I decided not to tell Maibe I was following my dead dog.
I think she knew I was following something from my brain, but she didn’t ask. We climbed back onto the tracks because that’s where Blitz went. Smoke engulfed the café behind us. The sick people inside it were burning up.
“We did the right thing, didn’t we?” Maibe said.
“I don’t know about that.”
Maibe hiccuped.
“But I don’t think there was anything else we could have done.”
“They were different than the ones trying to kill us before,” Maibe said.
She was right, but I had no idea what would make them so different. The Lyssa virus was supposed to be a form of rabies. It was supposed to make people go psycho. Yes, Matilda and her family were acting crazy—but they hadn't been violent. They had been sleepwalking, comatose-like at times. Matilda had clearly been reliving a memory. But none of them had the same skin issues as us, which meant they hadn't gotten the vaccine either.
I stopped walking when I realized Blitz had vanished. My heartbeat picked up speed. Maybe Blitz would come back. Even if he was a ghost, following him had felt comforting, as if he was leading me home.
I shaded my eyes with a hand and scanned the area. The run-down neighborhoods had given way to empty fields. A line of trees backed up the fields. The river cut in and out of sight between the trees.
Straight down the tracks, almost totally obscured by smoke, were the downtown skyscrapers. Though there was no fog today, the smoke smothered the color of everything except for the green fields, and something red.
I squinted, trying to make out what this red thing was in a sea of green.
It was boxy, falling apart, decaying. Like something out of the old railroad days. When I was ten and devouring the Boxcar Children book series, I pictured a boxcar like this—red and rusting, with weeds growing up past the wheel base, the sides built out of wood, and a sliding steel door.
I was sure it was some weird ghost-memory. I opened my mouth to ask Maibe if she could also see the boxcar and whether she’d ever read the books.
Then the steel door opened.