Crap. I had no idea who this person was, but I had my suspicions. I tensed. Were we going to have to jump him? There were nine of us, two dogs and a crow. That made twelve against one, not counting Poopy Puppy. There was nobody else around. We could take him. Hell, Jimmy could probably take him by himself.
All I knew was that he was wearing enemy colors and he was alone. Chasing that thought was another, more important one that jumped out and smacked me in the head.
Where were my mom and dad? Where was Aunt Ella?
Where was everybody else?
38
“DON’T GET YOUR panties in a wad,” I heard another voice say. Thankfully the second voice was a familiar one.
Dorcas emerged out of the gloom, none the worse for wear. Most eighty-somethings wouldn’t have been able to hack getting shot at by soldiers, let alone being left behind to traverse the distance between Swifty’s and Apple without anything but their wits to guide them.
I had a suspicion that nothing could slow Dorcas down. She was going to live forever.
Still, it took every ounce of self-restraint for me not to run up to her and give her a huge hug like I did when we found her alive in Hollowton. I guess spending a whole day thinking that Diana’s people had murdered her was still fresh in my mind. It didn’t matter that I knew it wasn’t the truth. It mattered that I ever had to live through it in the first place.
“Dorcas,” I cried, but still didn’t move. The guy dressed in white was totally wigging me out. Was everything we did for nothing? Did we travel all the way up to the Peace Pagoda, fight off Cheryl the It and the other soldiers for nothing? Did Prianka get shot in the arm for nothing? For all I knew, the pretty doctors were here this whole time, just waiting to pack me and Trina off to the nearest site so we could be drained of blood, or cut apart, or whatever it was they wanted to do to us.
Only then did I realize that the guy dressed all in white wasn’t really wearing doctor scrubs. He was wearing a tee-shirt and white sweatpants. When I looked—when I really looked—I could see there was a tag still hanging from the pocket of the sweats.
Okay—he wasn’t one of the pretty doctors. He was just a reasonably good-looking guy wearing clean clothes he probably lifted from one of the racks.
That still didn’t explain who he was.
And hello? Who wears all white after Labor Day, anyway? This was Western Massachusetts, not the Bahamas.
Dorcas probably sensed my apprehension. “Hey, kid,” she said. “Relax. It’s all good.” Then she actually pulled a cigarette out of her man shirt, popped it in her mouth and lit it.
“Um, you can’t smoke inside a store,” said Niki. Her voice sounded like it was coming out of the mouth of a mouse.
“Says you,” Dorcas croaked. “And I ain’t seen your face before so don’t you go telling me what I can and can’t do. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big girl.”
Niki looked stunned. I didn’t think she knew that little old ladies like Dorcas had an edge to them—or smoked like a chimney. “Um . . . uh . . .” she stammered.
“Ooooh,” Dorcas went on. “I’m in a heap of trouble now. Why don’t you report me?” Dorcas laughed in that sickening, phlegmy way she always did. Then she blew a cloud of exhaust into the air and took another deep drag. This time she actually flicked the edge of her cigarette and let some ash drop to the floor. “And lookee here,” she croaked. “I bet I can’t do that neither.”
Niki literally shrank into the shadows, somewhere between Manny and Professor Billings.
“Seriously, Dorcas,” I said. “That’s sort of gross.”
She took one look at me, stuck her finger up her nose, pulled out a snot and rubbed it on her shirt sleeve. “Lot of things are gross,” she said. “You’ll get used to it.”
“Nice,” said Trina. “Classy.”
“Take that back, girlie, or I’ll give you a what-for.”
I half expected Trina to say something like, ‘Bring it, granny,’ but she focused instead on the other guy, the one dressed in white.
“And who are you?” said Trina.
He took a few steps forward. “Charlie,” said the guy.
Sanjay sidled up to Prianka. “Charlie flew away in a great glass elevator with Willy Wonka,” he whispered. He was right, but this was a different Charlie. Still, some of the tension that was draped over us like a burial shroud seemed to lift.
Charlie got down on one knee in front of Sanjay, just like I did only moments before. “Not Charlie Bucket,” the guy said to him. “But close. I’m Charlie Buckman.”
Okay. So this guy in white was some dude named Charlie Buckman. We were still down a bunch of key players and I was tired. “Where’s everyone else?” I asked. Prianka was okay but she still needed to see my dad.
“They’re fine,” said Dorcas. “Me and Charlie here, we’re just taking the early morning watch, is all. Our group is in camping supplies with Charlie’s group.”
Charlie’s group? Say what?
“Me and my parents,” said Charlie Buckman. “We showed up here yesterday afternoon. Trudy made us dinner and Mrs. Stein gave us tea. Then they set up a tent for us in the camping supplies department. It’s been a rough couple of weeks, you know?”
He was so preaching to the choir. I could tell him all about having a rough couple of weeks. I bet he didn’t have to fight off poxers and soldiers and a crazy lady who kidnapped his parents and performed experiments on his mother.
I bet he didn’t have to . . .
His parents.
His parents?
“You and your parents,” I said flatly. “You and your . . . biological parents?”
