My hands tingled as I thought about what to do. “Get out of my way.” Lame. Especially since Anton kept driving and Dr. Ferrad didn’t move. Actually, she did move. She pulled out a gun from her waist. “I can’t let you leave. The cure is too important.”
My mind spun and I saw red. She dared to keep me away from my friends. She dared to hold me prisoner. She dared to tell me what to do. Before I could think about it too hard, I barreled into her stomach. She yelped and the gun skittered across floor of the RV, disappearing underneath the front passenger seat. Anton shouted. I grabbed Dr. Ferrad’s hair and pulled until she yelled out in pain.
We were flying through the air. Anton must have slammed on the brakes. I hit the back of the driver’s seat with a hard thump. Dr. Ferrad landed on me before falling flat to the ground. I fell on top of her.
I scrambled up and raced, dizzy and swerving, for the side door. I jammed my finger on the handle. Anton was sitting back up. He had found the gun and he was pointing it at me.
I jerked open the door anyway and flinched in anticipation of the shot. A man blocked my path, his left cheek torn into shreds. He reached out with ugly, bloody fingers and clawed at my neck. I cried out as he broke skin. A loud bang deafened my ears. His head puffed out a cloud of a pink mist that seemed to hang in the air for several awful seconds. He dropped away. I ran through that mist, slapped a hand to my bleeding neck, dodged another V, and another one who clawed on my shirt, almost catching it.
Two more shots rang out. The RV roared back to life and sped down the road away from the Vs. Dr. Ferrad stood in the doorway and gave me a look that made me shiver. As if she would make sure I would regret this.
I tumbled onto the hood of the truck. The five Feebs stuffed inside the cab just stared at me, eyes wide, guns drawn, looking confused. Then they looked past me and I didn’t bother turning around. It had to be more Vs.
I pushed myself off the hood. “Follow Dr. Ferrad!” I slapped the window as I screamed it. My hand left blood behind. I ran around a half-burned house that spilled its interior onto the yard like animal guts. Clothes and furniture and insulation that hung in strips and floated in the air like cobwebs. I heard the truck’s engine fade as it disappeared after Dr. Ferrad.
I didn’t understand what had just happened. I didn’t want to understand. Why had Dr. Ferrad pulled a gun on me? Was Mary safe with her? The sinking feeling in my chest said that I had made the wrong decision. And now Mary had no one to protect her and they were gone.
I noticed the garage window was still intact. I used my sleeved elbow to break it. I climbed inside. The garage was empty. I pressed in between two benches and waited and prayed for the Vs to pass me by and for my pulse to slow down and for the fever to hit from the wound on my neck. I wanted that water again. I wanted so desperately to pour it over my neck and scrape the wound clean. I began to drown in the heat of the fevers, they rose like waves when the tide comes up, higher and higher each time. There was no time for this. Ano and Jimmy and Ricker needed me. Tabitha and Kern were ahead of me, they had too much of a head start. I couldn’t stay here and there was no one to go through the fevers with me—
“Just stay back. I’ll help her.”
“Are you sure?”
“There’s blood. You can’t risk it. Give me the water.”
“What’s going on with her?”
“She’s in the fevers.”
I felt a cool splash on my neck. A rough scraping renewed the pain that had turned into a dull throb. I opened my eyes. A grotesque face swam before me. Weird, oversized eyes that shined. Blonde fur that hung over the face like hair. A huge snout covered with dirt, no mouth. I blinked. The shapes swam into better focus. Safety goggles and a painter’s mask, but I didn’t recognize the face. It was too well covered up.
Another face zoomed in. I flinched backwards, but the wall stopped me.
“Oh good, you’re awake.”
Her voice. Her voice—
Her hair framed her face like Mary’s had. Long, dark, matted. Her pink sweatshirt was torn at the shoulder and looked brown now, crusted over in dirt and blood.
“Maibe?”
She smiled.
I decided that even if it was a ghost-memory, I’d enjoy it while it lasted.
She pressed a rag to my neck.
“Ow!” I slapped my hands over it.
