by Jeff Hirsch
I took a shaky step toward him. “Greer, listen . . .”
He turned away and started down the trail. “Forget it, man. Good luck with your gardening.”
The dogs followed him as he headed back to camp. Soon their footsteps faded, and I was alone again. I tore off my mask and dropped it. My hands were ice-cold and shaking bad, so I curled them into fists and squeezed until I felt as if a bone was about to pop. There was an angry buzz in the back of my skull.
Everything was so damn simple to Greer. A couple kids might be in trouble? Go get them! Who cares that there might be a price to pay? Who cares that one wrong move could lead to everything we’d built being taken away? And the thing was, it wasn’t just Greer. All the infected lived in a world that, as far as they knew, was unbreakable. Every betrayal they’d ever felt? Every disappointment? Every failure? Every disaster? Gone. That’s why they needed me. I remembered how fast the world could fall apart, and I remembered what it was like when it did.
I kicked at one of the branches and started back to my tent. I wasn’t going to be able to get any more work done that morning. As I stepped through the woods, a flash of red caught my eye. Greer’s bandanna. He’d left it sitting on a rock by the trail. Right where he knew I wouldn’t miss it. I knelt and untied the bundle. The two biscuits were still there. Golden. Untouched.
When had I eaten last? Not that morning. The night before? Sometime earlier the previous day? That was the thing about Greer. He was never more annoying than when he was right. Kind of like you.
I took the biscuits off the rock and devoured them.
2
BY THE TIME I made it down to Greer’s camp, it was in full-on riot mode.
“Let’s not forget our ponchos, people!” Greer shouted as the kids sprinted from cabin to cabin, getting ready. “Radio says rain later on, and I don’t want a repeat of last time. Let’s move! We don’t have all day!”
There were eleven of them, five boys and six girls, ranging in age from seven to fifteen. They all lived on the grounds of the old summer camp about a quarter mile down the mountain from my tent. I had lived there myself for a while, but once Greer and the kids showed up, I’d grabbed some camping gear and found a place of my own closer to the peak of Lucy’s Promise.
Greer caught sight of me and planted himself a few feet away, his arms crossed over his chest. “What’s up, Cassidy? You forget something?”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Coming with me where?”
I stared at Greer until it dawned on him.
“What? No. Card, that’s not—”
“I’ll get Snow Cone’s meds, and then I’ll talk to Gonzalez about those two kids. We’ll work something out.”
“Work something out so you can bring them up here?”
“So we can find them a good home.”
“Card—”
The buzz in my head started up again, but I forced it down. “If we bring more people up here, Gonzalez can’t protect us. That’s it. Game over. Benny and DeShaun and all the others get stuck in that National Guard shelter. You want to take that chance?”
Greer looked away, his eyes narrowing on Eliot and Ren, who were play wrestling in the dirt by the main lodge while the girls cheered them on.
“We protect who’s here now.”
His jaw tensed, as if he were gnawing on a scrap of leather. “You haven’t been in town since—”
He cut himself off. No one liked to mention the night of the sixteenth, especially to me. To tell you the truth, I hated it—the way they tiptoed around me like that.
“Look, I’ve got my mask and my gloves. And it’s not like I’m going to stand in the middle of Monument Park. I’ll go see the doc, talk to Gonzalez, and come right back.”
“But—”
“Can we just go? Please? Seriously, Greer, we don’t have all day.”
Greer spun away from me and headed back to the kids. I hadn’t meant to snap at him. I’d apologize later. I just wanted to get this over with.
“Yo!” Greer called out. “Rugrats! Anyone not with me in five seconds stays here and cleans bathrooms! Five—four—three—two—one!”
The chaos stopped at once, and everyone snapped into a single-file line at the head of the trail that led off the mountain. As always, Carrie was in the lead, since that meant she got to be closest to Greer. She stared up at him adoringly as he gave the group their final inspection. He sent Astrid back to her cabin to put on more sunscreen and told Isaac to get a bigger backpack. Once they returned and Greer double-checked the four wagons they used to haul things up the mountain, it was time to go.
