“I love that!” she says. “Bitch with a heart of gold. It could be my slogan.”
“We’ll get some business cards printed up.”
I water the hundreds of seedlings and check the fire in the stove. This is my favorite place to work. It’s quiet and warm and smells like moist earth and tomato leaves. The peas are growing like crazy. They need to get out there soon.
“Why aren’t you complaining about the snow?” Ana asks.
“Because it keeps things frozen. Things I’d rather not have thaw out.”
“True. But I wouldn’t mind a little patrolling.”
I point a stake at her. “I am under orders to keep you reined in this summer. You are not allowed to do anything stupid.”
“Peter.” Ana sighs. “He wants me in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.”
“Ana, no one, anywhere on Earth, wants you in a kitchen. He just wants you alive. Remember your quarry idea?”
The old quarry sits a half mile south of us, tucked in among the farmland that’s quickly becoming forest. You can see it from the top of the mountain we use to watch for pods of Lexers moving north. The quarry’s been dormant for decades, and the three immense holes have filled with water. It would be a great place to swim, if it didn’t have Lexer corpses floating in it.
Ana had a plan to lead a pod of Lexers there with our ambulance, sirens blaring and lights flashing. She thought if she could get them to follow it along the narrow road that snakes between the pools, they’d fall in. But if they caught up with her, or more came from the other side, so would she.
“It was a great idea!”
“Well, it probably would have worked,” I admit. “But that doesn’t mean it was a great idea. How’s Penny? She wasn’t at breakfast this morning. I’m going over there when I’m done.”
“She’s either puking or about to puke. I am so not having a baby. Ever.”
“You might want to talk to Peter about that. Since he wants you barefoot and pregnant and all.”
She lifts a plant and kisses it. “Who needs a baby when I have my beautiful little plants?”
CHAPTER 11
I convinced Penny that coming to dinner would make her feel better, but now that she’s here, head on the table, I’m thinking that maybe it wasn’t the best idea.
“Oh my God.” Penny lets out a moan. “Move the food away.”
Ana pushes Penny’s bowl of soup to the center of the table. “I didn’t think people got sick this early.”
“Doc says it’s a good sign,” James says. “The baby’s strong.”
Penny raises her head. She’s pale, with dark circles under her eyes. “The baby is not strong. The baby is kicking my ass. This is awful. I don’t know why people have babies, if this is how they feel.” She looks at James. “We are never having sex again.”
“Okay,” James says. “Never again.”
“Stop agreeing with everything I say.” Penny’s head clunks back down.
“Okay, I mean, no.”
Penny’s hand rises from the table, middle finger extended. Ana and I laugh. This new Penny may feel like crap, but she’s entertaining. She’s usually so well-mannered. It must be exhaustion; she can barely drag herself to the little school cabin every morning.
“How are my three favorite ladies?” Dan stops to ask. He looks at Penny, who groans. “That bad, huh? Be right back.”
Five minutes later he returns with a glass packed with fresh snow and another glass with yellow liquid. He pours the yellow liquid over the snow. “Here, drink this.”
Penny lifts her head and sips from the glass. “That’s not bad. What is it?”
“Ginger lemonade. It’s what my sisters drank when they were pregnant,” Dan says. “I thought it might work, even though it’s powdered. It won’t make it go away, but they didn’t throw it back up. Most of the time.”
“How many kids did they have?” Penny asks.
“Jen had two and Christy had three.”
“They must’ve been crazy to do this more than once.”
“It’ll get better. Promise.” He motions to my ring. “So, I hear Adrian’s making an honest woman out of you. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. When are you going to settle down with some lucky lady?”
He points at the three of us. “My top choices are all taken.”
“Well, you’re my second choice,” Ana says. “I’ll let you know if the first spot opens.”
“I’ll be here.”
Penny rolls her eyes at me. Those two can flirt for hours.
“Are you propositioning my girl?” Peter asks Dan. He sets his bowl down next to Ana and takes a seat.
