Since before I can remember, my goal in life has been simple: stay alive, don’t get hurt, don’t get caught.
If you’re one of those people who count three goals in that sentence and love to point out those kinds of things you can just go to hell right now. You’re probably one of those people who make fun of those other people who post internet comments with spelling and punctuation errors too.
Just so you know, it doesn’t make you smarter or righter than them.
What it does make you is a dick.
It’s the kind of thing Corrina would do—I’d bet you $20 on it, if I had that kind of money, but I don’t because I’m a runaway teenager who used to be a runaway kid.
I’ll wait while you catalog your snobby thoughts and acerbic zingers.
Here’s your chance.
Probably something about how there’s no way in hell someone like me could mess up grammar but use a word like acerbic correctly, right?
Well then this story isn’t for you so put it down right now. Preferably in the library so someone actually worth something might find it and read it for free and get something out of it and not tell me how to count or where to put my commas or what words I’m allowed to use and how I’m allowed to use them.
Now that we all understand each other and only the right people are still reading, I can get started.
It’s winter time and with that comes fog. I like the fog. It’s moody and hides things easier. It’s causing Maibe and me some trouble though. We’ve lost the rest of our group and something bad went down. How could it not with Vs running loose and soldiers fingering their triggers like a woman’s—well, Maibe might read this and she’s only thirteen and even though when I was thirteen I knew all about that sort of thing I don’t think she does. I like thinking I could help keep it that way for her. At least for a little longer.
As I was saying, Maibe and me stayed behind to guard their backs, but now it looks like we’ll need to save their asses and no matter what I think, I know Maibe won’t let us leave without finding Corrina so—
“Gabbi, do you think they’re okay?”
I stopped writing in the journal and looked up from where I sat on the van’s bench. A dim flashlight, domed with an old, cloudy Tupperware container sat in the middle of the floor between us. Maibe was on the opposite bench, a wool blanket around her shoulders, scratching an insect bite on her neck. Curtains that Mary had made, before we’d lost her to the V virus, were attached with magnets to the back windows. The vent on top of the van let in the only fresh, freezing air. Yeah, it was cold, but the air needed to circulate. Spencer had learned that the hard way and I had learned from him.
We hadn’t slept much in days and not at all since Leaf and Ano and the rest had been captured. We should have been sleeping.
I put down my pen. “No, I don’t.”
Her eyes widened and the circles around them darkened.
She hadn’t expected honesty, I guess.
“But we’re going back for them,” I said, forcing myself to sound more sure than I felt. “We’ll get them back and then they’ll be okay.”
She smiled, then her smile disappeared as if it had never existed. I knew how that sort of thing happened. I expected more of it to come both our ways before it got better, if it ever got better. But that’s why I made myself simple life goals: stay alive, don’t get hurt, don’t get caught.
“How come we can’t stay in a house?” Maibe asked. “It would be so much warmer and we could’ve locked the doors and maybe found some extra food and slept in real beds.”
She pulled her dingy pink sweatshirt lower on her forehead. It had been days and she had yet to take that thing off. This bothered me a great deal because surviving on the street meant a kid needed to blend in—that meant look clean and put together—if she didn’t want the police or social workers to pick her up. But then I remembered that sort of thing didn’t matter anymore. Those people probably looked as homeless as us now, if they were still alive. Maybe they even looked worse since they wouldn’t know all the tricks to keep yourself clean and warm without luxuries like running water.
“Gabbi?”
I realized I hadn’t answered her yet, but I didn’t see why I should. I got up and checked the curtained back windows for the millionth time. Our bicycles were on the ground a few feet away. A V was across the parking lot, punching the back of a bus bench and throwing trash around. I dropped the curtain back into place. Vs locked onto you like a wolf going after a rabbit. It hadn’t noticed us yet and I wanted to keep it that way.
The crumbling red of the fitness center’s sign took up most of the view through the front windshield. The van hadn’t moved from where we’d abandoned it months before. Months ago, when things were just the normal amount of messed up for a kid living on the street, Mary had gone crazy for a second in the fitness center’s showers and I had been so scared because she’d been about to hit me and Mary wasn’t like that. But the worst of it was when Mary had infected us with the V virus and turned us over to the scientists and the soldiers to get the cure. Sergeant Bennings said Mary had killed herself. But I didn’t believe it. No way she would just give up like that. No way.