“It’ll get infected,” Maibe said.
“It’s a little late for that,” I said.
“Haha,” Maibe said. “You’re such a comedian. Blood poisoning is so funny.”
I waited for her to disappear, but she pushed my hands away and doused the rag in water again. She attacked my neck. I gritted my teeth and let her work. I decided she wasn’t a ghost-memory after all. Mostly, because I had never seen Alden dressed up in this ridiculous getup before. Ghost-memories conjured up what had already been experienced. As far as I knew, they didn’t make up new stuff.
“How are you here?” I croaked.
“We’ve been following you since the train station,” Alden said.
“What? By yourselves?”
“I’m getting much better at this surviving thing,” Maibe said. She patted the bat strapped to her back and smiled.
“About time,” I said trying to crack a smile but it only managed to crack the skin on my lips.
Alden stepped forward. He wore jeans several sizes too big and rolled up at the cuffs. The t-shirt was this collared polo with a logo embroidered on the front. A ridiculous, heavy duty painter’s mask and suction goggles obscured part of his face, making him look like the monster I’d first thought I’d opened my eyes to. “Did you see my father?”
I turned my head away. “He was there in the train car when the Vs came.”
Alden slumped his shoulders. Maibe reached out to put a comforting hand on him, but stopped when he flinched at her touch. She was infected.
“Dylan and Corrina were in the train car too,” I said, wanting to get the bad news out all at once. “And Tabitha is going to infect every one at camp and turn them into Feebs.”
Maibe locked up, stunned. “They were supposed to be at camp. I left them at the camp.”
“Corrina said they got in trouble after you and me disappeared.” I didn’t say because they were trying to find her, but the look on her face said she’d already figured that out. “They were being moved to a different camp when Kern and his people took the train.” I couldn’t bear to continue. If they hadn’t taken the train, the Vs wouldn’t have overwhelmed the area. Sergeant Bennings and Corrina and Dylan would still be alive.
Alden retreated to a corner of the garage. Tears slipped down Maibe’s cheeks. I felt it too. The pain carved a hollowness to my chest that I hated. I couldn’t stand it another second. I forced myself onto my feet. I was woozy, dizzy, my neck felt hot to the touch, my scalp still burned. “Tabitha’s gone crazy.”
“We have to stop her,” Alden said. He waited for me to agree. I didn’t really care what happened to everyone else, except that it made me sick to my stomach to let her get away with it.
I realized I wanted to help. I wanted to finally stop something terrible from happening instead of picking up the pieces afterwards.
“We have to get back to Ano and Ricker and Jimmy,” I said.
Maibe stood a little taller. She wiped the tears from her cheeks.
I glanced at Alden. “We have to stop Tabitha.”
We found bicycles. I felt the pressure of getting back to the boys like a pair of strong hands squeezing my throat closed.
Sometimes we biked down the blocks and Faint shadows passed by curtained windows, or crossed streets in a slow, rambling gait, or puttered in the front yard, acting as if it were spring in the garden instead of the end of winter. Some of them shut down in mid-motion. Others looked strangely doll-like. Others even looked normal. The Vs didn’t attack them, as if somehow the Vs new the Faints carried something that would harm the Lyssa virus.
I brushed off the jitters fr
om all the Faints wandering around like zombies of old, slow and brainless and trapped by the need for motions they could no longer control. I focused instead on making the exercise clear away the cobwebs in my brain.
We stopped at a hardware store and stocked up on weapons and a bolt cutter. When we left, we picked up some Vs on our tail. At first glance they’d looked like Faints and we’d gotten too close. Before the fairgrounds, we had been able to move around without getting noticed. Now, the world had become infested with the infection. Every move drew them to us.
We pedaled as fast as we could. The houses were like burned-out clown masks. Beams and studs tumbled about like matches with burned ends. We lost them around a corner and then another corner. They caught up at an intersection blocked by a dozen crashed cars we had to hike the bikes over.
