Gasping, he turned a look back. Intensely bright, insanely brilliant gouts of bloody light burst from the hall’s ruptured windows, like the fiery breaths exhaled from the many mouths of monsters rising from the deep. He could feel the gush of heat, and more surging after. The entire village hall didn’t just fall away; it blew apart in a rocketing hail of stone and steel and surging fireballs that rolled in orange-red waves to crash over the Changed and braying horses and every living soul still in that square. That light was so bright it cut him a long, fleeing shadow. His eyes shouted with pain as if he’d tried staring into the heart of the sun. If there were shrieks and screams, he couldn’t hear them.
But closer, in his arms, he felt Peter stir, and heard him moan. Things were now falling, in a shower, from the sky: a rain of stone and flaming wood. Limbs blown from trees stabbed down in jagged, flaming spears. And there were bodies, in pieces: legs and arms, the scorched blackened balls of skulls. The haunches of horses and stumps of bone and more flesh too blasted even to guess at. A block and a half away, a horse’s head, mane ablaze, blistered a burning arc to slam the roof of a house before tumbling off.
“Chris!” It was Tom. Still dazed, he turned and saw Tom and Greg and that enormous wolfdog waiting at the mouth of the road that would take them to the hospice and away from Rule.
When he reached them, Chris said, stupidly, “It was so . . so big.”
“I know,” Tom said. In his arms, Alex cawed a breath. Gathering her, Tom swung his horse and pointed them north.
“Let it go, Chris,” Tom said. “Don’t look back.”
THE LONG WALK
IT felt like early summer, although he couldn’t be exactly sure. Chris sat cross-legged on a flat table of greenstone-speckled basalt in a drench of sun. The day was cloudless, the sky a hazy white where it edged the indigo of the lake but a deeper, stonewashed denim directly overhead. Smelling of cool iron and tangy spruce, a northerly breeze feathered his hair. Drifting up from the valley some thousand feet below came the solitary grunt of a wood frog. Directly north, off the far coast, he counted at least five thin and rocky treestudded slivers and a larger green splash spread over the water like an outstretched hand.
Teasing out the blade of a pocketknife, he sliced a wedge of cheese, tore off a hunk of flaky baguette, and laid the cheese on top. Holding the food under his nose, he inhaled a buttery aroma of warm cheddar and fresh-baked bread, then took a bite. He moaned.
From just off his right shoulder came a low laugh. “Good, isn’t it?” Peter said.
“Oh my God,” he mumbled around bread and cheese. “I’ve got to learn how to make this.”
Peter’s laugh was light as a breath of air. “Well, first you got to have a couple cows. And, oh, some flour. Yeast. Sugar. Rennin and—”
“A guy can dream.” He tore off more bread. “Don’t be such a dweeb.”
“Moi? Never.” A gurgle, then Peter’s swallow and contented sigh. “Want some?”
“Gee.” He pretended to think. “I don’t know . . . I’m not legal.”
“As a duly appointed officer of the law and your guide, I insist. Promise not to fall off the ridge and no one will know,” Peter said. “Besides, the old rules don’t apply anymore, especially here.”
“Well, when you put it that way.” Chris took the bottle that Peter passed over his shoulder. Cool condensation beaded the glass. When he put the lip to his mouth, what flowed over his tongue was crisp and cold and tasted a little like . . . grapefruit? Closing his eyes, Chris drank, concentrating on the wine’s flavor.
Thinking: I have to remember this, all of it, every second. This may never come again.
“So.” He could feel the warmth already flooding into his head and thought he really might have to be careful on the way down. If that was an issue here. If Peter ever came down. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”
“Thunder Bay to your left,” Peter said, pointing northwest to a distant, hazy ribbon of purple mountains. “From where we are on the Greenstone Ridge, Amygdaloid Island is the furthest barrier island, that really long, thin one due north. That big splotch to the right”— from the corner of Chris’s right eye, a hand pointed the way—“is the western edge of Five Finger Bay. I’ve portaged all through there. Talk about a killer. All I carried was a kayak and a pack. Think about a canoe. My shoulders ached for days.”
“Sounds terrible.”
“Hence, the need for medicinal wine. But it really is . . . heaven.”
“No,” Chris said, a little giddy with the wine. “It’s Michigan.”
“Smart-ass. I could hike this whole ridge, all forty-plus miles from one end of Isle Royale to the other, take my time, make this walk as long as I wanted—and still not see a single person or hear anything other than birds and frogs. In spring there are more butterflies than you can imagine. A few times, I’ve even heard the wolves.”