“I was propositioning him,” Ana says.
“Well, that’s a relief.” He smiles when Ana kisses his cheek.
I wave over Nelly and Adrian. “Why don’t you sit here tonight?” I ask Dan. “We’ll push tables together. You can sit at the old married people’s table for once.”
Dan agrees, and by the time everyone’s arrived it’s become an impromptu dinner party.
“This soup is really good,” Jamie says. “Better than usual.”
“Well, you didn’t make it,” Shawn, her husband, says. “It’s got that going for it.”
Jamie gives him a friendly smack with her spoon. She’s mid-thirties, five foot nothing, with an ample chest, curly black hair and olive skin. Shawn has a scruffy beard, a tree trunk chest with arms to match and a sarcastic manner. It’s obvious they love each other, but they also love to shoot each other down at every opportunity.
“That’s because it’s Peter’s recipe,” Ana says. “He can cook anything. Oh, Maureen, I wanted to ask you—I keep signing up for kitchen duty, but I always end up assigned somewhere else.”
Peter chokes on his soup. Maureen says, “It’s just that you’re so good at other things, Ana. We try to assign everyone based on their strengths.”
It’s a diplomatic reply, but it doesn’t escape Ana that Nelly and Adrian are overly focused on their bowls and everyone else has gone silent. She narrows her eyes. “I’m not allowed to work in the kitchen? There’s actually a plot to keep me out?”
“No, Ana,” Nelly says, “there’s a plot to save us all from death. It just requires that we keep you out of the kitchen. Especially after the arroz con pollo incident.”
That had been the worst meal ever. Ana had tried to cook Maria’s famous dish, but it had fallen short. Way, way short.
“It wasn’t that bad! Cassie ate it. Right, Cass?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I did. I did it to be nice. And I paid the price, believe me.”
Ana crosses her arms and her lip juts out. “So it wasn’t the best arroz con pollo—”
“More like arroz con peo,” Penny says. She even smiles a little. Maybe that drink’s helping.
Bits informs the table, “Peo means fart!” She’s had Penny teach her every semi-inappropriate Spanish word there is. Everyone roars with laughter.
“Remember how bad it was, Adrian?” Bits asks. “Cassie ate so much of it, too.”
I can see where this is going. Good Lord. I swear Adrian has a tear of laughter snaking down his cheek. “We almost had to kick her out of the room, right, Bits? It—”
“Enough!” I say, my face on fire. “This is where I draw the line! It’s bad enough everyone knows everything about everyone else. Can we please keep the two secrets that are left?”
Even Ana is laughing now. I kick Adrian under the table and drop my head into my hands. “New topic, please!”
“Let’s play I Miss,” Bits says.
It’s a game where everyone names something they want but can’t have. We never mention people, which is what we all want most of all. It has to be a thing, sometimes frivolous, sometimes not, but it’s never, ever a person.
“I miss orange juice,” Bits says.
“I miss not being pregnant,” Penny mutters.
“Pepsi!” Nelly calls out.
“A Caramel Macch
iato,” I say.
“The internet,” James says. “But not Facebook.”
“Red Sox games,” Dan says.
“Music,” Adrian says. “All the music on my phone.”
“Why don’t you charge your phone?” Dan asks. “You could, couldn’t you?”
Adrian shakes his head. “It wouldn’t be fair. And if we had everyone charging phones and iPods we wouldn’t have juice for anything else. We can barely keep the lights going as it is.”
He doesn’t even charge it occasionally. I’ve told him he should. It’s his farm and I think he and Ben have every right to a little extra power, but he refuses. He’s given me an idea, though. I barely listen to the rest of the answers while I mull it over.
***
A few days later, I find James in the solar barn, where he would probably sleep if he didn’t have Penny warming his bed at night. He hands me a small box wrapped in a cloth, and I hide it in my bag after I hug him in excitement.
“It works, I tested it myself,” James says. “You know, he’ll never agree to this.”
