by Лорен Оливер
“Why north?” Pike breaks in angrily.
Julian barely misses a beat. “Or south, whichever. Hike for half a day, look for the highway. If it isn’t there, hike in the other direction. At least we’ll get more of a sense of the terrain. We can help orient the group.”
“We?” Raven parrots.
Julian looks at her. “I want to volunteer,” he says.
“It’s not safe,” I burst out, climbing to my feet. “There are Scavengers patrolling—maybe regulators, too. We need to stick together. Otherwise we’re easy prey.”
“She’s right,” Raven says, turning back to Julian. “It isn’t safe.”
“I’ve dealt with Scavengers before,” Julian argues.
“And almost died,” I fire back.
He smiles. “I didn’t, though.”
“I’ll go with him.” Tack spits a thick wad of tobacco onto the ground and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. I glare at him. He ignores me. He has made no secret of the fact that he thinks it was a mistake to have rescued Julian and a liability to have him with us. “You know how to shoot a gun?”
“No,” I say. “He doesn’t.” Now everyone’s looking at me, but I don’t care. I don’t know what Julian’s trying to prove, but I don’t like it.
“I can handle a gun,” Julian lies quickly.
Tack nods. “All right, then.” He extracts another bit of tobacco from a pouch he wears around his neck and balls it into his mouth. “Let me unload some of my pack. We’ll leave in half an hour.”
“Okay, everyone.” Raven raises her arms in a gesture of resignation. “We might as well camp here.”
The group, as one, begins to shed packs and shake supplies out on the ground, like a single animal molting its skin. I grab Julian’s arm and draw him away from everybody else.
“What was that about?” I’m struggling to keep my voice down. I can see Alex watching us. He looks amused. I wish I had something to throw at him.
I take Julian and swivel him around, so he blocks Alex from my view.
“What do you mean?” He shoves his hands in his pockets.
“Don’t play dumb,” I say. “You shouldn’t have volunteered to scout. This isn’t a joke, Julian. We’re in the middle of a war.”
“I don’t think it’s a joke.” His calmness is infuriating. “I know better than anyone else what the other side is capable of, remember?”
I look away, biting my lip. He has a point. If anyone knows about the tactics of the zombies, it’s Julian Fineman.
“You still don’t know the Wilds,” I insist. “And Tack won’t protect you. If you get attacked—if anything happens, and it’s a question of you or the rest of us—he’ll leave you. He won’t endanger the group.”
“Lena.” Julian puts his hands on my shoulders and forces me to look at him. “Nothing’s going to happen, okay?”
“You don’t know that,” I say. I know I’m overreacting, but I can’t help it. For some reason, I feel like crying. I think of the quietness of Julian’s voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.
I love you, Julian. But the words don’t come.
“The others don’t trust me,” Julian says. I open my mouth to protest, but he cuts me off. “Don’t try and deny it. You know it’s true.”
I don’t contradict him. “So what? You need to prove yourself?”
He sighs and rubs his eyes. “I chose to make my place here, Lena. I chose to make my place with you. Now I have to earn it. It’s not about proving myself. But like you said, there’s a war on. I don’t want to sit on the sidelines.” He leans forward and kisses my forehead once. He still hesitates for just a fraction of a second before he kisses me, as though he has to shake out that old fear, the terror of touch and contamination. “Why are you so upset about this? Nothing will happen.”
I’m scared, I want to say. I have a bad feeling. I love you and don’t want you to get hurt. But again, it’s as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears and past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.
“We’ll be back in a few hours,” Julian says, and cups my chin briefly. “You’ll see.”
But they aren’t back by dinnertime, and they aren’t back by the time we rake dirt over the fire, extinguishing it for the night. It’s a liability now, and even though we’ll be colder, and Julian and Tack will have trouble finding their way to us without it, Raven is insistent.
I volunteer to stay up and stand watch. I’m too anxious to sleep. Raven gives me an extra coat from our store of clothing. The nights are still edged with a hard chill.
