The Plague Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Jones, Isla

  “A burger,” she finally said. “A big, juicy chicken burger with spicy mayo and fries. I’d put the fries in the burger.”

  I crinkled my nose at her. What an odd thing to do.

  Summer used to make sandwich stacks out of her fries. She would line up four on a plate, then another four across it, then again. Somewhere between the layers, she would add a sheet of plastic-like cheese and some sauce.

  Sometimes, I did it too. Though, I wasn’t a huge fan of it. I guess it was one of those things younger sisters did to imitate their older sisters.

  Ahead, Castle whistled—loud enough for us to hear it, quiet enough to not draw attention from any lurkers nearby. Though, given the abandoned state of the complexes, I doubted there was anyone around, infected or not.

  Castle gestured for us to move.

  At the head of the group, Adam shoved Mac’s cart through the snow. Already, his muscles pushed against the back of his fitted sweater and his shoulders hunched. His back would ache soon.

  Adam shared a glance with Leo. It sucked in my attention; I studied the pair from behind. Then I remembered what Vicki had told me. Leo and Adam wanted to mercy-kill Mac. But as I watched them both, I wondered if it really was motivated by mercy, or they just didn’t want the extra baggage.

  Adam jerked his head. Leo followed the gesture to Castle on the other side of him. Castle’s frozen green glare was fierce enough that I even read it from a few metres behind him. Then again, I’d spent some time studying the delicate art of Castle-language. His warning sliced through the chilly air and shut down the unspoken words Leo and Adam had shared in their gaze.

  Whatever I’d just witnessed, collapsed. Adam pushed on with Mac, Leo lit himself a cigarette, and Castle held his M4 to his chest.

  Vicki and I trudged through the snow behind them.

  Lisa and Oscar followed at the rear.

  We marched onwards in search for more ahead, with nothing to go back to.

  8.

  Fifteen.

  Fifteen blocks in and not a single rotter in sight. Whatever reasons I could conjure up for their absence just didn’t seem to satisfy me. A constant pit of unease bubbled deep in the hollow cave that was my gut.

  It was too easy. All of it. And if my life—before and after rotters—taught me anything, it’s that nothing in any shade of this world is easy.

  Vicki must have hitched a ride on my thought-train.

  “It’s too quiet,” she whispered, as if afraid to shatter the calm. “Where are they?”

  I told her what Castle had once told me. “They don’t like the cold.”

  My own response didn’t soothe either of our anxieties. Even Cleo picked up on the eerie ghost-road that we marched down.

  “They’re starving, obviously,” huffed Oscar behind us—not a hostile huff, but one slick with the impatience of everything. “There’s no food to keep them going, and without me, you would all be in the same boat.”

  I resisted a small smile. Oscar fancied himself the group’s homemaker. Without him to stir the pots of noodles, or boil whatever pasta we had left, Oscar imagined we would all starve and die, unable to fend for ourselves.

  Lisa battled the trolley through the thicker lumps of snow. “The more of us who die or become infected, the less food for them.”

  At the start of all this, the infected posed two threats. Infection and a gruesome death by pounding—beatings that belonged in wretched horror movies. They never showed any interest in eating us. They weren’t zombies, they were rabid, infected people.

  Now, with their hunger on the rise, we were fair game.

  “What about animals?” I asked. That’s what they used to eat.

  “Animals are smart,” said Vicki. “Faster than infectees, too. Animals are still out there, but I doubt they make themselves known.”

  In answer, I gave a thoughtful hum.

  In the distance stood the remains of the inner city. Smog lifted up in clouds form the flames. I jerked my head at it. “The rotters could be there, drawn to the fire.”

  Oscar answered in his prim, know-it-all tone; “They’re dying out.”

  “Think about it,” added Vicki. “Think of how many of them get injured. How can they treat themselves? The virus doesn’t give them superhuman strength—they’re still human, and they can die like us too.”

  Can a rotter, a person already infected with the world’s most brutal virus, have an infected cut on their leg and die from it? It was an interesting thought. Rotters, dying from septicaemia and blood loss.

