Old Bully was propped against the side of the boxcar. I’d never been so glad to see its tricycle wheels and snowplow-like attachment, even if it was spattered with V blood. They must have escaped and gone back for the bikes they’d abandoned when they had first rushed the fence. When Maibe and I had run for the van. When Leaf had still been alive and unhurt.
It was a reunion, but things had changed. The relief I’d felt, digging through the ceiling to discover them, that was there, in the background, but mostly I felt nothing other than a claustrophobic fear that made my throat choke up. We needed to leave. Every minute we stayed was more time for them to gather and cut off any escape. My message, scratched into the boxcar for Mary, stared at me as if somehow Mary would know what I had just done, that I had left behind someone who needed help. But I told myself she would have understood.
Ano rested a hand on my shoulder. He looked at the message and then back at me. “We have to keep going,” he said.
“I know,” I shrugged him off. It’s what we had tried to do with Mary, what we had done so many times before—when the situation got too weird, we left. We jumped a train, took a bus, hitchhiked out. This was both the same and different. We didn’t know which way to go or where.
“We should take the freeway out of here,” Ricker said.
“We could go deeper into the valley,” Ano said.
Spencer said nothing and I almost didn’t notice anymore.
I stood up and walked a few steps away. This was a stupid place. The river was a bunch of dirty ice water. The field was dotted with trouble coming our way. It was too close to Sergeant Bennings. This was where Mary and Leaf had died and it was time to get the hell out of dodge.
“We should go to Dutch Flat,” I said. Was there something rustling in that bush? My hand automatically went to unsling the crossbow but it wasn’t there anymore. I touched the bat instead and hoped it would be enough.
It was only a rabbit, its cottontail a white flash as it jumped away. I didn’t relax.
“Where’s that?” Jimmy said.
Dylan moaned from where we’d laid him out on the ground.
“Ask him,” I said. He’d been in the fevers for hours now. He’d come out of it soon, for a little while, if his infection followed the same pattern ours had followed.
“Gabbi,” Ano said and stopped. I just looked at him. I realized I had been avoiding talking to him. It was too hard with what had happened to Mary. He was the one who understood the best and he was the one I least wanted to talk to.
“Dutch Flat is in the foothills,” Corrina said. She rested a hand on Dylan’s.
Dylan sat up as if splashed by cold water. “In this little hollow below a ridge.” His eyes were wide open but he didn’t see us. “Less than two hundred people live there. I played there growing up, down by the river bed, before my grandparents died. The gardens always overflowed with fruit and flowers and vegetables and all of it is surrounded by tall pine trees…” He kept talking. Ano’s eyes went thoughtful, Jimmy’s went dreamy, and even Ricker had stopped chewing on his cheek long enough to listen.
“The bike path,” I said when Dylan slumped back down like a windup toy that had run out of tension. “There’s too many fires, too many Vs in the city and along the freeway. Better to take our chances on the bike trail along the river.”
“Except,” Maibe said. “That same bike trail drew a mob of Vs onto us the last time.”
“But that had been the plan,” I said.
“What about the train whistle?” Maibe said. “Maybe the trains are working now.”
“If they are working, it won’t be for Feebs like us,” I said it more confidently than I felt. What if the trains were working? What if Sergeant Bennings was wrong and the whole world wasn’t infected and there was a way out?
“We heard it too,” Ano said quietly. His dark eyes stared at the ground before flicking up. He didn’t really need to say much more. The grim look in his eyes said enough.
“We saw it on the tracks as it passed near the boxcar,” Ricker said when Maibe looked confused. “A whole mob of Vs followed after it. We had to stay dead silent in the boxcar until they passed.”
“I felt like I didn’t even breathe for the whole time,” Jimmy said.
“Wherever the trains are going, it is not for us,” Ano said. “It was Sergeant Bennings and his people inside.”
We all went quiet for a moment as if mourning the loss of something I couldn’t quite put a name to. The trains were off limits now. The trains had always been the way we could count on to move from one place to the next. I wondered if that had been why parts of the camp were left unguarded—maybe they’d been evacuating.
“If we take the bike trail,” I said finally, “then we’ve got plenty of water from the river. And if there’s too many Vs, we can cut into one of the neighborhoods.”
“We’re going to Dutch Flat, right?” Jimmy said, looking around. “That’s what we’re talking about, right?” The eagerness in his voice was not subtle.
Ano elbowed him in the ribs and hissed into his ear, “Yes.”
“Taking the freeway would get us out of here faster.” Spencer spoke for the first time. He was cross-legged next to Old Bully, fiddling with the chain. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” Spencer looked at me.
I repositioned the bat on my back. “I want to get out of here alive. That’s what I want. Isn’t that what you want?”
The group looked back and forth between me and Spencer. It was a contest I hadn’t realized I had entered. I hated it. I didn’t want to fight with him, but everything in me screamed that the freeway was the wrong way to go even with the Vs that might still be waiting for us at the overpass.
Spencer returned to the chain without saying a word.