“I think I have that part covered,” I say. “Thank you so much, James. This is the best birthday present ever.”
CHAPTER 12
The snow melted in days, and the past week has been unseasonably warm for April in the Northeast Kingdom. Now that the roads have cleared, we visit what we call the lookout twice or three times a day. We drive up a dirt road to an abandoned house and then hike the short trail to where we’ve cleared trees on the summit. The view is beautiful, but it’s also strategic. If anything’s moving in the fields or near the quarry, we can see it in what’s close to a 180 degree view.
We can’t see into the woods, though, and we have no way of surveying north of the farm without the plane, which would probably attract more Lexers. So, when the radio in the greenhouse crackles and Jamie announces that seven Lexers are approaching the north fence, I’m not surprised. Ana and I grab our gloves and walk the short distance. I wear my shoulder holster and my knife on my belt. We’d stopped carrying weapons in the winter, but everyone is armed now that it’s warm.
Jamie is winding her hair up into a knot on top of her head when we arrive. She hands Ana her binoculars. “They just came out of the tree line. Taking their sweet time, but they’re definitely heading this way.”
She swings her spike and hops from foot to foot. Jamie’s almost as crazy as Ana. Maybe you have to be somewhat crazy to have survived this long.
“Oh, yeah,” Ana says. “There’s another three behind them, too.”
It’s impossible not to make noise while living on a farm with so many people. Farm machinery, chopping wood, voices, kids playing, drifting stovepipe smoke—they all serve as zombie beacons. It’s pretty much a guarantee that anything close is going to stop by eventually.
“I’ve got Ana and Cass,” Jamie says into the radio. “Ten Lexers now. We’re all good here.” She turns to us, hands on hips. “You know a guy is going to come anyway, right? No way three girls can kill ten Lexers through a fence.”
Footsteps sound behind us, and Shawn appears. Jamie raises the radio in the air. “Did you or did you not hear ‘All good?’ ”
“Oh, I thought you said, ‘Send a strong man,’ ” he replies, and flexes a furry arm.
“Then why’d you come?”
“I was in the north barn, light of my life. I thought maybe I could help. I know you can kick anyone’s ass, including mine.”
“That’s right,” Jamie says.
The Lexers are halfway to us, and there’s nothing to do but wait as they plod across the muddy field, laboriously pulling their feet out of the muck. A tall, thin Lexer takes a fat one down with it when it falls, in a Laurel and Hardy-esque routine.
I giggle, which may be callous, but I can’t stop. The others join in. It was nowhere near as funny as the level of hysteria we reach. Shawn hangs on to the fence to stay upright, and Jamie wipes away tears. These are officially the first Lexers of the season, and the tension it causes has to come out somehow. When the first two are twenty feet from the fence we quiet down to hiccups and gasps.
“I’ve got one,” Jamie says.
Ana holds her cleaver like a javelin, spike side toward the fence. “Me, too.”
The rasping moans start when they hear our voices. Coarse, wrinkled, gray skin is mottled by open wounds edged with black. The one that has lips bares his teeth. They hit the fence and the chain-link bends, but I’m not worried. Those posts are sunk deep; it would take many more to push it down.
The lipless one tightens its fingers around the links. The metal sinks into his skin where some black moss has taken hold, and a dark fluid trickles out. They usually don’t drip unless you cut them with something sharp, and even then it’s more of an ooze. The moss must be breaking down his tissue.
Ana glances at the liquid on her boot and says, “Gross.” She lines her cleaver up with his eye and pushes.
Jamie drops her spike and releases her hunting knife from the sheath on her belt. The other one has his head pressed sideways, and her knife enters his ear and comes back out with a popping noise. Five more have reached the fence, including Laurel and Hardy. Laurel’s mud-covered mouth is open wide. I hold the spike of my cleaver at the closest opening and give a quick jab to the spot where jaw meets neck. I yank it out and do the same to Hardy, who falls with a meaty thud. Maybe I shouldn’t be so sweaty because I’m quite safe behind here, but seeing them on the move has reminded me that I’m not safe. None of us are.
