Sergeant Bennings escorted me to my old hotel room. Ricker and Gabbi had protested leaving me alone with him, but they had guns and we did not. I still had not puzzled out why he was here. They had Jane. If she didn’t remember where to find the cure there was nothing we could do to fix that. His remark about farming made me think this was about food but there were still plenty of places to scavenge.
I was allowed to gather a few things, some clothes, some personal items. They were moving all the Feebs out to make room for the uninfected.
He watched me like I was a criminal. Maybe I was. Maybe I had always been one in some form or another. I pulled a bag from the closet and began packing.
“Do you know where he is?”
I stopped. I knew who he was talking about. I pretended not to know. “Who?”
“Alden’s been missing for months now. I came here because I thought he’d be here. Because of you.”
“He knew I was here. He’s come here before. It—”
“He’s been here before? He knew where this place was all this time?”
I saw it was too late to take back my words so I didn’t. “Yes.”
“I cannot believe… Do you know where he is?”
“I do not.” I resumed my packing. Lesa would want her favorite shirt with a picture of Dolly the Fish on it. The colors always seemed to register in her eyes.
I was going to wait him out. I was going to keep what little power was left to me and make him ask whatever it was he was trying to ask.
“How often did he come here?”
That wasn’t what he really wanted to know, but I answered it anyway, letting him stall. “Once every couple of months. But sometimes I went to meet him.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“What did you talk about? What did he say?”
The longing in his voice spoke more than his actual words. He didn’t care about what we had talked about. He cared that his son had done all this behind his back, that he’d lost his son a long time ago.
“We traded information, sometimes supplies, sometimes—”
“—I see.” His mouth snapped shut.
I zipped up one bag and grabbed a second one, then began filling it with supplies from the kitchen. Cans of food, the fruit we had just picked. The leftover oatmeal. My ankle bumped against a table leg. Pain shot through my body, making me stiffen. I had forgotten about my injury once it had dulled to a low throb, but now it screamed at me.
“I need your help.” He turned his back to me and began to rifle through a shelf of books as if embarrassed by this confession. “I need you to help me find my son.”
I stopped packing and curled up the leg of my pants. Spots of blood covered it. Part of the cloth was torn.
My fingers froze as I revealed the skin. I began to shake. This didn’t make any sense.
Sergeant Bennings picked up a book, flipped its pages, returned it to the shelf. “But how can I even trust that you will find him?”
I stared at my skin, at the puckered flesh, at the indents that formed an irregular oval.
The bite had broken the skin.
The bite had made me bleed.
The bite had been from a V.
Sergeant Bennings sighed, rifled through his pockets, and pulled out a small journal.
Why wasn’t I trapped in the fevers like Ano and Kern? I dropped my pant leg down to hide the wound. Maybe it was Corrina’s tea. I didn’t think I’d felt anything from it, but maybe that was the point. Maybe that’s how it worked.
But a little voice inside me whispered that this wasn’t a very good lie. Ano had gone into the fevers minutes after getting bit. So had Kern.
Ricker and I hadn’t made the tea until hours after I’d been bit.
Sergeant Bennings set the journal on the dining table and stepped back.
I tried to hide the shaking in my hands as I opened the journal.
I stared. My name was scrawled all over it. Again and again, in cursive, in block letters, in big capitals and tiny swirls. There were drawings too, notes, little maps with markers.
Alden’s handwriting.
I rifled through the pages, they were as if from a mind gone crazy. Most of it didn’t make sense. In the center of one page there was a crude map. This map had been circled by a pencil so many times the marks formed a dark ring, making the paper fragile and smooth.
I recognized the drawing.
It was of a camp. We’d been sitting on a ledge above it. It was where I had tried to kiss Alden once. It was where the Garcia family had been murdered.
Someone had drawn an arrow through the circle, pointing to the camp. In dark, blocky letters, the arrow's label said:
Cure?