by Kate L. Mary
Ben is standing in front of the house when we make it back to the street. He’s pacing and looking around. Looking agitated. Suddenly I feel really bad for running off like that. It was obvious when we met him that he didn’t want to be alone anymore, but Walker and I just left without telling him we’d be back. It was kind of selfish.
“Ben!” I call, waving my hand.
He turns toward us, then heads our way. Jogging. It’s the most animated I’ve seen him.
“Would you look at that,” Walker says, tipping his head as a smile spreads across his face.
When Ben stops in front of us he’s panting, and once again his eyes focus on my forehead. “I didn’t know where you went. You ran out, but you didn’t tell me when you would be back. I walked down the street, but I didn’t see you.”
“Sorry about that, buddy.” Walker slaps Ben on the back so hard that he stumbles a little. “We were upstairs and saw Lilly. It was kind of impulsive.”
Ben’s eyes move to Lilly, looking her over briefly before going back to focusing on my forehead. “Your sister is alive.”
I squeeze Lilly’s hand, too emotional to speak for a full ten seconds. “She is.”
“Good.” Ben pushes his long hair out of his face. “Now we can go north. You said we would go south to get your sister, then go north. So now that we found her we can go north to the town you told me about. It sounds nice.”
Lilly turns to face me, and her blue eyes are full of hope. “A town?”
Now that we’re in the sun, I can see just how devastating her scar is. How puckered the skin around it looks. The cut must have been deep.
“Yeah,” I say, holding onto her hand even tighter. “We have a place to go.”
Lilly’s eyes fill with tears, and she throws herself against me again. I wrap my arms around her and hold her close. Overcome with tears and happiness and pain at losing the last year.
Thank you for letting me find her.
The four of us head into the house, where we congregate in the living room. Ben flops into the oversized armchair that used to be a favorite reading spot for Dixie’s mom, and Walker stretches out across the floor. Lilly takes her book bag off and drops it on the floor, then sits on the couch.
“I’ve been staking out the house for two days,” she says. “I’d gone out to look for some food, and when I came back, I saw all of you. I didn’t know who you were or what you wanted, and I was scared to come to the house. Honestly, I was really just hoping you’d leave so I could come back and get my stuff.”
She twists her blonde hair around her hand as she talks, looking us all over slowly before settling her eyes back on me. Every time I look at her, I feel like I’m dreaming. I’ve thought about what I’d say and do if I ever saw her again so many times, but right now none of it matters. I just want to stare at her. To soak her in and allow myself to believe that the future can be better. That there can be hope.
It’s been a year, but Lilly looks so much older. Her small frame is thin from lack of food, but there’s a roundness to her body that wasn’t there before. Like she’s on the verge of puberty. I hate thinking someone else might have found her. What they could have done.
I swallow and scoot closer to her. Taking her hand in mine and holding it tight like I’ll never let it go. “I found your message in the treehouse.”
Lilly nods slowly, and I’m not sure since she’s staring at her hands, but it looks like her eyes cloud over. “Dixie’s house was the only place I could think to come when I saw that ours was gone. It was like a second home to me, anyway. It just made sense.”
I squeeze her hand again, and she raises her head. Her blue eyes meet mine, holding them. My throat tightens. The only thing I really want to tell her is how sorry I am, but it’s impossible to put the emotions swirling around inside me into words.
“I missed you so much,” I finally say.
One corner of Lilly’s mouth pulls up, but her bottom lip trembles. She blinks, then lowers her head until it’s resting on my shoulder. After a second, she pulls back and her eyes narrow on my arm.
“What in the world?” Lilly runs her fingers down over my scars, then looks up at me. “What is this, Eva?”
I pull away and cross my arms, trying to cover the marks on my skin as best as I can. It’s impossible, though. The cuts go all the way up and down both arms.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Just some cuts.”
“Who did this to you?”
