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by Mira Grant

  We stuck to the coastal forest for as long as we could, keeping company with the wildlife. When we reached the point at which the woods became impassable, I turned onto a narrow frontage road, branches reaching out on all sides to snag at our windows and slow our progress. According to the maps Ben had, we were less than fifteen miles from the business park where we’d find Dr. Abbey, and maybe get our showers. From there, we just had to get through Oregon and Washington to hit the Canadian border and disappear. Freedom was close. I could almost taste it.

  The road curved. I turned the wheel to follow it. Things began happening very fast after that, seeming to collapse together, leaving no room for anything but reaction. The trees to either side of us exploded with motion as people launched themselves out of the woods. They were riding what looked like modified Jet Skis, heavily armored, with lances and cowcatchers affixed to the front. I hauled on the wheel as hard as I could, sending us into a spin. Amber was shouting. Ben was shrieking. Audrey was curiously silent, and I had just enough time to worry about that before we slammed into the first of our attackers. There was a sickening crunch from the front of the ATV, the engine giving an audible whine that broke through the sound shielding.

  Amber had cranked her window down and was firing into the fray, pulling the bolt back on her rifle and pulling the trigger again and again. There was a particularly loud crack, and something whizzed past my head, tracing a hot line of danger in the air, before shattering my window. Bits of glass flew outward and away. Amber screamed, rage and pain and fury, as the bullet went through her shoulder and into the seat behind it.

  Audrey leaned into the front seat, a pistol in either hand, and began firing through the shattered window, giving Amber time to get her equilibrium back. I wanted to shout at her, to order her back into her own seat, but I said nothing. I was fighting with the wheel, Amber was fighting shock, and Ben didn’t have the kind of marksmanship that the situation required. We needed to get out of here.

  More people poured into the open, shaking the trees. One of the raiders popped up in front of us. I hit the gas, slamming into his Jet Ski as hard as I could. He went flying. Something in the engine made a crunching noise, and we lost forward momentum. I could steer, but we were losing speed fast.

  Amber got her senses back and braced her shotgun against her unwounded shoulder, using her dominant hand to steady the barrel as she fired again and again. Two more raiders went down. The car continued slowing.

  “Can you speed this fucking thing up?” Amber demanded.

  “I wish I could,” I said.

  “Then I’m buying you time,” she snapped, and unfastened her seat belt.

  Until my dying day, I will swear I didn’t know what she was about to do, and until my dying day, I’ll be lying, because part of me did know, part of me did understand, and that part of me—that terrible, remorseless part of me—approved. Reducing our weight might be the only thing that kept us moving, and we’d slowed enough that it wouldn’t hurt her worse than she’d already been hurt. And she’d been hurt badly. She was trying not to show it, but the seat behind her was soaked through with blood, and she was still bleeding. The bullet had severed something essential.

  We were a rolling biohazard now, and Amber didn’t have much time. That’s what I told myself as she unlocked her door, as Ben realized what she was doing and shouted for her to stop.

  She didn’t stop. Unbuckling her belt, she kicked the door open and tumbled out into the clearing, shrieking like a madwoman as she brought her gun up and continued firing. The ATV picked up a little bit of speed as her weight was subtracted from its total. For a moment—a single, shining moment—I thought we might stand a chance.

  The back of her shirt was black with blood, shining in the sunlight. She fired twice more before the raiders gunned her down and she collapsed, a bullet through her skull guaranteeing that she wasn’t going to be getting up again. Amber was gone.

  It might still have been worth it, if we hadn’t been slowing down again. If her blood hadn’t soaked through the seat where she’d been shot, rendering the vehicle unsafe. Even if the engine wasn’t dying, we couldn’t have stayed where we were long enough to get away. She’d died for nothing. No: not for nothing. She’d died so that she wouldn’t amplify in an enclosed space with her friends. She’d died so that we’d stand a chance of surviving. We had to honor that.

  We had to find a way out of this.

