And then, behind him, the last one, the final star, the one he carried across an infinite sea of white, the one thing he’d found worth dying for, opened fire.
And the bullet connected them when it wedded bone, binding them together as if by a silver cord.
30
THE BOY STOPPED talking the summer of the plague.
His father had disappeared. Their supply of candles ran low and he left one morning to find more. He never came back.
His mother was sick. Her head hurt. She ached all over. Even her teeth hurt, she told him. The nights were the worst. Her fever shot up. Her tummy couldn’t hold anything down. The next morning she would feel better. Maybe I’ll get over it, she said. She refused to go to the hospital. They’d heard stories, terrible stories, about the hospitals and walk-in clinics and emergency shelters.
One by one, families fled the neighborhood. Looting was getting bad and gangs roamed the streets at night. The man who lived two doors down was killed, shot in the head, for refusing to share his family’s drinking water. Sometimes a stranger wandered into the neighborhood and told stories of earthquakes and walls of water five hundred feet high, flooding the land as far east as Las Vegas. Thousands dead. Millions.
When his mother became too weak to get out of bed, the baby became his responsibility. They called him the baby, but he was actually almost three. Don’t bring him near me, his mother told him. He’ll get sick. The baby wasn’t that much work. He slept a lot. He played only a little. He was just a tiny kid; he didn’t know. Sometimes he would ask where his daddy was or what was the matter with Mommy. Most of the time, he asked for food.
They were running out of food. But his mother wouldn’t let him leave. It’s too dangerous. You’ll get lost. You’ll get abducted. You’ll get shot. He would argue with her. He was eight and very big for his age, the target of school-yard taunts and cruel insults since he was six. He was tough. He could handle himself. But she wouldn’t let him go. I can’t keep anything down and you could stand to lose a little weight anyway. She wasn’t being cruel; she was trying to be funny. He didn’t think it was funny, though.
Then they were down to their last can of condensed soup and wrapper of stale crackers. He heated the soup in the fireplace, over a fire he fed with pieces of broken-up furniture and his father’s old hunting magazines. The baby ate all the crackers but said he didn’t want the soup. He wanted mac and cheese. We don’t have mac and cheese. We have soup and crackers, and that’s all we have. The baby cried and rolled on the floor in front of the fireplace, screaming for mac and cheese.
He brought a cup of the soup to his mother. Her fever was bad. The night before, she had started throwing up the lumpy black stuff, which was the lining of her stomach mixed with blood, though he didn’t know that then. She watched him come into the room with dead, expressionless eyes, the fixed stare of the Red Death.
What do you think you’re doing? I can’t eat that. Take it away.
He took it away and ate it standing at the kitchen sink while his baby brother rolled on the floor and screamed and his mother sank deeper into mindlessness, the virus spreading into her brain. In the final hours, his mother would disappear. Her personality, her memory, the who of who she was, surrendering before her body. He ate the lukewarm soup and then licked the bowl clean. He would have to leave in the morning. There was no more food. He would tell his little brother to stay inside no matter what and he wouldn’t come back until he found something for them to eat.
He snuck out the next morning. He looked in abandoned groceries and convenience stores. He looked in looted restaurants and fast-food places. He found Dumpsters reeking of decaying produce and overflowing with torn-open garbage bags where many hands before his had searched. By late afternoon, he’d found only one edible morsel: a small cake about the size of his palm, still in its plastic wrapper, underneath an empty shelf in a gas station. It was getting late; the sun was going down. He decided to go home and return the next morning. Maybe there were more cakes and other kinds of food stashed or lost and he needed to look harder.
When he got home, the front door was ajar. He remembered closing it behind him, so he knew something was wrong. He ran inside. He called for the baby. He went room to room. He looked under beds and inside closets and in the cars that sat cold and useless in the garage. His mother called him into her room. Where had he been? The baby wouldn’t stop crying for him. He asked his mother where the baby was and she snapped at him, Can’t you hear him?
But he heard nothing.
