Sometimes being a runaway sucks.
Most of the time actually.
But it sure beats the hell out of going back to what I ran away from. No one will ever convince me otherwise and you’re a terrible person for even trying, so stop.
I’ve written down everything like how I remembered it. That may not have been what happened to everyone else, but it’s what happened to me as I saw it.
Anyways, I wanted to get all that down because I don’t know what will happen next and I wanted someone to know I wasn’t just some dumb runaway too stuck up or damaged or stupid to figure out I should have gone back to my grandmother or my mom and dad. I made the right choice, my choice, to run away. I will always be proud of taking control of my own destiny. I want everyone to know that.
“They can’t last much longer up there without water,” Corrina said.
I put down the pen I’d stolen from the classroom before we’d left. “I know,” I said in a subdued voice. We were on the roof of a house far enough away from the high school not to attract notice—yet.
Three days. It had been three days since Corrina and I had woken up surrounded by flies and dead bodies. We’d walked out of that courtyard but hadn’t gone far.
The stink had given it away.
Corrina and I had followed the smell to the far end of the high school campus. The river and the bike trail were at our backs. The sun had burned off the fog, but not the chemical filled smoke from all the fires. The sky was a dull brown, the sun like a runny egg yolk.
“How many are there now?” I asked, looking back down at the binder paper I’d also swiped from the classroom.
“A few hundred. And more trickling in every hour or so.” She was talking about the Vs and how they milled around, lost in their dementia.
The rest of our group was surrounded on the roof of one of the classroom buildings. They were all alive. I think both Corrina and I counted every five minutes, just to make sure it was true. They were all still alive. Even Kern and Laurel.
“Message them again. See if Maibe is still puking her guts out,” Corrina said.
I took out a little pocket mirror and flashed a Morse code message to Ano. He flashed back an answer.
“She’s better,” I said. “Sort of. Throwing up every couple of hours instead of multiple times an hour. Though he says the bite looks like its getting infected.”
“She probably can’t throw up anymore, not without more water.” Corrina walked the roof line until she stood at the edge closest to the high school. The tops of trees blocked a portion of the V crowd, but there were plenty in plain sight. “I just don’t get what drew them all here. Why all of a sudden? Why now?”
“Maybe our battle made too much noise. All the windows we broke.”
“But none of us had guns and we were inside a classroom inside a courtyard.”
“But they’re really sensitive to noise,” I said, irritation pricking my neck. I didn’t necessarily think my hypothesis was all that good either, but she didn’t have to dismiss it so quickly.
“But not THAT sensitive.”
“Okay. So what do you think happened?”
Corrina returned to my side and sat cross-legged on the shingles. I folded the papers and stuck them in my jacket.
“I don’t know.”
“Look,” I said. “More of them are waking up. Me and Spencer and the others, we were some of the earliest people in the city to get infected. It happened weeks before you got bit and you were probably one of the first regular people it happened to. So now, everyone else is waking up from the fevers either as a V, a Faint, or a Feeb.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Well,” I said, feeling exasperated. “What the hell does it matter why, only that it is, and they’re going to die if we don’t fix this?”
Corrina pushed her thick hair off her face. It was like an unkempt mane of a lion that had been dragged through a puddle of mud and twigs. I knew I must look about the same although I always kept my hair short but shaggy around my ears to pass sometimes as a boy.
“You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right!” I exploded.
“Quiet.”
I wanted to slap her but fumed in silence instead. Of course she was right too. Now was not the time to raise my voice.
“We should create a diversion,” I said, thinking about the crazy stunt Maibe had pulled at the van. She could have died, but it had worked. “Make some noise. Attract them away so the others can climb down and go for the bike trail.”
“But with what? And won’t that just get us stuck somewhere and then they’ll have to return the favor?”
“Not if we’re smart,” I said. “We figure out a distraction and an escape route. More than one escape route. An escape route for the escape route.”
She chewed on her lower lip and looked across the gap again, at the roof that held Dylan, a guy still recovering from the memory-fevers and still way too hot to have ended up with someone like Corrina.
“I have an idea,” she said.