They’ve known each other maybe two weeks at most. It feels like a lifetime.
“Okay,” she says, when she’s done the best she can. It isn’t pretty, or particularly clean. Brian is mercifully still unconscious. She tries not to think about what will come later.
“I should have let him take the first watch,” Darby says. “I would have—I would have let them go. I wouldn’t have tried to be a hero—”
Moira pulls her hoodie over her head, grateful for its warmth, then rests a hand on Darby’s arm. “At least he’s alive.” Alive, with a leg that’s as good as useless. And no hospital in sight.
“We have to go after them,” JJ says. “Both of you get in the truck. Let’s go.”
Moira and Darby both stare at him. “Why?”
“There was a woman with them,” JJ says. “Right?”
“I think so,” Moira says.
“Where there are people,” JJ says, “there might be food. We need to follow them.”
“How the fuck are we supposed to follow them in the dark?” Darby says. “We don’t even know which way they went, for fuck’s sake.”
“They went north,” JJ says, and he points behind them, into the trees.
“How the hell do you know that?” Darby says.
JJ shrugs. “It’s just a hunch. A feeling.”
“I don’t want to drive God knows where on a goddamned hunch!” Darby shouts.
JJ remains calm. “They’ll come back out on the road,” he says. “Even they can’t run through the forests forever—you’ve seen the undergrowth. They’re heading north, toward the mountains.”
Moira doesn’t ask how he knows this. She thinks of the creature. How he’d reached for the woman and shattered Brian’s leg in less time than it took her to inhale. How the woman had curled into his chest as though she was the wounded thing.
He could speak. He’d looked right at her when she held that gun in his face.
The rifle. She runs back to where Brian fell and finds it, already half covered in green. She reaches for it and is not surprised when the green vines and long, tangled grasses at her feet twine more tightly about it. She tugs, gently at first and then less so, and finally the green things let go and she stumbles back. As she rights herself, she notices something glinting at her feet—a small, delicate knife, a scalpel. She picks that up too. It is always good to keep what they find. She hurries back to the truck and hands Darby the rifle, then lets him hoist her up.
“What’s that?” JJ says, pointing to the knife in her hand.
“Don’t know,” she says. “A scalpel? I found it near the rifle.”
“What’s Dr. Moira need a scalpel for?” Darby says, trying to make a joke.
She echoes JJ. “Just a hunch,” she says. “A feeling.”
JJ nods, then shuts them in.
As they bounce over the unforgiving road, she turns the scalpel over and over in her hands. She’s never seen a scalpel like this—not that she’s seen many scalpels at all. The handle is cylindrical and smooth, with tiny designs running the length of it. She slowly draws a line through the air with the blade.
Maybe it’s magic, she thinks. Like the creature. Maybe she can cut a window through the air and step back in time to the years before any of this happened.
“What, now you’re a doctor for real?” Darby teases. She lets him have his fun. They are three broken men and Moira, who is not a doctor, just someone who used to be on TV sometimes but has mostly been a waitress.
(It was the nose, her agent told her a million years ago. It was too sharp. We want real but not that real, he said.)
She wraps the scalpel carefully in some cloth and puts it in the pocket of her hoodie, then puts her head in her hands and tries to still her shaking mind. The truck rumbles through the dark and no one speaks.
She’d walked and walked and walked in those first few hours after the scream—moving out of her bathroom refuge and then down the street, out of her town, through the town after that. The sun had gone down, the stars had come out, and she’d taken shelter in an abandoned gas station convenience store, then woken to the sound of someone at the fuel tanks. When she went outside, she saw Darby trying to siphon diesel, the old U-Haul silent and waiting. Brian had been sitting in the passenger seat. He’d been the first to notice her.
Eric, already delirious, had been out of sight in the back.
“How do you know if there’s even gas left?” she had called.
Darby had looked up, almost dropping his gas can in surprise. “I don’t,” he said, once he’d regained his composure. “But it never hurts to try.”
She went with them—they asked no questions. Darby had rigged the truck up to work on vegetable oil as well as regular diesel, so whenever they stopped, they looked for both of these things. They didn’t travel far. They found JJ a few days after that, waiting for something by the side of the road. Eric was dead by then and so it was only the four of them, swirling into place like a constellation. It feels like she’s known them her whole life.
“Do you know how to set a leg, Dr. Moira?” Darby asks, breaking the silence. “For real?”
“Of course not,” she says, staring at the floor.
Neither of them looks at Brian.
22
Annie has a pistol in her belt—they found it a few days ago, and it’s the only gun they have—and Tasha has Elyse hooked around her shoulder as they stagger toward the mountain. It is harder going now than it had been during the winter—there is practically no path left, just an endless vista of green, with bright flowers that arch over them, glorious, unchecked. They take their time. The world is quiet save for birds that chirp unseen in the trees.
They smell the greenhouse before they see it, and are grateful the scent doesn’t make them spin in panic. They creep forward to find the greenhouse door broken, its panes of glass shattered.
“Here,” Elyse says between breaths. “The creature was right here.”
Tasha lowers her to the ground. Elyse still wears the Doc Martens, still has the black leather jacket. Some things, Tasha thinks, have survived.
Tasha looks up at the mountain rising above them. A mountain tall enough that one could climb it and reach the clouds. A mountain where mothers and fathers might have brought their crippled, disfigured young to die so many years ago.
The world is still beautiful, despite all of its terror and tragedy, and she understands none of it. Blood and brains and heartbeats? Things that grow and things that don’t and stories about birds that fall from the sky? She tried so hard to keep them all alive—and for what? When her parents died, she was not there; the people in this city died around her even as she fought to stop it. And here she is, alive. After everything.
“I thought we could do it,” she says then, staring off into the green. “I just wanted us all to survive.”
“People believed in you,” Elyse says. She coughs again.
“People believed in stories,” Tasha says. She can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “The mountain and its secrets. The Food Angel, whatever that was. There was nothing I could do about that.”
“You were a story too,” Annie says. “I told you that, Tasha—and you didn’t listen to me.”
Tasha nods. Her gaze drops to the trees—the green things that grow, the world that has turned away from them all. “I thought I would—rewrite it? Shift everyone’s attention to things that mattered? I don’t know.”