Forever Between (Between Life and Death Book 2) (21 page)

I forget pretty much everything at those words and take off at a run across the warehouse. I can hear Savannah just a half-step behind me. The metal stairs ring loudly as I run up them, a no-no in our world, but all I can think is,
Has Jon been infected?
It’s the new big fear for parents, including me. It used to be strangers dragging off our kids that we feared. Now, it’s whether or not our kids have enough different nanites inside them to come back from the dead if the worst happens.

Charlie has ducked back into the room and the door is open. I have no idea what I’ll find, but what I find is Maribelle standing in the corner and Jon standing next to his pallet, all the LED lanterns at full illumination and glaring off his almost nude form. In just his underpants, Charlie is examining his skin under the harsh, white light.

“Stop,” he says, his hand raised in emphasis to his word as we rush through the door. Savannah does right away, and she grabs the back of my shirt to pull me up short as I keep going. I bounce back against her and turn to try to loosen her hold, but her eyes are riveted on Jon, a look of horrified alarm on her face. She’s good with the kids and always keeps her smile on so that they don’t get scared when things inevitably go wrong. Even when an in-betweener gets too close to our fence, nose lifted at our scents and voice raised in a snarl, Savannah can be counted on to corral the kids with perfect calm and a smile. I can feel her fist twist into my shirt, holding me fast.

I turn back toward Jon and Charlie and this time, I really look. While I had been focusing on the fact that Jon was standing in the cold air in just his underpants, I missed the smattering of red spots covering his torso and legs. Now, I see them.

Charlie turns Jon around, soothing him with a quick ruffling of his hair as he does. He doesn’t look up, keeping his eyes to the cataloging or examination of Jon’s spots. “Are you both vaccinated?”

Vaccinated. The word is like a bucket of ice down my back. “Oh my god,” I whisper, trying to run the list of childhood diseases through my head that I must have received shots for.

Savannah slips past me, pushing me backward with a palm to my chest. Sticking close to the edge of the room, she takes Maribelle’s shoulder and leads her out. They disappear into the spare room—the name we’ve given to the office that we’ve pushed all the other desks into. It has only enough room for a pallet or two left on the floor and we use it in case of sickness.

“Are
you
vaccinated?” I ask Charlie. The truth is, I don’t know how current I am on my shots. Every year before school I went to a doctor and sometimes I got a shot or four, sometimes I didn’t. My mom—or more likely my doctor—kept track of what I needed and when.

Charlie shrugs, turns Jon back around and asks, “Are you still itchy, Jon?”

He nods, his fingers reaching for his belly, but Charlie gently pushes his hand down again and smiles. “Let’s put something on that instead of scratching. Okay?”

Jon nods again, and I can see under the bright light that he has two big bright spots of feverish color on his cheeks.

“Is he hot?” I ask, my hands almost twitching to go and soothe him.

“A little,” Charlie says, smiling at Jon to keep the alarm down. He finally looks my way. “Do you still have any of that anti-itch cream stuff?”

Luckily for us, it was high summer when all this happened. That means tons of sunscreen, mosquito repellent and bug-bite cream was left in the warehouse for distribution. We’ve used it liberally in the years since the world died. Mosquitoes were terrible the first two summers, as if the loss of so many animals and people to feed on only made them more committed. This past summer, there were far fewer. We still have loads of the various creams and lotions.

“I’ll go get it. And some cool water. Don’t let him get too hot,” I say, then stop. “But don’t leave him with no clothes on either.”

He nods and picks up a huge t-shirt from our pile of clean laundry. “I’ve got it. Just go get the cream.”

Any thoughts I may have had about going to the military base leave my mind as I try to remember where we stacked all the summer supplies, including the anti-itch cream. Even Emily, in her haze of pain inside the cage, passes my mind no further than to wonder how we’ll arrange the cage watch if we have to take care of sick children. Nothing matters except Jon and his angry red spots.

Today - No Words

Our ruckus in the street has drawn others. The second floor of the bank is a bad place to try to hole up, given the glass exterior and the wide stairs, but it’s as far as Charlie could get Gloria. At least it provides a good view of the street.