  I’d have to ask Summer about it when I saw her.

  Soon.

  I was so close. So close that my belly tickled all the way around to my back and done to my tail bone. A surge of excitement danced through my limbs, and I wondered if I needed to go to the toilet.

  Castle stopped at the end of the block and gestured with splayed fingers. Time for a five-minute break.

  My bullet wound relaxed with relief—I could almost hear its sigh—and Lisa muttered behind me, “Thank hell for that.”

  Frowning, I turned to shoot her a confused look.

  Lisa steered the trolley to the nearest brownstone stoop.

  Oscar snickered and slid to my side. “Superstition is strong in that one,” he said. “I swear on all the glitter left in the world, if you can get her to take any religious word in vain, I will double the flavour in every meal I cook for you for a whole year. And,” he added, wiggling his faded-pink eyebrows, “I’ll even share some of my secret peanut butter stash.”

  I snorted and followed to the stoop. “It’s hardly a secret stash now, is it?”

  “You wouldn’t dare tell,” he said with an air of superiority. “If you did, your meals would never have even a pinch of salt ever again.”

  I manoeuvred myself onto the short, stone wall beside the stoop and planted the IV stand at my side. Oscar handed out the protein bars for our rations.

  Mine was coconut flakes, drizzled with white chocolate. Castle’s favourite flavour. Anything coconut, he would go for it first.

  At the stoop over, Leo dished out their snacks. Castle checked cargo-boy’s restraints.

  Cargo-boy. God, I’m repulsive.

  I’m giving him a name. Right now…

  Bob. No, that’s awful. I’m going to call him … Noah.

  Noah from the Ark. I won’t share the name with the others, it will just be to write here, in you.

  Anyway, Noah’s restraints must have been secure.

  Satisfied, Castle joined the deltas at the other stoop and took Leo’s offered protein bar. From the pause on his blank face, I knew it was a flavour he wasn’t fond of, like raspberry or yoghurt.

  I unwrapped mine and bit into it. Coconut wasn’t a flavour I ever craved. I could have swapped with him, but that anger … it still brewed within me like a cauldron, ready to boil over, and the flames were fuelled by my pain. Is it possible to hate someone so intensely, yet still hold onto a piece of what was once shared?

  Before I could take a second bite, Castle advanced on our stoop. He was crossing borders. This was our stoop.

  His gaze locked onto mine. The moment it did, Lisa tugged Oscar back to the road. Vicki, perched on the highest step, hesitated. It wasn’t until Castle stopped a few inches from me that Vicki left—not before she pleaded with me in her silent look alone, ‘Don’t tell’.

  It was just the two of us.

  Every pair of eyes pierced into my face, but I ignored their stares as best I could.

  I hadn’t expected it. I should have, but I’m naïve in some ways. Summer always said so. Still, I wouldn’t have banked on Castle approaching me like that, in front of everyone, when we had so many other things to concern ourselves with.

  ‘You’re a distraction …’

  Those words were spoken out of lies. I had to remind myself of that. Nothing of what he’d told me in those weeks was the truth. I was never a distraction. I was a toy.

  And at that stoop, it wasn’t any d
ifferent.

  Castle needed a minute to figure out his words. He stared right through my skin and bones to the stormy brain in my skull. Whatever he was searching for, he must have found it. He slid closer with a single, fluid step.

  He slipped a protein bar into my hand.

  Brows knitted, I eyed the bar (raspberry, like I’d guessed). “What’s this for?”

  The indifferent mask he wore said one thing; ‘You know what it’s for.’

  I stuffed it into my parka pocket. Later, I would give it to Vicki—it felt wrong to keep it for myself. “You know what those pills are, don’t you? Even if I’m … you know, I’m going to take those pills.”

  His gaze was unwavering. I fiddled with the coconut bar, and suddenly wondered if he could see my own mask to the truths behind it.

  I cleared my throat. “Extra rations used on me is a waste. I don’t need them.”

  Cold puffs of breath clouded the air between us; I watched the clouds merge before I blew at them to break them up. It was harder than I thought to keep up the charade. I hated Castle, I hated him so much that there was no guilt within me for the lies I’d led him to believe. Still, I ached to blurt out those words and spill all the truths of the matter.

