My tears stop falling, and my chin stubbornly sets. I don’t know how to deal with the aftermath of killing, but I’m pretty good at the actual murder part.
“You think it’s Valor?” Wyatt whispers in my ear.
“Who else?”
“Second Union again, maybe?”
I hadn’t thought of that—that Second Union might still be sending their own assassins after the kids, like me, who got tapped as bounty hunters for Valor. I can’t believe we ever trusted banks. They sent my best friend, Jeremy, after me, and now he’s dead. What else can they possibly do?
I snort. “Either way, they’re going to die.”
Wyatt’s big body uncurls from around mine, leaving me cold. Iron seeps into my veins. I check my clip, even though I know it’s full. This is my dad’s gun, the one Valor didn’t know about. Wyatt reaches into his backpack and pulls out Jeremy’s Glock, the one stamped SECOND UNION in glittering gold. He nudges Roy’s shotgun so that it’s on the ground between us, and he nods and clicks off both of our flashlights, which were fortunately pointed low instead of lighting up the windows like idiots. The light from outside dances in my eyes, and Wyatt dives for the ground and pulls me with him, our shoulders smashed together and my arm around Matty.
“Shh,” I murmur. “Good dog. Don’t get us killed, ’kay?”
Voices chitter in the night as a beam of light cuts the darkness overhead.
“Is it safe?” says one—a young guy. Funny—that’s the same thing I asked.
“Oh, for a haunted house in the middle of a creepy forest, it looks pretty safe,” says another guy, smooth as butter. “I’ve hung out here before. It’s cool.”
“Idiots,” hisses a third. A girl. “Shut up and point the light down. Could you be less obvious?”
“They’re kids. So, not Valor,” Wyatt whispers.
“Doesn’t mean they don’t want us dead,” I whisper back. And we’re both thinking about Jeremy and Roy, sent by Second Union to kill us for reasons we still don’t completely understand.
“They’re going to the front door.”
I grab my flashlight and silently rise to a crouch. “Then let’s go tell ’em we don’t want any damn Girl Scout cookies.”
Wyatt goes first, hurrying down the hallway. It’s dark as death, so I grab the back of his hoodie and try not to step too heavily. I’ll never forget the sound of that thug’s foot breaking through a rotten step in Sharon Mulvaney’s house. Was that really only three days ago that I got in a gang shoot-out in a meth house? I shake my head. If I can survive that, I can survive this.
White light shoots overhead as a face appears in the window by the front door.
“Amateurs,” I mutter.
A high whine reminds me that Matty is at my side—stupid, loyal, doesn’t-understand-guns Matty. We should’ve locked her in a bathroom or something. Overweight Labradors suck in gunfights. I guess she’s an amateur too. It’s too late to lock her up somewhere safer—I just have to hope we can end this quick, whatever it is.
My heart is in my throat again. But then, did it ever leave?
They’re all on the porch now, and fingers scrabble around the floorboards.
“You said there was a key,” says the young one. Baby Bear.
“There used to be,” says the smooth, cool guy. Papa Bear.
“Again, you guys are idiots. The wood’s rotten. One kick and the whole fucking house will fall down.” Sensible Mama Bear.
The door bangs open, and I step into it with my gun up and my flashlight on.
“Can we help you?”
God, I sound like a badass. But inside I’m screaming. Matty starts barking like crazy, and Wyatt grabs her collar and pretends to hold her back, his gun pointed alongside mine. I can barely see them in the single beam of light. They’re just ragged, desperate shadows in the night. Whoever was holding the flashlight on their side? They drop it.
I smell piss and gun oil, and then Papa Bear is cocking a pistol like it means something. “Yeah, you can help us. We’re hiding here. So you can leave.”
“Wrong answer. Go hide somewhere else or get shot.”
My jaw is so tense that my teeth are about to crack like popcorn, and I can hear these kids breathing, because they’re kids—they’re our age or maybe even younger—and Papa Bear’s gun doesn’t waver and Matty is barking and when Baby Bear goes for his waistband, I spit, “Goddammit,” and shoot him before something seriously stupid happens.
But I shot him in the leg, so I guess I’m learning.
It wasn’t meant to be a killing shot this time.
He squeals like a baby and falls over, and Wyatt lets go of Matty and slaps a hand over the kid’s mouth to stop his screaming.
