“When did he say he was coming back?” Nova looked across at me, her features hard and dark.
“Do we have any chocolate? I miss chocolate,” Joan said, a wave of emotion crossing her face as she looked up at us brightly, all traces of her previous doom-and-gloom statement vanishing. “I used to love a hot cocoa right before bed, too.”
“Joan, I need you to answer me,” Nova said as softly as she could.
“With marshmallows in it! Cocoa with marshmallows was my favorite!” Her eyes shone, lighting up with excitement. “Oh, perhaps we could toast some marshmallows!” She stood up.
“Crazy Pants!” I yelled, drawing her attention to me.
“My name is Joan,” she scowled.
“When did the angry man say he was coming back?” I snapped, and I could almost feel the glare of annoyance that Nova was giving the side of my face. Well, she could kiss it. There was no time to play the soft card. We’d just have to play good cop, bad cop. Of fucking course I’d be the bad cop. I always was, wasn’t I?
Joan pouted. “You,” she pointed a bony finger at me, “are a very rude young lady.”
“Yes, she is,” Nova snapped, “but it is important that you tell us.”
“He said,” Joan looked away from me with narrowed eyes and directed her answer to Nova, giving her a polite smile like they were the best of friends, “he was coming back today.”
“Shit!” I yelled, standing up abruptly. “Nova, we need to load the truck and get the hell out of here.”
She nodded and stood up without question.
“What? Why?” Joan replied, sounding worried. “I wanted marshmallows!” she wailed.
I spun to face her. “Because some crazy madman is on his way back here to burn this place to the ground!”
My breathing was becoming erratic, and I knew I was being bitchy when none of this was her fault. The woman barely understood what day it was. But what worried me—and as I looked across at Nova, I could see the same worry on her face—was what day this had really all happened? Could this man be on his way here now? Or would it be tomorrow? Joan had no concept for days—shit, she had no concept for anything, and she could be imagining the entire thing, but I wasn’t about to take that risk.
“Nina, one man couldn’t take this place out,” Nova scoffed, though I noticed that she continued packing all of our things. “I mean, this place is huge. Something else must have happened here.”
I grabbed my damp clothes off the line hanging across the room and shoved them haphazardly into my bag. Sure they were filthy, but they were less threadbare than most of my things, and clothes like that were a huge commodity these days.
“Really? One person couldn’t do this on their own? Even if they came at night and caught people unguarded? You’re sure about that?” I snapped, feeling frantic.
How did I get myself into these situations? It was like I had some gravitational pull for bad luck. Joan yelled something about looking for marshmallows and left the tent, but I ignored her and continued to pack.
“No, they couldn’t. Not unless they knew the run of this place,” Nova said dismissively.
I glanced across at Nova, nodding ever so slightly as I thought about what she had said. Because in my head she was right, but in my heart I knew she was wrong. Joan had said something about retribution for the sacrifices of the many. That was a bold statement for anyone to say, and it sounded like someone with a grudge. Cogs slipped into place, and as I watched Nova, I saw the same realization cross her features also.
“It’s someone that used to live here,” she acknowledged softly.
I nodded. “Yep—someone that was tested on.”
“Someone that had nothing and no one left to lose,” she replied, her voice filled with dread.
I stood up, slinging my backpack over my shoulder. “Nova, do you think that we just found Deacon and Hilary?”
She watched me for several heartbeats, so many emotions crossing her face—guilt, anger, sadness. Because if this was Hilary and Deacon, then the deaths of all the people here now fell on Rachael’s head. On Nova’s head. Most people I couldn’t give a shit about, but there were innocents here also—women, children, women like Joan, who had no one left to protect them and only wanted somewhere safe to stay.
“Or just Deacon,” she said almost painfully. And she was right: Joan had said an angry
man
, , not a woman, had come back there. What hope did that hold for Jessica back at the base?
Nova finally stood up straight, her emotions in check. “Let’s load everything up and take cover. If he’s coming back, then we need to wait for him. We need to know what happened. If Hilary is okay and the baby…” Her words trailed off and she looked away shamefully.
I bit my lip, wanting to say something nasty about Rachael, wanting to cuss and yell and kick and scream and throw a hissy fit, because this whole shitstorm just got a whole lot shittier. But I didn’t. It wouldn’t help anyone or anything, so I bit my lip, swallowed my tongue, and pulled up my big girl panties.
