by Astor Penn
“If it means I can spare you from something, I’ll do it,” she says. “Then we leave, and we don’t talk about it ever again.”
I tug at her hand in warning, then attempt to lift myself off the ground. I curse, my injured side sagging in exhaustion. Her hands slide under my arms and help me to my feet, then I curl my body around her shorter height. I’m half lying on top of her back, its warmth seeping into my chest and filling me with both hope and dread.
“No, I’ll do it. She’s my responsibility now.” Perhaps I lean my face too close to hers; when she turns her head, her breath tickles my cheek. I don’t move away. “Besides, you should stay away from her.”
We move together quietly, slowly back toward our area of the river with Raven supporting half my weight. It’s strange, watching the last true day of summer before the fall comes, then winter, and when winter freezes over it will kill everything in its fury and force, so when spring comes, only the purest life will bud. We may be all gone in a few months; that’s all it took for our population to drop off to the smallest fraction, but right now I realize that life, in some form, will go on, even if we ourselves do not. Today I am hopeful. Today I am not alone.
“But you have used that gun, haven’t you?” I ask. I’m almost positive. My thoughts spring from place to place—trying so hard not to think of the task ahead—but all I picture is that gun.
I feel her pause, one foot poised to step forward, my weight shifting to rest heavily against her back. The moment breaks, and she keeps walking. She takes her time answering. I’m thinking that maybe she shot a rabbit or some kind of animal to eat, even though the handgun isn’t exactly a hunting weapon.
“There were others in these woods with us.”
“I know.” I push down my feelings of disappointment and anger. “We saw them the day after we all escaped the town.” Who did she shoot? What happened? Raven has killer instincts, but not the kind that would drive her to kill in cold blood. Her hand was forced to some extent.
“Did they see you?” she asks after a short pause. I shake my head so she can feel it against the blade of her shoulder. “Good.”
We keep walking. She offers nothing else. “Did someone threaten you? Get too close?” The likelihood of there being more infected villagers is high; maybe Raven just happened to find one.
“They didn’t get a chance to threaten me. They threatened you, and that was enough.”
Shock, incredulousness, and heartache wrap around me. “What do you mean?”
She stops walking, wrapping her arm around me to stabilize my weight before turning to face me. When her hands scorch my bare skin and her eyes burn with possession, I know from this moment on, she’ll be my person. The only one I can have. The only one I’ll need. The best friend I never had, and the one I can’t afford to have now. Her next words do nothing to contradict this.
“I found you two nights ago. The night that Poppy must have fallen ill. I kept my distance because I had to, but I stayed and watched out for you. When you didn’t get sick, I thought maybe it was a miracle. Maybe you were my reward for what I had to do to get here.”
“You found us and just stood by watching?” Anger stirs in the bottom of my empty stomach. “What were you going to do? Watch us die and then leave us to rot?”
“What would you have done? What good would it have been for me to sit by your side and get sick?”
Fools rush in, I think. I know she’s right, but it still stings. This is my person. She is a lifeline.
“You’re here now.” I lean heavily in her arms.
“Yes. I watched you. I saw you taking care of her, and yet you never showed any symptoms.” She pauses. “I didn’t plan on showing myself to you quite yet. You still could get sick.”
I hear it in her voice: the resignation. The thought that this could be the last active choice she ever made. She made it for me.
“Thank you.” My eyes sting, and this time I don’t mind it. I let the tears fall, only half ashamed to cry in front of her. “Thank you for coming back.”
Silently, she wipes away my tears without any sign or look of indignation. I can’t imagine Raven tolerates tears usually, not from herself or anyone else.
“I made my choice. We all do.” Slowly, she reaches a hand to touch my hair. Slides her long fingers all down and through it. She twists the end of it around her finger. “There was a couple in the woods with us. They were watching you too. Mostly they were watching your supplies.”
When she looks at me, I can see her softness, like an underbelly. Almost intimate. A care or concern for me. I wonder how many people Raven cared for before me, wonder if there were many or few. I am certain I am the only one she’s cared for since the beginning of the end.
“I made a choice then too. They didn’t know that I was there. I ambushed them before they could ambush you. They put up more of a fight than I expected, but I killed the woman with a clean shot. The man might still be alive. I’m not sure. I got him around an artery with the wire, so he was bleeding out when he ran for it.”
That’s where all the cuts are from, then.
“You let him go?” I ask incredulously, not because I’m upset she let him live. No, I’m quite glad she didn’t kill him, but I’m surprised. He’s a loose string now, and it strikes me as odd that Raven let such a thing exist. Of course, it begs the question why she didn’t just shoot him too. Was she saving the bullet? She had to get close enough to use the wire, which means he probably got a jump on her.
Suddenly, I lean away from her, realizing how much weight I’m putting on her slighter body. I scan her for visible injuries, but I don’t see any.
“Are you all right?” She raises an eyebrow at the question. “He didn’t hurt you?”