  “Ash…” said Audrey, looking over her shoulder at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. The engine rattled and died. The raiders had us surrounded. Some of them were wearing black and silver pre-Rising football gear with snarling men blazoned across the back. They looked like a gang out of an old movie, and they had us outnumbered ten to one. Even if Amber—oh, God, Amber—had still been alive, we would have lost. There was no way this could have ended any differently.

  Ben reached up from the backseat, putting his hand on my shoulder. I took my hands off the wheel and put them up, signaling our surrender. Then I turned, and pulled Audrey as close as I could while avoiding the spreading stain of Amber’s blood, and I kissed her like the world was ending. I kissed her like I was never going to have the opportunity to kiss her again, and ah, her lips were sweet, and ah, our tears were bitter.

  The door opened behind me. Hands grabbed my shoulders, yanking me out of the car. I saw Amber’s body, crumpled on the broken road. Then my head slammed into the pavement, and everything stopped for a little while, like a clock whose hands had been removed.

  Tick.

  Tock.

  Tick.

  I opened my eyes on blackness. For a moment—just a moment, but a terrible one—I thought I’d gone blind, or that they’d put my eyes out. That had happened before, to Irwins who stumbled into the wrong part of the underground network of black markets and illegal communities crisscrossing the world. We could be valuable as organ donors, sources of information, and… other things. I didn’t like to think about those other things. I didn’t want to.

  But these people had killed Amber. Sure, she’d been firing on them at the time, and she’d been an excellent shot; I knew just from the bodies I’d seen fall that she’d managed to hit at least two of her targets. They could still have found a means of taking us without shooting her. Whoever these people were, they weren’t interested in harvesting slaves. The fact that I couldn’t see probably didn’t speak to any permanent damage, so much as it spoke to the space that I was in.

  I tried to sit up. I couldn’t. Something was strapping me down, crossing my chest and legs and pinning me in place. All right. I clicked my tongue. The noise didn’t travel far, but it did sound hollow as it returned to me. From the sounds of it, wherever I was wasn’t large, and was at least somewhat disconnected from whatever else might be around us. Stretching out my fingers—which did move, albeit reluctantly—allowed me to brush them against a cold metal wall. I winced, closing my eyes again. I was in a cadaver drawer. It was the only thing that accounted for everything I was experiencing, from the darkness all the way to the faint reverberation in every sound. It was a good place to store prisoners. Even if one of us amplified, we wouldn’t be able to get to anyone else to infect them, and we could be withdrawn and tested one by one, all without removing the straps. There was no telling how many people had lived and died in this exact position.

  There was no way of knowing whether I was about to be one of them.

  I steadied my breathing, trying to deduce as much as I could about my situation from what little information I was getting from my own body. My head hurt. I couldn’t move it much, but when I did, the ache came from the side of my head and the back of my neck, implying that someone had kicked me after I fell. That would explain the conclusive nature of my blackout. It was hard to deal with two different types of trauma at the same time. Nothing else seemed to hurt, and when my hands brushed against the tops of my hips, I felt fabric. I was still dressed, then.

  Wait—still, or again? I breat
hed in, and smelled nothing but antiseptic and citrus cleaning products. I should have smelled my own funk, which Amber had so gleefully described not long ago. Whoever had taken me had also washed me. It was a terrible thing to realize, accompanied by a profound feeling of violation and rage. In a way, I was almost glad for that. It chased away some of the grief.

  Amber was dead. Of that much I was sure: I’d seen her die, and there was no way she was coming back, either as herself or as one of the walking infected. Kellis-Amberlee can fix a remarkable amount of damage in the process of getting the body up and running, but it can’t fix a hole in the back of the skull, or the attendant brain damage. Thankfully. If zombies could survive head shots, we would have lost the Rising, and those of us who had managed to survive to the present day would never have been able to stand a chance.

  So fine: Amber was dead. I wasn’t. If I wasn’t dead, it stood to reason that some of the others might not be dead, too. Audrey might not be dead. And if Audrey was alive, I couldn’t stop fighting. Not for a minute, not for a second. I had to get back to her. Whatever it took, I had to get back to her.

