“Who do you think started this whole mess?” I shot back. I rested my crossbow on my shoulder and locked my face into a grimace. “Whose fault do you think this is?”
Corrina looked at me with her dark brown eyes full of sorrow, sadness, pity. But pity had only ever spurred on my anger.
“People like you, in your clean houses and white picket fences and white collar jobs making the rules for the rest of us who never wanted to play your game. Never wanted anything but to be left alone to make our own way, but you couldn’t stand it, couldn’t believe it, had to fix it—”
“What are you talking about?” Corrina said.
Maibe looked at me and then back to Corrina and then back to me.
The fury dribbled out of me and left only a dull ache. “Maibe’s right, our ghost city is waking up. Almost a million people surround us right now and even if only ten percent survive, that’s a lot more people than we can handle. And Sergeant Bennings knows we’re here.”
“You saw him?” a male voice said behind me. I whirled around and saw Dylan rising onto unsteady feet, wobbling like a drunk. Hay stalks clung to his clothes and his beard and hair. His eyes were the brightest blue I’d ever seen. But he did not even look at me even though he’d asked me a question. His eyes were only for Corrina.
“No. But it was his people at least,” I said.
“We should get out of the city. Go into the foothills.” Dylan coughed and began to crumple. I dropped my crossbow and wrapped my arms around his chest. His shirt was soft under my fingertips, his smell a cross between sweat and earth and musk. He leaned on me, almost draping my side, his body heat a shock. His beard scratched the skin on my neck.
Corrina rushed over and grabbed his other side, throwing his arm around her shoulders, lifting him off me. The pressure release left an ache I could not name, did not like, forced myself to ignore. She led him back to his stall while he mumbled about a place he called Dutch Flat. His head rolled and revealed glazed eyes. He regained consciousness for a moment and stumbled a few steps and turned and gripped Corrina’s face with both hands and kissed her deeply before slumping to the ground.
I stood there knowing I should help and knowing I better not.
Maibe pushed past me and helped Corrina settle Dylan back into the hay. Corrina offered Dylan a few sips of water and brushed his hair from his forehead.
I turned away and picked up my crossbow.
He’d gotten himself captured, almost killed, infected—for her—and I was a runaway with a temper and a chip on my shoulder. I pushed open the door without waiting or listening or looking. A man, in ripped jeans and a green-collared shirt, sporting long gashes of dried blood, stood a few yards from the door. He had already turned toward me. His eyes were bloodshot, vacant, furious. His mouth opened in a grimace. He held up his arms before him, as if choking someone that would have only come to his shoulders. I raised my crossbow and he grabbed for it, choking it like it was the neck of some ghost-person he was trying to kill again and again.
I released the arrow and it buried deep in his forehead even as one of his hands clamped the fiberglass and twisted. The string broke, whipping a burning line of fire along my cheek.
He fell into a heap on the ground. I wished I could fall into a heap on the ground.
There was a scuffle of steps. The creak of gear. The glare of the flashlight. Behind the fallen V, a group of Sergeant Bennings’ soldiers came into view.
Chapter 11
Part of me knew the soldiers were a ghost-memory even as I threw myself back inside the barn. “We have to leave!”
Maibe’s forkful of beans froze halfway to her mouth.
Maybe the look on my face did it, but neither of them protested. Corrina and Maibe got Dylan into the wheelbarrow. His arms and legs hung out in what looked like uncomfortable angles and his head lolled to one side, but it couldn’t be helped. Corrina packed in some of the canned food around his body.
I opened the door, slowly, peering through it for signs of Vs or Feebs or patrols. Nothing so far.
I opened the door wider, letting in more light. The space was clear and I motioned them out. Suddenly the strangest train whistle floated across the landscape.
“What is that?” Corrina asked.
I had no idea, but the sick feeling in my stomach said it meant nothing good for us.
The bike shop was a mile away. We hurried as best we could with Dylan in the wheelbarrow and Sergeant Bennings’ ghosts at my heels. I put down two Vs with my bat and wished the crossbow had stayed in one piece. But it was gone now and we would be gone too if we didn’t hurry.
