“Shane, Monica didn’t do this, and it’s not a game! Shane! Listen!”
“I’ve listened enough to you!” he yelled, and shoved her so hard she fell and almost cracked her skull on Marvis Johnson’s memorial stone. “You stay the hell away from me and my family, you crazy bitch! This is sick! This is fake!”
He tried to push over Alyssa’s tombstone. It didn’t move. He kicked at it, panting, and Claire lay where she was, watching him, heartsick. She’d thought maybe this would convince him, maybe it would force him to remember . . . but he didn’t. He couldn’t.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please stop, Shane. Stop hurting yourself; I can’t stand it.”
He collapsed against his sister’s tombstone and just sat there, his back to Claire. His shoulders were shaking. She got up and went to kneel beside him. He looked destroyed, just . . . broken. She put her hand on his shoulder.
He didn’t hit her, at least. He didn’t seem to notice she was still there. He was pale and shaking and sweating, and hunched in on himself as if somebody had punched him really, really hard. “She can’t be,” he said. “She can’t be dead. I just . . . I just saw her. She was making fun of my shirt. My shirt . . .” He looked down at himself, pulled his T-shirt out, and said, “I wasn’t wearing this. This isn’t even my shirt. This is wrong. This is all wrong.”
“I know,” Claire said. “I know it feels that way. Shane, please come back with me. Please. I’ll show you the room you have in Michael’s house. You’ll recognize some of the things in there; maybe it’ll help. Come on, get up. You can’t stay here; it’s cold.” He didn’t move. “Alyssa wouldn’t want you to stay here.”
“Why didn’t she get out?” he asked. “If there was a fire, how did I get out if she didn’t? I wouldn’t leave her. I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t . . . just . . . run—”
“You didn’t,” Claire said, and put her arm around him. “You tried to save her. You told me, Shane. I know how hard you tried.”
He finally swiped at his eyes and looked at her. “I don’t even know you,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”
There it was again. How could her heart keep on breaking? Why didn’t it just do it once and get it over with? Claire struggled to keep the hurt she felt from echoing in her voice. “I know you think you don’t,” she said. “But honest, Shane, you do know me. We’re . . . friends.”
He stared at her for what seemed like the longest time, and then he said, “I’m sorry I pushed you. I don’t . . . I don’t do things like that.”
“I know.”
“Is it true? Is Lyss really . . .”
Claire just nodded without speaking. Shane’s hair blew in his face, but he didn’t blink. She reached over without thinking and moved it back. He caught her hand against his face.
“You touch me a lot,” he said. “Don’t you?”
She looked down and felt the blush mounting in her face. “I guess I do,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She risked a quick look up at him. He was studying her, as if he were really seeing her for the first time. “What?”
“Are we going out?”
She nodded. He didn’t say anything at all. She didn’t know how to feel about that. Before she could think how to ask what he was feeling, he stood up, and she hurried to do the same.
“So I have amnesia,” he said. “That’s what you’re telling me. I got some kind of kick in the head and I lost a bunch of time and forgot all this. And you.”
That was . . . so much easier than what she’d been trying to say. “Yes.” She nodded. “Amnesia. That’s why you need to trust me, Shane. It’s dangerous out here. You don’t know how dangerous.”
For the first time, he gave her an ironic expression she recognized—classic Shane. “It’s Morganville. Of course it’s dangerous.” He glanced back down at Alyssa’s headstone, and that moment of the Shane she knew flickered and almost disappeared. Almost. “She wouldn’t want me moping around the cemetery like some dumb-ass. Alyssa wasn’t like that. She’d make fun of me if I did.” Shane took in a deep breath. “So I guess . . . I guess I can go to Michael’s house. At least I know him, even if I don’t know you.”
She smiled a little. It felt forced. “We’ll work on it.” She held out her hand, but he put his in his pockets.
“No offense,” he said, “but I’ve got a lot to think about, here. I need some time.”
Her shattered heart broke all over again.
It felt just as bad this time.
“Sure,” she managed to say. “I understand.”
There was still nobody at the Glass House when they returned, but Claire still shuddered in relief at just being home. Shane looked a little mistrustful, but he came inside and didn’t protest when she locked up behind him. “Do you want to see your room?” she asked. He shook his head, hands firmly in his pockets. “Do you want coffee?”
“I hate coffee,” he said. “Never touch the stuff.”
“Really?” Maybe that had been something he’d learned on the road, with his mom and dad. “Okay, how about . . . Coke?”
“Sure. Who doesn’t love Coke?”
She left him looking at the TV and the game controllers, and went to pull the last two cans out of the fridge. Somebody was going to have to go shopping. She supposed she’d better do it soon, before she lost her mind, too. Even in an apocalypse like this, surely running out of Coke qualified as a disaster.
Shane was sitting on the couch when she came back, and she handed over the can and sat on the other end, leaving plenty of comfort space between them. He nodded and popped the top. “So, I live here?”
“Yeah. Right up there.”
“That’s Michael’s room.”
“No, he’s over there now.”
“Huh, he always liked that room better.” He poked at the controller. “And we have an Xbox.”
“Actually, you’ve got an Xbox 360,” she said. “You bought it last year.”
“Sweet. What’s the difference?”
“Do you really want to talk about games right now?”
He stopped fiddling with the controller and put it down. “I guess not. Those other people out there, the ones acting so weird—they’ve got what I have, right? This memory problem. I didn’t just get kicked in the head or drugged or something.”
“No,” Claire said. “There’s a machine underground; it’s what wipes people’s memories when they leave town. But it’s not working right. It’s wiping memories inside town.”
He stopped to think about that. It said something about his childhood in Morganville that he didn’t, in fact, find that unbelievable at all. “How many people have it?”
“A lot. Maybe all of us, eventually. Michael got it yesterday. So did Eve. So did Amelie.”
Shane looked at her sharply. “Who?”
“You know. The Founder.”
“You know her by name?”
“So do you. But right now, she’s stuck in three years ago, just like you. She doesn’t remember me. She doesn’t remember Oliver or—”
“Who’s Oliver?”
This was going to be harder than she’d expected. “Never mind. The important thing is that before we went to sleep last night, we agreed we were going to find other people who could help us and we were going to try to turn off the machine.”
“We went to sleep together,” he said. “Without clothes.”
“Uh . . . yeah. We had underwear on, though.”
“Right. Why do I think that maybe it’s come off before?” He stared at her for what seemed like an uncomfortably long second, as if he were remembering her almost naked. “Okay, sounds easy enough. Let’s do it, if this is going to fix things.” He watched her expression, and said, “But it isn’t that easy. Is it?”
“The vamps won’t let us anywhere near where we need to go,” she said. “I can’t think of any of them we can count on now. Not even Michael.”
“Wait a second, what? Michael Glass? He is not a vampire. I think you mean his granddad Sam. Are you sure you really live here? Because that’s a pretty gigantic mistake.”