Footsteps clicked against the rock, echoing down the walls of the gorge, growing softer each second. It wouldn’t be long until Dad and I were alone again.
With Dad the way he was, I’d never be able to get us out of there. I closed the box of bullets and struggled to my feet, my head pounding.
I knew that what I was doing was wrong. If Grandpa had been around, he’d have had a better answer, but he wasn’t. It was just me.
“Marcus!” I called out as I ran down the shore. “Sam! Wait up!”
PART TWO
NINE
We headed west for the rest of that day, tumbling through the yellow grass just below a heavily cratered highway. A thin sheet of clouds, like dirty cotton, was smeared across the sky.
They had me wear a bandanna over my eyes all morning so I wouldn’t know the path they were taking, but they let me take it off by the time the sun was halfway into the sky. Not that it mattered much. I had never been so far west in my life and had no clue where I was.
Marcus led the way with Jackson bringing up the rear. I was with Dad in their wood-slat wagon, sitting behind Sam and Will. Lying across from us was a buck Marcus said he’d shot earlier that morning. I tried not to look at it. Its stillness and empty, glasslike eyes caused something inside me to quake.
I scanned the area around us for salvage, eager for something familiar, but there was nothing useful on the path, just blowing trash and a few distant billboards and road signs.
I huddled down behind the front bench of the wagon and tended to Dad. He was lashed to a driftwood stretcher that Sam had improvised to get him out of the gorge. I raised his head into my lap and poured some water over his lips to wet them, careful that none of it went down his throat. I made sure Sam and Will were focused on the road, then took his arm in my hand and squeezed, praying that if some part of him was still awake he’d feel it and know I was there.
Jackson had abandoned his position as rear guard and was trailing along behind the wagon, his rifle too big for him and cradled awkwardly in his hands.
“You know, my mom’s real good,” he said. “Last year she fixed my friend Derrick’s broken arm.”
He waited for a response, but I ignored him, turning my attention back to Dad. I was relieved when Jackson finally let the wagon pull away. I couldn’t seem to look at him without seeing his face framed in my scope the night before. The memory of my finger tensing on the trigger felt cold and dark inside me, like a stone at the bottom of a well.
“Hey, look at that!” Will called out, his golden hair fluttering in the wind. We were rolling past an island of gas stations and fast-food restaurants off the highway north of us. An Applebee’s sat in the center of it all like a faded king, its red, white, and green striped awning in tatters. A pack of dogs, razor thin and rabid, was in the parking lot, snarling as they fought over bits of trash. “Looks like some friends of yours!”
“Will,” Sam warned.
“No, seriously. Bet they even smell the same, like a mix of dead horse and an outhouse.”
Will had raised holy hell when Marcus and Sam had told him I was coming, yelling about outsiders and spies and how I’d tell everyone where their town was.
“Guess they don’t have bathtubs in Fort Leonard, huh, spy?”
I gritted my teeth. I didn’t know what Fort Leonard was, or why he thought I was some sort of spy for them. I knew I should ignore him like I’d ignored Jackson, but I found my fingers curling around the handle of Dad’s knife instead.
Will was about to start up again when the wagon slammed to a halt, tossing him back into his place at the front. “Ow! Sam!”
“Oh gee, sorry, Will.”
Sam turned and gave me a mischievous little grin as Will righted himself, cussing and spitting.
Marcus came striding back from his place at the head of the group, wiping sweat off his bald head with his sleeve. I hid the knife under my coat before he could see.
“It’s time,” Marcus said, and dropped a red bandanna on the wood rail at my shoulder — we must have been getting close. The whole thing seemed pretty ridiculous, but Marcus was nice enough about it, so I went along.
As I was about to tie on the bandanna again, I caught Jackson staring at me. He held his rifle tight to his chest, his arms straining, his finger along the trigger guard. His face had gone stony. Confused, I followed his eyes down to my lap and saw that my coat had brushed open, exposing the weapon in my hand. Our eyes met before his darted away, but in that second I saw that he was afraid. I eased the knife back into its sheath before tying the blindfold around my eyes, feeling strangely satisfied to be the one causing fear instead of the one feeling it.
The air grew steadily cooler and twilight settled around us. After a while, we came to a halt, and Sam and Will piled out of the wagon. There were shuffling footsteps and low voices up ahead, then the sound of something large brushing against the ground. I slipped the bandanna up over my eyes while their backs were turned and caught the four of them moving aside a group of small trees and brush to expose a rough path cutting into the woods ahead of us. Clever. I raced to pull the bandanna back down before they returned.
It was colder and darker in the woods. We were surrounded on all sides by creaking branches and animal calls. It was another hour or more of bouncing travel before we moved out onto open ground, where we flew downhill before coming to a stop.
There was a pause, then Sam loosened the knot of my blindfold so it fell to my shoulders.
We were at the bottom of a grass-covered valley, surrounded on all sides by deep forest. Ahead of us was a white stone wall that cut across the entire valley like a bright line of snow, with a heavy double iron gate at its center. Two words were engraved in deep letters on the white walclass="underline" SETTLER’S LANDING.
After Marcus opened the gates, Sam shook the reins and we rolled through. The gates made a rusty clank and then a deep final boom as they closed, hemming us in. A nervous flare bit through me. For a panicked moment, I wanted to leap out of the wagon and run. I took Dad’s arm tight in my fist.
What have I gotten us into?
On the other side of the gates, the grass turned into black asphalt, not at all the cracked, bomb-ravaged stuff most highways had become, but smooth and neat, snaking away down the hill. The horses’ hooves clicked as we followed it. The trees on either side of the road filtered the dying rays of sunlight so that they fell on us in shifting patterns of small shadows. It was achingly quiet. As we got farther in, I caught flashes of black and white and bright, unnatural colors peeking out through the trees.
I was about to ask what they were but before the breath could leave my lungs the first house emerged from the trees. It was set back about a hundred feet from the road, two stories, with bright yellow on top and brick on the bottom, the whole thing circled by a wide porch the color of beach sand. Glass glittered in the window frames and there were brass fixtures on the doors and casements. In front of the house, a man in a sweater and jeans was raking up leaves from the lawn. He waved as we passed.
“Better close your mouth before a bug flies in,” Sam said to me as he waved back.
Will snickered. “It’s like the spy’s never seen a house before.”
It was true. I hadn’t. Not like this anyway. Grandpa said that in the days of P11, people tried to escape the disease by barricading themselves in their homes, praying it would pass them by like an ill wind but it rarely worked. Somehow the plague always slipped in, under the doorways or through the windows like a mist, and killed them as they lay in their beds or sat at their dinner tables. Grandpa said that people used to think their home was their castle, but the Eleventh Plague made them all tombs. Every house I had ever known stank of rot, desperation, and fear. I didn’t go anywhere near them.