“We’re good for each other,” he says.
“The way it should be. Now get some rest while your boyfriend freezes his butt off.”
Liz, Zeke and Margaret sit in varying levels of comfort on the floor and seats. Except for Hank, no children, parents of children or pregnant people are allowed in the sick bus. I watch the passengers in the pickup’s bed fight a losing battle to keep the tarp they use for shelter out of the wind’s grip. It must be miserable out there. Everyone in our nice warm bus exclaims when the rain changes to snow flurries and the fat, white and, in all probability, cold flakes spiral through the air and under the flapping tarp.
I put my hand to my mouth. Nelly is never going to speak to me again.
46
We’ve gone farther than we’d anticipated due to our early start. This part of Alaska is so empty that it seems we could drive all night safely, but the icy rain coming down could cause hypothermia and we’d hit Wasilla before dawn. The suburb of Anchorage is probably infested and therefore better traversed in daylight.
We slow at two mailboxes, the only sign of life we’ve seen for miles after the tiny town an hour back. The long dirt driveway ends at two hunting camps, one of logs and the other red clapboard. The doors are unlocked, nothing of value inside. Each has an old woodstove, a scuffed dining set and empty bed frames. A cord of wood sits out back with an outhouse.
“What do you say we split up tonight?” Zeke asks the assembled crowd. “Same as the vehicles.”
“As long as I get out of this rain, I’m good,” Nelly says. His cheeks are raw and his hair has gone crazy, but he winks when I blow him a kiss. He’d insisted on staying in the truck for Peter’s turn and wouldn’t budge when Peter argued. He stands over the stove while I build a fire in the log cabin. “How’s Bits?”
“The same,” I say. The dry kindling lights immediately, as do the logs, and in a few minutes the heat begins pushing out the cold. I stare into the flames and think of all the things that could go wrong with a sick little girl.
“Hey, Half-Pint,” Nelly says in a firm voice. I look up, and he says, “Stop stressing.”
“Sometimes I think if I consider every bad thing that could happen, it won’t come true. Like the opposite of jinxing.”
“Reverse jinxing? I’ll have to try that. How’s it working so far?”
“It’s got about a fifty percent success rate, if I’m lucky. So not at all, I guess.”
He pats my head. “That’s what I figured.”
It’s tight with nine people in our cabin, but cozy with the roaring fire and lantern and giant cup of tea. I sit at the bottom of the bed frame and cringe whenever Bits coughs in her sleep. She’ll be warm tonight—that’s got to be better for her than cold, damp air.
We eat boiled potatoes with the jar of salsa, which is better than the plan we had to mix the baby formula into mashed potatoes. One sniff of the vitamin-saturated powder made us decide to save it for when we’re really desperate. I mix some with hot cocoa mix and manage to get a few sips down Bits’s throat, but she’s so unresponsive I give up or risk choking her. Hank drinks his down and proclaims it a little weird but chocolaty.
Mikayla refastens her short ponytail and sinks against Ben. “I wish we’d gone to the hot springs. You guys are so clean.”
I’d rather have made it across the country without losing five people along the way, but I know she doesn’t mean it that way. “Tomorrow you’ll get a shower, maybe. They have to have some way of washing.”
“Less than a full day’s drive,” Zeke says from his chair. “Might get a little dicey in Wasilla, but we’ll go around as much as possible.”
“There’s not another way to Talkeetna?” Ben asks.
“There is, but it’s a gravel road,” Peter says. He sits on the floor with coffee in one hand and the other on Bits. “It would add hundreds of miles and we don’t have enough gas.”
Liz shoots out a sinewy arm. “We’ll blast our way through Wasilla. We’ve made it this far, right?”
“Famous last words,” Peter says, and barely smiles when the others laugh. He doesn’t feel like laughing any more than I do, I guess.
I find it hard to be anxious about tomorrow when my thoughts are consumed by Bits’s rumbling chest. We’ve given her a child’s dose of cough medicine, but her coughing continues unabated.
