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“You can stop staring at me like that,” I say.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m some kind of freak. Like I’m unstable dynamite about to go off.”
We’re in the car and back on the road. Thick black smoke rises from the hill behind us. I stare into the mirror, unable to look away. It’s such a strange sight to see, something burning like that without the accompanying wail of sirens. No fire trucks or police cars to pull over for, nothing to indicate that something is terribly wrong. If not for the growl of our own engine and the sticky hiss of the tires on the road, the world would be completely mute about the horror we’ve just left behind. I watch the smoke rising and torment myself by thinking how that’s Kelly rising up into the sky and floating away from me. He’s gone now, forever.
“I wasn’t staring.”
“You were. I can feel it.” I sigh and shift my gaze from the mirror to the scenery flashing past beside us. Without realizing it, my eyes drift back to the mirror.
Kelly. My dear, sweet Kelly. It’s all my fault.
I feel numb, senselessly achingly numb, like my body and mind are simply unable to process anymore pain and have started to do a complete system shutdown. I know I should be hurting terribly, and I do, I just can’t seem to get the pain to mean anything. Kelly’s dead. He died a terrible death. All because of me.
And yet the pain feels far away, detached.
Shock, Jessie. You’re in shock.
“It’s just...” He sighs. “It was weird.”
“What was weird?”
“It was like they knew to get out of our way back there. Out of your way.”
I know exactly what he means. Back there, as we were escaping the compound, when we were surrounded by the undead, the gap seemed to open up ahead of us the moment I step toward the horde. I’d led a winding, sinuous path through the dead in the forest, thinking I was simply finding the best way for us to escape through them. It was like I could see the openings in front of me before they were there, like the dead were the walls of an ever shifting maze, and I could tell exactly where they’d be a moment before they formed. I can tell from the way Reggie brought up the subject that he thought there was something supernatural about it, like maybe I’d had some sort of second vision. But it was just heightened awareness, perhaps brought on by my—
condition
—anguished state.
“You got us out of there without a single one touching us,” he says.
“It was just intuition,” I reply.
A mother’s intuition. A mother fiercely protecting her child.
“Was it, though?” he asks. “Why don’t you want to kill them?”
I sigh and ask him if we talk about something else, because right now, right this very moment, I would like nothing more than to kill them all for taking Kelly away from me. I fear if I start talking, I might actually give voice to that desire, and it’ll be like making a decision I can’t change.
We drive on in silence, but it barely lasts two minutes.
“You couldn’t have done anything,” he says. “It was too late.”
I say nothing. If there’s anything I want to talk about even less than what happened back there during our escape, it’s what happened right before it.
“You couldn’t have known. Neither of us could have.”
“I heard him,” I whisper. “I heard Jake.”
“It’s not your fault. I heard him, too, first, before we dug out the bag.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
I’d sensed Jake nearly from the moment we set foot inside the compound, but I’d ignored it, thinking it was the same paranoiac feeling that had come over me the last time I’d been there. So when Reggie kept acting like he was hearing things, I’d wanted to believe that’s all he was experiencing, too. I should’ve pressed him harder. If I had, I would’ve realized Jake was still around, physically around, and Kelly might still be alive.
He’s dead because of me.
It’s a cruel irony. Kelly never trusted Jake, had always been jealous of him. He believed the boy was going to come between us. And I’d fought him on it every step of the way. Yet that’s exactly what had ended up happening. In the end, Jake had split us apart for good.
“Kelly did it for you, Jess. He sacrificed himself for us.”
“He was already dead.”
“Doesn’t make it any less of a sacrifice. He pulled Jake into that shack. He died a hero. He died saving the one thing he loved more than anything in this world: you.”
I can feel Reggie watching me again. Or still. Whichever. I can feel his concern and it only makes me angrier. I want him to be angry with me. At me. I don’t want his pity. I need his condemnation.
I turn and stare out the window. I can no longer see the hill or the smoke in the mirror.
“You’re still doing it,” I say.
“What?”
“Staring.”
“Because I’m worried about you.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“Someone has to.”
This almost pisses me off. It’s as much an unnecessary reminder that Kelly’s not around anymore as it is a judgment on me. I turn to snap at him that he’s wrong, but I can tell from the look on his face he hadn’t meant it that way. He genuinely does care and he worries because that’s the way he’s wired. He doesn’t know any other way.
“You knew, didn’t you?” he says.
“About what?” I cautiously ask.
“That you were pregnant. You had to know.”
