I lie to the grown-ups and say I haven’t been anywhere near the wire, and they decide it’s food poisoning. With no airplanes to bring us new flus, it’s all food poisoning these days. Or maybe an infection from a cut, but our last amoxicillin went bad two years ago, so all they can do is keep me hydrated. Someone’s always with me, forcing me to drink water that I’ll only puke up. They keep me in the isolation hut where Mrs. Zimmer died, even though food poisoning isn’t contagious, and they try not to make a big deal about the pistol on the bedside table.
You can’t be too careful, after all.
But why isn’t Kalyn here? She could have volunteered to watch me. Is she as worried as I am that she got it all wrong?
On the second day I’m still puking, and Alma Nazr comes in and strips me in a no-nonsense way, looking for teeth marks. Dr. Bill watches with a shotgun pointed at the floor. Alma’s hands feel hot on my skin, like she’s the one with a fever. She turns me around and around, going over every inch of me, like in the dreams I used to have.
She doesn’t notice the pinprick on my middle finger.
But I can see it, the little purple circle where Kalyn and I mingled at blood’s length.
The rest of me may be turning cold, but that one spot stays warm and tingling.
On the third day everyone relaxes a little, the pistol disappearing from the bedside table. No one’s ever taken three days to turn, so it must be a dented can or some mundane infection.
They don’t notice that mosquitoes have stopped biting me.
I’m seeing things. There are flickers in the corners of my vision when I puke, and at night I can see the tribe sleeping around me, even through my eyelids, even through the walls. Human bodies are hot sprays against the cool of night, like fireworks on a dark horizon. Every night they’re more spectacular, the relentless little engines of their heartbeats astounding me. Five days after my infection I can see them in the daylight, even halfway across the farm.
Slowly I start feeling … better.
And one night when no one’s watching, Kalyn comes for me.
6.
She takes me to the tree house, the watchtower overlooking the front gates. The grown-ups never use it anymore, but we do.
“I’m so sorry,” Kalyn says for the fourteenth time. We’re sitting cross-legged, and her fingernails are scratching at the wooden floor on either side of her. “But I was scared you’d turn.”
“You were scared? How do you think I felt?”
“I didn’t know it would be like that, Allison. I only puked after meals.” She leans forward, taking my hands. “No one even noticed I was sick.”
“Well, that’s just more annoying.” But instead of pulling away I squeeze her hands tighter. “I thought I was going to die.”
“I know. I heard you moaning.” Kalyn sighs at my expression. “Yes, I came by.
But I was afraid to go in. Like, if Dr. Bill saw you and me next to each other, he’d figure out what we were.”
She reaches up and traces the smudges under my eyes. My infection is a deeper color than hers. A pair of black eyes, like I’ve been fighting demons in my dreams. Her fingers are cool against the heat beneath my skin.
“You’re so pretty now,” she says.
For a moment I wonder what she means by pretty “now.” I can’t complain, though.
Kalyn only flipped my switch five weeks ago. Before she was infected, I only wanted Alma. But Alma seems like a different species now, just like the other grown-ups, broken and stuck in the before.
And she’d kill me in a second if she found out what I was. Any of them would.
They didn’t make it this far by being gun-shy.
“Did Dr. Bill notice your eyes?” Kalyn asks.
“Yeah, he noticed. He said that puking can burst blood vessels. Said it should go away in a few weeks.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll never go away.” Her hand falls from my face, takes the collar of my sweatshirt and draws me near. Our lips press together.
This time my mouth is as dry as hers. Water tastes foul now, but I’m thirsty for the fireworks inside her. She isn’t showering sparks like the others, but something serene and endless flickers inside her. It’s deep blue, like the hottest part of a flame.
The fireworks must be how the zees find us humans, why they stack up outside the wire, waiting for a stray finger poking out, or a hurricane to pull up the fence.
And that’s why Kalyn and I can leave anytime we want now—we aren’t so dazzling anymore. We look more like the zees outside the wire, with their mean, unwavering little lights.
