by Tarah Benner
“That’s not how she sees it. Give her something she actually needs.”
“What?”
“A challenge . . . a distraction . . . a good laugh. Take your pick.” I took a step toward him and squeezed his arm once. “She’d be lucky to have you.”
Greyson broke into a smile that made me feel as though I could finally breathe.
“Thanks.”
I turned to go, but he reached out and tugged at my arm. “Haven? You give really good advice for someone who doesn’t remember her friends.”
My head twinged slightly, but it was nothing like the debilitating pain I’d felt a few days ago. I dragged in a huge stream of air, trying to find the right words. I didn’t want to get his hopes up, but I owed him an explanation.
“I’m starting to remember the important things,” I said.
I left him standing there heartsick over Logan, and I wondered what it was going to be like having them living under the same roof.
Mulling over the scattered memories I had of them, I realized they were both my best friends for a lot of the same reasons. Both were intense and loyal — hell-bent on doing whatever they thought was right. Either they would kill each other, or they would be the most annoyingly in-love people in the world.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next day, I awoke to the sound of Roman swearing loudly from the backyard.
I lay there for several minutes, willing him to stop, but if anything, his shouts just seemed to be growing louder.
I pulled on some clothes and padded out into the hallway, where Logan was slumped half-asleep, still in her pajamas.
“Too early,” she yawned. “I need my beauty sleep.”
“We need to get the place ready for the Hoopers.”
Logan groaned. “This is the first time in days when I haven’t been in imminent danger. I just want to sleep in.”
I nodded and waited for her to change, and then we both went down to the kitchen and out the back door.
By the time we came outside, Amory had joined in the shouting match. He and Roman had lugged Ida’s old emergency generator up from the shed, and by the sound of it, they were having trouble getting it to work.
Greyson was leaning against a tree, watching the argument with amusement.
“If you can’t play nice, you can’t play at all,” Logan crooned from the step.
“Oh!” said Roman, turning his sweaty face to her. “So nice of you to join us, princess.”
“What’s got your panties in a twist this morning?”
Roman opened his mouth to let loose what I was sure would not be a nice explanation, but Amory broke in first.
“He doesn’t like the idea of the Hoopers coming to live here.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Roman’s eyes darted to me. “They’re trouble.”
“You just don’t like the oldest one . . . Marcus.”
Roman rolled his eyes and went back to the generator. “Him I can deal with.”
That took me by surprise. “Who else didn’t you like?”
“The sister — Krystal. I don’t trust her.”
“He finally met the woman who could make an honest man out of him,” Logan teased.
I bit back a laugh. So I hadn’t been the only one who’d noticed how Roman looked at Krystal.
“What?” snapped Roman. He didn’t turn around, but I could see his brain working furiously to get ahead of whatever Logan was about to say.
“You like her,” said Logan. “Well . . . you like the way she looks.”
A dark cloud rolled over Roman’s face. He was such an angry person that it was hard for me to imagine him having a love life. But with Krystal, he had definitely met his match.
“She’s a lunatic,” he muttered. “We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t kill us all in our sleep.”
“You’ll keep an eye on her,” Logan mused. “I don’t imagine you two would be sleeping much.”
A laugh burst out of Greyson’s mouth, and he tried to cover it with a cough.
“Whatever,” growled Roman. “Since you slept in, you get to clean out the guest house.” He tossed the extension cord in the grass and stalked off in a huff.
Amory grinned at me, and I felt something flutter in my chest.
“You shouldn’t provoke him,” Greyson told Logan.
She shrugged. “He’s really more of a teddy bear than a grizzly bear.”
“If you say so.”
I smiled. If anyone could get away with teasing Roman, it was Logan.
He’d treated her like a porcelain doll ever since he’d found her weak and dying at the Infinity Building. Logan, of course, hated being treated differently, so she’d been goading Roman more than usual, as though she were trying to lure him into a fight just to prove she could still hold her own.
We each grabbed a power bar for breakfast and went off to the guest house to get it ready for the Hoopers. In the last few years, it had only been used occasionally to house illegals staying at the farm when the main house overflowed, and it had fallen into disrepair.
There were ten dusty rooms that needed cleaning and a broken-down kitchen with cupboards full of cobwebs. The bed linen was moth-eaten, and the whole place was overrun with mice.
It took the whole day to get the house in a condition that would be livable. It was nasty work sweeping the cobwebs, dust, and rodent excrement out of the rooms, but it felt good to sweat and do something productive.
While we cleaned, Roman and Godfrey scouted the rest of the nearby farms for food and supplies. Amory and Greyson busied themselves with dismantling the PMC’s work out in the fields. They began filling in the foundation of the plant and cleared away the mess the builders had left during construction.
When we all gathered around the kitchen table for a late supper of noodles in thin broth, we were sweaty, exhausted, and irritable.
Amory still hadn’t managed to get the generator running, and Roman and Godfrey’s supply runs had not been very fruitful. At this point, we faced the strong possibility that we would run out of gasoline and be unable to make more trips into the city to gather food.
“We need to rebuild the barn by spring,” said Roman. “We need more room for people.”