We broke into the bike shop through the back. I hooked a trailer up to one of the bikes and we fit Dylan into it as best we could. Corrina strapped his legs and arms to the rails of the trailer so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. Vs began to pile up along the front store window. Bikes hung down like odd skeletons from the ceiling. We left the food behind. There wasn’t room.
When the glass began to crack, white veins streaking it, we left through the back, pedaling past a group of Vs. A fast one in the front snatched at my shirt. I kicked out, almost tumbling off when my leg connected with her knee. There was a crunch and she fell. Corrina was behind me with Dylan, Maibe was in the back. I went first, taking us back to the boxcar because maybe Spencer and the boys would be waiting for us there, even though part of me screamed to get far away from the fairgrounds. I led us onto the bike trail and worried about the train whistle and Sergeant Bennings’ men and the Vs that waited in the bushes along either side.
The boxcar was two miles away but it was back the way we had come. The fairgrounds was death. The city was death. Why couldn’t we leave this place behind?
We could—if I was willing to leave Spencer, Ano, Ricker, and Jimmy. I immediately banished that thought.
The only sound was that of our pedaling, the wap-wap of rubber on the asphalt, the whir of wheels. I led the way down the trail, across an open field with half a dozen dots of people that shifted in our direction as we zoomed by.
The smells of swampy, brackish water deepened as the trail bent closer to the river. My breath puffed spurts of mist into the air as if I smoked a cigarette, which I badly wanted. I focused on bringing my legs up and down and keeping the handlebars straight and straining my senses to find a V or a Faint about to wreck our escape.
The bike trail drifted away from the river. Oak trees full of moss that hung like curtains from the branches separated us from the water. On the right was an open meadow, green from the winter wetness. Grass so vividly green against the white sky it hurt my eyes. Electricity towers five stories tall rose up from the mist like sentinels. We were close. My heart rate sped up. More dark figures dotted the landscape. A strip of gray formed in front of us, above our heads. The freeway. Underneath it, the trail disappeared into a black hole.
I slowed and stopped a half dozen yards before that cave.
We had to pass underneath to get to the boxcar, but anything could be in there.
I was still first. Corrina and Maibe behind me. Dylan moaned inside the memory-fevers. Further behind us, a group of Vs followed down the trail. There was no going back through that crowd.
A car hung down from the ledge of the freeway above. Twisted and mangled, windshield broken and glass scattered across the trail beneath. A body hung halfway out the driver’s window. Injured, bloody, but the fog obscured the details and it was hard to know if the injuries were from the car accident or something else.
Better not to know.
I steered my bike to miss the worst of the glass and held my breath when my tire crunched over some of it anyway. There was no way I was going to stop and fix a flat.
Sounds changed once the underpass enveloped us. Now every creak and squeak and cough seemed to slap back at us from all directions. Our lights revealed dirt and trash and some homeless guy’s sleeping bag, but no homeless guy. The dirt sloped up on either side. My light caught a swallow’s mud nest attac
hed under one of the T-beams.
There was a moan, low and long behind me.
I lost my balance and struggled to keep the bike upright. It weaved a snake-like path that almost tipped me onto some river rock. Corrina and Maibe zoomed by.
A shape limped out from the sloped dirt. I pedaled faster. My wheel ran into the back of Maibe’s wheel.
“Are you okay?” she said.
“Go!” I said fiercely.
She’d set a foot down but now took off, popping out of sight into the bright fog on the other side.
I was about to pedal when the moan turned into a groan. “Please. I need help. My leg. I think it’s broken.” He came within a dozen feet. Definitely injured. There was a long gash in his thigh. He’d tied it with a belt and held both hands around it.
I fled into the fog after Maibe and Corrina.
“Please,” he said, his voice already distant and echoing.
I told myself we couldn’t stop for him. I told myself we would all die if we helped him.
