“What was she even doing out here?” I rasped. I stopped inside the tree line, wishing I had been levelheaded enough to grab a flashlight and a pair of boots like everyone else.
Jake stopped beside me, but Cooper trotted passed us, his nose skimming the ground for a scent. He locked on to a trail and began to follow it. I heard a barrage of whispers around me before everyone broke off into groups, but I focused on the dogs; they were following two different scent trails.
After what felt like an hour of following, searching, and waiting for Jack or Cooper to find some sign of Dani, both dogs’ trails converged at a narrow, jagged tree stump. Jack whined, and Cooper sniffed the pine needles around the base of the stump. The dogs had found something. Instinctively, my gut balled into a knot.
Ben, who was helping to keep his brother upright, began to say something. “I think—”
“Here,” Harper said, aiming his flashlight at the exposed roots of the stump. Crouching, he shifted a fist-sized stone and picked something up.
Chris stepped up behind him and peered over his shoulder. “Jason,” she said ominously, glancing at my brother.
He moved to her side, and hesitantly, I followed. I stopped almost instantly. Jason’s dread washed over me, a wave of nausea making my insides lurch, and I had to close my mouth and hold my breath to avoid vomiting. Every hair on my body stood on end at the thought of what they’d found. “What is it?” I croaked. Please don’t say a body part…
Stiffly, Jason squatted beside Harper, taking whatever Harper had found from his hand. A yellow piece of fabric?
“It’s just like the ones we saw back at Lewis-McChord,” Chris said quietly. Rising from his seated position next to Jason, Jack stretched out his neck to sniff the cloth and whined.
Chris glanced around at our confused faces and explained, “It’s an armband, or at least part of one. Some of the personnel were wearing these when they put our base on lock-down.” She shook her head. “We stole a few; it was the only way we could get off the base. The people wearing these”—she snatched the armband out of Jason’s hand and clenched it in her fist—“had something to do with the Virus.”
“I’ve seen those before too, on people from the Colony,” Jake said. He’d been trying to convince us that the supposed safe haven was dangerous since we first met up with him at Fort Knox. “It must’ve been them…”
An image of his sister’s dark hair and violet eyes flashed through my mind. He was remembering her. He was remembering the men who’d promised to help her, the men who had frightened her enough that she’d taken her own life before they could.
Everyone looked at Jake, including my dangerously quiet brother. “Why would they take Dani?” Jason asked as he rose and took a menacing step toward Jake. “How would they even know we’re here?”
I didn’t like Jason’s accusing tone, but Jake didn’t seem to notice. Never taking his eyes off the yellow armband, he answered, “I don’t know how they knew we were here, but if they wanted her bad enough to kidnap her…their resources are—were…” He paused. “It wouldn’t have been difficult for them to take her.” The images of his sister’s final breath played through his head…through mine. A gut-wrenching feeling of loss took root in the pit of my stomach.
“You seem to know a lot about them,” Jason probed, taking another step toward Jake. “Maybe you know more than you’re letting on. Maybe you—”
“You think I’d save Zoe’s life back at Fort Knox just to put her in danger again? You really are a piece of—” Jake inhaled and then emitted no further sounds, like he’d decided holding his breath for a while was the safer option. He was probably right.
He met Jason’s challenging stare a moment longer before turning his angry gaze on me. “I warned you not to come here.” His words stung with truth.
“Then how the fuck did they find us?” Jason’s voice was damning, his glare focused solely on Jake. I didn’t like it and felt a sudden desire to punch my brother in the face.
“How the hell should I know?” Jake snapped. “We’ve been here over a month and nothing. You get here and now they know where we are.”
Jason made a noise that was part exhale, part growl. “How exactly do you know so much about them?”
“Because they tried to take my sister, and now she’s dead,” Jake replied hotly.
The two men were standing less than two feet apart, Jason’s rage barely contained. He didn’t lose control often, but when he did…I shuddered, recalling the worst of the fights between him and our dad. Jason cracked his knuckles, an ominous sign I was all too familiar with, and I feared my brother wouldn’t be able to rein in his temper.
