The cold air sunk into my chest and made my breath hiccup. We had spent two days hiding. Two days worth of avoiding the extra guards, the extra patrols, and looking for Corrina. I’d gone back for my crossbow, but that was the only weapon we’d yet managed to find. We knew where we were going next though. Ricker had overheard that morning while stealing food from their soup lines that they were planning to hang Corrina as a way to celebrate the New Year.
We skirted the fenceline. The evening light threw shadows everywhere. I trailed behind the group. I told myself I was watching our backs instead of dragging my feet. Spencer hadn’t sent anyone away—even half-paralyzed Leaf, injured Jimmy, and Maibe in her silly pink sweatshirt. The three of them were too young, too injured, too weak. Mary would never have let them come.
Groans drifted out from the darkness, on the river’s side of the fence, and grew louder as we approached a gate.
Spencer held up his hand.
A person lurched into view through a gap in the fence. A gap, it dawned on me, that shouldn’t be there.
Dark shapes littered the ground. Unmoving lumps of clothing that had once been guards. Their uniforms gave away which side they’d belonged to. I tried to breath around the sudden tightness in my chest. How could we get Corrina and the others and fight off the uninfected and the Vs too? We were runaways, not soldiers, we stayed in the shadows, we blended in, we avoided stuff exactly like this.
“Check them out.” Spencer said.
I pushed all thought away and went through the closest guard’s pockets, then stopped, realizing I didn’t need his money or his plastic. He was facedown on the ground and his neck was twisted. Broken.
“What happened?” Maibe said. She held a bloody knife in her hand. Part of me was glad she had the guts to take what she needed and another part of me was sad. I pushed it all away and focused on getting us all out of this alive.
Leaf limped over to the fence and brushed his fingers along the opening. “The Vs must have overwhelmed it.” He kicked at the parts of a broken radio. The plastic bits scattered. “They might not even know about it.”
The shuffle of feet on the fairground side of the fence drew our attention to a group of Vs yards away. Some ran, some walked, others limped.
They were moving away from us.
They were moving toward the noise and smells and activity of the camp.
“We have to warn them,” Leaf said.
“They don’t deserve a warning,” Ricker said. “We don’t have to warn them. The opening is right here. We just leave now.”
I opened my mouth to agree with Ricker.
“We’re not leaving without the rest of the Feebs,” Spencer said.
“We don’t owe them,” Ricker said.
“I won’t go,” Maibe said.
Ricker looked at her, begging her to change her mind. “Maibe…”
I waited for Ano to speak up. His dark eyes surveyed the landscape. He’d picked up a rifle and a knife and looked too much the part of a soldier—hard, uncaring, set on doing damage. But I knew that wasn’t him, was it?
Ano didn’t say a word. He just let them argue it out in fierce whispers while the cold sunk deep into our bones and the mucky smell of the river mixed with the smell of blood.
Spencer started walking without a word. Maibe was the next one, and Jimmy after her. Ano and I looked at each other. We didn’t need to say anything to know the other’s thoughts.
Spencer had decided and we would follow.
Stay alive, I told myself. Don’t get caught. I repeated this like it would automatically come true if I said it a million times.
Ricker caught up to us when Spencer slowed down at the base of a set of stairs.
“Jimmy. Maibe. Get up those stairs and keep lookout.” Spencer pointed at where he wanted the two of them. Up high, out of the way, in direct view of the center of camp. The electronic sound of a man speaking suddenly filtered through the air.
Maibe dashed up and Jimmy followed. The voice droned on.
There was a sick slap as a figure slammed into Ricker and took him to the ground. We’d caught up too close to the Vs and one of them had noticed us.
I panicked and jumped onto the V and bashed in his skull with the crossbow. Ano helped me drag the V off Ricker. Blood poured down Ricker’s face. The V had bitten him on the head, not so deep, but enough for a scalp wound, enough to send him into the fevers at the worst possible moment.
“You’ll be okay,” Ano said.
I echoed Ano’s words even as Ricker’s eyes began to glaze. Ricker wiped his hand across his face, smearing the blood. He wasn’t going to be much help now. I looked around for Spencer and Leaf, but they were gone.
“We can’t leave him,” I said.
Ano thought for a moment and then nodded. We propped Ricker between us, his arms slung around our shoulders. The crossbow hung at my side. We limped him up the stairs and every step felt slow, like walking in quicksand.
The entire camp seemed spread before us. A mix of tents, tables, and people on one side of the moat of water, and a stage lit up as if it were Christmas on the other side. Two people stood on boxes.
“Who’s that with Corrina?” I asked.
