by Kate L. Mary
Her good eye sparkled, the blue of her iris standing out against the pink skin of her face, and her expression was nothing but welcoming when she looked us over. When she turned to look at the man, it was clear that they were in fact a couple.
Jada turned to face us after she’d set the can of oil back on the shelf. “This is Bonnie and Max.”
The two nodded and I waited for Jada to introduce us, but she didn’t.
“Help me,” Bonnie said, motioning to the counter.
Jada did as requested; carrying the plate of bacon to the table while Bonnie went back to cooking. The sizzling seemed loud compared to the silence of those gathered here. There were more than a dozen people crowded into the room and yet not one of us said a word. Jim leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, staring at the back of Jada’s head while at the table Max seemed to be adjusting one of his legs. Glitter was leaning on her father like they had spent their entire lives together as the rest of us shuffled around, waiting for something, anything, to happen, and Jada brought plate after plate to the table. Not only was there bacon, but there were scrambled eggs as well, fluffy and yellow and piled high on a platter. Two stacks of toast sat next to that, and at its side was a plate of butter, a luxury I’d rarely had in my life and one that made my mouth water and my stomach growl even louder than ever.
It wasn’t until Jada had brought the last plate of food over that she turned to face us. “We’ll talk while we eat.”
“Or perhaps after,” Bonnie said. She stood behind Jada, wiping her hands on her shirt and shaking her head, and once again I felt as if I was about to receive bad news.
Clearly I wasn’t alone in that thought, because no one moved. Jada frowned, but before she could say anything Mom stepped forward.
“We appreciate the food, but I think we’d all like to know what’s going on. You can start with who you are and why we’re here.”
Max sighed and waved to the table. “Let’s sit down, then.”
We did, moving into the kitchen where extra chairs had been squeezed around the table. There weren’t enough for all of us, but Jim, Jada, and Bonnie all stayed standing. Luke, too, didn’t sit, but he also didn’t keep his distance. As if he found himself trapped between the two groups and unsure of where exactly he belonged anymore. I couldn’t say that I didn’t agree with the feeling. He and I had been close growing up, spending most of our free time together as children, but things had changed over the last few years as I’d found him missing from my life more and more. Charlie and I had grown closer, which I never would have thought possible considering what a pain in the ass she’d been when we were little. I’d thought Luke had a girlfriend or something, but now that I saw him, looking like a zombie slayer instead of an apartment kid in New Atlanta, I had to wonder if there wasn’t more to it. Clearly he knew things about the city that we didn’t, but I wasn’t sure how.
“You’re here for safekeeping,” Max began once we’d all settled in. “That’s the best way I can put it.”
His gaze was pulled from Mom’s when Jim cleared his throat, and everyone turned his way. He was frowning and Jada was looking up at him, nodding. There was an expression on her face that made my gut clench and I found myself reaching for Mom without thinking. She startled when I closed my hand over hers, but didn’t look away from Jim, and I knew that she could feel it too. This was it. This was the moment I’d been dreading.
“We didn’t want to tell you this until after you were out of the city safely. This is going to be a shock. I’m sorry.” Jim looked down for a second, swallowing like he couldn’t get the words out, and then dragged his gaze away from the floor until he was looking Mom in the eye. “It’s Margot.”
Mom’s fingers dug into mine, and her back stiffened. “Margot?” she whispered.
Jim didn’t blink before saying, “She’s alive. In the CDC.”
The words had no meaning because all I could picture was my little sister’s smiling face as the memory of her laugh filled my head, making it impossible to focus on anything else. Not even when Mom’s hand went slack in mine and her body dropped to the floor. The room swirled around me as everyone moved at once. Words and cries were thrown around and I blinked, but I couldn’t comprehend what was happening.
Margot wasn’t alive. She couldn’t be.
But Jim had said she was, and he seemed to know a lot more about what was going on than we did.
She was in the CDC.
But why? Margot wasn’t immune. She couldn’t have been.
