“You’re keeping it under wraps, but I know you, Mama Bear.” Eric winks. “Happiness is practically oozing out of you. Well, maybe not happiness. You’re just in your element. That’s all I mean. Even more so than when we’re on the track or running for our lives through Arcata.”
A soft laugh bubbles out of me. “I’m glad I don’t look like I’m having my own personal party.” I sober. “Eric, I’m sorry.”
“For what? For wanting to rescue Alvarez?” He shrugs. “You didn’t force any of us to come. He’s our friend, too.”
“Not that. I mean Lila. It’s my fault she went outside that day. If I hadn’t been pushing her to leave Creekside—”
“Stop, Kate.” Eric holds up a hand. “It’s not your fault.” He looks down at his feet as he splashes through a puddle. “We both know Lila wasn’t cut out for the apocalypse. It was only a matter of time.”
“We don’t know that—”
“I do.” Eric looks at me, but all I can see is the water smearing his glasses. “I cared about Lila. A lot. But I always knew she wouldn’t make it for the long haul.”
Hearing him say that makes me wish for a big, giant do-over. There must have been something I could have done differently to help Lila. I refuse to believe her fate was pre-determined.
Our feet splash in the wetness pooling on the trail.
“I miss her,” Eric says. “Finding her recipe book was like ...” He makes a choking sound.
I wait in silence. The ocean pounds away in the background, ever present.
Eric recovers himself. “I’m going to keep part of her alive. When I get back to Creekside, I’m going to start making her recipes.” He draws in a deep breath that has nothing to do with physical exertion. “My mom was a recipe blogger. Did I ever tell you that?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yeah. She specialized in recipes you could cook in under thirty minutes. She used a lot of processed food. Which I didn’t realize was scary until I moved to Humboldt and got assaulted with propaganda on organic whole foods. I think Mom had five different casseroles you could make with a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup.” He chuckles. “Anyway, I feel like I can pay tribute to both of them in my own way if I keep Lila’s recipes alive. Although Mom wouldn’t like it if she knew about the pot. Even if it is for medicinal purposes.”
“Did I ever tell you about my first night of the apocalypse?” Eric asks.
I shake my head. I’ve made it a point not to ask people about that. If I don’t want to talk about my experience, why would I think anyone else wants to?
“I was so stoned,” Eric says. “Like, majorly stoned. I got my hands on a new hybrid ... never mind. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to take mushrooms while I was stoned. I had just finished three batches of brownies to trade for three term papers and wanted to celebrate.” He grins to himself, lost in a happy memory. “I thought these two zombies were hot chicks. They had on low-cut tanks tops and super short skirts. They looked scary but I thought that was just the combination of mushrooms and pot. I was trying to work up the nerve to hit on them. Then they started eating this guy and I thought my mushrooms were totally taking the wheel. Then Carter and Reed found me.”
Despite the fact that I’m freezing my ass off, wet from head to toe, and hungry enough to eat raw seaweed, I laugh. I laugh so hard I double over.
It’s not funny. Not really. People died. A lot of people. But somehow Eric’s description makes me laugh.
He grins at me. “Who would have thought that being a chicken shit with girls would save my life? If you think that story is funny, I could tell you so many more.”
Eric rattles on, spinning a long story about a high school crush, a botched attempt to get a prom date, and a faulty soda machine. I escape into the conversation, grateful to have my own distraction from the cold, wet, relentless trail.
59
Confession
BEN
“There’s something I want to tell you.” Ash’s voice rattles out through her chattering teeth. Ben wishes he had a jacket or a blanket or anything warm to put over her shoulders.
“We can talk later,” he says. “Don’t waste your energy.”
“No.” Ash shakes her head. The ocean crashes, a constant hum in the background as they run. “I should have told you a long time ago.”
“It’s waited this long.”
“Stop arguing with me, anaciano casacarrabias.”
