Of course I remember.
“I’ll be the distraction,” he whispers, loud enough for John to hear. “I’ll jump up on the dumpster while you all go over the fence.”
It won’t work. He’ll be surrounded in seconds. I shake my head. “You’ll never make it out.”
His gaze holds steady, and I see by the set of his face he already knows this. I gasp and shake my head again.
“Three minutes,” John whispers. “We’ll only have a minute before the ones on the side of the pub come around. He’s going to back up to the fence.”
I turn back to Peter and whisper-shout in his ear. “No!”
Peter watches Bits, who’s raised her head and looks at us in terror. He smiles at her, and I can just make out the words he mouths: It’ll be okay. He turns back to me, and although his face is resolute, there’s fear in his eyes. It reminds me of Neil, right before I shot him, but it’s different. They shine with a light that reminds me of the paintings of saints in churches. The martyrs.
“It’s the only way,” John agrees. “But I’ll do it. You go over.”
I gasp. I can’t believe we’re having this argument.
Peter shakes his head. “No, I’ll just jump up there with you. More distraction. You can get them to the farm, I know you can.” His eyes are desperate and his next words are choked. “Promise me you’ll get them there.”
“I swear,” John says. He clasps Peter’s arm and looks him in the eye. “I swear I will.”
Peter nods once and exhales through his clenched jaw.
John raises two fingers and motions to the fence. Two minutes to find an alternate plan. I look around wildly. We can’t just let him die. There has to be another way.
Peter’s poised to jump up. His hair and face are soaked, his pupils dilated, the blackest I’ve ever seen. I can hardly see through my tears. I want to fight, to shout, but there’s nothing I can do to change this.
I hold out my hand and whisper in a cracked voice, “Love you.”
I need him to know that we love him like he loves us. Our fingers are icy as we grasp each other’s hands.
“Love you,” he mouths, his eyes red.
Then, reluctantly, I let go. Ana’s across from us, unable to hear our whispers. Her eyes move in confusion from Peter to me and back again. They widen in horror. Peter points his chin toward the fence and gives her a soft smile. Her face pales and her jaw drops. He parts his lips, about to speak, but John gathers Bits in his arms and whispers, “Now!”
Tires peel into the lot and a pickup swings wide and backs up to the fence. Peter leaps onto the dumpsters and bangs his machete on the brick of the building.
“Hey!” he yells. “Over here!”
The Lexers turn to him as one. It’s our cue to run, but Ana doesn’t move. Her mouth is still open, and she’s frozen in a crouch.
I grab her arm. “Ana!”
She rises to her feet. We hit the fence with a metallic bang. Ana, the most nimble, is up and over in a flash. We lift Bits into her arms, and they drop into the truck bed. The fence wobbles and screams as the three of us climb. My jeans catch on the top, and I free fall into the truck, onto Nelly’s bicycle. I ignore the pain and scramble up to kneel against the tailgate. I shoot through the fence at the Lexers at Peter’s feet.
Peter fights. He hacks them with his machete and then dances back and fires point-blank into their heads. They can’t reach him and it’s driving them crazy. There’s a brief moment when I think we can get to him; we can back into the fence, knock it down. But then more Lexers pour into the lot. James hangs out the window and fires at the encroaching wave.
John pounds on the roof of the truck. “Go! Go!”
The tires squeal. Ana and I fire at the infected that surround Peter, but it’s a drop in the bucket. Peter looks up as we move away, and before he turns back I swear I see something like happiness pass across his face.
Nelly jumps the curb to the street. I hang on to the tailgate, but I don’t look away. I don’t care about the infected around us. I keep my eyes on Peter and watch him fight with every ounce of strength he has until we round the corner and he disappears from view.
CHAPTER 106
Nelly pulls into a clearing and leaps from the driver’s side. His hair looks bleached in the harsh sunlight, as white as his face. “Peter,” is all he says.
