I START CLIPPING newspaper articles, pasting them into an album. Colonel Higgins and some of her team were picked up near the Pennsylvania-Ohio border a week after they nearly decimated Windale. The colonel herself was next to dead after some of the zombified townspeople beat her senseless. Not long after that, the army came in, this time led by some bigwig general, and shut down TerraCorp, making up some story about hallucinogenic toxins being released in the air. They put it all on Higgins.
It’s like I wasn’t even there. I fell asleep in the woods on Dagger Hill and woke up almost two weeks later in the hospital. Everything I know has changed.
But sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Especially when Gabe and Charlie and Sonya come to see me.
Of the four of us, Gabe came the closest to dying that night. He lost so much blood by the time Rebecca Conner found him on the rooftop of the video store. Charlie was also in shock when she found him. And honestly, I don’t know if he’ll ever be the same. He still carries that same joy he always has, but sometimes it feels like there’s slightly less of it.
We’re all a little more subdued now. We laugh and rag on each other and try to make light of some of the things that went on that weekend. It’s just easy to get bogged down by the idea that Windale itself might not be a livable place right now if not for what we did, if not for Jack Albright and Sonya’s dad, too. They’re both retired now. They hang out. A lot.
Charlie gets a chance to finally let his broken leg heal, but it will never be totally right after the strain he put on it. Doctors told him he’ll probably need to use a cane for the rest of his life.
“That’s okay,” Charlie says. “It’ll make me seem worldly and intriguing.” He winks, and we all laugh.
It’s good to be together like this, the three of them sitting on the end of my hospital bed, sharing snacks, talking about some movie or TV show or comic book, cracking jokes at each other’s expense. But that same inevitable dread that hung over us the day of the crash is still there. Our lives almost ending didn’t change the average teenage drama we were going through. Now, we’re the Almost Somebodies. Because dying would have made us infamous. Living is just more of the same complicated pain.
A song sung four, I think, watching my friends play Go Fish around my feet. It’s a rhyme that isn’t mine. The only thing the anomaly left behind instead of took was this stupid lyric that plays in my head on a loop, and I hate it.
All outta time.