  My captors may have taken the time to re-dress and—presumably—decontaminate me before shoving me into a drawer, but they probably hadn’t given me back my weapons. That would have been too much to ask. All logic said that I was unarmed, and that they’d be expecting me to be unprepared when I awoke. I couldn’t do anything about the first part. My field training meant I was better equipped than most to handle the second.

  I began calmly and systematically tightening and relaxing the muscles in my arms, legs, and back. As a meditation technique, it was supposed to help relieve tension and prepare the body for a long, restorative sleep. Sometimes it helped with my nightmares. I wasn’t meditating now, and I didn’t want help with my nightmares: I wanted my nightmares to help me. I was thinking the darkest, least relaxing thoughts I could, trying to keep myself primed to move. None of the straps were tight enough to cut off blood flow. That was good. I wanted to be ready to leap into action the second I had the opportunity to do so.

  Eventually, they were going to have to open that drawer. There was no point in taking us alive if they were going to leave us in here to die—unless, murmured a small, traitorous corner of my mind, they were looking for zombie gladiators. I’d heard about the underground fighting rings, like something out of a horror movie, where the fresh infected were pitted against the unprepared living. Most of the time, the “fighters” would have the same weapons that the dead did: teeth and fingernails and desperation. But while the zombies were desperate to feed, the living were desperate to escape, and those two goals were never going to be compatible.

  No. I was being silly. If they’d taken us for the sole purpose of killing us, they’d do it. Allowing us to die of starvation or thirst would just leave them with a bunch of substandard zombies. No sport or show in that. The sort of people who’d swarm our ATV, shoot Amber, and seize the rest of us were absolutely the sort of people who would think zombie pit fights to be the height of sophistication. They’d know how to make it as interesting as possible.

  On some level, I knew I was doggedly pursuing this idea—born of purest supposition, with no evidence whatsoever to support it—because the alternative was to let myself consider that maybe the raiders had only taken me. Some of the folks who chose to go off the grid in modern America were racial supremacists of one stripe or another, and all the faces I’d seen during the assault had been white ones. It was less of a stretch to assume I was alone than it was to assume that we’d all been taken. But if that was so, if I was the last one standing, then I wasn’t going to be standing for long. The people who’d put me in this drawer were going to learn, in short order, that it was better not to fuck with the Irish.

  I don’t know how long I lay in the dark, methodically tensing and relaxing my muscles to keep myself warmed up and alert, my eyes open and staring into nothingness. It was long enough that the beat of my heart seemed to be impossibly loud, echoing in my ears like a countdown to some terrible inevitability.

  Something clanked, the sound of a great key being turned in an even greater lock, pulling back some unspeakable tumbler. This time when I tensed, I did not relax. Things were about to start moving again. I was going to rejoin a world where things happened, and those things were going to happen to me. That seemed inevitable.

  The second clank was smaller, and closer, coming from the end of my drawer. I squinted my eyes shut just in time to block out the majority of the light as someone pulled the drawer open and the sterile hospital glare of the former morgue came flooding inside. No natural light here; this was all man-made and cruel, as unforgiving as anything.

  “I think she’s awake,” said a voice, female and a little awed, like finding a prisoner already conscious was unheard of. Maybe it was. Maybe they usually supplemented their head trauma with the sort of drugs that required a counteragent before they could be thrown off.

  Lucky me, I’d gone with the pure “concussion” package. “Sure, and I’ve been awake for hours,” I said, eyes still virtually closed, hitting my Irish brogue as hard as I could. If these were white supremacists, they might take my foreign origins as a sign of “purity,” which could buy me the time to find out where they’d taken Ben and Audrey. If they were just bandits, they might panic at the thought of kidnapping a foreign national. Either way, the less American I could sound, the better off I would be, at least for right now. “What took you lot so long? I was starting to get bored in there.”