“Jesus! You shot him!” says the girl. She fumbles for the flashlight and shines it on whoever the hell I just shot, and oh my God, I didn’t shoot a teenager. I shot a ten-year-old, maybe. A rat-faced little kid in boat shoes, and his pants are a wet splatter of piss and blood, but at least the blood isn’t gushing out, so maybe I’m not going to hell forever.
“You come knocking on somebody else’s house after dark, you got to expect bad things to happen,” Wyatt mutters. “She warned you.”
With a deep sigh, he pulls off his hoodie and ties it around the kid’s leg. I can only stand there, numb, gun flopping at my side, hating myself and feeling like shit. At some point, the kid stops shouting and passes out, and the girl is fussing around with him, shooing Wyatt away, and the weird slurping sound I hear is Matty licking Papa Bear’s gun hand. It’s too dark to see much, but he’s leaning against the door, cool as a stupid cucumber, staring at Wyatt.
“Sup, Beard?” he says.
Wyatt’s head snaps up, and he stands, suddenly twice as tall as he should be and exuding menace as he gets in Papa Bear’s face. “Do I know you?”
“Haven’t seen you since Mikey’s funeral. You don’t remember me? I’m hurt.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember now. You used to have a shaved head. Pretty sure I got drunk every time we hung out because I couldn’t stand you. What’s your name again? Chance?”
“Cianci. But Chance is good enough for the apocalypse. Yeah, let’s go with that.” He tucks the gun under his shirt against tight abs and slumps against the door. “Chance,” he says to himself. “And who’s the chick with the itchy trigger finger?”
“I think you mean the chick who still has fourteen bullets,” I say.
He just laughs like that’s adorable. Which pisses me off even more.
I ram my gun against his belly and say, “Dude, I will totally blow you a new butthole. Just pick up your friends and go away.”
He shakes shaggy, dark hair out of his eyes, which are just shiny black pits in this light. “They’re not my friends. And no.” I think he’s reaching to hold my hand, but he does something with the gun, pushing it smoothly out of my grip before I can react. Holding it up, he grins. “Tonight’s not New Butthole Night. It’s actually Thursday. And you should never touch somebody with a gun unless you’re going to pull the trigger, because you never know who spent a lot of time in juvie practicing disarming techniques.”
Still holding my gun, he walks past me and into the house, whistling.
Wyatt and the girl drag the kid I shot (The kid. I shot.) into the house and onto our sleeping bag. Turns out my bullet (My. Bullet.) went right out the back of his thigh, leaving a clean wound that didn’t hit anything major. Which makes me a monster but not, at least, a monster who murders little boys.
“I don’t blame you, Zooey. I wanted to shoot him, too,” Chance says, settling in on the squashy sofa and splaying out in the way of boys who want to seem bigger than they are. “But Gabriela wouldn’t let me. So here we are. And now I ask you: Do you have any food? Because I’m dying here.”
“My name isn’t Zooey,” I say.
“I don’t want to know your real name, and you look like Zooey Deschanel’s trailer-trash sister, so we’re going with that.”
“I wish I’d shot you instead.”
His grin is so annoying that I click off the flashlight.
“Lots of people say that, Zooey.”
Gabriela grabs my flashlight and props it up with hers so she can inspect the kid. It’s not a pretty sight. Wyatt and I are standing just outside the hallway, watching and incompetent, and it’s horribly awkward. Not as awkward as that time I wasn’t wearing pants and he got a pajama boner while trying to slash my throat with a steak knife, but close.
“We can take him to the vet tomorrow,” I say, and Wyatt shakes his head.
“We can’t go back there. And we’re broke. Except for the card.”
“But a vet wouldn’t turn away a bleeding kid. Hippocratic oaths, right?”
Chance sits forward, a gun in each hand, his and mine. “Zooey, do you honestly think oaths mean shit in this world? All contracts are void, and God bless Valor.”
I stare at him, hard. “Were you . . . ?”
“A Valor assassin? Yep. I did my ten. Had to shoot the kid’s parents right in front of him, and Gabriela McBigheart brought him along like a dumb puppy. And when we all went home to be a happy family, our house had burned down. Coincidence? I think not.”
But I’m not listening anymore. My hands are fisted in Wyatt’s shirt, and I’m on tiptoes, pulling him close and murmuring, “We have to go. We have to go now. We have to go to my house. My mom. She needs me. They can’t. They wouldn’t. Wyatt. We have to.”
