We worked fast. Kern was propped against a brick wall. Ricker ripped part of his own shirt into strips and I tied up Kern’s wounded arm. The bullet had passed through muscle and gone out the other side. As long as the wound didn’t get infected, he would survive it. I told myself I could think about what his words meant later—a cure! It was real!—but unless we hurried, we might not survive the Vs surely headed our way.
It was silent except for the birds. The birds were always around now, singing their songs in the cool early mornings or the warm evenings. There were no cars or planes or electricity to interfere. Technically some of it still worked. Sometimes over the past couple of years I could hear an engine’s grinding gears if the wind blew just right.
Jimmy and Gabbi stood on lookout at either corner of the huge warehouse that hid us in its shadow. They were barely still in sight of me and Ricker as we worked on Kern. We were on the side of the building opposite the battle that had turned silent. The fighting was over, but we had no idea who won.
Jimmy scraped his foot in the dirt. I focused on Kern’s blood seeping through the makeshift bandage. Bright red like flashing rubies. He smelled like forest, like dirt, like fear. Ricker rested a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I looked.
Jimmy held up both hands. One formed a ‘V’ shape, the other flashed all five fingers—three times. I looked over to Gabbi. She watched a different street. She flashed the same signs Jimmy did—five times.
Now I heard them. It was a sort of growling that rose up that you didn’t notice at first. Background noise that grew and transformed into something vicious. We hadn’t seen more than two or three Vs together in at least a year and now there were forty all in one place? The question was on my lips—where did they all come from? But there wasn’t any time.
Kern’s injury was beginning to clot, but blood still dripped down his arm and into the dirt. He looked pale and unsteady. Ricker and I helped him onto his feet, but he slipped back down to the ground. His eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled showing us the whites.
Gabbi sprinted back to us. She was slick with sweat and mud streaks and Kern’s blood. “We have to get into the cave right now.”
“It’s too quiet in there,” Ricker said, but there was no heat in his voice. We couldn’t fight off forty Vs at once, no matter how slow or weak they might be at this point.
“We don’t have a choice.” Gabbi propped Kern up, using her shoulder to brace him under his arm. Ricker took the other side as I helped. We dragged Kern to the end of the warehouse and paused at the corner to see if our path was clear.
Ricker glanced over his shoulder and froze. “Jimmy!”
I looked behind us. The noises had grown now, unmistakably. Growls and screeches and the snap of teeth. Jimmy stood still at his lookout at the far corner of the building. He leaned against the brick and showed us his side profile. Too still. Too dreamy. A half-smile on his lips.
Acid burned my throat and my hands became slick with sweat. He was going Faint again.
Ricker moved to drop Kern.
“No!” I said. Gabbi and I couldn’t move Kern alone. Ricker knew it. “I’ll get him.”
Before Ricker could protest I ran off after Jimmy. Gabbi shouted at Ricker to move his ass.
My feet pounded the dirt, kicking up puffs of dust that formed haze in the air. My heartbeat pounded so loud in my ears it drowned out the growls. One V came into view and another tripped into the dirt close behind him. Jimmy felt a mile away. I pushed myself harder. Even from this distance, the Vs moved like I did. They looked normal. They looked fresh.
I shouted at myself to go faster. I felt like my heart might explode. Jimmy stood there, with his curly hair like a halo around his head, his lanky body thin and covered in scratches, his face dreamy, his muscles relaxed and lazy because he couldn’t see what was closing in on him.
There was shouting behind me. Time slowed down. There were five Vs now, strung out yards apart from each other. One of the Vs was still facedown in the dirt from falling. Sweat poured off me and I swore I saw drops of it fly into the air and scatter into a million tiny rainbows. The drops fell into the dirt and it was the most beautiful sound and I pushed all of it back and thought about the most terrible things instead—Ano trapped in the fevers for an eternity, the girl and her family dying in the summer sun on that hillside, Jimmy about to die in front of me.
I slammed into the first V as he reached out to grab Jimmy by the hair. We went tumbling into the dirt and I tasted a dry, grittiness on my tongue that crunched between my teeth. I punched and kicked and everything was a blur of clothes and teeth and dust that stung my eyes.
There was a sharp pinch on my leg, like it had just been caught in an animal trap, the metal teeth clamping down, tearing, ripping.
