“The cure is back there,” Tabitha said. “You can’t just leave it with them.”
“There is no cure,” Alden said, speaking his first words since waking up. His voice sounded hoarse. Dark purple circled his eyes. His blond hair kept falling into his face. Tabitha stared at him like he was a snake that had just slithered onto the path.
“We can’t go home,” I said.
Alden and Gabbi turned to look at me. Now I felt like the snake. I stepped to the edge of the road. It went for miles in either direction. Below us was the water on one side and the facility on the other. The trees blocked a clear sight line, but the tops of the buildings were still visible. In there was the machine that made the cure possible. In there, Dr. Ferrad took a life for a life.
Gabbi turned away from me. She kicked at a rock that flew off the road and disappeared into the water. “Maybe we just leave and don’t come back.”
“Gabbi’s right,” Ricker said. “We run away. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re still alive when everyone else is dead.”
“Don’t you understand?” I said. “There’s no running away from this. We’ll be no better than them if—”
“We aren’t killing people for no reason,” Ricker said, anger flaring in his voice. He stood apart from us. We all stood apart from each other like we couldn’t bear being closer. “Don’t compare us to them. You know it’s nothing close. We have to watch out for ourselves. No one else is going to do it.”
“The right thing to do—”
“The right thing to do is survive,” Gabbi said.
My thoughts swirled. They didn’t understand. I thought at least—
“Alden? You get it, don’t you?”
Alden stilled. He was bent over, his hands on his jeans. The fabric had torn at the knees and his skin was bloody underneath. Mud covered his clothes and face and hair, some of it drying into a lighter brown. We were all covered in drying mud. Gray ash covered his blond hair. The Feeb marks on his skin—the veins, the wrinkles, the dry texture—were almost all gone.
“What are you saying?” Tabitha said. “You would destroy any chance—all the research, all the testing? What hope would Kern have? What hope would any of us have?”
“And who would you choose to die so that you could be cured?” I said.
Alden flinched as if my words were meant for him. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t the same. He had been forced. He hadn’t known what was happening.
“Dr. Ferrad is trying to refine it, I’m sure.” Tabitha’s face was pale. “It requires a life now, but later—”
“We need to wrap your shoulder,” Ricker said quietly.
“Let her bleed!” Gabbi whirled around. Her eyes flashed and her body was rigid.
Tabitha flinched.
“This is your fault,” Gabbi said, taking out all her mixed up emotions on Tabitha. “Since the beginning, you’ve lied, you’ve planned, you’ve ruined—”
“They’re the ones lying to you.” She held her shoulder at an angle like she was in a great deal of pain. Blood soaked through her shirt creating this huge wet patch of red. “We worked in the same building at the beginning. Soldier, doctor, manager. They never thought that highly of me—Dr. Ferrad and Sergeant Bennings. I represented paperwork, regulations, procedures. When my son and I got infected because of THEIR scientific negligence, that’s when we finally became interesting to them. They considered exterminating us to cover everything up.” Tabitha slumped to the ground. “Except your friend there got infected. Then she infected the rest of your group and they couldn’t contain it. So they went to Plan B—the camps.”
As Tabitha talked she swayed almost in time to Mary’s rocking. Her words became breathy, like she couldn’t get her vocal cords to work right. I thought maybe she was about to fall into the fevers after all. She had lost a lot of blood. Even from here I could see the V bite had created a jagged wound that had torn her skin to shreds. It wasn’t the fevers we had to worry about with her but the blood loss.
“We need to clean this,” Ricker said.
The water was right there, but we had no containers.
I looked at Gabbi so she would know it didn’t matter what she said back to me. “Gabbi, help us move her to the water.”
Ricker and I lifted Tabitha to her feet. She swayed in my direction and suddenly her weight was all on me. I stumbled and fell to one knee. My ankle and wrist burned. My muscles ached. I didn’t have the strength to get us back up even as Ricker tried to pull her off. I wondered if maybe they were right. Maybe they were all right. We should run as far from this place as we could. We should go to whatever home remained with the time we had left.
Gabbi stepped in and hooked Tabitha’s shoulder over her neck. With the weight lifted I was able to stand and help them limp Tabitha down to the water.
