Haven Read Online Free PDF

asked, sincerely hoping for an answer or some profound insight on the cause of all that we’d just seen.
    “Because,” she replied sarcastically, “when Jesse Metcalf was sitting next to me in Calculus yesterday he wasn’t trying to eat me.”
    “Right,” Doc mumbled, nodding slowly. “Right…”
    “Those glass doors better hold,” Beverly warned, defiantly. “And those things better not get inside.”
    I wondered what she would do if they did.
    “They’ll need to come through the steel fence wrapped around the school,” Harrison explained before adding for reassurance, “and those should hold.”
    What he said was true. Mr. Packard was a veteran who’d left the military with a chest full of accolades, and when he’d taken over as principal one of his first actions was to surround our school’s building with a galvanized steel fence, made to meet minimum yield strength of 45,000 psi. I knew this because he’d told me.
    I believed him and still I headed back to my locker.
    “Where are you going now?” Beverly asked, more to fill in the void of broken conversation than out of real concern.
    “I’m going to check for others who made it inside.”
    “Hopefully they aren’t the eating kind,” she muttered.
    “Can you keep trying to reach someone?”
    When she didn’t answer, I pressed, “Beverly?”
    “Yeah…yeah. I’ll keep calling. At least until my dad shows up.”
    “He’s coming for you?”
    She laughed through her nose. “Well, he’s not going to leave me here….”
    That made me feel incredibly alone. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t realize the reference.
    Refusing to sit there and dwell on it, I took the guard’s weapon, turned and headed into the heart of the school. Footsteps followed behind me and I peered over my shoulder to find Harrison stepping up alongside me, meeting my pace.
    “You’re not going by yourself,” he declared, his tone leaving no room for debate.
    I was oddly conflicted. I wanted him to come with me, and not just because it would be safer to walk in pairs, not just because what Beverly said had opened up a void. I just didn’t want my first walk with Harrison to be through a vacant, eerily quiet school where we might find things that would give us nightmares, worse ones than we were already sure to have. We turned the corner and found another empty hallway, and I felt the blatant unfairness that our walk couldn’t have been yesterday. Just one simple day before this mess broke out…
    Now that we were out of sight, his hand came into view, breaking through my thoughts. “You left these back there,” he said. And I looked down at his palm to find both of my steel stars. “They seemed important to you.”
    “They are,” I said, taking the stars and slipping them into my back pocket. “Thank you.” We walked a few more feet before I asked, “How did you get them? No, no…Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
    He nodded. “Smart choice.”
    “I want to thank you, too, for…for helping me with Tammie.”
    “The girl at the gate?”
    “Yeah, I…I didn’t want to…” The rest of that sentence stuck in my throat, but he inferred what I meant anyways.
    “You’re welcome,” he said, saving me from having to explain further. “So that’s her name? Tammie?” he asked, and I noticed how he didn’t refer to her in the past tense, which I appreciated.
    “You don’t know too many people here yet, do you?”
    His lips turned up, forming a crooked grin, and he laughed to himself before remarking candidly, “I know the ones who matter to me, Kennedy.”
    Despite the situation we were in, and all that we’d just endured, something pleasant stirred my stomach. It seemed muted, but it was there, because I had a hunch he was including me in that group.
    Our tour of the school grounds was quiet from that point on. The silence was only interrupted when we shouted hello into the empty rooms, and once when he pointed out one of the classrooms