“Kip?” she says. “Is that really you?”
I’m stunned.
“How—how do you—”
The words catch in my throat. Suddenly I’m convinced this is some sort of trick. I’ve heard stories over the years—at first on the radio and then from my father—of raiders who enlist or force young women to lure unsuspecting survivors into traps.
But even if that’s the case, how in the hell does she know my name?
“Relax,” the girl says. “We went to school together.”
I loosen up a bit. Maybe if she wasn’t so grimy, I would have been able to recognize her. Now that I think about it, I’ve seen her face before, only it looks slightly different because of the weight she’s lost in the past several years. Her name is Marie or something like it.
“Peltham High School,” I say. “You were in the class below me.”
She nods slightly, eyes locked on mine. I wonder why she doesn’t blink.
“Can I trust you?” she says.
“I was wondering the same thing. Marie, right?”
“Melanie.”
She says it quickly with no sign she’s offended by my slip up. I never knew her in high school, but her name is familiar—and mine, too, probably—from posters the school drew up when she and I both ran for president of our respective classes. She was elected. I wasn’t.
“Melanie, listen to me,” I say. “They’re coming. The infect—”
“I know, I know. We need to get out of here. But how?”
“The window,” I say, gesturing to the hole I cut into the glass. “I have a grappling rope we can use. We’ll figure out the rest later.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
She hurries past me and climbs through the window. I can’t help but wonder what makes her trust me so easily. In a world like this, a guy my age is more likely to be a rapist or a thief than a normal guy.
“This way,” she says when we’re on the ground.
I gather the rope and follow her southward.
South. Even though my house is to the north.
We crouch-run along Route 1, using what cover we can find along the way to avoid exposing ourselves. We’re headed toward a Lubroline station a half-mile away.
“I can’t stay,” I tell Melanie.
“Just be quiet.”
I follow her, shaking my head. This is so stupid. My father is going to die, and it’ll be my fault, all because of a girl. How can I be sure she isn’t leading me into a trap?
“Wait,” I say, grabbing her arm and pulling her into a patch of weeds. They’re tall enough to hide us while we crouch and face each other.
“Let go of me,” she says.
I release her arm—that old, familiar fear of overstepping a girl’s boundaries. And yet, out here, a guy in my situation could be way worse. She doesn’t seem to get that.
“How can you trust me this much?” I ask her. “We barely know each other. I could be dangerous.”
“If that was true, you wouldn’t be telling me this.”
I frown at her. “You trusted me before I said it, though.”
“I can tell you’re not like that, Kip. You’re a collector, not a raider.”
“A what?”
“A collector. You go out on supply runs and—”
“Okay, I get it. I’m a collector. But I’m also heavily armed, and I haven’t seen a girl in three years.”
She seems taken aback by this. “Oh.”
I’m about to explain when she cuts me off.
“Well, I haven’t seen a guy in over two years since my neighbor Artie left his house and never came back. So I’m in the same boat. What difference does it make?”
Now I’m flat-out suspicious. I’m a guy carrying knives and guns telling this isolated young woman I might be a rapist, and she’s either too dumb to realize it, or she’s playing games with me.
“Tell me you’re not this naïve,” I say in a harsh whisper, “because I’m definitely not. If you’re not the least bit scared of me, then either you’re too stupid to be out here—no offense—or you’re leading me into a trap. How do I know that station”—I point at the Lubroline—“isn’t hiding three guys with shotguns who are going to—”
“Go screw yourself,” she throws back at me. “I just saved your life.”
“And I’m grateful for that, Melanie. Really, I am. But my dad is going to die of sepsis in less than two days if I don’t get him the antibiotics in my pack. So it was nice meeting you, and I hope I didn’t offend you, but I have to go.”
“You’re just going to feed him pills, huh? How do you know you have the right ones? Are they broad or narrow-spectrum?”
I’m not surprised she knows this stuff. It’s Survivalism 101.
“One of each,” I say, maybe a little too smugly. “Nafcillin and Vancomycin.”
“And what are your dad’s symptoms?”
“He has sepsis.”
“You said that already. But what did he look like when you left the house?”
I describe all of the important details, down to his heart rate and the way he was breathing. She nods along with my words and never rushes me. I notice she has coppery green eyes and a light dusting of freckles visible beneath the layer of grime on her cheeks.
“Cold and clammy skin,” she says, repeating my description, “dizziness when you tried to move him to the couch, a rapid heart rate, breathing rate—I’d say he’s on the verge of septic shock.”
“What are you, a doctor?”
“No, but my Mom’s a nurse. Was, I mean. I live with her and my sister.”
“What about your dad?”
Her expression hardens, and her eyes take on a distant look.
“He couldn’t handle it. All this, I mean.”
She drops her gaze like she’s ashamed.
“It wasn’t your fault, Melanie. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“It’s okay.”
She flashes me a look of revelation, as if she has just remembered something.
“Your father needs medicine, but not pills.”
“Huh?” I say stupidly.