We’re something halfway between, eternal but not rotten. On the way to the tree house, Kalyn made me stick a finger out, and none of the zees even glanced at it.
“I’m sorry I got scared,” she repeats after we pull apart. “That always happens when I kiss someone the first time.”
“Always happens? Hah. You were, like, eleven back in the before.”
She gives me the smallest smile. “Maybe I’ve kissed someone since then.”
I stare at Kalyn, making a mental list of everyone on the farm. Even including the people who’ve died since we got here, everyone’s so old. Except …
“Not Sammy?”
She nods.
“When?”
“It was only one kiss, ages ago, and it only made me giggle.” She smiles.
“Jealous?”
“Of that waste of gravity? Hardly.”
Her eyes close, and she moves closer. “Glad to hear that won’t be a problem.”
We’re like that for a while longer, then we lean out to look at the six billion stars.
Their twinkle is stronger than it used to be. Maybe my vision is sharper, or maybe aliens live on those faraway planets, and I can see their fireworks too.
I’d make a great astronaut now. No water, no food, ageless.
“Do you think we’ll live forever?” I ask. “Like zees do?”
Kalyn turns from the stars and sighs. “Dr. Bill says they don’t, because of that thermodynamics law. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they won’t run down.
Eventually.”
“What’s there to run down? Their hearts don’t even beat.”
She puts her cool palm against my neck. “But yours does.”
“I guess so. Too bad.” I can feel it pulsing where her hand rests—so much for being an immortal astronaut. I’m going to die, or run down, so I’m wasting time here on this stupid farm. “What should we take?”
“Well, we don’t need food. We don’t need guns. We can go into the cities for new clothes.” Kalyn smoothes her homemade dress. “Real clothes, finally. So we don’t have to take anything.”
“Sure. But I want a car—the Benz. That’s the only one that still runs.”
“You want to drive?” Kalyn thinks that’s funny, like she wanted to shamble out of here. “Do you even know how?”
“Alma showed me once. It’s easy. You point the car and push the pedals down.” I was paying more attention to Alma than the car, but it didn’t look too hard. “There are no other cars on the road, not moving ones anyway.”
It feels a little weird to be talking about stealing the Benz, because it’s Alma’s favorite. But it’s not like she’s ever leaving here, not without the rest of them. And they’ve got their pot plants and their movie nights, their stacks of cans going bad.
All those dessert points carved into the dining room wall.
They’d never trade all that for freedom.
Even if we infected them, they’d probably just shoot themselves. Kalyn hasn’t even mentioned the possibility, and I’m certainly not going to. I want her all to myself, forever.
And I want to learn to drive before the highways break down into asphalt puzzles.
“Okay, Allison, we’ll steal the Benz. Four days from now.”
I smile, thinking of a few favorite things I’ll bring. Maybe one of Alma’s raid caps, black with dea in big silver letters on the front. Her raiding days are over, and mine are just beginning. Might as well bring a few guns, in case we run into living people who annoy us.
“Why not tomorrow? Why not now?”
“Four days.”
My smile disappears. “Why?”
Kalyn sighs, pulling back a little. Her fingers drum on the wooden floor. The wind steals through the open windows of the watchtower, sending a cool finger down my spine.
Then she says it:
“Because I don’t want Sammy puking in the car.”
7.
It’s four days later and we’re stealing the car—all four of us.
Yes, that’s what Kalyn was doing while I puked and moaned and almost died.
She was going after Sammy, bleeding her pox into him. Kissing him.
Ages ago, my ass.
And then, two days after our conversation in the tree house, we both decided we couldn’t leave Jun behind. He’s only ten; we can’t leave him here alone with the broken grown-ups.
He changed the easiest of all of us, the little twerp. Didn’t vomit once.
So here we are, stealing the Mercedes-Benz together, one big happy semizombie family … and we are total crap.
“Push the clutch down first,” Sammy whispers, like anyone outside the barn can hear us. Can’t he see that no one’s awake? All those little fireworks are tucked safely in their beds, hearts slow and steady.