That pretty much decided it—I had pretty much decided it. We would take the bike trail and deal with whatever problems that route brought our way.
I scanned our group of runaways. Jimmy was still nursing his wounded shoulder and had a shell-shocked look to him. Ano had turned inward, his face like a stone. Ricker never could hide his emotions. He was worried and perceptive—he knew we didn’t know what to do. Spencer might as well not exist and I couldn’t bear to look at Corrina or Maibe.
I hoped I was right about the bike trail.
I jumped into the boxcar. There were dozens of maps in a pile, one for every place we’d visited in the last three years. Favorite cities, favorite rest stops, favorite parks, friendly places—all of it was marked on the maps. I took the only one we needed.
We loaded up the bikes and closed off the boxcar. Deep down, I knew we weren’t ever coming back again. I used a rock to scratch out the message I’d left for Mary. I kept her name untouched, carved into the boxcar like it was carved into my arm.
Everyone waited for me to finish, as if they couldn’t leave until I said so.
“Dutch Flat is over seventy miles away. We should get going,” I said.
“Seventy miles!” Maibe said, but didn’t follow up with anything else. We all knew there were a lot of neighborhoods in those miles.
I took off without looking back.
The fog lay over the field like a blanket, hiding us from any Vs. Hiding the Vs from us. It muffled the sounds we made and also somehow seemed to magnify them. I rode Old Bully this time because I didn’t trust Spencer to do it without getting himself killed.
The river rushed by on our right because I was taking us on the same bike path we’d traveled what seemed like a million times now. I scanned for movement, for sound, for signs of danger. Every lizard scrambling away, every bird spooked into flight, shot up my adrenaline levels.
The group of Vs that had followed me, Maibe, and Corrina were at the overpass—bodies strewn about in the grass, riddled with bullets. Their blood turned a whole section of the field red. I didn’t look to see if one of them was the Feeb I had abandoned. I decided to believe he had gotten away somehow. But the dead Vs were almost more disturbing than if they’d been alive. Who had killed them? Where were those people now?
Smoke rose in thick columns on our left. It would only be a matter of time before the whole city and its surrounding suburbs burned. We biked for over an hour before I stopped us again. It made me nervous, that much time without any problems. A mountain of trouble felt headed our way, but I just couldn’t see it.
I held up a hand when the river widened up enough so that a small island with a few trees popped up in the middle. We were coming up on the high school soon. A school I could have attended if I hadn’t run away and wasn’t trying to stay out of CPS hands. Those had always been the oddest-feeling moments, when I passed by a school in session and saw so many kids my age doing something so foreign to me now, something like sitting in a classroom listening to what someone else thought I was supposed to learn and believe. I wasn’t like Mary, she had wanted to go back someday. Even Leaf had talked about missing school sometimes. I’d take a public library over a school any day, but still, I avoided schools whenever possible. I didn’t like what it did to my stomach.
There was an obstacle in the middle of the trail. I almost breathed a sigh of relief. I knew it had been too easy. Nothing in life was ever this easy. I held up a hand for everyone to stop.
The starthistle and grasses grew tall here, almost waist-high, providing cover for whoever might hide in its depths, but it was the path I worried about. Two people were sitting on the ground. One was laid out flat and the other one hovered over him.
“They’re Feebs,” Maibe said behind me. Too loud.
The one who was sitting looked up at Maibe’s voice. I didn’t know what I should do, what I should say. I wanted to ride on by. Their clothes were dirty and ripped. Their faces were streaked with dried blood. The younger one’s upper arm was wrapped in layers of bandaging. The man laid out on the ground looked overweight and his balding head was pointed at us.
“We don’t need more baggage,” I said.
The balding man struggled to sit up. The two of them exchanged a look that made me nervous.
“Hello,” the balding man said, nodding to us. “I’m Laurel Gillen. This is Kern. Do you know what has happened?”
“What are you doing in the middle of the trail?” Ano said. He stepped next to me, a chain hanging from his hand. They were Feebs like us, but that didn’t mean they could be trusted.
Laurel’s eyes shifted to the chain. “We were taking a break.”
“In the middle of the trail?” Ano said.
“That way we could see someone coming,” Kern said quietly. His eyes seemed to burn into mine.
“When did you wake up from the fevers?” I demanded.
Laurel’s focus shifted to me. “May I ask your name?”
I did not respond, only waited and crossed my arms across my chest.
Laurel sighed.
“I’m Corrina.”
I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. We had a system for dealing with strangers. What right did she have to speak up?
“Hello,” Laurel said, nodding in her direction.
She strode forward and offered her hand to them.
I hissed between my teeth. “What the hell are you thinking?”
They shook. Corrina tossed her hair over her shoulder and looked at me with a guileless gaze I knew she must be faking. “We can’t keep avoiding everyone. We can’t act like everyone we meet is the enemy.”
“Yes, we can,” I said. “If we want to be smart and get out of this alive. That’s exactly what we should do.”