I want to tell him I didn’t, I had no idea. But that wouldn’t be totally true. I’d started suspecting something more was happening a while ago. I’d missed a period. I’d wanted to believe it was the stress and trauma we’d all suffered. But then, after those weeks of nausea and vomiting, nothing seemed to track with my wounds healing. Plus, my mood was all over the place.
But I’d never allowed myself to go all the way to contemplating whether I might be carrying a baby.
“There were... signs,” I say.
“Uh huh.”
“But how did Doctor White know?”
“Really?” he asks.
I realize it’s a silly question. The woman’s been collecting my blood for years. She’d have had it tested. It makes me wonder how long she knew. Did she know that day I barged into her office and demanded to know what she was doing with Kelly? Did she know before I came back here? Did Kelly?
God, I’m suddenly so tired. So damn tired.
“Where are you taking us?” I ask.
“Western wall.”
“Why?”
“There’s still another tablet, remember? And if I know Micah, it’s going to have a copy of his script on it. We get it and we can still hack into the codex...” His voice trails off as the folly of this plan sinks in. With the Stream shut down, the codex will be completely inaccessible to us. And with the generator now blown, we won’t be able to reboot the mainframe and transmit a hack.
I feel the car slow. We drift to a stop in the middle of the highway. I think we’re about a mile east of Woodbury. After sitting there for a couple minutes staring out the windshield, he reaches over and shuts the engine off. “Maybe it’ll find a solution on its own,” he says. “The codex is pretty advanced. It’ll fix itself.”
I shake my head. “The Stream’s been out for too long this time. I think if there was a solution, then it would’ve come up with it by now and reset the network.”
“But if there’s no Stream, then they can’t activate our implants.”
“I don’t think it works that way, Reg. The Stream is off to prevent the virus from spreading. It’ll come back on to send that one last command.”
“Maybe not,” he says, pleading. “We have to believe.”
I exhale through pursed lips. “We’ve tried everything, Reg.”
“No! Don’t say that!”
I throw my hands up in defeat. “What else is there? It’s not like we can go back to our lives. We can’t even leave the damn island!”
His forehead crinkles. “Not back, Jess,” he says. I can almost hear the gears inside his hear turning. “Never back. But we can still go forward.”
“Just stop with the feel-good platitudes, Reggie.”
“Look, I’m sorry Kelly’s gone. It fucking sucks. It hurts like fucking hell, like a part of me has died inside. I know it’s much worse for you, but you can’t just give up, Jessie. I refuse to let you. You have to think about the baby.”
I chuff. “I’ll be doing it a favor by dying here.”
“That’s not true.”
“Everyone out there is dead, Reg, dead or dying. Eric’s gone missing. He’s probably dead. Mom’s dead. Everyone’s gone.”
“Eric’s in jail. And your mother’s not dead. Why would you think that?”
I turn to him in surprise. “What?”
“She’s not dead. I just spoke with her two days ago.”
The world spins. I feel sick. I try to push the dizziness away, but it’s like a lead blanket smothering me, holding me in some kind of vortex.
“But Ashley said— She told me Mom had died.”
“Fuck her. She lied to you.”
I gasp with sudden realization. She told the truth in the end.
He wrings the steering wheel with both hands until it groans from the strain. “Goddamn fucking bitch,” he whispers. “Goddamn stupid fucking...” He lowers his forehead onto the backs of his hands. “God, Jessie, I’m so sorry about her. Really, I am. I don’t know what I ever saw in her.”
I brush his apology aside. “Are you sure?” I ask. I need to know. I need to be able to believe him. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“Two days ago,” he says, nodding.
“And... how was she?”
“Well, weak, but recovering. My parents are with her. They’re taking care of her. Kelly’s parents, and Kyle, too. They’re all together. They’re holed up in a secret spot just outside of the city.”
“Why?’
“The police were after them. They’re in this junky apartment Doctor White had been renting. It’s where she did all her experiments.”
“She’s alive? You’re saying my mother is alive?”
He nods and reaches for the ignition. “They’re waiting for us. We should go, be with them.”
“We can’t. Even if we had time.”
“Yes,” he says. “We can, and we will. Somehow, we’ll make it. What do you say? Should we go home?”
“Home,” I echo. The word feels strange on my tongue, hollow-sounding and unfamiliar. I try to picture what home must look like now, but nothing comes to me. I can’t even seem to remember what my mother looks like.
I sigh deeply and nod. “Yeah, let’s go home.”
Reggie turns the key in the ignition. The starter motor clicks. We wait, but nothing more happens. He tries again. The result is the same.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
He curses. “The fucking engine won’t start.”
