The hardest part before we left always was saying good-bye to JoJo. After nightfall most of the kids were gathered in small groups playing cards or chess with pieces carved out of soap like in prison movies.
JoJo was sitting in my lap hugging Bunny, and Rocky leaned into my side.
“I don’t get why you always have to leave,” JoJo said. “And you take Alex and Patrick with you, and they’re our next-favorites.”
“Every time we’ve left, we’ve brought back information,” I said. “And information is power.”
“You sound like a teacher,” Rocky said.
I made a face. “Okay, scratch that. I mean, the more we learn about the Harvesters, the more we’ll know about how to beat them.”
“You think you can beat them?”
I thought about being one of two people in the whole world chosen to save humanity and felt a charge of pride. “Yeah, I think we have a shot.”
On his cot across from me, Patrick slotted shells into the magazine tube of his shotgun, one after another. Alex prepped her fingers like she used to before hockey games, wrapping protective bands of medical tape on her fingers in the spaces between her knuckles. She stripped each piece from the roll and bit it off. Her hockey stick rested against the inside of her thigh. She looked tough as hell.
Every time we left the school, we were stepping into a war zone. I had to ready myself, too, but right now there was an eight-year-old who needed me, and suddenly that felt more important to me than anything else.
“Today’s Thanksgiving,” JoJo said. “I bet you forgot that.”
“I did.”
“Do you hafta leave on Thanksgiving?”
“I do.”
She crossed her arms. “I don’t feel like I have so much to be thankful for.”
I almost told her right there about my role, how I was the savior of the planet, destined to carry out a secret mission, but the words sounded ridiculous in my head before I could say them. Like hearing about the wonder that is me would make JoJo feel any better. I didn’t make me feel any better.
I put my hand on her head. Her hair—still tacky. “Is that dried Sprite?”
“No,” she lied, indignant.
“I’ll try to bring you back some good news, Junebug,” I said.
“Who’s gonna look out for me when you’re gone?”
“Your big brother,” I said, and Rocky puffed up a bit. “And Eve.”
Eve glanced up from the same magazine she’d been leafing through for a month and gave a wave. She and I hadn’t really spoken since that kiss. I don’t know what I’d thought would happen, but it had only made things awkward between us.
“And Eve’s gonna make sure you shower, too,” I said, loud enough for Eve to hear.
Keeping her face in the magazine, Eve held out a thumbs-up.
Rocky and I laughed. But when I looked back at JoJo, she was crying. I gave her a hug. “What’s wrong?”
She sniffled a few times, wiped snot on her sleeve. “We’re all stories. That’s all we are, really. There was a story of a brother and sister whose parents died. And they wound up here in this awful place but found someone to look after them. Right?”
My throat felt dry, so I had to swallow before I could talk. “Right.”
“So now you’re part of our story and we’re part of yours. But when you leave…” She clutched Bunny tighter. “I don’t get to be part of your story.”
I turned her around so she was facing me. “You’ll always be part of my story, Junebug.”
But her tears kept rolling into her worn stuffed animal.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said, taking out my notebook from beneath the thin mattress. “When I see you again, you’ll tell me everything that happened to you guys. And I’ll tell you everything that happened to us. And we’ll write it down together in here, okay?”
She nodded.
Patrick walked over to the supply station, shotgun over his shoulder, and retrieved my baling hooks. He came back, stood over me, and let them dangle in front of my face.
He started to say something, but I cut him off. “I know, I know,” I said. “We got work to do.”
I kissed JoJo’s sticky head, slid her out of my lap, and picked up my hooks.
* * *
It was a long haul to our house. If we cut through town square instead of circling, we’d knock off at least an hour of slow going through the surrounding streets. But darting out into the open carried obvious risks.
Alex, Patrick, and I huddled behind a parked truck by the hospital, peering across the big lawn. An ambulance had smashed into the central fountain, turning it to rubble. At the edge of the grass, the church rose up, seemingly abandoned. Power cables draped the streets, which had been jackhammered in spots when the lines were cut. A few cars and trucks remained where they’d been the instant the Dusting had moved through town. All the windows of the One Cup Cafe had been shattered. The only movement I could make out was in Bob n’ Bit Hardware, which was lit with a guttering orange light from the old-timey blacksmith forge in the back.
