“Sloane.” My voice is too weak. I try again. “Sloane—”
“Shut up.”
I start coughing. It sends the pain in my skull up to ten. My vision blurs. When I can see again, a man is standing over me. He’s got a gun pointed at my face.
“I won’t hurt you unless you give me a reason to.”
“I won’t,” I rasp.
He lowers the gun. “You awake now? For real?”
“Think so.”
“Good.”
He’s a white guy. Thick all around. Not exactly big, but beefy in the kind of way I’d be no match for on a good day, let alone this one. He has brown hair, not short and not long, and a wiry brown beard, mottled with gray. His face is full of lines.
“I’m not sure what you remember. I pulled you out of the river this morning. You’ve been in and out but I don’t think most of it stuck. You don’t look so messed up now, though.”
“Where am I?”
“My campsite,” he says. I try to sit up and everything starts spinning again. The man puts a hand on my shoulder and forces me back. “Don’t think you’re ready for that.”
“Where’s Sloane?”
“You’ve been saying that name. Not yours?”
“No. She’s—she’s a girl. She’s with me.”
“Didn’t find a girl with you.”
I don’t know this guy from Adam, but I know he’s not lying. My throat tightens. Didn’t find a girl with me. Didn’t find her with me and what does that mean.
“You didn’t find a girl?”
“No.”
It means she’s probably dead, Rhys.
One way or another.
I press my hand over my eyes and dig my fingertips into the bruised and swollen one just to feel something other than—she can’t be dead. She can’t be.
“You sure—” I fight that pull backward, that feeling of everything I should have done differently. “You sure there wasn’t a girl somewhere?”
“Not that I saw.”
A tear slides down the side of my face and I wipe it away, but there’s another quick to follow, and another after that, because all I can see is Sloane, the girl in the school, the girl in the school who trusted me. A door closes inside me.
She can’t be dead. That part can’t be over.
I try to breathe through it but I can’t. I curl on my side, gasping, because there’s nothing else my body knows how to do and the man says, “Easy,” and then “easy, dammit.” His hands are at my shoulders. He keeps them there until my lungs are working right.
“River tore you up.” His voice skirts the edges of my loss. “Scrambled your egg, cut you up some, and bruised you even more than that. That said, could’ve been a lot worse, that current, this time of year. Where’d you come from?”
“Fairfield,” I say. It’s harder for me to skirt those same edges. I squeeze my eye shut and I see her and I open it again. I swallow. “Fairfield …”
“Fairfield’s overrun. That whole area is crawling with ’em.”
“I know. That’s how I ended up in the river.”
“Well, you’re a lucky son of a bitch then. You’re pretty far from where you started.”
“You really didn’t find a girl?”
“Only found you.”
“And what’s—what’s going to happen to me?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “We’re heading out tomorrow. Didn’t feel right leaving you alive and defenseless, though. These woods are safer than Fairfield, but that’s not saying much.”
“But—”
A crackling sound interrupts us, something moving in the woods. The man brings his finger to his mouth and then draws his gun, his eyes on the trees.
I stare at the stars, no moon in sight. My mother, my father, Grace, Harrison, Trace, Cary. Sloane. But not me. Not me. And what am I. Lucky son of a bitch. I hurt, every single cut and bruise singing its song on my skin. I try not to start crying again, don’t want to be weak, even though there’s no one I care about left alive to see it if I am.
The man finally decides it’s safe enough.
He says, “Just a minute,” and goes into the tent and when he comes back out he’s got a package in his hand. “Get yourself sittin’. I got an MRE here. I’ll get it going for you.”
It takes a lot to get myself upright. I could use help, but I’m too proud to ask for it. I get it in the end, though, when I almost pitch forward and eat the flames of the campfire.
The man props me up against a tree. I stare at the fire until he hands me a plastic pouch and spoon. It’s so warm. I dip the spoon in the open top and watch something white and creamy ooze off.
“Pork sausage and gravy,” he says.
“Thank you.”
My hand shakes when I bring it to my mouth. It tastes—good. Warm and rich and maybe better than it actually is because in the school we didn’t have this kind of luxury. Only had stale, packaged food that wasn’t aspiring to be … something. The man stays standing while I eat, watching the dark. The sausage bites are meaty, satisfying, and it reminds me of things that are good. I want Sloane here. I want her to be reminded of it too.
“Don’t get yourself too worked up to finish that,” he says because it must be all over my face. “Where were you headed?”
“Rayford.”
“Why would you want to go there?”
“Voice on the radio said to.”
“What makes you think Rayford is still standing?”
My heart stops. “It’s not?”
“Nothing is.” He shrugs. “Why should it be any different?”
“It’s the government,” I say and he snorts. “We needed somewhere to go. We were in a school … holed up in a high school. It got bad. We didn’t know what else to do.”
“You and the girl?”
“My group—”
“Group?” His voice is sharp. “You’re with a group? They looking for you?”
“No. We lost them and then it was just me and … me and her.” I stare at my hands. My hands, holding food. I make myself say her name. “Sloane.”