A few hundred feet from the camp is a slight incline, and an old cement wall, still imprinted with ghostly loops of graffiti, that will shield me from the wind. I huddle up with my back against the stone, cupping the mug of hot water Raven boiled for me earlier to help warm my fingers. My gloves were lost, or stolen, somewhere between the New York homestead and here, and now I have to do without.
The moon rises and touches the camp—the slumbering forms, the domed tents and makeshift shelters—with a fine white sheen. In the distance, a water tower, still intact, hovers over the trees like a steel insect, perched on long, spindly legs. The sky is clear and cloudless, and thousands of stars float out of the darkness. An owl hoots, a hollow, mournful sound that echoes through the woods. From even this short distance, the camp looks peaceful, wrapped up in its white haze, surrounded by the splintered wrecks of old houses: roofs collapsed into the ground, a swing set, overturned, its plastic slide still protruding from the dirt.
After two hours, I’m yawning so much my jaw aches, and my whole body feels as though it has been filled with wet sand. I lean my head back against the wall, struggling to keep my eyes open. The stars above me blur together . . . they became one beam of light—sunshine—Hana is stepping out of the sunshine, leaves in her hair, saying, “Wasn’t it a funny joke? I was never planning to get cured, you know. . . ” Her eyes are locked on mine, and as she steps forward, I see she’s about to put her foot in a trap. I try to warn her, but—
Snap. I jolt awake, heart throbbing in my throat, and quickly, as quietly as possible, move into a crouch. The air is still again, but I know I didn’t imagine or dream the sound: the sound of a twig snapping.
The sound of a footstep.
Let it be Julian, I think. Let it be Tack.
I scan the camp and see a shadow moving between the tents. I tense up and reach forward, ever so slowly, easing the rifle into my hands. My fingers are swollen with cold, and clumsy. The gun feels heavier than it did earlier.
The figure steps into a patch of moonlight, and I exhale. It’s just Coral. Her skin shines a vivid white in the moonlight, and she is wearing an oversized sweatshirt that I recognize as belonging to Alex. My stomach clenches. I bring the rifle up to my shoulder, swing the muzzle toward her, think: Bang.
I bring the gun down quickly, ashamed.
My former people were not totally wrong. Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison. And if Alex no longer loves me, I can’t bear to think that he might love somebody else.
Coral disappears into the woods, probably to pee. My legs are cramping, so I straighten up. I’m too tired to stand guard any longer. I’ll go down and wake up Raven, who volunteered to replace me.
Snap. Another footstep, this one closer and on the east side of the camp. Coral went north. Instantly, I’m on alert again.
Then I see him: He inches slowly forward, gun raised, emerging from behind a thick copse of evergreens. I can tell right away he’s not a Scavenger. His posture is too perfect, his gun too pristine, his clothing well-fitted.
My heart stops. A regulator. Must be. And that means the Wilds really have been breached. Despite all the evidence, a part of me has been hoping it wasn’t true.
For a second everything gets silent, and then frighteningly loud, as the blood rushes to my head, pounding in my ears, and the night seems to light up wi
th frightening hoots and screams, alien and wild, animals prowling the dark. My palms are sweating as I bring the gun once more to my shoulder. My throat is dry. I track the regulator as he moves closer to the camp. I put my finger on the trigger. Panic is building in my chest. I don’t know whether to shoot. I’ve never shot anything from this distance. I’ve never shot a person. I don’t even know that I could.
Shit, shit, shit, shit. I wish Tack were here.
Shit.
What would Raven do?
He reaches the edge of the camp. He lowers his gun, and I move my finger off the trigger. Maybe he’s just a scout. Maybe he’s supposed to report back. That will give us time to move, to clear out, to prepare. Maybe we’ll be okay.
Then Coral reemerges from the woods.
For a split second she stands there, frozen stiff and white as though framed in a photographer’s flash. For a split second, he doesn’t move either.