“Cars don’t have clutches, dork.” I shift into drive, keeping one foot down hard on the brake.
“The Ford does. Dr. Bill showed me how it worked.”
“Yeah, but the Ford’s, like, a hundred years old. This is a real car.”
“Then why isn’t it moving?” Kalyn moans.
“Um, maybe because I don’t want it to? The barn doors are closed.”
We both look at Sammy, who jumps and rolls, then scuttles across the dirt floor.
He stares at the barn door lock, which isn’t locked—no one locks doors here. An open padlock is just stuck in the hasp, holding it together. We wait while he figures it out.
Like I said, we are crap.
It’s lucky we don’t have to bring anything. We would’ve been crap at packing, too.
Sammy swings the doors open, and I consider plowing past him, just crashing through the front gates and leaving him behind. If the grown-ups wake up quickly enough, they can probably stop the zees from pouring through the hole.
But I couldn’t do that to the Benz’s paint job. Alma spent hours keeping it beautiful while the other cars slowly fell apart.
As my foot comes off the brake, we ease into motion. Kalyn grasps my knee, like everything’s fine between us again. Like she didn’t lie to me about kissing Sammy and everything else.
Well, everything except the pox itself. She was telling the truth about that, and how it feels amazing to be one of us. Every day is better.
I touch her hand. We’re really leaving.
I remember this feeling now, from back in the before and the early days outside the wire—how you can just sit in a car and watch the world slide by.
Sammy jumps onto the hood as we ease from the barn, and soon we’re rolling past the rec hall and the isolation hut, waving good-bye. Past the storage sheds and the barrels full of rusty-tasting rainwater. Past the crappy Ford in its muddle of deflated rubber and broken safety glass.
Toward the wire.
Jun giggles in the backseat, even though we’ve threatened to dump him if he makes a single noise. He was six the last time he sat in a moving car. This must be like Disney World for him.
A little spray of fireworks flares in a corner of my vision. Someone’s waking up.
Even on a hot night with the insects buzzing, the sound of a car engine is alien enough to stir the brain.
I let the brake up a little more, pointing us at the front gates.
Fifty feet away Sammy jumps off the hood and runs ahead. Kalyn scrambles out the door to follow, the hem of her long, impractical dress bunched in one hand.
This is the part of our escape plan we’ve actually thought about—getting through the front gates without letting in a thousand zees. We owe the grown-ups that much. Even if they’re broken and pathetic, they kept us after our parents were eaten.
Sammy’s climbing up the chain-links, right at the split between the gates, while Kalyn slides the heavy bar across. The zees shuffle around a little, but they’re not looking at her—they’re watching the fireworks behind us. More people waking up.
I hear a shout, and roll forward again.
The bar falls to the ground just as I reach the gates. The Benz’s bumper scrapes chain-link, pressing the mass of zees backward. Kalyn jumps onto the hood, and Sammy swings overhead as the gates slowly open.
Behind us, bright little showers of consciousness are erupting from every building. I hear them shouting, calling to us, trying to understand.
The zees push back against the gates, but the Benz is stronger, rumbling beneath me as I let the brake out more. I’m driving with two feet, which Alma said was bad. But I’m scared to take my feet off the pedals, like I’ll never find them again down there in the dark.
A gunshot sounds. Probably an alarm, but I wonder if they’ll think of shooting out our tires. They must think we’ve gone insane.
The Benz finally slides through the open gates, zees pressed against every window. On the hood Kalyn is reaching out to pat their heads, and a nervous sound comes from the backseat.
“It’s okay, Jun,” I say sweetly. “They can’t hurt you anymore.”
The zees are surging now, trying to get past the car and at the people waking up inside the wire. But the implacable Benz crowds the opening, and the zees at the sides will only push the gates shut once we’re through. A few may slip past, but Alma will make short work of those. I can see her sparking back there, very awake now, an automatic in each hand.