He stared at my slack-jawed face. “You know, I’ve been getting that question a lot since we got here. I guess that probably explains this.”
Charlie stood up and faced the rest of us. Then he handed me his flashlight, took a step back, and rolled up the bottom of his tee-shirt. He had a bandage wrapped around his middle. “This was pretty bad until your dad fixed me up,” he said. “One of those poxer things really took a bite out of me.”
Prianka gasped. So did Trina.
Charlie rolled his shirt back down. “The funny thing is, after the bite I didn’t change. Not even a little.”
39
WHILE WE WERE gone, everyone had moved out of the breakroom in favor of more space. They ended up in the camping department.
Dorcas and Charlie led us to the other side of the store, near the back wall, where all the adults had set up tents on a carpet of fake grass. When I say ‘us,’ I mean me and Prianka. Everyone else headed off to gardening where they could spread out among the dying plants and get some well-needed rest.
I needed rest, too, but it was more important that my dad look at Prianka’s arm.
“Your parents are angry,” said Charlie.
“Tell me something I don’t know.” I grimaced as we followed Dorcas down one of the aisles that sold drug store things like toothpaste and soap. I absentmindedly plucked a stick of roll-on deodorant from one of the shelves, popped the cap, lifted my shirt, and tried to hide the fact that I smelled a little too much like a dirty teenager.
“They seem like good people,” Charlie said.
“They are good people,” I told him.
“That’s why we left them behind,” added Prianka. She still had one hand cupped under her elbow, holding it up. “We didn’t want to put them in danger.”
Charlie frowned. “That didn’t work out too well for you,” he said.
“She’ll be fine,” I said, but I didn’t really know if that was true or not. I knew diddly about getting shot, other than that it was the goal to shoot the enemy in almost every one of my video games that I was never going to play again. As far as I was concerned, I could go the rest of my life never ha
ving to see another gun. Like Sanjay said back at the Peace Pagoda, ‘Guns do kill people. People kill people, too.’
“I bet they won’t stay mad for long, now that you’re back,” Charlie said.
“If I survive the next hour, we’ll know for sure.”
“I don’t know, kid,” croaked Dorcas. “The doc’s been spending a lot of time beating up a punching bag over in the sports section.”
“You’re not helping, old lady,” I said to her in the most endearing way possible.
“Geez, kid. You say the sweetest things.”
Two more aisles and we came upon the camping section. It had been rearranged with picnic tables, tents and some battery-operated lanterns. As expected, everyone was sleeping inside the tents except for one lone shadow sitting at one of the tables.
It was my dad. He had his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.
“Hey, Doc,” whispered Dorcas. “You lose this?”
She pushed me forward into the glow of the lanterns. He pulled his head from his hands and just stared at me. His face didn’t move. He was wearing such a sad expression that he didn’t even look like my dad at all.
“I’m okay,” I blurted out. His face didn’t change. “Trina’s fine, too.”
“But I’m not,” said Prianka. She stepped forward. “I got grazed by a bullet. It was nobody’s fault. It just happened.”
Okay, that was a total lie. It was my fault. Everything was my fault.
“I . . .” I began.
“Shut up, Tripp,” my father snapped at me like he was channeling Trina on one of her worst days. He stood up, brushed past me and went to Prianka.
I wanted to say something. I’m not sure what, but I wanted to say something that would diffuse the tension that was gumming up the space between me and my father. It’s not like I’d always been a saint, because I hadn’t. Still, my dad snapping at me like that? Dr. Douglas Light wasn’t known for emotional outbursts unless they were truly, seriously warranted. I could probably count the times on one hand that he had exploded.
As he led Prianka away from me, Dorcas put one hand on my shoulder to stop me from following. “He’ll be fine,” she whispered.
As for me, I didn’t want to be there anymore. I didn’t want to be anywhere where I could hurt another person. I had done enough of that to last a lifetime. I turned and walked back into the dark, my eyes adjusting to the dim corridors filled with useless bath mats and tacky Halloween decorations like plastic pumpkins and straw scarecrows dressed in overalls.
“Tripp.” I heard a voice following after me. It was Charlie Buckman with the white teeth and the bite mark around his middle that didn’t turn him into a monster.
“What?”
“Your dad,” he said. “He’s just scared.”
“I guess.” I kept walking, and Charlie kept following me.
“He just wants to keep you safe. I get it. I have my own father sleeping in one of those tents, probably having nightmares right now because he thinks he has a family to protect.”
I don’t know why but I didn’t want to talk to Charlie. At that moment I didn’t care that his parents were in one of the tents near my parents. I didn’t even care that he got bit and didn’t turn.
In an epically immature moment, I turned into someone roughly eight years old and said, “So?”
Charlie caught up to me and grabbed my arm.
“Hey,” he said. “We’re all in this together, you know?
I wrenched my arm away from his grasp. “Too bad for you,” I snapped at him then pointed as his abdomen where a poxer had bit him, but he didn’t change. “Too bad that you get to be immune like me and my sister and carry the weight of the world on your shoulders like we’ve had to do since everyone died.”
