They killed Leaf.
We left him behind. Dead on a stage. Blood spreading away from the hole in his chest.
He saved Corrina and Dylan but not himself.
Spencer should have never let him come with us. Spencer should have known better.
I put down the pen and paper because it was too painful to keep writing. I don’t even know why I did it, except that Mary had always done this with her blog posts. We’d hidden ourselves away in a warehouse later converted into a bar. All the alcohol was either missing or smashed. Thick dust layered the bar counter. A grungy claw-foot bathtub had been dumped at some point in a corner.
I helped Ano drag the tub into the middle of the two-story space and we put Ricker inside of it. Ano found a bunch of rope and I helped him tie Ricker’s hands and legs. We took turns staying with him through the fevers. We’d promised each other to never let one of us go through it alone. It helped to wake up to a face you knew wasn’t going to hurt you no matter what the fever made you relive.
The camp battle sounds had finally faded into silence. We’d made a pile out of broken chair legs and set it on fire. The flames made shadows dance across faces covered in smoke, blood, mud, afflicted skin.
Maibe was here. Her body hunched, her knees pulled into her chest, her face cast toward the ground as she sat against Ricker’s bathtub. She scratched a bug bite on her wrist as an afterthought. Jimmy had his injured arm propped on her shoulder. He stared with vacant eyes into the flames.
Corrina and Dylan were missing. We had not saved any of the other Feebs but we had gotten a lot of people killed.
Spencer was somewhere nearby.
No one dared search for him. I had never seen that mixture of grief and hate and self-disgust on him before, not even when we’d lost Mary. Not even when he’d discovered some particularly gruesome act a pimp had demanded of a kid or when we’d stumbled across a dead body swollen beyond recognition in the creek.
Jimmy’s squinting eyes shifted to me every few seconds, waiting for me to do something. With Leaf dead and Spencer absent, they expected me to take up the mantle, to be responsible for them, to tell them what would keep them safe and alive and relatively warm for another night. Except I had no idea what to do.
“Gabbi, is there any food?” Jimmy whispered across the firelight.
I grabbed a granola bar out of my pack and threw it across the fire into his lap.
“Thanks.”
“There’s water too,” I said. Whoever had taken the alcohol hadn’t cared about the shelf of bottled water or the pen and papers next to it. I stood up and passed out the bottles. “We should move on soon. Get as far away as possible from this whole mess.”
“We should go back to the boxcar,” Jimmy said. “Go back to what we know.”
Ano cocked his head, not quite disagreeing but not agreeing either. The boxcar had been our home after we’d been ‘cured’ and escaped Sergeant Bennings—before the rest of the city had fallen apart.
“We should run,” I said. “You always run, Jimmy.” I looked to Ano for agreement.
“But what about Mary? I thought you said she was coming back?” Jimmy said.
Ano winced.
I closed my eyes. All of me wanted to run, but I couldn’t just leave the message I’d scratched into the wall—Mary, we’ll back. She would wait for us and it would be my fault that we never came back for her.
Ricker shouted out something about his brother.
“We can’t do anything until Ricker is out of the fevers,” Ano said finally.
A door squeaked open and feet shuffled along the ground. I tensed and looked at Ano across the fire. He held himself like a statue. At first whoever it was blended into the darkness, but then slowly took shape as it approached the fire. Spencer had returned. He went over to the water bottles. Ano relaxed.
“It’ll be light in another couple of hours,” I said. “That’s when I think we should go back to the boxcar to leave a message for Mary.”
“There’s no point,” Spencer said, his voice cracking.
“What if Mary’s come back?” I said.
“Mary isn’t coming back,” Spencer said, not looking at me.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
Something about how he said it felt off. “You know something,” I stood up. “What do you know?”
“I saw her. During one of the experiments. She’s in their V cages.”
“What did you say?” Ano shot up to stand next to me.
“If it was her.” Spencer brushed a hand across his face. “I couldn’t get close enough to be sure, but if it was her, she’s all V now.”
Fury rose up in me then, a small wave of it that grew bigger and threatened to crash into the sand and drag me under. “We should never have gone back for Corrina, what were you thinking, Spencer?”
Jimmy scooted back. Maibe stayed frozen in her cross-legged position against the tub.
Spencer took another drink of water, his presence looming over us. His seventeen years and experience on the street made him so much older than the rest of us. He was supposed to know what was best and tell us what to do and we’d just listen like we’d always done. Like we’d done with Mary, and going into the fairgrounds in the first place, and then going back for the other Feebs. All of that had turned out wrong.
A sick feeling swelled in my chest. Spencer couldn’t be trusted anymore. I backed away from the warmth of the fire. Cold immediately slid down my spine. “Mary’s gone because you told us not to run.”
Spencer flinched, but I kept going.
“You all got captured, because you told us not to run.”
Spencer didn’t move this time.
I clenched my fists. “Leaf is dead. Because you told us. Not. To. Run.”
Spencer’s mouth turned into a snarl, but not a sound came out.
Jimmy was wide-eyed. Even Ano looked surprised. Maibe stared into the fire as if she couldn’t hear anything.
“It’s time to run, Spencer. We aren’t heroes here. We’re nobodies. We’re the stray dogs people throw out onto the street when they no longer want to bother with them. We’re the weeds people spread poison over. But we don’t die, we stay alive. We stay alive because we run away. We. Run. Away.” I lifted my hands in supplication and then forced them down to my sides. I didn’t beg. I would never beg. To hell with him.
He turned and his nose stood out in profile, his hair like a clown wig, casting cross-hatched shadows on the wall behind him.
Ano coughed. “We should run.”
“We should run,” Jimmy said.
Ricker moaned in the fevers, but I knew he would have agreed with us.
I looked at Maibe and her pink sweatshirt drying at her feet. Her hair stood out in all directions like Spencer’s. She opened her mouth and I waited to hear her vote.
“All right,” Spencer said, almost in a whisper.
Maibe closed her mouth and put her forehead to her knees, hiding her face.
“All right, what?” I said.
“We’ll run.”