I hooked the Vs nose with my fingers and yanked. His eyes flew open—brown, bloodshot, empty except for the anger that haunted them. The trap released its hold. I scrambled away. Rocks scraped my skin raw. Two more Vs ran at us. Their clothes were mostly clean, their sprint was smooth and fast.
The roar in my ears grew so loud I thought my head would burst. The first V came at me again. He shaped his hands into claws. His blond hair was long and beginning to form mats. He had that wild, hungry look in his eyes. Without thinking, I jumped up, grabbed a fist-sized rock and smashed it into the side of his head. He held a hand up as if surprised, then crumpled.
Jimmy still stood, hands at his sides, that half-smile on his lips. I ignored the burning pain in my leg and ran to him. Back by the cave, Ricker sprinted for us, his machete waving in the air, even as Gabbi picked up a rifle and shot at the Vs that came out from the other direction.
The next two Vs locked on me and Jimmy. Ricker was too far away. He’d never make it in time and my little rock wasn’t going to do anything to two of them.
I yanked Jimmy’s arm but he didn’t move. I screamed at him but he didn’t even blink.
My body burned with a heat that made me see things so clearly. I whispered in his ear a list of wonderful, beautiful things. I described chocolate ice cream and parks with green grass and a squirmy puppy with soft, silky fur and how they were all there in the cave, all waiting for him, just for him, and shouldn’t we run to it? Wouldn’t that be a fun game to see who got there first to play with the puppy?
His leg twitched. The two Vs were within several feet now. Ricker was still too far away.
Jimmy laughed a clear bell sound and before I could blink he ran off. His hair bounced with each step. Ricker stopped in his tracks and his mouth fell open. I sprinted after Jimmy and I couldn’t hold back the thrill that bubbled up. It worked! He was going to be okay.
Jimmy ran past Ricker.
My heart dropped into my stomach.
Jimmy was headed straight for the other battle. He wouldn’t see them. He wouldn’t turn. He wouldn’t fight.
Something snatched at my shirt. I screamed, pivoted, saw a V had caught me. Her stinking breath blocked out all other sensations. It smelled like something had died in there. I fell backward. My shirt ripped and suddenly I was free and running as fast as I could in spite of my burning ankle.
Ricker caught up to Jimmy and herded him to the entrance. The darkness of the cave swallowed the two of them. The fighting near Gabbi had stopped because some of the Feeb’s had come out to help. When they looked in my direction, they shouted and fled back into the cave too. I dared not look behind me but pushed myself to go faster.
I crossed the threshold. The door slammed closed behind me with a screech that echoed. I tripped over something soft on the ground, flipping and landing on my back so hard it knocked the breath out of me.
My chest heaved as I opened my mouth and gasped for air. The panic in my brain drowned out the pain in my leg.
Suddenly my lungs began to work again. Cold cave air rushed in and I felt such pleasure in just the simple act of breathing.
In and out, in and out.
It felt like an eternity before I realized the thumping I heard wasn’t my heartbeat but from Vs slamming into the cave door. My eyes began to adjust to the almost complete darkness.
Shapes appeared—lumps on the ground. Dead people. The one I tripped over was still warm. I jumped up, shaky, needing to get out of that hallway before I threw up.
I walked through the bodies until the passageway opened up to a larger room lit by torches. More lumps on the ground here. More dead.
Gabbi had Jimmy sitting down. She nodded at me while biting her lip. He still had that smile on his lips. He laughed just a little bit and moved his hands in his lap like he was playing with that puppy I’d promised him.
I felt sick to my stomach. Jimmy was like Molly and Freanz and the twins now. I couldn’t bear to look at him like that because maybe I’d saved his life but he was still gone from us. Was that what I had looked like to Ricker and Gabbi?
I let low, urgent voices draw me further into the cave. Here was an eating area, rock ceilings braced with huge wooden beams. More uninfected slumped across tables—murdered so fast they’d had no time to get up. The smell of blood and iron was thick in the air. I raised my shirt over my nose and breathed through my mouth.
This room branched off into several passageways. Only one was open. The others were filled with piles of supplies. I followed the voices down the open passageway. My skin felt clammy and cold. Each breath I took left an ache in my chest. My leg still hurt like someone had taken a match and held it against my skin. If the V had actually bitten me, I’d be trapped in the fevers by now like Ano, so I ignored the pain. I could deal with a sprained ankle later.
