Our friends and schoolmates were in terrible shape. Both of the Mendez twins, JoJo’s closest friends, were missing patches of their hair. Little Jenny White wore a torn and bloody dress, and one of her shoes was gone. I couldn’t remember her age, but she couldn’t have been older than ten. A few seniors were there, including Ben Braaten, his face sporting that jigsaw scar from the car crash that had killed his two brothers. I saw several of my classmates. Eve Jenkins, who sat next to me in American history, had claw marks across her face. It looked like they’d been caused by fingernails.

A bunch of the emergency cots had been rolled out from the storage room, just like after last year’s flood, when two dozen families had taken up residence here for the better part of a month while their houses were repaired. The retractable bleachers, pulled out now like they were for pep rallies and basketball games, served as a base camp for some of the kids. The benches were covered with sleeping bags, backpacks, first-aid kits, and a few scattered pillows for those lucky enough to have grabbed them before they fled. A row of makeshift weapons—knives, fire axes, baseball bats—lined the lowest bench. Now I understood Chatterjee’s foraging among hammers and wrenches in the shop class. High casement windows atop the bleachers let in weak shafts of dusty light. A freestanding dry-erase board had been wheeled to the front of the polished court, facing the cots. Coach McGill’s zone defense diagrams had been mostly erased and written over them was a list of hundreds of names.

A roll call of all the kids of Creek’s Cause.

The survivors must have made a list of their team members and classmates, young neighbors and relatives. About a hundred of the names on the unofficial census had been crossed off.

While we’d been scrambling from horror to horror, they’d been hard at work organizing here tonight. Almost as hard at work as the Hosts had been.

Dr. Chatterjee walked to the board, his steps echoing through the gym. He picked up the marker and crossed out Patrick Rain, Chance Rain, Alexandra Blanton, Rocky McCafferty, JoJo McCafferty. The tip made a squeak with each line.

None of us had spoken. We were too stunned. I couldn’t take my eyes off the hundreds of names that weren’t crossed off. All those kids missing, taken by Hosts. Andre Swisher from track. Talia Randall, the picture-perfect cheer captain. Blake Dubois, one of the special-needs kids. I pictured Blake with his warm smile, his stick-thin legs propped on the footrests of his wheelchair. He wouldn’t have stood a chance.