“Like the zombie ants,” I said.
His lips quivered a little. He scratched at the side of his face, the stubble giving off a rasping sound. It occurred to me that I’d never seen him not perfectly clean-shaven. “What do you mean, Chance?”
“Well, we saw Hank McCafferty—” I caught myself, feeling a surge of remorse. I glanced nervously at Rocky and JoJo.
Rocky’s eyes glimmered, but he kept his chin up. “It’s okay,” he said. “I want to know.”
I took a deep breath. Then I continued, filling in Dr. Chatterjee, starting with when Patrick had interrupted me in the barn. The acrid smell on the wind. The hammering noises and screams carrying over from the McCafferty place. When I got to the part about Mrs. McCafferty in the grain silo, JoJo buried her and Bunny’s faces in her brother’s chest. I described climbing to the top of the water tower and the sight waiting for us, Hank blown wide open, releasing spores to the wind.
Rocky held his sister tight. He didn’t sob, but tears spilled down his cheeks. Alex put her arms around him from behind, holding him even as he held JoJo. My face burned as I related details of Hank’s death—I knew as well as anyone that a child should never have to know too much about that—but I also realized that everything was different now.
We couldn’t lose track of our emotions, certainly, but we couldn’t give in to them the way we used to. Maybe Rocky and JoJo would need this information someday. Dr. Chatterjee certainly needed it now.
I finished telling him about the scene at the water tower and said, “Like those ants in that video you showed us. With the parasite?”
He took off his glasses and polished the lenses on his rumpled button-down shirt, though they did not look in need of polishing. “Ophiocordyceps unilateralis,” he said quietly. “The pieces are starting to fit together.”
“How?” Patrick said.
“Those adults out there”—Chatterjee pointed a trembling finger through the doorway of the nearest classroom to the windows and beyond—“have been infected.” He shook the detector, the words blinking out at us again: UNIDENTIFIED PARTICULATE. “This parasite attacked their white matter.”
“So why didn’t it attack ours?” Alex asked.
“You’re teenagers,” he said. “You have less.”
Patrick drew back his head. “We do?”
“Of course. Kids have a lesser-developed frontal cortex.”
“Rub it in,” Alex said.
“Look,” Chatterjee said. His hands shaped the air as they did when he was in teacher mode. He seemed to forget that one of them was gripping a clawhammer. “Every year from childhood on, white matter wraps around more and more of the nerve cells of the brain—that process is called myelination.”
“What is white matter?” Rocky asked.
As the sun inched up, squares of light from the windows stretched across the classroom floor opposite us. Some of the male Hosts had drawn closer to the school, spiraling their way around the front parking lot. One man in a scuffed denim jacket drew closer to the fence, his shoulder rat-a-tat-tatting along the chain-link, the sound sending electricity up my spine. Dr. Chatterjee took Rocky by the arm, drawing him out of sight past the doorway, the rest of us following. Sensing that something was wrong, Cassius leaned into my leg, his black-mask face pointed up, no doubt reading the stress coming off me.
“White matter transmits information from different parts of the body back to the cerebral cortex,” Chatterjee said, the hammer wagging by his face. “Which helps with executive function—decision making, attention, planning, motivation. Think of the myelination of axons as creating information pathways, connections that allow communication between all the parts of the brain. That’s what maturity is, really. Teenagers grow more white matter every year. But the last part of the brain to be myelinated is the frontal lobe.”
“So you’re basically saying we’re all stupid,” Alex said.
Chatterjee shook his head. “I’m saying that part of being a kid, a teenager, is that you literally don’t have the capacity yet to think fully about the consequences of your actions.”
Alex cut in: “Where have I heard that before?”
Patrick had leaned back around the doorjamb to spy on the Hosts outside. Chatterjee yanked him back, as if proving his point, while barely slowing down. “That’s why teenagers can be impulsive, angry, lovesick, higher in risk taking—”
“Well,” Patrick said. “We’ll need risk taking now.”
“That’s absolutely true. But if what Chance is saying is correct, then this airborne parasite invades its host and gains control by spreading through the white matter, seizing control of the frontal cortex.” He waved the clawhammer in a circle. “From there it takes over the brain and the nervous system, manipulating the host like a puppet. It can run the human body as if it’s a machine, operating the muscles without regard for pain or injury.”