“You need to inject the medicine directly into his blood steam, intravenously, and he’s going to need fluids, too. Otherwise, his blood pressure will drop, and he’ll go into septic shock. Then his organs will start to fail—”
“Oh God,” I say, awash suddenly in self-loathing. “You’re right.”
How could I have been so stupid?
“Kip,” she says, “look at me.”
When I do, all I see is urgency, and not a trace of pity.
“I can give you what you need to save him,” Melanie says.
“You have an I.V. set-up?”
She nods. “The one at my house is broken. I wanted to replace it. But you need it more than I do—and besides, I won’t be able to get home until I fix my bike anyway. That’s more important.”
“What does your bike need?”
“A new chain.”
“You rode a bike out here without a spare chain?”
“You know what?” she says, scowling at me. “That’s right. I did. Sort of like how you forgot what sepsis was and how to treat it.”
I sigh impatiently and look away at nothing but a soft wall of smelly, bug-infested weeds. Our coveralls are probably covered in ticks right now. Not that I care the slightest bit about ticks.
“Let’s go somewhere safe,” I tell her. “Then we’ll talk about this.”
I lead the way, feeling like a jerk. But Melanie is right, which makes bumping into her one of the luckiest breaks I’ve had so far.
The Lubroline station is one of those quick-serve, oil-changing facilities where you drive through one side and out the other ten minutes later. A small building made of brick and glass, it looks like the last place a rational person—especially a trained survivalist—would use as shelter. All six of its garage doors are busted, and the floor is covered in a broad carpet of broken glass.
“It’s so I can hear if someone’s up here,” Melanie says. “Follow my steps.”
Up here?
I place my boots in the clean spots on the floor where Melanie has cleverly made a winding trail.
There’s a row of panels built into the concrete floor, which I imagine the technicians once slid open to access the car’s undercarriage. A raider with a crowbar and enough time on his hands could probably crack one of these open without much difficulty and find the space below, which I’m sure is where she’s been hiding.
“Those are sealed,” Melanie says, thrusting her chin to indicate the nearest one.
“Good,” I say. “I was going to ask.”
She whirls on me, gracefully avoiding the glass shards. Maybe she was a ballerina once.
“Do you think all girls are stupid,” she says, “or just me?”
I lift my hands and motion for her to slow down. “All I said was—”
“I don’t care what you said. It’s in your tone, your body language. I saved your life, and the only thanks I get is accusations that I’m leading you into a trap, or subtle remarks meant to make me feel stupid.”
Her voice reverberates inside the building.
“Keep your voice down,” I whisper.
“See? There you go again,” she says, lowering it only slightly. “I know that.”
I feel like gritting my teeth. She’s going to get us killed.
“Fine,” I say in a grating whisper, “go ahead and scream at me. It’s obvious you want an audience. How about a horde of infected? Will that do it for you?”
She looks away, cheeks rippling as she clenches her teeth. The first girl I’ve seen in three years, and she totally hates me.
“Do you want my help or not?” she asks me in a quiet, stern voice.
“What I want is that I.V. setup so I can save my father’s life. You want to trade for a bike chain, that’s fine. You’re lucky I don’t plan on just taking it from you.”
Her next motions are so swift that I don’t comprehend what she’s doing until an arrow with a sharp metal tip is staring me in the face, tightly drawn against the bowstring.
It took her two seconds, tops, to ready the weapon. Her boots never even crunched the glass.
Mine definitely make a crunching sound as I take a cautious step back, arms flying up to defend my face.
“What is your fucking problem?” she says.
“Melanie. Will you just relax?”
The arrowhead is a well-crafted point of glistening steel with ridges along the blades meant to give it teeth. The way she yanked it out of her quiver and nocked it—I didn’t even know that was possible, except in the movies.
Maybe she’s killed guys like me before. Why not? It obvious this isn’t her first time out here, which is more than I can say for myself.
She needs my help, though. There’s no denying that.
“I know you won’t shoot me, Melanie,” I say. “That’s not what I’m afraid of.”
“Then why are you being like this? What are you afraid of?”
Her bow is trembling now, the arrow still nocked against a string, bent at an angle that could end my life. Faced with the possibility of dying, though I don’t fear it at all, I tell her a truth I’m just beginning to understand.
“I’m afraid of what you might mean to me, when this is over.”
CHAPTER 6
I’ve always excelled at embarrassing myself around women.
Flirting with them at parties, working with them in study groups, even chatting with them online were all just opportunities for me to screw up.
Even female teachers at school were a struggle. Peltham High had a few attractive ones, and I was always such a mumbling kiss-ass around them that a couple of jocks once started a rumor about how they had caught me taking pictures of my English Lit teacher, Mrs. Russell, during class. (It wasn’t true. My cellphone didn’t even have a camera.) Nothing ever came of it except a few jokes, but for the rest of that year, I never took out my cellphone in any class taught by a woman.