“It was his idea,” John says. He raises his big body out of the truck and jumps to the dirt. He holds his hands up, like he’s explaining his innocence to a jury. “He wouldn’t let me…”
James holds Penny tight. Bits is in her arms, eyes closed. There’s no way she could have fallen asleep in the fifteen minutes of bumpy riding. Not after what just happened.
Nelly looks diminished standing there, like he’s slowly shrinking. My knees hurt from the metal truck bed. I’m still kneeling, still clutching the tailgate, still looking toward Peter. Ana is, too. Her breath hitches.
Nelly opens his mouth. I want him to say something, anything, that will make this horrible, empty feeling subside. But, instead of words of comfort, he gulps in air like a fish out of water. Then Nelly, who I’ve never seen more than teary-eyed, leans on the truck, buries his face in his hands and sobs. Blood runs down his arm, soaking his shirt, and it snaps me out of my stupor. I crawl to him. It’s the cut on his arm. The bandage is gone, and the cut’s opened back up.
I cradle his head to my chest like a mother would. “Your arm.”
He nods, and when his crying subsides he speaks. “We had a scuffle getting the truck.” His cheeks are soaked with tears, and he uses his good arm to wipe his face. “The bandage got ripped off. I dropped my glove at the house when I cut my arm.”
“Let’s fix it,” I say, glad to have something to attend to.
We sit under a tree. I pour water over the deep wound. The edges are red and irritated. I squeeze antibiotic ointment onto my finger.
Nelly grabs my hand. “Put on a glove.” His voice is sharp. “Or let me do it.”
“Nels.” I smile at him. “Please, I think I know you well enough—”
He looks at his arm and smiles to offset his brusqueness, but the crinkles near his eyes are missing. “Cass, he grabbed my arm before I killed him. I just realized he could have gotten something on me. In me.”
For a moment I’m frozen to the core. Then I shake my head. The chance is too slim. “You’re fine, Nelly. But I’ll put on gloves anyway, okay?”
He nods like he’s satisfied and leans back against the tree. John’s coaxed Ana to where we sit. She hugs her knees to her chest and stares into the woods, one hand on her cleaver. Bits’s head rests in Penny’s lap. When I’m done, Nelly takes the gloves and shoves them in his pocket.
“We need to move farther away from Bennington,” John says.
“We need to go back and find Peter,” I say. Ana looks my way quickly and then turns back to the woods.
“Cassie,” John says. “There’s no way Peter’s—”
“Alive?” Everyone winces. I picture Peter as we left, back against the wall, surrounded on three sides by infected. “I know that. But we can’t just leave him.”
I envision Peter’s handsome face turned rotting and gray, and it’s almost more than I can bear. I want to punch something. I’m so angry that, for once in my life, my eyes are dry.
“We have to,” I say, yanking grass out of the ground. “He would want us to—” I don’t want to say kill him, because he’s already dead, and because it sounds so awful, “—take care of him.” Ana jumps up with a sob and walks into the trees.
“Peter didn’t sacrifice himself so we could go back and put ourselves in the same situation,” John says gently.
Of course he’s right. There’s nothing to do but keep going, keep running, forever wondering what’s happened to another person I love.
I catch a glimpse of Ana in the trees and stand. The fern-covered ground muffles my steps, but Ana knows I’m behind her and waits for me to catch up. I hold out m
y arms, and she falls into me with heartbroken sobs, just like when she was small and had to let go of that little rabbit. I run my hand over her short, silky hair and murmur words that don’t help at all—I know this from experience—but I say them anyway.
CHAPTER 107
John insists we eat before we move on. No one’s eaten anything of substance since last night. There’s trail mix and MREs and energy bars. I stare at the food blankly until he hands me a bar. I unwrap it and eat methodically. Chew and swallow, drink. Repeat. We’ve been waiting for Bits to wake, but she’s still out. John says that as long as her pulse is okay, she is.
Ana, Nelly and Penny sit in the cab of the truck. Nelly has a clean shirt in his pack, and before we leave I watch him bury the old, bloody one under a carpet of leaves. We lay Bits in the truck bed with her head in my lap, and I stroke her hair as we rumble up the road.
