We left the foothills and stopped in a town. The brown sign called it Plymouth, population 861.
We stopped because there was no more road. A sinkhole had taken out houses all the way to the base of this sloped hill of yellow grassland dotted with oak trees and crumbling tombs from an old cemetery. On the other side of the road, the pit had sheared a former elementary school in half. One of the classrooms spilled out its insides of desks, books, and papers like a waterfall frozen in time. The sinkhole stopped at the entrance to a large sign that read “Amador County Fair Grounds.”
We needed to turn back and find a way around it. Instead, Sergeant Bennings ordered everyone out of the cars. Sweat poured down my face and arms. My clothes stunk. I didn’t want to think about the cemetery or the school or the fairgrounds or the sinkhole consuming all of it. Instead I focused on how the skin on their uninfected necks was so smooth, so different from ours.
Hugh dug his rifle point into my back. He motioned me, Gabbi, and Ricker forward. Two other uninfected escorted Kern, Tabitha, and the rest of us Feebs.
I struggled at each step. School had never been a good place for Ricker or Gabbi—for any of the runaways. But I missed going to school. I missed books and learning new things. I missed how the yard duty lady always smiled at me. Alden and I had gone to the same school for sixth grade. We had no classes together, but I had noticed him. He never noticed me. Not back then.
Hugh pushed us on until the road turned into crumbling dirt, splintered wood, broken glass, and twisted metal pipes.
I looked down and it felt like I looked inside the half-digested contents of the belly of a monster. This monster growled as if hungry for more. Debris shifted and groaned. A classroom desk slipped over the edge and tumbled into the darkness.
Soon the sinkhole would eat the entire school. Next it would consume the fairgrounds, the rest of the houses, and then the cemetery at the top of the hill.
The memories shouted at me—the Cal Expo fairgrounds that Sergeant Bennings had turned into a prison camp with human experiments. The high school where we’d lost Corrina and Gabbi and I thought I would die of dehydration while trapped on a rooftop by a mob of Vs.
But those were the easier ones to remember. The memory underneath, the one like the belly of this monster that rumbled with hunger pains as beams shifted, and glass tinkled, and dirt resettled—that one had the shape of a stone like those dotting the hill. This stone was pockmarked, pale, and engraved in Arabic script with the name of my mother.
I turned from those thoughts with all the force I possessed. My breath hiccuped. I slowed it down—five seconds to breathe out, five seconds to breathe in.
A voice behind me said, “Company.”
The Vs came out of the fairground entrance like a group of cats that had found an interesting scent trail. One fell into the chasm while shrieking her outrage. Dark dots shifted on the hillside. People stood up and began to wander among the tombstones.
Sergeant Bennings signaled. Instead of heading back to the cars, his people shifted on their heels, pulled out knives, machetes, swords, bats. No guns. He wanted to fight it out, but with as little noise as possible. I thought he was crazy. They were all crazy for not running from this.
The Vs from the fairgrounds skirted the edge of the sinkhole. Different ages, different clothes, different genders and ethnicities, but all had something in common. They had a decent amount of weight on them, not the gaunt, practically starving look of Vs who couldn’t remember to eat or bathe or how to use the bathroom anymore. They had few injuries among them. Their clothing was threadbare, but mostly intact.
Something about their skin caught my attention.
Was that—
“That’s Feeb skin!” I said far too loud.
“Quiet.” Hugh smashed the butt of his rifle into my side, knocking the breath out of me.
Ricker pushed Hugh back so hard it dropped him to the dirt. Hugh swung a leg out and sent Ricker face first into the dirt. The sinkhole rumbled deep below.
Gabbi stood at the edge of the sinkhole, staring, nothing but air under the front half of her shoes.
One of the uninfected went down in a series of grunts and wrestling holds with the first V. Another cut a V down by slicing her between the shoulder and neck. Blood sprayed the air and splattered their face shields.
People grunted, cried out, lashed out.
Ricker was still on the ground, his chest heaving. He’d gotten the breath knocked out of him. One of the Vs dove for him. I threw myself at the V even as Hugh delivered a vicious kick into Ricker’s side.
I barreled into the V’s warmth, into his musky stink, and landed hard on my injured leg. The ground seemed to slip away from me. My feet lost their hold and felt like they dangled in the air. I dug my fingers into the dirt but it crumbled. My stomach flipped and I tasted acid in my throat. I was eye level with the fighting now. A dozen legs twisting, stumbling, falling, smacking, grunting. The sucking noises of knife wounds. Gabbi still stood on the edge of the abyss as if the fighting around her didn’t exist. Her face had glazed over, her hands reached out for something that wasn’t there.
