We made it across the valley without major incident. Minor incidents were of course unavoidable. Once we reached the outskirts of town, we snaked off the highway up a bumpy dirt road into the forest. We left the Mustang with the hood steaming and its grille dripping remains. Then we threaded back through the trees toward town and the school—our base camp—beyond.
Darkness folded around us, the treetops blotting out the stars. Beneath the oatmeal bandage, my forearm pulsed with heat. I tightened my grip on the baling hooks. And then I remembered.
I dropped my hooks, letting them dangle from my wrists on their nylon loops. Putting my fingers in my mouth, I gave a piercing whistle.
I faced the dark woods. Patrick and Alex stopped behind me. Alex had a gun in one hand, the Rebel helmet in the other. We waited and waited some more.
And then we heard them coming, darting through the underbrush, paws scrabbling across the hard ground. The Rhodesian ridgebacks I’d raised burst into the clearing, panting and wagging and bumping us with their noses like playful dolphins.
My giant puppy, Cassius, jumped up on me, resting his muddy paws on my shoulders and slurping my face. Smiling, I pushed him off. He rammed his side into my knees until I scratched his back. He was a black-mask ridgie—the band of dark fur covering his nose and eyes contrasting with the rest of his honey-tan coat. Like the others, he had a narrow band of reversed fur running down his spine, a wicked-looking racing stripe. He’d put on another ten or so pounds since I’d seen him last, his powerful chest widening with muscle. He was the second-biggest now, behind Tanner—and that was plenty big. These guys were bred to hunt lions, so imagine what they did to Hosts.
Deja, Princess, Thor, and Grace bumped Cassius aside, competing for my attention. I took a knee and greeted them all. Atticus sat aloofly until they were done and then trotted over. I noticed he was limping. When he drew near, I lifted his front paw. The pad beneath was badly torn. Dread hit me like a dropped stone, rippling through my insides. How long would he make it out here injured? He nuzzled my palm and then backed away.
They were feral now.
I called Cassius and Tanner back over and said, “You look out for your brother, you hear?”
They cocked their heads, furrowed their brows, wagged their tails. Silly human making silly human noises.
The others were sitting in a semicircle around me. “Release,” I said, and started walking.
They surrounded us as we moved through the woods, keeping us inside the pack. This forest was their home now; here they ruled over all things living and not.
As we reached the edge of town, they started to fall away. Patrick, Alex, and I halted and looked across the unfenced backyards. It took a moment for our eyes to focus through the darkness. Something had knocked over the Woodrows’ barbecue grill. But there was no movement.
Cassius whimpered at my heel, and I turned back to the pack, scratching him behind the ears. I snapped my fingers, and Atticus hobbled forward.
I gestured toward town, but he backed up, whining.
“C’mere,” I said. “Don’t be stubborn.”
I tried to examine his paw again, but he darted away, slinking among the trees, his eyes glinting out at me. I thought of Zeus, my biggest boy, who’d died protecting me. Something cracked in my chest, threatened to break.
I looked back at the pack. “You guys better protect him,” I said. “That’s your most important job. He’s your big brother, and he took care of you all these years. Now’s your turn.”
Patrick rested a hand on my shoulder. “Sun’s gonna rise soon,” he said gently—or at least as gently as Patrick said anything. “We gotta move.”
Atticus kept his distance. He didn’t want to go with us. It’s not like we had that much to offer anymore. If I were him, I’d have preferred the woods, too. I went to him slowly, holding out my hand. He licked it. I kissed his head—musk, dirt, and cinnamon.
“Release,” I told the dogs, and they trotted off, Atticus limping behind them.
We stepped out from the tree line and hustled along the side of the Woodrows’ house, stepping over the fallen barbecue. Then we peeked up the street. The neighborhood here was little more than a cluster of single-story houses hugging the high school.
Most of the action (and I use the term loosely) in Creek’s Cause used to take place in town square, a mile or so south. Not that there was much to the square—a few blocks rimmed with restaurants and shops, a supermarket, two traffic lights, a big church perched at the edge of a grassy sprawl. It had been reduced mostly to blood smears and shattered windows, a ghost town haunted by the grown-ups who hadn’t left to help at the Hatch site.
Now Patrick, Alex, and I picked our way up the residential street, hiding behind hedges and abandoned cars. We made slow but steady progress toward the tall chain-link fence guarding the school’s perimeter. As the first light of morning filtered over Ponderosa Pass in the distance, we snuck across the school parking lot and flattened ourselves to the ground in front of a gate.
Patrick reached up, his hands working the combination lock securing the chain. He spun the dial back and forth and then tugged. Nothing happened.
I sensed movement on the streets behind us. Grandpa Donovan emerged from the Swishers’ old house and plodded onto the sidewalk, his head canted forward. Across the street from him, a worker I recognized from the Piggly Wiggly supermarket stepped out onto the porch of the Rose residence.
They were mapping the interiors of buildings now?
Grandpa Donovan shuffled toward the next house in the row. One of his coverall straps had come unhooked, and it swayed in front of his stooped form. If he lifted his head three inches, those eyeholes would register us here. That would bring Hosts scurrying from all directions. And that would likely reveal the high school as a hideout—the last bastion of safety for the kids and teenagers of Creek’s Cause.
“Move it,” Alex said to Patrick.
Patrick’s hands stayed steady. He rolled the dial through its combination once more and tugged. Again there was no give.
The sun inched higher above the horizon, exposing us even more on the strip of lawn lining the fence. I’d been holding my breath. I tried not to move anything but my eyes, which tracked the Hosts on the sidewalk.
