“Just leave me alone,” I said.
“Sorry.” She pulled the sleeve of her fur coat back to show me her wrist. It was red and inflamed where I’d cut her—infected. It didn’t look like it was going to kill her, though. More’s the pity. “You cut me. No man has ever cut me and lived to tell the story. We’re not done, Stones. We’re not done by a long shot. Not until I say so.”
CHAPTER 31
She’s never going to forgive you,” Adare said when I’d told him everything. “She never could forgive a man who did her wrong.”
I had hesitated before talking to him about Red Kate—I’d made enough trouble for him already, and maybe his patience with me was running out. Which was bad, since I was wholly dependent on him for my survival, at least until I could find a way to get to Ohio. But Kate worried me. She was a factor in this new world of mine I couldn’t get a grasp on, a puzzle I couldn’t solve. I turned to Adare in the end because he knew more about the wilderness than anyone else who might talk to me. It was during one of our long drives, this time out to a subdivision in Rahway we hadn’t hit before, when I finally got up the courage. If he was annoyed by my questions, he didn’t show it.
“So I cut her—that’s . . . that’s enough for her to want to kill me. She had her chance last night, but she didn’t take it.”
“Well, a couple of things there—A and B. A is, she had no such chance. She couldn’t just kill somebody out in the open in the middle of a looter camp. That sort of thing’s frowned upon.” He smiled. “We’re not total savages.”
I shook my head. I thought I would never understand the code these people followed, if there even was such a thing.
“Besides, she knows you’re under my protection, and she would never tussle with me. She may be crazy, but she’s not stupid.”
Her gang outnumbered us, but I knew it wasn’t always about numbers. People in the looter camps had an almost supernatural respect for Adare. A reverent fear. I don’t know what he’d done to get such a fearsome reputation, but everyone seemed to agree—you didn’t mess with Adare. At least that was a point in my favor, for the moment. “Okay, that’s thing A. What’s thing B?”
“There’s always a B,” he said, and sighed deeply. “Nothing’s ever simple. B is, just killing you wouldn’t be enough. It would be over too quick. Killing, out here, it’s just a means to an end. She doesn’t want to just end you. She wants to punish you. She wants to get creative about it. And a woman like Red Kate has a powerful imagination.”
I could feel the blood draining from my face. “You mean she’s going to . . . torture me before she kills me?”
“Knowing her, she would make you beg to be tortured to death,” Adare said. But then he laughed and slapped me on the back. “Stones, you look like you just shit yourself. Relax. I’m here, and I’ll protect you.”
I forced myself to thank him. “But I still don’t understand. What drives somebody to be like that? What gets them so twisted they treat other human beings like toys to play with?”
Adare thought on that for a long while before answering. “There’s not much out here to occupy an active mind,” he told me. “No real excitement.” He laughed at my expression. “You think constant danger is exciting, huh? Give it another few months. Nothing can hold your attention that long. Eventually, you do get bored—and that’s a problem. Maybe you become complacent, which is a synonym for ‘dead.’ Or maybe you go crazy—I’ve seen that often enough. Start thinking you’re untouchable, or that you’ve been chosen for some higher purpose. That’s another word for ‘dead,’ too. This world loves nothing more than a man who thinks he’s immortal—and it loves proving him wrong. If you’re smart, you remember to humble yourself every so often. To remind yourself why you need to stay sharp. But all of us who do this long enough, we’re going to run across this problem eventually.”
“So it’s inevitable? You just get so bored you burn out and die?” I asked, because obviously that wasn’t where he was going with this.
“Nah. There’s other ways to handle the tedium. You find something else to keep your brain busy. I’ve got my girls—I spend all my time thinking about how to take care of ’em, keep ’em healthy and happy. Red Kate tends to fixate on people who cross her, and how she can make them regret it.”
“Great,” I said. “And now I’m in her sights.”
Adare shrugged in something approaching sympathy. I don’t know if he was capable of the genuine article, but at least he understood my predicament. “There’s one surefire way to beat her at that game, though,” he said.
“There is?”
“Uh-huh. Ignore her. Pretend she doesn’t scare you. That’ll make her even crazier for a while, but eventually she’ll find somebody else with buttons she can push.”
Easier said than done, of course. The community of looters in New Jersey was a small enough group that I was guaranteed to keep running into her. I could try, I supposed, to keep my head down—stick close to Adare, not go wandering off at night anymore. But I doubted Red Kate would let me off that easily.
I brooded for a while on how to escape her, until something else she’d said occurred to me. Something I’d never really processed before.
“She said I was a slave,” I told him.
His eyes narrowed. “We don’t like that word out here. They’ve got slaves for real in some of the cities, now. Indentured servants, and worse. They get worked to death and fed as little as possible. That sound like you and me?”
“If I said I wanted to leave you, would you let me?” I asked him, in turn.
“You couldn’t make it out here without me.” There was a warning in his tone, but one I chose to ignore.
