I changed into more layers, pulled a knit beanie tight over my ears, put on knit gloves with the fingertips cut off, and set to making coffee. The little camp stove had fed me and Spencer and everyone else many a cold night. A warm can of beans made all the difference in luxury eating compared to eating it cold.
I positioned the stove under the vent. Spencer always told the story about this guy he had known who’d killed himself because he’d slept all night with the windows closed and then had lit up his stove in his enclosed car. Stupid. I didn’t understand how the guy hadn’t felt it coming and just cracked open a stupid window and I wondered if Spencer had made the story up, which he’d been known to do, but then again, I never forgot to open a window, no matter how cold it got outside.
I handed Maibe a cup of coffee and offered cream and sugar packets hoarded long ago from some breakfast splurge at Denny’s. She held the cup, sniffed it, took a tentative sip, and curled her lip.
“You never had coffee before?”
“No.” Her dark hair haloed her face. I’m sure she would have looked young if not for the double infection turning her skin into an old leather sofa beat to hell. Someone else had infected her with both the V virus and the bacteria cure weeks before we’d met. It was one of the few things she didn’t like to talk about.
I kept myself from rolling my eyes, but it was a close call.
She must have seen me hold it back though because she said, “My aunt wouldn’t allow it.”
I handed her a bowl of steaming oatmeal next. I’d done the same morning after morning for everyone. Spencer made the coffee, I did the oatmeal, Mary made bacon or eggs or potatoes, and we’d all eaten out of bowls in our laps, knee-to-knee on the benches.
Yeah, we might have been a bunch of kids living in a van, but in the homeless street world, the van meant we had been rich and we tried to make life better for each other whenever we could.
I shook my head. I couldn’t let my mind wander, otherwise I’d become ripe for a memory-rush and Spencer and the rest didn’t have that kind of time.
Something shifted.
The bowl in Maibe’s hands shivered.
I noticed the wood walls, the metal door, the field that led to the trees that led to the river.
A part of me screamed at myself to snap out of the memory-rush. We were in the van and it was me and Maibe and we had to get to the others.
■
Sunlight pulled me out of the memory-rush. The rays glared in my eyes because the ceiling vent was wide open.
I sat up and looked around. The van was back, the windows were curtained, the front windshield—
The Vs were gone.
Maibe was gone too.
Panic made me dizzy and the van’s walls and windows and cabinets blurred as if I were taking a turn on a carousel. I scrambled through the vent and pulled myself onto the roof. My weight created depressions in the metal that popped back up when I stepped away. I scanned the parking lot, the gym’s entrance, the street full of houses built just long enough ago for the paint to fade.
There. Movement on the street.
It was happening so fast, I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first.
Five Vs. Maibe out in front. The V girl was closest to Maibe, the old man last of the bunch.
Maibe was sprinting down the block, drawing the Vs away. She ran just like Mary had run when that V in the plaid shirt had chased us. Mary had made us split up. The V had followed her and bitten into her and I cursed and jumped off the van’s roof before the memory-rush could go any further. I needed to move or I was going to lose it and Maibe would die for nothing.
As soon as I went weightless in the air I knew I was going to land wrong. I tucked like I’d learned to do while jumping off moving trains. The shock of the ground was jarring and I thought about how fast I would die if I managed to sprain my ankle right then.
A yell from Maibe snapped me to attention. I slammed open the van door and grabbed for my crossbow—a stolen piece of property thanks to the local hunting supply store. I ran after them but they disappeared around a house. I ran anyway, thinking I’d catch up just in time to watch them tear Maibe to pieces and it would be my fault because I hadn’t found a way. The V girl had freaked me out and I’d hid and pretended everything would be okay if I ignored it for long enough.
My breath came out in gasps, but my legs were used to running. Halfway down the block a figure darted out from a side street.
I skidded to a stop, dropped to one knee, and raised my crossbow.
Maibe looked at me like I was crazy as she ran by. “Come on, Gabbi!”
I sprinted after her, fear mixed with admiration. She’d outrun them by herself. She’d actually done it.
When we made it to the van I bent over and took in huge, gulping breaths while pressing my head against the cold metal. If she had died, I would have been alone. “What were you thinking!?!”
“I knew I was faster than them,” Maibe said. Her hair was in disarray and she didn’t even carry any weapons. “But we don’t have much time.” She showed me her arm.
One of the Vs had bitten her. She’d be lost to the fevers soon.