  But to do that would mean to betray Vicki. Why she wanted to keep it secret, I wasn’t sure. Why she wanted me to take the heat for it, I wasn’t sure. But I was sure of one thing—I owed her my life and Cleo’s. If it weren’t for her, I would have died on the floor of the caravan, and Cleo would have been left behind with the rotters at the farm.

  So I withstood the fierce burn on my face—one of my many tells—and stared at Castle’s chin (the closest I could bring myself to his gaze).

  Finally, Castle turned his cheek and found the courage to face his fear of words. “Are you ok, Winter?”

  “Fine.”

  The curtness of my answer brought shadows to his cheekbone. He ran his fingers through his sawdust hair and glared off the stares of the other deltas at the stoop over.

  “What is it that you want?”

  The air was punched out of me. His voice, the tension that wrapped it tight and riddled it with raw truth, was so loaded that I was at a loss for words.

  I licked my cracked lips and dug my fingernails into the protein bar.

  What did I want?

  I didn’t know. That question went beyond us—it reached around the world. Did I want the CDC? Did I even want to live anymore? Did I want to have all hopes of Summer being alive to be shattered like cheap glass?

  Gaze on his profile, I let my words fall out; “I want to go back to the RV. Not the one back there, the one at the start of all this. Before I met you. When I had something that I lost a long time ago.”

  Hope.

  Real hope. Hope that fills the heart, not the mind. Faith that was stolen from me.

  “Don’t you want to find your sister anymore?” Unlike what I’d expected, Castle didn’t cut me with his tone. He stepped closer and brought his gaze to my troubled face. “You’re still at the cliff, aren’t you?”

  Now that we’d gotten so close to the CDC, mere blocks away, I wasn’t sure I wanted to close the distance. I’m a quitter. I’m a coward. And doubts started to burn brighter with every block closer we got. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to find Summer, or that I was stuck at the cliff in the forest. I just didn’t want to find out that Summer was dead.

  It would be a death like Cleo’s. One that I doubt I could survive.

  I locked stares with him. “I’m not sure I ever left the cliff,” I told him.

  There must have been something in the protein bar that I ate. Strange things were happening at that stoop. Why Castle had come to me, given me his ration, asked me those prying questions—I couldn’t wrap my tangled mind around it.

  Worst of all, I couldn’t understand why I entertained it.

  There was one absolute certainty: How easy it was to slip into that moment with him, to tell him my darker thoughts, and to let the familiar tornado of hurt rip through my entire being.

  Back at the restricted RV, when I’d figured everything out, the brunt of his betrayal hit me hard—but my mind had been torn in a dozen directions. I’d thought then that Leo had cut me the deepest.

  On that stoop, in a desolate housing estate of D.C., Castle pried open old wounds and showed me how much deeper they went than any mark Leo had ever left on me.

  My lips twisted into a grim smile. “I could turn around right now and never look back.”

  Castle inched closer, his jaw working, eyes so sharp and bright that they reminded me of new flashlights. “Is that what you want?”

  He was so close to me that the toes of my boots touched his shins. “I don’t know.”

  “What would you have me do?” he hissed, urgent and exhausted. There it was—the cutting hit of his anger, the impatience he couldn’t hide anymore. “You want to live in this world, on a farm in the middle of nowhere?”

  Everyone watched us now, no one tried to hide it. But Castle held my full attention with his cracking stone mask.

  “Soon, all the food left will rot. You would have to grow your own, but you would have to settle somewhere. Infectees will be drawn in. How long will we survive before they come in numbers we can’t withstand?” His face came closer; the heat of hissed words touched my nose. “Other groups, infectees, disease, the elements…” He shook his head, his lip still curled. “We can’t survive like that. What other options do we have?”

  Behind trapped tears, I held his gaze. Then, I slid off the wall and forced him back a step. “Who said anything about we?”

  Those words came out in stone. Hard, indifferent, and rough enough to send him back a step.