“I’m going to Ohio. To the medical camp there,” I told him. “If we meet someone headed that way—will you let me go with them?”
For a long while he was silent. He fiddled with the car’s controls in a way that suggested he was too busy to answer, but I knew he was stalling.
His eyes flicked to one of his mirrors, and behind me Kylie stirred. He had glanced at her, and she’d sat up, expecting some kind of command. When none came, she sank back down into her seat.
I don’t think I was supposed to see that glance. It wasn’t until later that I realized what it meant. If he let me go to Ohio, he might have to let Kylie go, too. Half his girls had plus signs tattooed on their left hands. I knew he would never let them all go.
“You meet somebody like that,” he said finally, “and I think they’re on the level. Then—and only then—will we discuss this again.”
I was smart enough not to press him.
CHAPTER 32
Rahway might have been a little nicer than the other towns we’d seen—the houses all had a little scrap of yard out front, and fewer of the windows were broken—but the routine was the same as always. Adare dropped Kylie and me off at the end of a long street and then cruised around the corner and out of sight with the rest of the girls. We’d done this often enough that Kylie and I didn’t even speak as we pried the boards off a front door and headed inside the first house.
Inside we found a single bottle of liquor, mostly empty. A couple of bottles of pills. While I went through the upstairs medicine cabinet, Kylie searched the rooms downstairs for anything we’d missed. Once I was done I headed back down the stairs and found something I didn’t expect.
The main, front room of the house was a mess. It had been like that when we arrived—clothes were strewn on the floor, and there were toys everywhere, children’s toys of the kind they had before the crisis. Dolls and little plastic soldiers and things that looked like they used to light up or talk or who knew what back before they died.
Kylie was kneeling in the middle of the room, her back to me.
I took a step toward her and nearly tripped over something. I picked it up and saw it was a tenn
is shoe, about a quarter of the size of one I might wear. I turned it over in my hand, thoroughly surprised. I had never seen such a thing before. When I was young enough to wear such a thing, I went around barefoot.
There had been children in this house, obviously. Kids who got evacuated during the crisis. I suppose I wondered what had happened to them, but I was a lot more interested in what Kylie was doing just then.
As I came up to her I saw she was smiling.
I didn’t think it was possible. It was such an innocent, sweet smile—one I couldn’t imagine her wearing. Somehow her armor had come down.
I looked at her hands and saw she was holding a plastic horse with purple fur and stars woven into its mane.
“I had one of these,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “In Connecticut. Except mine had a broken leg.” She brushed its blond hair with her thumb.
“Why don’t we take it with us?” I asked. Anything that could make her smile like that was worth taking back to the SUV, I thought.
Apparently I was wrong. “No,” she said.
She dropped the horse and stood up. Walked away like it had meant nothing to her. “Come on,” she said. “We need to go to the next house.”
“Why don’t you want the horse?” I asked.
She didn’t get angry, but I could tell she didn’t want to answer. “It would make me think about other times,” she answered, her voice perfectly flat. “It would make me think about my family.” Then she stopped and looked right at me, though her eyes had about as much life in them as the horse’s had. “Do you miss him?” she asked me. “Your dad, I mean.”
I’d told her all about my mom, and how I’d come to be a positive and get exiled from New York. I’d told her lots of things while we were looting old houses. She never responded to anything I said, but it was good to hear myself talk. Otherwise the houses were just too quiet. So she knew all the details.
“I haven’t thought of him a lot, not since I left,” I admitted. “When I do, it hurts too much. So I try to worry about other things.”
“Do you think he’s dead? That they killed him because he was exposed by being with your mom?”
I gritted my teeth. Kylie had never been a master of tact. I knew she didn’t understand what that question would do to me. So I tried to answer it honestly. “I think they probably did. I don’t know. I think that would probably be the right thing to do. But he’s my dad. So I think I would hate them if that’s what they did.”
“My parents are still alive. I think they are,” she said. “I don’t allow myself to think about them. Sometimes I feel things. But that’s not good. So I try not to let it happen. I worry about other things,” she said, repeating what I’d said before.
I took a deep breath. “I guess nobody can keep things bottled up all the time.”
“You should be more like me,” she said. “I see you feel things and I worry about you. I worry you’re going to be hurt.”
I was shocked. “I . . . appreciate that,” I told her. “Thank you.”
She nodded, just acknowledging me. Then she turned and headed out of the room. I shook my head and followed.
Outside, somebody started screaming.
CHAPTER 33
It had to be one of the girls, judging by the pitch of the screaming. I couldn’t tell which one.
We rushed out through the house into the street, and the noise of it was all around us—in that silent place it filled the air, replaced the wind. The screams went on and on, and I spun in circles, trying to figure out where they came from.
“Where?” I asked. “Where?”
Kylie scratched the side of her nose.
“Damn it, don’t just stand there—tell me where we go!” I shouted at her, my own voice pitched high.
“Hold on,” she told me.
