“Yes, trying to find a cure. And I been hearing chit-chat about this chick they were watching who was resistant. I had no idea it was Grace, though it did raise a flag when Deuce asked me to pose as a waitress and serve her some moonshine. I just thought . . . I don’t know what. I’m so used to doing whatever the hell they tell me to without question. So I didn’t question it.”
“What’s the moonshine for?” Logan asks.
“It has many uses, but is also a carrier of a new strain of Yes. Well, for the ladies, anyway. Did you notice they had ‘Men’s’ and ‘Women’s’ bottles at the bar?”
“Yeah, I did. Thought that was strange, for sure. What the hell is Yes?”
“Ugh, there’s too much to explain it all right now, papi. More about that later, okay?”
“Sure, whatever.”
“Where’d you find her?” Syd asks.
“Well, I was working on some files at my desk and a strange message popped right up on my screen. There was a map of quadrant C in the Labs—the sector where they keep the test subjects—with a red blinking light in autopsy room seven, and a message below it that said ‘Go here NOW. Grace needs your help. Hurry. Take a weapon. ALL TEST SUBJECTS WILL BE RELEASED IN FIVE MINUTES’—in all caps, like they were serious, so I jumped up and went straight there. If it was anyone else I probably would’ve ignored the message, but Grace is my girl, I mean—since before all this. And good thing I did, ’cause sure enough, there she was, stumbling down the corridors by herself. Shortly after I got to her, some asshole started chasing us, and then the doors opened, but we managed to get to a storage room. Then this crazy chick had the bright idea to escape through the air vents. We made it, obviously, but it was a bitch.”
“Holy shit.” Syd blows out a heavy sigh.
“I think, whoever it was, did it as a diversion, so we could get out of there,” Jade says
“My goddamned head is spinning,” Logan says. “Where am I going?”
“Just keep driving for now . . .” Jade’s voice fades into the rhythm of the road beneath the tires. “We’ll find a place soon.”
Thirty-Six
When we stop, I sense the glow of a last remaining light pole on the other side of my eyelids. When the door opens, they carry me out, and I can’t understand most of their somber words. They argue over who’ll stay with me, until I spend a morsel of remaining strength to tell them no, go.
“How long until we know?” Syd asks, putting something soft beneath my head as they lay me down onto a cold floor. “Here’s a bottle of water, sweetheart.” And there’s the sound of it being placed by my head.
“Within a couple hours, for sure,” Jade answers. “Hang in there, muchacha triste. We’re right on the other side of this door in the van.” She squeezes my hand. “We’re guarding you while you’re in here.”
“If I die,” I whisper, “she’s at Riverbend. She’s with Y. Save her . . . for me.”
“I promise I would do that for you, momma. But I’m not giving up on you yet. I underestimated your badassness once before, but I’m not doing that again.” She releases my hand with a kiss to it, and someone else takes her place beside me.
There’s a kiss to my forehead, then Logan’s breath. “I’m sorry, Grace. I don’t know how to fix this, but if you—when you—pull through, I’ll do everything I can to help you find Gideon. And Missy.” He kisses me again, and there’s a break of sorrow in his words. “I promise.”
“I’m not telling you goodbye,” Syd says from my other side, brushing my cheek with her hand. She presses her lips against my hot cheek. “Just goodbye for now.”
Thirty-Seven
I’m dying.
I feel my body shutting down, and I know what’s coming, no matter how much I want to believe otherwise. But, out of curiosity more than anything, I manage to part my eyelids enough to see where I’ll be dying.
It’s a small space; I could reach out and touch each wall on either side of me if I had the strength. A countertop above me, and windows all the way around about three feet up. Through them, the dark sky, a light pole, and a green highway sign peeking out from under a bridge.
I’m dying under a bridge. Now there’s some irony. I always considered I might die under a bridge . . . but not like this.
My gut contracts again, and I’m clenched in vomit-seizure for a few seconds before my stomach tells the rest of me there’s nothing left to give. I’m empty.