Suddenly I was moving through the air as if I’d been hit by a car. The street and sky switched places. My crossbow flew away from my hands as if tied to a string someone had yanked. Air rushed into my ears and I landed on my gloved hands and bare knees and cheek. The shock of the asphalt sent tremors through my skull. My eyes couldn’t focus and the world spun. I raised stinging fingers to my cheek and felt wetness.
There was a growl, low and deep, behind me. I flipped over and stared into the eyes of what had once been a man but was now a V. He must have been drawn by the commotion we’d made.
He leaned over me, too close. Burst capillaries formed red rivers through the whites of his eyes. His breath stunk of spoiled milk. Half of his face seemed paralyzed. The other half showed a rigid snarl. I waited for him to rip me apart. He cocked his head like a dog might, opened his mouth so I could see his straight pearly-whites and the thousands of dollars he must have spent to make them so before the virus took him. He growled again and clicked his teeth shut with enough force to take off a finger.
The Vs eyes widened in fury, like he was reliving every angry moment of his life all at once. I dared not move.
A metal bat swung into view and slammed into the back of the V’s head. He dropped like a brick.
I scrambled to the side, crab walking to my crossbow.
Maibe stood over the unconscious V, hesitating now that he was down but not dead. Would Maibe have the guts to deliver a second blow and finish him off?
I readied my crossbow but waited to see.
She held up the bat and then dropped it to her side.
I aimed and shot into his head. His body hiccuped and stilled.
“Coward,” I said even though she had outrun a pack of Vs all by herself.
She looked ashamed. “Did you really have to—”
“Them being sick doesn’t give them a free pass to hurt us.” I went to the van. “We’ve got to keep going before you lose it.”
She turned and puked.
It was like we were on speed as I made us gather our stuff: some food and water, the bat I bungee-corded to my back, a knife I insisted Maibe carry. We grabbed up the bikes. Our breath came out in long twirls of mist that made me ache for a smoke. The fog had a light brown tint to it because of the sunrise and the fires. The air smelled like a gross mixture of damp campfire and overcooked meat. The fires would only get worse with no one to put them out.
Maibe pedaled for a couple of blocks before the memory-fevers took over. I tried tying a shopping cart to my bike and dragging her along but the noise was terrifying.
I pushed her into the nearest dumpster and kept my crossbow lifted and ready to shoot anyone who dared show their face.
She stayed in the fever for hours. She tumbled back and forth on old food wrappers and lumpy plastic bags. Her face was flushed and when she moaned I tensed, waiting for Vs to hear it. I used the bungee cords to tie her hands and feet together—that was the rule Spencer had made. It kept someone in the fevers from hurting themselves or anyone else. But there was nothing else to do except watch and pretend I couldn’t hear the terrible memories she was reliving—and stand guard until my arms couldn’t lift the crossbow anymore.
I think I shot off my crossbow once. I don’t know if it had been at something real. Sometimes the memories are like that—ghosts that fly into reality and become part of the scene around you.
■
My arms had turned to Jello by the time she came out of the fevers. I could barely pull myself back over the edge of the dumpster. We picked up the bikes I’d abandoned on the sidewalk when Maibe went under. Before the infection had taken down the city I’d done my bike up with silver streamers and a skull and crossbones sticker.
As we pedaled, life returned to my arms. We didn’t speak to each other. She couldn’t talk and there was nothing I could say. Though there were plenty of signs that life had been around at some point, there was nothing alive now: abandoned cars, broken glass, a hydrant that gushed water and flooded one street, bodies laying still on the ground.
I’d bet my best sleeping bag that Faints filled every house in sight. They were like the opposite of Vs. They went comatose and sometimes did their own version of sleepwalking, but they were mostly neutral. When me and the rest of us had almost come out of the fevers, Dr. Ferrad was there too, recovering from her own fevers. She’d told us that Faints were people who only caught the bacteria—though she didn’t know how that was possible. The bacteria wasn’t supposed to be contagious like the V virus.
What mattered about Faints though was they didn’t come after you like the Vs did, but they could still cause trouble, plus they were super creepy all sleepwalking around with smiles plastered on their faces half the time.
Yeah, I’d told Maibe houses weren’t safe. And they weren’t. But I also couldn’t bear to step inside one and run into a Faint.
We rode by a car with its windows busted and a body humped over the steering wheel. He could have been drunk and passed out like my dad used to get, except blood spatter marked up the pieces of windshield glass on the hood and road, and his head seemed sort of caved in.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Maibe said.
