In February here in Northern California, the weather lets you taste the sunshine of summer without its heat. It also never let a runaway forget the cost—February still dropped below freezing sometimes. We felt that in the cells. No heat except for our bodies tucked under a few wool blankets. But even though it was warm the way we slept—all in a pile of bodies—I always got up before the rest. I couldn’t stand to be in the cell closet for longer than I had to.
Today, I had decided to bring back the hot water.
I had seen the others collect various food waste containers to be dumped later. Some of them were transparent milk jugs, five-gallon buckets, even some tubing.
I needed something dark to collect heat, and then a second person to help me set up. That’s where Kern came in. I was going to prove to Tabitha that I deserved to be on the V team.
Kern sat at the table with a group of his teammates. Sometimes they went out in the mornings and didn’t come back for several days. When they returned from the outside, people would shake their hands and nod their heads in respect.
I wanted that respect. I wanted that specialness. I wanted to go outside.
I swallowed my pride and took my plate of food and walked past Maibe and Ano and the rest of our group—who all tried not to look like they were watching but weren’t very good at hiding it—and I sat at Kern’s table.
The conversations stopped for a moment. They glanced at me, at each other.
Kern paused, a piece of cheese halfway to his mouth.
I tried to smile but grimaced instead.
He set down the piece of cheese. “What can I do for you?” He enunciated each word.
“I need your help.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“It’s to help out everyone here.”
“And why would you want to do that?” he said in this maddeningly asinine tone. “You’ve made it pretty clear you’re disgusted—”
“I never said—”
“I’m pretty sure you did.”
“Let me finish!” I said in too loud of a voice, half rising off the bench.
Conversations stopped again. Someone snickered at the end of the table.
“Neil Madsen,” Kern said and the guy shut up, “this is Gabbi. Gabbi, Neil.” Neil’s face was thin, gaunt at the cheeks as if he continually sucked them in. His nose was bulbous and red and his long neck stuck out of his shirt like a sickly giraffe.
Neil nodded at me, not in a good-natured way, more as a flinch from the elbow he got from the woman sitting next to him.
“Leave it, Lilia,” Kern said.
Lilia looked older than Neil, maybe middle-aged, but it was hard to tell because of the Feeb skin. Her thick, golden brown, curly hair hung on her head like a helmet and she didn’t even try to smile.
“Over there is Enos and Julian.” They were like caricature opposites of each other. Enos was thick and burly and muscled. Julian was so thin and he hunched his shoulders making his whole body look warped like a bow.
Enos rose up to shake my hand but stopped midway, his arm in the air. His eyes dilated. “You look so much like my—”
Julian punched Enos hard in the shoulder. “Snap out of it.”
Enos’s eyes refocused. “I got a fresh dose of the Lyssa virus while we were outside yesterday.” He showed me the ugly gash on the back of his neck. “Still shaking it off I guess. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I mumbled as I tried to keep the yearning out of my voice. They’d gone outside, away from this tomb.
“Go ahead, then,” Kern said.
I settled back and took a calming breath. I knew more than just this table watched. I knew Tabitha must be watching too.
“It seems to me that no matter how much we don’t like each other—”
“I never said I didn’t like you.” He smiled an impish grin.
I gritted my teeth even as I noticed that his smile set off his brown eyes and lightened the exhausted lines of his forehead.
“You’re not going to make this easy,” I said.
He crossed his arms across his chest. “I’m going to make this the opposite of easy.”
“So you know I want to be on the team. Did Tabitha tell you?”
“In fact, she did not. But why else would you be talking to me right now? I don’t see you as the kind of person happy washing dishes every day. I’m surprised you lasted this long.”
“I do have people here I care about. You’ve seen how good I am at protecting what I care about. I recall you were on the receiving end of my help not so long ago.”
Kern nodded. “Fair enough. So, how can I help you be on the receiving end of my help?” His face held a leer in it. Nothing too obvious, nothing I could exactly put my finger on, but I felt it all the same. I almost lost it. I clenched my fists. He was doing this on purpose just to see if he could get a rise out of me. I would not give him the satisfaction.
“I’m not going to talk about it here,” I said, realizing this was partly an act Kern was doing for the table. I headed to the bathrooms. A wolfish whistle and laughter followed me and Kern outside.
I pushed through the double doors and the cold hit me deep in the chest. The guards faced me. It was hard to believe they were protecting us when they did that. Footsteps shuffled next to me.