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“Life’s not fair,” I spat out for no other reason than that I was bone-tired and wanted to be alone.
“Fair?” he hissed at me, not in a scary way but in a horrible, sad way. “Do you want to talk about what’s fair? Is it fair that my wife is gone, too? Is it fair that I lost the one person in the world who I loved who loved me back? Is it fair that I had to pour gasoline on her . . . and . . . and . . .” Charlie’s voice cracked.
That’s all it took.
I immediately started crying.
I don’t know what reached inside my head and turned the waterworks on, but whatever it was, tears began pouring out of my face like I was four-year-old Krystal after Trudy Aiken almost took a bite out of her chubby little arm.
Every bit of the horror that I had lived through since leaving Littleham came out of me in a flood. I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to.
I fell to my knees and just sat there, letting it all come out and not caring that Charlie was watching me or not. I didn’t even care when he crouched down next to me and put his hand on my back to try and comfort me.
I didn’t care about anything.
40
AFTER I STOPPED my little meltdown, which was thankfully over in just under thirty seconds, Charlie and I sat on the floor in the dark and talked.
“I killed my wife,” he said, which was such a weird thing to hear coming out of someone’s mouth, yet totally normal these days.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. I wasn’t sure if I was saying I was sorry because I had just been a total dick to him, or because of what he told me. “I killed my uncle,” I said.
“I killed a lot of other people, too,” whispered Charlie. He sat with his back against a pile of towels, facing me. I sat with my back against a wicker laundry basket with my legs stretched out. I was exhausted, but I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted Prianka to be okay and my dad not to be mad at me for trying to fix everything.
“Welcome to our new world,” I snorted and stared at my hands. After a moment, I said, “Where did you get the picture of me and Trina?”
He had folded our photograph into his front pocket. He reached in for the copy, pulled it out and handed it to me. “My mother got the photograph,” Charlie said. “I had left my parents to look for some food. While I was gone, a helicopter came with soldiers looking for you and your sister. They weren’t interested in my parents and thankfully, my parents didn’t tell them about me.”
“You’re lucky,” I said. “The people the soldiers work for would have had a field day with you.”
Charlie shrugged. I felt bad for him. I had no way of knowing what it was like to lose a wife. I was just a kid. Still, if Prianka had turned into a poxer and I had to torch her, I would have counted that as one of the worst moments of my life, and I would carry the memory with me for a long time.
“How did you get bit?” I asked him.
He reached over and rubbed his side. “A kid,” he said. “She came out of nowhere. I was in a convenience store sorting through the canned goods, and then she was right there.”
“That sucks,” I said.
“I thought I was done for. I thought I was going to turn into a zombie and my parents would never know what happened to me. What’s worse, I knew my dad couldn’t help but come looking for me. He would have found me dead, or living dead, and that would have been bad.”
I took a deep breath. A memory I had back at Swifty’s after Trudy had almost taken Krystal’s arm off came back to me. I had asked her what it felt like when she almost turned.
“Did you feel it in you?” I said. “The Necropoxy?”
Charlie shook his head. “I didn’t feel a thing. I mean I sure felt that little monster’s teeth in me but that’s it. Trust me, I was as surprised as you that I didn’t turn. Life can be funny, you know?”
I shrugged. “I’m not laughing much these days.”
Charlie Buckman and I sat on the floor of Walmart for a long time. He told me about how
he and his parents had pretty much stayed in their home over in Hadley since the outbreak. Hadley was a rural town on the other side of the University, about twenty miles away. When Charlie came back home with a bite mark in his side, his parents flipped and came to the conclusion that they had to go find medical help. To them, medical help meant heading off towards Boston.
“You didn’t make it too far,” I said.
“Nope,” he smiled. “Just to a Walmart in Apple, Massachusetts. Go figure we’d find a doctor and a whole bunch of other people waiting inside.”
“You’re lucky.”
“We’re all lucky,” he said then took a deep breath. He looked down the aisle for a long time. Finally, he turned to me and slowly nodded his head. “We have to stop them, you know?”
“Stop who? The soldiers? Diana? I don’t know about you, but I’m sixteen. I don’t . . . I wouldn’t know the first thing about stopping them. Besides, we don’t have helicopters. We don’t have sites all over the place.”
Charlie shrugged. “That’s true,” he said. “But you know what? I’ve heard this story floating around. It’s about a sixteen-year-old who saved his parents from being held prisoner with a lot of other people. That sixteen-year-old has successfully led those people this far.”
I rolled my eyes.
He smiled. “Scratch that. I know three sixteen-year-olds, a twelve- year-old, a kid with autism, another in a wheelchair, two dogs and a talking crow, who have been beating the odds at every turn.”
“We’re just lucky is all.”
“Luck is for rabbit’s feet,” he said. “I think you guys are all pretty smart. When I was sixteen, I would have curled in a ball and let myself get eaten by zombies.”
I sighed. “No one knows what they’re going to do until they’re backed into a corner.”
“Okay,” said Charlie. “The thing is, I think we’re backed into a corner. Either we hightail it out of this part of the world as quickly as we can, or we stay and fight.”
Dead End Page 16