I shouted the name she only revealed while deep in the fevers. The name none of us were supposed to know. “Cecelia Gabriela Vergara Ortiz!”
She flinched.
I shouted her full name again.
My hands slipped more.
The belly of the monster waited below. I couldn’t make out the bottom, only the remains of the house—jagged, sharp, dangerous.
Hands grabbed mine. Ricker’s face filled my vision, his expression twisted, his eyes holding a terrible light.
I flew into the air, my body weightless, my stomach turning over on itself. I landed on my side in the dust that painted everything with a blurry golden glow. The V that had jumped for Ricker tackled Jane. He clawed at her as if he were a dog digging for a bone.
Jane’s knife flashed out but then dropped from her hand. I scrambled up, ignoring the screaming pain in my ankle, ignoring the terrible light I’d seen in Ricker’s eyes. I picked up the knife and drove it into the V’s skull. There was a crunch, and a slick, squishy, slurp. The sounds made me gag. The V went limp.
I spit out the acid in my mouth but more returned.
If we had the cure already, I might have saved him.
Gabbi backed away from the edge of the sinkhole. The Vs were dead. Blood spattered every face, every shield, every piece of clothing. A guy cradled his left arm while sitting in the dirt. An almost perfect circle of bites leaked blood onto the dirt.
One of Sergeant Bennings team had been injured—bitten. Infected.
The fight was over, but not for long. The dark figures among the tombstones were coming down the hillside.
“Cut it off, Eddy,” the injured man said to the man holding a machete. “Do it now, before it spreads.”
“But what if we find the cure?” Eddy said. “We could heal you.”
“What if we never find it? Cut it off.”
Eddy looked at Sergeant Bennings. Instead of answering, Sergeant Bennings examined the hillside of moving dots. He rested a hand on his gun holster.
“Put a stick in my mouth. Knock me unconscious first. Whatever it takes, just, just do it now…please.”
“It’s not that bad,” Kern said. “It’s not fun, but you’ll live—”
“Shut up.” The injured man had gone a weird gray under his brown skin. He extended his arm on the ground. In a muffled voice, he said, “Do it now.”
Eddy held out the machete as if it were a snake about to bite him. He lowered it. “I can’t. I just—”
Ricker snatched the machete out of his hand. Before anyone could stop him, he swung the blade over his head and sliced through the arm at the elbow. Blood squirted. The arm dropped onto the dirt. The man screamed and then fell unconscious.
Hugh raised his gun and locked it on Ricker’s face. Kern whipped off his belt and knelt to strap it to the wound. The blood slowed into beads of red that bubbled and dripped on the ground.
Sergeant Bennings stepped forward and pointed a second gun at Ricker’s head. Ricker dropped the bloody machete. I held my breath and silently pleaded with Ricker to not move another muscle.
“What the hell did you just do?” Hugh said.
“What you couldn’t,” Ricker said, his voice sounding normal. “I helped him stay uninfected.”
“You made him trade one kind of infection for another,” Sergeant Bennings said.
“Someone should take him back to our town,” Ricker said. “They’ll help him in the hospital. They’ve got supplies.”
“Not antibiotics,” I said, unable to keep my mouth closed, my stomach sick at what I'd just seen.
“Not antibiotics,” Ricker agreed, “but other things might help.”
Sergeant Bennings nodded to Eddy. “You take him back.” He flicked his eyes over Ricker. “You may have just saved his life.”
That was as close to a thank you as I’d ever imagined hearing come out of Sergeant Benning’s mouth. All because a man would rather lose an arm than become a Feeb like us.
“We should go back too,” Kern said.
Sergeant Bennings holstered his gun. A muscle on his neck twitched. He looked over the hillside and the sinkhole. “We’re not going back until I find my son.”
Sergeant Bennings led the way. His people followed even though his decisions might get all of us killed. I fell in behind Gabbi. She didn’t acknowledge me. I had revealed something I’d learned about her in the fevers. I had broken our code, even though it had saved her life.
Ricker came up behind me and I thought about jumping away if he attacked me.
If Ricker attacked me.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around this.
Ricker looked at me sideways. “Don’t be scared, Maibe. Not yet, at least. I’m still okay.”
There was such a note of longing in his voice, my confusion almost stopped me in my tracks.
I felt the tease of Fainthood whispering at the edges of my brain. If I let it take over I wouldn’t have to think about any of this. It would all go away and I would feel so much better remembering only the good things.