He pulls me close like he can hug the pain and panic away. “You know we can’t go back. You knew that when we ran. You knew after Amber. Just try not to think about it. We have to keep moving. Right? That’s what you said. We have to go on.” His whisper trickles into my ear, and it should make me feel better, but it doesn’t. He’s right. We can’t go back, not for good and not for bad. For the first time, it occurs to me that if my mom knew what I’d done, she’d be horrified. It was bad enough, doing what Valor demanded. But now I’ve shot a kid for no reason at all. Would she even recognize me?
“I’m a monster,” I whisper.
“You’re Patsy.”
I can’t unclench my fists, and he helps me, gently untangling me from his shirt like I’m a panicked kitten. My fingers shake, and I drop to sitting cross-legged, suddenly light-headed and lost. It’s one thing to have hope, and it’s another thing to know that you never had hope and were just fooling yourself all along.
“Holy shit! It wasn’t you, was it, Beard? It was her.” Chance leans down, elbows on knees, grinning at me like a shark. “How many?”
“Leave her alone, man,” Wyatt warns, but Chance doesn’t budge.
“How many?”
My eyes roll up to him. “As many as I had to.”
“And you haven’t been home.”
It’s not a question. His eyes meet mine like the click of teeth.
“Me and Valor didn’t end things on the best of terms,” I finally say.
“Valor doesn’t end anything on good terms,” says the girl, pushing her way into the tight circle of our conversation. She’s about my age with medium-dark skin and a faded purple fro-hawk.
“You too?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Nope. Just went with my brother to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid.”
I look from her to him, Gabriela to Chance, or Cianci, or whatever, and the only thing they have in common is that they’re angry. He’s tall and lanky; she’s short and curvy. He’s tan, but she’s brown. His eyes are shifty gray; hers are maybe dark hazel. They can’t be related.
“Yes, she’s my sister. Yes, it’s a long story. Point is, would you like to adopt the nerd you shot? Because we’re on the run, and he can’t run anymore, and it’s kind of your fault.”
“I can run,” the kid whimpers.
Chance stands and saunters over to nudge the kid’s leg with his boot tip. The kid howls and sniffles. “No, you really can’t.”
I look up at Wyatt, unsure what to say.
“We have plans,” he says for me.
“So do we.” Chance looks pointedly at the door. “And they’re happening now.”
“I don’t want to go with the girl that shot me!” the kid wails.
“I can shoot you, too,” Chance offers, flopping his gun in the kid’s direction.
“No, you can’t. You’re out of bullets.”
If looks could kill, Chance just turned the kid into pulp.
“Did I mention he’s a tactical genius?” he says, shoving the gun into the front of his jeans. It’s a black Glock, of course. Just like mine, which he pulls out instead. “I’ve got fourteen bullets now. You want one?”
The kid just sniffles and glares like he knows that Chance is an asshole but not a monster. Lucky him.
“So you’ve got bullets now. Take your kid and go. There’s another building in the park. Stay there. But don’t come back here, or we’ll aim higher,” I say. “We have more guns.”
“Where are you headed?” Gabriela asks, too quick.
My hands go into fists. “Wouldn’t you like to know? Let me guess. You want our supplies.”
“Yeah. I’m just really excited about half-eaten hamburgers and a fat dog. And is that a freaking snake?” She shakes her heads and puts a hand on her hip. “Look, I’m just saying . . . if you’re in the same boat we are, we might as well see if we can help each other. We have nowhere to go, no one we can trust. You don’t, either. Maybe there’s safety in numbers.”
“I promise we won’t eat your dog,” Chance says, but that’s obvious. Matty is on her back, licking his knuckles while he rubs her belly.
Wyatt and I lock eyes. He shakes his head no. And I know that he knows more about this Chance kid than I do, and if their only connection is Mikey, that means Chance is a connection from Wyatt’s bad-boy phase. Could be drugs, destruction, or punk shows. Could be worse. But I shot this kid, and they look desperate, and I can’t help thinking about what it would feel like to go home and see your house on fire. There’s a connection here—a common enemy. In the new world Valor is fashioning, connections like this one might be the only way to survive. I don’t trust these kids. Not a bit. But I don’t know if my conscience can take three more lives, three more strike marks. If we send them away without money, without food, without medicine, with only fourteen bullets against the world, I will hate myself even more.
