“Well, kids,” Nelly says, “I guess it’s back the other way, once we get to the next exit.”
“I don’t imagine it’s going to get better,” James agrees. “People are getting out, just like us.”
He points to a blue sedan in front of us, with beat-up boxes and bags attached to the roof with double-knotted twine, just as it bumps into the SUV ahead of it. It’s barely a nudge, but the door of the SUV flies open and a man with a graying crew cut jumps out. His chinos and t-shirt stick to him with sweat. He leans into the car and comes out holding a metal flashlight.
“What the fuck!” he screams.
Spit flies from his mouth as he storms the sedan. A small, dark-skinned man hops out. He raises his hands and gestures toward Chinos’ car. Nelly rolls down the window so we can hear.
“Sorry. Hey, I’m sorry,” the guy says in a calm voice, and takes a step back.
Chinos advances, his face well on its way to purple. His hand is white-knuckled as he lifts the flashlight menacingly.
“Look, man, nothing happened to your car. Take a look!” the smaller man says. He points to the SUV.
“You should be looking. Looking at the goddamned road!” Chinos yells. “You should be taking care, goddamn it!”
He lifts the flashlight higher. There’s a dark spot on the underside of his arm. A purple wound with red streaks. Round like a bite mark.
“Did you see that?” I ask. Everyone nods and stares at the scene.
The smaller guy shuts his door and backs around the car as he talks to Chinos. He uses a quiet voice, the voice you would use to soothe a wild animal. He doesn’t realize this guy has nothing to lose. He stops and Chinos moves quickly, the flashlight in the air.
“Oh, fuck,” Nelly says.
He grabs the shotgun he’s placed in the holster of the police truck and steps out. He cocks the gun and points it at Chinos, who freezes at the sound.
“Officer,” he says. He smiles like he’s been waiting for him to show up, instead of planning to beat the other party to death. “We just had a little accident. Nothing to worry about.”
James gets out of the car and stands behind the open door. Suddenly it seems like a really bad idea for someone to be trapped back here. Nelly walks closer to Chinos.
“Drop the light,” he orders. Chinos does and lifts his hands into the air. “Where did you get your wound?”
Chinos looks from side to side and his tongue darts out to wet his lips. He lowers his arms a bit in an effort to hide it.
“Doing some work in the garage. Screwdriver slipped.” He gives a high-pitched laugh. “Not a good time to go to the hospital, as you know, so I figured it’d be fine. Putting lots of ointment on it. Nothing to worry about.” He licks his lips again and takes a step back.
“Sir.” Nelly sounds so official and calm. “You need to be seen by someone. Let’s go to the toll booths right there, and we’ll find you some help.”
“You’re right.” Chinos nods wildly, eyes darting. “You’re exactly right. I should have someone look at this. I—” He jumps the median and gallops across the oncoming lanes. Nelly lowers the shotgun and looks at the wiry man.
“You okay?” he asks. The guy nods mutely and watches Chinos disappear into the trees.
Finally, he speaks. “He was infected?” Nelly nods, and his eyes widen. “Thanks for stepping in.”
He pumps Nelly’s hand and looks him up and down. “Officer?”
Nelly smiles. “No, not quite. We need to get this guy’s car out of the way. Maybe over to the tolls there. We can use the siren.”
“I’ll get it. My wife’ll follow us.”
James switches on the siren. Cars inch and scoot out of the way until we make it to the shoulder. We head to the right of the tolls, into a lot for highway trucks.
The man comes up to our window once he’s parked Chinos’ car. He looks to be in his late thirties, with close-cropped hair and the hands and face of a man accustomed to working long, hard hours. But the weariness disappears when he smiles and thanks Nelly again.
He holds out his hand, and Nelly and he shake. “Name’s Henry. Henry Washington.”
“Nel Everett. No problem, man. Where are you going?”
“North. Doing some long-term camping at a spot we know.” Henry hooks his thumb in the general direction.