“Fuck! There’s no time for you to—”
Kylie lifted an arm and pointed at the far street corner. “That way,” she said. “I can smell them.”
I shook my head in frustration, but I didn’t waste any more time. I raced for the corner, pulling her along behind me. The screaming was louder now, and I could sort of gauge its direction. I turned down another street of identical houses—
—and nearly ran right into a crowd of zombies.
There were dozens of them. Their long hair hung down over their filthy, torn clothes. I didn’t see any of their red eyes because they were all facing away from me.
Facing something else—the source of the screams—
Bonnie.
She was down on the ground, and she couldn’t seem to get up. She was dragging herself backward, away from the zombies, but they were gaining on her. Her leg was all red—I didn’t register at the time that it was blood I was seeing; it just looked red. Mary and Addison were farther up the street, standing on the porch of a house, gripping the railing, screaming as well but not as loud, not as piercingly as Bonnie. No sign of Adare or the SUV.
“Oh,” Kylie said. “It was Bonnie.”
“What?” I demanded.
“I thought it was Addison,” she said. “It sounded like Addison. Like someone younger.”
I stared at her wide-eyed, but I knew, I understood even in the heat of that moment, that Kylie had completely shut down. That the terror of this instant was so much she had shut off any kind of emotion at all rather than have to deal with it.
I didn’t have that option.
I rushed forward, waving my hands over my head. “Hey,” I said, my voice failing me at first. “Hey, assholes.” I swallowed all the spit in my mouth and found the courage to shout it. “Hey!”
One of the zombies started to turn around slowly, to look for the sound of my voice. I had no real plan beyond getting their attention. I thought I could draw them away from Bonnie if I gave them something to focus on.
But she wouldn’t stop screaming.
“Hey!” I shouted again. I reached down and picked up the first thing that came to my hand—an empty plastic water bottle that was lying in the street. I hurled it at the mass of zombies. It fell short, but the sound it made got another zombie to turn around.
The ones closest to Bonnie were almost on her. There was no more time. And she kept screaming. She never stopped.
“Bonnie, run!” I shouted, even though I knew she couldn’t. That if she could she would have already. Her leg must have been broken. She could no more stand up than she could stop what happened next. One of the zombies reached down and grabbed her ankle and started lifting her leg toward its mouth.
“No! No, damn you!” I said, and ran forward to grab the arm of one of the zombies, thinking I would drag them away from her with my own hands.
That got most of them looking at me. I realized my mistake almost instantly, but not before I grabbed the zombie’s arm and pulled. It spun around, its teeth clacking together as its red eyes focused on me. It lunged forward, trying to bite me.
I don’t remember pulling my knife out of my belt. I don’t remember stabbing that zombie in the face. I just did it, without thinking. I must have hit something vital because it went down in a heap, without so much as a sigh of regret.
Four more of them were grabbing for me before it even hit the pavement.
“Kylie!” I shouted as they plucked at my sleeves. I reared backward, away from them, but they kept coming. “Kylie, help me!”
I kicked and pushed and punched and drove them away from me, but there were always more. Kylie grabbed one and pushed it away, knocking it off balance and sending it sprawling in the gutter. She stomped on the knee of another and I heard bone crack, and the zombie fell down to kneel in the road, trying over and over to get up but failing. Then hands grabbed my shoulders, and I started to fight them off before I realized they were Kylie’s, pulling me back, away from the zombies.<
br />
Suddenly I was free. Kylie dragged me up to my feet and we raced backward, stumbling over each other, but still we were faster, fast enough to get clear. All the zombies were following us now, staggering toward us.
All but one of them. The one that was taking bites out of Bonnie’s arm. She fought it viciously, slapping and shoving and smacking it away, but she was covered in blood. It looked like part of her face was gone, just missing.
I heard a screech of tires and the SUV came rocketing around the corner, veering to a stop. Adare leaned out of his window with his carbine in his hands. Fire blasted from its barrel as he fired into the crowd of zombies, again and again. One after another of them collapsed motionless in the street, until they were all gone. He shot the one that was on top of Bonnie, and it rolled away, a neat hole in the back of its head oozing blood.
And still, Bonnie kept screaming. She was still alive.
CHAPTER 34
Adare kept shooting—there must have been more zombies around than I’d even seen—while Kylie headed over to the porch where Addison and Mary were huddled together, holding on to each other as if a terrible wind were trying to blow them away. I ran over to Bonnie and leaned over her, not wanting to touch her and the infected blood all over her, at the same time wanting desperately to pick her up in my arms. She was in bad shape. Bites had been taken out of her legs, her arms, and her face, and her blood was flowing away from her, toward the gutter. She was breathing just fine—screaming still—but she wasn’t moving at all.
“Just hold on,” I told her. “Just—just—”
I realized I had no idea what to do. I thought maybe I should bandage her wounds, but there were so many of them. And how do you bandage someone’s face when all you have is the shirt you’re wearing? I needed tape and gauze and antiseptic. I needed all kinds of things I was never going to have.
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