Chance slides out my clip, flicks a bullet out with his thumb and rolls it around in his palm. “These aren’t Valor issue, are they?”
I say nothing. Wyatt curses under his breath. Chance slides the bullet back in, snaps in the clip, and aims the gun at me. “Where are the rest of the bullets?” he says slowly.
Wyatt’s gun is ready, aimed at Chance’s chest. “None of your goddamn business. Now, she asked where we were going, and that’s nowhere. So where are you going? Because now would be a good time to leave.”
Chance measures us with his eyes, stares around the dark room as if taking inventory. Roy’s shotgun pinned under my foot, Wyatt’s Glock pointed at his chest, our bags, our dog who is clearly not a guard dog, a glass box full of snake. He gives me a lopsided smile.
“We don’t know where we’re going, okay? We were going to figure that out here, tonight. I mean . . . what’s left? Can’t go home. Can’t go back to school. Don’t know who’s in on the takeover and who’s not. This place is turning into the Wild Wild West.”
“I forgot how much you and Mikey liked crappy movies,” Wyatt says. “Idiot. It’s nothing like that.”
“There’s no law, the law there is went corrupt, and you can shoot anybody without consequences. That’s pretty fucking Wild West to me, bro.”
“Why don’t you just go join the Citizens for Freedom?” I say, hoping to scrape them off.
Gabriela looks up from beside the kid. “The what now?”
“Okay, so we found out about this meeting—” I start.
“Don’t!” Wyatt puts a hand on my arm.
“Ugh!” I wave my arms around and pace up and down the hall. “Why not? What do we have to lose? They’ll see the flyers one day anyway. Let them go. Maybe the Citizens have medicine for the kid.”
Wyatt leans in to whisper, “You want them to go to the meeting?” He inclines his head toward Chance. “Look, I know this guy, and you don’t want him on our side.”
“If I’m a bad guy, you’re a bad guy, too, bro,” Chance says lazily, turning the gun around like he’s looking for the gold stamp.
“Why don’t we all go?” Gabriela says. “If you were going anyway. Strength in numbers.”
Wyatt’s voice is strained. “I don’t like this.”
Gabriela stands and walks to me. “Okay, so let’s work this out without the gorillas. Do you trust him?” She motions to Wyatt, and I nod. “Well, I trust him.” She points to Chance. “So if you and I can trust each other, maybe we can all live. But if we dick around, I’m pretty sure the kid’s not going to be okay. And we don’t have a car.”
I look at the kid on the floor, and he’s so pale he stands out against the darkness of the rotten house. He’s painfully small and still, just as floppy as Amber was. I don’t want to be haunted by another ghost. And even if Wyatt doesn’t trust Chance, I like Gabriela. And I think she’s right. Maybe it’s because I lost my best friend this week, but I want to agree with her. And if it all goes south, we’ve still got more bullets than they do.
“Seriously, you’re not considering this?” Wyatt puts his arm around my shoulder and turns me away, but I notice he keeps his gun on Chance. His whisper is even softer this time. “That guy is bad news. Seriously bad news.”
“He hasn’t shot us yet.”
“That doesn’t mean much.”
I turn around and raise my voice, because I’m so damn sick of this tension, of the way the temperature in a room ratchets up as soon as someone aims a gun.
“Look. Here’s my final say. I don’t trust them, and they don’t trust us, but I’d rather join forces than shoot three more people. They can come with us to the Citizens for Freedom meeting tomorrow, or they can leave right now, or we can kill them. I just want to go to sleep and forget today happened. Prey animals live in groups for a reason. So come on or get out.” I plunk down on the sleeping bag and shine my flashlight in Chance’s eyes. “And give me back my goddamn gun.”
Chance reaches into his pants and gives me his gun, his empty gun, and it feels all wrong in my hand even though it’s a Glock just like the one Valor gave me.
“This is not my gun.”
“So fill it with bullets, and then we’re all on the same page. I’m not letting my sister sleep in the same room with two armed strangers and me holding my dick.”
It’s probably the sleep deprivation and insanity talking, but I kind of see his point.
All this time, Gabriela’s been dealing with the kid, but now she’s hunting around the room for something.
“If we’re sticking around, we need to elevate his leg,” she says.
