My chest heaved as I opened my mouth and gasped for air. The panic in my brain drowned out the pain in my leg.
Suddenly my lungs began to work again. Cold cave air rushed in and I felt such pleasure in just the simple act of breathing.
In and out, in and out.
It felt like an eternity before I realized the thumping I heard wasn’t my heartbeat but from Vs slamming into the cave door. My eyes began to adjust to the almost complete darkness.
Shapes appeared—lumps on the ground. Dead people. The one I tripped over was still warm. I jumped up, shaky, needing to get out of that hallway before I threw up.
I walked through the bodies until the passageway opened up to a larger room lit by torches. More lumps on the ground here. More dead.
Gabbi had Jimmy sitting down. She nodded at me while biting her lip. He still had that smile on his lips. He laughed just a little bit and moved his hands in his lap like he was playing with that puppy I’d promised him.
I felt sick to my stomach. Jimmy was like Molly and Freanz and the twins now. I couldn’t bear to look at him like that because maybe I’d saved his life but he was still gone from us. Was that what I had looked like to Ricker and Gabbi?
I let low, urgent voices draw me further into the cave. Here was an eating area, rock ceilings braced with huge wooden beams. More uninfected slumped across tables—murdered so fast they’d had no time to get up. The smell of blood and iron was thick in the air. I raised my shirt over my nose and breathed through my mouth.
This room branched off into several passageways. Only one was open. The others were filled with piles of supplies. I followed the voices down the open passageway. My skin felt clammy and cold. Each breath I took left an ache in my chest. My leg still hurt like someone had taken a match and held it against my skin. If the V had actually bitten me, I’d be trapped in the fevers by now like Ano, so I ignored the pain. I could deal with a sprained ankle later.
The passageway led to a room filled with Tabitha’s people. She held a torch taken from the wall. They had their backs to me. Their focus was on a man chained by his hands and feet, spreadeagled and lifted up in such a way that his body formed the shape of an X. His head hung down, a shock of dirty brown hair. He looked young, so young—
Alden.
I cried out and ran to him. I pushed through Tabitha and her people, and fell to my knees before him, the cold wetness of the cave seeping deep into my bones. The darkness of this place boxed up my mind.
He did not move.
He was dead. They had tortured him and strung him up like an animal and I was too late.
“I understand their fear of us,” Tabitha said behind me. “But I still do not understand how they could have done this to one of their own.”
Her words did not reach my brain for many long seconds. My ears heard them but did not understand, not while the rest of me was so shocked by seeing Alden here, his bruised and scratched legs, his dirt-grimed feet, a toenail ripped off—
“Keep searching,” Tabitha said to her people and most of them left.
I looked up and saw a face, and for a brief flash, it WAS Alden’s face, hazy and fogged and overlaid on this one as if someone had moved the camera too fast while taking a picture. My heart broke into a million pieces. I would never be able to tell him—
And then suddenly, it wasn’t Alden’s face. It was someone entirely different, someone older, larger than Alden would ever be.
I choked over my breath.
“Maibe.” When Ricker’s voice broke the silence, only then did I notice that his hand rested gently on my elbow as if I needed to be steadied. Maybe I did.
“Tell me who this is,” I whispered to Ricker. “Who do you see?”
He took in the tears on my face and his eyes widened. “It’s Perkins, Maibe. Whoever you thought it was—it’s not. It’s Perkins.”
My mind had played an awful trick on me. I had thought it was Alden, but now the fog in my brain cleared.
This wasn’t Alden.
“What did he do?” I said, even as my heart began beating again. “Why did they do this?”
Tabitha’s face looked worn but determined. “He was going to turn Feeb.”
“Because you infected him,” I said with a venom that surprised me.
Tabitha nodded. “Yes, and he’d probably already gone into the fevers.”
“But why this torture?” Ricker said.
“Look around,” Tabitha said, a hint of exasperation in her voice. She’d always sounded so levelheaded in the prison, so Zen, and some of that was still there, but now with cracks. “Look closer. They were trying to fix him, in their own sick and twisted way.”
“They were bloodletting him,” Ricker said, his voice in awe.
On the ground underneath Perkins sat two large pans that collected the blood still dripping down one leg.
“They don’t believe we’re human any longer,” Tabitha said. “Why not? Why not try everything that might work to keep one of their own from changing? If you get it out fast enough, maybe you can stop it, or you make the person bleed to death, but either way, you take care of the problem until it’s not a problem anymore.”
“You say all that like it’s nothing,” Ricker said.
“It’s not nothing,” Tabitha said. “But it’s of no matter to us.”
“You can’t mean that,” I said.
“We won’t be changing their minds. Not you, not me. We’ve enough to do trying to survive them and the rest of the world.”
A shout slapped the walls with its intensity.
Tabitha whirled around and there was a gun in her hand where there had been nothing. Leon, with his full beard and dark shining eyes, appeared in the room with us. “You need to see this.”
She followed him out. Ricker and I followed her.
“Kern said you know Dr. Ferrad has found a cure,” I said. “You actually think these people had a cure.”
She froze mid-step, then continued. “Clearly not. Their little torture room proves otherwise.”