He went outside and yelled the baby’s name. He checked the backyard, walked over to the neighbor’s house and banged on the door. He banged on every door on the street. Nobody answered. Either the people inside were too scared to come out or they were sick or dead or just gone. He walked several blocks one way, then several more the other way, calling his brother’s name until he was hoarse. An old woman tottered out onto her porch and screamed at him to go away; she had a gun. He went home.
The baby was gone. He decided not to tell his mother. What would she do about it? He didn’t want her to think he was bad for leaving. He should have brought him along, but he thought it was safer at home. Your home is the safest place on Earth.
That night, his mother called to him. Where is my baby? He told her the baby was asleep. It was the worst night yet. Bloody tissues wadded on the bed. Bloody tissues crowding the nightstand, littering the floor.
Bring me my baby.
He’s asleep.
I want to see my baby.
You might make him sick.
She cursed him. She told him to go to hell. She spat bloody phlegm at him. He stood in the doorway, hands nervously fiddling in his pockets, and the cake wrapper crackled, the plastic damaged by the heat.
Where have you been?
Looking for food.
She gagged. Don’t say that word!
Watching him with bright red, bloody eyes.
Why were you looking for food? You don’t need any food. You’re the most disgusting piece of pig lard I’ve ever seen. You could live till winter on just your belly fat.
He didn’t say anything. He knew it was the plague talking, not his mother. His mother loved him. When the teasing at school got bad, she went to the principal and said she would file a lawsuit if the bullying didn’t stop.
What’s that noise? What’s that horrible noise?
He told her he didn’t hear anything. She got very angry. She started to curse again and bloody spittle spattered on the headboard.
It’s coming from you. What are you playing with in your pocket?
There was nothing he could do. He had to show her. He pulled out the cake and she screamed for him to put it away and never take it out again. No wonder he was so fat. No wonder his baby brother was starving while he ate cakes and candies and all the mac and cheese. What sort of monster was he that he ate all his baby brother’s mac and cheese?
He tried to defend himself. But every time he started talking, she screamed at him to shut up, shut up, shut UP. His voice made her sick. He made her sick. He did it. He did something to her husband and he did something to his baby brother and he did something to her, made her sick, poisoned her, he was poisoning her.
And every time he tried to speak, she screamed at him. Shut up, shut up, shut UP.
She died two days later.
He wrapped her in a clean sheet and carried her body into the backyard. He doused the body with his father’s charcoal lighter fluid and set it on fire. He burned his mother’s body and all the bedding, too. He waited another week for his baby brother to come home, but he never did. He searched for him—and for food. He found food, but not his brother. He stopped calling for him. He stopped talking altogether. He shut up.
Six weeks later, he was walking down a highway dotted with stalled-out cars and wrecks of cars and trucks and motorcycles when he
saw black smoke in the distance and, after a few minutes, the source of the smoke, a yellow school bus full of children. There were soldiers on the bus and the soldiers asked his name and where he was from and how old he was, and later he remembered nervously stuffing his hands in his pockets and finding the old piece of cake, still in its wrapper.
Pig lard. Live till winter on your belly fat.
What’s the matter, kid? Can’t you talk?
His drill sergeant heard the story of how he came to camp with nothing but the clothes on his back and a piece of cake in his pocket. Before he heard the story, the drill sergeant called him Fatboy. After he heard the story, the drill sergeant renamed him Poundcake.
I like you, Poundcake. I like the fact that you’re a born shooter. I bet you popped out of your momma with a gun in one hand and a doughnut in the other. I like the fact that you got the looks of Elmer Fudd and the goddamned heart of Mufasa. And I especially like the fact that you don’t talk. Nobody knows where you’re from, where you’ve been, what you think, how you feel. Hell, I don’t know and I don’t give a shit, and you shouldn’t, either. You’re a mute-assed, stone-cold killer from the heart of darkness with a heart to match, aren’t you, Private Poundcake?
He wasn’t.
Not yet.
31
THE FIRST THING I planned to do when he woke up was kill him.
If he woke up.
