Jess pats her face and says, “Good girl …”
He ends up making a sling for her out of a belt, of all things. He hangs it around her neck, makes a figure eight, and puts her wrist through the bottom loop. By then, she’s exhausted, her eyes not tracking anything, but staying stubbornly open.
“Okay, let’s get you up,” Jess says. “You can make use of that bed in there …”
“But—Rayford. We have to—Rhys?”
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “We’re okay.”
We get her up. Her face goes a scary shade of white and her eyes roll back. Jess seems to anticipate it, gets her in his arms. Carries her with the ease I imagine he must’ve carried me from the river. I follow him in. He maneuvers his way back and eases Sloane down on the bed. She stirs a little, but curls into the mattress. No one refuses that kind of comfort, not in these kinds of times. There’s a privacy curtain, and he pulls it closed, ushering me out even though what I want to do is be with her, next to her. I want to put my hands on her face again. I want to be sure she’s really there.
Jess sits down on the couch and pulls Ainsley toward him. He looks at me and says, softly, “You lucky son of a bitch.”
Later, I find Jess outside, staring into the woods. It’s chilly. I cross my arms.
“She’s going to be down a couple days,” he tells me. “If she can get moving sooner, then we’ll do that, but for now, she needs rest and food.”
“Yeah, she does,” I say.
“I set the trips. I think we should all stay inside, though, while we’re here. Lay low.” He looks like he’s tracking something in the dark. I squint, but I don’t see anything.
“What is it?”
After a long moment, he turns to me.
“Nothing.”
I look at him and I know how denied he must feel of his own happy ending and I don’t think he hates me all the way for mine, but he must a little.
“Stop staring,” he says.
I flush. “Sorry.”
“So you got a gun now. If she lets you have it.”
“You want the knife back?”
“Keep it. Why don’t you go on in, check on Ainsley? I’ll be there in a little bit.” Then he lies, or at least I think he does. “I just want to be sure it’s safe.”
“Okay.” I hesitate. “Hey, I don’t think I said it—thanks for pulling me out of the river.”
He doesn’t look at me.
“Guess it had to happen.”
I go back inside. Ainsley is still curled up on the couch, but she’s occupied with a coloring book and a pack of crayons we found under the driver’s seat. She was happy about it, but it was one of those sick little discoveries for the rest of us. There were kids here, wherever they are now. Ainsley looks at me. She doesn’t say anything, and it’s so wrong, the absence of questions, of wanting her mother out loud. I tap the page of the coloring book, of the Disney princess’s hair she’s decided to turn blue.
“That’s cool,” I tell her.
On the counter next to the sink, there’s a photo. An eight-by-six in a cheap plastic frame of some house. A home. A nice little bungalow. The sky above it is overcast and moody, some kind of storm on the way. There’s nothing ominous about it, but it’s awful in its nostalgia. I don’t know the place, but I know the time. Before.
After a while, Jess comes in and gets the food ready and I have to wake Sloane for that because she’s got to be starving. She’s half-gone and I have to feed her and I’m glad she’s kind of out of it because I don’t think she could stand it otherwise.
“Lily,” she says once and it bites into me and I don’t know where she thinks she is.
“She’s not here,” I tell her.
“I know that,” she says. “I have to tell you something.”
“You can tell me later, okay?”
I remind her that she’s hungry. She can’t finish it all, but tomorrow will be better, I think. After that, she stays awake long enough to help me clean the blood off her and bandage her forehead and when I’m done, she curls back on her side and falls asleep instantly. When I come out, Jess is sitting at the dinette, finishing up his dinner. There’s an empty MRE bag beside him. Ainsley’s. I look around and she’s tuckered out on the sofa, just as out as Sloane is.
“How’s Ainsley doing?”
“She’ll be fine,” he says. Another lie. He nods. “Sit there.”
I sit next to him. In the space between us, there’s an old People magazine. Nearly a year old now. There’s a headline about whether or not social media is the new death of celebrity. That’s weird to think about. That first week in the school, I had this Internet itch I couldn’t scratch. I just wanted to see the end of the world unfold online, check if I had any e-mail about it. I never thought I’d get used to being without, but now I can barely convince myself there was a time the need I had for it was real. I look away from the actor smiling out at us on the glossy cover page to Ainsley again.
“Why doesn’t she talk?”
Jess is silent so long, it forces me to look at him.
He pushes aside his food. “It was hard going for us the first few days.”
“It was for us too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Took us a week to get across our town. We lost people.”
“I had a son about your age, from my first marriage. Andrew.”
Andrew.
To Ainsley, love Andrew.
“He didn’t make it,” Jess says.
I want out of these clothes.
“Did he read to her?” I ask slowly.
“Yeah.”
I bring my hand to my face and try not to let it get to me but it does. The weight of everything Ainsley has lost is on me and for one moment, I feel it more deeply than my own losses. Everything that’s been taken away from her. Everything she’s never going to have. There’s nothing she’s going to grow up to be. There’s nothing I can grow up to be, either, but at least once, I got a taste of my own possibility. What does Ainsley have? That stupid book I read to her?