“Okay, troops! Let’s move out!”
I started to follow, but stopped when I saw Benny standing off by himself a few feet from the trail. He was all hunched up, head down, skinny arms hugging his chest. It was like he thought that if he tried hard enough, he might be able to make himself disappear.
Lassiter’s didn’t have any after-effects. Once it did its work erasing someone’s memories, it left them perfectly healthy. Unfortunately, that rarely meant they were okay.
At seven, Benny was one of the youngest kids in camp. From what we could figure out, he got separated from his mom and dad when they were all infected on the night of the sixteenth. Once the quarantine was in place, the Guard tried to reunite him with his folks, but as far as Benny was concerned they were trying to make him live with two complete strangers who acted like they were his parents. He ran away. The Guard dragged him back. He ran away again. Greer found him nearly a month later, hiding out in an old muffler shop. He’d been living on creek water and a vending machine he’d smashed open with a brick. Greer brought him up to Lucy’s Promise and, I don’t know, I guess the Guard finally decided they had bigger things to do than chase around one pissed-off seven-year-old.
The rest of the kids on Lucy’s Promise had similar stories. Families that fell apart when the memories that bound them together were gone. Parents who died in the chaos of the sixteenth. Parents of kids who never got infected and left the Quarantine Zone to keep it that way. Some of them just couldn’t stand living with all the other infected down in Black River. You remember that animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer movie we used to watch when we were little? The one with the Island of Misfit Toys? I guess that’s what the sixteenth had turned them into. Misfit toys. Lucy’s Promise was their island.
“What’s going on, Ben?” I asked.
He scrunched up his face, still not looking at me. At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer at all, but then I got a dry little whisper.
“Isaac and Eliot say there are ghosts.”
“What? Where?”
Benny pointed his chin toward the trail that led to Black River.
“In all those houses down there,” he said. “And up here too. In the trees and stuff. They say if you’re not careful, the ghosts’ll reach out and—”
“Isaac and Eliot were teasing.” I made a mental note to have Greer give them a talking-to. A vigorous one. “There aren’t any ghosts.”
He gave me a deeply skeptical look. “How do you know?”
“Because I know.”
“But, well, what if I get lost? Or somebody grabs me, or they make me go back to that shelter—”
“Do you think any of us would let somebody grab you?” I said. “Or let you go back to that place?”
His forehead wrinkled as he considered it, but clearly he wasn’t convinced. I checked behind me and found the trail deserted. The rest of the group was already past the first turn. I squatted down so I could look Benny in the eye.
“You know, when I was your age, I had nightmares a lot.”
Benny cocked his head. “You did?”
“Oh yeah. Bad ones, too. They’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and then I’d be too scared to go back to sleep. And since I shared a room with my big brother, that meant he couldn’t go back to sleep either. So he came up with this thing to help me get over being scared.�
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“I’m not—”
“No, I know. You’re not scared. But still . . . you wanna try it?”
The way Benny looked at me it was clear that every atom in his body was primed for some kind of trick. But in the end, he nodded.
“What’s the happiest thing you can remember?”
The question took him by surprise, but then he thought about it for a second and said it was one day last month when he and DeShaun—the camp’s other seven-year-old and Benny’s best friend—were walking through the woods and found a bird’s nest. It was small, he said, the size of two hands cupped together, made out of twigs and leaves and bits of plastic. Each of the four eggs inside it, snow white and speckled with blue, was hardly larger than his thumb. Benny said that he and DeShaun stood there for the longest time, not saying anything, just staring at those tiny eggs until it was like they were the biggest things in the whole world.
“Okay,” I said. “Now, close your eyes.”
He did.
“I want you to see those eggs again,” I said. “Not like you’re looking at a picture, but like they’re really there in front of you. Do you see them?”