Only, I knew she could. Angus was, and so was Dad, so it made sense that Margot could have inherited whatever it was in their blood that protected them from the zombie virus. The CDC would have known it too. It would have been easy for them to get a blood sample when Margot was born, and they had already proven that they wouldn’t tell us. But how had they gotten her? How had they saved her that day the zombies flooded the city? Had they staged the breach just so they could steal my little sister, who had only been nine years old at the time, and lock her away in the CDC just like they had with Angus? No. That was crazy. That was impossible.
Only it wasn’t and I knew it.
Four
Meg
Luke knelt in front of me. “Meg.”
“Did you know?” I whispered, thinking about the way he’d acted that night I saw him at the bar, as if he knew all the dark secrets the CDC was hiding from us. “Did you know about my dad? About Margot?”
He looked away. “I found out a few weeks ago.”
I sucked in a deep breath, holding the air in my lungs until I felt like they would burst. When I let it out, I found myself lashing out at Luke, my hand flying through the air and making contact with his cheek. The slap of flesh against flesh cut through the chatter in the room and everyone froze. All eyes were on me, my half-conscious mom forgotten as everyone in the room focused on the red handprint that had sprung up on my cousin’s cheek.
My face grew hot, not from embarrassment but from anger, and I was suddenly afraid that I would lash out at Luke again or at someone else even. At Jim, who had clearly known all along that my dad was alive, at Glitter who was in on this too. At Angus who had saved me more than once but had also kept secrets from me. At Al and Parv who’d known for years that Dad was immune.
I needed air.
I pushed away from the table and stood, leaving everyone behind. The rooms I’d passed through only a few minutes earlier flew by in a blur. When I pushed the front door open and burst outside, I was met with early morning light that nearly blinded me. I sucked in a deep breath, but the air was thick with humidity and muggy and not the least bit refreshing. If anything, it made my insides tighter. Made it harder to breathe. I leaned against the porch rail and took slow breaths in through my mouth, blowing them out through my nose, but I couldn’t calm down.
Margot was alive. I knew it had to be true, but accepting it was a different story altogether. I had been there, I’d witnessed what had happened that day and I could remember it all with perfect clarity. Now though, facing this truth and knowing what I did about Jackson and his father, I couldn’t help feeling like the vivid memories from that day were nothing but a lie that had been carefully planned out and spoon fed to me by someone who knew I’d swallow them without a second thought.
The last day I saw Margot had been the first day of my friendship with Jackson. I’d always known who he was of course, because not only was he the son of the Regulator of New Atlanta, but he was also charismatic. Even at the age of eleven I hadn’t been able to ignore the magnetic pull he’d had on me. We’d never spoken, but I remembered how he’d smiled at me that day as I stood outside the school. How it had made me feel hopeful and excited and had filled me with a buzz that seemed to energize my body.
How much time had passed before all of that changed? Ten minutes at the most, probably less. One second I’d been sharing a look with a boy and the next I’d been running with my mom and sister, fleeing the dead that had somehow man
aged to penetrate the safety of our walls. Mom had disappeared, and then Margot, and I had been left alone. People had run by, too panicked and worried about their own asses to even notice me.
Jackson had popped up out of nowhere and saved me. He’d comforted me, stayed with me, helped me when it was all over, and I had trusted him. To me it had seemed like he’d been sent from God, like his sole purpose had been to save me, and that feeling had stayed with me for years. More than that, it had grown stronger until I had been certain that Jackson Star was the only person I could depend on.
But it had all been a hoax. Margot wasn’t dead, and it made the whole thing twice as devastating. After she’d disappeared, I’d given up while my parents had clung to hope. I’d been so certain that they were fools, but I had been the fool. I’d let Jackson trick me and manipulate me, had let the fact that he’d listened to me cry trick me into thinking he was something he wasn’t.
I shouldn’t have given up. I should have held onto Margot harder. Should never have let her go.