Her face darkens. Suddenly, I don’t feel so safe with her hands still holding me. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” She wouldn’t be giving murderous looks unless the man did something serious.
“I said I’m fine, Brie.” She turns away, at first I think to physically put an end to the conversation, but I realize she’s offering her back again as a crutch. Gentler this time, with less of my burdensome weight, I lean against her, and we walk on. It’s mostly an excuse to be near another person. I have a human connection for the first time in months.
“Doesn’t it seem quiet to you?” I ask, passing through an area I must have come through given the heavy footprints in the ground, but one I have no recollection of noticing before. I was hysterical, though. Easy enough to forget my surroundings. “Too quiet?”
“You mean given the number of people that fled the town?” Her hair smells like lilac, earthy but still sweet somehow. “Yes. It does. I have my suspicions that most of them ended up shot and killed or shot and arrested.”
“Arrested? Is that what we’re calling it now?”
“What else?” she asks, flexing her back against my weight. Maybe she’s getting tired. Maybe it’s a visceral reaction to the hazmats. “I think at first the suits were startled by the sheer number of us and killed a lot of people in the beginning of the raid. But by the end—and this is just my guess—I think they weren’t shooting to kill. I think they wanted to bring in as many of us alive as possible.”
“My shoulder,” I think aloud. That bullet could have easily been for my heart, but instead it was just a superficial wound by any account for someone with medical access. Here, in the wilds, it can be deadly if infected, but if they meant only to harm me enough to slow me down, then perhaps they were planning to patch me up and let me live. And then do something far more terrible to my body.
“Exactly. On the other side of the river, anyone who made it that far wasn’t being shot in the head or chest. There was a woman, a sprinter really, who flew up behind me and had just passed me when they got her in the leg. She went down hard and couldn’t get back up from what I saw.”
“Do you think—” I’m about to ask her if she thinks Bryant or Aaron might still be alive. Maybe if
they tried to run with us, maybe if they got a little farther, they wouldn’t have killed them. They would have just tranquilized them and took them in to a camp—a camp where anything could be happening inside.
We didn’t see them die; for all I know, they could still be alive.
“There were a lot of gunshots for a small room.” This time, she doesn’t stop to console me, but her voice is consoling, like she didn’t want to be the one to remind me of this.
Deep down, in the decreasing space of infinite hope I used to have, I know Bryant and Aaron are gone. I’ve been waiting for a faintest proof to come along to contradict common sense, but I can’t outsmart it anymore.
“But why bullets? Why not tranqs? Then we wouldn’t have been able to run far.” It would have hurt a lot less too.
“You weren’t supposed to get far with a bullet in you, either.” Raven shifts my weight. She sounds almost proud. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re running low on tranqs.”
“Do you think it’s as bad as they say? I mean, who really is out there gossiping about the camps? Gossip doesn’t even exist anymore. Humanity—neighbors helping neighbors, kids going to school, women in the stores—it doesn’t exist anymore.”
“I think it’s likely that the camps existed from the beginning, but they weren’t well organized. People would have tried to come and go as they wished, and the government in their overzealous righteousness would have locked them in for their own good. And I would like to think these people, these early escapees, wouldn’t be so selfish to keep their information to themselves. That’s what I like to think.”
Her free hand creeps into mine. Bravely, I push off her back so I can walk side by side with her. It hurts the same, walking on my foot, but less, easier now that she’s here.
“What’s really important is that we’re here. The camps don’t matter at all. We’ll be okay.”
There are layers of feelings, and the majority of them right now are pain related to my injuries, but beneath those are the anger and hope I have for this girl. I almost feel like smiling.
“My, you sound hopeful for once.” My ankle wants to roll out from under my weight to escape the pain of walking on it, but I grit my teeth and tease her anyway. What else can I do? “Here I got the impression you were all doom and gloom about our future.”
Her fingers twitch in mine. “I suppose traveling alone makes you meaner. You’ve only got yourself to convince that something is or isn’t right. I’ve been on my own for so long. Long before contamination began.”
“Are you going to tell me your story now?” I can only imagine every scenario—Raven’s young; maybe she was orphaned. Maybe she dropped out of school. Maybe she lived on the streets. She’s got the soft, graceful curves of a desirable body; I shudder and think she might have found desperate means to make money. She could have been or done anything in her past life.
“Tell you what,” she says, smiling a little. “If we make it through fall and winter together, right into a new year, I’ll tell you my story.”
I snort—one of my most annoying habits. “You only say that because you’re sure we won’t make it that long.” There’s nothing humorous about the situation, but we both halfheartedly grin anyway.
“I don’t know. For the first time, I might have faith.”
More painful than my ankle or shoulder or stinging wounds are my smiles; I want to smile. I am happy to be with Raven again. I am so happy to have another chance at any kind of redeeming relationship that I might burst from the light inside that threatens to rekindle.
