“You need to eat while you're awake.”
He took the opened can I handed him and dug into the beans. When he had finished, I passed him a can of apricots. I opened up more cans of food and he ate those too. I didn't bother rationing the cans. Who knew when he'd feel well enough to eat again or how long the next memory-fever would last.
“They feel so real,” he said, once he polished off the second can of beans. “Did yours feel so real?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What did you relive?”
I told him, briefly, quickly, without emotion, about his parents.
His face became sad. “They should never have acted like that. They—”
“Are your parents,” I said.
“No. It’s not right.”
“It is what it is. But they weren’t all like that. Some of them were nice to relive.” And I told him about the first time we met.
“That was one of mine too,” he said quietly. “And then one of just watching you sleep. Just that calmness, that perfect peace. It was a bright morning and you slept in, and I’d woken and watched you breathe and it was perfect.”
I looked down, blushing, embarrassed.
“Except for the morning breath, that is.”
I sucked in air and looked up. Dylan smiled. “Joking.”
I smiled back, my face cracking. I couldn’t remember the last time I really smiled. “Funny.”
“You’re perfect. You never have morning breath.”
“Oh, now I know you’re lying.”
Dylan sobered. “No, really, it was perfect.”
We sat in silence for another moment. I knew I should go back out and stand guard, but I didn’t want to leave him, not while he was lucid, not when I had almost lost him for good.
A flush began to creep up his neck. Sweat broke out on his forehead.
“I think it’s coming back,” I said.
He set the empty can down. It tipped and became lost in the hay.
Suddenly I needed to know. I couldn’t bare not knowing for another minute. “You said Jane’s name. You said it like a caress. Were you, were you—” I couldn’t finish. Tears sprang to my eyes, my stomach twisted. I shouldn’t have asked. This wasn’t fair, not like this.
Dylan’s eyes glazed, he struggled to stay upright. He shook his head as if to clear it but I knew it wouldn’t work.
“It doesn’t matter, Corrina. I chose you. That’s what it made clear. I will choose you, again and—”
He slumped over. I jumped up to lay him back out more comfortably. I kicked the hidden can, bouncing it out of the stall so that it skipped onto the cement floor. Its sound was shocking and intrusive.
Once I knew he was safe and comfortable, I left. To scout, I told myself. But now I was the liar. I couldn’t stand to be in there with him another moment, not when the first thing he had relived, not when—
I burst into silent sobs. Of course I wasn’t good enough, of course I had never been good enough.
But he’d gotten himself sick for me, he’d exiled himself from everyone normal now. For me. I let that fact plant itself in me, take root, blossom. I would not dismiss his sacrifice because I wanted to have a pity party. I could not forget what Jane had done, what Dylan and Jane had done, but he had infected himself to prove he loved me, that he couldn't live without me. Either I moved on or I let the past control me.
Two figures stumbled out from behind the truck, limping, dirty. A dozen thoughts tumbled through my brain. I should have been watching. I should have taken my chances with the wheelbarrow.
“Corrina?” A young voice called out across the distance between us.
“Maibe?” My heart pounded.
The two came closer. Maibe and Gabbi. Gabbi raised her crossbow at me and let lose an arrow. I screamed and raised my hands. When I lowered them, a V was dead in the dirt with an arrow buried in his back. Gabbi shot off another arrow, but this one only nicked his shoulder and almost embedded into my foot. I jumped, surprised.
“You idiots need to get inside,” Gabbi said.
I locked the door as best I could behind us.
Dylan moaned and thrashed around. Gabbi swung up her crossbow again and crouched, scanning the barn.
“It’s Dylan,” I said. I went over and pushed her crossbow to point at the ground. “He’s in the fevers.”
I had so many questions, they tied my tongue in knots. Where had they been? What had they done? Who was still alive? Why was Gabbi so angry at me?
“Thank you for coming back for us,” I said simply.
Maibe was eating from the last apricot can, but Gabbi stopped and jerked her finger at Maibe. “Don’t thank me. It’s this one who made it happen. She was ready to get herself killed for you. I couldn’t have cared less.”
I reached over and hugged Maibe. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, smiling.
“But what kind of idiot intentionally gets himself infected and hung from the gallows and—”
Maibe stared at her.