“How many people you lost?” he asks after a second.
God. Numbers heavy in my mind will be even heavier off my tongue. I don’t know what’s worse, holding their names, or turning them into a body count.
“Seven.”
He whistles, impressed.
“Is this your place?” I ask. “You stay out here?”
“It’s a stop along the way.”
“Where you headed?”
“Nowhere you’ve earned,” he says, like we got to the part where I asked him to take me with him and my face heats up because I might’ve been working my way to it. “This isn’t a time for strangers. I’m sure you know that.”
“My name is Rhys Moreno,” I say. “I’m seventeen. I lost my mom and dad.”
He doesn’t offer me anything for it.
“Wake up.”
The cut of his voice has my body upright before I even really know what’s going on. The fire is out and smoldering. The sun is slowly climbing its way up the white sky. It’s a testament to how exhausted I was that I didn’t hear him moving around, didn’t hear him put the fire out. If he hadn’t been here, I could’ve been killed, slept through my own devouring. I rub my eyes, forgetting about the busted one. That fucking hurts. I suck a breath in through my teeth. My clothes feel scratchy and gross, like they dried to my skin. I’m sure they did.
“What?” I ask.
“Can you stand?”
I untangle myself from the bag, and that takes some doing. I loosen the cords, unzip the zipper, wriggle out, and get my feet under me. By the time I’m upright, I’m sweaty and my head is pounding. I lean against the nearest tree for support, but at least I’m standing. The man eyes me. In the light, his face looks worse. Dirtier and weatherworn.
“That was pathetic,” he says.
“Well, I guess that’s my problem.”
“I guess it is.”
I take in the patch of land he’s carved out for himself. The drowned fire and the tent, which is on the small side and a shade of green that matches our surroundings. There’s someone in that tent. Listening for infected, your senses get a little sharper. Never sharp enough, though. I’m about to ask who it is, when he asks me what I’m thinking about.
I’m thinking I don’t ask for a lot. It wouldn’t have been that hard for Sloane to end up on the same muddy patch of bank I did. For us both to be here right now.
But I’m thinking that even if she didn’t—she doesn’t have to be dead.
“I gotta look for the girl I lost,” I say.
He raises his eyebrow. “Think she made it?”
“I don’t know but I have to try to find her,” I say. I reach into my waistband and realize—shit. “Was there a gun on me? Did you take it? I had a gun …”
“No gun on you.”
“Fuck.” I bury my face in my hands and after I’ve absorbed this latest loss, I cast around until I find a … stick. I pick it up. It’s got a little heft to it. Maybe. I feel the man’s eyes on me and I must look too pathetic for the man to even say so this time. “Which—which way’s where I came from?”
He looks me up and down. “You’re serious.”
“She’s the last thing I got left.”
He studies me a long time, his arms crossed. Finally, he shakes his head like I’m an idiot. “You follow the river south, she might be that way. In a few days—and that’s if you run into no trouble—you’ll get to Riverside. You know the way to Rayford from there?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“We’re headed that way. We’re not going to Rayford, but we’ll be sharing the same path for a bit.” He pauses. “Nobody’d make it through Fairfield in one piece on luck alone. We were talking while you were out. You can travel with us until you hit Riverside and then we’ll separate. The closer we get to that town the more infected there’s gonna be. Safety in numbers.”
But he’s not offering out of the goodness of his heart. I think he wants a body if he needs one. That’s okay, because I think I want one too.
“Who’s we?” I ask.
He sizes me up again, or maybe he never stopped. Runs his tongue over his teeth and then he says, “Lisa.” There’s movement inside the tent. After a moment, a woman steps out and she’s got long brown hair past her shoulders that makes me think Sloane, even though it couldn’t possibly be her. My heart gets right in my throat. This woman is in her thirties, younger than the man. She’s fair-skinned with brown eyes. She’s wearing khaki pants and a black vest over a long-sleeve shirt.
She’s got a kid in her arms.
It’s a girl, maybe four. The girl’s hair is a mess of brown curls, fat little body in an outfit that mirrors her mother’s. Her head rests in the crook of Lisa’s neck and she stares at me with the palest blue eyes. I have never seen a more desperate symbol of hope since the world ended and I’ve never felt the world more desperate to make a mockery of it.
The only thing I’ve got inside me for this is horror.
They have a kid.
These poor fucking saps.
“This is my wife, Lisa, and our daughter, Ainsley.”
Lisa sets Ainsley on the ground, but Ainsley clings close to Lisa’s leg. Her eyes widen as she takes in my face. I remember how beat up I am and it probably gives me all the makings of a monster to someone as small as her. Part of me hopes I’m the only monster she’s met so far.
“Hi, Rhys,” Lisa says.
“Hi,” I say and then, to Ainsley. “Hi, there.”
Ainsley presses her head into Lisa’s thigh.
“I’m Jess,” the man says.
Jess.
They dismantle their campsite, fit it in two bags. Ridiculously efficient. Jess throws me an energy bar and calls it breakfast and tells me I better keep up. I’m more than ready to go. Lisa gets Ainsley ready, tying impossibly tiny shoelaces on impossibly tiny shoes on impossibly tiny feet. The kid is quiet in a way no kid should ever be quiet. She’s already learned.