My throbbing ankle brought me back. I walked faster, trying to banish it all away. Ricker increased his pace to match mine.
We explored the fairgrounds until we found a two-story warehouse with a fire escape. Sergeant Bennings sent in us Feebs to search the building for Vs. He decided we would stay on the roof for the night and let any Vs in the area move on. We’d find a way around the sinkhole in the morning.
Once on the rooftop, they built a small fire. Pink, orange, and gray streaked the sky during the sunset. No trees interrupted the view this high up. It was as if we had entered a painting. Yet there was this imaginary line that separated Ricker, me, Gabbi, and the other Feebs from the uninfected.
They gave us some blankets and made us set up on the far side of the roof from them, as if breathing the same few inches of air was too much. For a long time, Sergeant Bennings stood at the edge looking out at the brilliant light and the destruction below.
Tabitha sat away from all of us. She was cross-legged, her hands resting on her knees, her back straight. She looked like a picture of calm meditation. As if she were thinking about all the ways she could help the world instead of hurt it.
Most of the other Feebs worked on our own little fire and passed around whatever food they’d escaped with from the cars.
Gabbi was at the other corner of the roof as far away from us as possible.
Ricker sat next to me and I wondered how close I should get to him and what nightmares the darkness might bring him and how I would protect him from the others if he did lose control.
I bit my lip and moved my blanket closer to his. “Hi.”
Ricker looked at me, evaluating my hello as if it held a deeper question.
Of course it did.
He talked softly, as if I were the wild animal that needed soothing instead of the other way around. “Sergeant Bennings was going for his gun. His whole body was going tense. He had this mean stare he was giving the guy like he was a rabid dog that needed to be put down for his own good.”
“He’s right,” Kern said. He stood several feet away. I realized he stood halfway between Tabitha and Gabbi. Unsure or unwilling to go to one over the other. “I saw it too.”
I tilted my head, trying to think over the scene. I’d only had eyes for the machete and Ricker. I hadn’t seen Sergeant Bennings or paid attention to what he had been doing.
“Didn’t you see Sergeant’s gun?” Ricker said. “He was ready to kill the guy for getting bit. For getting infected.”
“But we’re going after the cure,” I said, remembering the disturbing light in Ricker’s eyes. I also remembered how Sergeant Bennings had placed his hand on his holster. I thought he’d been focused on the hillside of Vs. “He believes the cure exists. He’s going after it. It doesn’t make sense.”
“He was about to kill him for having gotten infected,” Ricker said. “I had to do something. You believe me, right?”
“I believe you.” Although I wasn’t sure I did. But I didn’t NOT believe him either.
Ricker squinted at me.
“I believe you. I do.” This time I said it with more conviction.
Hugh crossed the imaginary line on the roof while slapping on a pair of blue surgical gloves. Two other uninfected walked on either side of him, guns ready. Hugh went over to Gabbi.
I stood up.
She turned her head. Her short hair was plastered to her skin. There was a wild look in her eyes.
I took a step. Kern grabbed my wrist. “Let her be.”
I shook him off. He didn’t know Gabbi very well if he thought letting her deal with someone like Hugh alone would work.
“Put your hands together,” Hugh said. “In front of you. Ankles too.”
“What are you going to do?” I called out.
One of the guns swiveled in my direction. The other stayed trained on Gabbi.
“You’re to be tied up for the night so you can’t escape—or worse.”
“Or worse?” I said.
“Infect us,” Hugh said, not taking his eyes off Gabbi as he answered me. “Pull another stunt like you all did today while we’re sleeping and can’t defend ourselves.”
“We’re not criminals,” I said.
“Depends on whose point of view you take,” he said.
Gabbi didn’t move. I thought if she did move, it would be an explosion and we’d all die from the blast.
“Right.” I held out my hands. “Go for it. Tie away. Whatever.”
Hugh left Gabbi and used simple rope around my hands and ankles, then he did the same to Ricker. Next came Kern and the other Feebs.
Gabbi was the only one left untied. They had all the weapons. We had nothing. Gabbi held out her hands while staring steadily at Hugh. He kept breaking the stare and fumbling with the rope. When he finally finished the three uninfected hurried back to their side.
“That’s it?” I said.
“He can’t believe this will hold us for long,” Ricker said.
Hugh returned with a gun and a steaming packet of food. He sat cross-legged on the ground.
“What are you doing?” Ricker said.
“First watch,” Hugh said.