I’m on watch, sitting on a pile of couch cushions liberated from one of the nicer offices, so that my head is high enough to see out, but only just. Down the hall I can hear the faint sounds of Charlie talking and the tiny moans and squeaks of pain Gloria emits now and again.

Poor Gloria. I don’t want to know more. I know Charlie will come out again, come and relay yet more as he finds it out, but I don’t want to hear it. Not now.

My arm is throbbing like it has a second heart lodged somewhere deep inside my swollen wrist. The bone that normally sticks up a little at the wrist, the knob girls used to compare or display as a sign of their skinniness—mostly the aspiring anorexics and budding bulimics—is standing up like a beacon. It’s clearly out of joint and I have no idea how to put it back other than the obvious. I’m terrified of what that’s going to be like.

Out in the street, an in-betweener is vacillating between raging around and becoming entranced by birds flitting between buildings, or chasing the papers in the street. Charlie tossed handfuls of loose papers from one of the drawers down below out in the street. Loan forms that used to cause dread in people hoping for a new house are being put to a much better use. Now, they flutter in the wind and draw the attention of the in-betweener, sending him lurching from one side of the street to the other. Some of the papers have made it to the limits of my vision, the white standing out more than a block away, and I’m hoping his steady progress in that direction will make him forget why he wanted to be in this area in the first place.

But he’s not our only company. Charlie smashed a couple of deaders trapped in the break room, but they weren’t very mobile. Outside, the deaders that are mobile have followed the sounds of the in-betweener or the disturbance we caused. They’ve congregated. A few of them have latched onto a fire hydrant where the paint is peeling off to expose the metal, but the rest are doing the deader shuffle, just wandering around and waiting for something to attract them. Something like us.

No matter what, we’re a little bit screwed here. In-betweeners are easily distracted, deaders too, but they’re also pretty low on energy as a general rule. They’ll stay close unless something more enticing happens elsewhere and the ones by the hydrants aren’t going anywhere.

I sigh, fogging the glass with my breath. Another tiny squeal of pain comes from down the hall.

Trying my best not to jostle my arm on its cushion, I reach for my backpack with my other hand. I’ve already checked, so I know everything is intact. The precious vials still contain their clear fluid filled with invisible machines. Having it close just makes me feel better. I don’t know how we’ll get out of this, but I want my backpack close when that time comes.

After a long while spent watching the deaders, one of which is softly biting at his own reflection in a window across the street, Charlie comes out of the office and shuts the door with exaggerated care.

His face is grim as he walks down the hallway, so I know he’s got more bad news to give me.

“She’s asleep. We need to get her back so Savannah can take a look at her,” he says. The way his eyes flick away as he says that last part tells me he’s talking about the injuries that washed her legs in blood.

“I can do it. I just need some help with my arm,” I say.

He sucks in a deep breath, eyeing my swollen wrist suspiciously.

“We can’t leave my arm like this. At least not for long,” I add. I don’t like the idea any more than he obviously does, but I do know you can’t leave a joint out of alignment for too long or else the damage can be permanent. I need my hands.

Charlie squats on the floor next to my cushions and crawls over to get within viewing range of the windows. For a moment, he watches the deaders and cranes his neck to get the in-betweener in view. The in-betweener has moved a little further down the block and isn’t making as much noise, but he doesn’t seem like he’s in any hurry to leave the area either. He’s caught a paper and is stuffing it into his mouth at the moment.

“Does he look like one of those guys?” he asks, referencing the five dead guys we captured and the one we took care of on our way out, the ones who we think took Gloria. We know there was at least one more out there based on the number of sleeping bags in their lair.

I nod. “I think so, but who knows?”

With that out of the way, silence falls between us again. I know he wants to talk about Gloria.

“Did you find out anything more?” I ask, breaking into the topic.

“Sort of. She wrote down some basics, but she needed rest and I think her thumbs are broken. Maybe a couple of fingers, too. It’s hard for her to write. We’ll just have to find out the rest later.”

The big topic lies between us like a mountain. Her mouth.