“What do you think?” Alex whispered.
“Looks clear,” Patrick said. “And we haven’t seen any Hosts yet.”
It had been eerily quiet on the way here. We’d taken all the usual precautions, but we hadn’t spotted a single Host. That had never happened before.
“If we keep going at this pace,” Alex said, “we won’t make the house by midnight. And missing that meeting—”
“Is not an option,” Patrick finished for her. He looked at me. “What do you think?”
“‘Fortune favors the bold,’” I said.
“So that’s a yes,” he said, slightly annoyed.
I nodded. “We’ve been here watching for … what? Ten minutes? And we haven’t seen a thing. If we shoot the diagonal across the lawn and cut up the slope into the hills behind the general store, we’re home free.”
“Big if,” Alex said.
“All ifs are big these days,” Patrick said.
“Aren’t you two extra cocky ever since you were promoted to the Most Important People in the World?”
“You gotta admit,” Patrick said. “It is an impressive title.”
He held up a fist, and I bumped it with mine.
“You Rains are intolerable sometimes,” Alex said. “You should remember: Rain only goes one direction—”
“Down,” we all whispered together, and stifled our laughter.
“So are we gonna do this or are you guys gonna just sit around and feel important?” Alex said.
I looked at my brother. “I say we just sit around and feel important.”
Alex smacked me. I pretended it didn’t hurt.
“Okay,” I said. “Seriously? I say we go for it.”
We all looked at one another and came to an unspoken agreement through that telepathy thing that sometimes happened when it was just the three of us.
Patrick crept out from behind the truck, and we followed him in a V formation. We walked across the sidewalk. Stepped onto Main Street for the first time since it all began.
It felt liberating and terrifying at the same time.
We slipped past a long-dead pickup with a broken driver’s-side window and stepped onto the lawn.
I’d thought I’d never stand in town square again.
Keeping alert, facing different directions, we walked along, moving past a knocked-over bench. Squirrels darted up trees. I almost tripped over something and looked down. It was a man’s loafer.
With a rotting foot still in it.
We kept on, moving right across town square.
Despite the cold I was sweating through my undershirt. Our eyes picked across windows, doorways, vehicles. Now and then I shot a glance at the general store and the woods beyond. The finish line.
We neared the center of the square.
Most of the water had spilled out of the fountain, but what remained was thick with scum. It reeked like death.
We shuffled past it.
We made it two-thirds across the square.
Then onto the sidewalk. The deserted shops and restaurants lined the street before us like a row of teeth. We stared at the general store, which was nestled back into the hillside and the woods beyond.
Patrick halted.
“Patrick,” Alex said. “What’s up?”
“Shh.”
I heard it, too. A buzzing sound.
It stopped.
“Maybe the wind?” Alex whispered.
We took another step, and then it came again, a little clearer. We froze.
This time it didn’t stop. The breeze shifted, carrying it to us again, and now it didn’t sound like one noise.
It sounded like a lot of noises.
A cloud of tiny black dots appeared over the roof of the general store. Billowing.
No—swarming.
Flies.
A figure cut through the swarm, shuffling forward into view on the roof. His head came into sight first.
With holes in place of eyes.
And flies spurting through those holes.
They hummed all around him, more than used to fill the air around the Braaten slaughterhouse, more than I’d ever seen in one place at the same time.
As the figure moved forward, his torso came into view. He was backlit by the moon, his silhouette perfectly black but breath misted in front of where his mouth would be.
He took another step and made a rasping sound—his feet scuffing the tar-and-gravel roof.
But it came at us in stereo.
I blinked sweat from my eyes, trying to make out the movement behind him through the teeming air.
Six more eyeless forms resolved in the swarm behind him, trudging forward, seeming to bleed up from the roof itself. Their heads oriented toward us as we stood there in the open.
I swept a gaze up the slope of the hill behind the general store.
The entire rise was in motion, like a landslide.
A horde of Hosts pouring through the trees beneath a river of flies, heading onto the roof.
Heading toward us.