“Sorry,” Gabbi said, not looking at me.
“That’s okay. I kind of thought the same thing when it happened. All that trouble I went to trying to find him and keep him alive, and—” I laughed and it wasn’t a fake laugh. Gabbi and Maibe were here now. Dylan was here.
“We can’t stay here,” Maibe said. “I think things are going to get much worse very soon.”
“But I can’t move him, not when he’s in the fevers,” I said.
“But they’re waking up,” Maibe said. “The Vs wake up first, and then the rest.”
“Those who survive the fevers anyway,” Gabbi said.
Dylan stood on unsteady feet, shirtless, the fevers too hot for him to keep it on. I went to get him some water.
“We should get out of the city. Go into the foothills,” he said, and crumpled. I was too far away to help, but Gabbi jumped in time. I ran over and helped bring him back to the stall.
He kept mumbling something about Dutch Flat—where his grandparents had owned a little house before they died. I told him it was going to be okay. Just rest. He pulled me into him for a kiss. When he let go, Maibe was by my side, holding out a cup of water.
I thanked her and helped him drink and he settled back into a troubled sleep.
Gabbi slammed the door behind her.
“What's wrong with her?” I asked Maibe.
“I don't know,” Maibe said.
“We have to leave. Right now,” Gabbi said, bursting back into the barn.
“What happened?” I said.
“Sergeant Bennings is alive. He's here. He's still here,” she said.
I didn't make her explain further. The panicked look on her face said enough.
Maibe helped me position Dylan in the wheelbarrow. He woke and helped us pack as many supplies as we could fit around him.
As we left the barn, a low train whistle sounded across the sky. After all this time, the noise seemed strange, almost creepy. It filled the empty sky with its howl. When the sound drifted back into silence, an aching loneliness filled my heart. The world had been ripped apart and emptied out and the people still living in this world weren’t safe.
“What do you think that was?” Maibe said.
“You heard it too?” Gabbi said. “I thought it was a ghost-memory.”
“I heard it,” I said quietly.
“I don’t think it means anything good,” Maibe said. “Stuff like that never means anything good in the movies.”
I wanted to contradict her but stopped myself. She’d been right too many times.
Gabbi paced around us, scanning the area for trouble. “We can’t worry about that right now. Spencer and the rest will be at the boxcar. We have to meet back up with them.”
I realized there were still some people in the world I could consider safe. Maybe not many but enough. Spencer and Gabbi and Leaf and the others had taken care of me and Maibe. I decided to do the same for them, if they gave me the chance.
“How do you know?” Dylan asked.
“That’s the place. It’s always been our meeting place,” Gabbi said.
“And after the boxcar?” Dylan asked.
Gabbi huffed and turned away.
“What’s her problem,” Dylan whispered to me.
“She doesn’t trust most people,” I said. “With good reason.”
Dylan nodded. “Until I get through this, this, whatever this is—”
“Memory-fever,” Maibe and I said at the same time.
“Until the fever passes, I’m in your hands. Tell me what you want to do.”
Gabbi turned back and examined him for a long moment. “How long have you had the fevers now?”
Dylan turned to me.
“Four days,” I said.
Gabbi looked out into the distance as if remembering. “Sometimes the fevers pass in as little as a week, sometimes as long as three weeks.”
“He’s already been awake for longer stretches than I remember when I went through it.” I shuddered, remembering the Army surplus store and how Christopher had died.
“So maybe you get lucky and have the fevers for only a week,” Maibe said.
“But that’s still three days of hauling around someone who could go comatose any minute,” Gabbi said.
“There are still Vs on the trail. More of them than before,” Maibe said.
“We’ll get through it,” I said, resting a hand on Dylan’s shoulder and looking Maibe and Gabbi in the eye. Dylan clasped his hand over mine. “We’ll figure it out together.”
We did figure it out, and it ended up being the beginning of something much bigger and darker than we could have imagined.
But all of that is a story for Gabbi and Maibe to tell.
Mine ends here: we made it to the boxcar, to Spencer and the pup-boys, and we headed for the foothills.
We are all of us together.
Dylan and I are caring for each other, and it is more than enough, and whether you believe we are human or not—we are surviving, and we are not going away.