“Not the left?”
“No. The left means he’s only mildly interested. The right is the serious thigh.”
“Deal.”
Lara turned around and hugged her, and Gaby felt a sudden flood of emotions she wasn’t prepared for. It almost got the best of her, but she managed to push it down so she wouldn’t start crying like a girl.
Girls cry. Soldiers don’t. You’re not a girl anymore.
“Take care of yourself, Gaby,” Lara whispered. “And him too, if you have the time.”
“I will. He and Danny are like the brothers I always hated.”
Lara laughed. “You’ve been spending too much time with Danny.”
“You think?”
“Just a tad.”
“That would explain the strange desire to punch myself in the face for absolutely no reason.”
They heard the helicopter’s rotor blades starting up behind them, the whup-whup-whup getting faster and faster, pushing the wind all the way over to the patio.
She looked over, saw Will waving at them.
“That’s my signal,” Gaby said.
“See you soon,” Lara said.
Gaby hurried off, jogging down the steps and running across the lawn, afraid that if she hesitated for even a second, she might change her mind and convince herself that she wasn’t ready for this.
She passed Blaine and Maddie, bracing against the onslaught of swirling wind. The whine of the helicopter’s turbine engine was already deafening even before she got close. Will opened the back door for her and she slipped inside. He slammed the door shut, then climbed into the cockpit’s passenger seat.
Will held up an aqua and black headset and motioned for her to put hers on. She grabbed a pair off the seat next to her. Will’s voice came through loud and clear. “We good?”
She nodded back. “We’re good.”
Will turned to Jen. “How far to Lafayette by air?”
“Eighty miles, so call it an hour, give or take,” Jen said. “I like to take the scenic route whenever I can, in case I run across survivors below.”
“How many survivors have you found over the last year?”
“Exactly thirteen.”
“Lucky thirteen.”
“Lucky for them, I showed up.”
The helicopter lifted into the air, gaining speed and altitude with each passing second. Gaby looked out her window, saw Carly outside the front patio with Lara and the kids leaning against the railing around them. It wasn’t until she saw the girls waving good-bye that the realization she was leaving the island for the first time since arriving here with Josh and the others three months ago finally struck her.
“How are you for fuel?” Will was asking Jen up front.
“There’s enough to get us to Lafayette and back, if necessary. Don’t sweat it.”
“Sweating things is what I do.”
“Is that how you landed the hot doctor?”
“That, and my charming personality.”
“Is that what she told you?”
Will chuckled.
Gaby became slowly aware of an insistent clicking noise. It took a few seconds to track it down to the ammo cans on the floor next to her, shaking from the vibrations that coursed through every inch of the helicopter. The rectangular boxes were dull green with handles on top, and the bullets inside were trembling against the sides, the metallic click-click-click sounding disconcertingly like a bomb’s timer.
Jen pointed the helicopter northeast, and Gaby watched Song Island slowly fade behind them.
Somewhere between Beaufont Lake and Lafayette, Gaby drifted off to sleep. When she opened her eyes, the first thing that flickered across her mind was—
Josh.
How long had it been since she thought of him?
Too long…
Josh is dead. Move on, girl.
She pushed him out of her mind and sat up in the backseat. In front of her, Will and Jen were talking, their voices coming through the headset that had slipped down to her neck while she slept. She pulled it back up over her ears.
“The city’s almost completely empty,” Jen was saying. “I flew this chopper over every inch of it before I started expanding out into the countryside. I was sure there would be survivors at Lake Charles. If anyone can survive the end of the world, it’s got to be gamblers, right?”
“Where do you land this thing in the city?” Will asked.
“I’ve been landing and taking off from the hospital rooftop. Every time I leave it up there overnight, I’m always dead certain the next morning I’ll find it in a hundred pieces, that they — the ghouls — would sabotage it. But they never did. I don’t know why.”
“It’s a good question.”
“You don’t have any theories?”
“Not really. They used a car against us once. They lifted it up and crashed it into a brick wall.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
Gaby had heard that story before. Will and Lara had lost a couple of people they were traveling with that night.
We’ve all lost people.
She thought about everyone she had lost over the last year. Her parents, her friends, her neighbors…
Josh…
“What was he in the Army?” Will was asking in the cockpit.
“Mike was a lieutenant,” Jen said. “You?”
“Corporal.”
She grinned over at him. “So what was it, a general lack of ambition? You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d be happy pulling down a corporal paycheck for the rest of his life.”
“I didn’t see the point. I left the Army after my enlistment was up, joined the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Danny and I were working SWAT when all of this happened.”
“Damn, Will, I didn’t know I was flying a badass soldier-slash-ex-SWAT commando around. I’m practically trembling with excitement.”
Will smiled. “You want an autograph?”
“Will you sign my breasts?”
“Are they big enough?”
“Wouldn’t you like to find out.”
Lafayette, Louisiana, according to Jen, was a city of 112,000 people. Dull, gray concrete highways had replaced open prairie below the swiftly moving helicopter, and she glimpsed large buildings and skyscrapers in the distance. Marble and glass curtain walls, something she hadn’t seen in a while, glinted underneath the sun’s glare.
Jen reached forward and hit some switches along her helicopter’s dashboard — they all looked the same to Gaby — before speaking into her headset. “Mercy Hospital, this is Jen, I’m on approach. Anyone manning the radio over there? Over.”
There was static through Gaby’s headset for a few seconds, before a male voice answered: “We hear you loud and clear, Jen. Welcome back. We thought you’d abandoned us for good this time. Over.”
“No such luck, Mercy Hospital. I’m ten minutes out. Over.”
“Roger that. ETA ten minutes. Over.”
“Inform Mike I’m rolling in with two new people. They’re armed but not dangerous, so no one get ants in their pants. Over.”
“Will do,” the man said. “Mercy Hospital over and out.”
“You guys have problems with other survivors before?” Will asked.
“Here and there, but nothing we couldn’t handle,” Jen said. “We’ve never had to fight off a whole army of collaborators, though. Mike’s done a hell of a job keeping us going, but…” She paused.
“But?”
“I don’t know. We’re not soldiers, you know? There are a couple of soldiers at the hospital. Mike and a couple of his guys, but the rest of us are just civilians. If there was a fight like the kind you guys had to deal with…” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”