“I know,” I said. “It is.”
“So we’re just going to have to keep running?” Trina asked. She sounded a little bit annoyed and a little bit excited at the same time.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. I was tired of running and I was tired of soldiers trying to capture us, but for the time being, we didn’t have a choice. “Let’s get Prianka back to Dad and we can figure everything else out from there.”
Everyone on the bus was quiet for a minute or two. Trina finally turned the corner of a windy road and brought us onto a main drag. Bullseye still hung out the bus door and still guided her as we went, but at least she could speed up a little.
Meanwhile, Prianka leaned over and put her head on my shoulder. “I’m so stupid,” she whispered.
“Why? Because you got shot? Think about the stories you’ll be able to tell your kids someday, not to mention the awesome scar.”
She snorted. “Kids? Yeah, right. I’m sort of wondering how to get through today. I don’t think having a kid is anywhere on my radar—at least until I’m done with college.”
Now I was the one who snorted. “College?” I laughed. “Why would you want to go to college? I hear the whole freshman class at Harvard is just a bunch of deadbeats.”
I could feel her good shoulder jumping up and down against me. She was chuckling. I liked it when Prianka had a smile on her face. It was way better than seeing her cry or wince in pain. “Stop it,” she said. “My arm hurts when I laugh.”
I kissed the top of her head. “My dad will have you fixed up in no time.”
Again, the bus was quiet. Then Jimmy turned around and stared at me. He looked serious. Jimmy James with a serious look on his face was unnerving.
“The offspring of two immune parents is super immune, right? They can’t get Necropoxy from the airborne virus and they can’t get it from a bite.”
“Seems like,” I said. “If Trina and I are any indication.”
“Okay,” said Jimmy, “So that means that anyone born from here on out is super immune because everyone left alive right now is regular immune.”
Unless I was missing something in our messed-up scenario, what Jimmy said was correct. I nodded my head. “Yeah,” I said.
He took a deep breath. “But if Diana creates a shot, or a pill, or whatever to make people super immune, that means anyone currently living that she thinks is undesirable won’t get it. That’s a whole generation of people who will never be safe from poxers. People like me.”
“Any people that don’t fit her ideal,” I whispered.
He was silent again. A moment later he said, “Why can’t she just wait a generation? Then everyone will be super immune?”
I didn’t want to state the obvious, because the obvious was terrible. Still, it needed to be said and the words needed to sink in. “Because the undesirables will breed,” I told him. “And the world, according to Diana, will go right back to being what it was before Necropoxy began.”
“But that’s . . .” Jimmy struggled with the right words. Then they came to him. “That’s genocide by poxer.”
He was right. Genocide by poxer was exactly what Diana and her people were trying to do. Maybe lining up and shooting all the survivors who didn’t fit her pretty picture was a bit too messy. Maybe her conscience, if she had one, would let her sleep at night if people were just taken out by monsters instead of her.
The truth was that Diana was the monster, and the worst kind. She was a monster who didn’t even know she was one.
Another bout of silence blanketed the bus. Then the smallest of us all opened his mouth.
“Genocide,” said Sanjay. He held Poopy Puppy cradled in his hands. “Genocide is the intentional action of destroying any group of people—ethnic, racial, national, religious or other. The word is derived from the Greek word ‘genos’ which means ‘people’ and the Latin suffix ‘cide’ which means ‘the act of killing.”
“Genocide by poxer,” I repeated. I peered out the black window. I didn’t want to look at my friends.
“That’s not right,” said Jimmy. “None of this has been right from the beginning.”
Sanjay spoke up again from the darkness of the bus. His words were chilling. “Adolph Hitler endorsed genocide,” he said. “He tried to get rid of anyone he thought was undesirable.”
“Hitler,” squawked Andrew.
“Under Adolph Hitler’s ideology of creating a master Aryan race, the Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of an estimated five and a half million Jews and countless other people who were considered to be ‘untermenschen’ or sub-human.”
What an awful word. What a horrible, terrible word.
“I’m in a wheelchair,” said Jimmy. “That means I’m untermenschen.”
“So am I,” whispered Prianka. “I don’t have the proper color skin.”
“Shut up,” I told her, but she was right.
“I am untermenschen, too,” said Sanjay.
“No, you’re not,” snapped Prianka. “No, you’re not.”
Whitby and Newfie both raised their heads and whined when Prianka said what she did. The rest of us were numb. We just sat with the knowledge that we had a massive weight on our shoulders, and it felt like there was no one else left in the world to do anything about it but us.
The thing was . . . what were we supposed to do?
34
“STOP THE BUS,” Prianka screamed out. Her voice erupted into the night so suddenly that I almost fell off my seat.
Trina slammed on the breaks, and Andrew wildly flapped his wings.
“What the . . .” I yelped. It was pitch black outside. We had been driving for a while, but we couldn’t seem to quit the dense trees.
At one point, a little ways back, we had passed a shadow up against the road. I knew it was Billy, still sitting in his wheelchair with a note pinned to his shirt. Thankfully, Whitby was fast asleep, or she would have gone bonkers. After all, she belonged to him for her entire life.