I stepped between them. “It’s not Jake’s fault, Jason, so back off!”
My brother ignored me, instead turning his aggression on Chris. “Stay the fuck out of my head,” he ordered, obviously feeling her cerebral fingers trying to manipulate his mental state into something more stable.
Jake and Jason weren’t the only ones on edge. Biggs was worrying about Sarah and their unborn baby, and Ky was in pain, practically folding under the weight of our collective panic. Ky’s Ability to feel volatility—to sense and internalize everyone’s destructive emotions—was physically debilitating him. He reached for the flask in his pocket without a second thought. Abandoning Jason, Chris ran to Ky’s side.
The weight and amount of negativity Ky was picking up on frightened me; it was as if he wasn’t just sensing our group, but all of the fear and hostility surrounding us. From Cañon City? From the Colony? Like Ky, I was pulled in all directions by the mounting unease and fear of everyone around us, as though I were being emotionally drawn and quartered. I wanted to scream.
The looming fog seemed to thicken in my brain, tangling with the barrage of emotions. What the hell’s going on? I searched my convoluted mind for something I could grasp on to—something other than anger and fear and resentment. I’d been so fucking naïve to think everything would be okay once we found each other. Keep it together, Zoe, Dani needs you.
Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the forest—the sharp smell of pine needles, damp soil, and wood. The fog continued to spread its tendrils through my mind in a horrifyingly familiar way. I felt trapped in my own head, unable to escape the encroaching numbness. The only other time I’d felt such an overwhelming loss of mental control was when my mind had been invaded by Crazies in the hospital back at Fort Knox. What if we’re wrong? What if it isn’t the Colony?
Feeling a sudden jolt of panic, I opened my eyes. I could see the lichen coating the tree trunks in the dim moonlight, like spots on a leopard. But there were no snarls or howls or voices beyond our group. There were no fiendish sounds of Crazies cackling in the distance. There were no signs giving me cause to think anyone was there at all.
But someone took Dani.
A bolt of anger shot through me, jostling me from my statue-like state. I took a step toward my brother. “What the hell was she doing out here, Jason?” He’d always been big, bad, protective Jason—so why had he let Dani go outside, alone, in the middle of the night?
In the faint moonlight dappling his face, I could barely make out the hard set of his features. “Peeing,” he answered lamely.
“Peeing? Alone? In the woods?” My anger flared, fury consuming my disbelief and fear. “I can’t believe you, Jason! I just got her back, and now you—”
“Fuck you!” He pointed at me in warning, his eyes glinting silver in the darkness. “She was just peeing,” he muttered.
“I can’t believe someone was just standing here,” Biggs said and began pacing. “Were they just waiting for us this whole time? Sarah…the baby…” He looked up at Sanchez abruptly. “We need to get out of here,” he said evenly. “It’s not safe here anymore. We’ve—”
“Do what you want,” Jason growled. “I’m going after Dani.”
“You think you can just walk into the Colony and get her? We need a plan first,” Jake said
, facing Chris and Sanchez. “We need—”
“Need to what? To wait for them to hurt her? To do worse?” Jason’s tone was scathing as, once again, he took a step closer to Jake.
“Calm down, Jason.” I placed myself between them again. “We need to come up with a plan first. I mean, what if it’s Crazies and has nothing to do with the—”
“It’s not Crazies,” Jake and Jason said at the same time. They exchanged an irritated glance.
I rolled my eyes. “If it is the Colony, they’ll outnumber us and—”
“Then you stay here and plan,” Jason said with a smirk. “I’ll go find Dani.”
“Get over yourself already!” I seethed. “You think I’m not worried about her? Like I haven’t been waiting to see Dani for months? Like I haven’t been worrying about her since all this bullshit started? Like suddenly I don’t care about her anymore because you’re in the picture? She’s my best friend, remember? Or did you forget that, since everything’s always about you?” My voice was riddled with bitterness and jealousy, and my words were laden with twenty-six years’ worth of resentment.