“Did you see it?” I ask.

Charlie lowers himself to the floor, careful not to jostle my arm in the process. He nods, but his eyes are clouded by whatever he saw in there with Gloria. I’m not sure if he needs to talk about it or would much rather avoid the subject. It’s hard to tell with Charlie sometimes. Then again, maybe he’s not sure which of those things he would rather do.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” I offer and hold out my good hand for him to take.

He laces his fingers in mine and squeezes my hand a little. Then he lets it go and sighs. When he looks back up, his eyes are shining with tears and he says, “They cut out part of her tongue.” His breath hitches in roughly and he wipes under his now-running nose. “Because she made too much noise.”

It isn’t like I couldn’t have guessed that. The weird darkness in her mouth and the garbled sounds she made as we hurried her inside the building told me something of the sort had happened. But hearing it is like whipping the cover off a hidden cache of brutality in the world. What’s happened to Gloria is the reason I stayed inside the apartment where I lived with Sam and never went further than the roof for a little sunlight. It’s the same reason Emily remained so steadfastly hidden.

Charlie starts to cry and I pull him to my shoulder, my arm around his neck and my teeth gritted against the surge of pain in my injured arm as his sobs jostle me. He needs to cry this out. When Gloria came he latched onto her like a puppy. Gloria was—is—a real mom. Not a college student lassoed into taking care of him by circumstances, not a teen younger than himself left with someone’s orphaned baby—a real mother with a kid. And she easily included him, and even me, in that overall maternal umbrella of warmth.

It’s amazing how a few months can make a person seem like they’ve been around forever and make their loss an excruciating and unacceptable one. And now this.

After a time, his sobs diminish to hiccups, but he stays curled into my shoulder. He’s taller than I am so our position is awkward. But I don’t want him to feel bad about needing some comfort, so I take pains not to fidget or give him any sign of how uncomfortable this is for me. I keep watch and listen for any noises that might indicate a deader has made it past the barrier we hastily erected at the door when we came in.

The in-betweener is gone, at least for the moment, but I don’t take that to mean he’ll stay gone. Distracted or not, they often return to the places where their interest was piqued. Whether it’s memory or something else, I don’t know, but either way, I won’t feel like he’s gone until one of us has actually bashed his brain into foamy, pink mush.

The deaders are still doing their deader things, but the agitation is bleeding out of their movements and they seem settled into their actions, ready to wear a new groove into the record of their afterlives.

As the afternoon grows, the light pouring into the window intensifies until it feels almost hot. I feel it when Charlie is finally done with his crying because his body tenses a little, as if he’s embarrassed that he let himself go like that.

I smooth back the hair from his forehead where he’s nestled into my shoulder and whisper, “It’s going to be okay, Charlie.”

As he starts to disengage himself, I plant a kiss on his forehead and push him up, trying to smile but not doing too well at it. My arm hurts so much that it’s making my head hurt and now my butt and back hurt from being seated awkwardly for so long. All in all, I’m just a big old bundle of throbs and pains.

He looks at my arm and says, “I’m sorry.”

I wave it away, carefully lifting my legs and butt, one side at a time, to let the blood flow again. “What do we do now?”

“She can’t travel. She needs food, rest, water. Lots of all of it. And medical care we can’t give her,” he answers.

I nod, because this is what I expected. And really, there’s only one thing to be done.

“Charlie,” I say, waiting for him to look me in the eyes before continuing. “We’ve got one bike and I can’t hang onto you like this. And, no offense, but I’m not feeling too confident about you and I trying to fix my arm. And Gloria for sure can’t make it like she is. You have to go back, get one of the others and bring the trikes.”

He nods a little, taking in what I say. I figure he must have already thought about this and come up with the same simple geometry for this rescue.

“Can you really stay on watch for that long? It will be a long night,” he says, examining my face to see if I’m lying.

I do my best to look confident, though I’m far from it. “Absolutely,” I say.

He leans over quickly and plants a kiss on my cheek, the first time he’s ever done such a thing. I’m so surprised by the gesture that I can’t help but grin.