She had only belonged to us for a day.
“Did you see that?” cried Prianka. “Did you?
“See what?” I said. “I don’t see anything but night.”
“Back there,” she said. “I swear I saw a light.”
“I didn’t see anything,” said Bullseye. He had pulled himself in from the stairwell where he had been holding onto the railing, hanging out the open door, and guiding Trina in the darkness.
“You’re on the wrong side of the bus,” Prianka said. “I’m positive it was a light.”
“Where?” asked Jimmy. “In the woods?”
“Maybe,” said Prianka. “I don’t know. I was sort of drifting off and I saw it flash.”
Jimmy turned to Trina. “What do you say, babe? Interested in investigating?”
“NO,” I almost screamed. “We don’t have time for investigating. In case you haven’t noticed, my girlfriend is bleeding back here.”
Prianka elbowed me with her good arm. “Don’t be such a wussy. I swear there was a light. How can we not go look?”
I felt like I was sitting on a bus with a bunch of crazy people. “So,” I said. “There was a light. Big deal. You probably caught the reflection of something on a piece of metal or a broken-down car.”
“Or someone had a flashlight,” she said. “How would you like to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with only a flashlight and zombies everywhere? As you’re so fond of saying, I’d bet you’d ‘piddle a little.’”
Jimmy already had his wheelchair unfolded. He was wearing a fresh tee-shirt because his old one was covered with blood and pressed against Prianka’s bad arm. “Come on, Andrew,” he called out. “Let’s go have us a little look-see.” I kept forgetting that before Andrew started enjoying the company of Sanjay
over everybody else, he was Jimmy’s crow.
“Have a look-see,” said Andrew. Then he chirped, “Get lucky,” which is one of the first things I ever heard him say when we met him after Jimmy failed to come home that first night from the radio station back in Amherst.
Trina got out of the driver’s seat and stretched. She looked back at me and Prianka. “Coming?” she asked.
“No, we’re not coming,” I said. My eyes fell on Sanjay. “Sanjay’s not going either.”
Sanjay didn’t say anything. I didn’t expect him to. Instead, he curled up in his seat with Newfie and Whitby smooshed in with him, even though Newfie could barely fit. Sanjay looked like he was covered in a dog rug.
Protected was more like it.
As soon as Trina, Jimmy and Bullseye left the bus, it got very quiet. The only sound was Newfie’s heavy breathing.
“It wasn’t poxers,” Prianka said to me. “Poxers don’t carry lights.”
“Soldiers?” I asked her, not that she would know. All she said she saw was a flash.
“What would soldiers be doing out here in the woods in the middle of nowhere?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe it was the Donkey Man.”
“The who?”
“Never mind,” I said, but I couldn’t deny that skeleton hands tickled the back of my neck the moment I uttered the words ‘Donkey Man.’ Dorcas had told me about him when we were driving to Guilford. The Donkey Man was supposed to be some sort of ghost who wandered the desolate roads along the foothills of the Berkshires with his ghostly donkey in tow. Just thinking about him gave me the chills. That, and the big-headed people that my mother used to tell me about, to try and scare the crap out of me.
A minute or so later I heard voices. Trina, Jimmy and Bullseye were talking, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying. At least they didn’t sound like they found something bad, or someone dead that had to be burned. I was tired. I didn’t want to play with the dead anymore. I didn’t even want to lock up the living with the dead inside monasteries on top of mountains. I wanted to sit with my girlfriend, without a gunshot wound in her arm, and I wanted to talk about teen stuff.
I wanted normal—just for a little bit.
A smidge.
Thirty seconds more and Trina walked up the stairs of the bus and stared at me. Her face was blank but it spoke volumes.
“Um, Tripp?” she said in that way that I knew was going to be followed by something that I didn’t want to hear.
“Tripp doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Yeah, well,” she began. “Can I see you for a second?”
Prianka shifted in our seat. “What is it?” she asked Trina, but my sister couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her what she had found.
I pulled myself to my feet. “I’ll be right back,” I told Prianka and made my way to the front of the bus.
As I passed by Sanjay, covered in dogs, he looked up at me and said, “Hey, Buddy.”
“Hay is for horses,” I said, which is something dorky my dad always used to come out with.
“It’s for cows and sheep and goats and llamas and elephants,” he said. “And camels and alpacas and donkeys.”
I smiled. “Hay is for a lot of things.”
“And buffalo, too.”
He wasn’t wrong. I found myself thinking how weird it would be to have so much information stored in my head. I think it would start dripping out my ears or something. I definitely didn’t have the space in my brain for crazy amounts of trivia.
Just like I didn’t have space in my brain for what happened next.
“What’s so important?” I said to Trina when I got to the front of the bus.
“Come here,” she said and motioned for me to follow her. As my feet hit the pavement I turned around and almost jumped right out of my skin.