  “Awake, and a snotty little thing,” said a male voice. It was deep and surprisingly smooth, the sort of voice that should be accompanied by a glass of good Scotch and a blazing fire. A hand touched my cheek. It was a light contact. It was still enough to feel like a violation. My stomach did a slow roll in protest. “Pretty, though. Look at this skin. Red and white all over. Are your eyes blue, girl? Are you a living American flag?”

  “I’m Irish,” I said, and opened my eyes, which struck me as suddenly traitorous. I didn’t want to be blue-eyed for this man, whoever he was. He had the power to let me out of the drawer, which meant he’d probably been the one to put me there in the first place.

  The light stung. I blinked repeatedly, eyelashes growing damp with unshed tears. Eventually, the room came into focus, bringing the two people I’d heard speaking into focus with it. The female voice belonged to a gawky brunette with short-cropped hair and a tattered lab coat. Faint brown stains down one lapel said “blood” to me, even though it had clearly been bleached until the protein strands broke down. She’d tried to cleanse herself. She just hadn’t been able to replace her coat once she was done. We were in a place that had supply-chain issues, then, where things couldn’t be thrown away for the sake of something as petty as mental or emotional distress. Lots of people had panic attacks at the sight of bloodstains. They meant death, danger, and exposure. All good reasons to get a new damn coat.

  The man was tall enough that I had to crane my neck to see his face. Tattoos covered almost every inch of his exposed skin, leaving only the palms of his hands and most of his facial features unmasked. “Most” because the skin above his left eyebrow was tattooed with a dense block of Cyrillic text, and a lightning bolt scar was tattooed under his right eye, standing out green and black and painful against his pale skin. His eyes were cold, and his hair was buzzed so short that I couldn’t quite tell what color it would have been if allowed to grow out to a proper length. A white tank top strained to contain his massive chest, and camo pants covered his legs. A real tough-guy type, it seemed, and one who was better left uncrossed.

  Too bad I’ve never been good at leaving better off alone. “Got a few tats there, haven’t you?” I asked. “Must not have much of a problem with needles. Brave of you. Brave enough that you ought to be able to unstrap an unarmed Irish girl, not worry about whether I’m set to claw your eyes out.” My grammar was slipping, becoming a parody of itself. I was almost grateful. The nice thing about
having an accent in America was the way people would forgive my words for getting jumbled: It was like they thought there was no way I could put a proper sentence together, and were hence happy to have their prejudices proven.

  Or maybe that was just the nice thing about having a white accent in America, one that came from “the old country” and not one of the places good patriots still assumed were hemorrhaging immigrants onto American soil. As if there would have been a modern America without immigration, people coming from far away and trying to make a home for themselves amongst the stones and the sky. The people who’d owned the continent before Columbus showed up would probably have had a few things to say about immigration. I doubt any of them would have been very pleasant, or very welcoming.

  “Undo her straps,” said the man.

  “But sir—”

  He turned to the woman in the stained lab coat, the skin around his eyes tightening until it was like gazing at a shark: cold, implacable, and deadly. “I’m so sorry, Jill, I missed the announcement that you’d deposed me. Tell me, was it poison? A sliced artery that’s been bleeding for the last hour without my noticing it? Have you science types finally mastered nanotechnology? Am I about to be reduced to a pile of quivering gray goo?”

  “N-no,” she said, voice shaking. She didn’t step away from him. I had to admire that, even as I thought it was likely to get her killed. Put more stains on that lab coat of hers, these ones too deep to be washed away. “It’s just that she doesn’t know the situation here, and unstrapping her could be dangerous.”

  “Ah. Worrying about my safety, then, so a tiny British girl doesn’t somehow overpower me and take what’s mine as hers.” The man glanced back to me, eyes lingering on my midriff. I didn’t know whether it was covered or not, but in that moment, it didn’t matter. I glared at him, hating the fact that he’d called me a Brit, but I didn’t speak. “I think I can handle myself. Undo the straps now, and I might be able to forget that you ignored my first order.”