The passageway led to a room filled with Tabitha’s people. She held a torch taken from the wall. They had their backs to me. Their focus was on a man chained by his hands and feet, spreadeagled and lifted up in such a way that his body formed the shape of an X. His head hung down, a shock of dirty brown hair. He looked young, so young—
Alden.
I cried out and ran to him. I pushed through Tabitha and her people, and fell to my knees before him, the cold wetness of the cave seeping deep into my bones. The darkness of this place boxed up my mind.
He did not move.
He was dead. They had tortured him and strung him up like an animal and I was too late.
“I understand their fear of us,” Tabitha said behind me. “But I still do not understand how they could have done this to one of their own.”
Her words did not reach my brain for many long seconds. My ears heard them but did not understand, not while the rest of me was so shocked by seeing Alden here, his bruised and scratched legs, his dirt-grimed feet, a toenail ripped off—
“Keep searching,” Tabitha said to her people and most of them left.
I looked up and saw a face, and for a brief flash, it WAS Alden’s face, hazy and fogged and overlaid on this one as if someone had moved the camera too fast while taking a picture. My heart broke into a million pieces. I would never be able to tell him—
And then suddenly, it wasn’t Alden’s face. It was someone entirely different, someone older, larger than Alden would ever be.
I choked over my breath.
“Maibe.” When Ricker’s voice broke the silence, only then did I notice that his hand rested gently on my elbow as if I needed to be steadied. Maybe I did.
“Tell me who this is,” I whispered to Ricker. “Who do you see?”
He took in the tears on my face and his eyes widened. “It’s Perkins, Maibe. Whoever you thought it was—it’s not. It’s Perkins.”
My mind had played an awful trick on me. I had thought it was Alden, but now the fog in my brain cleared.
This wasn’t Alden.
“What did he do?” I said, even as my heart began beating again. “Why did they do this?”
Tabitha’s face looked worn but determined. “He was going to turn Feeb.”
“Because you infected him,” I said with a venom that surprised me.
Tabitha nodded. “Yes, and he’d probably already gone into the fevers.”
“But why this torture?” Ricker said.
“Look around,” Tabitha said, a hint of exasperation in her voice. She’d always sounded so levelheaded in the prison, so Zen, and some of that was still there, but now with cracks. “Look closer. They were trying to fix him, in their own sick and twisted way.”
“They were bloodletting him,” Ricker said, his voice in awe.
On the ground underneath Perkins sat two large pans that collected the blood still dripping down one leg.
“They don’t believe we’re human any longer,” Tabitha said. “Why not? Why not try everything that might work to keep one of their own from changing? If you get it out fast enough, maybe you can stop it, or you make the person bleed to death, but either way, you take care of the problem until it’s not a problem anymore.”
“You say all that like it’s nothing,” Ricker said.
“It’s not nothing,” Tabitha said. “But it’s of no matter to us.”
“You can’t mean that,” I said.
“We won’t be changing their minds. Not you, not me. We’ve enough to do trying to survive them and the rest of the world.”
A shout slapped the walls with its intensity.
Tabitha whirled around and there was a gun in her hand where there had been nothing. Leon, with his full beard and dark shining eyes, appeared in the room with us. “You need to see this.”
She followed him out. Ricker and I followed her.
“Kern said you know Dr. Ferrad has found a cure,” I said. “You actually think these people had a cure.”
She froze mid-step, then continued. “Clearly not. Their little torture room proves otherwise.”
“But you thought they must have it or at least know where. Is that why Leon is here? Because he said he’d seen a cured one? You really—”
“I’ve seen a cured one,” Tabitha said. “A Feeb. Someone who had been a Feeb and now isn’t. Leon lied about seeing one himself, but that doesn’t make it any less true.”
Leon flinched at Tabitha’s words even as he led the way down the tunnel. “I knew one existed. I needed help finding him. People needed convincing.”
“And where is this cured one everyone claims to have seen,” Ricker said. “You’d think he’d be the most well-protected, famous—”
“SHE is out there still. This group of uninfected was hunting her.” Tabitha continued down the snaking tunnel that would soon fit us as snug as a cocoon if it continued to narrow. “They don’t believe once you’ve turned you can be brought back.”
“Maybe they’re right,” I said.
“You expect us to believe all this?” Ricker said. “This bloodbath is simple revenge. A cure would be shouted from the rooftops. There’d be no way to hide it or keep it from everyone.”