Jimmy and Bullseye were with three other people, real live people. There was a black woman, who was around my mom’s age, a twenty- something guy with an eye patch who probably came from the university, and an Asian girl who wasn’t much older than Trina and I were.
The Asian girl took one look at me and plastered a big smile on her face. “You’re Tripp Light.”
“I . . . um . . . I . . .”
“So it’s true.” said the guy with the eye patch, also grinning like he had just eaten a special brownie, and nodding his head like he was grooving out to that same invisible tune that only he and Jimmy could hear.
I had nothing.
I looked at Trina who looked at me with that unspoken expression she always plastered on her face when she was truly stumped.
The black woman put her hands on her hips and smiled, too.
“Tripp Light,” she said along with that other word that only old people use when they hear my name. “Fantastic.”
35
THE BLACK LADY was Professor Constance Billings. I don’t mean to sound weird or anything, because she was like mom-old, but she was really pretty. She looked like someone who spent her days in Hollywood making movies instead of someone who spent her days in front of a classroom.
I think I might have stared at her a little too long.
Yeah, I know. Creepy much? Blame it on sixteen-year-old hormones.
The Asian girl was Niki Flowers. She was from East Meadowfield, two towns to the right of Littleham. Niki was seventeen, one year older than Trina and I were. She had been visiting her older sister with her parents at the University when everything happened. While Niki’s parents had been fussing over her sister’s dorm room, she had split to go over to the University mall with plans to meet them for dinner at this restaurant called Hanger Nine.
Hanger Nine had a huge plastic plane stuck in its roof as a goof. Supposedly the building that used to be there had been destroyed by a plane crash. I had eaten at Hanger Nine with my parents. It was kind of cool and kind of lame at the same time.
Sort of like Chuck Peterson’s Hummer.
The guy with the eye-patch was Manny Cruz. He made Jimmy’s brand of chill seem positively manic. Manny was so laid back that he was the poster child for the exact right kind of person to survive something like a zombie apocalypse. Not that he thought it was cool, or anything morbid like that.
I just think nothing much fazed him.
Manny was from the University, too. He had been studying in his dorm when everything went south. He managed to get out of the building and run in the exact right direction to get away.
What was sort of sad about Manny was that he was from Puerto Rico. Like Prianka, he had no way of knowing if his family was still alive or not. He probably would never know.
Oh, and he didn’t wear the eyepatch because of some weird pirate fetish. He was blind in one eye and thought that the patch was better- looking than what was underneath.
If I had a milky eye, I’d be wearing an eye patch, too.
Professor Billings seemed to be in charge of their little gang and with good reason. Niki was kind of shell-shocked from running and hiding and running again, and mellow Manny was just too chill. Someone had to be in charge and since Professor Billings was the adult, she was it.
After I got over my shock of finding three more survivors, I noticed the piece of paper in the professor’s hand.
“I see you got the memo,” I said to her as I lifted my chin toward the photograph that had probably been making the rounds to every survivor the soldiers encountered.
“It’s a cute picture,” Niki whispered and blushed.
“We’ve had the picture for a few days,” Manny told us. “A little soldier lady who looked like a man and some other dudes gave it to us and said that if we found you to bring you to some place called . . . um . . . uh . . .”
“Black Point Fort,” said Professor Billings.
“Crap
, that’s it,” Manny said.
“Language, Manuel,” the professor scolded.
“Mierda,” he said. “Sorry.”
The professor grinned. “I’ll allow it.”
Jimmy leaned forward in his wheelchair. “So what happened?” he asked.
“Well, we didn’t exactly expect the soldiers to help us,” Professor Billings said. “They didn’t seem like they were in a helping mood.”
“You got that right,” muttered Trina.
Niki looked at Trina with sad eyes. “All they cared about was you and your brother. They didn’t tell us anything else, like what caused all of this, or if our families were okay, or anything.”
Trina and I shared another uncomfortable, knowing glance. The three of them, for various unspoken and incredibly awful reasons, weren’t the sort of people that Diana and the Necropoxy brigade were looking for. Just like Cheryl the It didn’t help overweight Trudy Aiken, and the soldiers didn’t want Dorcas because she was older than a mummy, no one was clamoring to help a middle-aged black woman, an Asian girl, and a Puerto Rican dude with a bum eye.
I felt sick.
“That’s not the first time we heard about you, though,” added Manny.
“What do you mean?” I said. “What have you heard?”
The professor chuckled. “It seems like there are two soldiers up in Cummington on a llama farm who are scared silly of you and your group. They’re convinced that you, your sister and your friends are all devil worshippers and that your leader is a small child with a giant black dog.”
“Oh,” I said with my mouth turning small and round. I suppose the Luke and Cal sideshow would have been crap-your-pants worthy if it actually had been real.
“Yeah, well,” said Trina. “Those two soldiers aren’t the brightest.”
Jimmy smiled and folded his hands together. “But we do have a small child and a big black dog,” he said. “And another dog who’s really fast who doesn’t like guns all that much.”
I cleared my throat. “And we also have a talking crow.”
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