The door behind me opened and I stiffened. “What?” I snapped without turning to look at the person who had come out.
“You sure do remind me of your mama,” Angus said.
I turned to face my uncle. His gray eyes took me in, and they were so similar to my dad’s that I found myself wondering how I had never noticed it before. When he’d first approached me in the street and given me a note, at the bar when I’d been shocked by the appearance of Joshua’s zombie corpse in the ring, in the street when my uncle had saved me from being attacked. All those moments and I’d somehow missed the obvious similarity he and my dad shared. Of course it made sense, because I hadn’t been expecting that my supposedly long-dead uncle could ever pop up, but it probably wasn’t really an excuse. Not when I had known something strange was going on.
“I hope that’s a compliment,” I said, because I had no idea how else to respond.
He stared past me, out over the town that was just now waking up for the day. “It is. I didn’t like much of this world before all this went down, but after, when we was tryin’ to learn how to live, I found that I appreciated a hell of a lot more than I had before. She was one of them things I woulda liked either way, though. Hollywood was a tough little thing from day one. Probably why she was able to survive what happened in Vegas.”
“What happened in Vegas?” I asked, and then immediately found myself wondering if I really wanted to know. Right now, I wasn’t sure I could take in anything new.
Angus lifted his eyebrows. “Guess your folks never told you ‘bout all that.”
“Do I want to hear this?”
“There probably ain’t much ‘bout that time that anybody would wanna hear, but I’ll tell you if that’s what you need.”
“Why?” I asked.
“‘Cause I know that right now you’re feelin’ like you been left in the dark a little too much, and you need to know it ain’t ‘cause we didn’t think you couldn’t handle it. It was to keep you safe. You and your mama and everybody else in there. Them people in the CDC would slit your throat to keep you quiet. That’s who they are, and we didn’t want nobody else to die.”
“I guess that makes sense.” The words should have come out grudgingly, but the truth was, it did make sense and I knew it. That didn’t mean it didn’t sting to learn so many horrible things at once.
“Is my sister okay?”
“I ain’t seen her.” Angus frowned and it seemed to darken his irises until they looked like clouds just before a storm set in. “She’s immune though, so they ain’t tryin’ to kill her.”
“But she could die?”
He pulled his gaze from the houses at my back and focused on me. “They all did. All of ‘em but me.”
I closed my eyes and let out a deep breath. I’d wanted the truth, but it hurt like a bitch. Dad, Margot, and Donaghy, all three of them were now in Jackson’s clutches and I wasn’t sure how we were going to get them back.
I opened my eyes and focused on my uncle. “Do you have a plan?”
“We do,” he said, but he didn’t sound thrilled about it.
Of course, at that moment I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know why he rolled his eyes the way he did or what the tight-lipped expression he wore meant. I honestly didn’t want to know anything else. Not what Angus had been through over the last twenty years, not what Donaghy or Margot or Dad were going through right now, and not what Jackson had in store for us. I just wanted to take some time, even if it was only an hour, to absorb the information I’d gotten before shoving anything new into my brain.
“I should check on Mom,” I said, turning toward the house.
My uncle followed me back inside without a word, almost like he knew I couldn’t handle any more information right now.
Mom was resting on the couch in the living room, her eyes closed and a cold compress on her head. I paused in the doorway and Angus stopped at my side, and together we stared at my mother in silence. She was still trembling and her face was pale, and even though I knew the shock of finding out her daughter was still alive and being held in the CDC had to be overwhelming, I couldn’t help being disappointed. This wasn’t who I wanted her to be. I wanted the mother who’d raised me back. I wanted her to pull herself together and get up, to show the fire and determination I knew she had inside her.
Her eyes opened and she gave me a weak, sad smile. “Come here,” she said, holding her hand out.
I did, crossing the room while Angus stayed where he was. I sat down next to her, positioning myself on the edge of the couch. Her hand grasped mine and she squeezed, and something flickered in her brown eyes that gave me hope.