Lilly sits up, but I can’t look her in the eye. Instead, I meet Walker’s gaze. He’s frowning from his position on the floor. Probably waiting to see how I’ll explain this to Lilly.
“It’s not a big deal. Don’t worry about it.” I shrug, trying to play it off. Because it isn’t a big deal. Not anymore. “Tell me what you’ve been doing for the last year. I want to know how you’ve been. That you’ve been okay on your own.”
Lilly’s eyebrows pull down, and I hold my breath while I wait to see if she’s going to press the issue. After a few seconds, she exhales. “Like I said, I was on the ship when the troops rolled in.” She swallows like talking hurts, then says, “They were doing their experiments on me when it happened.”
Walker sits up, and even Ben looks Lilly’s way.
“What did they do?” Walker whispers.
I shoot him a glare, but he doesn’t notice because he’s focused on my sister.
“Walker,” I hiss.
He still doesn’t look my way, and Lilly doesn’t look up. She just shrugs.
“It’s all so blurry, really. I can remember bits and pieces. Them dragging me from the tent. Being carried. How oily their skin felt against mine when they stripped me down. Then they hooked me up to this machine. It’s really distorted in my head, but I remember how huge it was. And there were so many lights. Red and green. They blinked.” Lilly’s eyes blink but I’m not sure if she’s mimicking the memory of the lights or trying to rid herself of it.
My heart pounds against my ribs like it’s trying to escape. I lick my lips. I want to tell her to stop, but I can’t. Thinking about her going through that is utterly terrifying and painful. Like someone has shoved a knife into my heart. But there’s a part of me that wants to know. To understand why these animals came here and did this to us. To figure out what they were looking for.
“Why?” Walker asks, almost as if he’s reading my mind. “Why did they do it?”
Lilly shakes her head. She never looks up. “I don’t know. How could I? All I know is that when it started, there was so much pain. It was like they were trying to suck the life out of me. That’s the only way I can describe it. I screamed, and I was in so much pain that I was sure I was going to die. But I didn’t and it just went on and on and on.”
My hands tremble, and I ball them into fists. I want to scream or cry or punch something. I want to run out right now and find a creeper and skin it until it bleeds out under me, then find another and do it all over again. I want them all to pay for what they did to us, especially to Lilly. She was just a kid!
“You don’t have to talk about it,” Walker says.
Lilly shrugs, then finally looks up. There’s a tiny smile on her face. “I’ve been alone for so long. You can’t imagine how nice it is to have people to talk to.”
“Still,” Walker says, getting to his feet. “There have to be other things we can talk about. Better things.”
“Like Hope,” I whisper.
Walker forces out a grin. “Yeah. We should head out soon. Now that we have Lilly.”
“Hope is a place?” Lilly looks back and forth between us, waiting for an answer.
“It is,” I say, reaching out to take Lilly’s hand again.
I give it a squeeze. It’s for me more than her and she probably knows it, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She squeezes my hand in return, and everything inside me constricts. I’m terrified she’s going to disappear or that I’ll wake up only to find this was all a dream. Having her with me feels unreal.
<
br /> “I like the name Hope,” she says. “It’s a good name for a town.”
25
Our backpacks are stuffed with food and a change of clothes, and we have as much water as we can comfortably carry. Walker, Ben, and I are more than ready to head out. Walker’s worried about Tara and wants to get back to her, and I’m just ready to get the long walk over with. Another seven days on the road feels like an eternity now that I’m ready to start a new life. I want to get there and get settled.
But Lilly seems reluctant to leave.
“What’s she doing?” Walker asks for the hundredth time. “We’re burning daylight.”
“It’s still early,” I snap, but to be honest, I’m ready to go too. Now that I have Lilly, I want to put the past year behind us and start again. In Hope.
Walker huffs and drops into a chair. Ben stays where he is, standing next to the door. He’s pretty stoic most of the time, but even he looks impatient.
I drop my pack to the floor as I head toward the stairs. “I’ll go see what she’s doing.”
