“Because I’d get smashed by burning death?”
“Because you would have been racing on a path to meet it.”
“It didn’t make sense to run toward danger. I’ve kinda lived my life doing the opposite.”
“We didn’t run toward it. We ran under it.”
“I get that now.”
“Remember it.” He stands, offering me his hand. “The night’s not over.”
I let him help me up. I was right, the machine is still standing, but the fire is dangerously close to it. Crenshaw is watching the Page girl run to the roaring crowd of worried Vashons, shouting for her to get to safety, while the rest of the group is already back at the trebuchet to make sure it doesn’t catch on fire.
“Is it okay?” I ask Ryan.
He looks up from where he’s checking one of the wheels. “I don’t know. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. Thanks, man,” he says to Trent with a jut of his chin. “I’m glad you were there to stop her.”
“No problem.”
“He’s fine, too, by the way,” I snap, annoyed they’re talking about me like I’m not even here. Let’s move past the fact that I wouldn’t be here if Trent hadn’t stopped me.
Ryan chuckles. “I know he is.”
“We’ve got a problem!” Bray shouts.
Ryan and Trent run around the trebuchet to where Bray is crouched by a rear wheel.
“What is it?” Ryan asks.
“It’s cracked.”
Ryan swears, his hands diving into his hair and rubbing it roughly.
“We can’t reposition it,” Taylor’s stocky twin tells us. “If we move it, that wheel will split in half and it’ll never shoot straight. We’ll have no aim.”
Trent steps up, touching the crack in the wheel. “It’s deep. Almost all the way through. If we fire it at all it’ll snap, most likely while the arm is in motion.”
“Which means our aim is gone anyway,” Ryan says, sounding resigned. Then he swears again and I think he’s lucky Crenshaw is too far away to hear him.
“What do we do?” I ask. No one answers me and I realize that’s my answer. “There’s nothing we can do, is there?”
“No. It’s dead,” Ryan admits.
“But the gate.”
“I know.”
“Maybe the Risen will take it down on their own,” Bray suggests. “There are a lot of them.”
“It’ll take too much time,” Trent tells him.
Ryan nods. “We needed them cruising right through that gate to flush the people out. We can’t give them a chance to defend against the herd.”
“We need to tell Alvarez. He’ll have to send in more people.”
“The tunnels?” I groan.
“Or the water,” one of the Vashons replies. “The cannibals are blowing the sewer tunnel entrance once they’re out. There’s no way to tell them to stop. Tunnels aren’t an option anymore.”
“How long until they do it?”
“Soon,” Bray says.
Ryan looks around urgently. “Where’s the Page? We need to tell Alvarez we can’t blow the gate.”
“She’s gone. Crenshaw told her to go so she ran...” My words taper off as I look around, spinning to search the area. “Where’s Crenshaw?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan answers.
“I don’t see him,” Trent says.
And that’s when I get scared.
“Crenshaw!” I shout, spinning around again.
“Guys,” Bray calls from the explosives table.
“Crenshaw!” Ryan yells.
“Guys.”
“Crenshaw!”
I can’t say exactly why I’m so worried, but something inside me is terrified. It’s the same cold feeling I had when I looked at Ryan and he smiled back at me. It’s that ominous sickness in my gut I’ve had all day. It’s some part of me that knows the world better than I ever could that’s screaming at me to pay attention. To see the signs.
“Crenshaw!”
“Guys!”
“What is it, Bray?” Ryan snaps.
“We’re missing explosives. A lot of them.”
I lock eyes with Ryan.
“He wouldn’t,” I whisper.
“Wouldn’t he?” he challenges.
I wait two beats—two measures in my heart that scream in my ears loud and clear.
Go! Now!
Ryan is half a step behind me when I take off at a sprint toward the gate. He’s fast, faster than Vin is, but he’s not as fast as me. Nothing is as fast as me.
Nothing but fate.
Once we’re away from the camp, I can’t see anything. The lights ahead at the gate are burning bright but they’re not focused out this far. I’m running in a dead zone of darkness where the sound of the crowd behind me is fading and the chorus of zombies rolling down the road right beside us is deafening. We’re stupid if we think the Colonists can’t hear this. They know what’s coming.
But it will never get there if that gate stays standing.
Not far ahead, where the water meets the fence line, I see a spark—once, then twice, in the familiar motion of someone striking flint.
I want to shout again to tell him to stop, to wait, to see how dangerous it is to be this close to the gate, this close to the zombies barreling down on it. Cren isn’t a fighter; he never has been. He doesn’t even like killing animals to eat them. If this herd of Risen reaches him, he’s done for. Ryan and I probably are too. Who knows? We might already be dead.
Another spark and then something catches. It buzzes with orange life in the darkness and I can see the outline of Crenshaw and his bathrobe billowing in the wind.
Before he can throw it, the night erupts in a series of explosions from inside the Pod. The ground shakes underneath me, making me feel unsteady on my sprinting feet. I try not to stumble just as flames blow into the sky in pillars that devour trees as they climb. There’s screaming drowned out by a few smaller explosions.
The cannibals have done their job, which means we’re late doing ours.
“Throw it!” I scream to Crenshaw.
He’s hesitated, the burning fuse still eating its way down to the explosives in his hand. He’s running out of time.
Luckily he hears me. He reaches back then launches the bomb forward, straight at the gate. It lands just shy of it, bouncing and rolling over the ground until it comes to a stop a few feet away.
“Get down!” Ryan shouts at me.
I throw myself to the ground just as it explodes. There’s more fire, more dirt and debris falling from the sky, along with the very satisfying sound of metal groaning in angry protest.
When I look up, I find Ryan on the ground next to me and an inferno burning at the gate. It’s still standing, but it’s taken a good hit.
Before I can catch my breath or stand, there’s another spark. I bury my head in my arms, preparing for another blast.
When it happens, it’s big.
Too big.
There’s the initial burst that sounds exactly like the first: boom, rain, groan. But then almost immediately there’s another one. And another. And another. They keep coming in rapid fire until I stop counting them and the sky feels like it’s falling down on top of me. Large chunks of dirt and rock pelt my back and legs. I feel like I’m deaf or underwater, the way I was in the tunnel. It’s too loud and disorienting. It also doesn’t make any sense.
When the rain finally stops, I hesitantly look up. The gate is gone. It is completely and utterly destroyed, and just in time too. The zombie herd, not even the least bit worried about the explosions ahead of them, are wandering directly toward it. They’ll walk right in, make themselves at home, sleep in their beds. Snack on their brains.
The part that’s crazy, though, is how it happened. I’m not an expert on explosives. I actually don’t know jack-all about them, but I know it’s weird that one bomb did minor damage while one just like it threatened to crack the earth in half.
I sit up, glancing at Ryan to find him on his knees, staring in amazement at the devastation surrounding the Pod.
“Ryan.”
He looks back at me with his face still intact, not a drop of blood to be seen, and I sigh with relief.
Then I nearly scream when I see his expression.
“Joss, it—” He chokes on his words.