To my surprise, Jason remained silent.
Sanchez cleared her throat. “Look,” she said deliberately. “If we want to find your friend, we need to be rational. So grow the fuck up and stop arguing, and then we can come up with a plan that won’t get us all killed.”
“We can’t do much else in the dark,” Harper said, his voice breaking through the tension. “The sun’ll be up in an hour or so, then we can continue searching for signs of what happened.”
“I’m not finished looking for her,” Jason muttered and turned toward his tent.
“I wasn’t implying that any of us were finished looking for her,” Harper clarified, but Jason continued stalking away. The rest of us dispersed, some making their way back to camp, but Jake, Harper, and I stopped at the edge of the forest, watching…thinking.
“Look how close they were to us,” I said with a shaky breath. I gauged the distance between where we stood and the barn. Although far away, I could see the dim embers of the night’s fire and the outline of the hay bales and chairs surrounding it. I watched the dark figures of my companions as they moved around the camp. “We never even heard them.”
Suddenly, as if my skin had become animated, creeping over my bones and muscles, I shivered. The thought of never seeing Dani alive again after everything we’d been through—journeying across the country, surviving homicide attempts and Crazies—caused a rogue tear to roll down my cheek. Determination, Zoe, I told myself. I hurriedly wiped the tear away.
With my brother out of earshot, I turned to Harper. I recalled the fleeting look of unease that had flashed over his dark, handsome features when Dani had arrived the day before. Whatever he’d seen was startling enough to have made his green eyes flare with apprehension.
“You had a vision earlier…yesterday, when you were hugging Dani, didn’t you?” I knew I wasn’t going to like his reply the moment he closed his eyes in…regret?
Harper didn’t look at me when he spoke. “I saw her in darkness,” he said quietly. “I don’t know if she was sleeping or—”
“Unconscious,” I finished for him, refusing to hear him utter the word “dead.”
2
ZOE
MARCH 15, 1AE
I sat on one of the hay bales arranged around the campfire and brushed off the bottoms of my feet to pull on my socks. My eyes drifted to Dani’s cup from the night before, sitting on the makeshift table Jake had made. It still held about an inch of white wine. Then my gaze moved to the empty liquor bottles and red plastic cups stacked on the boulder a few feet away. The sight was enough to make me sick to my stomach all over again. I couldn’t believe how stupid we’d been…how careless. We weren’t safe, and we never had been.
Cooper licked the back of my hand, and I looked down. He was watching me with downtrodden eyes, his tail moving in a half wag. “Thank you for your help, Coop,” I said, rubbing his velvety ears. I hadn’t seen Jack in a while, but I assumed he was still in the tent with Jason.
“What if whoever took Dani is waiting for you guys in town?” Sarah said to Biggs as he, Harper, and Sanchez noisily readied our weapons behind me. “I mean—”
“They won’t be, baby,” Biggs said, trying to soothe her. “They have better things to do than wait around for the likes of us.” His voice was cool and easy, and I wondered if Sarah believed him. I wanted to believe him.
I glanced over my shoulder in time to see Biggs give Sarah a kiss on the forehead. She smiled, rubbing her bulging belly anxiously. Their unborn child had grown so much in the past month that Sarah was limited to sweatpants and loose shirts, a look that was so out of character for the former fashionista, I almost smiled.
“Are we at least moving camp?” she asked him, practically pleading. “I mean, what if they come back and take someone else?”
“Dani might come back,” I interjected before Biggs could formulate an answer. I knew he wanted to leave. “Besides, they could’ve hurt us last night if they really wanted to. They’re not interested in the rest of us.” At least, I assumed they weren’t.
Sarah tucked a strand of curly hair behind her ear and absentmindedly chewed on her fingernails—a new nervous habit she’d adopted within the last couple months since learning she was pregnant. Realizing I was watching her, she focused on me and lowered her hand from her mouth. “I guess that makes sense,” she said and wrapped her arms around her belly. It was like she was protecting the rapidly growing fetus from the gloomy shadow that had settled over us all.