Lilly is in Dixie’s old room, sitting on the bed with pictures spread out around her.
“I came in just to grab a picture,” she says without looking up, “but I couldn’t make myself leave.”
“I’m sorry, honey.” I sit next to her, and the bed creaks under my weight. “I know you miss everyone, but we have friends we need to get back to. It’s going to take days as it is.”
Lilly nods, but she still doesn’t look up. The picture in her hand is of her and Dixie at what looks like a birthday party, but I’m not sure whose. They’re smiling, wearing silly hats and oversize glasses.
“Sometimes I still can’t believe they’re all gone,” she whispers.
My throat tightens, and the pain and disappointment of the last four years suddenly feels like it’s going to choke me, but I know I can’t let it get the best of me. I need to be strong for Lilly now. She hasn’t had anyone to take care of her the last year, and it’s my job from here on out.
“I understand,” I whisper, putting my hand on her knee. “We all feel the same way, and I know it’s hard to say goodbye, but Walker and Ben are waiting.”
“I know.” She lets out a deep breath, then gathers the pictures. I expect her to put them in her bag, but instead she stacks them neatly on the nightstand. She gets to her feet. “I think taking a picture would just make the whole thing harder. Maybe moving forward means putting the past behind us.”
I stand too and wrap my arms around her. She tucks her face in the crook of my neck, and I close my eyes when her hand runs down my arm. She hasn’t asked me again about the notches, but I know one day I’ll have to tell her about it all. I’m ashamed because I realize now that the notches I once thought made me tough are proof that I haven’t handled things very well. That I’m weaker than I wanted to be and I almost let the creepers destroy me.
When we go downstairs, Walker gets to his feet without a word. I scoop up my pack and follow the guys out, still clutching Lilly’s hand. It’s afternoon, but we still have a good six hours of daylight ahead of us before we have to find shelter.
The four of us walk in silence under the hot sun until Valdosta is so far behind us it has disappeared completely. It isn’t uncomfortable though, just tense. Like none of us know what to say. There are so many things I wonder about what Lilly did over the last year and how she managed to keep herself safe, but I’m hesitant to bring it up after her comment about moving forward. I’m not sure if she’ll want to talk about it.
“Tell us what you’ve been doing, Lilly,” Walker says after maybe an hour of no conversation.
“Where do I begin?” Lilly sighs, but she doesn’t tense up or act like she doesn’t want to tell us. “Like I said, when the troops moved in, they blew up the ships and I was trapped. I’m not sure how long I was there, but eventually a soldier named Matt found me. He was young. Too young to be in the military any other time, but by the end the army was desperate. Matt pulled me out of the ship but I was weak from losing blood and from the experiments, so I couldn’t look for you.” She squeezes my hand but keeps her eyes focused on the road ahead. “Matt set me up in a nearby tent. Found a first aid kit and some food. Water. It hurt like hell when he sewed up my cheek.”
Lilly runs her free hand across her scar and frowns, and I have the urge to scream. Even if I’d found her I wouldn’t have been able to save her from that pain, but it still hurts me. I should have been there to hold her hand at least.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “From here on out, I’ll be there to protect you.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” Lilly says. “This was something beyond our control.”
“So you traveled with the soldier?” Walker asks.
“Eventually. It was several days before I was strong enough to move around, then we searched the camp. He was looking for supplies, but I was trying to find Eva. When I realized she was gone, I wrote a message on the wall. There were already a few up, other people looking for family, and it seemed like the only option. Then Matt and I packed up and headed south.”
“So you weren’t totally alone?” I’m glad to hear it even though it’s obvious something happened to Matt along the way, since he’s no longer with her. I hope he didn’t suffer.
“No. Matt turned out to be sixteen and he was headed home too. Down to Florida. It made sense to travel together, especially after we ran into a few other groups. People who weren’t interested in playing nice or sharing or even trying to start over.”
“There’s a lot of that,” Walker mumbles.