“But you thought they must have it or at least know where. Is that why Leon is here? Because he said he’d seen a cured one? You really—”
“I’ve seen a cured one,” Tabitha said. “A Feeb. Someone who had been a Feeb and now isn’t. Leon lied about seeing one himself, but that doesn’t make it any less true.”
Leon flinched at Tabitha’s words even as he led the way down the tunnel. “I knew one existed. I needed help finding him. People needed convincing.”
“And where is this cured one everyone claims to have seen,” Ricker said. “You’d think he’d be the most well-protected, famous—”
“SHE is out there still. This group of uninfected was hunting her.” Tabitha continued down the snaking tunnel that would soon fit us as snug as a cocoon if it continued to narrow. “They don’t believe once you’ve turned you can be brought back.”
“Maybe they’re right,” I said.
“You expect us to believe all this?” Ricker said. “This bloodbath is simple revenge. A cure would be shouted from the rooftops. There’d be no way to hide it or keep it from everyone.”
“Believe what you want,” Tabitha said. “It doesn’t change the truth.”
“But it does,” Ricker said fiercely. “It does change the truth, and you know it.”
In a small room, almost fully enclosed by rock, dimly lit by smoking torches, several of Tabitha’s people hovered over a table spread with papers and other maps hung on the wall.
I approached the table, expecting for someone to bar my way or tell me to stay back. No one did. The papers were thin, almost like tissue, light blue, with dark blue lines drawn with care, and the paper crinkled at my touch.
The designs felt familiar somehow as if I knew the shapes in real life.
I turned to the maps. These shapes seemed even more familiar. Rivers, valleys, streets, highways. Town and city names, landmarks, waterways. I hadn’t ever used maps in school, before school ende
d forever. Gabbi and the others had used them all the time as runaways and I’d gotten really good at map reading—often our rescue missions depended on reading a map and knowing how it matched real life.
This was a map of our area—the River City all the way into the Sierras.
“Do you see it?” Tabitha lifted an arm and lightly brushed a finger over a section of map two-thirds of the way from the River City.
I stepped closer and saw faint pencil markings. They sectioned off Dutch Flat, our town. I turned back to the table drawings and pictured our town and the surrounding hills, the back roads that were still passable, the reservoir that contained our water and the little dam that held it all in.
I rifled through the papers. Different angles, different details.
“This group of uninfected was going to take out your water supply,” Tabitha said.
I stood there in shock still trying to make sense of the maps.
“Actually, let me rephrase that,” Tabitha said. “The uninfected ARE going to take it out. The people we fought today, they’re just the ones these Feeb-haters left behind. We’d been following a much larger group. Maybe they’re already on their way.”
Ricker pivoted on the wet stone and ran out. I dashed after him, through the cold, damp tunnel, over the bodies, into the main room. Ricker was talking to Gabbi, throwing his arms around, cutting the air into shapes and punctuation. “And what will they do after they destroy the water supply? Why not burn down the town next? Set fire to our food? Kill anyone they meet along the way?”
“We have to get back!” Gabbi stepped away from Jimmy then back to him.
I knew what she was thinking—we had to leave, we had to go back to Corrina and Ano and Dylan and the others, but how could we keep Jimmy safe too?
“Stop.” I put a light hand on Gabbi’s arm to convince her to stay in place. I knew better than to use any real force to hold her, but she looked ready to jump away like a scared rabbit and disappear into the trees without thinking about what would happen. “Gabbi, we have to get there fast. But if we’re going to have a chance, we have to think about this. Vs are outside, can’t you hear them?”
I paused to let the thumping sounds bleed through.
My mind twisted and turned through the different options. Make a run for it, just the three of us and hope Tabitha would magically take Jimmy under her protection. There was no telling how far ahead the other Feeb-haters were or how many guns they might have. Wait and convince Tabitha to help us save the town, but even if they came, we would be slow, too slow, to make it in time.
“The main group of Feeb-haters is far ahead,” Kern said, limping over. “The group split off days ago and we didn’t have enough people to split ourselves up too.”
“You followed the wrong group!” Gabbi yelled. “You followed the wrong group and now everyone we know is going to die!”
Kern looked about to shoot back a response, but I cut him off.
“We need to find some working vehicles,” I said, barely thinking over this idea as the words came out of my mouth.
Conversation stopped, but I wondered if I was the one who had stopped, if this were a Faint moment that had stalled me. We huddled around Jimmy like he was our life vest. And maybe he was. All of us fought to protect each other. That’s what made everything worth surviving. He was lost now and we would lose each other, one by one, until there was nothing left.
Unless Tabitha was right.
Unless there really was a cure and we could get everyone back.
For the first time in a long time, I allowed myself to hope there might be a chance to fix all of this.
“The Vs will follow us like bees to honey,” Kern said. “All the way back to your town.”
“We should risk it,” Gabbi said. “There are a ton of cars around, we just need a few to work.”
Ricker stood up. “There’s got to be another way out. This can’t be the only entrance, can it?”
“We don’t have a choice.” I forced my voice to fill with a confidence I didn’t actually feel. “We have to try.”
“Even if it kills us?” Kern demanded.