He has no idea what she just said, but he can hazard a guess. Ash often flips into Spanish when she insults someone.
“Do you remember that day when Carrie and Melissa went missing?”
“Yeah.” How could he forget it? Those two girls snuck out of College Creek while everyone slept. Their note said they were going to the dorms on the north side of campus to see if they could find food.
Ben knew it was a lie. They’d been afraid of Johnson. They’d run away.
Johnson had known it, too. He had a thing for Melissa. The way he’d looked at her left no doubt in Ben’s mind what he intended, and it wasn’t flowers and a romantic stroll.
“I looked for them,” he tells Ash. “After the massacre. When I went my own way. I scoured the north side of campus for any sign of them.” That was how he’d found Kate and the others at Creekside, though he hadn’t revealed himself to them at the time. He’d been hell bent on tracking down Johnson and killing him. “Ash, I don’t know what happened to them, but if they made it to the north side of campus, I never found them.”
He’d even looked for their bodies among the undead. The girls weren’t cut out to survive. They were scared of everything and didn’t know the first thing about taking care of themselves. Hell, Carrie admitted to having never done her own laundry until moving away to college, and half the time she just took everything to the dry cleaner and paid to have it washed.
“They never made it to the north side of campus,” Ash whispers. “They tried to sneak away. I was keeping watch at the time. Johnson caught them.”
Ben grinds his teeth. He wants to plug his ears, but there’s no escape.
“Johnson and Ryan.” Ash swallows. “They caught Carrie and Melissa as they tried to sneak away. I—” She stops, a cough wracking her body.
“I asked you,” Ben says. “The next morning when we realized they were missing. I asked you if you saw anything.”
“I lied.” Ash doesn’t look at him. “I’m sorry, Ben. I was so fucking scared of Johnson. The only reason he didn’t try to touch me in the beginning is because he knew I could defend myself. But it was only a matter of time.”
“What happened to Carrie and Melissa?” Ben demands.
Ash dissolves into another round of coughs. She looks worse than ever, though this time Ben doesn’t think it has anything to do with the hypothermia.
“I have never been so scared as when I was living in that maldita frat house with all those boys. I’d face a hundred zombies before I’d put myself through that again. Caleb did his best to shield me.” Her face crumples. “But he couldn’t be with me every second of the day. Johnson made sure of that.”
Ben wants to hit something. “What did that fucker do?”
“Not as much as he wanted to do. But a lot more than I wanted.” Her face is wet with rain, but Ben doesn’t miss the tears snaking down her cheeks. “Johnson and Ryan killed Carrie and Melissa. They caught the girls and dragged them to the library. I—I found their bodies. They’d been raped before Johnson and Ryan killed them.” She chokes on a sob. “I didn’t do anything to stop them. I could have told you. I could have intervened, but I was a coward.”
Something inside Ben cracks open.
God dammit. He’d known. In his gut, he’d known Johnson and Ryan had done something to those girls. The tally in his head goes up. Instead of sixteen kids on his conscious, he now has eighteen.
“Why are you telling me this?” His voice comes down like a hammer. He couldn’t hold his anger back even if he tried.
Ben has no words. He’d failed Ash. That was the simple truth. He’d seen the fear in her eyes when he questioned her about the disappearance of Melissa and Carrie. He’d suspected she knew more than she let on.
Yet he had done nothing.
Every day he’d stood by and done nothing. He’d been in denial as to how dangerous Johnson was. He’d stood by with his thumb up his ass and all those kids had been slaughtered.
Anger and self-loathing boil up within him. He can’t speak. He doesn’t know how to tell Ash how very, very sorry he is.
“Ben,” Ash murmurs. “I just wanted you to know the truth. Don’t hate Caleb for something I did.”
Her knees buckle. Ben catches her as she falls.
60
Old Friend
KATE
“Kate!” Ben’s bellow grinds me to a halt in the middle of the trail.