Lilly nods and so do I, and then we lapse into silence. I’m sure we’re all thinking about the assholes and jerks we’ve come across over that last year. I know I am. Especially Donnie.
“Yeah,” Lilly says after a few minutes. “Anyway, it took us a few weeks to make it south. Back then there were still a lot of creepers and bigger groups of people to avoid, plus it was fall and the weather was bad.”
She’s right. I’d forgotten how much rain and wind there was the first few weeks after we were liberated. If we still had the weather channel to keep us informed, I’m sure there would have been coverage of some devastating tropical storm. Of course, I doubt there was really much of anything left for it to destroy.
“We made it to Valdosta and found the house gone, so I went to Dixie’s. Matt left two days later. He promised to come back, though. He said he just needed to check on his family first.” Lilly shrugs like it’s no big deal, but her eyes are moist. “I never saw him again, so I don’t know if he ever made it.”
“I’m sorry, Lilly.”
I hope he made it to his family and just got too caught up to get back, even if that means he abandoned Lilly. I’m too grateful to him for taking care of my sister when I couldn’t to wish him ill. Thinking he made it all the way down to Valdosta and got Lilly to safety, only to get killed before he made it home, is too depressing.
“Sounds like he was a nice guy,” Walker says.
“He was.” Lilly lets out a sigh, then shakes her head.
We spend the rest of the day comparing notes on survival. Where we found food, where we slept, how we defended ourselves. It gives me a chance to not only learn how Lilly spent the last year but to learn more about Walker and Tara as well. Tara’s little book came in handy for more things than just my infection. Like the time Walker got poison ivy all over his legs and she was able to make a paste out of cucumber to sooth the itching.
“I cleaned out every house in the neighborhood first,” Lilly says, “and it took days. Hauling all the canned goods and other boxed food was tough, but I knew I needed to do it right away. There wasn’t a lot but even one can meant I was that much farther from starving. Then I needed other supplies, like the camp stove and jugs and buckets for water, but those I couldn’t carry by myself from all the way across town. I found a big stroller in someone’s garage and pushed that across town. Loaded it up, then pushed it
back to Dixie’s. I did that every day for a week until I had everything I needed.”
“Smart.” Walker nods appreciatively. “We were never in one place long enough to really gather supplies, but we talked about the future a lot, and what we’d do once we settled in one place. We knew gathering things would be tough with no gas for cars. Never considered a stroller, although we talked about trying to find one of those bike trailers.”
“That would have been nice to have.” Lilly grins at Walker, then looks toward me. “How long have you been together?”
She says together like she’s digging for information, and my face gets hot. I look toward Walker, who just grins, and for the first time in a few days, I’m relaxed enough to think back to the day by that little pond. The way my skin tingled when he kissed me…
I tear my eyes away from Walker and focus on the sky. In the distance the clouds are dark gray, and the patches of sky that are visible are almost black. Looks like a storm is moving in.
“We just met a week ago.”
“A week?” Lilly looks at me, then at Walker. “But you said we.”
“Tara,” I say before Walker has a chance to respond. “He’s been with her since the camps were liberated. They were searching for her family when they found me.”
My cheeks grow even hotter thinking about how they found me, skinning that invader. I don’t feel like the same person anymore, and the thought of telling my baby sister what a savage I’d turned into when I thought I was alone makes me sick to my stomach. She won’t understand. She couldn’t. I don’t even know if I understand it anymore.
“Who’s Tara?”
“A friend.” Walker winks, and I roll my eyes. “She’s back in Hope resting an injured ankle, but she’ll be thrilled to meet you.”
“And I can’t wait to meet her. Or any of them! You have no idea how lonely I’ve been. I was looking for supplies a few months ago and found this old, deflated volleyball, and I had this insane urge to draw a face on it. Like I’m Tom Hanks or something.”
Lilly laughs, and I join in. So does Walker. Ben is the only one who remains quiet as usual, but he does look Lilly’s way, and there’s curiosity on his face.