Until the End of the World (Book 3): All the Stars in the Sky

by Sarah Lyons Fleming

  As the sun goes down, we light the lanterns, close the drapes and I ready my toothbrush. “You have any mouthwash left?” Nelly asks, and proceeds to tell the others about my dousing Peter in mouthwash. By the time he kneels and mimes my panic, they’re in tears.

  Sorry, I mouth to Peter and wiggle what’s left of the bottle. He answers with a shake of his head and upturned mouth. I’m lucky he finds me amusing most of the time, since he’s stuck with me for as long as we have the kids. Actually, I’m lucky just to have him at all.

  CHAPTER 45

  I sit to play with Bits’s hair on our mattress while they go over tomorrow’s route one more time. It’s damp with sweat. I press my lips to her cheek and call Peter over. “She has a fever.”

  He kneels with his hand on her neck. “You feel okay, baby girl?”

  “Not so much,” she says. “My chest hurts and my throat is sore.”

  I know it’s probably a run-of-the-mill fever, but I remember the runny eyes and coughing of Boss’s men. It could have been from their diet, or a cold, the flu or even something worse. The fact that I can’t name what it was scares me. I tend to overreact when it comes to Bits, but I can feel the reach of those men hundreds of miles away. If they manage to kill her too, I might lose my mind. “Let’s give her some antibiotics.”

  “They won’t work if it’s a virus,” Peter says.

  “I know, but…” I don’t want to alarm her, but I’m going to pump her full of everything we’ve got just in case. Peter acquiesces and helps Jamie figure out a dosage.

  Bits swallows a pill, takes her ibuprofen and asks, “Do I have to brush my teeth?”

  “No, sweetie,” I say. “Just curl up with me.”

  She’s asleep immediately. I brush her hair away from her face and hope the medicine does its job. Peter lies on Bits’s other side and I whisper, “Why don’t you sleep with Hank? You don’t want to catch this.”

  “Neither do you,” he says, and stays put.

  Bits kicks off blankets and coughs all night, and I give up on sleep to watch her by lantern light. Before dawn, Peter sits up like he’s been shocked out of sleep.

  “Bad dream?” I ask.

  He runs a hand down his face. “Yeah. What are you doing?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “It’s just a fever.” Peter leans against the wall, shoulder touching mine. “She’ll be fine, I promise.”

  “You can’t promise things like that,” I say, angrier than I ought to be. “You promised you’d come back before, when there was no way to be sure.”

  “But I did come back.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You can’t promise—”

  Bits coughs, a deep sound full of phlegm, and sits up choking. Peter holds her while she gags and throws up last night’s dinner. I run to the kitchen for a bowl, but by the time I’m back she’s asleep on Peter’s chest. The next coughing spell wracks her body until even Peter looks alarmed.

  The thermometer reads almost 105 degrees. I look to Jamie, who’s been woken by the coughing along with everyone else. “Can I give her more ibuprofen?” She nods and brings me the bottle. It wasn’t full to begin with, and now it’s less so.

  I measure out the dose and hold the cup to where her head lolls on Peter’s arm. “Bits, wake up. You have to take some medicine. It’s the good stuff.”

  Bits rouses enough to swallow and sinks back into sleep. Jamie takes the cup and says, “It’s okay. She probably just has the flu.” I think but don’t say that people die from the flu every year.

  We load up early, and I tuck Bits next to Adam on the VW’s bed. “I’m sorry, Adam. I know you don’t need any germs on top of a bullet hole.”

  He squeezes me with his good arm. “Don’t worry about that. Just take care of Bitsy for us.”

  “I had the flu one time, Cassie,” Hank says. I half wanted him to ride in the truck so he doesn’t catch this, but I kept him with me in case we get separated. “I was so sick it was crazy, but they just said to drink lots of water and juice.” He thinks for a moment. “Well, we don’t have juice, but we can give her water.”

  I kiss his cheek. I want juice for Bits—juice and doctors and my mother here to tell me that I was sick like this too, once, and everything turned out fine.

  The mountains in the distance are the same brown peaks as yesterday. A few hours in, we stop at a rocky beach on an immense blue lake. I make a compress using the icy water, careful to filter it first, and rub Bits’s skin to cool her down. She mumbles in her sleep and kicks at me in a foggy, mindless way. But this is what the book says to do, so this is what I’m doing even if she pummels the shit out of me. I murmur softly and take her temperature again—the medicine has barely made a dent.