I spin around and find him running toward me, Ash clutched to his chest. She’s unconscious, her body flopping with his cadence. Caleb tears down the trail back in their direction.
Hypothermia. The word flashes through my mind. The wet. The cold. The exhaustion. It’s gotten the better of Ash.
“We need a fire,” Ben shouts. “Right fucking now.”
I spin on my heel, taking in the soaking trees, the soaking trail, and the soaking ferns. Rain continues to patter down from the sky. The fog sits low against the land, compounding the dampness.
Caleb takes Ash’s limp body. Ben sprints toward me. “Fire,” he shouts again. “We’re going to lose her if we don’t get fire.”
“There’s nothing to burn,” Eric whispers, face riveted on Ash and Caleb. “Everything’s wet.”
Something in me hardens. No way am I going to let Ash die.
“We burn a tree down if we have to,” I snap. So what if our world is drenched in water? So what if we have no food and are on the brink of running out of water? “Whatever it takes. We get a fire started.”
Eric wipes at the water on his glasses, eyes wide. “Come on, Reed,” he cries, bolting off the trail and into the greenery. “We need to find a place to start a fire!”
Thirty minutes later, our party crouches inside a tight ring of Douglas firs a quarter mile off the trail. The ground beneath the trees is the only piece of relatively dry land we’ve found since emerging from the ocean.
Our fire is pathetic. Finding dry wood has been a joke. The only thing we’ve been able to burn are pine needles.
“Come on, girl,” Caleb murmurs, his face twisted in anguish. “You’ve survived worse. A little cold isn’t gonna get the best of you.”
He’s stripped out of his wet shirt, his bare chest pressed to Ash’s back. She’s been stripped to the waist, in nothing but her sports bra. The sight of the chafe marks under her armpits and along the bottom of her sports bra makes me wince. The salt in the clothing has been brutal on all of us, but somehow it all looks worse on Ash. Her arms and legs are covered with tiny cuts from the thistle patches we pushed through.
“Shit.” Ben leaps to his feet, stalking out of our shelter. He marches up to a young pine tree, running his hands over the wood. “Fuck me. I can’t believe I didn’t see these earlier.”
“What is it?” I join him at the tree.
He pulls out his knife and begins prying out a section of bark. “See these?” He points to a few dried white streaks on the outside of the bark.
“Bird poop?”
“No. Dried sap. See these bumps in the bark? They’re filled with sap. My old man showed me how to make fires with bark like this when he took me camping as a kid.”
Realization dawns. Tree sap. It’s flammable. With sudden hope filling me, I yank out my knife and also begin prying up a section of bark.
In less than two minutes, we have two large handfuls of bark. We rush back to the shelter.
“Everyone, get back,” Ben orders. He begins snapping the bark into smaller pieces, revealing small, gooey pockets of sap.
I’ve never seen Ben so focused. He crouches before the small pile of burning pine needles, holding a raw edge of bark over the flames. Within several seconds, the sap ignites.
“No way! How did you do that?” Reed gapes.
“Tree sap,” I explain. “Ben’s idea. Go find some more bark like this.” I hand Reed a sample from my harvest with Ben.
He wordlessly takes the bark. With a nod at Eric and Susan, the three of them hurry into the rain to find more bark.
Ben stares at the fire with fixed intensity, steadily feeding it larger pieces of sap-infused bark. He also throws handfuls of pine needles onto it, sending up huge puffs of smoke and steam every time he does. Eric, Reed, and Susan return with another armload of bark.
I kneel on one side of Ash, working my hands up and down her bare arms in an attempt to warm them. Caleb rubs her stomach, trying to do the same. Every part of her is damp and chill, her skin sickly white.
Susan, Reed, and Eric all strip out of their running shirts and have pulled extras out of their packs. They hold the pieces of clothing over our fire, trying to dry them so Ash and Caleb can use them as blankets. Ben curses under his breath, worried eyes constantly flicking to Ash.