“Why did you let yourself get attacked.” Gabbi said this like it was an accusation, like Tabitha must have some terrible motive.
I had learned a long time ago that Gabbi did and said things she later regretted. We couldn’t unlearn what the fevers revealed about one another, we could only protect it from each other as best we could. I knew Gabbi was trying.
“If I die.” Tabitha took a step that twisted her shoulder. Her breath hitched. “If I die, promise me that you will help Kern.”
Gabbi didn’t respond for the longest time. I thought maybe she wasn’t going to. Finally Gabbi nodded. “You know I will.”
We stepped down the hill, slipping a few times. This forced out a cry of pain each time from Tabitha. Alden stayed on the road with Mary. There was so much infected blood on Tabitha after all and he was now uninfected.
Ghosts appeared in place of Ricker, Gabbi, Tabitha. I knew they were ghosts this time because they appeared with this faint silver edge, like my eyes couldn’t quite bring them into focus.
It was Jane and Corrina and Mark.
Corrina had demanded I hand her a water bottle to help clean Mark’s wounds. I’d been uninfected then. We had just lost Dylan, though we didn’t know it was to Sergeant Bennings at the time. Mark was already a Feeb and the V bite he had suffered in the fight was throwing him back into the memory-fevers. Though we didn’t know any of that either.
I stood at the river’s edge and watched the water slowly move by even as Corrina bent to wash Mark’s wound. I knew it was the ghost-memories overlapping with the present. Mark had looked so sick, so not right. Corrina and Jane had worked on him like that didn’t matter.
I’d been so afraid. That fear struck me again now, making my heart pound so that it drowned out the sounds of water and Tabitha’s yelps of pain. I’d been grieving for my uncle. I watched him die under an onslaught of Vs, in the room where we would close the blinds and make popcorn that filled the air with delicious smells of butter and salt, in the room where we watched marathons of apocalypse and zombie movies.
He would hook an arm around my shoulder during the scariest parts and say things like, “I guess our lives aren’t so bad. We’ve still got all our teeth,” or, “I give you permission to cut class if you ever see a bucket full of blood,” or, shaking his head at a particularly stupid move a character made, “You are so much smarter than them, Maibe. Life is tough, but you’re tougher.” He’d pop another movie in and we’d start again and whatever was bothering me would fade away for a little while because whatever it was, it wasn’t THAT bad, not compared to zombies.
He had died saving me and I hadn’t stopped it. I had frozen behind the couch. We’d been watching Shaun of the Dead and laughing and laughing and the Vs had burst through. We knew it was coming. We had planned and prepared and been listening to the police scanner. We were leaving the next morning, but it hadn’t been soon enough.
He died because I had frozen. He died because I was too scared to do what needed to be done. He had died and I missed him and all I wanted was to eat some popcorn with him again and just sit with him. I wanted to sit next to him on the couch and hear the faint buzz of the DVD player spinning up. My uncle would be alive and I would be taken care of and I would be loved.
This terrible pain gnawed at my heart and made me want to sit cross-legged at the edge of the water and add my tears to the river. I wanted that feeling suddenly, the stone feeling. I wanted to feel like a Faint, just for a moment, if it meant the hurt over my uncle would stop for a little while. I wanted to become like the water that passed by, unconcerned with the fire and death and destruction around it. The water moved over the stones and soil like it always had. The water found ways around and through things like fences and gates. The water would make everything go away.
A tree branch floated by. A section of leaves not touching the water smoldered with orange light.
I did not turn into a stone.
It had always come when I didn’t want it, and now that I begged my brain to bring it, there was nothing.
Except.
My uncle always believed I was the hero of my own story. He believed in me even when I hadn’t.
I knew, I just knew, what my uncle would want me to do.
Tabitha’s shoulder was cleaned as best as we could. Our clothes were soaked now, but it didn’t matter. The air was so hot, it would all dry soon enough.
I stood up on the edge of the river. The mud squished under my shoes. The road held back the water. There was another road on the other side of the river, toward the fire, that held the water back from flooding the fields on that side.
“We can’t run away anymore. We have to do the right thing, even if it brings the sky crashing down on us. Even if it destroys our only chance forever. Even if it means I do this alone.”
I waved my bandaged hand back up the levee road, to the fence and trees.
“I have to destroy that machine.”