Our beverages consumed, we get in bed. I squeeze in with Bits and Peter sleeps on the floor with Hank. Just before the lantern is extinguished, Peter reaches for my hand. I hold tight, our hands resting on Bits, and pray into the darkness that somewhere up there someone gives enough of a crap to not punish us by taking her away.
I insist on taking my turn in the pickup and go first to get it over with. Bits drank a little of the hot cocoa this morning before passing out, but her fever is still set to broil instead of bake. Nelly sits with his arm around me as we yell over the wind. The rain and flurries have cleared up, thankfully.
“Look at those,” Nelly says. White-capped mountains stretch south and east and west of us under a bright blue sky. Nothing’s getting past them without a whole lot of trouble, and Lexers don’t go in for a whole lot of trouble unless they see people.
“You know what I keep thinking?” I ask.
“What?”
“Adrian and I wanted to drive to Alaska. He would’ve had a heart attack at all of this.” I wave my arm at the scenery. Nelly nods—he knows how fanatical Adrian was about mountains. “He would’ve been pointing and almost running off the road. I would’ve driven him crazy pumping the imaginary brake on the passenger’s side, until I finally flipped out and demanded the keys.”
Nelly laughs so loud that everyone in the truck looks our way. “That is totally how it would have gone.”
“I know. But it still would’ve been amazing.”
Nelly hugs me to his side. I miss what could have been, but it’s the gentle ache I’ve grown used to. Most of all, I miss having him to hold on to when it feels like everything is collapsing around me. And with Bits sick, that’s exactly how I feel.
My shift over, I get in the VW. Bits wakes coughing and I clean the horrible-looking stuff she brings up. I’ve never seen someone so limp with fever, and I cross my fingers that by the end of today we have a doctor to see to her.
The houses and businesses are spread out when we slow at what was to be our turnoff onto a less traveled road. It looks like half of Anchorage used this road as a getaway route, and most of the cars are still here although the bodies have wandered away. We luck out at the main road, where someone has taken advantage of its width and the parallel train tracks to create a travel lane. Last year’s bodies hang out of cars and lie on the road, along with the ones that are milling about. Not a ton, but it’s more than we’ve seen since Whitehorse.
Hank raises a shaky finger to his glasses when we pass a large group of Lexers. I’m glad Bits can’t see them. Let her think we made the trip just fine and that there’s nothing below us when we get to Talkeetna. I can see there’s a lot below us, even if the winter did kill off half of them, and there will be plenty next summer.
“This map sucks,” James says via radio from the truck. “We’re going to have to stay on this road.”
We pass strip malls and dead traffic lights. An ice cream shack and motel. As long as we keep moving, the Lexers can’t get close. They converge on the road behind us, a slow-moving swarm of bodies and grunts, and I wonder how long they’ll follow before they forget we were here. I breathe a sigh of relief when the businesses become fewer and farther between.
“Seems like there should’ve been more,” Zeke says. “Where’d they all go?”
47
His question is answered on a semi-rural stretch of highway, where a whole bunch of undead Wasilla waits around a bend. Zeke manages to swerve around the pickup rather than hit it when it skids to a stop.
“Where do we go?” Peter yells into the radio.
I hear James’s curse through the truck windows
. He points back, the obvious choice, and Zeke reverses to an access road. We take it a quarter mile west, paralleling the highway, and stop when it hits a gravel road that dead ends fifty feet to our right.
“Christ!” Zeke says. He spins the VW around.
Lexers make their way onto the road from the woods. All that separates us from that pod on the highway is a few hundred feet of trees. I hold Bits in place while Zeke slams on the gas and trails the truck up a steep driveway to a house built into the hill. The garage doors are at ground level but, thankfully, the front door is on the second level and can only be reached by stairs. Peter gathers Bits in his arms and Hank drags Sparky from under a seat. I grab the closest bag and race up the stairs. Zeke and Nelly open the door with a splintering of wood and enter with their weapons out. It’s empty.