I thought about Uncle Jim’s death shudder. All those men we’d seen out there, walking their mindless spirals. Coach Hanson scrabbling forward to get us, not even caring about the bone sticking out of her leg.
I suddenly understood. “So if the parasite is spread through white matter, the frontal cortex—the puppet master—has to be covered with white matter for it to become infected. Or else the spores have no pathways to get to our brain’s control centers.”
“That’s right!” Dr. Chatterjee said. “Which means the thing that makes it harder for teenagers to formulate mature decisions is the same thing that saved you. And saved me.”
Suddenly I felt much younger than my fifteen years. There it was, tightening around my spinal cord, that same sensation I’d felt as a six-year-old waking up to Sheriff Blanton standing on our porch, shifting awkwardly from boot to boot, hat in his hands, bad news on his face. That feeling of bone-deep aloneness, as if I’d been set adrift, a boat left to navigate across the rocky slate of the ocean. If what Dr. Chatterjee was saying was true, then the people least equipped to make good decisions were the only ones around Creek’s Cause left to make them.
Like me.
But Patrick was still focused on Chatterjee. “Why’d it save you?”
“Do you know what causes multiple sclerosis?” Chatterjee asked.
We all shook our heads.
“White-matter lesions.” He smiled. “I have enough holes in my brain that the parasite couldn’t take me over either.” Turning, he started back up the hallway, wobbling past the cracked-porcelain bank of water fountains. I hurried to keep up, Cassius scampering along at my side. With his big strides, Patrick had no problem regaining the lead.
“Your weakness is your strength,” Patrick said.
“That’s right, Patrick,” Chatterjee agreed. Then he looked at us all. “Just like your weakness is yours. As Alex said, you’re willing to take risks. Now you’ll have plenty of opportunity to do so.”
I thought of Eddie Lu out there wandering around the Dumpsters in his beanie and apron. “Wait,” I said. “But this means … as we get older…”
Chatterjee’s eyes moistened behind his round glasses. “If the spores are still in the air, yes.”
“What?” JoJo asked. “What’s that mean?”
“It means we’ll turn into them,” Rocky said angrily, waving a hand at the wall and the Hosts beyond.
It took a moment for the realization to work its way across JoJo’s face, and then her forehead furrowed and she started crying. I wanted to comfort her, but the shock was still ringing through me, too. Of all of us, she’d be safe the longest. I’d get there well before her, the white matter spreading through my brain until one day it hit a tipping point. One more cell would grow, bridging some microscopic connection—just enough to allow the parasite to reach its nasty little claws around my frontal cortex, encasing it and taking me over.
But first I’d lose Patrick.
And Alex.
It was like life had always been, I guess, but accelerated. Aging brings us closer to death—any idiot knows that. I’d just always tho
ught I’d have a longer runway. I was fifteen, sure, but at times I still felt like I was just a kid. Even if the future laid out before me wasn’t glamorous or grand, it still always seemed to stretch out, decade after decade, farther than I could see. I didn’t want the end of the road to be visible. Not yet.
I pictured having to watch that death shudder hit Patrick. And alter him. My big brother, my rock, the most solid thing I’d ever known.
And that was only if we got lucky. If the Hosts didn’t take him first. Or me.
JoJo’s cries grew louder.
Patrick said, “We gotta be quiet. We don’t know who’s in here.”
JoJo crammed Bunny’s ear into her mouth and chewed on the ragged tip.
“Don’t worry,” Chatterjee said, ambling ahead of us past the glass trophy cabinet toward the gymnasium. “We’ve checked the entire school. It’s secure.”
“Who’s we?” Patrick said.
Dr. Chatterjee struck the double doors with the heels of his hands, and Alex gave a little gulp of shock. We froze at the threshold. Dozens of sets of eyes stared back at us.
Huddled in groups across the bleachers and the basketball court were about half the kids of Creek’s Cause.
The others who had made it.