“It might not even be them,” I replied instead.
“Him.” She looked up at me. “It’s him. Grief makes you crazy—crazier than anything else can. This was Deacon’s doing, all right. I remember him as we left, and he was so angry—furious, even. All he cared about was saving her. If she’s dead, then…” She shook her head, not able to finish the sentence.
“All right.” I said through a tight throat, nodding, the warm air inside the tent suddenly overwhelming. “It all seems too easy though, you know?”
“Because we’ve actually found what we were looking for? Or should I say who we were looking for?”
I nod. “Well, yeah. What are the chances of that?”
“When the world’s population has been struck down to around twenty percent of what it originally was? I would say the chances are pretty fucking high actually.” Nova looks at me like I’m an idiot, but I still have the uneasy feeling in my gut.
“I couldn’t find any marshmallows,” Joan whined as she came back into the tent looking sullen. “I tried everywhere.” She slumped back down in her seat, her head lolling to one side, and began snoring almost immediately.
I blinked in surprise. “How the hell does she do that?” I mumbled.
I heard Nova chuckle. “What’s there left to fear? She’s not even really here half the time, and she has no clue what’s going on.”
“What do we do with her?” I asked as we made our way to the door.
Nova glanced back at Joan. Already a thin line of saliva was beginning to trail down her chin again and I looked away, my stomach feeling queasy at the sight.
“Leave her sleeping. She’ll be more of a problem if she’s awake and in the way.” She shrugged and pushed out of the tent door. “Besides, there’s no way we could keep her quiet.”
“That’s true,” I agreed.
We loaded up the truck with as many supplies as we could fit in it—clothes, ammo, food, medicine. It was a haul and a half, and if we made it back to base I knew that Zee and James would be arranging another scavenging mission to recover anything else that was left behind. As I looked around at the rotting, half-eaten bodies, I realized that pretty much everything was left. Everything but life. Guilt like I haven’t felt before embraced me. We’d left the base with good intentions—okay, and a little running away on my part—but with both Nova and I gone, and Mikey and Michael on a scavenge mission, the place didn’t have nearly enough people to protect it. If anything happened to the people there while we were gone, I would feel that pain for the rest of my life—however short that might be.
*
We had been hiding for several hours on the top wall overlooking the gate. Night had quickly fallen, and the rain continued to do so as well. It was cold—colder than cold, actually—and I was beginning to wonder if Crazy Pants hadn’t dreamt up the whole damn thing about an angry man coming back. Or maybe I was just hoping that she’d made it up so I could go get some rest somewhere. My teeth and jaw hurt from chattering so much. I was no superhero, and I really had no place being up there—especially since the noise my teeth were making was enough to wake the dead.
No, seriously—several deaders had already tried to come into the compound, and Nova was adamant that it was because of all the noise I was making. She hadn’t even trusted me enough to go and kill them, since my hands didn’t want to work properly, the cold having worked into their bones.
Another tremor of cold raked up and down my back until my body did a full-on convulsion. Nova turned to glare at me once more, but I ignored her stare since my eyelids felt frozen in place. She was like a machine: poised and still, frozen to the spot, her singular goal to stare into the horizon, waiting for whoever the hell it was coming back. Though my gut said Deacon, my heart hoped it wasn’t. Nova didn’t flinch or move when the rain began to come down, gradually growing more intense. She didn’t even shiver as the wind whipped her red hair around her face. She crouched, waiting, persistent, and almost eager for the kill, her eyes narrowed, her hands poised.
“You can go inside, you know. You’re not really doing any good being here,” she hissed, and turned back to the front.
“If you’re sticking it out, I’m t-t-totally sticking it out. We’re a team,” I quipped, trying to keep up my team spirit, but inside I died a little more as the wind howled across the back of my neck and I trembled in my boots.
“Yippee for me,” she replied, sounding thoroughly pissed off about me staying. “It’s not even that cold,” she grumbled under her breath, but I heard her—though how was a mystery.
And she was right: it wasn’t really that cold. I wasn’t sure exactly what month it was anymore—January? February, perhaps. People stopped trying to work it out accurately a while back—but I knew that the worst of the winter was behind us. However, the damn rain was killing me. It was like pure ice drops pelting against my skin. And worse than that was how the cold that had been coming on had smacked me upside the head to say a big hello.