I look out before the door slams. The Lexers are at the base of the driveway and moving up the hill. Once everyone’s in, James severs the cords that attach the stereo and TV to the wall and he and Mark drag the entertainment center to the door.
Ben looks out the window. “They’re coming, but I don’t think they know where we went.”
Footsteps close in. As long as we’re quiet, they might leave. It could take days, but it’s possible they’ll go. I won’t think about the fact that most everything we need is outside—water, food, extra ammo. Jamie raises a finger to her lips and Jasmine nods, eyes two dark orbs. Nelly leads Adam to a chair and stands over him. We’re all on alert, heads cocked. Even Barnaby doesn’t need to be told to be quiet.
Bits lets out a cough that must be heard outside because the moans grow in volume. Peter hugs her to his chest to muffle the sound and nods when I point to what I think is the basement staircase in the foyer. This level of the house is the kitchen and living room, with a hallway that might lead to bedrooms. We pass the garage door landing into an unfinished basement. A couple of high windows at ground level let in enough light, even through overgrown grass, to see boxes, bikes and tools.
Peter sits on the concrete floor and cradles Bits in his arms. She’s stopped coughing for the moment. Her next doses of medicine are in the VW with everything else. I sit with my head on my arms and wait for the next round of coughing or the breaking glass that’ll mean they’re coming in. Peter nods when I look up, like everything will be all right, but this is not all right. Not at all.
Twenty minutes later, Penny pads down the stairs and kneels by my ear. “They’re still out there, but they don’t know where we are.”
As if on cue, Bits coughs for a minute straight. Her clothes are soaked and her body shakes with chills. I take off my coat for a blanket. Penny disappears upstairs and returns with blankets stripped from the house’s beds. I sit under them next to Bits and Peter, staring at the box labels I can’t read in the dim. After what seems like forever, Nelly and James come down with a mattress they set on the floor. Peter tucks the covers around Bits and props her head on a pillow. Everything is done silently—the most important game of Who Can Be the Quietest we’ve ever played.
I return to the main level. The house is from the seventies and the furniture isn’t far from that decade, either. Margaret’s in the kitchen, gingerly opening and closing cabinets. She points to the counter, where a few cans of soup, the end of a bag of bleached flour and four boxes of macaroni and cheese sit. The few bags that made it in add some small boxes of cereal and two old protein bars to our larder.
The others move around the house, gathering blankets and pillows from the bedrooms and setting them on the shag carpeting. I visit the smoked-mirror bathroom, use the dry toilet and search for anything vaguely medicinal. I come up with expired cough medicine and Tylenol. I can crush the pills, maybe, to bring Bits’s fever down. It’s what I’d been doing with her antibiotics once she found it too difficult to swallow. I have to hope that they’re still in her system, if indeed they’re doing anything at all.
Back in the basement, I grind a pill with a hammer. Peter opens Bits’s mouth for me to dump it in. I follow it with the cough medicine and coerce a bit of water down after. I find a lantern, some citronella candles, two sleeping bags and a camping stove in a box labeled camping, but no propane. I leave one sleeping bag and candle and bring the rest upstairs.
Sheets are hung over the blinds with thumbtacks, making the room and its plaid furniture a ghostly blue. The steady drone of Lexers seeps through the closed window. I lift a corner of fabric to find it’s worse than I thought—well over a hundred roaming around the driveway and sniffing at the vehicles, with who knows how many on the road. The backyard is no better. One bumps into the swing set’s glider, which hits another in the behind and knocks it to its knees. It would be funny if the situation wasn’t so bleak.
But I won’t be hopeless. They aren’t banging in the doors. Right now they’re hanging around and are bound to move at some point. Or they’ll freeze, maybe soon, with the way the weather’s been. I can hear Bits coughing, but it’s almost inaudible if I weren’t listening for it.
Kyle gives every weapon we have a once-over and lines them up on the kitchen table. Thankfully, we all wear our guns, my tomahawk is on my waist and Mark had the presence of mind to grab his bow. I grab every decent-sized knife out of the wooden block on the counter and set them with the rest. Kyle nods and returns to his work, Nicki crouched at his feet.
