The night was loud. Crickets and frogs called out a chaotic drum session. A type of painted gravel covered the roof and dug into my skin through the blanket. Even though I was warm enough at first, it soon chilled. I slept in fits. The ropes dug into my body in weird ways. I dreamed of Dutch Flat and wondered how my Faints were. I hoped Corrina and Dylan were still okay.
I woke the next morning to the sun and uncurled from between Ricker and Gabbi. She wouldn’t talk to me, but even still had thrown a protective arm over my waist in the night. I didn’t know if she was angry, sad, scared. Probably all of those things at once.
Ricker moaned at the loss of heat and opened his eyes. “What’s on the menu?”
“Hot coffee and French Toast dipped in eggs and cinnamon,” I said, “and real maple syrup.”
“And fresh squeezed orange juice?” He smiled.
“Of course.”
We ate the stale crackers, cheese, and sour water passed around. Hugh untied all of us and we climbed down the fire escape after checking for Vs.
The sinkhole had grown over night, taking out more houses, the entrance to the fairgrounds, and our vehicles.
The drum session hadn’t been the crickets.
Leon cursed. Tabitha whispered something to him. He went silent.
Sergeant Bennings went to the lip of the monster and looked down.
“I hope he falls in,” Gabbi said. They were the first words she had spoken to me since I had called out her full name.
“That’s Alden’s father,” I said.
“That’s the man who imprisoned us, who kept Mary from us, who tried to kill us.” Gabbi’s voice rose in volume with each word until she was practically shouting.
I snatched at her arm. “Lower your voice.”
She jerked away and pushed me up against a fence. The metal chain links scratched my skin.
“Gabbi,” Ricker hissed.
Nobody paid attention to our little drama except for Leon. His gaze stayed steady on Gabbi, flicking only once to me. Gabbi’s fingers pinched my arms. Ricker looked ready to punch her, and Leon, I didn’t know what he would do.
“We need Sergeant Bennings,” I said.
Gabbi snarled. “I don’t NEED anyone. I’ve survived fine without help from anyone like him. Anyone like you.”
Ricker placed a gentle hand on Gabbi’s shoulder. She flinched. Her head turned as if she were about to snap at him. I wanted to throw up. Gabbi couldn’t go V, not now, not with all of them here. She would die. We would watch her die.
“Gabbi, I’m sorry about your name,” I said. “You were standing at the edge. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t want you to die.”
Her voice softened. “Maibe?” She blinked. “It’s just a name. It’s nothing. It’s not anything. You’re one of the only people who has ever cared enough—sometimes you remind me of her.”
Leon stepped closer, blocking us from the sight of Sergeant Bennings and the other uninfected. Something bright glinted in the sun. He unsheathed a knife from his belt. Somehow, he’d kept a weapon from the uninfected. Now he held it out as if ready to use it on Gabbi. Fear shot through me. My heartbeat slammed into my ears, drowning out all sound.
“Mary always cared, even if she was hard on us sometimes. I knew it was because—”
“Gabbi,” I said, my voice low, urgent. I tried to keep the fear out of it because I thought if she could hear that, it would only trip her further into a frenzy. “Remember the cure? Remember Ano and Jimmy? We’re here for them. We’re here and we’re alive and we’re going to find the cure that will bring everyone back and fix all of this.”
Something about Gabbi changed. Her eyes narrowed, her grip became more painful. “You always said we were dead. You said we died as soon as we got infected. What does any of this matter? We’re zombies—that’s what you said. And zombies are supposed to hurt and kill and—”
“Mary’s still out there,” Ricker said, putting a sureness into his words that he couldn’t possibly feel. But then I looked at the blaze in his eyes and thought that maybe he did believe it. I didn’t know Mary, but she was a powerful person to them. She was who this had all started with. She was everything.
“We’re not dead.” My voice caught in my throat. All the movies I’d watched with my uncle tumbled around and overlapped in my brain. Infection. Change. Death. It was my life. It was thick around us. “I was wrong.”
I wasn’t just saying these words to talk her down. I really believed them now. We were alive and I wanted to stay that way.
“We need Sergeant Bennings in order to find Mary. You want to find Mary, right?”
Leon crept closer.
“If he dies,” I said, “How long do you think it will be until Hugh and the others hurt us?”
Her grip on my arm loosened just a little, but it was enough to get her back. She knew I was right.
Leon’s knife flashed in the sky, blinding me.
“No!” I screamed.
Gabbi whirled.
Two figures crashed into Leon. They tumbled to the ground. Dust kicked up and stung my eyes, my mouth, my lungs. Ricker coughed next to me.
Sergeant Bennings and the others ran up.