“How can we house people if we can’t feed them?” Amory muttered.
“Well we can’t defend this place with just us and the Hoopers. We may be able to drive off the workers, but the PMC will send in reinforcements.”
“Once they know we’re here, all they’ll have to do is set up a roadblock. They’ll be able to starve us out.”
“We can still hunt,” said Logan.
Amory shook his head. “All the carriers drove off most of the game in the area. That deer the Hoopers shot was probably the last of its kind.”
“We have enough gas for one more run,” said Godfrey. “We’ll have to go far and wide this time. With any luck, we’ll find enough fuel left to make it worth our while. That’s what we need to worry about. As long as we have gas, we can do runs to get more food.”
We finished our unsatisfying meal in irritable silence, and I went upstairs to be the first at the bathroom. I didn’t care if the water was cold. I just wanted to wash away the filth and grime from the day.
When I emerged, Logan was sitting outside the door, waiting her turn. Amory, Roman, and Godfrey were talking downstairs, but Greyson’s door was cracked.
I knocked half-heartedly and pushed the door open before he could respond. He might have wanted to be alone, but I didn’t.
He had his back to the door, and he sighed when he heard me come in.
“Can you shut the door?” he asked.
I pushed it closed and walked around to the bed.
Greyson was leaning against the wall, the side of his jaw twitching as though he wanted to cry. He had something in his hands I couldn’t quite see.
Cautiously, I sank down next to him.
“Why are we here, Haven?”
I was startled b
y the lump in his throat. “W-What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . why am I here?”
He sighed, and I could sense the energy this confession took from him. “I feel like I’m just an extra person . . . like I don’t belong with you guys.”
“Of course you belong with us!” I said, taken aback by this statement. I’d never considered that my friendship with Logan and Amory had made him feel left out, or what it must have been like for him when I wasn’t myself.
He shook his head. “I should have gone west. That’s what we planned on doing, and that’s where I should have gone.”
“We will go west,” I said, my voice wavering despite my resolve. “I promise.”
“When?” he demanded. “When will we go? It seems like everything we do just takes us farther and farther away from my family . . . farther from what we wanted in the first place.”
I was taken aback by his words. I vaguely remembered Greyson wanting to fight with the rebels after Sector X fell. I had been the one who wanted to flee, but I’d joined up to save Amory.
“I thought . . . I thought you wanted this,” I said quietly. “I thought you wanted to be a rebel.”
“That was after I got out of prison,” he said, his face contorting in pain as he remembered. “I was angry. I wanted to get back at the PMC for what they took from me. But now . . . I just want to live my life.”
His voice was tired, defeated, and that sobered me more than anything.
“I don’t want to be on the run anymore . . . to go to bed every night thinking I might be killed in my sleep or hauled back to prison.”
“What brought all this on?” I asked. “This isn’t you talking.”
“I don’t belong here!” he snapped. “I’m just in the way!”
It seemed odd that Greyson was telling me he didn’t belong — after I’d spent two weeks tied up in a tent while the others debated whether or not I was going to turn on them.
But then Greyson shoved what he was holding into my hands, and I understood.
A stack of glossy Polaroid pictures slipped between my fingers. They were all pictures of Logan: Logan laughing, Logan lying in the grass with the sun in her eyes, Logan perched in the old tree with a rifle slung across her lap.
“Where did you get these?” I asked. I knew he couldn’t have taken them.
“They were under the bed. They must have belonged to —”
“Max,” I finished, closing my eyes. That stung me deep down — not just because I missed Max, but because of what he had lost, and because of the pain it caused Greyson to bear witness to what had slipped away from Logan.
I gripped his arm and felt him flinch a little. Greyson wasn’t emotional. He didn’t wear his pain on his face the way Roman and Logan did. I knew it killed him to break down like this in front of me, but I gripped him harder, devotion blazing in my chest.
“Listen. You’re not an outsider here. You helped me save Amory from Isador. You helped him get me out. And you are the reason I’m remembering everything.”
He looked at me, and I could see the effect my words had on him.
“I am?”
“Yes,” I said. “That night the carriers attacked the camp . . . that run triggered my memory.”
The dark haze that had settled over him seemed to be lifting, so I kept going. “You belong here as much as any of us — probably more than me. I went into Sector X for you, and I would do it all over again. You’re the closest thing I have to family, and I promise we’ll find your mom and Dani.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can promise we’ll try. If we’re still alive after all this, we’ll go up north and find them. But we have to fight the PMC. How long do you think they’ll let illegals live free out west? They postponed migration, but they didn’t escape it entirely. You’d be living in fear out there, too. Things aren’t how they were before. You can’t just choose to be free. We have to fight for it.”
There was a long pause. My heart was pounding against my ribs. I didn’t want him to be angry, but he needed to hear the truth.
“Thanks,” he said finally, sniffing loudly and forcing a laugh. “I think I actually feel better now. That was just the ass-kicking I needed.”