I kiss the top of Hank’s head before I follow Jamie and Liz to the basement, where they work on getting water from the water heater. Jamie leaves behind a container for us and brings the rest upstairs.
“What’s happening?” Peter whispers from where he lies next to Bits on the mattress.
I crouch next to him. “They’re everywhere but not trying to get in yet.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Wait it out.”
Peter lifts the blankets. I crawl in and turn on my side. “Bits kicks whenever I touch her,” he whispers in my ear. “So stay on this side.”
It’s not as loud down here, nor is it as cold, although there’s only a few degrees difference. I listen to the distant hum of the dead people on the lawn, and when evening comes I find three good-sized rags, hang them on the window frames and light the candle with the lighter I keep in my pocket. Dan’s unicorn is in there, too, the same way I carried the ring from Adrian last summer. It’s still on my right ring finger, the silver star shining gold in the candlelight. The thought that I’m forever meant to carry reminders of people I’ve left behind makes me weary. But the unicorn is for Bits, and I’ll be damned if she isn’t going to get it.
I crush another pill and ready her cough syrup. Her forehead may be a tiny bit cooler. She gags on her medicine and rolls away gasping for air. I pound her back with cupped hands the way my mother did when I had a chest cold, but it’s too loud. If I had access to heat, I’d boil water so she could breathe in the steam. It seems there’s always a reason we can’t get what we need or do what would be best, and I’m so sick of it I want to scream.
Her coughing tapers off to a whimper and rattling chest. I lie down next to Peter, so tired I can hardly breathe myself, and fall asleep.
48
Another full day passes with even more Lexers holding a semi-silent vigil. Barnaby visits us throughout the day, as do some of the others, but I barely listen to their hushed voices. I put cut newspaper in a bin for Sparky’s litter box. She doesn’t leave Bits’s side and neither do we. Bits’s chest is a symphony of noises now. A low, deep moan, a high-pitched wheeze and a slight rattle. The rattle scares me most of all.
There may not be much food to eat, but I’m not hungry and send it up to Penny and Hank. I don’t know how long we can live without food, how long before we’ll be too weak to fight our way out if we have to. But all of that is a distant concern. I hold Bits when she coughs and watch her breathe when she’s still. She’s so still.
I think about her dying. I’m not sure I would care if the Lexers found a way in after that. I’m completely embroiled in a game of reverse jinxing when Pet
er lights the candle and says, “You should sleep.”
“You should sleep,” I say.
“You first.”
“No. What if she stops—” I may reverse jinx in my head, but saying it out loud is too real.
“We’ll take turns.” He must see something in my face because he says, “You know I’ll watch her just as carefully.”
I trust Peter with my life and even more so with Bits’s, but I can’t relinquish control over this situation. “You sleep. I’ll wake you.”
“No,” Peter says. “Because I know you won’t.”
“She wants to look at the stars. That’s not so much to ask—just to want to see the fucking stars, is it?” Peter shakes his head, candlelight reflecting in his damp eyes. I’m torturing him the way I’m torturing myself. “I’m sorry.”
“She’ll be all right,” Peter says.
“Promise?” I shouldn’t ask, but I want so desperately for it to be true.
“Promise.”
Peter sits at the head of the bed and pulls me to him, arms around my waist. We watch Bits, my hand resting lightly on her chest. Neither of us suggests sleep. His chest rises when Bits’s does, as though he’s taken on the role of breathing for her. I’m doing it too, and I’m light-headed, which could mean she isn’t getting enough oxygen. We sit until the basement windows are gray with morning light and I no longer think it’s my imagination that her breathing is less labored.
The pounding starts just after dawn. Peter runs upstairs and returns a few terrifying minutes later. “Something fell,” he whispers. “They should stop soon.”
Bits croaks, “Cassie?”
I cover her mouth, although I’ve never been happier to hear someone say my name. “Shh, they’re outside.”
Until the End of the World Box Set Page 100