“Believe what you want,” Tabitha said. “It doesn’t change the truth.”
“But it does,” Ricker said fiercely. “It does change the truth, and you know it.”
In a small room, almost fully enclosed by rock, dimly lit by smoking torches, several of Tabitha’s people hovered over a table spread with papers and other maps hung on the wall.
I approached the table, expecting for someone to bar my way or tell me to stay back. No one did. The papers were thin, almost like tissue, light blue, with dark blue lines drawn with care, and the paper crinkled at my touch.
The designs felt familiar somehow as if I knew the shapes in real life.
I turned to the maps. These shapes seemed even more familiar. Rivers, valleys, streets, highways. Town and city names, landmarks, waterways. I hadn’t ever used maps in school, before school ended forever. Gabbi and the others had used them all the time as runaways and I’d gotten really good at map reading—often our rescue missions depended on reading a map and knowing how it matched real life.
This was a map of our area—the River City all the way into the Sierras.
“Do you see it?” Tabitha lifted an arm and lightly brushed a finger over a section of map two-thirds of the way from the River City.
I stepped closer and saw faint pencil markings. They sectioned off Dutch Flat, our town. I turned back to the table drawings and pictured our town and the surrounding hills, the back roads that were still passable, the reservoir that contained our water and the little dam that held it all in.
I rifled through the papers. Different angles, different details.
“This group of uninfected was going to take out your water supply,” Tabitha said.
I stood there in shock still trying to make sense of the maps.
“Actually, let me rephrase that,” Tabitha said. “The uninfected ARE going to take it out. The people we fought today, they’re just the ones these Feeb-haters left behind. We’d been following a much larger group. Maybe they’re already on their way.”
Ricker pivoted on the wet stone and ran out. I dashed after him, through the cold, damp tunnel, over the bodies, into the main room. Ricker was talking to Gabbi, throwing his arms around, cutting the air into shapes and punctuation. “And what will they do after they destroy the water supply? Why not burn down the town next? Set fire to our food? Kill anyone they meet along the way?”
“We have to get back!” Gabbi stepped away from Jimmy then back to him.
I knew what she was thinking—we had to leave, we had to go back to Corrina and Ano and Dylan and the others, but how could we keep Jimmy safe too?
“Stop.” I put a light hand on Gabbi’s arm to convince her to stay in place. I knew better than to use any real force to hold her, but she looked ready to jump away like a scared rabbit and disappear into the trees without thinking about what would happen. “Gabbi, we have to get there fast. But if we’re going to have a chance, we have to think about this. Vs are outside, can’t you hear them?”
I paused to let the thumping sounds bleed through.
My mind twisted and turned through the different options. Make a run for it, just the three of us and hope Tabitha would magically take Jimmy under her protection. There was no telling how far ahead the other Feeb-haters were or how many guns they might have. Wait and convince Tabitha to help us save the town, but even if they came, we would be slow, too slow, to make it in time.
“The main group of Feeb-haters is far ahead,” Kern said, limping over. “The group split off days ago and we didn’t have enough people to split ourselves up too.”
“You followed the wrong group!” Gabbi yelled. “You followed the wrong group and now everyone we know is going to die!”
Kern looked about to shoot back a response, but I cut him off.
“We need to find some working vehicles,” I said, barely thinking over this idea as the words came out of my mouth.
Conversation stopped, but I wondered if I was the one who had stopped, if this were a Faint moment that had stalled me. We huddled around Jimmy like he was our life vest. And maybe he was. All of us fought to protect each other. That’s what made everything worth surviving. He was lost now and we would lose each other, one by one, until there was nothing left.
Unless Tabitha was right.
Unless there really was a cure and we could get everyone back.
For the first time in a long time, I allowed myself to hope there might be a chance to fix all of this.
“The Vs will follow us like bees to honey,” Kern said. “All the way back to your town.”
“We should risk it,” Gabbi said. “There are a ton of cars around, we just need a few to work.”
Ricker stood up. “There’s got to be another way out. This can’t be the only entrance, can it?”
“We don’t have a choice.” I forced my voice to fill with a confidence I didn’t actually feel. “We have to try.”
“Even if it kills us?” Kern demanded.
I didn’t need to look at Gabbi and Ricker to know they agreed with me. It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do.
“Even if it kills us all.”