  The previous group who rode in the pickup bed has raw noses and looks desperate for warmth, which means my time has come. “I’ll go first,” I say to Peter. “She can have more medicine in a half hour. Rub her with the cold water even if she yells at you, okay?”

  “Let me go,” he says.

  “I just want to get it over with.”

  “I’ll do yours so you can stay with Bits.”

  It’s too long to be out in this weather, which has taken a turn for the worse and looks like rain. I almost take him up on his offer, but he doesn’t want to spend hours away wondering about Bits any more than I do. “That’s okay, thanks.”

  Adam kicks Nelly, who’s perched at the end of the bed, hard enough to make him grunt. “I’ll take your turn,” Nelly says with a sigh.

  “You already went. You don’t have to take mine for me.”

  “I’ll never hear the end of it if I don’t,” Nelly says. He raises an eyebrow at Adam, who nods and pats the bed for me to stay.

  “I’d do it if I could,” Adam says. “So think of it as my turn. And you can’t say no to me. I’ve been shot.”

  “Thank you, Nels,” I say. “And Adam, of course.” Nelly grumbles and rubs my head as he leaves. Of course he rubs it harder than he needs to, but it’s a friendly noogie.

  “These mountains are amazing,” Adam says once we’re rolling.

  I have to crane my neck to see the cloudy sky now that we’re surrounded by mountains. The two-lane road barely fits in the space between peaks and lake. It’s absolutely stunning, but it also feels secure to be encircled by mountains this enormous.

  “It’s like a giant bear hug from nature,” I say.

  “That was one of the stranger things you’ve ever said,” Peter says over his shoulder with a laugh. “But it does.”

  He turns on the wipers to clear the drops of rain that have begun to hit the windshield. “Poor Nelly,” I say.

  Adam waves off my concern. “He’s fine. He would’ve offered anyway. And if he didn’t, he would’ve ruminated on it until he felt so guilty that he stopped us to switch.”

  “You know him well. He’s the best pain in the ass ever.”

  “He is.” Adam rests back on his pillow with a suppressed wince. He doesn’t complain, but a bullet in the shoulder must hurt like crazy.

  “You’re good for him. You’re what he was looking for all along. It just took the zombie apocalypse to make it happen.”

  I think of what Dan once said—that maybe this happened so the people who belonged together would find each other. I don’t really believe it—not after losing Adrian—but it makes for a nice story when people like Nelly and Adam find true love.

  “We’re good for each other,” he says.

  “The way it should be. Now get some rest while your boyfriend freezes his butt off.”

  Liz, Zeke and Margaret sit in varying levels of comfort on the floor and seats. Except for Hank, no children, parents of children or pregnant people are allowed in the sick bus. I watch the passengers in the pickup’s bed fight a losing battle to keep the tarp they use for shelter out of the wind’s grip. It must be miserable out there. Everyone in our nice warm bus exclaims when the rain changes to snow flurries and the fat, white and, in all probabilit
y, cold flakes spiral through the air and under the flapping tarp.

  I put my hand to my mouth. Nelly is never going to speak to me again.

  CHAPTER 46

  We’ve gone farther than we’d anticipated due to our early start. This part of Alaska is so empty that it seems we could drive all night safely, but the icy rain coming down could cause hypothermia and we’d hit Wasilla before dawn. The suburb of Anchorage is probably infested and therefore better traversed in daylight.

  We slow at two mailboxes, the only sign of life we’ve seen for miles after the tiny town an hour back. The long dirt driveway ends at two hunting camps, one of logs and the other red clapboard. The doors are unlocked, nothing of value inside. Each has an old woodstove, a scuffed dining set and empty bed frames. A cord of wood sits out back with an outhouse.

  “What do you say we split up tonight?” Zeke asks the assembled crowd. “Same as the vehicles.”

  “As long as I get out of this rain, I’m good,” Nelly says. His cheeks are raw and his hair has gone crazy, but he winks when I blow him a kiss. He’d insisted on staying in the truck for Peter’s turn and wouldn’t budge when Peter argued. He stands over the stove while I build a fire in the log cabin. “How’s Bits?”

