“Abram.” I stop marching and turn around. His eyes flash with warning but he doesn’t raise the gun. “Perry had to die before he understood why he was alive. Don’t wait as long as he did.”
“The fuck is going on back there?” one of the soldiers barks over his shoulder. “Move your prisoners, Roberts!”
“Your father wasn’t weak. He was good.” I look straight into his eyes. “And your brother wasn’t stupid for loving that girl on the playground.”
Abram’s eyes go wide. “Shut up and march!” he yelps, jabbing me in the ribs with the rifle barrel. I grimace but I stand my ground.
“Every good thing is worth fighting for. No matter how long it lasts.”
His eyes scan me up and down, his mind racing for explanations, but I’m not trying to shock him with my secret knowledge. I’m just trying to reach him however I can. I feel Julie’s eyes on me too, but I pretend not to notice. I turn and resume marching.
The “battle” has ended. Unleashing the Dead was an effective diversion and even managed to take out a few soldiers, but it bought the Fire Church twenty minutes at most. The troops dissolve their formation and climb into their vehicles. I see the prisoner van. The doors are still open and it looks like there’s room for us. I see our friends inside and they see us. I see Nora drop her head into her hands. I see M looking at his feet, eyes full of shame. I see Tomsen rubbing her scalp with manic intensity. And I see the boy, Addis, staring at me, through me.
A hard shove from behind. I stumble into a shadowed alleyway and Julie falls in after me.
Abram stands in the opening, silhouetted against the gray sky. “Two things before I never see you again. One”—he looks at me—“you’re fighting a giant. You can’t win. Get out of its way before it crushes you. And two”—he looks at Julie— “the Burners have your mother.”
And then he’s gone.
“What the fuck?” Julie says in a shaky whisper.
I twist around to look at my cuffs. The key is sticking out of the lock.
“He’s lying, right?” she says, still staring at the spot where he was standing. “She’s not really here, he just said that so we wouldn’t go after him, right?”
I present my cuffs to Julie. She sees the key. She unlocks me and I unlock her.
“What do we do?” she mutters to no one. “I don’t know what to do.”
I peek out from the alley. Knobby tires are grinding over corpses as the convoy pulls out of the square. Prisoner transports go straight down the hill while trucks and SUVs spread out in search of fugitive Ardents. I see Nora’s face in the rear window of the departing van. She sees us. She waves.
“This isn’t happening,” Julie snarls, digging her fingers into her scalp. “It can’t.”
Her eyes dart to the barrel of a shotgun poking up from a pile of corpses, and I recognize a dangerous threshold approaching. Julie is smart, and surprisingly rational for a self-proclaimed dreamer. But as I’ve witnessed more than once in others and myself, every cup has its brim.
She grabs the gun and runs after the van.
Nora is violently shaking her head, mouthing No! but I doubt Julie even sees her through the blur of tears. What do we do? What do I do?
I run after her.
Everything slows. I feel each second like heirloom china slipping through my fingers, precious and irreplaceable. Why? What does my mind know that I don’t? My surroundings snap into map-like clarity, every building and street etched in vibrating lines.
Ten feet ahead of me, framed by falling globes of water, Julie is running.
Forty feet ahead of her, the van and the rest of the convoy are approaching the crest of the hill.
Thirty feet ahead of the convoy, a freight door is sliding open on the front of a large warehouse.
A woman is staggering out from the shadows, naked and mutilated, eyes wide with fear.
Julie stumbles and stops. Her mouth opens, and it feels like minutes before the scream comes out.
“Mom!”
Audrey sees her daughter. She recognizes her daughter. She smiles and starts toward her. And then the shadows behind her fill with bodies, a dense mob of mangled corpses rushing into the street with the speed only starvation gives them in their dark inversion of biology.
I’ve never seen Julie run so fast. She’s halfway to her mother before I’ve processed what’s happening. The convoy revs forward and tries to plow through the mob; the Dead jam themselves into wheel wells and smash through windshields and I hear screeching tires and gunfire but I don’t pause to determine the convoy’s fate, even though it’s also my friends’. I run toward Julie as she runs toward her mother.
I see her shotgun flashing fire. I see it swinging to crack skulls or snap necks or simply push bodies back—whatever clears a path. She knows there’s no third life for these ruined creatures. She’s only ending their long nightmare. I’m right behind her now, and as she lowers her gun to grab her mother’s hand, I see the swarm closing in around her.
I release my restraints. I begin to kill.
Unarmed combat with the Dead is an absurd proposition. They feel no pain, their organs are irrelevant, and even broken bones are no obstacle for the force that animates their limbs—tissues stiffen around the break and they keep moving. But there are ways. I would quickly destroy my hands trying to punch through skulls, but I find that my elbows work nicely, especially once I’ve peeled them down to pointy shivs of bone.
Craniums crack like eggs on a pan. The feeling is hideous and more satisfying than I’d like to admit. Were Paul and Mr. Atvist right about the violence in everyone? Am I proving the wisdom of the devils that duel on my shoulders? I don’t care. All I want is to get Julie through this. I want to lift her out of this churning sea and set her safe on the shore, and once I’ve done that…
Two bloated, putrefying men get ahold of her shirt and yank her backwards. I rush up behind them and smash their heads together so hard they deform like rotten melons. Julie turns. She sees me. She and her mother are free of the swarm; the street is wide open ahead of them. I offer an encouraging smile and open my mouth to say something—
My teeth bite tinfoil, my nails scrape chalkboards, there are wasps in my hair, a cut cable in my neck, electricity knotting my nerves, splitting my bones, aluminum and bile in my mouth—it happened.
It happened.
Instant, unavoidable, like a drunk driver hurtling around a corner—how did it ever feel unlikely? How did the danger feel distant? A single glass-crack second and everything is gone.
I hear Julie screaming. I am sticky with cold gore; did she shoot the one that bit me? It doesn’t matter. The electricity is baking my blood into fat black worms and I feel them wriggling through my veins. It hurts. It shouldn’t be possible for anything to hurt this much; I should go into shock or black out completely, but I don’t. I feel every shrieking detail.
The first time I met the plague, I embraced it with a tired sigh. This time I know what I’m losing.
Julie is clinging to my shirt, sobbing, but there’s no time for any words worth saying. The bite is in my neck, inches from my brain—it will happen fast. Even if she can bring herself to shoot me, I won’t give her that trauma as my parting gift. I will exit the stage gracefully.
I pull her hands off me.
I take a step back.
I grant myself five seconds to look into her eyes. To let her see all the love I wanted to give her. To mourn for a future that died in its chrysalis.
Then I run into the forest.
WE