“Look,” I said, and drew up my sleeve, where they’d tattooed my intake number at the Crypts.
He relaxed then, and lowered the gun. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought the others would be back by now. I was worried….” Then his eyes lit up, as if he had just registered what he said. “It worked,” he said. “It worked. The bombs…?”
“Went off,” I said.
“How many got out?”
I shook my head.
He licked his lips again. “I’m Rogers,” he said. “Come on. Sit. I got a fire going.”
He told me about what had happened while I’d been inside: a big sweep on the homesteads, extending from Portland all the way down to Boston and into New Hampshire. There’d been planes, bombs, the works, a big show of military might for the people in Zombieland who’d started to believe that the invalids were real, and out there, and growing.
“What happened to the homesteaders?” I asked. I was thinking of Lena. Of course. I was always thinking of Lena.
“Did they get out?”
“Not everyone.” Rogers was twitchy. Always moving, standing up and sitting down, tapping his foot. “A lot of them did, though. At least, that’s what I heard. They went south, started doing work for the R down there.”
We talked for hours, Rogers and me. Eventually, others came: prisoners who’d made it across the border into the Wilds, and two of the freedom fighters who’d launched the operation. As the darkness drew tighter they materialized through the trees, drawn to the campfire, appearing suddenly from the shadows, white-faced, as if stepping into this world from another. And there were, in a way.
Kyle, constant-wedgie-boy, never made it back. And then I felt bad, really bad.
I never even thanked him.
We had to move. There would be retribution for what we’d done. There would be air strikes, or attacks from the ground. Rogers told me the Wilds weren’t safe anymore, not like they used to be.
We agreed to catch a few hours of sleep and then take off. I suggested south. That’s where everyone had gone—that’s where Lena, if she had survived, would be. I had no idea where. But I would find her.
We were a small, sad group: a bunch of skinny, dirty convicts, a handful of trained fighters, a woman who’d been on the mental ward and wandered off soon after she joined us. We lost two people, actually. One guy, Greg, had been on Ward Six since he was fifteen years old and had been caught by the police distributing dangerous materials: poster for a free underground concert. He must have been forty by then, skinny as a rail and insect-eyed, with hair growing all the way down his back.
He wanted to know when the guards would come by to bring us food and water. He wanted to know when we were allowed to bathe, and when we could sleep, and when the lights would come on. In the morning, when I woke up, he was already gone. He must have gone back to the Crypts. He’d gotten used to it there.
Rogers shook us all awake before dawn. We’d made camp in one of the remaining trailers. It was decently sheltered from the wind, even though it was missing one of its walls. For a moment, waking up with a layer of frost crusting the blanket and my clothes, with the smell of the campfire stinging the back of my throat and the birds just starting to sing—I thought I was dreaming.
I’d thought I would never see the sky again. Anything, anything is possible, if you can just see the sky.
The attack came sooner than we were expecting.
It was just after noon when we heard them. I knew right away they were untrained—they were making way too much noise.
“You”—Rogers pointed at me—“up there.” He jerked his head toward a small embankment; at the top were the ruins of a house. “Everyone, split. Spread out. Just let ‘em pass.” But he shoved a gun in my hand, one of the few we had.
It had been a long time since I’d held a gun. I hoped I’d remember how to shoot.
The leaves crunched under my shoes as I jogged up the hill. It was a clear day, cold, and my breath burned in my lungs. The old house had the rotten smell of an unwashed sock. I pushed open the door and crouched in the dark, leaving the door cracked open an inch so I could keep watch.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The voice made me spin around and nearly topple over. The man was filthy. His hair was long, wild, and reached below his shoulders.
“It’s all right,” I started to say, trying to calm him down. But he cut me off.
“Get out.” He grabbed my shirt. His fingernails were long and sharp, and he stunk. “Get out. Do you hear me? This is my place. Get out.”
He was getting louder and louder. And the zombies were close—would be on top of us any second.
“You don’t understand,” I tried again. “You’re in danger. We all are.”
But now he was wailing. All his words ran together into a single not. “Getoutgetoutgetout.”
I shoved him down and tried to get a hand over his mouth, but it was too late. There were voices from outside, the crackle-crackle of feet through the dry leaves. While my attention was distracted, he bit down on my hand, hard.
“Getoutgetoutgetout!” He started up his screaming as soon as I drew my hand back. “Getoutgetoutget—“
He was cut silent only by the first volley of bullets.
I’d rolled off him just in time. I threw myself flat on the ground and covered my head. Soft wood and plaster rained down on me as they emptied twenty rounds into the walls. Then there were other shots, this time farther off.
Our group had broken cover.
The door squeaked open. A band of sunlight grew around me. I stayed still, on my stomach, hardly breathing, listening.
“This one’s dead.” The floorboards creaked; something skittered in the corner.
“How about the other one?”
“He’s not moving.”
Holding my breath, willing my muscles not to move, not to twitch even. If my heart was still beating, I couldn’t feel it. Time was slowing down, stretching into long, syrupy seconds.
I’d killed only once in my life, when I was ten years old, just before I moved to Portland. Old Man Hicks, we called him. Sixty years old, the oldest person I knew in the Wilds by far, crippled by arthritis, bedridden, cataracts, full-body pain, day in and day out. He begged us to do it.
When the horse ain’t no good, you’re doing the horse a favor. Put me down, he used to say. For the love of God, put me down.
They made me do it. So I would know that I could. So I would know I was ready.