“It’s going to be at least two hundred miles from here,” James says. As he closes the map, I notice the hollows under his cheekbones and eyes. “The truck doesn’t have enough gas. And at this speed it’ll take us until night, if we don’t have to stop.”
“Truck’s diesel,” John says. “As long as we can find another diesel and a container of some sort, I can puncture the fuel tank from underneath. Easy enough. The hard part’s finding one, and with fuel still in the tank. Otherwise, we’ll need a new vehicle.”
The sun is blazing, so I hold my jacket over Bits’s face to keep it from getting burned. Her face twitches until, at last, her eyes flutter open. She closes them, struggling to forget, to sleep, but the tears slide out. I wipe away the tracks they make.
She sits up and inches into my lap. I wrap my arms around her, just barely able to hear her whisper, “Peter.”
“Oh, honey.” I brush her hair away from her ear. “He loved you so much. He loved all of us and wanted us to be safe.” I don’t know how to explain, but she nods like she gets it, like the old soul she is or has become.
We pass through a few small towns. Pretty towns with ugly groups of infected, so we don’t stop to look for a new vehicle. The isolated houses we pass have no cars in their driveways, or they’re useless. The truck kicks up dust that covers our skin and crunches in my mouth. I’m drinking the last of my water when we slow. A jumble of cars litters the road. There’s no way around. One side of the road is trees, the other a drop-off to a stream.
Nelly hangs out the window. “Should we go back?”
James consults the map and shakes his head. “Did you see all the Lexers in that last town? There was a huge group after we passed. No way should we go back through there.”
“Then we’ll move them,” John says. “I can pop them into neutral from underneath, and we’ll push them to the side.”
It takes longer than expected. Two hours later we’re shoving the second to last car into a ditch, when I notice Nelly wince.
“You should relax,” I tell him. “I think you need stitches, but at the very least you shouldn’t be pushing thousands of pounds around. How does it feel?”
“It hurts a little.”
I can tell he’s trying to play it down. “Let me see.”
I try to lift the bandage, but he moves his arm away and does it himself. The wound is bright red and puffy around the edges.
“It’s getting infected,” I say. He pulls his arm back nervously, and I look him in the eye. “With a regular, run-of-the-mill infection, Nels. There’s some amoxicillin in the first aid stuff. I’ll go get it.”
By the time I find the bottle and hand him two pills, the last car has been moved. We fill our water bottles at the stream and rinse off the dust. The cold water soothes my sunburn. Ana’s face is blank as she rinses herself off; she hasn’t said a word since the woods. Penny shoots her worried glances but says nothing. None of us is okay right now, so asking seems ridiculous.
Bits and I sit in the cab with Nelly. We stop twice more to move cars, and since traveling at night is too dangerous, it’s obvious we won’t get to Kingdom Come Farm today. The thought of Kingdom Come used to fill me with equal parts excitement and dread, but now I’m just numb. It doesn’t seem possible we’ll even make it. I obsess over all the obstacles we could hit, but I can’t think this way. We have to get there, if only because of Peter. I won’t let him die in vain.
Hot tears escape and race down my cheeks. I close my eyes to stop them and slide my ring along the chain. I concentrate on the bump of the ring over the links until I’m in control again. Bits is curled up next to me, and the pressure of her body is like a blanket. I feel sleep steal over me, and I’m so tired I give in.
The truck swerves and I’m thrown against the door. My eyes fly open, ready to fight whatever’s in the road, but there’s nothing.
“Sorry!” Nelly yells out the sliding back window to where the others grip the truck bed in surprise. Sweat runs down his flushed face, and his chest rises and falls way too fast.
I lean over Bits and put my lips to his forehead. I can feel the heat before I even touch him. “Nelly, you’re burning up! Pull over.”
He wipes the sweat with a bandana. “It’s hot outside. I thought it was just that.”
He pulls onto the shoulder. After he puts the truck in park, he leans back and closes his eyes.
James speaks through the back window. “What’s going on?”
I walk around to the driver’s side. “Nelly isn’t feeling well. He has a fever.”
John stands next to me. “How’s your arm?”