“She must see something in you. Ainsley. Because she just—she really went inside herself after we lost him. I didn’t know a four-year-old could do that. That night she tried to give you the book, Lisa lost it. Told me we should keep you around because who knows, maybe she’d start talking again.” His voice cracks. “She’s got the sweetest voice.”
“I’ll bet.” I rub the back of my neck.
“I’m glad we found you,” he says after a long minute. “You and Sloane. It eases my mind.”
“Jess,” I say. “About Lisa—”
“When we get there, I’ll …” He trails off. “But right now, I’m not going to think about it. So that’s the last time you’re going to say her name to me, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Look, we’re close, once we get past Riverside. And we’re only on its edges.” He reaches beside him and pulls out a map. “I’m going to show you where the cabin is. You need to know how to get there.”
“Right.”
He lays it all out for me, traces the path with his finger and when he does it like that, it looks like nothing. Like all we’d have to do is take a few steps and we’d be there. If everything goes right, Jess says we’d arrive in about a day. We go over it and over it and over it again, until I’ve got it memorized, until I can say it all back to him and when I do, it sounds like a prayer. It sounds like something I can believe in.
I slip behind the curtain, into the bedroom.
Sloane is sleeping. I sit down on the edge of the bed and listen to her breathing and then I match my breath to hers because if she’s still here, so am I. I stay like that until the sound of Jess’s snoring fills the RV and then I carefully crawl up the bed and lay down next to her.
“Sloane,” I say.
My voice, her name.
People aren’t supposed to be able to fathom eternity. It’s an amount of time beyond all human comprehension. But ever since everything e
nded, I think I’m getting closer to understanding it. These little tastes of it in the way hell stretches around us, making pain endless and moments like this one rare and fleeting.
Making moments like this one everything.
I fall asleep and the next time I open my eyes, it’s still dark but she’s awake and she’s watching me and I think she has been for a while. I reach out and she moves closer to me. She says, “I thought it was a dream.”
“It’s not.”
She exhales and closes her eyes. After a while, mine start drifting shut and the last thought I think I’ll have is about how nice it is waking up and falling back asleep and having the person you want to have beside you, beside you, but then she speaks again, pulls me out of it.
“I was alone,” she says. “I was so scared.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner.”
“It’s okay.” She pauses. “The whole time I was out there, I kept thinking about her.”
“Who?”
“Lily. I kept thinking about how strange it was.”
I take her hand, running my thumb along the top of it.
“She was supposed to be the strong one,” she says.
“Sloane.”
“But I’ve gotten so much farther than her.”
We stare at each other. After a long moment, she asks me to tell her what’s happened since I came out of the river, so I tell her everything. I tell her about Jess and Lisa, saving me, about Lisa and how she died. I tell her about Ainsley and the book. I tell her about the place Jess has for us the way he told it to me, that it’s far enough away to still be standing, and he says it’s safe, that it’s so safe.
“Then let’s go there,” she says.
By dinner the next day, Sloane is up and moving around. She’s put in breakfast and lunch. She’s still pale, a little stiff, but she’s better. Jess asks her if she’s up for a hike.
“Yes,” she says, without hesitating.
“Anyone else look like you do right now, and I’d tell them they were lying,” Jess says. “But I believe you. You know why?”
“Why?” she asks.
“Because you made it here on a lot less,” he says and he has no idea how on the mark he is. The compliment brings a little bit of color back to Sloane’s face. An actual blush.
“What were you thinking?” I ask him.
“I think we move out early tomorrow, before dawn. That should give us the cover we need and we’ll be able to see any infected, if they’re out there.”
“Okay,” I say. “That sounds like a plan.”
“Water should be boiled by now,” he says. “We’ll eat, call it an early night.”
He leaves the RV to get it. Sloane watches him go and then she sits on the couch next to Ainsley, who hasn’t taken her eyes off Sloane since they were introduced. Her curiosity seems to overwhelm her, sitting this close to Sloane, and she reaches out and gently grabs a tiny fistful of Sloane’s hair. Sloane gives me a questioning look, but she says, softly to Ainsley, “I like your hair too.”
And then I realize—Sloane has the same color hair as Lisa.
Ainsley lets the strands fall back against Sloane’s shoulder and then climbs off the couch, finds her Molly book and holds it out to me. I take it and sit down and Ainsley sandwiches herself between me and Sloane. Ainsley keeps a little closer to me and I wonder if she looks at me in the dead boy’s clothes and gets confused. She’s young, but she’s old enough to know the difference, isn’t she? Old enough to look at Sloane and miss her mother.
I go through the story and when I reach the last page, I close the book. Ainsley opens it as soon as I do, wants to hear it one more time. I read it again.
Jess comes in when it’s happening and the whole thing takes him off guard, first time he’s seen it. His face crumples, but he leans against the counter, closing his eyes, and listens to me tell it too. I imagine all of us in that cabin a year from now, what that would look like. Carving out our own place, making something out of nothing. It feels as right as it doesn’t and I think maybe I was wrong. We can’t have exactly everything we lost. But maybe we can come close.