ENTRY 13
Our friends and schoolmates were in terrible shape. Both of the Mendez twins, JoJo’s closest friends, were missing patches of their hair. Little Jenny White wore a torn and bloody dress, and one of her shoes was gone. I couldn’t remember her age, but she couldn’t have been older than ten. A few seniors were there, including Ben Braaten, his face sporting that jigsaw scar from the car crash that had killed his two brothers. I saw several of my classmates. Eve Jenkins, who sat next to me in American history, had claw marks across her face. It looked like they’d been caused by fingernails.
A bunch of the emergency cots had been rolled out from the storage room, just like after last year’s flood, when two dozen families had taken up residence here for the better part of a month while their houses were repaired. The retractable bleachers, pulled out now like they were for pep rallies and basketball games, served as a base camp for some of the kids. The benches were covered with sleeping bags, backpacks, first-aid kits, and a few scattered pillows for those lucky enough to have grabbed them before they fled. A row of makeshift weapons—knives, fire axes, baseball bats—lined the lowest bench. Now I understood Chatterjee’s foraging among hammers and wrenches in the shop class. High casement windows atop the bleachers let in weak shafts of dusty light. A freestanding dry-erase board had been wheeled to the front of the polished court, facing the cots. Coach McGill’s zone defense diagrams had been mostly erased and written over them was a list of hundreds of names.
A roll call of all the kids of Creek’s Cause.
The survivors must have made a list of their team members and classmates, young neighbors and relatives. About a hundred of the names on the unofficial census had been crossed off.
While we’d been scrambling from horror to horror, they’d been hard at work organizing here tonight. Almost as hard at work as the Hosts had been.
Dr. Chatterjee walked to the board, his steps echoing through the gym. He picked up the marker and crossed out Patrick Rain, Chance Rain, Alexandra Blanton, Rocky McCafferty, JoJo McCafferty. The tip made a squeak with each line.
None of us had spoken. We were too stunned. I couldn’t take my eyes off the hundreds of names that weren’t crossed off. All those kids missing, taken by Hosts. Andre Swisher from track. Talia Randall, the picture-perfect cheer captain. Blake Dubois, one of the special-needs kids. I pictured Blake with his warm smile, his stick-thin legs propped on the footrests of his wheelchair. He wouldn’t have stood a chance.
“We weren’t sure we’d find any more kids,” Chatterjee said. “The town is pretty much locked down by the Hosts. You live the farthest out, so I suppose it makes sense that it took you longer to get here.”
Alex peered out through her tangled bangs. “Plus, we had a few detours on the way.”
Patrick finally broke our silence, turning to face the others. “We got work to do,” he said. “More of us could still be locked up or hiding in houses.” His shadow against the floorboard was well defined, right down to the Stetson. “Why aren’t we out there helping them?”
A number of the older kids averted their eyes.
“Dick and Jaydon went out,” Ben Braaten said. “And never came back.”
Patrick stared at him. He and Ben had never gotten along, not since the fistfight behind Jack Kaner’s barn in their freshman year. This was a while before the car crash, and Ben and his brothers thought it would be funny to empty my backpack into Hogan’s Creek. I hadn’t thought it was very funny, and Patrick hadn’t either. The brawl went twenty minutes and wound up a draw—the only fight I’d known Patrick not to win. Both of them were bigger now, and every time they were near each other, it seemed like they were itching to go at it again and answer the question left hanging by the last round.
“The Hosts are taking the kids to the church.” Patrick raised the shotgun, laid it over his shoulder. “We should scout it, see if we can free them.”
Ben waved a hand. A line of scar tissue twisted his upper lip, so you could never tell whether he was smirking or not. “You want to kill yourself, have at it.”
Britney Durant, Gene’s daughter and Alex’s best friend, cocked her head, her jaw shifting from side to side. A rainbow ribbon took up her chestnut hair in a ponytail. She said, “Ben, don’t be such a—”
“We need a plan,” Dr. Chatterjee said, cutting her off. “But first we need to regroup, think everything through carefully.”
I remembered what he’d said in the hall about impulsiveness and decision making and put a hand on my brother’s shoulder. “Let’s take a second, Patrick,” I said quietly.
He looked over at me, gave a little nod. At times I was the only person Patrick would listen to.