When the last three are down, Jamie picks up her binoculars and scans the field. “That’s it. Good job, people.” She looks behind us and sighs. “I said we had it.”
Thirty people stand there, probably all the adults who heard the radio and could leave their posts. But I know they’re not there because they doubted us; they wanted to see it with their own eyes. I think we all harbored some shred of hope—one that we knew would never be realized—that the winter might end this. That the fifty percent who’d survived the cold wouldn’t be able to walk far on damaged muscle, or that they would rot away. We hoped for something, anything, other than the alternative. Something other than this.
CHAPTER 13
We’ve heard from the Safe Zone in New York City. They’d stopped broadcasting in the winter, but they’re up and running again. I’m not sure how they’ve made it this far—hundreds of people vs. eight million or so Lexers. Maybe only half that number of Lexers now, due to the winter, but they roam the city in endless circles since no one, including the survivors, can leave.
Maria’s not with them, we checked again to be sure. The New Yorkers live in the sky, on the tops of buildings. They drink rainwater and grow what they can on rooftop gardens and in backyards, but they say there’s still a lot of food to scavenge even though those promised FEMA food drops never arrived. From their vantage point, with high-powered telescopes, they’ve seen a few pods across the water in Jersey, pods that might end up here later this summer.
Over thirty have come out of the woods in the past week. It may not be a lot, but one group came to the fence while the kids were outside. We spotted them right after they left the trees, but so did the kids. Bits was so scared that her nightmares returned, and she’s just had another one starring her mother.
“What if you die too, Cassie?” she asks me with trembling, tight lips. “I’m scared you’re going to die.”
I kneel at the edge of her bed and find her hand under the blankets. I wish I could promise her it won’t happen, and I lower my head to hers. “I’m planning to be here a long time, honey. I can promise you that.”
She attempts to hold in her tears, but one makes a glistening track on her cheek in the moonlight and then drops to her pillow. “But what if you do?”
“You’ll always be taken care of. There are so many people who love you, you know. I wish I had as many people as you do. I have, like, five, and you have a million.”
“There aren’t even that many people
here.”
“That’s what makes it so amazing,” I say. Bits rolls her eyes and lets out a soft giggle. “Don’t worry about me. And don’t worry about you. Let me worry about that, okay?”
I press my lips to her forehead, and she closes her eyes. I sit on the edge of her bed to wait for the even rise of her chest. Her eyes flicker under their lids, and even in sleep her hand clutches the locket I gave her. It’s big as lockets go, a little less than three inches long, the kind in which Victorians would put miniature paintings of their loved ones. I painted a tiny image of her mother this winter, from my memory of the photograph we left behind. Bits cried because she’d forgotten what her mother had looked like.
“You look just like her—beautiful blue eyes, heart-shaped face and cute nose,” I’d said. “All you ever have to do is look in a mirror.” But still, she carries it everywhere.
I kiss her forehead and creep back to bed. Adrian pulls me close with a sleepy arm, but I can’t fall back asleep. Bits lies motionless in the moonlight. I’ve watched her sleep enough times to know that I can’t always see her breathe, but suddenly I’m convinced that she isn’t. The fear rises up so fast that I throw Adrian’s arm to the side and rush to get my hand on her chest. Once I feel the up and down of gentle breathing, I let out my own breath and cross the floor again.
Adrian’s eyes are open. “What’s wrong?’
“I thought she wasn’t breathing,” I say softly. “I know, it’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous.”
I get back under the covers and whisper, “So I’m not crazy?”
“You’re a little crazy.”
He chucks me under the chin, but I can’t shake the panicky feeling in my belly. There’s so much that can go wrong, and I feel like it’s only a matter of time before our luck runs out. We escaped Brooklyn. We made it here. I’m in bed with Adrian, something that should have been impossible. A person can only be so lucky. I feel tears brewing and clench my teeth. I barely cried all winter, but this time I lose the battle.