Murray’s gone, but I sense he isn’t too far—probably smoking a cigar nearby, waiting for me to cross over to the bright side with him. If that’s even where he came from. Maybe he’ll take me to whatever realm of universal magic he transpired from. Maybe it’ll be nice there.
I start with my earliest good memory and move up, trying to remember every single one of them. There were so many, especially with Eileen and Henry, but somewhere along the way the clouds came, blocking that light from me, and they never left. Not until the world went away. So now, I hold them each for a moment, memories with Aislynn in foster care, my willow tree, times with Evie, Eileen, Henry, Corbin, Missy, Gideon, Logan, and Syd, and all the love I have for them collapses my strength, and I weep.
I don’t want to die.
I once spent every day of my life flirting with death, and now, I’d give anything to stay alive for just one more. But now, there’s nothing I can do except wait and see how strong I really am.
Logan’s face appears outside, and he paces, smoking a cigarette. He cares about me. I care about him, too. But it’s Gideon I wish I’d see standing outside that window.
“I miss you . . . so much,” I whisper, and cry.
Logan’s face disappears, and I’m left alone with the sky again. I zone out in it for what seems like hours, though the moon hardly moves an inch.
A blinking red light catches my eye, moving closer, closer, until it stops beneath the bridge. Panic stirs in me because it may be a drone, and the children are in danger, wherever they are. But all the will in the world can barely lift a hand from the floor. The only thing I can do is watch, and wait, muttering the last protection spell I said with Evie, for comfort more than anything.
The red light disappears for a moment, but then it blinks again a couple of times before it goes off again. After the pattern continues like that for a few minutes, it strikes a familiarity in me.
Morse code.
But is it? I count the darkness between the blinks, and when they’re all three seconds, there’s a lump in my throat. I begin to make out letters, stringing them along to make the words, and when the first full sentence is clear, I cry tears of joy.
I’ll keep her safe, it says, followed by: I’ll find you. And finally: Survive.
It’s him. Gideon knows I’m here, and he’s right here with me. I force a half-smile, to tell him I’ll be fine, to tell him I’ll survive, but Logan appears again, between us, rifle raised, and shoots it from the sky. The shot pierces me, too, and there’s a spark of anger at Logan for taking what little piece of Gideon I had. But he has to keep the children safe—I know that.
And Gideon said he would find me. If he was the one who helped me escape from the Tunnels, who sent Jade that message, who helped me get away from Fletcher, who set their monsters free as a diversion, and who somehow got a drone to find me and give me that message, then he’s capable of far more than I ever gave him credit for.
He’ll find me again. He’ll keep her safe.
All that’s left now is to survive.
Thirty-Eight
When I open my eyes, there’s a bright light, and for a moment, I wonder if I’m dead. Maybe I fucked up on the whole denouncing Christianity thing? But the white light turns out to be an anomaly I haven’t seen in a while, and something I believed I might never see again: the sun.
“She’s awake!” Jade announces outside. “Holy fuck, she’s awake!” She whips open the door
to where I am and crouches beside me, bawling. Logan and Syd follow behind her, and they’re both wet-faced, too.
“Do you know what this means?” Jade takes my hand and squeezes, then she turns to Logan and Syd. “Do you know what this fucking means!” Her excitement stirs more life in me, and it shakes some straggling tears free from my eyes.
“It means you are immune.” She kisses my cheek, then pushes back to get a good look at my face, faucet pouring saltwater all over me. “It means . . . you’re our last hope, Grace Vincent. You’re humanity’s saving Grace.”
“Wow . . .” Logan kneels beside me, touches my cheek. “I knew there was something special about you.” He gives me a wink.
“Wanna try to sit up and drink some water?” Syd circles around behind me to help me to a sitting position. My head spins, and my mouth is so dry it might crack in half.