“We’re heading back over to the Palisades. Northeast. If you want to follow, you can have a police escort,” Nelly offers, his mouth half lifted.
“I’d appreciate that. I’m just trying to get my kids somewhere safe. Hearing anything on the police band?”
“We didn’t even get a chance to turn it on,” James says, and turns the knob.
A woman’s voice repeats that she needs officers in the vicinity of somewhere. Other voices ask for help. “Shots fired.” “Officer down.” One man screams something I can’t make out, but I understand the rawness in his voice. He sounds like someone who thinks he’s going to die, and it makes my stomach clench. James switches it off, but the screams reverberate even after it’s gone.
Penny points. “Oh, God. They’re here.”
A few dozen Lexers come out of the tree line and disperse between the cars down the road. They have different wounds, different clothes, different faces, yet they all look the same with their slack-jawed hunger and shuffling gait. Two of them pound on the windows of a gold hatchback, and the mouths of the couple inside open with screams I can see but not hear.
The occasional honk becomes a chorus of blaring horns and screams. But there’s nowhere to go. One man leans out of his truck and yells at the traffic to move. He rolls up his window when the only response is for the infected to move his way. A heavyset woman throws her car door open and leaps over the median to the other side of the highway. And in that instant an entire lane becomes useless. A car bumps over the shoulder and heads for where we sit. The truck behind it follows. This lot is going to be as jammed up as the road in a minute.
“I know a back way to Bear Mountain,” Henry says. “Follow me?”
Nelly nods, and Henry jumps into his car. He straddles the curb to fit past the posts that block cars from entering from the street. We follow him onto a street of suburban homes.
A Lexer, his bloody abdomen scooped out like a bowl, stands on one of the neat lawns and watches us pass. The houses all look the same; I don’t know how Henry knows where to go in this maze. But he must, because we hit a main road and make another left.
A few Lexers move down one block, and a tense group of men armed with pipes and bats rushes to meet them. I watch out the back, but a turn throws me off balance, and then they’re out of sight. I pick myself up and hang on to the hatch. I hope this guy knows where he’s going.
CHAPTER 28
We follow Henry to two adjacent campsites in the back of the empty campground. There’s a picnic table and metal fire pit at each site. Penny releases me from the cargo area, and I walk on the packed dirt to work the cramps out of my legs. A woman and two kids jump out of the sedan and follow Henry to where we stand.
“This is my wife, Dorothy. Dottie.”
Dottie is petite, and her eyes are a striking light brown against her dark skin. Her smile is warm. When she speaks I hear the soft lilt of the Caribbean in her voice.
“I can’t thank you enough for helping us. I was sure—” She stops and looks at the children.
“This is Corinne, she’s twelve,” Henry continues. He places his hand on the shoulder of a slight, pretty girl who resembles her mother, down to the eyes. She gives us a small smile. “And this is Henry Junior, we call him Hank. He’s nine.”
If there’s ever been a child who looks less like a Hank, I haven’t met him. He’s small, like the rest of his family, but he lacks the compact strength of his father and the vitality of his mother and sister. His hair is short, which makes his glasses and the eyes they magnify look even larger. At first glance he looks frail, but when he says hello he looks me in the eye. I get the feeling he doe
sn’t miss much.
“Thank you for leading us here,” I say. “We wouldn’t have made it without you.”
“No problem,” Henry says. “A couple of times there I thought I was lost, but I helped run the electric in those houses, so I gave it a shot.”
He’s so relieved that he beams at me, and I can’t help but smile back. After the last twelve hours of jaw clenching, it almost hurts. We decide to stay the night and figure out a route in the morning. Our two tiny tents set up quickly. I’m not sure how all six of us are going to fit into them. I head to the water spigot a few campsites over, but it’s too early in the season for the water to be on.
“Dry?” Henry asks from behind me. I nod. “There’s a stream over on the other side of the campground. We should go before it’s too dark to see.”
“I’ve got a hiking filter,” I say.