I grab a few moldy pillows from the corner and put them under his foot.
“Blankets?”
I point at the sleeping bag. “That’s our only one.”
“Spare clothes?”
“Not that would fit him.”
Gabriela stares daggers at me like I’m totally useless and tries to prop the kid up. He whimpers like he’s having a bad dream.
Which . . . I guess he basically is.
“Yo, Cianci—” Gabriela calls.
“Call me Chance from now on. It’s cooler.”
I can almost hear her roll her eyes. “How about you share your bounty?”
Chance gets up and strolls to the door. Wyatt follows him, and their angry whispers carry down the hall in the still night. The slap of flesh suggests they’re bumping chests or something similarly apelike. I kind of wish I could see it. I’ve never seen Wyatt talk to anyone our age except me, and everything about the way he walks and talks and acts changed the second he saw Chance. He’s gone full silverback.
“Don’t fuck this up,” Wyatt finally says.
Chance saunters back in and squats beside us, tossing a ratty duffel bag on the ground. When he unzips it, the inside rattles around. Dozens and dozens of pill bottles.
“What the hell?” I say.
He hunts through them, pulls out an orange bottle, and knocks two white pills into his palm. Gabriela hands the kid a half-full bottle of water and helps him swallow the meds.
“You’re a drug dealer?” I ask.
His stare is flat and judgmental. “I’m a businessman. The kid’s in pain. I can help him. The insurance system is effed up. I help people, connect them with what they need. This isn’t meth and crack. It’s all real. I’m like . . . the Robin Hood of Big Pharma. What if your mom couldn’t afford insurance to get her meds?”
My mouth drops open and I choke. My eyes are swimmy, and I’m hot and cold all over, and Wyatt hurries to me, his arm heavy on my shoulder.
“Guess I’m a telepath, too,” Chance murmurs, zipping up his pack. “Your folks dead? Natural orphan or Valor?”
“She told you. She hasn’t been back to find out,” Wyatt growls.
The old house goes eerily silent, as if all our ghosts rushed in at once to haunt us.
“How long does it take until it stops hurting?” the kid asks.
“I’ll tell you when I find out,” I say.
That’s not what he meant, but it’s what we all want to know, really.
Wyatt’s in the corner, filling Chance in on the Citizens for Freedom, or whatever Alistair and his group are calling themselves. I don’t know what was said in the hall, but they seem to have an uneasy truce now. I scoot back against an armchair and slide bullets into the clip of Chance’s gun. My vision is wavering, and I almost nod off before I’m done. The kid—I still don’t know his name and haven’t asked—his meds kicked in, and he’s on his back, snoring hard, his glasses askew. His leg stopped bleeding and crusted up, so I guess it’s fine for now. Matty is stretched out by his side, paws twitching as she dreams. Whenever the kid tries to move and cries out, I flinch and swallow down the guilt. Gabriela’s on the squashy couch, perched over him like an awkward angel.
Chance looms over me, his stare hard. “I sleep light,” he says.
“Congratulations.”
“You try to take my gun or hurt Gabriela or that kid, and you die. And so does Beard. And that dog.”
But I don’t believe him anymore, not really. At least he wouldn’t hurt Matty.
“I’m too tired to care,” I say.
Wyatt returns from whatever he was doing outside and stretches out on the least nasty part of the carpet. Strong arms pull me close.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s going to be okay.”
Which is a lie.
My eyes don’t want to close, and my fingers are clenched around Chance’s gun. I can see my gun, likewise clamped in his hand. He’s in the middle of the room, between us and Gabriela. In sleep, his smirk has stretched into a grim frown. His gun feels wrong, but why should any gun ever feel right?
I breathe out and settle back, ever the little spoon curled against Wyatt, both of us facing them as if for battle. This truce—it was the only choice that didn’t end in somebody dying. But Wyatt’s not happy. I can feel the tension in his chest, the gruffness of each exhalation. I keep trying to match my breathing to his so that I can get some sleep, but the air is full of unwelcome, unfriendly scents. Gabriela wears a patchouli perfume that mixes with the scent of old weed and the crust of black mildew and the hard tang of a kid who’s soaked in piss and blood because of me.
So many people have bled because of me.
But I can’t fall asleep like Chance, still and hard and unmoving.
All I can do is cry as quietly as possible, when everyone else is asleep.