrs. Wooly said to him quietly. “Real heroic, son.”
    Niko turned red. He started to get up.
    Mrs. Wooly pressed a bottle of Gatorade into his hands with some Advil and another bottle of cough syrup.
    “You’re sitting,” she told him.
    He nodded his head, coughing up more gunk.
    Jake was pressing the screen of his minitab repeatedly.
    “Hey, Mrs. Wooly, I’m not getting a signal,” Jake told her. “It’s like it’s out of juice, but I know it’s charged.”
    One by one, pretty much everybody took out a minitab and tried to turn it on.
    “Network’s probably down,” Mrs. Wooly said. “But keep trying. It’ll come back.”
    Alex took out his minitab. It was dead—blank. He started to cry. It seems funny now. He didn’t cry during the storm, he didn’t cry seeing me all beat up, he didn’t cry about the kids who’d been killed on my bus—he started crying when we realized the Network was down.
    The Network had never, ever gone down.
    We had all seen hundreds of commercials aimed at reassuring people that the National Connectivity was infallible. We had to believe that