“Check in your weapons, please,” Chatterjee said, gesturing to the lowest bench. We stepped into the gym, Cassius staying next to me like he’d been trained. As Patrick, Alex, and I laid down our weapons, JoJo ran to the Mendez girls, and they did a three-way huddle-embrace. The rest of our little band spread out, greeting our friends, bumping knuckles and waving. It was comforting, but I also felt a weird embarrassment. One of the McGraw boys from my PE class was balled up in a corner sobbing. Leonora Rose, who I’d known since forever, squeezed me in a tight hug. Others crowded in on me with a million questions.
Chubby Chet Rogers leaned toward me, his cheeks flushed with concern. “Did you see my little brother?”
Someone else said, “My mom—was my mom in the square?”
All those dread-filled faces, hands grabbing at me, trying to get my attention. Fighting through claustrophobia, I shook my head. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t. I don’t know.” The kids finally eased off and left me alone, going back to their groups. Gossip swirled all around, bitter with desperation.
“I heard Tommy’s dad put him in a duffel bag.”
“Sheila saw Patrice slung over her mommy’s shoulder in a burlap sack. She said she could see her in there squirming.”
Through the press of bodies, I saw Alex resting her hands on Britney’s shoulders, talking to her. Britney was crying. I figured Alex had told her about seeing her dad and uncle in the square, working the jackhammers, taking down the power grid. They were Hosts like everyone else’s parents. For the first time in my life, I was grateful that my mom and dad weren’t around. Seeing Uncle Jim and Aunt Sue-Anne had been painful enough. At least I never had to see this happen to my parents.
I reached the bleachers and realized I was standing next to Eve Jenkins. She said hi quietly and turned her right cheek away from me, the one with the scrapes.
Patrick had always thought that she had a crush on me, though I wasn’t sure. She’d do things like borrow my science textbook, then stop by our house later with it, apologizing that she’d forgotten to gi
ve it back. Patrick said it was an excuse to see me, but I wondered if she was just absentminded. She was pretty in a simple kind of way—dark hair with straight bangs, round face, a dimple in one cheek when she smiled. Even though she was also older than me, next to Alex she still looked like a kid.
Then again, I supposed I still looked like a kid, too.
Up in the bleachers, JoJo and Rocky were sitting behind the Mendez twins, helping them put their hair up in pigtails to cover the patches that had been yanked out.
Eve’s eyes were still lowered, her face turned slightly away. I figured maybe I should take a page from JoJo and Rocky’s book.
“Hey,” I said to her. “You okay?”
Her eyes were watering. “It’s nothing.”
“Fingernails?”
She nodded, maybe because she knew she’d start crying if she spoke.
“Can I clean it for you?” I asked.
She firmed her trembling lips. Then she turned her face fully to me for the first time. Her brown eyes held tiny flecks of yellow. “My mom,” she said. And that was all she could get out.
I took some Neosporin from one of the first-aid kits on the bleachers and put it on a soft gauze pad. I rested one hand on her warm cheek, and she closed her eyes. When the pad dabbed her cuts, she flinched, squeezing the wrist of my hand on her cheek. I didn’t pause, and she didn’t stop me. Cassius walked over and nudged her, and she lowered her other hand. He licked her palm. Once I’d finished, Eve took a shuddering breath and opened her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said.
We were interrupted by a loud rapping sound. We turned to see Alex tapping the dry-erase board with her hockey stick to get everyone’s attention. Patrick was up front with her, Dr. Chatterjee to the side. The gym fell silent.
Britney stood beside Alex, her face red from crying. They were holding hands, but now Alex let go and stepped in front of the board.
“Okay, guys,” Alex said. “Let’s talk about where we are with everything. Have you tried a phone?”
“Of course we tried a phone,” Ben Braaten said. He wasn’t as tall as Patrick, but he was thicker, with beefy biceps and big square wrists. His flannel shirt tugged up in the front, snared around something shoved in the waistband of his jeans. As he swaggered closer, I saw that it was a bolt gun used to stun cattle before the kill. It made sense, since his dad worked at a slaughterhouse. An image from earlier came to me—Don Braaten in his bloodstained overalls, pinning Janie Woodrow to the road.
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