The dust cleared. Leon was knocked out, knife still in hand, eyes rolled to the whites. Nindal and Bernice held him down.
Gabbi sat on the ground, arms crossed over her chest. She was covered in dust, but she looked unhurt.
“He attacked them,” Bernice said without blinking an eye.
I thought the three of them had teamed up, but now I wasn’t so sure.
Sergeant Bennings took in the scene. He bent over and plucked the knife from Leon’s hand. “Tie them all up again. No more chances.”
We hiked around the sinkhole. The rope rubbed just the right way against my pants that it opened up a fire where the V had bitten me. I gritted my teeth and bore the pain as best I could.
On the other side of the pit we lost several hours until we found enough working vehicles for our group. Once we were bustled into the new cars, the landscape moved by in a blur. We ate up the miles in this flat part of the state. You could almost pretend nothing had happened here because it had always looked abandoned.
We didn’t take I-5, but instead took Jack Tone Road around Stockton, Manteca, Modesto. We avoided the dense population centers. We passed by fields of dead almond trees, grape vines, rows of industrial warehouses, miles of barbed fencing.
Out here, there hadn’t been many people in the first place, and there didn’t seem to be anyone now. When we hit Shiloh Road I began to recognize the scenery. The citrus orchards had died off between now and when I had been here last. Eventually we came to a small rise of a hill that felt a certain way, the paper-thin rattle of dried grass sounded a certain way, the stretch of highway and the now dead trees on the other side looked a certain way.
Sergeant stopped and let all of us stretch our legs. He didn’t want to enter the camp making a bunch of noise. I wandered to the hilltop, my hobble making it awkward.
The rise allowed me to see some of the camp buildings. My breath caught in my throat. Ricker grabbed my hand. I flicked my eyes to him for a moment and then looked away. I’d never told him. I’d never told any of them but they knew. We all fell into the fevers but we never told each other what we learned. Never.
“Those trees,” I said.
“Breathe,” Ricker said.
The orchard, now spindly and transparent and dead, stood between us and the strip of highway. On the other side of the highway was the camp. A slight breeze rustled the dead leaves. Through there I had run and not looked back and had looked back ever since.
“Move, Maibe. You need to move around.” He raised my arm for me and knocked his foot unknowingly against my injured ankle. Shooting pain woke me up.
“Move through it. Move through your practice.”
I breathed deep, brought my hands together above my head, and then leaned over to allow blood to rush to my cheeks. I stood back up and all of it hit me like a train crash.
“Take the medicine.” Ricker held out a steaming cup of liquid. “There were a few bits left. I made it as strong as a could.”
The last of Corrina’s medicine.
How long had I been in the exercises? How long had I been lost if he’d found the time to make tea? My mind rebelled but my mouth opened. Ricker’s face overlaid my visions of the girl and the fence, the father on his knees, the sounds of bullets. I swallowed the tea to keep from choking.
It seemed like only seconds later that my vision cleared. But the sun was at a different angle than I remembered. When I looked down the hillside I saw Sergeant Bennings and his people lounging in the shade of a large metal storage bin. Two played with a deck of cards, others stared listlessly into the heat. Tabitha sat in the shade with her eyes closed, her hands tied together in her lap. Gabbi was in the shade too, away from everyone, staring out into the distance but not really seeing anything.
Then I noticed I sat on the ground, leaning against someone. My legs were outstretched in the dirt, my arms were slick with sweat because I was in the sun. The ropes around my wrists and ankles were dark with my sweat. A breeze increased and helped cool my skin a little. My pant leg had crept up, revealing the angry red of the V bite. I flicked my cuff back over it. But then I thought—why was I hiding it?
I turned around to tell Ricker. I saw bright red skin, like a lobster.
“Ricker!”
“Yes, my love?” he said, not turning around.
“Get in the shade.”
“You first.”
I snatched the bandanna from around my neck and doused it in my remaining bit of water. Hopefully the camp would have more.
“Bend over.” I wrapped the wet cloth gingerly over his burned skin. “Oh, Ricker.”
“It’ll be fine. I want to know how you are.”
“How long was it?”
He paused. “Two hours.”
It had felt like only seconds.
“And Sergeant Bennings waited like it was no big deal? Just waited for me to…come out of it?”
“You’re why we’re all here, Maibe. He believes he doesn’t have a chance of finding Alden without you.”
“And what do you believe?”
But as soon as I asked it, I knew I wasn’t playing fair.
“Ricker, I—”
He shook his head. “It’s okay. Forget it.”
I held my hand out. He took it and I helped him up, his warmth comforting me more than I thought it should. The wind turned the dust that coated my clothing into a cloud around us. I looked over the landscape. Flat, yellow, the air so hot it distorted shapes, making everything swim.