Laurel held up his hands as if that might fix the tension in the air, as if that somehow made him more trustworthy. “We woke up several days ago from…whatever this is. My son, Kern here, had come visiting. I thought it was a burglary, but…they killed my wife.” He went silent and pressed his thumb and index fingers onto either side of his nose as if trying to hold back tears.
Kern placed a comforting hand on his father’s shoulder. “It killed my sister too—”
“Your daughter,” I said to Laurel.
He nodded. “My wife and my daughter.”
“—and we both got really sick, in and out of this fever, these memories…and then we woke up.” Kern released his hand from his father’s shoulder and held it out and looked at it in wonder. “We saw what had happened to us, but we don’t know why. We had guns but lost them a ways back fighting off the crazies—”
“We call them Vs,” Jimmy said.
Kern cocked his head. “Sure, kid. Whatever you say. We heard there was a camp. Like for refugees. We tried the hospital first, but…”
“Who told you there was a camp?” Ano said.
Kern looked at Ano for a long second. “On the radio.”
Ano and I glanced at each other. They woke up a few days ago—were radios even still working? Maybe. But maybe not. I tapped my fingers against my thigh: W-A-T-C-H. Ano didn’t bother to reply. The scowl on his face said his message would have been something along the lines of: N-O D-U-H.
Laurel shook his head. “Don’t go to the hospital.”
“We’re not stupid,” Ricker said.
“Did you kill those Vs back there?” I said.
Kern glanced at Laurel. “We haven’t been that way yet. That’s where we were headed.”
“We think the camp is that way.” Laurel pointed back the way we’d come.
“It’s more like a prison,” Corrina said. “You don’t want to go there.”
“But the radio…” Kern turned to his father. Laurel’s face had collapsed on itself.
“The trains are no good either,” Maibe said.
This seemed to bring both Kern and Laurel to attention.
I glanced at Ano. He cocked his head. He’d seen it too. “What do you know about the trains?” I said.
“We don’t know anything about the trains,” Kern said. “We told you we only woke up a few days ago.”
“Are you sure about the camp?” Laurel said.
“We’re sure,” Maibe said.
“What the hell is happening?” Laurel looked around as if the sky would answer him.
“We don’t have time to help you understand,” I said.
“We’re not sure how it started,” Corrina said and began explaining her story.
I wanted to slap her and looked at Spencer to demand him to step in and end this farce so we could keep going, but Spencer wasn’t listening to the conversation. He was looking ahead, past the two men.
A dark clump of figures stumbled into view, still far away but coming toward us. Of course an hour without trouble had been too much to ask.
Maybe the bike trail had been a mistake after all.
“Time to go,” Spencer said quietly.
Laurel looked over his shoulder. “We should go to the camp. That way is open.”
“Are you crazy or stupid?” I said.
“We can’t stay on the trail,” Maibe said, hopping from foot to foot.
A pause. “The high school, then,” Kern said. “We were just there. There’s fencing and a gate we can close.”
And just like that the group followed these two strange men we had known for all of thirty seconds. I was left on the trail staring after them and at the oncoming Vs.
Corrina acted as if she were in charge now because, what? She was the oldest? That didn’t give her the right to tell the rest of us what to do, especially when all our lives were at stake.
Jimmy turned and when he saw me still on the trail, said, “Come on, Gabbi. We need you.”
This broke me out of my frozen state. I followed as they cut through the brush with the bikes. We ended up at the back parking lot of the high school.
“This way.” Laurel motioned us forward. Kern jogged ahead to a chain-link gate that opened to a quad area between two buildings. The similarity between these buildings and Sergeant Bennings’ was creepy. Government-built places always had this institutional feel, no matter how many windows they tried to include. I was about to point this out, that maybe these two men were leading us into a trap, when the clump of Vs broke through the brush behind me. They were all men, all approximately the same age and wearing similar clothes, and I wondered if they’d once been friends and what exactly they were remembering now as they ran for us. What was it that the virus made them relive with their hands out and their teeth ready to tear us apart?
“Gabbi!” Maibe’s shout broke through my thoughts.
I pedaled through the gate that Laurel held open. I would make Corrina pay if she’d helped lead us into a trap.
My bike zoomed into a courtyard teenagers had used in a former life for breaks, its cement benches and trashcans and a few spindly trees mostly untouched, ready for the next bell.
The gate slammed shut, clanking against the pole. Laurel grabbed an unlocked chain that had once secured a garbage can in place and wrapped the gate closed. Dylan took this moment to wake up and was shouting questions.
Ano grabbed a thick branch and stuck it between the chain-links. Maibe and Ricker helped me drag a cement bench over to block the front gate.
Glass tinkled. Kern had thrown a trashcan through the windows of one of the classrooms. He took off his shirt, revealing a chest crisscrossed with bruises over muscles that flexed with his effort. He set the shirt on the window’s edge and lifted himself through the gap, then came back out the door.
I didn’t like how fast all of this was moving. I wheeled my bike up to Kern and leaned it on the outside wall.
“Welcome,” he said, ushering me through.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll see.”