But as soon as I feel it, it snuffs out. There’s a little girl who needed me, and I failed her. I did it in spectacularly little time too. Poppy will die. I will be the one to do it. I can’t risk Raven getting close to her again. It seems silly when we’re holding hands, because the likelihood is that I’m a carrier by now. Strange that the illness hasn’t taken me. Stranger yet that Raven doesn’t seem to care. She’s made her decision. It’s me, and whether that brings an end or a beginning is irrelevant now.
We’re both fools, but we all make our own choices. She’s right.
“What were you looking for in our bag?” I ask, thinking about Poppy and how I found her earlier. The way our bag had been riffled through.
“What are you talking about?” We’re getting close to the river; I can faintly hear it. Soon we will peek through the trees and the bank where Poppy lies—all alone, I think glumly—will appear.
“You went through our bag. I could tell.” There’s only one item I care about—and I need it back. It’s the last thing I can do for Bryant. For Poppy. “You took Bryant’s bracelet. I wanted to continue to number our days.”
Raven stops walking, dragging me by the hand to a stop. My shoulder feels like it’s been torn off. She narrows her eyes at me. The peace is gone from her face. “Something was missing from the bag?”
“Yes.” What can she mean? She must know. She took it. Who else could have? “The bracelet. With tallies on it.”
“Brie, I didn’t take anything from your bag. I didn’t even look in your bag. I was never even that close to your camp. Why would I be? I knew you’d have to leave her side sooner or later.”
“What are you saying?”
“How long did you leave her alone?”
“I—” Have no idea. It seems like just hours ago that I noticed her fever. “Long enough, I guess.”
“You’re sure you didn’t lose it?”
“Absolutely.”
“And nothing else was missing?”
“I don’t think so.”
We stand quietly close to the river; too close, I think now. We’re both thinking something along the same lines—either Poppy was momentarily well enough to move around and take the bracelet (maybe it’s mostly me hoping this), or someone else found our camp. Someone went through our things and left Poppy alone.
“Someone would have to have a reason to get so close to a sick girl,” Raven says, eyes toward the river. She drops my hand and takes out the gun.
“Someone needed supplies.”
“Or someone was impervious to infection.”
I choke on fear—there is only one type of people who can’t be infected.
Hazmats.
Chapter 10
“RAVEN, LET go!”
“No.”
She’s got me by the hand, dragging me backward even though she hears the pain in my voice when she moves just my good arm. We still have our eyes on the river—or I have my eyes on the river, and she determinedly refuses to look back. I should have never left Poppy alone. This is my fault—everything. I wish I had never met any of them. I wish I had never agreed to stay with them. I wish—
It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing I can do now except see this through.
“Let go, Raven. I’m going to the river. I have to see for myself.” I’m not sure what to expect—will Poppy still be cocooned in a blanket by the water? Will she be gone already?
“Don’t be stupid! She’s gone, Brie! She doesn’t need us anymore! There’s no need for you to do this.”
“We can’t be sure.” For all her hushed whispering that feels like shouting, I feel like the one in control. I keep my voice calm, collected.
“She’s probably dead by now! And all you’d be doing is walking into a trap! What good will it do for her to throw away your life?” She’s clutching my arm so possessively that it almost feels good. I never thought I’d be wanted like this. It’s strange to think about giving it all up.
“Give me the gun. I’m going.”
“No. I won’t let you.” She shakes my shoulders, completely ignoring my injured one. The pain is severe. “It’s pointless! Don’t you see that? Everything is pointless now. We need to run. They could be anywhere, watching us right now.”
“Then you’re right. It’s pointless even to run.” I jerk away painfully from her hands; my skin feels raw, like it’s been ripped off in her claws. I am falling apart, in the most literal way
s. My blood is on her hands already.
“When we all met, you were ready to leave us all to our fates by that road. You didn’t give a shit what happened to us. Now all of a sudden you care enough to throw your life away?”
“I—” Flounder for words. She’s right; I would have left them for dead then.
“Things change,” I finish lamely. I can’t explain it. Poppy, in reality, even in this moment, means little to me. I don’t know much about her, nor do I particularly care to. She was just a young girl, young like me in many ways, and letting her go would be the same as giving up on myself. Going to her now would also be the same as giving up. I’m lost.
“Yes. They do.” Raven looks at me with her wild, fierce, and determined eyes. They’re lit up in a way I haven’t seen since our first meeting. She’s challenging me in a very physical and emotional way. Her eyes light up for me, only me, and I realize how very true this must be when she grabs me again, this time rather gently, and rocks forward onto her toes.
I haven’t been kissed many times before; just a handful of times, really, and by boys I never really liked and by one cold girl, the one I did like. Being kissed was never a priority and it certainly isn’t now, but when it happens, it’s a wild spark in the pit of my stomach, the place that has sat so cold for so long. It’s like being born again, finally shaped to this new, strange world, because within that kiss I feel the will to live just like Raven wants. To run and never look back. Take what we need but keep our ears to the ground and steel by our hearts.
My lips feel cold when she touches down after the kiss. She looks a little shocked, even more so than I feel. I didn’t anticipate the kiss; I’m not sure she did either.