I glanced at Maibe. She was still waiting for an answer. I sighed. “When you’re hiding, you want to do it in plain sight, in a place that locks and that won’t get noticed. Think about how big a house is, how many windows it’s got, how easy it is to break into.”
“But what if we wake up and…and we try to leave, but Vs surround us?”
“A running vehicle is safer than a house. Way safer.”
“But you said the van won’t start.”
I bit back a retort. She was right, but it didn’t matter to me even though it should. When Spencer, Leaf, and the others had stormed the fairgrounds yesterday with a V mob at their backs, they had gotten themselves captured. All I could think of was getting us to the van. To our old home base.
I looked up at the crumbling, yellowed fabric of the van’s ceiling and tried to think about what would prove it to Maibe. “Picture yourself in your house when all this started. Did the Vs get in? Even though you locked the doors and windows and—”
A strangled sound came from Maibe’s side. Her eyes glazed over, her jaw became slack.
I jumped from the bench. My papers hit the floor with a smack and the pen bounced and rolled somewhere out of the light. I yanked off her blanket, grabbed her by the shoulders, and then I slapped her—hoping to surprise her out of the memory-rush.
But then she screamed.
My muscles froze and my brain locked up. Too loud.
I slapped her again because I like to learn things the hard way, I guess. She screamed again and I swore something groaned low and close to the van.
“Get on your feet, Maibe,” I said, fierce desperation in my voice. I didn’t dare touch her. “Stand up, walk around. Push it back and shut up.” My breath came in short gasps, the cold air in the van turning it into mist.
Slowly, slowly, she closed her mouth. Her eyelids blinked once, twice, and then focused on me. “I’m okay.”
“No. Get up and walk around.”
Her shoes struck the floor like the sharp closing of a book.
“Quietly,” I said.
She paused, shoe in midair, then put her foot down toe first. The space around the flashlight allowed for only a few steps.
I peeked through the window. The V had stopped punching the bench and was back to throwing around trash. I let out the breath I’d been holding.
“You freaked,” I whispered. “You just totally freaked when I slapped you.”
Maibe waved her arms around and kept walking. Exercise was the only thing we knew that sort of worked to beat back the side effects of the cure. “I was having a memory-rush and… it’s my zombie trigger, I guess—getting slapped.”
“No kidding,” I said. “But for the record, zombies eat brains, they don’t scream like that.”
“My aunt used to—”
I held up my hand and forced it not to shake. Three red dots marked where a flea or a spider or who knew what had bitten me. No surprise that bugs tried to eat us up, we didn’t hang out in the cleanest places. Corrina had showed us how to make something out of oatmeal so the itching would stop, but I hadn’t been paying attention. “I don’t really want to know, kid. It’s enough to know that it’s one of your triggers. FYI, one of mine is heights. Do you know any of your others? A slap to the face and…”
Maibe shook her head. “I didn’t even know about that one.” The flashlight cast spooky shadows onto her face and highlighted the lined, wrinkled, aged look of her skin—the cure did that. It was weird on a thirteen-year-old like her, as if a prop artist had done a bad makeup job, but no amount of scrubbing would take it off.
I touched my cheek and felt the same webbed texture. “We’re only here for the night,” I said as much for me as for her because a little voice in my head said that going back to the van had been the act of a scared sixteen-year-old girl running from the friends who needed her help. My stomach twisted into knots. I should have gone in to rescue them right away. That’s what Ano and Leaf would have done.
“Tomorrow, we’ll take the bikes and go in like stealth ninjas to save them all from their stupid selves.” I pictured the looks on their faces when I came to save the day. Leaf, Ano, and Jimmy would be grateful, Ricker would act like it was no big deal, but Spencer would act annoyed and like he was just about to save himself and the others and why did I interfere? But he’d feel grateful deep down and that’s what mattered.