“Yeah,” I whisper, and the three of them go for the bottle I haven’t been able to lift myself. Syd holds up my head, while Logan tips it back, and I take a careful sip that only drenches the desert in my mouth. The second, larger sip moves down my esophagus and into my body, a river of life, rejuvenating me. I take another, larger gulp, but stop myself from chugging because I don’t want to make myself puke. I may be immune, but . . . what if I still carry the virus? What if I can still infect others?
“Am I . . . a carrier?” I ask Jade.
“Possibly, muchacha. Just don’t go biting or scratching anyone, and we should be fine.” She giggles, and her glee makes me smile inside.
“I won’t,” I say. “I’ll wear gloves or something . . . just in case.”
“We’ll get you some sexy fishnet ones,” Syd teases.
Jade takes my other side, while Logan angles himself in behind me, and they lift me off the floor of what I’m discovering now is a toll booth.
“We gotta move,” Logan says, breath heavy in my ear. “I shot a drone down about three hours ago, and I’m wor—”
“It was him,” I mumble. “Gideon.”
“What?” Logan asks as they carry me through the narrow doorway. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah . . .” And I close my eyes against the sun.
Logan takes Syd’s place at my side so she can open the door, and the three of them work together to hoist me into the front seat of the van. Syd sits beside me, arm around my shoulder to hold me steady, while Jade hops over us and into the middle.
“Where’s Buddy?” I ask.
“He’s with us,” a little voice answers from the back.
Syd sniffles beside me, wiping her face. “You promised we’d get out.” She laughs through her tears. “I didn’t believe you—but you were right.” She kisses my cheek. “I’m still in shock.”
“I think I am, too.”
“Are you okay, Grace?” Cholita asks from the back of the van.
“She’s more than okay,” Jade answers. “No worries, girls, just sit tight. We’ll get you all somewhere soon.”
“So, how do you know it was Gideon, with the drone?” Logan asks once he climbs into the driver’s side. “Also, we need to find a fucking place to go—it’s broad daylight and those things are roaming all along the highway. If we get caught in a horde, we’re pretty much fucked.”
“Just go to the first building you see,” Jade says. “Right now there’s nothing but trees.”
“So, how’d you know?” Syd coaxes.
“It was Morse code. He taught me it . . . when we were staying at Wipeouts.”
“You were staying at Wipeouts?” Jade cocks her head at me. “The water park?”
“Yeah, for a couple months, in one of the waterslide towers.”
“Cool.” Syd laughs.
“It was. It was . . . home.”
“So, what did the message say?” Logan asks.
I replay the discovery of each new letter in my mind, the hope that came with the first sentence, because he’s going to take care of Missy. The strength his last two messages gave me.
“It said, ‘I’ll keep her safe. I’ll find you. Survive.’”
Everyone’s quiet for a moment, then Logan brushes a knuckle beneath his eye. “Do you trust him, Grace? Will he—?” But he chokes up, composes himself before continuing. “Will he keep my little sister safe?”
“He will,” I say. “He’ll keep her safe, and he’ll find me. I trust him with all my heart.”
I’ve survived—I’ve done my part. Now it’s time for Gideon to do his.
Thirty-Nine
Logan stops beneath an underpass as a Boeing 747 flies by overhead. It’s probably too high to see us, but it’s daylight, and best to play it safe. After all, we are carrying rather priceless cargo . . . Same as the planes. That sad mystery has been solved.
I think of the little girls, most of them asleep. But when I realize I might be an even more priceless piece of cargo, the strength, awe, and humility that come from that quickly vanish in the light of a stark truth: What if I’m putting them in danger?
My suspicions were correct all along, and now I’m chalking one up for Grace’s acute paranoia, which has now been fully and irrevocably validated. I suspected it had been the kid I killed, but sensed there was more to it than that. All along it was my blood they were after, my body. And now that we’ve set their monsters free and escaped with a van load full of their “property,” something tells me these assholes will stop at nothing to track me down.