I couldn’t keep my hands dry. Every few seconds they slipped off the handlebars and I wiped them on my pants. My legs were getting tired now. Maibe was falling behind a little. Alden kept our tail. He wouldn’t let her go last, but that meant the mob was closing the gap.
When we got to Camp Pacific’s fence, I worked on it with the bolt cutter. The mob was only a couple of blocks away. There were more of them than had been at the high school. They flowed like water over the smashed cars, broken light poles, and burned-out skeletons of houses in their path. I had never seen a group that big. Even when we made it to the other side of the fence, it wouldn’t hold them back for long.
“You need to get up on a roof,” Maibe said to Alden.
My hands slipped off the bolt cutter. I wiped them again on my pants and went back to work. I was only a third of the way done with what we needed.
“No. I’m not a coward,” Alden said.
There were no guards in the towers. You could feel it in the air. This sense of heaviness, this sense of wrongness.
“Tabitha will infect you,” Maibe said. “They’ll rip off that mask—”
“You don’t know they’re inside yet. They might not have made it.”
I forced myself to move faster. The groans behind us became louder, more vicious.
The sound of a garbage can falling over snapped my focus to the left. There, coming from the opposite direction of the mob was a V pushing along a trash can. She dug through what fell out and was ripping it to pieces. A raccoon.
Her pencil skirt was ripped and her hose was dangling in strips from her bare legs. Her hair had fallen out of a bun. Suddenly she whipped her head around, searching, angry, laser sharp.
She dropped the bloodied pieces of raccoon like so much refuse. Her hands hung at her side, one finger sticking out at an odd angle. Broken, but she didn’t notice. She sprinted for me. We didn’t have time for this. I scrambled backward, losing my grip on the bolt cutter, and tripped onto my tailbone.
She had green eyes and a missing front tooth. I jumped up and swung out, punching her in the jaw. She reached out her hands and something dark blocked the sun and she fell to the side with a crack.
“Did you miss me?” Maibe said, a bat resting against her shoulder.
A shadow detached itself from a building and an old woman ran to us, her hands out like claws, her eyes bloodshot and vacant, her gait stiff and slow. She should be watching TV and drinking tea, not out here with a bloody foot and a torn dress that revealed a bruised shoulder.
She ran for Alden, but Maibe stepped in front of him and used the bat again. The woman fell flat on her bottom, her dress hiking up to thighs covered in more bruises and scratches.
The old woman growled and tried to get up. Maibe walked backward, facing her. She glanced at me for a second, then turned back and screamed, “Alden!”
He stood there, white as a sheet, frozen to the ground as the V crawled on her hands and knees to him. She grasped at his shoes and caught her hands in the laces somehow so that when she tried to stand she fell onto her face.
I ran and threw her off and then slapped Alden hard enough to skew the mask sideways. “Do you really want to become a Feeb after all we just did to keep that from happening? Are you serious with this shit right now?” I straightened his mask and made sure his goggles were on tight.
“I…I…” He waved a gloved hand in front of his eyes.
I pushed him to Maibe, but she was looking at something over my shoulder.
The Vs were half a block away now. Maibe picked up the bolt cutter. I took it from her and attacked the fence.
Chapter 29
We hurried through the gap and ran for the uninfected side of the camp—Alden with his ridiculous mask and goggles, Maibe with a bat, me with the bolt cutter.
The light was fading. I’d lost the morning in the fevers and we’d lost more time getting back to Camp Pacific. My body vibrated with dread. There was no going back, not through that V mob. But what we would find inside—it might be worse.
As if the world wanted to emphasize just how awful a place it was now, a train whistle sounded close by. I thought that might mean there would be a battle soon between Tabitha’s people and the uninfected coming back with reinforcements. The whistle rang strong like a horn and made the Vs go into a frenzy. Some of them screamed, others were climbing up the chain-link. The fence swayed and wobbled. A few had found our gap and were already inside.
The light was fading. The chill sunk into my bones even though we were running.
“Gabbi!” Maibe yelled at me.
I pivoted and saw she was leading Alden into a building. I didn’t know what her plan was, but since I had none, I changed direction.