The worst was when I had sketched, then framed a portrait of Hailey Bushnell—my girlfriend during the last four months of sophomore year—and given it to her as a birthday gift along with a bouquet of roses. We continued dating for the next three weeks, but she never mentioned it until she broke up with me at the start of summer. In her words, the drawing was an example of how “intense” I was about our relationship. She said it made her notice “little things” about me, like how I always looked in her eyes after kissing her, like I was “counting our unborn children.”
For the next few weeks, I stayed indoors and brooded about it, until I found out from a mutual friend that Hailey had been planning for months to spend the summer in North Carolina at her aunt’s beach house. (The woman also had a place in Italy, where she “summered.”) I called up Hailey’s online profile and discovered—it wasn’t even July 4th yet—that she had already found herself a tanned, muscular, lifeguard boyfriend.
Still, I vowed never to sketch a portrait of a girl ever again. I was damned good at it, too. I also vowed never to tell a girlfriend how much I cared about her until she made the plunge first. The Outbreak made both of those promises unnecessary, but I’m sure I would have followed through with them. That’s how insecure I was back then.
Turns out I haven’t changed a bit.
As I stand here staring at that shivering arrowhead aimed at my neck, deadly weapons strapped all over my body to protect against the endless threat of murderers, mindless cannibals, and a killer virus—all three of which live, literally, in my neighborhood—the only fear that goes through my mind is one that can be summed up in seven simple words.
Now she isn’t going to like me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean to be intense”—damn it, Hailey—“but it’s just that…”
“It’s okay,” Melanie says, lowering the bow. She tips her head in the direction she wants me to follow. “Come on. I’ll show you the way in.”
She stabs the arrow back into its quiver and slips the bow over one shoulder, so the string lies diagonally across her chest. We make our way carefully over the broken glass until we reach an unmarked metal door with a simple chain-and-padlock setup.
“Is this the only lock?”
She takes out a small key, pops it open, and frees the chain. Quietly, she slips it out, link by link, then lays it on the floor next to the doorframe.
“Take out your flashlight,” she says.
I dig it out. Melanie opens the door, and I flash the beam into the darkness to reveal a bending, concrete stairway that leads downstairs.
“What about it?” I say.
She gently takes my flashlight and shines it on the edge of the first step. I see a thread-like glimmer running parallel to the floor. At first, I think it’s a strand from an unfinished spider web, but a closer look tells me it’s actually a thread someone has placed there.
“No way,” I say in amazement. “A trip line?”
“I always thought it was called a trigger line,” she says.
“What is it connected to?”
“A hand grenade.”
“I have to see this. Is that the only line?”
I’m already grabbing the flashlight from her hands.
“Yes. But, Kip, be careful.”
I step into the stairwell and shine the beam down the angular tunnel between the handrails. Craning my neck, I catch sight of a small, greenish globe hanging there that must be the grenade.
“Nice work,” I say. “This is next-level stuff.”
Glancing over my shoulder, I catch a smile Melanie quickly hides, like she’s embarrassed by her own pride.
“Maybe now you won’t think I’m such a noob,” she says.
I haven’t heard that word in years, and it sends a warm wave of nostalgia over me. Once I’m out of the stairwell, Melanie closes the door and locks it back up.
“So how do you get down there?” I ask her. �
��Without losing a leg, I mean.”
“It’s this way.”
I feel like a dumb puppy following its owner around in hopes it’ll get a treat. I don’t mind. I’m learning. This is way better than the trash heap I probably would have built for myself as a semi-permanent shelter.
Igniting her own flashlight, Melanie guides me away from the rigged stairwell and through a short hallway in back that leads to a tiny, one-man office. The place smells like decay and contains nothing of value, only a cracked and pitted wraparound desk made of particleboard.
She falls into a crouch, flashlight beam illuminating a human skeleton beneath the desk.
I pull back at the sight of it. I’ve never been this close to a dead body, though to call this a body is a stretch. The grinning skeleton is mostly intact and lies stretched across a torn canvas blanket, making it look as though the person was asleep at time of death.
Melanie pulls the blanket—and the bones along with it—away from its original spot. In the beam of her flashlight, I see a thin board about three feet long and a foot and a half wide on the floor, pushed up against the wall. It lies there as if to cover something beneath it.
Melanie lifts the board and reveals something even more impressive than the grenade trap in the stairwell: a hole someone has dug through the concrete.
It’s a tunnel leading underground.
“No way,” I say, mixing the words with a chuckle. “You have got to be kidding me.”
She arranges the set-up so she can pull it back over the hole from inside. I like the way she thinks. She and my father would get along famously, and I’m struck with the sudden urge to introduce them to each other.
“Go ahead,” she tells me.
Without even a thought that this might be a trap, I go first, dropping several feet to yet another concrete floor. I ignite my flashlight and watch Melanie wriggle through. I catch her as she drops.
Suddenly she’s in my arms, her face a few inches from mine, breath warm against my chin. Our utility belts are bulky and press into each other, making it awkward to stand that close, but I barely notice it. For the next two seconds, I feel more comfortable than I’ve ever felt with another person, especially a girl.
Outbreak: A Survival Thriller Page 4