  “The same,” I say. The dry kindling lights immediately, as do the logs, and in a few minutes the heat begins pushing out the cold. I stare into the flames and think of all the things that could go wrong with a sick little girl.

  “Hey, Half-Pint,” Nelly says in a firm voice. I look up, and he says, “Stop stressing.”

  “Sometimes I think if I consider every bad thing that could happen, it won’t come true. Like the opposite of jinxing.”

  “Reverse jinxing? I’ll have to try that. How’s it working so far?”

  “It’s got about a fifty percent success rate, if I’m lucky. So not at all, I guess.”

  He pats my head. “That’s what I figured.”

  It’s tight with nine people in our cabin, but cozy with the roaring fire and lantern and giant cup of tea. I sit at the bottom of the bed frame and cringe whenever Bits coughs in her sleep. She’ll be warm tonight—that’s got to be better for her than cold, damp air.

  We eat boiled potatoes with the jar of salsa, which is better than the plan we had to mix the baby formula into mashed potatoes. One sniff of the vitamin-saturated powder made us decide to save it for when we’re really desperate. I mix some with hot cocoa mix and manage to get a few sips down Bits’s throat, but she’s so unresponsive I give up or risk choking her. Hank drinks his down and proclaims it a little weird but chocolaty.

  Mikayla refastens her short ponytail and sinks against Ben. “I wish we’d gone to the hot springs. You guys are so clean.”

  I’d rather have made it across the country without losing five people along the way, but I know she doesn’t mean it that way. “Tomorrow you’ll get a shower, maybe. They have to have some way of washing.”

  “Less than a full day’s drive,” Zeke says from his chair. “Might get a little dicey in Wasilla, but we’ll go around as much as possible.”

  “There’s not another way to Talkeetna?” Ben asks.

  “There is, but it’s a gravel road,” Peter says. He sits on the floor with coffee in one hand and the other on Bits. “It would add hundreds of miles and we don’t have enough gas.”

  Liz shoots out a sinewy arm. “We’ll blast our way through Wasilla. We’ve made it this far, right?”

  “Famous last words,” Peter says, and barely smiles when the others laugh. He doesn’t feel like laughing any more than I do, I guess.

  I find it hard to be anxious about tomorrow when my thoughts are consumed by Bits’s rumbling chest. We’ve given her a child’s dose of cough medicine, but her coughing continues unabated.

  Our beverages consumed, we get in bed. I squeeze in with Bits and Peter sleeps on the floor with Hank. Just before the lantern is extinguished, Peter reaches for my hand. I hold tight, our hands resting on Bits, and pray into the darkness that somewhere up there someone gives enough of a crap to not punish us by taking her away.

  ***

  I insist on taking my turn in the pickup and go first to get it over with. Bits drank a little of the hot cocoa this morning before passing out, but her fever is still set to broil instead of bake. Nelly sits with his arm around me as we yell over the wind. The rain and flurries have cleared up, thankfully.

  “Look at those,” Nelly says. White-capped mountains stretch south and east and west of us under a bright blue sky. Nothing’s getting past them without a whole lot of trouble, and Lexers don’t go in for a whole lot of trouble unless they see people.

  “You know what I keep thinking?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Adrian and I wanted to drive to Alaska. He would’ve had a heart attack at all of this.” I wave my arm at the scenery. Nelly nods—he knows how fanatical Adrian was about mountains. “He would’ve been pointing and almost running off the road. I would’ve driven him crazy pumping the imaginary brake on the passenger’s side, until I finally flipped out and demanded the keys.”

  Nelly laughs so loud that everyone in the truck looks our way. “That is totally how it would have gone.”

  “I know. But it still would’ve been amazing.”

  Nelly hugs me to his side. I miss what could have been, but it’s the gentle ache I’ve grown used to. Most of all, I miss having him to hold on to when it feels like everything is collapsing around me. And with Bits sick, that’s exactly how I feel.

  My shift over, I get in the VW. Bits wakes coughing and I clean the horrible-looking stuff she brings up. I’ve never seen someone so limp with fever, and I cross my fingers that by the end of today we have a doctor to see to her.