Benny nodded slowly.
“Now I want you to feel how warm the sun is on your skin and how the pollen tickles your nose. Now smell the honeysuckle and the dogwoods and that musty smell that comes from all those old decaying leaves on the ground. I bet there are birds up in the trees too, right?”
Benny nodded again.
“You can hear them singing and DeShaun’s breathing beside you and your own heartbeat.”
Benny’s shoulders relaxed and his mouth fell open, his bottom lip fluttering in and out as he breathed. It was almost as if he were on the edge of sleep.
“Open your eyes.”
When he did, they were steady and bright. Calm.
“No matter what happens, no matter what you see, that moment is locked up inside you. So if you ever get scared, that’s where you go. Deal?”
He nodded solemnly, never taking his eyes off mine. “But nothing bad’s going to happen, right?”
I raised my hand. “I swear. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
It was as if the chains holding him back snapped. He went shooting off after the others, kicking up a cloud of dust as he went. I knelt there in the quiet of the camp, staring at the trail and thinking about walking the streets of Black River for the first time in eight months. It had to have been eighty degrees that day, but I felt as if I’d swallowed a bucket full of ice.
Once Benny was out of sight, I went back to my own campsite. I dropped to my knees and hunted around inside my tent until I found what I was looking for: a T-shirt–wrapped bundle hidden under my sleeping bag.
From time to time we traded with the other groups that were scattered throughout the woods and hills surrounding Lucy’s Promise. Not long after I moved up to the mountain, I sought out one of them, and swapped almost everything I had for the one thing I wanted.
I unfolded the T-shirt. Inside was a six-inch hunting knife with a leather-wrapped handle. All along the top of the blade there were these rat’s teeth serrations, the kind you’d use to saw through thick branches. The cutting edge itself was so sharp it seemed to hum.
I tested the edge with a finger. It whispered through the skin, sending a pinprick of blood curling into my palm. The world became a little brighter and a little more clear. I smeared the blood off on my jeans, then sheathed the knife and threaded it onto my belt. I left camp and started down the trail toward Black River.
3
I SAW THE RIVER first. I’d come around the second-to-last switchback and the trees had started to thin. The Black River cut the Quarantine Zone roughly in half, with the mountains on one side and the town on the other. From up on Lucy’s Promise it looked like a dark ribbon. The only bright spot along its course was where the water ran fast over the falls, turning to white foam as it slipped beneath the stone bridge.
The town appeared next. From where I stood it was just trees mixed with black and russet-colored roofs and a few lines for roads. It grew larger with every step, until I could pick out the red brick of Black River High at the south end of Main Street and the crown of mansions way up at the north end. As soon as we came off the mountain, the kids sprinted down Route 9. Greer chased after them, but my legs wouldn’t move. I stood there, one foot on the asphalt, one on the grass, looking down the road at what had become of Black River.
The last time I’d been off the mountain was just after the sixteenth, when the QZ had been packed with people. Infected. Uninfected. National and local news teams. Ten different charities. Eight different government agencies.
The uninfected went first. They were released from quarantine around Thanksgiving. Once another month or two passed without any real developments—no cure or vaccine, no culprit, no other outbreaks—the news vans left skid marks on their way out of town. The Red Cross and the Salvation Army were next, followed by the Gates people and the Clinton people and the World Health Organization. The CDC, USAMRIID, and the rest of the government agencies hung in there until early March. After they left it was just us, a dwindling force of National Guardsmen, and the occasional smalltime charity—a bunch of losers shuffling around an empty dance floor long after the cool kids had found someplace better to be.
It was the silence that tripped me up the most. The chaos of those early days was long gone, but there was nothing to take its place. There were none of those old summer afternoon sounds. The pre-outbreak sounds. No whirring lawnmowers or blaring radios. No hissing hoses as people washed their cars or watered their lawns. Just wind moving down empty streets and in and out of the open windows of abandoned houses.