The bells sound while we’re asleep.
It wakes me up. At first, I think it’s wind chimes. It makes me remember lazy summer breezes in Cortege, hearing my abuela’s wind chimes rattling together, hanging in her front porch. I loved that sound. And then I realize. The trip wires.
“Oh no,” I say.
Sloane and I hurry out of the bedroom. Jess is already on his feet, already has Ainsley awake and on her feet too. He says, “Could be just an animal.”
The bells sound again.
I have my gun. Jess has his. Sloane has the hunting knife. I swallow and look to the front of the RV, the windshield. All I can make out are the shadows of the trees it’s run up against.
The bells sound again.
“That’s all sides,” I say.
Jess turns to the covered window in front of the dinette.
“I’ll look,” he says quietly. “Get an idea of what we’re up against. No one so much as breathe when I do.”
I nod and then I hear a strange whining, squeaking sound from the side of the RV. A hand, dragging itself alongside the vehicle’s body. Shit. I glance at Sloane and try not to think about how this kind of thing went for us in Fairfield. Jess opens the blind, just a tiny little crack, and looks out of it for what seems like a longer time than he should. Each second passes with the beat of my heart, and each time my heart beats, I think it’s going to give.
Finally, he carefully moves away from the window, letting the blind recoil back into place. He stands there quietly, thinking. We wait for him to tell us what to do.
“We have to go,” he says.
“How many are there?” I ask.
“Enough. The way they’re circling the RV, I don’t know which ones I’ve already seen and which ones I haven’t. We have to go before we’re too surrounded to leave. We won’t be able to take everything with us, but we should be okay for a day or so, then we’ll be at the cabin.”
“How are we going to do this?”
My brain is misfiring, too scared to think up a plan of action. The door to the RV rattles, dead hands experimenting with it. It’s locked, but the possibility of something being beyond it doesn’t escape the infected because then the door starts to shake.
They want in.
“Shit. Okay,” Jess says. “Rhys, you take Ainsley out through the driver’s side door, Sloane and I will go out the passenger’s side. We need to be everywhere, so they won’t know which way to go first. Get to that old road that’s beyond us. We run like hell until we get to Derringer Bridge. If we get separated, that’s where we’ll meet. You know where that is, Rhys? You remember what I told you?”
“Yeah,” I say. I picture it on the map Jess showed me. It’s a few miles. It’s okay. I can find it. I know I can. “Yeah, I remember.”
We get ready as quickly and as noiselessly as possible, shrugging on our coats. Jess dresses Ainsley and picks her up in his arms and then holds her tight, burying his face in her neck. He says, “I love you, baby.” She presses the side of her head against his. “You love me? You want to say it for me?” He pulls back and looks at her. Ainsley brings her hand to his beard, but she doesn’t talk. Won’t talk. His mouth trembles. He kisses her face. “I love you so much.”
Sloane catches my eye and she quickly turns away from me and I get this weird feeling in my chest, that I should tell her—not that I love her. Because I don’t. But that I could, maybe, if we survived long enough.
“You stay with Rhys,” Jess tells Ainsley. “You stay close to him.”
She nods.
“Okay,” Jess says. I tuck my gun back into my waistband because now I have to go out armed with a kid. He passes Ainsley to me. “You think you can hold her and run, the first stretch? I don’t want her on the ground for this part.”
“I can do it.”
“Thank you,” he says.
“Get to the front there. I just want to give Sloane a rundown on where we’re headed, because she doesn’t know …”
He pulls Sloane aside and starts laying it out for her. I move forward with Ainsley in my arms, trying not to think about how they’re already straining under her weight, light as she is. She keeps her arms around my neck, tight. I can hear her breathing in my ear. It’s a better sound than what’s outside and the sounds outside are getting louder. The dead push harder on the door, must be more than one of them now.
“We have to go,” I say.
“Okay,” Jess says and Sloane moves past him, comes up to the front near Ainsley and me. I have to adjust the seat so I can get by the steering wheel. “Okay, now,” Jess says somewhere behind me. “On my count …” I stare at the door handle. This close to the window I can hear the snarling, the teeth gnashing, outside. “One …” The door shakes more. “Two …” Ainsley’s hot breath on my face, her sweaty arms around me. “Three.”
Go.
Something’s wrong, we get it wrong right away. I push out the driver’s side door, nearly falling flat on my face, on Ainsley. Sloane stumbles out after me. She got the wrong door.
“Sloane, you got the wrong—”
She pushes at my back, urging me forward. “Go, go—”
And then I hear Jess explode out of the other side of the RV. Not from the passenger’s side, but from the entry door and I don’t understand, I don’t understand how we’ve all gotten this so wrong when we laid it down so easily minutes ago.
Jess starts to yell.
“Come on! Come and get me! Come on!”
No.
The dead scream. Ainsley’s grip becomes a choke hold and I try to move around the front of the RV, to get to Jess, to keep him from doing this stupid thing, but Sloane grabs me and pulls me back. I feel her hand snake around me for the gun.
“Jess!” I scream. “Jess, you asshole!”