  The houses and businesses are spread out when we slow at what was to be our turnoff onto a less traveled road. It looks like half of Anchorage used this road as a getaway route, and most of the cars are still here although the bodies have wandered away. We luck out at the main road, where someone has taken advantage of its width and the parallel train tracks to create a travel lane. Last year’s bodies hang out of cars and lie on the road, along with the ones that are milling about. Not a ton, but it’s more than we’ve seen since Whitehorse.

  Hank raises a shaky finger to his glasses when we pass a large group of Lexers. I’m glad Bits can’t see them. Let her think we made the trip just fine and that there’s nothing below us when we get to Talkeetna. I can see there’s a lot below us, even if the winter did kill off half of them, and there will be plenty next summer.

  “This map sucks,” James says via radio from the truck. “We’re going to have to stay on this road.”

  We pass strip malls and dead traffic lights. An ice cream shack and motel. As long as we keep moving, the Lexers can’t get close. They converge on the road behind us, a slow-moving swarm of bodies and grunts, and I wonder how long they’ll follow before they forget we were here. I breathe a sigh of relief when the businesses become fewer and farther between.

  “Seems like there should’ve been more,” Zeke says. “Where’d they all go?”

  CHAPTER 47

  His question is answered on a semi-rural stretch of highway, where a whole bunch of undead Wasilla waits around a bend. Zeke manages to swerve around the pickup rather than hit it when it skids to a stop.

  “Where do we go?” Peter yells into the radio.

  I hear James’s curse through the truck windows. He points back, the obvious choice, and Zeke reverses to an access road. We take it a quarter mile west, paralleling the highway, and stop when it hits a gravel road that dead ends fifty feet to our right.

  “Christ!” Zeke says. He spins the VW around.

  Lexers make their way onto the road from the woods. All that separates us from that pod on the highway is a few hundred feet of trees. I hold Bits in place while Zeke slams on the gas and trails the truck up a steep driveway to a house built into the hill. The garage doors are at ground level but, thankfully, the fr
ont door is on the second level and can only be reached by stairs. Peter gathers Bits in his arms and Hank drags Sparky from under a seat. I grab the closest bag and race up the stairs. Zeke and Nelly open the door with a splintering of wood and enter with their weapons out. It’s empty.

  I look out before the door slams. The Lexers are at the base of the driveway and moving up the hill. Once everyone’s in, James severs the cords that attach the stereo and TV to the wall and he and Mark drag the entertainment center to the door.

  Ben looks out the window. “They’re coming, but I don’t think they know where we went.”

  Footsteps close in. As long as we’re quiet, they might leave. It could take days, but it’s possible they’ll go. I won’t think about the fact that most everything we need is outside—water, food, extra ammo. Jamie raises a finger to her lips and Jasmine nods, eyes two dark orbs. Nelly leads Adam to a chair and stands over him. We’re all on alert, heads cocked. Even Barnaby doesn’t need to be told to be quiet.

  Bits lets out a cough that must be heard outside because the moans grow in volume. Peter hugs her to his chest to muffle the sound and nods when I point to what I think is the basement staircase in the foyer. This level of the house is the kitchen and living room, with a hallway that might lead to bedrooms. We pass the garage door landing into an unfinished basement. A couple of high windows at ground level let in enough light, even through overgrown grass, to see boxes, bikes and tools.

  Peter sits on the concrete floor and cradles Bits in his arms. She’s stopped coughing for the moment. Her next doses of medicine are in the VW with everything else. I sit with my head on my arms and wait for the next round of coughing or the breaking glass that’ll mean they’re coming in. Peter nods when I look up, like everything will be all right, but this is not all right. Not at all.

  Twenty minutes later, Penny pads down the stairs and kneels by my ear. “They’re still out there, but they don’t know where we are.”

  As if on cue, Bits coughs for a minute straight. Her clothes are soaked and her body shakes with chills. I take off my coat for a blanket. Penny disappears upstairs and returns with blankets stripped from the house’s beds. I sit under them next to Bits and Peter, staring at the box labels I can’t read in the dim. After what seems like forever, Nelly and James come down with a mattress they set on the floor. Peter tucks the covers around Bits and props her head on a pillow. Everything is done silently—the most important game of Who Can Be the Quietest we’ve ever played.