“All along the fence here.” I waved my hand to the right of us. “And here too,” I said, waving to the left. “And on the ground, and if we have any black cloth, like landscaper cloth, or black plastic, or—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Hot water,” I said. “Or at least lukewarm water—for bathing or cleaning.”
“Are you kidding me? We’ve already looked at the system. It’s broken. It can’t be fixed with what we have here. The propane they give us is barely enough to boil water for coffee in the morning.”
“I’m not talking about fixing the system. I’m talking about going around it. Ignoring it all together. Pretending it was never there in the first place. Plus, it won’t be hot water and it won’t be every day, just on the sunny ones at first but later—”
“People are going to shit themselves if they get their hands on some hot water.”
“Then they can clean themselves off with the water too.”
Kern laughed. “I told her you were worth bringing in.”
“What did you say?”
He winced.
“I thought it was your job to bring in any Feebs you found.”
“Yeah, well, we make a lot of ‘mistakes’. Most of the time. Feebs get away.”
“But not my group. Not me.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Not you.”
I stalked to the furthest point of the fence, to our makeshift graveyard for Spencer. His wooden marker would crack and splinter in the heat this summer. Eventually it would disintegrate and all that would be left was the hump of dirt that marked where his body lay. Even that would eventually settle and then he would be forgotten.
I rubbed the scabs on my arm.
Not forgotten.
I walked up to Kern—within inches. Our breaths intermingled, not smelling all that bad, considering. His brown eyes widened at my closeness. I could feel the heat from his body coming off in waves. His breathing shortened. Hell, my breathing did too. There was no denying the spark between us.
“So, will you help me with the hot water?”
“Of course.” He swayed in my direction, as if to kiss me, but then caught himself.
I stepped back and socked him hard in the stomach. The air whooshed out of his body and he doubled over.
“What the hell is going on,” he said between gasps as the blood rushed to his face.
“That’s pretty much my question exactly,” I said simply and then walked back inside to sounds of laughter from the guard towers. I returned to dinner, this time in my normal spot.
Kern returned a few minutes later. His face still red, he walked in as if nothing had happened. Neil jostled him in the ribs while making some sort of joke. The others laughed, but then Kern said something short that silenced them. He glanced my way and I held his stare to reinforce the fact that he was an idiot for thinking that helping me with a little hot water was going to get him out of hot water with me.
But then he smiled and I saw it was going to be a much bigger battle to make him pay. But he didn’t know I had hardly any lines I wouldn’t cross when it came to payback, no matter how much I had wanted to kiss him back.
“Tell me what you want to do about the hot water,” Kern said.
I hid my surprise and tossed the damp dish rag onto the wash bucket. Maibe and I had washing duty again. “It’s not that hard.”
“Hot water?” Maibe exclaimed.
“Warm water,” I said quickly. “Don’t get your hopes up. Lukewarm water.”
Kern motioned me on. “Let’s get on with it then. I don’t have all day.”
I explained about the materials I’d seen around the jail and what we still needed to track down. Then I explained the setup.
“That’s it?” Kern said.
“It’s not magic. It’s just using infrared waves the sun is already producing for free. Someone else would have thought of it eventually.”
“How do you know any of this?” Kern said. “I thought you were a runaway or a dropout or something.”
“She’s super smart,” Maibe said. “She spent hours and hours in the library and—”
“Shut up, Maibe,” I said.
She closed her mouth like a fish.
“You can’t just go around telling people things. The less they know the better.”
“Well, that’s a sorry way to live,” Kern said. “Nobody ever gets to know you? The real you?”
“Plenty of people get to know the real me.” If the definition of plenty was Ano, Ricker, Jimmy, and now Maibe—and Corrina on my good days.
“I guess I’m not on that list.”
I gave him my most patronizing smile. “Better luck next time.”
“I don’t give up easily.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. “I didn’t take you as very smart to begin with, so…” I shrugged.
Maibe’s eyes widened. Kern smiled that damn smile of his and said, “We’ll see.”
By the time we finished, it was lunch, and we had scattered dozens of transparent jugs of water across the yard. Kern was pretty much allowed to leave the jail when he pleased—after lunch he came back with rolls of landscaping cloth. We used this as a heat sink to help warm the water.
“Here, grab this corner,” Kern told Maibe. She held the cloth flat as Kern unwrapped it from its paper barrel. She kept looking at him, as if about to ask something and then deciding not to.