Then she gasps, and he swings his gun toward her, and without thinking or planning on it, my finger finds the trigger again and pulls. The regulator’s knee goes and he cries out, sinking to the ground.
Then everything is chaos.
The kick of the rifle knocks me backward, and I stumble, trying to keep my balance. A jagged tooth of rock bites sharply into my back, and pain shoots from my ribs to my shoulder. There are more gunshots—one, two—and then shouting. I sprint down toward the camp. In less than a minute, it has unfolded, opened, turned into a swarm of people and voices.
The regulator is lying facedown in the dirt, arms and legs splayed. A pool of blood extends like a dark shadow around him. Dani is standing near him with her handgun out. She must have been the one to kill him.
Coral has her arms wrapped around her waist, looking shocked and slightly guilty, as though she somehow summoned the regulator to her. She is uninjured, which is a relief. I’m glad that my instincts were to save her. I think about centering her in my crosshairs earlier, and feel another pulse of shame. This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.
Hatred, too, the zombies warned me about.
Pike, Hunter, and Lu are all talking at the same time. The rest of our group huddles in a semicircle around them, pale and frightened-looking in the moonlight, their eyes hollows, like resurrected ghosts.
Only Alex isn’t standing. He’s squatting, quickly and methodically repacking his backpack.
“All right.” Raven speaks quietly, but the urgency there commands our attention. “Let’s look at the facts. We have a dead regulator on our hands.”
Someone whimpers.
“What are we doing?” Gordo breaks in. His face is wild with panic. “We have to go.”
“Go where?” Raven demands. “We don’t know where they are, what direction they’re coming from. We could be running straight into a trap.”
“Shhh.” Dani hushes us sharply. For a second there is total stillness, except for the low moan of wind through the trees and an owl calling. Then we hear it: from the south, the distant echo of voices.
“I say we stay and fight,” Pike says. “This is our territory.”
“We don’t fight unless we have to,” Raven says, turning on him. “We don’t know how many regulators there are, or what kind of weapons they have. They’re better fed and stronger than we are.”
“I’m sick of running,” Pike fires back.
“We’re not running,” she says calmly. She turns back to the rest of the group. “We’re going to divide. Spread out around the camp. Hide. Some of us can head down to the old riverbed. I’ll be watching from the hill. Rocks, bushes, whatever looks like it will conceal you—use it. Climb a tree, for shit’s sake. Just stay out of sight.” She looks to each of us in turn. Pike stubbornly refuses to meet her gaze.
“Take your guns, knives—anything you have. But remember, we don’t fight unless we have to. Don’t do anything until my signal, okay? Nobody moves. Nobody breathes, coughs, sneezes, or farts. Is that clear?”
Pike spits on the ground. No one speaks.
“All right,” Raven says. “Let’s go.”
The group breaks up, quickly and wordlessly. People blur past me and become shadows; the shadows fold themselves into the dark. I push my way to Raven, who has knelt down beside the dead regulator and is checking him for weapons, money, whatever might be of use.
“Raven.” Her name catches in my throat. “Do you think—?”
“They’ll be fine,” she says without looking up. She knows I was going to ask about Julian and Tack. “Now get out of here.”
I move through the camp at a jog, find my backpack heaped next to several others at the edge of the fire pit. I sling my pack over my right shoulder; next to the rifle, the strap digs painfully into my skin. I grab two of the other packs and swing them onto my left shoulder.
Raven jogs past me. “Time to go, Lena.” She, too, dissipates into the darkness.
I stand up, then notice that someone unpacked the medical supplies last night. If anything happens—if we have to run, and can’t come back—we’ll need those.
I remove one of the backpacks and kneel down.
The regulators are getting closer. I can pick out individual voices now, individual words. I am suddenly aware that the camp has been totally cleared out. I’m the only one left.