Maibe settled back into her blanket with a sigh. “I don’t know how to be a stealth ninja. In the movies, people always died when they left the shelter, or when they tried to save someone, or when they went outside, or—”
“This isn’t the movies,” I said. “And just so you know, a shelter is the most dangerous place out there. It gives the illusion of safety, but that’s where people really get hurt.” She couldn’t know that I meant homeless shelters, group homes, and the like, she didn’t know that much about me. But what applied there applied elsewhere. Get any amount of people together in a place that was supposed to be safe—like a family in a house—and horrible things happened behind closed doors and under darkness.
“But in the movies—”
“This isn’t the movies!”
“But—”
“I can’t sit here and not know what happened to them—not help them out!”
“I wasn’t saying that, Gabbi, I wasn’t—”
I jumped up angry and unsettled because deep down—in a dark place I didn’t want to admit existed—for a split second, for a half second, for almost no time at all, I’d thought about running and leaving them behind because they’d gotten caught but I was still free. My foot accidentally hit the flashlight and knocked it over. The rays danced around the cabin sides. A shadow passed across the back door’s curtained window. I stumbled back, shocked at the movement. My arms swung around to keep me from falling. Before I realized it I grabbed the curtains and tore them away and the magnets pinged to the ground like a handful of pebbles.
It was a girl, not much older than us. The trash-throwing, bench-punching V from across the parking lot. Her blonde hair looked like a bird’s nest. Her face was dirty and streaked with crusted blood. Her blue eyes were crystal clear and totally insane. They were the opposite of empty. They were full of emotion, full of some interior knowledge, full of hate—and they were locked on my face.
The girl tracked me. Blue, angry dots that could see me but didn’t really see me. Mary had looked like that at the end. The V virus was the scariest thing. It’s like it took everything bad that happened to you and made you relive it over and over again like a song on replay.
Did I dare go outside? And then what? I wished Mary were there. She would know what to do.
I picked up the magnets and forced myself to begin fixing the curtain back into place. My fingers didn’t want to work and the magnets kept dropping and pinging against the metal floor. I had fought off plenty of Vs by now—that wasn’t the problem. But she was just a girl and I didn’t want to deal with any of it.
“She’s not going away,” Maibe said. “You know she won’t.”
The V slapped her hand against the glass and smeared it, leaving behind a bloody streak. Her knuckles were cracked open, probably from all the punching she’d been doing. Everything drifted away and I was back on the hot sidewalk and there was Officer Hanley and the air conditioning blasting cold air out his open window. Mary had wanted us to run and I was so angry. I was mouthing off to Officer Hanley and the guy had slammed into the police car. We’d lost all those seconds to run away, because of me.
“Hey.” Maibe grabbed my shoulder. I flinched.
The girl’s hand—the Vs hand—mirrored mine. I told myself there wasn’t a real girl in there anymore. This V would rip me apart if I let her. I swore I could feel her hot breath on my face—
Maibe finished attaching the curtain for me with shaking fingers. The girl was blocked out by an inch worth of glass and a little bit of cloth with a pattern of pink ice cream cones against a yellow background. Mary’s idea of a joke. I blinked, shuddered, dropped my hands to my side.
“What memory-flash did you have just then?” Maibe whispered. “You just froze up and your face turned angry and scared all at once.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. We shouldn’t be talking at all.”
Silence. Except for the V breathing.
“She already knows we’re here,” Maibe said finally.
A sick feeling entered my stomach. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t want this job. I didn’t want any of this. “She’ll go away if we’re quiet.”
“They never go away,” Maibe said.
There was the sound of shuffling steps. The V girl had come around to the front windshield. Another V joined her.
This one was an older man. Hunched at the shoulders and looking as if he would have needed a cane to walk in any other situation. My heartbeat throbbed in my ears. The Vs would surround us, smother us, block all the light and hope for escape. Why had we hidden in the van?
I grabbed for the flashlight and switched it off, plunging the van into darkness. I stared at a ceiling I couldn’t see anymore except for the faintest rim of light around the vent, and I prayed and prayed for the Vs to go away.
The only sounds were the two of us trying not to breathe, and the Vs bumping up against the van, and the shuffling that meant more were coming to join them.