“Just spit it out, kid,” Kern said.
“Are they really looking for a cure here?” Maibe said.
Kern paused, then continued unrolling another section of cloth. “Yes.”
I don’t know why, but when he said it this time, part of me believed it. A spark of hope rose in me.
“But it’s not going to work,” he said.
“How do you know?” I said, not willing to give up the hope so quickly.
“What do you mean?” Maibe said.
“Think about it. So they find a way to make us not be sick like this anymore. So then we’re like them again? We go outside and get bit and turn into a V?”
“The cure would make us immune,” Maibe said.
“We’d get a vaccine or something,” I said, “and we’d never be able to catch it again.”
Kern shook his head. “The scientists have been working for over a year on it. There are too many variations. Even if they come close to finding something that will work, it won’t be permanent.”
I didn’t know what to do. There were so many things wrong with what he just said. I couldn’t process the cure stuff so I stuck on the other part. “Did you say a year?”
“But I only got infected in November,” Maibe said.
“It happened to me in August,” I said. “I thought we were some of the earliest cases. They said we were some of the first.”
He looked up and then away. “This camp was set up a year ago. That’s when I was infected,” he said as if confessing some great sin. “They were fearing the worst in case they couldn’t stop the spread. They were right.”
“Whoa,” Maibe said. “I didn’t even think…how come…”
“This is as done as it’s going to get,” Kern said. He left Maibe and me to stare at each other in disbelief.
“He said a year.” Had all of this been planned somehow? Did they know it was going to happen like this?
Maibe shook her head. Something bright flashed across Maibe’s face, as if someone had flicked a mirror. She blinked and the flash disappeared.
I looked up at the guard towers, but none were turned our way.
“That was weird,” I said.
“Yeah, well, Kern likes to make things weird,” Maibe said quickly. She began dancing from foot to foot as if playing hopscotch.
“That’s not what I meant—”
“I need to use the bathroom.”
“You just went half an hour ago.”
Maibe shrugged. “All this water makes me need to go again.”
I looked around at our crazy array of buckets, bags, and black cloth. Maybe the sun had glinted just right off the water in one of the jugs.
Maibe disappeared into the pit’s plywood walls.
I scanned what I could see of the camp. Two guard towers, the edge of the fence that separated us from the uninfected side. The gap of space where the graves were. A flash of light again.
I went into the bathrooms. There was no one in any of the stalls, but a plank of plywood lay at a weird angle under one of the sinks. I kicked it and it moved.
“Maibe, what the hell are you doing?” I crouched on my hands and knees and pushed aside the plywood. There was just a big enough hole for me to crawl into. When I came through the other side, I was in this gap between the stalls. It backed up to a section of fence the guards couldn’t see unless they came down off the towers and patrolled on foot. Maibe was there against the fence. Talking to Alden.
“Maibe, what the hell?”
She whirled around as if caught in the act of something she knew she wasn’t supposed to be doing. She recovered and motioned me over.
“This is Alden.” She nodded in his direction. He had Sergeant Bennings eyes. Blue, clear, cold. But he was all of thirteen or so. His blonde hair peeked through the green beanie he wore.
“This is going to get you killed if Sergeant Bennings finds out.”
“He won’t find out,” Alden said. I looked at him more closely. He stayed far enough from the fence that Maibe couldn’t possibly touch him, but he acted like he wished he could get closer.
“Then Ricker’s going to kill you when he finds out.”
“Who’s Ricker?” Alden said.
“No one,” Maibe said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Just like Kern is no one,” Maibe shot back.
That shut me up.
“I don’t have much time,” Alden said. “I just wanted to give you this.” He pushed a thin package through the fencing. It was a chocolate bar. He’d gotten her chocolate.
Maibe took it and thanked him.
He smiled and said, “Dr. Ferrad has a whole drawer full in her lab. She won’t miss it.”
“Dr. Ferrad is here? But she’s the one who experimented on Leaf! How could you—”
“I know,” Maibe said, cutting me off. “I’ve been asking Alden to watch her for us. He’s been telling me what he knows about the uninfected side of the camp and I’ve been telling him about this side.”
“You’ve been telling him about us?” I looked at her in disbelief. This whole time I thought she was this scared little girl who could be tough when she needed to but otherwise just wanted to be safe. Here she was proving me totally wrong. A little bit of pride rose in me.
“I trust him,” she said.