If this had been a real ultra, Ash would be in a medic tent right now. That’s what happened to me at the JFK fifty-miler when I got hypothermia. A thunderstorm had shown up at the start of that race and decided to stick around for the duration.
By the time I staggered to the finish line, I hadn’t been in much better shape than Ash. The race director put the medal around my neck and hustled me off to the medic tent, where I spent the next five hours. They packed hot water bottles around me, layered me with blankets ...
Wait. Water bottles.
I snatch my pack off the ground and stare at the water bladder inside.
“Does anyone have a pot or something we can heat water in?” I ask.
“I have a collapsible metal bowl in my pack.” Reed dives into his pack, rummaging inside. He produces the bowl and pops it open.
“Figure out a way to hold it over the fire,” I tell him. “We’re going to heat water.” I stand, grabbing the running packs dumped in a pile on the ground. The bladders inside all need to be filled.
Ben looks at me sharply. “Where are you going?”
“Water. We need to heat water and put it in our bladders and pack them around Ash. Maybe get some hot water into her.”
“You can’t go out there alone,” he says with a scowl.
I scowl right back. “There are no zombies out here. Hell, there are no people out here. You need to focus on the fire. Get it nice and hot. The rest of you, keep drying out clothing. And figure out a way to suspend that bowl over the fire.”
I turn my back on Ben, ending the conversation. I march out from beneath the trees before anyone else can argue with me.
In my head, I retrace the route we’d taken to get here. About a half-mile back, we crossed a swollen creek that came up to my knees. That’s where I’m going to get water.
I take off at a run, charging through the water-laden grasses that grow close to the coast. I dodge around trees and clumps of thistles, making a mental note to check everyone for ticks again when I get back.
What’s wrong with me? Why am I worried about ticks when Ash’s life is on the line?
I shake my head, struggling to get my emotions in order. I can’t slip now. My kids need me.
I burst through a clump of fennel and clear a mess of cobwebs out of my face. The trail looms in front of me, a muddy track stretching to the left and right.
“Finally.” I leap onto
the dirt path and take off at a sprint, my headlamp illuminating my way.
It’s the fastest I’ve moved since first setting foot on this trail. It doesn’t take long before I realize just how depleted I am. Between the near-miss with the ocean, the stress of all the events leading up to the shipwreck, and the short supply of food and water, I’m wasted. My body is sluggish, refusing to move as fast as I know it can move.
Ash. Ash. I say her name over and over in my head. I charge through puddles. Mud and water fly up, soaking me all the way to the waist. Ash.
I hear the creek before I see it. I tear around a corner and drop to my knees at the bank. My cold, wet fingers fumble with the first bladder. The plastic opening keeps slipping in my grasp. My fingers are too numb to grip properly.
“Dammit!” I hurl the bladder to the ground in frustration, breath rasping.
Ash.
Tears sting my eyes. I got her into this mess. I can’t fail her.
I snatch up a bladder and flip it upside down, pinching the seal between my knees. This time, when I pull at the plastic, the opening slides free.
I push the first bladder into the water. The creek is flowing so fast it almost rips it out of my hands.
Crouched there on the side of the bank, alone in the rain, it all comes crashing down on me.
The helplessness of our situation. The fact that I have six green runners in my care and that I’m trying to keep them alive on one of the toughest trails on the west coast. The odds are stacked against us, and no matter what I do, things just keep getting worse.
My breath quickens. I swallow back tears. Now is not the time for self-pity.
Something moves on the far side of the bank. I blink, trying to clear water out of my eyes. The world is blurry from all the rain, which seems to be coming down harder than ever before. Just great.
I fill the rest of the bags, wondering if there’s a way to warm the water inside without melting the plastic. Reed’s bowl won’t fill more than one liter of water at a time. That’s not fast enough. It—
Undead Ultra (Book 3): Lost Coast Page 32