“How long you been out here?” Jess asks, hefting his pack onto his shoulders. “There any place she might go back to, if she survived?”
“A few days,” I say. “And I don’t think so. We were just running.”
“You’ve only been out in this for a few days?”
“I told you. We were in a school like from a week after it started.”
“So you found shelter,” he says. “You have food there? Water?”
“Yeah.”
“And you left. Why the hell would you do that?”
“Just stupid, I guess,” I mutter, feeling it. “What, you been camping this whole time?”
He laughs a little. “Sure.”
“And how’s that better than leaving a school?”
“We’re headed somewhere safe,” he says, looking a little too proud. Or maybe I’m just jealous. “But unlike you, we’re not going to leave when we get there.”
“We should go,” Lisa says abruptly. “We’ve been here long enough.”
“Right,” Jess says. “I just want to make a few things clear to our add-on here.” I bite back the urge to ask him if he’s sure he’s not the one joining me. “I lead. Once we get moving, we’re quiet. Don’t speak unless you have to. You see infected, don’t make a fucking sound. This isn’t a Romero movie. We don’t fight unless we have to. We don’t engage. They’re too fast. We find a different way around. The only time you get close is when you’ve got no choice.”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
“Give him something,” Lisa says.
Jess looks at her. “We just met him and you want to arm him?”
“Give him something you can shoot out of his hands then.” She rolls her eyes. “You don’t want that to be the difference out here, do you?”
He has to think about that, thinks about it too long. Makes me impatient. I say, “I just want to find Sloane. That’s all. I’m not going to make trouble for you.”
“That remains to be seen.” He goes into his pack. “You put any of my family in danger and the dead will be the least of your worries. Understood?”
“Understood,” I say.
He hands me a hunting knife.
We walk for hours, through the trees, quietly following the river just beyond them—my eyes seeking but never finding Sloane—when my body starts quitting on me. My first real workout in a long time. Brief moments of running from the dead don’t count. All those weeks in the school sitting on my ass and doing nothing are catching up with me. My feet are blistered. My muscles and my joints burn. My head is killing me. Every battered part of me complains and it’s nauseating. I don’t say anything when my gut starts to revolt, I just end up hunched over beside a birch tree, barfing up the food I was so glad to have.
“You damned fool,” Jess says over the sound of my retching, and I hope, dimly, that Sloane made it out of the water in better shape than I did, which is quickly followed by the thought she might not have made it out at all, and I heave again. “Say something if you feel like that.”
I straighten, shaking all over. “You told me we had to be quiet.”
“Fool,” he repeats and Lisa says, go easy. “Fine. Break.”
“We need one too anyway,” she says and I decide to like Lisa.
I sit away from my puddle of vomit, and rest my chin in my hands. Jess nudges me a second later, with his canteen. I take it from him and drink. Rub my forehead. I’m sweaty too, and it’s not exactly warm out. I stare down at myself, my shitty post-river clothes and my running shoes that haven’t felt right since I put them on. The only thing that feels sure about me is the knife but I don’t want to get close enough to an infected to test that out. Jess and Lisa, every time I look at them, they make more and less sense. Lisa takes Ainsley a few feet away from us so they can both go to the bathroom. I turn my head. It’s all so close and it can’t be any other way. Jess keeps watch, a rigidn
ess about him that should be about me, but I can’t seem to make it happen.
“Where were you before?” I ask.
“Milhaven,” he says.
Milhaven’s a city. I’m not exactly sure how far it is but I know it’s far, because whenever Milhaven managed to make itself part of any conversation, you could hear its distance in the tone of the person talking about it. Milhaven. Far enough to be a getaway, maybe, if you were desperate for one.
“You been making your way from Milhaven to wherever on foot?”
“We’ve been moving since it started. We had a vehicle for a while and then we didn’t,” he says. “Won’t try for one of those again. Staying on roads is trouble. We went deeper into the woods and we run into a lot less of it now.” Lisa and Ainsley come back. “You about ready?”
“Uh.” I get to my feet slowly. “Yeah …”
“No, he’s not,” Lisa says. “Look at him. He’s exhausted. We need to fill up on water, anyway, and Ainsley’s getting pretty tired.”
“You tired?” Jess asks her. Ainsley stares at her father and, after a long moment of thinking about it, nods. That’s the deciding factor. Not the concussed boy, but the toddler who probably doesn’t even really know what she’s been asked. I don’t know. I don’t know shit about kids. Jess turns to Lisa. “You got an hour. We’re not setting up here for the night. We can get a little farther.”
Lisa nods. “That’s fine.”
I sit back down and I miss my bed. Jess circles us, checking the area, cocking his head, listening. The river’s still audible, a constant reminder that I should be looking for Sloane and not sitting on my ass, and if I wasn’t so weak, I would be. But beyond that, there’s nothing. No sound of infected. When he’s certain enough of our surroundings, Jess turns back to me.