As we watch the plane fly past overhead, I recount aloud my tales from Riverbend, but low, where hopefully only those in the front can hear. I tell Logan, Syd, and Jade everything about myself, because this is my third life now, and that’s proof that all of this hasn’t been for naught. My mother, whoever my father was, that encounter, as fucked as I always thought it was, and as screwed up as my mind is, by some cosmic act of magic and alchemy, they brought me Murray, and they brought me immunity. They gave me the power to heal myself, and the power to heal others.
I cry tears of joy for the second time today as I speak the horrors of my life, because now I know what they all add up to. I’m just as dangerous as I am a giver of life, and I’ve been that all along. Grace, Ophelia—it never mattered. All of those were a part of me becoming who I am at this very moment, realizing my true worth for the first time.
When I get to the part about talking to Sheryl-Dean in the dorms, and what they do with the women and children, Logan bangs his fist on the steering wheel and Jade bows her head.
Logan pulls off into the grass, down to an access road, then takes a left on a small-town dirt road. “I’m getting us within fifteen miles of Selam,” he says. “Is that where you say they are?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I know a place. It was abandoned for years before the end, so I bet it’s clear inside. I hope.” He shakes his head, mumbling angry curses.
We ride the rest of the way in silence, passing ragged corpses and fresh ones that start their pursuit of us at a brisker pace, but I’m not scared. At the moment, I feel like I’m invincible, and there’s nothing we can’t do.
Logan swerves, and bodies hit the front of the van in rapid succession. “Fuck fuck fuck,” Logan curses, speeds up, and busts a right down an alleyway and to the next street over. It goes on like this for another twenty minutes, with Logan taking backroads, alleyways, and sidewalks, the number of dead increasing at an alarming rate, until he busts through a chain-link gate and up a two-level parking structure connected to a factory-looking building of some sort. On the other side of it stretches a vast field of green, spotted with dark areas.
“It’s an old dairy farm,” Logan says. “One of the last for hundreds of miles. There was one guy living here with a few cows, last I heard. He may still be inside, so we’ll have to be careful. But if we park on the second floor, there’s a door there that we may be able to jimmy.”
One glance in my side
-view mirror tells us we’d better bust through that door.
“What about the ones behind us, Lo?” Jade asks. “Those are first-stagers, and they’re coming up here fast as fuck.”
When we get to the top of the ramp, Logan screeches to a halt and flings his door open. “Jade, Syd, grab the katanas and help me.”
Jade follows him through the driver’s side door with one of them, and Syd makes sure I’m stable before leaving my side to join them with the other. There’s the screeching of what may be a gate being closed behind us, then Logan rushing back to the cab to grab the nylon rope we’d found in the glove compartment. There’s screaming, then the three of them jump back into the van, and Logan slams it in reverse before the doors are even closed.
The van taps metal behind us, and Logan stomps on the emergency brake. “If this doesn’t hold them off, we’re screwed.”
The girls shriek when there’s a surge against the gate that makes the van bounce on its struts. The four of us in the front brace ourselves, and Logan grips our only firearm with any ammo left, as if it would do any good.
“How many of them are there?” I ask.
“Twenty or so.” Syd pants beside me.
“But they’re fresh,” Jade adds. “Fast, strong, and hangry.”
“If that gate holds,” Logan says, “we hit that door over there and see if we can get in. I’ll go check it out and one of you girls can cover me,” he tells Syd and Jade.
“I have to pee-pee,” a little voice says from the back, then: “Never mind.”
The groans of disgust from her neighbors, followed by the stench of urine, tells me I know why “never mind.” It wouldn’t be the first time in this van, I’m sure, though its use this time at least partially makes up for the malicious uses in the past.
“Fuck it.” Logan grips his door handle. “Now or never. Cover me.”
Jade hops from the van, katana raised and ready, while Logan races up to the cornflower blue door. To, I’m sure all of our astonishments, the door swings open when Logan twists the knob. He takes firing stance, rifle butt to his shoulder, and I brace myself for the battle to ensue. But after a few seconds of nothing, Logan peeks his head inside, yells something, then he waits another minute or so before propping the door open and heading our way.
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