I unzip the backpack. My hands are shaking. I wrestle a sweatshirt out of the backpack, begin stuffing it instead with Band-Aids and bacitracin.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing?” It’s Alex. He gets a hand under my arm and hauls me to my feet. I just manage to zip up the backpack. “Come on.”
I try to wrench my arm away, but he keeps a firm grip on me, practically dragging me into the woods, away from the camp. I flash back to the raid night in Portland when Alex led me like this through a black maze of rooms; when we huddled together on the piss-smelling floor of a storage shed and he gently wrapped my wounded leg, his hands soft and strong and strange on my skin.
He kissed me that night.
I push the memory away.
We plunge down a steep embankment, sinking through a rotten layer of loam and damp leaves, toward a jutting lip of land that forms a natural cave, a hollowed-out spot in the hillside. Alex pilots me into a crouch and practically pushes me into the small, dark space.
“Watch it.” Pike is there too: a few glistening teeth, a bit of solid darkness. He shifts slightly to accommodate us. Alex slides beside me, knees drawn to his chest.
The tents are no more than fifty feet away from us, up the hill. I say a silent prayer that the regulators will think we’ve run, and not waste their time searching.
The waiting is agony. The voices from the woods have dropped away. The regulators must be moving slowly now, stalking us, drawing closer. Maybe they’re even in the camp, threading their way past the tents: deadly, silent shadows.
The space is too narrow, the darkness intolerable. The idea comes to me, suddenly, that we are wedged in a coffin.
Alex shifts next to me. The back of his hand brushes up against my arm. My throat goes dry. His breathing is quicker than usual. I go stiff, perfectly rigid, until he withdraws his hand. It must have been an accident.
Another agonizing stretch of silence. Pike mutters, “This is stupid.”
“Shhh.” Alex hushes him sharply.
“Sitting here like rats in a trap . . .”
“I swear, Pike . . .”
“Both of you be quiet,” I whisper fiercely. We lapse into silence again. After a few more seconds, someone shouts. Alex tenses up. Pike eases his rifle off his shoulder, jabbing me in the side with his elbow. I bite back a cry.
“They’ve cleared out.” The voice floats down to us from the camp. So they’ve arrived. I guess now that they’ve found the tents empty, they don’t think they need to be quiet anymore. I wonder what their plan was: surround us, mow us down while we slept.
&n
bsp; I wonder how many there are.
“Damn. You were right about the shots we heard. It’s Don.”
“Dead?”
“Yup.”
There’s a faint rustling sound, as though someone is kicking through the tents. “Look at how they live out here. Packed together. Mucking around in the dirt. Animals.”
“Careful. It’s all contaminated.”
So far, I’ve counted six voices.
“It smells, doesn’t it? I can smell them. Shit.”
“Breathe through your mouth.”
“Bastards,” Pike mutters.
“Shhh,” I say reflexively, even though anger has gripped me, too, alongside the fear. I hate them. I hate every single one of them, for thinking that they are better than us.
“Where do you think they’re headed?”
“Wherever it is, they can’t have gone far.”
Seven distinct voices in all. Maybe eight. It’s hard to tell. And we are about two dozen. Still, as Raven said, it’s impossible to know what kind of weapons they’re carrying, whether there are reinforcements waiting nearby.
“Let’s wrap it up here, then. Chris?”
“Got it.”
My thighs have started to cramp. I ease my weight backward to get some relief, pressing up against Alex. He doesn’t pull away. Once again, his hand brushes my arm, and I’m not sure if it’s accidental, or a gesture of reassurance. For a second—despite everything else—my insides go white and electric, and Pike and the regulators and the cold zoom away, and there is only Alex’s shoulder against my shoulder, and his ribs expanding and contracting against mine, and the rough warmth of his fingers.
The air smells like gasoline.
The air smells like fire.
I jolt into awareness. Gasoline. Fire. Burning. They’re burning our things. Now the air is popping and crackling. The regulators’ voices are muffled behind the noise. Ribbons of smoke stream down over the hillside, float into our view, writhing like airborne snakes.