Dumbo wasn’t sure that would happen. “He’s messed up bad,” he told me after we stripped him down and Dumbo got a good look at the damage. Stabbed in one leg, shot in the other, covered in burns, bones broken, shaking with a high fever—though we piled covers on him, Evan still shook so violently that it looked like the bed was vibrating.
“Sepsis,” Dumbo muttered. He noticed me staring dumbly at him and added, “When the infection gets into your bloodstream.”
“What do we do?” I asked.
“Antibiotics.”
“Which we don’t have.”
I sat on the other bed. Sam scooted to the foot, clutching the empty pistol. He refused to give it up. Ben was leaning on the wall, cradling his rifle and eyeing Evan warily, like he was sure any second Evan would bolt out of bed and make another attempt to take us out.
“He didn’t have a choice,” I told Ben. “How could he just stroll up in the dark without somebody shooting him?”
“I want to know where Poundcake and Teacup are,” Ben said through gritted teeth.
Dumbo told him to get off his feet. He’d repacked the bandages, but Ben had lost a lot of blood. Ben waved him away. He pushed himself from the wall, limped to Evan’s bedside, and whacked him across the cheek with the back of his hand.
“Wake up!” Whack. “Wake up, you son of a bitch!”
I shot from the bed and grabbed Ben’s wrist before he could pop Evan again.
“Ben, this won’t—”
“Fine.” He yanked his arm away and lurched toward the door. “I’ll find them myself.”
“Zombie!” Sam called out. He popped up and ran to his side. “I’ll come, too!”
“Cut it out, both of you,” I snapped. “Nobody’s going anywhere until we—”
“What, Cassie?” Ben yelled. “Until we what?”
My mouth opened and no words came out. Sam was tugging on his arm: Come on, Zombie! My five-year-old brother waving around an empty gun; there’s a metaphor for you.
“Ben, listen to me. Are you listening to me? You go out there now—”
“I am going out there now—”
“—and we might lose you, too!” Shouting over him. “You don’t know what happened out there—Evan probably knocked them out like he did you and Dumbo. But maybe he didn’t—maybe they’re on the way back right now, and going out there is a stupid risk—”
“Don’t lecture me about stupid risks. I know all about—”
Ben swayed. The color drained from his face and he went down to one knee, Sam grabbing futilely on his sleeve. Dumbo and I pulled him up and got him to the empty bed, where he fell back, cussing us and cussing Evan Walker and cussing the whole fucked-up situation in general. Dumbo was giving me a deer-in-headlights look, like You got the answers, right? You know what to do, right?
Wrong.
32
I PICKED UP Dumbo’s rifle and pushed it into the kid’s chest.
“We’re blind,” I told him. “Stairway, both hall windows, east-side rooms, west-side rooms, keep moving and keep your eyes open. I’ll stay here with the alpha males and try to keep them from killing each other.”
Dumbo was nodding like he understood, but he wasn’t moving. I put my hands on his shoulders and focused on his jiggly eyes. “Step up, Dumbo. Understand? Step up.”
He jerked his head up and down, a human PEZ dispenser, and slumped out of the room. Leaving was the last thing he wanted to do, but we’d been at that point for a long time now, the point of doing the last thing we wanted to do.
Behind me, Ben growled, “Why didn’t you shoot him in the head? Why the knee?”
“Poetic justice,” I muttered. I sat next to Evan. I could see his eyes quivering behind the lids. He had been dead. I’d said good-bye. Now he was alive and I might not be able to say hello. We’re only about four miles from Camp Haven, Evan. What took you so long?
“We can’t stay here,” Ben announced. “It was a bad call sending Ringer ahead. I knew we shouldn’t’ve split up. We’re bugging out of here in the morning.”
“How are we going to do that?” I asked. “You’re hurt. Evan is—”
“This isn’t about him,” Ben said. “Well, I guess it is to you—”
“He’s the reason you’re alive right now to bitch, Parish.”
“I’m not bitching.”
“Yes, you are. You’re bitching like a junior miss beauty queen.”
Sammy laughed. I don’t think I’d heard my brother laugh since our mother died. It startled me, like finding a lake in the middle of a desert.