The building’s shadow swallowed them up. I followed into an old community hall. The kind of place that held dances and exhibits. It was empty. Our shoes made crazy-loud slaps that echoed off the walls. My heartbeat felt out of control, and our breathing—we sounded like Vs.
The train whistle rattled the glass windows. Maibe and Alden raced through a door on the other end. It bounced hard on the outside wall and came back. I held out my arms and slammed through it to the outside.
There was a row of trailers. Empty. I turned back, but the Vs had already cut off that retreat. A light flickered hundreds of yards away. In the jail. Fear clogged my throat. It was too far. We would never make it and even if we did, the Vs would lay siege to it.
“This way,” Maibe said. She had stopped next to one of the trailers and was motioning me over. I wanted to strangle her.
“You got us trapped!”
Maibe’s face went pale. “This is how we got out. We can get back into the jail this way.”
Vs burst from the building. Small, large, fast, slow. Their shadows were everywhere. Outlines of heads and arms and flashes of teeth. We were surrounded. Maibe dragged me behind the trailer. They grabbed at my clothes and hair. I wrenched myself away. I followed Maibe as if she were the only thing alive in the world at that moment.
We shimmied under the fence that sectioned off the toilets from the jail. Suddenly we were in that little gap and through the hole in the plywood near the toilet pit. It smelled overwhelmingly like diarrhea. I covered my nose with my sleeve.
Alden was there. Fear made the whites of his eyes huge, even behind the goggles. Maibe was bent over, hands on her knees, breathing hard.
We didn’t rest for more than a few seconds before we were racing into the jail. I was the last one in and I made sure to lock the doors behind us. I grabbed a metal bar and jammed it between the handles. It would hold for a little while, but even still, through the little windows I could see dark figures pressing up against the fence.
We entered the greenhouse, where we had eaten meals and done our exercises every morning. The moans grew louder. They were going to drive me insane. I clapped my hands over my ears. I was losing it. I had to get it together.
Each cell contained a messy pile of sheets. Not just sheets, I realized, but someone in the sheets, going through the fevers. Time seemed to stop as I saw the glass of water set next to each cot—on the ground, because there was no table in the cells. Some of them had I
Vs hung from the top of the bars and dripping into a vein. Others had a Feeb in their cell, keeping watch, sponging off foreheads, helping the sick sit up and sip water.
The uninfected men and women I had only seen from a distance were transforming before my very eyes. Their skin becoming thin and dry, their veins more pronounced. Some of them screamed in agony, others sobbed, and others babbled in replayed conversations. It was like the whole world had gone mad. We were in the center of it and the first ring was these new Feebs and the next ring was the Vs outside anxious to tear into pieces.
We’d come too late and now there were too many pieces to pick up.
These people couldn’t be moved and there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Vs trying to get in here. Vs that we had led here.
Lanterns set up on the tables created little glowing circles of light that revealed Feebs scurrying around, carrying supplies up and down the stairs and into the cells. One of the lanterns revealed a familiar face.
Ricker.
He saw us too and dropped the blankets from his arms. He shouted over his shoulder and Jimmy and Ano appeared. Ricker came up, eyes glowing in the light. He moved as if to hug Maibe but then got shy and just smiled the biggest smile. Then his eyes flickered to Alden and narrowed slightly.
I met Ano’s solemn gaze and my heart sunk a little. “She did it. She infected them all, didn’t she?”
Ano nodded.
Jimmy hugged me around the waist and I patted him on the back. I felt it too—we were back together. It was better together, even if we WERE all about to die. “It’s bad,” Jimmy said.
“No kidding,” Ricker said.
“We have to leave as soon as possible,” Ano said.
I shook my head. “There’s Vs everywhere outside. They followed us. We’re probably surrounded.”
“Gabbi?” Kern said, incredulous, yearning, and angry all at once. “What are you doing here?” He came up behind Ano. The lantern light made shadows dance across his face.
“You knew Tabitha was going to do this, didn’t you? She infected them all!” I shouted. “She’s as bad as any of them!”
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