I grabbed Ricker’s arm.
“Maibe!” he said, alarm in his voice.
I dug my fingers deeper into his skin.
“You can’t go V. It doesn’t make—”
“Smoke!” I shouted.
The orchard was dead. We were surrounded by a field of sticks and leaf litter that had been drying out for three years.
The wind shifted, grew in power. Out in the middle of the orchard, the smoke darkened and thickened like a tornado. Orange flames sprang to life and licked at the sky. Ash began to rain down like snowflakes.
Sergeant Bennings yelled for everyone to get on their feet.
The camp was just on the other side of the freeway, but the fire blocked us from the cars.
The orchard went up in flames like something out of a movie. My brain felt fogged, thick with fear and a headache. I couldn’t remember the name of the movie.
Tabitha shouted something about our ropes, but the uninfected had run off.
Ricker and I hobbled down the hill.
Suddenly Tabitha was next to me. She pushed me forward. “Run!”
I stumbled and landed chin first on the ground. I gulped air and got smoke instead. My wrists strained against the rope. Sweat coated my hands, making them slippery, but the ropes were still too tight. I scrambled back onto my feet. Gabbi was tearing at the ropes with her teeth.
I couldn’t find Ricker.
“Rick—” My throat felt like it broke apart on the smoke. Ash stung my eyes, making them tear. Nindal was on his knees next to a tree. His hair was like a smudge of charcoal against the trunk. I stumbled over to him, coughing and tripping on the ropes around my ankles.
“Get up!” I screamed this in Nindal’s ear. He turned to me. His eyes were bloodshot. They looked empty, so empty.
I blinked. His brown eyes were bloodshot from the smoke. Tears tracked dirt down his cheeks. Ash had gotten caught in his dark eyebrows, turning them white. I used my shoulder and elbow to lift him off the ground.
“Come on.” The orange light grew brighter around us. I didn’t know how we would make it out hobbled together, only that we had to try.
Hugh ran past. I shouted for help, but he didn’t pause. Then Sergeant Bennings appeared and slashed through our ropes. He pushed me forward and linked his shoulder under Nindal’s. This knocked his face shield sideways, revealing sharp blue eyes and a mouth locked in a grimace that showed his teeth.
“Run, you stupid girl.”
To my left, the flames danced along the tops of branches, like water pinging down a riverbed, but this was fire and wood. I ran through the trees. A figure came up behind me and for a moment it was Alden but then I blinked him away. Suddenly Ricker shouted at Tabitha. Gabbi was at his side.
“Where’s Maibe?”
Tabitha ignored him and limped along, as if having twisted an ankle. The uninfected were far ahead now, almost to the stretch of freeway that would serve as a fire break, if we were lucky. Except for Sergeant Bennings, the other uninfected had abandoned us to our ropes and the fire.
“I saw her,” Gabbi said. “I saw her ahead.”
“It was a ghost, Gabbi,” Ricker said. “She wasn’t there. I didn’t see her.”
I stumbled up to them. Tabitha’s hair was full of twigs. Ash coated everyone’s skin making them look more zombie-like than ever.
“I’m here.”
“I see her.” Ricker shook Gabbi by the shoulders. “Do you see her? Do you see her?”
Gabbi pushed him back. He fell onto the ground.
“I see her, idiot. Let’s go.”
Tabitha had kept walking. We caught up and passed her by. The freeway was a football field away. The fire was so hot and was no longer at our backs. It had swept ahead of us. It was curling through the trees as if it planned to cup us into its hands.
We could make it if we ran.
There was a shout behind me.
I looked over my shoulder. Tabitha had fallen.
Gabbi snatched at my arm. “Leave her!”
I shook her off and ran back. Ricker was close at my heels. We lifted Tabitha up between the two of us.
Gabbi appeared, chest heaving, hair wild and ashy, eyes dangerous. We took a step with Tabitha between us, but she moaned and went limp.
Gabbi cursed loud and long. She grabbed up Tabitha’s legs. The three of us carried her through the orchard. Sparks floated in the air—California’s version of the glow bug. One landed on my bare arm. It burned the hair, creating a stink that made me gag and a painful burning that left a dark mark on my skin. More orange sparks floated by, following different currents. They landed on our hair, our faces, our clothes, our skin.
Our feet touched the asphalt road. Seconds later, Sergeant Bennings and Nindal tumbled out next to us.
The sparks floated like a cloud of locusts in the sky. They drifted across the four-lane freeway, some tumbling to their death on the asphalt, but most—most caught air that brought them into the waist-high, yellowed grass on the other side.
The grass began to smoke.