We grab every bottle and his two collapsible containers. It’s a small creek, but he heads right for a spot where it widens into a swimming hole. I sit down on a rock beside it and dangle the filter in the water.
“I take it you’ve been here before?” I ask.
“We camp here every summer. Swim in this very creek. It’s strange to be here this time of year.”
It’s still a winter landscape, minus the snow. It’s getting cold, too. The creek water is freezing.
“Why did you decide to leave today?” I ask him.
He crouches next to me and wipes a hand across his forehead. “I went in to work. I didn’t know how bad it had gotten. I figured I’d be just as safe in that building as at home. The curfew was only in effect until dawn, and I left just before the sun came up. I didn’t get the paper. Dottie called me at work—it’s a big job and the electric guys are getting double time for weekends—and said we had to leave. She told me about the bridges and that some of the neighbors were infected. That there were people who looked like they were out of their heads.
“If Dot says it’s serious, then it’s serious. So I left right away. We live in an apartment complex, the kind with lawns and parking?”
I nod. My hand pumps the filter faster, and I realize I’m getting nervous for him.
“I pulled into our spot, when out of nowhere people started rushing me. I could tell they were far gone, all bloody, so I backed up. I hit one behind me. That thunk, oh, man.” He closes his eyes briefly.
“But I couldn’t get out of the car. I knew I’d get bit if I did. I pulled back, hoping she was okay. Her foot was crushed, completely crushed, but she got up with her leg dragging behind her. Didn’t stop her at all, didn’t even act like it hurt.
“I called Dot and told her to be ready at the back windows and drove on the grass. I wasn’t taking any chances by having the kids walk. She already had everything packed; she’d called me and then got ready.
“They were coming around the building, making these terrible noises. Have you heard them? I don’t know how to describe it.”
When he looks up his eyes are red and frightened. I know exactly what he means. It’s unearthly, hungry; there are many words to describe the sound, but none does it justice. A crying baby awakens an instinct to comfort it; its cry has been carefully calibrated by nature to force nurture. These sounds do the opposite. Some primal part awakens, scratching to get out and take over, like a little rabbit running for its life from a hawk. I shiver as I nod at him.
“Thank God the streets were clear for the most part. We didn’t have a plan, until we drove past our self-storage place. We used the code to get in, and for a few minutes I thought about staying there. It’s got a fence and the units have metal doors, but then I realized we might end up surrounded. So we got out our camping stuff to head upstate.”
I’m absurdly glad for a second that my life’s gone the way it has these past few years. Adrian and I might have had a baby to protect against this. That little boy at the office building was Hank’s age. I bite the inside of my cheek before my eyes can fill.
“Do you know where you’re headed?” I ask.
“I spent a lot of summers at YMCA camps. We’re heading to one that’s pretty out of the way. You?”
I tell him about my parents’ house.
“Sounds like the place to go.” He takes over the pumping of the filter and speaks again. “Hank has some pretty interesting ideas about what’s going on. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
“I bet I would.”
He gives me a look that says there’s no way. “He says they’re dead. Like zombies. Not Caribbean zombies, but horror movie zombies. I mean, they look like it, but it’s impossible.”
“He’s right.”
Henry looks up sharply. “But how can that be?”
“I don’t know. Penny and Ana’s mother is a nurse. She made us leave New York last night. She knew about the bridges.”
I tell him everything she told us and how the CDC still denies it. His face is grim when I finish.
Back at camp, our table is cluttered with ramen noodles, freeze-dried hiking food and junk from the vending machine. The latter items are being eyed by Hank and Corrine, who jump to inspect the packages when Penny invites them over. She’s started the backpacking stove and put on a pot of water.
Dorothy cooks dinner on a two burner camp stove. We decline her offer of fresh food. We have plenty, even if it’s mostly vitamin-free. She watches the kids take one treat each and nods approvingly when they thank us. Dottie’s quiet and has a soft smile, but underneath that is a woman who isn’t going to let things just happen to her family. I like her.