  A mere blink later, Castle had recovered and sneered; “I wasn’t referring to you and I. I meant the group as a whole.”

  I snorted to hide the bud of disappointment that blossomed.

  “I’ll be your key,” I said calmly. “And after that, don’t ever speak to me again. The sight of you sickens me. Your voice makes my skin crawl. And,” I took a step closer, my boot almost flattening on his, “just so you know, it’s always been Leo.”

  Lies, lies, lies!

  I couldn’t stop them from spilling out of me. I wanted to hurt him, I needed to see a flicker of pain in his eyes, a fraction of what he’d unleashed on me.

  Castle inhaled through his nostrils, so deep that the breath filled his lungs and pushed out his chest. A ripple of rage shuddered down his body, clamping muscle after muscle. Then, he let out the softest of breaths and I heard every single hitch in it.

  I’d hurt him.

  And I craved to do it again.

  Before I could swim in his pain, his mask slipped onto his face, firm and unyielding. I faced stone again. A blink, and it was gone—he was gone, back to the other stoop.

  *

  Silence pressed down on all of us so hard that no one spoke a word for fear of breaking it.

  I suspected some of what Castle and I had said to each other had been overheard. We’d spoken in low growls and hisses, loaded whispers and cutting breaths, but it wouldn’t have been too difficult to gather the gist of our ‘talk’.

  I avoided the hollow feeling in my gut and walked numbly among the others. The rest of the journey, I walked alone. Vicki was at Mac’s side (or his cart’s side); Leo and Castle led the way with Noah; and Lisa and Oscar stayed at the rear.

  I was surrounded by the group, but the rest of the road was lonely.

  When we turned right onto an all-white street, the thick silence pulsed over us. Some ached to speak, their excitement fizzled through the group, but the tension was too dense to break through. Still, we walked in silence down the street of snow-dusted brownstones.

  It couldn’t be the street, I thought. There were no fancy buildings, hospitals, or even clinics. This was a residential street for families and young couples.

  A trendy area.

  We stopped at one of the brownstones halfway dow
n the street. It stood out among the others with the wrought iron gate that hugged its stoop, solar panels packed with snow on the towering roof, and a bright red door the shade of rubies or ripe apples.

  I titled my head as I studied the exterior. Even with its character, the brownstone couldn’t be the CDC. It was only four levels high and—it was just a house.

  But then, I looked at the deltas. Adam grinned and slapped his hand on Leo’s shoulder and Castle even he allowed himself a small smile.

  We really were at the CDC.

  9.

  Adam was the first to shove through the gate. Castle followed with lazy footsteps, his hand clutched tight onto his backpack, while Leo stood by the mouth of the gate and held his rifle to his chest.

  Adam tried the door. It didn’t budge. No one seemed surprised by that.

  I leaned on my IV stand and watched Castle crouched at the door. He dropped his backpack to the ground and rummaged through it. The rest of us waited in the thick silence at the road. Lisa drummed her fingers on the handlebar of Noah’s trolley, while Vicki rearranged Mac’s duvet and pillow (though, he was too unconscious to notice). Cleo’s head poked out from her jacket, and her big beady eyes darted from side to side.

  A pang of jealousy tugged my insides.

  Cleo didn’t need just me anymore. She had two humans now. It was better for her that way—still, the logic of it didn’t ease the jealousy. At least it wasn’t as bad as it had been back at the auto-shop.

  I hung back, near Oscar who rested on the hood of a car buried in snow. His bum would be wet soon, but then again, he wore leather pants and I’m not sure how that works with melted snow.

  Ahead, Castle stood and pulled out a document from a large envelope. Then, he unhooked a chain with tags—those army ones that I think are called dog tags—from around his neck. I’d never seen him with dog tags, and I had no idea that there was an envelope with documents in his bag.

  All our time together, I never spared much thought to what was in his bag. Once, before the auto-shop, I’d seen him stuff a black book into his backpack; a book not unlike a journal. I’d assumed it was filled with strategy notes and places, lists of the meet-up points, and whatnot. Now, curiosity bloomed inside of me.