Months of neglect had led to overgrown yards and weed-cracked sidewalks. Roofs with missing shingles. Shutters hanging from broken windows. A family of white-tailed deer, two adults and two fawns, stood on someone’s front walk, nibbling at the grass. Another house seemed completely untouched, except that the front door was hanging open, exposing the empty throat of the hallway and shiny hardwood floors.
“Yo! Cardinal!”
Greer had stopped in the middle of the street and was waving me forward. Benny was standing next to him, looking back, curious, as if maybe I’d forgotten something. Of course it was also possible that he was wondering why a seventeen-year-old kid couldn’t just walk down an empty street. I took a deep breath and then I forced one foot in front of the other.
Every few blocks there were reminders of the night of the sixteenth. Empty lots where, instead of a house, there was a pile of ash and charred wood. Two police cars, burned black with smashed windows, sat in the cul-de-sac at the end of Elm Street. Spent tear gas canisters, mixed in with trash and fallen leaves in the gutter, made bonelike sounds as I kicked through them. A rat’s nest of zip-tie handcuffs lay bleaching in the sun.
I stepped up onto the cobblestone bridge that spanned Black River Falls. My shoulders tensed. Forty feet below me, the water crashed against jagged slate-gray boulders. The sound was like a wave of static. I looked over my shoulder, up toward the peak of Lucy’s Promise. The trail I had walked on only minutes before had vanished into the trees. It felt like a hand had grabbed hold of my guts and twisted.
“Hey. Take a look.”
Greer had stopped the kids at the far side of the bridge. He nodded up the street as a large black pickup truck came rolling toward the intersection. The back of it was open, packed with ten or fifteen men wearing bright blue hazmat suits. Black rifles hung from their shoulders. The men turned to face us as they passed. The eyeholes in their suits were shiny plastic, blankly white in the sun’s glare. The air filters that grew out of their masks looked like the jaws of huge insects. I stepped back, my hand automatically going to the knife at my side.
“Easy,” Greer said. “They’re just passing by.”
They picked up speed as they crossed Route 9 and headed toward Main Street. Just before they disappeared, I saw a logo on the ta
ilgate—a globe pierced by a sword. Beneath it were the words MARTINSON/VINE.
Greer stepped into the street to watch them go. “Dude, who the hell is Martinson Vine?”
I didn’t know, but something about them made me feel my heartbeat pulse in my throat. “Come on. Let’s just get this over with.”
Greer and the kids had a quick huddle, and then they were on the move again. I followed along, and pretty soon the heart of Black River came into view. This is where most of the infected lived. Thousands of them. They slouched against the walls of boarded-up shops or lounged in the tall grass around abandoned houses and apartment buildings, eyeing us as we moved down the street. I’d heard that there were infected with enough money hoarded away from before the outbreak that they could make a life in the QZ that was almost normal, but they were a minority. Most everybody lived like these people, jobless and adrift.
See, as soon as the quarantine came down, Black River became like a body that was dying one organ at a time. The tourist shops and art galleries closed first, then the grocery stores and the drug stores and the all-night diners. Last to go were the schools and churches. The National Guard and the charities had tried various kinds of resuscitation, but none of them worked. We were too far gone. No wonder Benny believed Isaac and Eliot when they told him Black River was haunted. In a town like this, there were bound to be ghosts somewhere.
By the time we hit Main, small bands of infected were coming out of every alleyway and side street, merging into a flood of people as they funneled toward the park. I tightened the straps of my mask and tried to get Greer’s attention, but he was talking to Astrid and Ren and they were laughing. How was that possible? How could they laugh in the middle of this?
It didn’t matter. I spun around, looking for the street that would take me away from the gathering mob, but was surprised to find myself lost. Hundreds of shifting bodies made streets and storefronts that had once been so familiar seem strange and distorted. My only choice was to fight against the tide and get someplace where I could think and breathe.