“Weren’t you lonely?”
“Back then? Not really. Maybe because it wasn’t forever. You always went back to your life.”
“What about now?” Dangling the bottle between his fingers, Chris gave the wine a swirl, then took another swallow. Grapefruit and apples and . . . vanilla? No, that wasn’t right.
“Lonely?” Peter let go of a long breath, and then Chris felt his friend’s hand giving his right shoulder a squeeze. “A little. You get used to it. This is my space, Chris. I can’t go or be anywhere else. But you can.” A small silence. “Are you going to?”
“I don’t know.” He sipped wine. “I’m not sure.”
“No?” When he didn’t reply, Peter gave his shoulder another squeeze. “Hey. Talk to me. What’s going on? This isn’t about Alex, is it?”
“Oh . . . no, I’m okay with that. This isn’t a dumb love triangle from a book or something. She’s had to deal with enough. Bothers me that she pitches her tent away from us, though. She’s been doing that ever since we walked into the Waucamaw.”
“Maybe because she started this walk, on her own, a long time ago. Besides, she nearly died. You know what that’s like.”
This was true. Thank Tom and what every soldier knew to save a buddy’s life, or his own. Otherwise, Alex never would’ve survived the ride back to Kincaid. Chris still remembered the hiss of escaping air when Tom slid that IV needle high up between two right ribs to help her breathe. How Tom had then tried, so hard, to give Peter a chance, too. For Alex, the only saving grace was that the bullet came in low enough to miss the big arteries and high enough not to take out her liver. That still left that collapsed lung, macerated muscle and tissue, and two smashed ribs. Kincaid had made very good use of that combat pack. Someone—Ellie, Tom, or Chris—stayed by her side the entire journey to Isaac’s new location. Once she could get up, Tom spent hours making her walk even when she didn’t want to, carrying her outside, and, in general, hovering like a hawk.
Since then, Alex had done . . . okay. Splitting off from Jayden, Greg, Pru, Sarah, and all the children—the Rule kids, and Tom’s—a week ago had tipped some mental scale. Passing that ruined ranger’s booth, the wreckage of her car still in the lot, it seemed to Chris that Alex had retreated a little more into herself with each passing mile.
“Tom and I are just giving her space to figure it out,” Chris said. “Can’t make her want to be with us, although it’s hard on Ellie. We haven’t told her everything, and she doesn’t understand.”
“Do you?”
“A little. Alex is . . . she’s not all here. You can see the distance in her eyes.” Sometimes, he wondered if memories were all she saw. Given what lived in her head, there was always another possibility, too upsetting to want to think about for long. “Tom spends every evening with her. She’ll talk to him. He understands way better than I ever will.” The ping of hurt was small but still stung. Everything he said to Tom in the jail at Rule, he’d meant. Tom and Alex were just . . . right for each other. “Tom says it’s like Alex has come back from a long war. That makes sense. She was with the Changed for months. She actually cared about Simon.”
“But Simon does have your face. She never would’ve let herself care or risked her life for him if she didn’t feel the same way about you.”
“I know that. We’re family, I guess. Tom said that once you found your people, you found yourself. Except . . . I’m still not sure.”
“I thought you liked Jayden.”
“Oh no, he’s great. I’m relieved he came up with this. Forget everything that happened: I’d never have fit with Hannah. She’s too territorial. I want to live someplace I make, try and do it right this time, find a balance. And, you know, avoid Changing or getting eaten.”
“Both are going to be problems for a long time, but not forever. The Change is a dead end, Chris. It’s not a disease. It was an event. The only children who will Change from here on out will be like Ellie—too young to Change right away—or like you, kids who still might Change down the line.”
“Thanks. That’s just so reassuring.”
“But it’s the truth. Then there are the ones like Penny’s baby. Maybe it’ll pop out just like the Changed, and maybe it won’t. Finn talked about this once; said that those babies who weren’t Changed might not live, because their parents would eat them.”
“Come on. They’re not gerbils.”
“Most mammals will destroy defective babies. But say they survive. They won’t be anything like their parents. They might not be able to communicate with them at all. All they’ll have in common is eating people. But that’s a behavior, Chris. It’s not destiny. The Changed could eat other meat, plants; their digestive systems haven’t changed. It’s only their brains that have been altered. For them, it’s permanent.”