I didn’t need to look at Gabbi and Ricker to know they agreed with me. It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do.
“Even if it kills us all.”
Alden
“This is the only way to save you.” Dr. Stoven held up a needle of dark yellowish green fluid.
Alden wanted to wretch. “But what about the cure? You have the cure. Use it!”
“I thought you understood this part,” Dr. Ferrad said. “I’m disappointed.”
Dr. Stoven stepped over to his bedside. “The virus and the bacteria no longer stay intact at sufficient enough quantities inside blood cells to catalyze transformation unless you are completely uninfected.”
“You’re not making any sense,” he said. “What is that?”
Dr. Stoven sighed behind his face shield. “If you must know, it’s a sanitized mixture of saliva and sputum that contains active virus and live bacteria in sufficient quantities to stimulate the body’s immune system, which will then mount a defense that predictably generates the onset of a group of symptoms characterized as—”
“It’s the Feeb infection, jerk. They’re making you a Feeb because you were stupid and almost got me killed,” Kailyn said.
Alden looked wildly around the room. It had been her voice, but he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t believe they would let her in the room with him like this, about to go V, about to be infected with that vial of fluid.
“The cure only works if both the virus and bacteria are fully present,” Dr. Ferrad said, bringing him back to the present.
“I don’t understand,” Alden said in a wail that embarrassed him even though he couldn’t stop it. Where was Kailyn? What was going to happen to him?
Dr. Ferrad and Dr. Stoven exchanged a look through their plastic face masks.
He hated how alone he felt. They were the ones who looked like they had come from outer space but he was the one who felt like an alien.
“You’re not supposed to understand,” Dr. Ferrad said.
Dr. Stoven plunged the needle of fluid into Alden’s arm.
They waited and watched and recorded him as he went into the memory-fevers. The needle was not the cure. The needle reinfected him with both the Lyssa virus and the bacteria that together would turn him into a Feeb again.
The worst memory was reliving when he found his mother and no amount of shaking would wake her from her stupor. His father had rested a hand on his shoulder and told him there was nothing to be done. That she wasn’t coming back. That she was sick somehow from this bacteria that was supposed to have saved people from the Lyssa virus.
When he came out of the fevers, the room was dimly lit. He’d been sucking on a sour candy from the fair when he was six. That sourness still sat on his tongue, puckering his lips. The walls were a sterile, dark gray. That stupid lens and speaker box and heating vent that never worked stood in judgment over his head. He wanted to smash it all to bits.
They forbid Kailyn to speak to him.
They didn’t cure him right away.
They said it was because the cure was hard to make and it cost a lot. But that didn’t make sense—money was useless now. How could the cure cost anything? They didn’t say they kept him Feeb as punishment for putting Kailyn’s life at risk—they didn’t have to say it.
He couldn’t get used to it. The skin. The memories. The way his brain kept betraying him.
And then there was the V girl who somehow knew Ricker’s name. Every time he thought of it, he lost feeling in his fingers and his heart sped up. She was a V but she had spoken. Not only that, she had said the name of someone he knew.
He had to find out more.
Dr. Stoven wouldn’t speak to him but Dr. Ferrad let him work with the chimps and Faints again after a few days.
The Faints needed daily care from the lab scientists—food, IVs, monitors,
samples—but no one bothered to turn them to prevent bed sores, so he took it upon himself to do just that during every meal time. It was like touching death, twice everyday, but he made himself do it. Maibe would have done so much more for them.
Plus, he needed the doctors to trust him again. He needed to see the V girl.
They finally let him take care of her again. Alden figured it was because there were so few people left. Sometimes uninfected showed up at the facility and he would catch glimpses of them in the halls or at the common dining area, but then it would be like they vanished into thin air. He would never see them again.
He couldn’t see the V girl now. Her door had a food slot at the bottom which he pushed the tray through. Everyday he crouched on his hands and knees and tried to talk to her. One time there was a glint of an eye on the other side. A hand snaked through and scratched his cheek, ripping it into ribbons. He patched himself up and kept trying.
He attended to the Faints and chimps as best he could. A part of him feared that maybe they weren’t going to cure him this time, so he threw himself into whatever they asked for. He became their errand boy, their chimp-feeder, their stall-cleaner. He scrubbed and cleaned and prepared and dropped into his bed each night exhausted. But the fear grew with each passing day. Why did they hold back the cure?
He fed her, whoever she was, this girl who knew people she shouldn’t have. He pushed the tray through and tried to talk to her and then moved on. When it was time for the next tray of food he removed the used one—that sometimes came back bent or dented or scratched—and replaced it with a fresh one.
After a week of this, five uninfected arrived. Their voices filled the cement dining hall with overwhelming sound. They were toasted, given all the best food because they’d brought other uninfected with them. It was like someone’s birthday party in there. They were welcomed without suspicion or caution. Alden didn’t understand this. People were dangerous now. It didn’t matter whether you were infected or not. But Dr. Ferrad and Dr. Stoven didn’t seem to care. They sent Alden to prepare rooms with fresh sheets but told him to stay out of sight so the new uninfected wouldn’t have to look at a Feeb’s skin.
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