As Sarah retreated into the barn, an image of her house in St. Louis flashed through her mind, and I knew she was missing her home. She hadn’t wanted to leave, but she’d done so for Biggs…for me. A fleeting pang of guilt gave me pause, but there was little I could do. I turned back around and picked up my right boot. Dani’s out there somewhere, in the hands of…who knows. That was my focus.
Three miles to the east, Cañon City was the closest place to search for maps, plans, and anything else that could help us come up with a way to get Dani back. Jason didn’t like waiting, but most of us agreed we needed to be strategic if we were going to have any chance of rescuing her. Assuming she’s still alive.
“I think we should assume these ‘Colony’ people want something specific from Danielle,” Grayson said, practically reading my mind. He sat on a hay bale on the other side of the dying fire. Although his face was grim and his weathered skin seemed particularly pinched around his eyes, his presence provided a sense comfort. I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. Maybe it was because Grayson reminded me of home, of my past.
I thought of my dad and Jason, of how they used to be, but that only conjured a mess of unsettling memories. I can’t believe Dad’s really gone. Then, I remembered the box Jason had brought from Bodega Bay—our dad’s box. I glanced toward Jason’s tent on the edge of the woods, assuming it was in there with him.
In my peripheral vision, I spotted Grayson watching me. I looked down at my boot instead of meeting his knowing, apologetic eyes. Satisfied that the laces were tied well enough, I pulled my pant leg down and raised my other foot to tie my left boot.
“They wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,” Grayson continued, “just to kill her, or—”
I swallowed another wave of nausea. Once the sun had risen, we’d searched the woods surrounding our camp for what felt like endless, heart-wrenching hours, only to be left with nothing but broken twigs indicating there’d been a struggle, the torn yellow armband, a cigarette butt, and five sets of boot prints, not including our own. We’d wasted the early hours of the morning getting nowhere. It was difficult to remain hopeful when I could feel everyone’s concern and even some of their doubt.
I gathered my hair behind me and started weaving it into a French braid, wondering what was taking Jason so long to get ready.
“—saying. They knew what they were after, and they must have planned it a
head of time.” Grayson leaned forward to stoke the fire with a scrap of cardboard.
“If they were after her specifically,” Harper said, drawing my attention to him, “they must’ve known about her ‘Ability’.” He was rifling through an ammo-filled duffel bag behind me. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“But what would they want with her Ability?” Carlos asked as he, too, joined us, donning his leather jacket. Though the sun was up, it was chilly. “A lot of you have an Ability, you know, so why take her instead of…” He shrugged.
Grayson nodded thoughtfully and scratched his brow. “True. There are other, more accessible victims they could’ve taken.” He glanced at Sarah as she waddled out of the barn, her cheeks packed with the last mouthful of her second breakfast.
Carlos tossed a piece of straw into the fire. “And…how’d they know about her? How’d they know anything about us?”
“Well, I suppose the first thing we need to consider is who, outside of us, knows anything about the people in our group.” Grayson reached behind him, pulling a couple saddlebags up into his lap, and he began packing them with water and granola bars.
Carlos crouched down near the fire, his eyes squinting from the brightness of the sun. “Hmmm…”
Sarah stopped at the edge of the campfire and tossed her paper napkin and plate into the pit. The flames grew. As I leaned in toward their heat, I scrubbed my face with my hands and took a deep breath. I watched the dancing flames until they died back down, recalling the weekend bonfires Dani and I used to have on the beach back home.
The beach… The memory of a dream flickered to life.
I was lying on an incredibly soft mattress, candles glowing all around me, illuminating the fire burning in Jake’s eyes. “I’m going to do things to you, Zoe,” he whispered against my cheek with delicious promise. His fingertips skimmed across my belly, lingering at the waistband of my boy shorts, and his lips were soft and moist against my neck as he kissed me. I closed my eyes in anticipation.
The Ending Series: The Complete Series Page 51