The solar radio reminds us to stay calm and remain home. It repeats the addresses of treatment centers in an endless loop but doesn’t say anything about the infected being dead or how long this will last. James curses and spins the tuning knob for some real news. We catch the tail end of an announcement that all government offices are closed until Tuesday before it turns to static.
“Chicken a la king or ramen noodles?” I ask.
Ramen noodles win. Nelly puts out the little tin plates he’s been carrying in his pack. I spoon noodles onto the plates, and then the only sounds are slurping. It’s warm and filling. Even Peter, who’s a food snob, seems to be enjoying his.
“I’ll clean up,” he offers, when everyone’s finished.
“I’ll help you,” I say.
I follow him to one of Henry’s water containers. He scrapes and rinses plates and pretends I’m not here.
“Listen, Peter,” I blurt out. “I’d like to be friends.”
I know it’s lame, but there’s no other way to say it. The beam from the flashlight leaves his face in darkness, but I can hear the scowl in his voice.
“I don’t really want to be friends, Cassandra.” I wince. “Is it really so hard to understand that?”
I don’t see much of an option at this point. Unless his plan is to hate me instead.
“Well, I’d rather be friends than fight. I’m sorry about back at the house.”
I can’t think of anything else to say. Usually when you break up with someone you get to leave and lick your wounds, not live with them in a tiny tent. He doesn’t answer, and we finish in silence.
Henry insists on taking first-watch shift, since we’ve barely slept. Nelly, Peter and I squeeze into our tent. When I accidentally brush against Peter, he recoils like I’ve stung him. I make myself as small as possible and curl into Nelly. What I wouldn’t give for that third tent in the van.
CHAPTER 29
I want nothing more than to snuggle with Nelly when he crawls in after his shift and wakes me for mine. It can’t be much more than forty degrees out here. I wish I could build a big, toasty fire, but it might attract attention. I duck back into the tent for extra socks and Nelly’s fleece. When I come out Penny’s zipping up her tent and yawning. She wears a hat and Eric’s old jacket over her own. I put on water for tea as we face out into the darkness and shiver. It’s not like we can see anything, so calling it a watch seems silly. It’s more like a listen, an
d, thankfully, the woods are silent. So quiet that when Penny speaks I startle.
“I’m so tired, I feel like I could sleep forever.”
“Why don’t you go back to sleep?” I say. “I can sit out here by myself.”
She shakes her head. “No, no.” I’m relieved. I would’ve sat out here alone, but I would’ve been scared. “I’m not leaving you out here by yourself. Besides, it’ll be nice. We needed some post-apocalyptic girl time.”
I laugh and lean against her. “You okay?”
“No. Yeah. What choice do I have? And Ana, it’s too much for her, with leaving my mom behind.”
Ana’s off the hook for watch because she’s acting like she can’t handle the responsibility. I think Ana could do watch, if she wanted to, but I keep that thought to myself. Penny gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, including me.
She stomps her feet quietly on the ground to warm up. I use the flashlight to pour us both a cup of tea. The powdered creamer and sugar don’t exactly make it delicious, but it’s warm, and that’s what counts. The emergency blanket crackles, and we shush each other and giggle as we spread it over us.
The mood has lightened, so I ask the question I’ve been dying to ask. “So, you and James?”
“Yeah, me and James. Cass, I really, really like him.”
“Well, Nelly and I already knew that. We thought you’d be perfect for each other, since you’re both nerds.” She elbows me. “Okay, you’re both smart and funny and well-behaved.”
She snorts. It’s true, though. She’s naturally good, she can’t help it. We balance each other out.
“So what base have you gotten to?” I ask. Now I’m just bothering her.
“Base? What are you, in eighth grade?” But she’s used to this question. I’ve been asking her it since, well, eighth grade.
I try not to laugh. “You know I am. So?”
“And what base do you think? Let’s see, there was the night we kissed, and then the night we ran from hordes of dead people. And then tonight, in a tent with my sister. It’s been pretty romantic so far. Why am I even answering you?” She laughs.