“We’re going to get them back.”
“How?” I found that I was the one teetering on the edge of losing hope, and I suddenly understood that the emotions swirling through my mother didn’t make her weak. They made her human.
Her hand tightened on mine. “I don’t know yet, but I do know that I won’t rest until we’ve done it. Even more, I want to see Star pay for what he’s done to our family.” Her gaze moved past me, back to where Angus stood. “To all of us.”
I swallowed when a lump of tears tried to force their way up my throat, but I found words impossible, so instead I just clung to my mom’s hand and held her gaze, letting the fire and strength swimming in her eyes sink into me.
“Get some food,” she said, loosening her grasp on my hand. “We need to stay strong.”
Most of my family was still in the kitchen, Luke included. I ignored him and instead focused on the plate of food that was waiting for me. It was cold, but my stomach was begging to be filled and I found that I couldn’t really taste anything anyway. I chewed the eggs, now rubbery from sitting on the counter, ignoring my cousin who was imploring me with his eyes to forgive him. Deep down I knew he wasn’t the one to blame here. It was Jackson’s father and whoever else was in the CDC doing his bidding, not Luke. Not Jim. Not any of my family members who had kept secrets from me.
Around the table my family did the same, their movements as they ate almost robotic. The silence was heavier than it had ever been before, worse than after Dad had disappeared, thicker than when Joshua died. This silence was weighed down not just with pain, but with questions and uncertainty.
Jada stood on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. She stared at me like she was trying to figure something out, and the look was just hostile enough to have the hair on the back of my neck standing on end.
“Can I do something for you?” I finally snapped.
When she shook her head, her blonde dreads swished across her shoulders. ”No.”
But she didn’t stop staring at me, her blue eyes locked on mine like she was caught in a trance. This girl, whoever she was, was impossibly beautiful, but something about her was also threatening. The way she carried herself, the way she barely blinked, the intelligent expression in her eyes.
She didn’t look away until J
im came into kitchen, and when she turned her gaze on him, everything about her softened.
“You ready?” she asked.
Jim nodded, barely looking at her. “Yeah.”
If his indifference hurt her, Jada didn’t show it. She pushed herself off the counter, the same air of self-confidence radiating off her that had before he’d come into the room, and headed to the front of the house. Luke followed, not looking my way.
Jim cleared his throat. “We have some things to discuss.”
“No shit,” Al muttered.
Jim headed after Jada and Luke, his only response being, “Follow me.”
We did, mainly because no one knew what to say. We followed them out of the house and down the street, through the walled city and past old houses. The sun was up now, as were the people, and they turned to watch us as we passed. We stood out because most of the people here looked like Jada, covered in tattoos and piercings, hair cut short or twisted into dreads so it was easier to maintain. My own dark hair was loose and hung down my back, occasionally getting caught on the wind and whipping across my face. I felt unexpectedly plain in the midst of these people who had turned their bodies into works of art, who had missing arms and eyes and legs, who limped or sported scars that were highlighted by lines of tattoos rather than hidden away. These people were survivors, and in comparison I felt like a silly child who’d lived her life sheltered from reality. No wonder Jada stared at me the way she did.
We reached a house at the end of the street and were led inside to discover that it had never been completed. Some of the drywall had been put up, but in other places the beams and electrical work were totally exposed. The floor was nothing more than planks of wood and there were no cabinets in the kitchen, although the plumbing told us where the sink was supposed to be.
From there, Jim led us to a closed door, and when it was opened a set of stairs that descended into darkness were revealed. We followed him down in a tight line, but the sharp scent of death hung so heavy in the suffocating space that I had to cover my nose before I’d made to the halfway point. The basement came into view, revealing prison cells lined up along both sides, each of them containing a zombie. There was an underlying smell of disinfectant, bleach and even vinegar, and I could tell they’d done their best to keep the space clean, but with these creatures locked in such close quarters and slowly decaying, it would be impossible to ever clean the space up completely.