A dark and terrible thought entered my mind. He would distract the Vs that followed us.
Chapter 12
Old Bully was propped against the side of the boxcar. I’d never been so glad to see its tricycle wheels and snowplow-like attachment, even if it was spattered with V blood. They must have escaped and gone back for the bikes they’d abandoned when they had first rushed the fence. When Maibe and I had run for the van. When Leaf had still been alive and unhurt.
It was a reunion, but things had changed. The relief I’d felt, digging through the ceiling to discover them, that was there, in the background, but mostly I felt nothing other than a claustrophobic fear that made my throat choke up. We needed to leave. Every minute we stayed was more time for them to gather and cut off any escape. My message, scratched into the boxcar for Mary, stared at me as if somehow Mary would know what I had just done, that I had left behind someone who needed help. But I told myself she would have understood.
Ano rested a hand on my shoulder. He looked at the message and then back at me. “We have to keep going,” he said.
“I know,” I shrugged him off. It’s what we had tried to do with Mary, what we had done so many times before—when the situation got too weird, we left. We jumped a train, took a bus, hitchhiked out. This was both the same and different. We didn’t know which way to go or where.
“We should take the freeway out of here,” Ricker said.
“We could go deeper into the valley,” Ano said.
Spencer said nothing and I almost didn’t notice anymore.
I stood up and walked a few steps away. This was a stupid place. The river was a bunch of dirty ice water. The field was dotted with trouble coming our way. It was too close to Sergeant Bennings. This was where Mary and Leaf had died and it was time to get the hell out of dodge.
“We should go to Dutch Flat,” I said. Was there something rustling in that bush? My hand automatically went to unsling the crossbow but it wasn’t there anymore. I touched the bat instead and hoped it would be enough.
It was only a rabbit, its cottontail a white flash as it jumped away. I didn’t relax.
“Where’s that?” Jimmy said.
Dylan moaned from where we’d laid him out on the ground.
“Ask him,” I said. He’d been in the fevers for hours now. He’d come out of it soon, for a little while, if his infection followed the same pattern ours had followed.
“Gabbi,” Ano said and stopped. I just looked at him. I realized I had been avoiding talking to him. It was too hard with what had happened to Mary. He was the one who understood the best and he was the one I least wanted to talk to.
“Dutch Flat is in the foothills,” Corrina said. She rested a hand on Dylan’s.
Dylan sat up as if splashed by cold water. “In this little hollow below a ridge.” His eyes were wide open but he didn’t see us. “Less than two hundred people live there. I played there growing up, down by the river bed, before my grandparents died. The gardens always overflowed with fruit and flowers and vegetables and all of it is surrounded by tall pine trees…” He kept talking. Ano’s eyes went thoughtful, Jimmy’s went dreamy, and even Ricker had stopped chewing on his cheek long enough to listen.
“The bike path,” I said when Dylan slumped back down like a windup toy that had run out of tension. “There’s too many fires, too many Vs in the city and along the freeway. Better to take our chances on the bike trail along the river.”
“Except,” Maibe said. “That same bike trail drew a mob of Vs onto us the last time.”
“But that had been the plan,” I said.
“What about the train whistle?” Maibe said. “Maybe the trains are working now.”
“If they are working, it won’t be for Feebs like us,” I said it more confidently than I felt. What if the trains were working? What if Sergeant Bennings was wrong and the whole world wasn’t infected and there was a way out?
“We heard it too,” Ano said quietly. His dark eyes stared at the ground before flicking up. He didn’t really need to say much more. The grim look in his eyes said enough.
“We saw it on the tracks as it passed near the boxcar,” Ricker said when Maibe looked confused. “A whole mob of Vs followed after it. We had to stay dead silent in the boxcar until they passed.”
“I felt like I didn’t even breathe for the whole time,” Jimmy said.
“Wherever the trains are going, it is not for us,” Ano said. “It was Sergeant Bennings and his people inside.”