The backs of my eyes ached, and a low throb had begun to build in the base of my skull. Germs were what made you sick, but being cold and wet lowered your ability to fight the infection. The rain got into your clothes, soaking you right to the very bone until you slowly froze to death. As if on cue I shuddered again, clenching my jaw closed tight to stop my teeth smashing together. I clenched and unclenched my hands again, gritting my teeth and hoping to God that this asshole would show up soon so we could put him out of his goddamned misery and go inside and warm up by the fire.
Yes, people, my sympathy for Deacon and Hilary—if it was in fact Deacon and Hilary that had torn this place apart, had gone out of the proverbial fucking window. Screw these people and all their drama. I was freezing my ass off.
“Please go inside, I’m fuckin’ begging you, Nina,” Nova demanded, her voice laced with irritation. “You’re not helping anyone by staying out here.”
“F-f-f-uck you,” I stammered back angrily, “I’m trying to be supportive and a g-good friend by staying with you.”
She turned to roll her eyes at me. “Dude, do I look like I need any help from a chattering wreck like you?”
I stared across at her, feeling hugely hurt by her callousness, though I could see the immediate regret in her eyes as she’d said it. But it didn’t matter. I felt like death, and now I had a whole bag of hurt to make me feel worse. I was trying to be sincere—trying to be a supportive friend, since that was what we supposedly were—and she’d basically just spat in my face. I blinked, wanting to cry and feeling annoyed with myself instantly that I had let her words hurt me, furious that my emotions were getting the better of me just because I had a freaking cold. Normally my skin was thicker than that, and I let comments roll down my back and into oblivion, but the sting of her words had cut me deep.
“Fine.” I turned away from her, hoping that the single tear that had slipped out got lost in the rain that was still coming down and lashing my face.
“Dude, I didn’t mean it like that,” I heard her yell after me, but I continued back down the steps, ignoring her. “Come on, don’t make me feel shitty!”
I had never felt so useless in all my damn life. I was cold, and feeling crappy and miserable, and the only people I had let get close to me were turning out to be royal assholes. I stomped off the last step, sniveling and barely holding back my self-pitying sobs. I knew I shouldn’t give a shit what she thought of me—hell, what anyone thought of me—and perhaps I wouldn’t under normal circumstances. Perhaps I would have laughed off her comment at any other time, but I was feeling mentally and physically drained. And this cold had just hit me like a ton of bricks. I needed some cold medicine fast, before I turned into a total girl about the situation.
I stormed through a puddle, biting my lip and refusing to cry as the rain soaked through my boots even more, and muttering to myself. Because really, I should have been glad to go inside, sit by the fire, drink hot non-coffee, and take a fucking nap, instead of crying about how useless Nova had just made me feel.
“Fuck her,” I mumbled to myself, kicking a muddy puddle angrily and feeling like a spoiled brat. I sniffled miserably and looked up, my face slamming into the hard chest of a man.
I yelped and flinched backwards, narrowly missing the sharp blade that was directed at my head. Cold or not, I was not dying today, and I gripped the large, meaty arm of whoever was holding the weapon with one hand and slammed my elbow automatically into his ribs. A loud grunt issued forth and I repeated the action again until the blade finally fell free of his hands. I looked up into his face, shrouded in darkness and rain—a face full of anger and pity and grief. A face that crushed my soul and felt like a punch to the gut.
“You’re not dead?” He spoke, his words gruff and full of red-hot anger.
“No thanks to you,” I bit out. I held back my shivers of coldness, my body feeling suddenly alive and full of warmth, adrenaline giving me a new lease on life. I narrowed my eyes at him. “Who the hell are you and what the hell are you doing here?” I ranted, holding my katana out in front of me. I didn’t even remember pulling it out, but clearly I had, and I held onto it with vicious courage.
“The question is,” his voice rumbled through the wind and rain, “who are you?”
A loud clank echoed around us and the man dropped to his knees before falling face first into the mud. Behind him stood Crazy Pants—sorry, Joan. She held up a chunk of wood and cackled loudly before grabbing hold of the bottom of her skirt and beginning to dance around in circles, doing the can-can in a muddy puddle. I stared transfixed, somewhat in awe and somewhat in…what the hell is wrong with you?
I looked down, noticing that the man had fallen into a muddy puddle, his face fully submerged, and I quickly bent down and turned him over, watching in fascination as he coughed up mud and water and began to breathe again. Though his eyes remained shut, I still didn’t trust him to be completely knocked out.