“Cassie called you a bitch,” Sam informed Ben, in case he missed it.
Ben ignored him. “We waited here for him and now we’re trapped here because of him. Do what you want, Sullivan. In the morning, I’m out of here.”
“Me too!” Sams said.
Ben got up, leaned on the side of the bed for a minute to catch his breath, then hobbled to the door. Sam trailed after him, and I didn’t try to stop either one of them. What would be the point? Ben cracked the door and called softly to Dumbo not to shoot him—he was coming out to help. Then Evan and I were alone.
I sat on the bed Ben had just abandoned. It was still warm from his body. I grabbed Sammy’s bear and pulled it into my lap.
“Can you hear me?” I asked—Evan, not the bear. “Guess we’re even now, huh? You shoot me in the knee; I shoot you in the knee. You see me butt naked; I see you butt naked. You pray over me; I—”
The room swam out of focus. I took Bear and popped Evan in the chest with it.
“And what was with that ridiculous jacket you were wearing? The Pinheads, that’s about right. That nails it.” I hit him again. “Pinhead.” Again. “Pinhead.” Again. “And now you’re going to check out on me? Now?”
His lips moved and a word leaked out slowly, like air escaping from a tire.
“Mayfly.”
33
HIS EYES OPENED. When I recalled writing about their warm, melted chocolateness, something in me went gah. Why did he have this knees-to-jelly effect on me? That wasn’t me. Why did I let him kiss and cuddle and generally mope around after me like a forlorn little lost alien puppy? Who was this guy? From what warped version of reality did he transport into my own personal warped version of reality? None of it fit. None of it made sense. Falling in love with me might be like me falling in love with a cockroach, but what do you call my reaction to him? What’s that called?
&n
bsp; “If you weren’t dying and all, I’d tell you to go to hell.”
“I’m not dying, Cassie.” Fluttery lids. Sweaty face. Shaky voice.
“Okay, then go to hell. You left me, Evan. In the dark, just like that, and then you blew up the ground beneath me. You could have killed all of us. You abandoned me right when—”
“I came back.”
He reached out his hand. “Don’t touch me.” None of your creepy Vulcan mind-meld tricks.
“I kept my promise,” he whispered.
Well, what snarky comeback did I have for that? A promise was what brought me to him in the beginning. Again I was struck by how really weird it was that he was where I had been and I was where he had been. His promise for mine. My bullet for his. Down to stripping each other naked because there’s no choice; clinging to modesty in the age of the Others is like sacrificing a goat to make it rain.
“You almost got shot in the head, moron,” I told him. “It didn’t occur to you to just shout up the stairs, ‘Hey, it’s me! Hold your fire!’?”
He shook his head. “Too risky.”
“Oh, right. Much more risky than chancing your head getting blown off. Where’s Teacup? Where’s Poundcake?”
He shook his head again. Who?
“The little girl who took off down the highway. The big kid who chased after her. You must have seen them.”
Now he nodded. “North.”
“Well, I know which direction they went . . .”
“Don’t go after them.”
That brought me up short. “What do you mean?”
“It isn’t safe.”
“Nowhere is safe, Evan.”
His eyes were rolling back in his head. He was passing out. “There’s Grace.”
“What did you say? Grace? As in ‘Amazing Grace’ or what? What’s that mean, ‘There’s grace’?”
“Grace,” he murmured, and then he slipped away.
34
I STAYED WITH HIM till dawn. Sitting with him like he sat with me in the old farmhouse. He brought me to that place against my will and then my will brought him to this place, and maybe that meant we sort of owned each other. Or owed each other. Anyway, no debt is ever fully repaid, not really, not the ones that really matter. You saved me, he said, and back then I didn’t understand what I had saved him from. That was before he told me the truth about who he was, and afterward I thought he meant I had saved him from that whole human genocide, mass-murderer thing. Now I was thinking he didn’t mean I saved him from anything, but for something. The tricky part, the unanswerable part, the part that scared the crap out of me, was what that something might be.