I grinned. “I know.” I shuffled the pictures into a neat stack and pressed them into his hand. “Now stop whining. Stop tiptoeing around the Max issue. If you don’t face this head-on, he’s going to be the giant elephant in the room every time you’re with her.
“Give these pictures to Logan. Tell her you’ll give her time. But tell her that when she’s ready, you’ll be waiting.”
The Hoopers arrived the next day, hauling a rickety open trailer behind their black pickup truck. The three of them were crammed into the cab, and the trailer was overflowing with their belongings and supplies.
Marcus killed the engine, and Krystal and Jason hopped out.
Logan emerged from the guest house. She’d been cleaning furiously again, fighting a losing battle with the spiders and mice. When she saw the Hoopers, she pulled her hair out of her bandana, and it tumbled down around her shoulders in golden waves. Dressed in baggy overalls with no rifle in her hand, she looked oddly domestic.
Jason ogled her. “We brought all the supplies we have,” he stammered, pulling the first crate out of the open trailer. “Where should it go?”
Logan smiled. “We can cook and eat in the main house, so just bring it inside. Any extra can go in the guest house and the cellars.”
The boys wandered out of the house to help unload the food, and we each carried a load inside while Godfrey took inventory of the ammunition. Logan directed the organizational process in the kitchen, making Roman and Amory move each box around two or three times until she was satisfied.
Outside, there seemed to be some sort of commotion going on. I heard someone yell but thought little of it. I’d only just met Jason, but already I knew he was the family loudmouth.
Then, without warning, a gunshot shattered the cheerful sunlight streaming through the kitchen window.
Amory and I exchanged a look, and we both ran for the back door. He snatched up two rifles that were resting against the wall, and I followed him around the house.
We hadn’t even made it to the front yard when two more shots rang out. I pushed my legs harder and then slammed to a halt.
In the front yard, a dozen carriers were rushing the trailer. Their withered skin was drooping around those unnerving yellow eyes, and their pale bald heads gleamed in the sun.
Godfrey stood frozen inside the trailer, hovered over a crate of canned goods with his rifle trained on the nearest carrier.
As I watched, more shuffled out of the woods, drawn by the scent of food. A few were rocking the trailer or trying to crawl up the sides. Godfrey was taking them out with methodical, precise shots to the head, but there were too many.
Amory and I started shooting, and Godfrey jumped into the bed of the pickup truck. One carrier tried to scrabble up the side, but I raised my rifle and shot him in the back.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a knot of them gathered near the far corner of the trailer. Someone whipped past me, and before I could stop him, Marcus had thrown himself into the fray.
“No! Don’t!” I screamed.
But it was too late. He’d disappeared into the horde, slicing their jugulars from behind with a butterfly knife.
Suddenly, I knew why the carriers were gathered like that. Looking down, I saw a familiar pair of boots thrashing on the ground. There was a guttural yell, and I realized the boots belonged to Jason.
I aimed at the carriers around him, but I couldn’t kill them quickly enough.
Roman and Greyson were already shooting by my side, and Logan ran into the horde with knives flashing in her hands. I knew she didn’t trust herself to shoot with Jason entangled in the mess, but I wanted to throttle her. There were too many carriers. I wouldn’t be able to stop them rushing her.
“Jason!” Kry
stal yelled, her voice high-pitched and hysterical. She took aim and was surprisingly accurate, despite the panic in her voice.
Logan had nearly cleared the knot of carriers around Jason. Even after the long-term effects of the cure, she hadn’t lost her touch in hand-to-hand combat. She moved her knives artfully, slicing and stabbing as though she were dancing, and they fell off one by one.
Jason lifted his head. He’d shoved his body between the trailer and the ground for cover, but one of the carriers had gotten hold of his arm. Now he had it cradled against his chest, trying to stifle his cries of anguish.
Logan moved into position to fend off three carriers who were still trying to claw at him, and Jason stumbled out behind her.
Then everything slowed down.
A fourth carrier nobody had noticed was crouched on the trailer, rummaging through a box of supplies. He lifted his head at the sound of Logan’s heavy breathing and pounced.
I cried out, but the carrier had already tackled Logan to the ground, and the other three were joining in the frenzy.
I couldn’t shoot at them. I was paralyzed. All I could see was a flash of golden hair as the four carriers overpowered her.
I yelled again, but my voice only gurgled in my throat.
Before I knew what I was doing, my instincts had hijacked my common sense, and I was running into the horde.
“Haven!” Amory yelled, but I ignored him.
I didn’t have my knives, but I grabbed the carrier on top of Logan around the neck with all the force I could muster, pulling him off her and striking him in the face. There was a vicious crunch that told me I’d broken his nose.
As he staggered out of the way, there was a sharp crack. Amory had shot him.
I fought the carriers as though they were humans: quick punches to the gut and well-placed kicks that brought them to their knees. They were slower than humans — softer — but they were still bigger than me.
I used every ounce of strength I had as I gouged out their eyes and elbowed them out of the way. As soon as I pushed them off Logan, Amory would shoot them.
Logan staggered to her feet, bleeding and disheveled, and relief rushed through my limbs. Then I saw the bite along her neck and the bites on her arms.