I felt perfectly fine and wondered what that said about me. “Just don’t look.”
We passed through a four-way stop with a stalled car in the middle. Mary sat on the hood of the car, her jet black hair falling around her shoulders. She waved and smiled at me as if nothing were wrong. My bike wobbled and I lost feeling in my fingers. I knew it was a ghost-memory, but I couldn’t see anything except her until I slammed into the stalled car and tumbled over the handlebars and through the spot where she’d been sitting. She disappeared then as I lay splayed out on the hood.
I closed my eyes for a moment because I was so tired of it all.
The squeak of a wheel made me open my eyes again. Maibe had picked my bike off the ground and flipped it over. The skull and crossbones sticker was all scratched to pieces now and half the streamers had ripped off. She was trying to spin the front wheel and unbend what couldn’t be unbent.
“I need another bike,” I said, but my voice trembled. We’d already lost so much time. Either I walked the rest of the way, or I searched a nearby house for another bike. “We’ll have to search the houses.”
“We can’t go in,” Maibe said. “We can’t! You said houses were dangerous, the most dangerous, the—”
“I need a bike,” I said simply. I limped over to a garage with a dark strip at the bottom. Maybe it wasn’t locked and I wouldn’t need to enter a house at all. There was no hum of electricity, only the smell of grease and oil and metal. I stood up, put both hands underneath the lip of the garage door, and the door went up with a screech. Geometric shapes edged the interior. Something red and metal and bike-like gleamed in the corner. Something else smelled like wet socks that hadn’t been allowed to dry.
My muscles knew before my brain could process it. Two people stood against a workbench, backs to me. Faints.
Faint skin looked like ours. It was weird because V skin didn’t—theirs was like normal.
We could walk to Cal Expo.
There was no good reason to step into this garage, to the bike waiting like a present in the back corner. I could lower the garage door and turn around. I almost did because the Faints creeped me out worse than the Vs, worse than others like me and Maibe—Feebs—with weird skin and even weirder memories. Faints were still people, still alive, but locked in somehow differently than Vs.
“Is there a bike?” Maibe said from behind me.
“Shh,” I said and dropped my arms. Sometimes you could wake up a Faint and that was even worse. “Yeah, but it’s not worth it.” I said this in a whisper as I turned around and walked down the driveway. I wouldn’t risk bringing the door back down, better just to leave.
“What?”
“There’s Faints,” I said, trying not to let the fear show in my voice.
Maibe cocked her head and drew her eyebrows together. “So?”
“So,” I said. “We’re moving on.”
“That’s it? But they’re Faints, they’re not going to bother you, they’re not going to do anything except maybe run through some old memory about taking out the trash or changing the sheets or cooking dinner. Did I tell you Faints saved Corrina and me?” Maibe waved her arms around in pantomime. “The Vs had followed us and she had gotten bit and the virus was flaring up again and—” Her voice trailed off and she looked at something over my shoulder.
The two Faints had moved to the garage opening. A black and white spotted cat twined in and around their legs, meowing outrageously at their lack of attention. They held hands. A middle-aged couple underneath the afflicted skin. Something about the look of the man, the scruff of his growing beard, the disarray of his hair, the mean hook of his nose, the way that he gripped the woman’s hand, like she was a possession he intended to hurt—it made my knees weak and wobbly.
I willed back the tendrils of memory that crept out—long nights spent curled in a pink comforter listening for the yelling and fighting and the crash of glass. The creak of my bedroom door opening, the sour stink of alcohol—he couldn’t hurt me anymore and I wasn’t letting anyone hurt me anymore and this was just a Faint and they might be sick and needed my pity but they couldn’t hurt me and—
“Can I help you?” said the woman in the driveway. My head cleared as I focused on her face. Her eyes were still glassy and unfocused, but something had triggered her to run a memory out loud. “Can I help you?” She scratched her wrist and looked at the man without really looking at him. “George, go see what they want.”
George dropped the woman’s hand and took a step down the driveway. I stepped back, and back, and back, until the car and the crippled bike and the dead Vs were between me and him.
“Gabbi?” Maibe said, her tone containing equal parts question and concern.
“I…” I leaned against the metal car door and slid to the ground. My palms burned as if someone had placed my hands on a hot electric stove, not someone, not anyone, but him, him over there behind the car, walking down the driveway to continue his business, as he liked to call it, walking down the hallway to drag me out of my room and into the kitchen and before I could stop it the sky and the Vs and the fog disappeared and there was only darkness and burning and his laugh.