Nelly opens his eyes and blinks to focus. He fumbles with the edge of his bandage and lifts it. It’s worse. The wound itself is puffy and purple. A pink streak moves out of it and up his arm. It resembles sunburn, but I know it’s not. That streak means it’s infected, and now the infection’s moving.
“Okay,” John says. “You need more antibiotics. Cassie, get him some?”
I find the bottle of amoxicillin and spill four into Nelly’s hand. “Take them all.” I hand him the water. “You need to really knock the infection out.”
Nelly does what I say and turns to John. “It may be the virus.”
John nods and rests a hand on his shoulder.
“Stop,” I say, angry. “It’s just an infection.”
Nelly turns to me matter-of-factly. “Cass, remember the man on the Thruway? Remember the bite on his arm?”
I nod. His wound had these streaks too, traveling out from it like roads on a map. Penny comes up behind me and gasps when she sees Nelly’s arm.
“It looked like this,” he says to John. “All my joints hurt. Just like they said they would on the news.”
“Let’s not jump the gun,” John says. The only thing that gives away his doubt is the way his hand runs over his eyebrows. “That can describe any major infection. Let’s see how these antibiotics help. You rest while I drive.”
Nelly insists on riding in the back so he can stretch out. Penny builds a makeshift tent by draping John’s shirt over two packs to keep the sun off his face.
We circumvent several larger towns that are probably too dangerous. Nelly’s asleep in minutes. I want to peek under the shirt to make sure he’s okay, but I don’t want to disturb him. His chest rises and falls. Whether or not there’ll be a next breath is all I can focus on. It’s supplanted the empty feeling, but it’s definitely not an improvement. John spies an old cabin on a hill in the late afternoon and turns up the overgrown drive.
“I thought we’d stop for the night,” he says. “It’s about as safe as we’ll get. I don’t want to keep driving only to stop somewhere that’s full of infection.”
Nelly sits up and I rush over to him. “How do you feel?” I touch his head. It’s still way too hot.
He gives a weak smile. “Not much better, darlin’. But I might be hungry.”
I help him into the cabin. There’s a main room with a rotting table and two chairs by the glassless front window. The wood stove is orange with rust. The smaller room has glass in its window and a cot mattress on th
e floor. A couple of moth-eaten wool army blankets rest on rough-hewn shelves. They don’t smell great, but they’ll do. I drag the mattress to the main room. Nelly sits on it and leans against a water-stained wall.
Bits kneels next to him and holds out her little water bottle. “Nelly, do you want a sip of my water?”
Nelly recoils slightly, but she doesn’t notice. “No thanks, Bits. Make sure you don’t drink out of my bottle.” He looks around in alarm. “Where is it?”
“In your bag,” I say, and place the small pack next to him. “No one drank out of it.”
He puts his arm over it protectively. James carries what little we have inside and sets it on the table.
“What do you want to eat?” I turn to Nelly, but his eyes have closed. “Bits?”
She looks over the food listlessly as I open an MRE pouch. Her eyes light up when I pull out Reese’s Pieces and a pouch marked Fudge Brownie.
“You can have them.” She sits by Nelly, candy in her lap, but doesn’t eat it. “Is something wrong?”
“I thought Nelly might want some. Whenever I’m sick I like sweet things. I’ll wait for him to wake up.”
The hopeful look on her face makes me want to cry. The only store-bought candy she’s had in a month, and she wants to share it. “You’re so sweet. But you go ahead and eat that, honey. There’s more for Nelly if he wants, okay?”
She lifts the brownie and takes a bite. I spoon something into my mouth that tastes like apple pie filling, but I don’t care enough to check. The sun is going down, and we’re drooping like flowers from heat and exhaustion and mourning. Penny bustles around in an attempt to clean and organize our stuff. She tries to be cheerful, but it’s a relief when she finally gives up.
James blinks from the strain of looking at the map in dim light. “There’s over a hundred miles to go and only an eighth of a tank of gas. We’ll work on that tomorrow, I guess? Depending on how Nel feels.”