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ANOTHER LONG DAY of walking.
On the plus side, my blisters have grown blisters and crusted into calluses. I no longer feel pain. I feel like I’m walking on a pair of numb stumps.
Clouds gather overhead, swirls of white fluff spiraling thicker and thicker, eventually obliterating our guiding sun. The branched road we were on has joined up with a wider main road again and Kane seems happy enough to continue along it.
We pass through a built-up area, houses on either side of us and in a far lesser state of disrepair. The plots are defined by long grass. Nature hasn’t completely overcrowded the structures. There’s a mixed level building with rows of garage doors on the bottom that may have been a business of some sort.
Gabe wants to investigate. “We could find all kinds of useful stuff in there.”
Georga agrees and I’m not exactly opposed—any short rest break is good.
Kane goes first, knocking a hard fist on the wooden frame to test how sturdy it is before he steps inside.
There are no windows on the ground floor, just the narrow doorway we enter through. The interior is dim, the air is stuffy and—
Something scatters beneath my feet with an awful clinking rattle.
Kane hurries over but I’ve already looked and seen and I’m going to hurl.
I race out into the fresh air and bend over, gagging and dry-heaving. Thankfully there’s precious little in my stomach that wants to come out.
A skeleton.
I stepped on a skeleton and sent the bones clattering across the floor.
My legs are as weak as a sapling oak swaying in a breeze.
I sink down onto the patchy grass, pulling my knees up to rest my forehead on. I don’t even berate myself for being this weak and this pathetic.
Human bones!
Georga joins me on the grass, white-faced and sober. “There’s a whole pile of them,” she says. “Resting one on top of the other in a corner. It’s like some above-ground graveyard from a horror movie.”
Mass graveyard.
“From the plague?”
“Or a vampire feast? Who the hell knows!” She gives a visible shudder. “This is sick.”
Gabe doesn’t find anything useful in there, although he didn’t look very long or hard. Within minutes, we’re back on the endless road.
And then, while the sun is hiding behind the cloud cover and daylight is still bright, we reach the end of the world. At first it’s just a glimmer, sparks of water reflecting through the trees. As we push through the bush and forest, the vista opens into an ocean of calm water.
“Not the ocean,” Kane says with a laugh when I express my thoughts aloud. “Just a very large lake.”
We go off-road, tramping through the scrub and bush that follows the lake. Kane’s gaze roams the vast expanse of blue as we walk, searching.
“Looking for something?” I ask.
He extends an arm, pointing. “You see that outline? I think it’s a headland, though.”
“As opposed to?”
He doesn’t answer.
After another half-hour or so, we spot a sprawling red-brick building right on the lake’s edge. There’s a partially collapsed wooden deck falling into the water. Signage scrawled in glass tubing on the side wall reads Marina Fish Grill.
Kane looks it up and down and says, “This’ll do.”
“We’re stopping for the day?” asks Gabe with a frown.
There’s still hours of good walking light.
Kane climbs carefully onto the deck, choosing the denser beams to step on, then he sits, pulling one knee up to rest his elbow on.
“I studied the geography of this area before the Tithe,” he says. “I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but I was hoping to find this lake.” He looks at Gabe. “You asked me how we know when we can stop. This is it...I think.”
“The Marina Fish Grill?” Gabe says skeptically.
“Not exactly.” Kane shifts his view toward the water. “There are a number of islands farther north, some closer to the shore than others. Some look quite large on the map, others smaller. One of them will be our new home.”
He looks back at us. “I’ve been telling you all along, I don’t have any sure answers. I can’t promise you safety. I can’t guarantee this will work. The large body of water may make it harder—impossible, I hope—for the bloodsuckers to sniff us out or track us. It also gives us some kind of early warning if we maintain a shoreline watch. If we are discovered, they’ll have to arrange a boat before they can reach us.”
His gaze lands on me and holds. “I think this is our best chance.”
I don’t hate the way he’s thinking.
“I’m not going to die a hermit on an island in the middle of a lake,” Georga declares. “It’s not even a proper island.”
“It’s not forever,” Kane says. “Just until the bloodsuckers forget about us.”
Looking out over the water, I see the bluish haze of landforms in the distance. “Are those the islands?”
He looks. “Personally, I’d go farther up the shore line than that. The bloodsuckers may still track us to here, and if they do, we want to be well out of their line of sight.”
“But won’t they just track us however far we walk up the lake?”
“That’s why we’re not walking,” Kane states. “We’re going to build a raft.”