“It’s Dylan,” Maibe said. “She found him. She didn’t think she would find him. She was afraid he had died.”
“He won’t be alive much longer.” Spotlights were trained on the two figures, highlighting the ropes around their necks.
“We have to stop them,” Maibe said.
“There’s way more of them than us,” I said. “They’re already on the ropes. They’re dead and we’ll be dead with them soon if we don’t get out of here.”
“They’re not dead yet,” Maibe said fiercely. “Take that back, Gabbi. Take that back.”
Sergeant Bennings began speaking through his stupid microphone, like an emcee announcing the next act. “Any last words before the New Year?”
Dylan said something about love and Sergeant Bennings spoke again about finding a cure and making necessary sacrifices so that people like his son and his wife and everyone’s sons and daughters and wives had a chance. He gave the microphone over to Corrina for her last words but she shook her head.
That’s when Maibe stood up at the very edge of the perch. Even though it was night the security lights shined just high enough that her pink sweatshirt stood out like a star when she waved her hands around.
“Wait,” Corrina said, her voice faint through the speaker system. “I have something to say.” She began telling some weird story into the microphone.
I dragged Maibe out of the light. “What are you thinking?”
“She needed to know we were here,” Maibe said. “She was giving up.”
“There’s nothing we can do—”
The camp erupted into shouts. The Vs had made it to the tables. People were running and fighting and dying. I spotted Spencer in the crowd and Leaf was on the other side of the moat, hobbling to the stage. My stomach dropped. Ano dashed down the stairs.
“Stay here!” I yelled at Maibe. “Keep Ricker and Jimmy safe!”
Maibe opened her mouth to protest.
“Please, Maibe. Please protect them.” I couldn’t keep the anguish from my voice.
She nodded.
I lost all sense of direction except that I had to follow Ano. It was impossible to tell V from uninfected in the dark like this with everyone looking equally insane and angry. A V slammed into my side and I went down under her hot breath, her scratching hands, her rabid eyes. Hands grabbed her shoulders and threw her off. Ano towered over me and held out a hand.
I grabbed up my crossbow and ran after him through the crowd, pushing my way through the stinking, hot bodies that had suddenly turned the night into a sauna. I broke through the crowd and fell off the edge. I was flying, falling. I hit the water hard. The shock stabbed a million needles of ice into me. The crossbow dragged me down and I imagined the dark bottom as an abyss that would swallow me up and never let me go. A boom shook the water, shook me to my core. My eyes were open but saw nothing, nothing but darkness, nothing but deep cold and wet night. I tried to get my feet under me. My shoes slipped on the thick muck of the bottom.
There was a bottom.
Energy surged through me. Water streamed from my head, my face, my arms, as I stood up. I lifted the crossbow and took in what I was seeing in the golden light of the stage. Corrina hunched over Dylan, spreading herself over him as if that would stop the bullet from the uniformed soldier standing over her.
I aimed the crossbow and shot it and closed my eyes just before the arrow buried itself into the soldier’s chest.
When I opened my eyes Corrina stared at me in shock. I screamed at her to get out of there. She looked at something behind me. I turned and saw Sergeant Bennings had climbed a light pole and was acting like a sniper, picking people off. He turned his gun to the stage but then a V jumped onto his boot and he tumbled into the water. I sloshed through the moat, set my crossbow on the stage, and hauled myself into the light.
Dylan and Corrina were gone. There were two bodies. I ran by them, thinking to catch up to Corrina. We’d find somewhere safe and then get back to the others and then—
A yellow shirt. One of the bodies wore a yellow shirt.
I froze, the knowledge sinking into my muscles before it registered in my brain. No. It was the light. The lights only made the shirt look yellow. It wasn’t really yellow. It wasn’t—
Spencer scrambled across the stage, his face a mask of grief, his jeans torn and bloody. He tumbled to one knee next to the shirt that couldn’t be yellow.
Leaf.
That was Leaf with the bright red spot like a target spreading from the center of his chest. That couldn’t be Leaf. Not the kindest one of us. Not the one who deserved more than any of us to get something better out of this life than what he’d gotten.
A keening sound filled the air and I realized it came from my own throat.
Spencer gathered Leaf into his chest and rocked him. The boom I had heard underwater. That had been Leaf dying. That had been my friend getting killed for helping someone he shouldn’t have cared about. But that wasn’t Leaf. Leaf always cared. It didn’t matter whether Corrina deserved it or not.
“We should never have stayed. We should have let her hang.” The water that streamed off me puddled next to him, thinning the blood into something pink. Her life in exchange for Leaf’s wasn’t right. This thought wormed deep into my heart like poison.