We all went quiet for a moment as if mourning the loss of something I couldn’t quite put a name to. The trains were off limits now. The trains had always been the way we could count on to move from one place to the next. I wondered if that had been why parts of the camp were left unguarded—maybe they’d been evacuating.
“If we take the bike trail,” I said finally, “then we’ve got plenty of water from the river. And if there’s too many Vs, we can cut into one of the neighborhoods.”
“We’re going to Dutch Flat, right?” Jimmy said, looking around. “That’s what we’re talking about, right?” The eagerness in his voice was not subtle.
Ano elbowed him in the ribs and hissed into his ear, “Yes.”
“Taking the freeway would get us out of here faster.” Spencer spoke for the first time. He was cross-legged next to Old Bully, fiddling with the chain. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” Spencer looked at me.
I repositioned the bat on my back. “I want to get out of here alive. That’s what I want. Isn’t that what you want?”
The group looked back and forth between me and Spencer. It was a contest I hadn’t realized I had entered. I hated it. I didn’t want to fight with him, but everything in me screamed that the freeway was the wrong way to go even with the Vs that might still be waiting for us at the overpass.
Spencer returned to the chain without saying a word.
That pretty much decided it—I had pretty much decided it. We would take the bike trail and deal with whatever problems that route brought our way.
I scanned our group of runaways. Jimmy was still nursing his wounded shoulder and had a shell-shocked look to him. Ano had turned inward, his face like a stone. Ricker never could hide his emotions. He was worried and perceptive—he knew we didn’t know what to do. Spencer might as well not exist and I couldn’t bear to look at Corrina or Maibe.
I hoped I was right about the bike trail.
I jumped into the boxcar. There were dozens of maps in a pile, one for every place we’d visited in the last three years. Favorite cities, favorite rest stops, favorite parks, friendly places—all of it was marked on the maps. I took the only one we needed.
We loaded up the bikes and closed off the boxcar. Deep down, I knew we weren’t ever coming back again. I used a rock to scratch out the message I’d left for Mary. I kept her name untouched, carved into the boxcar like it was carved into my arm.
Everyone waited for me to finish, as if they couldn’t leave
until I said so.
“Dutch Flat is over seventy miles away. We should get going,” I said.
“Seventy miles!” Maibe said, but didn’t follow up with anything else. We all knew there were a lot of neighborhoods in those miles.
I took off without looking back.
The fog lay over the field like a blanket, hiding us from any Vs. Hiding the Vs from us. It muffled the sounds we made and also somehow seemed to magnify them. I rode Old Bully this time because I didn’t trust Spencer to do it without getting himself killed.
The river rushed by on our right because I was taking us on the same bike path we’d traveled what seemed like a million times now. I scanned for movement, for sound, for signs of danger. Every lizard scrambling away, every bird spooked into flight, shot up my adrenaline levels.
The group of Vs that had followed me, Maibe, and Corrina were at the overpass—bodies strewn about in the grass, riddled with bullets. Their blood turned a whole section of the field red. I didn’t look to see if one of them was the Feeb I had abandoned. I decided to believe he had gotten away somehow. But the dead Vs were almost more disturbing than if they’d been alive. Who had killed them? Where were those people now?
Smoke rose in thick columns on our left. It would only be a matter of time before the whole city and its surrounding suburbs burned. We biked for over an hour before I stopped us again. It made me nervous, that much time without any problems. A mountain of trouble felt headed our way, but I just couldn’t see it.
I held up a hand when the river widened up enough so that a small island with a few trees popped up in the middle. We were coming up on the high school soon. A school I could have attended if I hadn’t run away and wasn’t trying to stay out of CPS hands. Those had always been the oddest-feeling moments, when I passed by a school in session and saw so many kids my age doing something so foreign to me now, something like sitting in a classroom listening to what someone else thought I was supposed to learn and believe. I wasn’t like Mary, she had wanted to go back someday. Even Leaf had talked about missing school sometimes. I’d take a public library over a school any day, but still, I avoided schools whenever possible. I didn’t like what it did to my stomach.
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