Grandpa Donovan finally disappeared into the neighboring house, but the supermarket stocker continued heading down the street directly toward us.
I grabbed Patrick’s arm. “We have to split,” I said. “We gotta find somewhere to hide.”
We’d just started to rise when we heard a rattle overhead.
Eve Jenkins’s slender hands reached through the chain-link, working the lock. It released with a dry click, and she swung the gate open.
We scrambled inside on all fours and then ran for cover, diving into the shadows in front of the school. The supermarket worker kept on toward us. For a moment I thought he’d spotted us, but then he turned crisply on his heel and padded up the steps to another house. We exhaled together, a chorus of relief.
“Ben changed the locks after you left,” Eve whispered.
Patrick nodded, his mouth a grim line. “Of course he did.”
“He said it was for safety.” She shook her head. “But I’ve been keeping an eye out for you.” She reached over and squeezed my forearm. “I’m happy to see you.”
To my side I sensed Alex’s face swivel to face me. I could practically feel her told-ya-so smirk.
Eve’s eyes moved to the Rebel helmet. Only then did I realize how futuristic it looked.
Patrick grabbed the helmet and shoved it into the backpack. “Nothing Ben needs to see,” he said.
We kept close to the side of the school until we reached the broad stone steps. Sure enough, Ben Braaten, the self-appointed head of security, waited behind the front doors. His hand rested on the bolt gun tucked into the front of his jeans.
When fired, the compressed-air gun shot a steel rod several inches forward. It was designed to whack the thick skulls of cattle. It worked even better on Hosts.
Ben’s face, scarred from the car crash that had killed his brothers, stared at us blankly. He was as tall as Patrick but beefier, the only kid I’d known to go head-to-head with my brother in a fight. I waited for Ben to remove his hand from the stun gun. It took a moment longer than I would’ve thought.
His eyes picked over us, catching on the conspicuous bulge in the backpack. “You’re alive,” he said.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Alex said.
A scar gnarled Ben’s upper lip, so it was hard to tell whether he was sneering. Sweat glistened in his crew cut. A fingerprint of shiny crimped flesh marred his forehead at the hairline.
“Alex,” he said, “you know I’m happy you made it.”
Patrick walked past him, brushing his shoulder. Alex and I followed my brother down the hall to the gym.
Rows of cots lined the basketball court, and on one side the bleachers had been pulled out from the wall. The morning sun shone brightly through high-set windows. Pennants for Creek’s Cause High’s various sport championships hung from metal beams way up in the ceiling, a reminder of how much that stuff used to mean—school records and rivalries and who was going to state. How dumb it all seemed now.
The surviving kids and teenagers—about a hundred in all—were just stirring.
JoJo spotted us first. Her eight-year-old face lit up with happiness, and then—instantly—her eyes filled with tears. She ran over, her yellow stuffed animal flapping under her arm. She jumped up, arms and legs koala-clamping around me, her stuffed animal mashed against my cheek. One of Bunny’s ears was wet from chewing.
JoJo’s tears were hot against the side of my neck. She squeezed me harder, and I patted her back. I could feel the ridge of her spine through her skin—it never ceased to surprise me how little she was. And how fragile.
Her brother, Rocky, came in her wake, flicking his head to clear the black curls from his eyes. We bumped fists. He was two years older than JoJo and playing it cool, but I could see how relieved he was that we’d returned.
We were the closest thing to family they had anymore.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
Rocky averted his eyes and gave a single-shoulder shrug.
JoJo whispered into my neck, “It was awful without you.”
I rubbed her back some more. “It’s okay now, Junebug.”
She pulled away and looked at me through uneven brown bangs. She’d cut her hair herself, and you could tell. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Ben tries to take over when you guys are gone, and he’s sucky and totally unfair.”
I set her down. A murmur rolled around the gym as the others noticed us and started hopping off the cots.
“Doesn’t Dr. Chatterjee keep him under control?” Alex asked.
“He tries,” she said. “But you know Ben.”
As if on cue, Dr. Chatterjee entered the gym, moving jerkily on his leg braces.
Our biology teacher—and former family doctor—was the one adult we knew who’d made it through the Dusting. He’d helped us close in on a working theory of what had happened to the adults in our town. We believed that the spores attacked the white brain matter of people over the age of eighteen, spreading through the myelin wrapping the nerve cells of their frontal lobe. Once the frontal lobe was under control, so was the rest of the Host organism. That’s why kids and most teenagers were protected—our white matter was still coming in. Since Dr. Chatterjee had multiple sclerosis, his white matter already had missing patches. The spores couldn’t gain a foothold, not in his brain. So he was still him.
We’d voted him the leader of the survivors, not that Ben had been too pleased about that one.
Chatterjee gave us a smile that rivaled JoJo’s and started for us. Before he could get across the basketball court, the other kids crowded in on us, thumping our backs and asking us a million questions. The returning heroes.
I had to confess, after everything we’d been through, it felt pretty good.
Only Ben and his lackeys, Dezi Siegler and Mikey Durango, didn’t join in. They stayed in a tight huddle over by the bleachers, whispering to one another out of the sides of their mouths, their eyes pinned on us.
Eve took our weapons back to the storage room so we weren’t standing there in the mob with guns and steel hooks. As the kids quieted down and started their morning routines, Chatterjee finally shouldered through. He gave me and Alex a hug, an unusual show of affection. And then he shook Patrick’s hand. Patrick inspired a kind of formality.
Dr. Chatterjee said, “I’d imagine there’s quite a bit you need to fill me in on.”
Alex said, “You have no friggin’ idea.”