“You’re the a-hole!” Sammy shouted after her. The door slammed in that quick, violent way of hotel doors. “A-hole.”
Ben looked at me, right eyebrow cocked. “What happened to your face?”
“Nothing.”
“I hit her,” Sammy said.
“You hit her?”
“For letting my daddy die.”
Now Sam lost it. As in tears, not fists, and the next thing I knew, Ben was kneeling and my baby brother was crying in his arms, and Ben was saying, “Hey, it’s okay, soldier. It’s going to be okay.” Stroking the crew cut I was still getting used to—Sammy just didn’t seem like Sammy without the mop of hair—saying that dumb-ass camp name over and over. Nugget, Nugget. I knew it shouldn’t, but it bothered me that everyone had a nom de guerre but me. I liked Defiance.
Ben picked him up and deposited him in the bed. Then he found Bear lying on the floor and placed him on the pillow. Sam knocked him away. Ben picked him up again.
“You really want to decommission Teddy?” he asked.
“His name isn’t Teddy.”
“Private Bear,” Ben tried.
“Just Bear, and I never want to see him again!” Sam yanked the covers over his head. “Now go away! Everybody. Just. Go. Away!”
I took a step toward him. Ben tsked at me and jerked his head toward the door. I followed him out of the room. A large shadow hulked by the window down the halclass="underline" the big, silent kid named Poundcake, whose silence did not fall into the creepy category, more like the profound stillness of a mountain lake variety. Ben leaned against the wall, hugging Bear to his chest, mouth slightly open, sweating despite the freezing temperature. Exhausted after a tussle with a couple of kids, Ben was in trouble, which meant we all were.
“He didn’t know your dad was dead,” he said.
I shook my head. “He did and he didn’t. One of those things.”
“Yeah.” Ben sighed. “Those things.”
A lead ball of silence the size of Newark dropped between us. Ben was absently stroking Bear’s head like an old man strokes a cat while reading the newspaper.
“I should go back to him,” I said.
Ben sidestepped to the door, blocking my way. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t poke your nose into—”
“Not the first person in his life to die. He’ll deal.”
“Wow. That was harsh.” We’re talking about the guy who was my father, too, Zombie boy.
“You know what I meant.”
“Why do people always say that after they say something totally cruel?” Then I said it, because I may have certain issues with self-editing: “I happen to know what it’s like to ‘deal’ with death all by yourself. Just you and nothing else but the big empty of where everything used to be. It would have been nice, really, really nice, to have had someone there with me . . .”
“Hey,” Ben said softly. “Hey, Cassie, I didn’t—”
“No, you didn’t. You really didn’t.” Zombie. Because he didn’t have feelings, dead inside like a zombie? There were people at Ashpit like that. Shufflers, I called them, human-shaped sackfuls of dust. Something irreplaceable had crumbled inside. Too much loss. Too much pain. Shuffling, blank-eyed, slack-jawed mutterers. Was that Ben? Was he a shuffler? Then why did he risk everything to rescue Sam?
“Wherever you were,” Ben said slowly, “we were there, too.”
The words stung. Because they were true and because someone else said practically the same thing to me: You’re not the only one who’s lost everything. That someone else suffered the ultimate loss. All for my sake, the cretin who must be reminded, again, that she’s not the only one. Life is full of little ironies, but it’s also pockmarked with some the size of that big rock in Australia.
Time to change the subject. “Did Ringer leave?”
Ben nodded. Stroke, stroke. The bear was bugging me. I tugged it from his arms.
“I tried to send Poundcake with her,” he said. He laughed softly. “Ringer.” I wondered if he was aware of how he said her name. Quietly, like a prayer.
“You know we have no backup plan if she doesn’t come back.”
“She’ll come back,” he said firmly.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because we have no backup plan.” Now an all-out, full smile, and it’s disorienting, seeing the old smile that lit up classrooms and hallways and yellow school buses overlaid on his new face, reshaped by disease and bullets and hunger. Like turning a corner in a strange city and running into someone you know.
“That’s a circular argument,” I pointed out.
“You know, some guys might feel threatened being surrounded by people smarter than they are. But it just makes me more confident.”
He squeezed my arm and limped across the hall to his room. Then it’s the bear and the big kid down the hall and the closed door and me in front of the closed door. I took a deep breath and stepped inside the room. Sat beside the lump of covers. I didn’t see him but knew he was there. He didn’t see me but knew I was there.
“How did he die?” Muffled voice buried.
“He was shot.”
“Did you see?”
“Yes.”
Our father crawling, hands clawing the dirt.
“Who shot him?”
“Vosch.” I closed my eyes. Bad idea. The dark snapped the scene into sharp focus.
“Where were you when he shot him?”
“Hiding.”
I reached to pull down the covers. Then I couldn’t. Wherever you were. In the woods somewhere off an empty highway, a girl zipped herself up in a sleeping bag and watched her father die again and again. Hiding then, hiding now, watching him die again and again.
“Did he fight?”
“Yes, Sam. He fought very hard. He saved my life.”
“But you hid.”
“Yes.” Crushing Bear against my stomach.
“Like a big fat chicken.”
“Not like that,” I whispered. “It wasn’t like that.”
He slung the blankets aside and bolted upright. I didn’t recognize him. I’d never seen this kid before. Face ugly and twisted by rage and hate.
“I’m going to kill him. I’m going to shoot him in the head!”
I smiled. Or tried to, anyway. “Sorry, Sams. I have dibs.”
We looked at each other and time folded in on itself, the time we had lost in blood and the time we had purchased in blood, the time when I was just the bossy big sister and he was the annoying little brother, the time when I was the thing worth living for and he was the thing worth dying for, and then he crumpled into my arms, the bear smushed between us the way we were trapped between the before-time and the after-time.
I lay down next to him and together we said his prayer: If I should die before I wake . . . And then I told him the story of how Dad died. How he stole a gun from one of the bad guys and single-handedly took out twelve Silencers. How he stood up to Vosch, telling him, You can crush our bodies but never our spirit. How he sacrificed himself so I could escape to rescue Sam from the evil galactic horde. So one day Sam could gather the ragtag remnants of humanity and save the world. So his memories of his father’s last moments aren’t of a broken, bleeding man crawling in the dirt.
After he fell asleep, I slipped out of bed and returned to my post by the window. A strip of parking lot, a decrepit diner (“All You Can Eat Wednesdays!”), and a stretch of gray highway fading into black. The Earth dark and quiet, the way it was before we showed up to fill it with noise and light. Something ends. Something new begins. This was the in-between time. The pause.
On the highway, beside an SUV that had run into the median strip, starlight glinted off the unmistakable shape of a rifle barrel, and for a second my heart stopped. The shadow toting the gun darted into the trees and I saw the shimmer of jet-black hair, glossy and perfectly, annoyingly straight, and I knew the shadow was Ringer.