It was odd for Will to watch someone else go through the same brain-flattening realization that he’d had that night in the rain. He knew how much Belinda had looked up to David. He knew how much she loved him. She’d been one of the original group of Scraps who had approached David about starting a gang. She had helped carry David to safety after he had been hanged. She had mourned his loss. Will had a clear memory of Belinda sobbing by the fire the night the remaining Loners had found out that David had died. He’d always felt closer to Belinda after that, but he’d never told her, and for some reason he knew he never would.
When Will reached the gate, the man who’d tested Belinda walked on and left David to lock up. By now, Belinda seemed to be able to stand on her own two feet.
“No—but—but David, how …?” she managed to say as she neared him. She was crying, tears traveling down her round face like longitude lines on a globe.
“Long story,” David said.
She nearly toppled David with the force of her hug. She squeezed him with all her might, and pancaked her cheek into his chest. She smiled with her eyes clamped shut. You would have thought she’d just found out Santa was real.
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “I can’t believe it.”
When she let go, David guided her toward the newly built bunkhouse.
“Come with us,” he said, and for the first time, Belinda glanced over at Will.
“Hi,” Will said.
She didn’t reply, she simply walked with David. Will assumed that maybe she was still too caught up in the magic of David’s existence. He walked in silence as Belinda and David talked. Belinda never acknowledged him once, and he began to wonder if she had a reason to snub him. What did she know?
There were too many information bombs that Will had yet to disarm before his brother could find them out, and now he was afraid of them all exploding at once. The history of McKinley that David knew had been abridged by Will. David knew that Will had fallen in with the Saints because the Loners had fallen apart, something that had been beyond Will’s control. He knew Lucy had gone Sluts, but Will told him that he had lost contact with her at that point. He didn’t tell him that they had fallen in love or that they had slept together. He and his brother were getting along for once, and it was too nice to mess up. Will didn’t know what David still felt for Lucy, and he didn’t want to know. And David seemed just as happy to avoid the subject entirely.
But as David and Will approached the bunkhouse, Belinda’s presence made the topic of Lucy feel unavoidable. Will started to sweat. He couldn’t take it anymore.
“How is she?” Will asked. “Lucy.”
Belinda met Will’s eyes for the first time. They were angry.
“Oh, you care?” she said.
David paused as he opened the bunkhouse door. He gave Belinda a curious look.
“Of course I care,” Will said. “What do you mean?”
Her next words sucked all the air out of Will’s world.
“She’s pregnant.”
“What?” David said.
Will’s hearing went away. He saw David gesturing, but he stopped processing the words that came out of his mouth. David waved Belinda inside. Will followed in a daze. Lucy was pregnant. Will shook his head. He dropped onto a cot. His hearing tuned back in with David’s next three words: “Who’s the father?”
Will’s eyes snapped to Belinda. They screamed at her to not say if she knew. She looked away from Will, back to David, but she didn’t answer him. Will could see her wrestling with a decision. She frowned and huffed air out her nose.
“She didn’t say. She only told me right before I left.”
David raked his fingers through his brown hair. He stumbled a little bit and sat down on a cot.
“Is she okay?” Will asked. He felt like an idiot asking it. What girl was ever okay being pregnant inside McKinley? He knew what it meant. And he got the answer he dreaded most.
“No,” Belinda said. “She isn’t.”
David pounded a cot-side table with one heavy fist. He pounded the table four or five more times before grasping his forehead. They all sat in silence for a moment.
“I want to know everything,” David said, his voice barely a whisper.
Belinda took a breath and told them the terrible story.
Will and David left Belinda behind in the bunkhouse. A parent would be along soon to educate her about her options going forward if she wanted to stay on the farm or leave in search of her family. She’d choose family. They all did.
Family. The idea meant something new to Will now, and he felt like he was going to be crushed under its weight.
“We have to do something,” Will said as they walked toward the minivan.
“I know,” David said.
Will waited a moment for more, but more didn’t come.
“We have to go in,” Will said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You heard what Belinda said. She’s all alone.”
David looked around as they walked, as if he was sure someone was eavesdropping. The only ears nearby belonged to the sheep.
“We have a plan, Will. Let’s get the cure. We’ll be back in a week. That’ll fix everything.”
“What if the cure’s not real?”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? Because it might be true?”
“You’re the one who was so convinced we needed to go in the first place. Now you’re telling me you don’t believe in it?”
“All I know is Lucy’s pregnant. That’s a fact. If we waste a week or two on this trip and come back with nothing, that’s forever that Lucy’s in there alone with no help. Anything could happen to her.”
David fell back against the minivan and let out a groan.
“David, don’t tell me you forgot what it feels like to be in there. To not belong to a gang. To have no one watching your back. Can you even imagine facing all that while being pregnant?”
David faltered. “Jesus Christ.”
“She needs us. We have to get her out. We have gas masks. They filter out the virus, right?”
“It’s too dangerous. We’ll make an announcement, have her come to the quad.”
“We can’t single her out. She’ll be as bad off as Sam was. Someone will use her against us. Just like before.”
“What about the guy who knocked her up?” David said with a splash of anger in his voice. “Huh? Isn’t he looking after her?”
Will couldn’t fathom a way to answer that.
“What if he’s not?” Will finally said. “What if he’s just some dickhead that doesn’t care what happens to her?”
It didn’t inspire the response Will was looking for. David began to sneer. With his black eye patch, he looked almost frightening.
“Do you know who she was dating before you left?”
Will shook his head before he could say something. “I don’t—I don’t think so.”
“No idea?”
“I don’t know, maybe some Nerd with stupid hair,” Will said. “I saw her with him at this party, but he looked like a big pussy. We can’t count on him.”
David stared at the school. Will understood that going into the school was madness, but Lucy needed them. He stared at David and waited. If anything would bring him back to his old self, it would be Lucy in trouble.
Finally, David shook his head.
“There’s no way.”
“But—”
“It’s a death sentence,” David said. He was raising his voice, trying to drown Will out. Will hated that.
“And what if the cure isn’t a rumor?” David continued. “Then, we would’ve gotten ourselves killed when there was an easy answer. And Lucy would still be in danger.”
“You don’t get it,” Will said. Not that he could unless Will told him the truth. But he knew that would only make his brother angrier, and then Will would be on the defensive.
“No, you don’t get it,” David said. “You
didn’t go on pointless missions to get your old pal Gates’s bullshit, and watch good people cough up their lungs and die, because some angry kids wanted revenge. You’re not infected anymore, Will. You don’t realize how afraid you should be of everyone in that school.”
Will stared at David, wondering how long his brother had been judging him for what he’d done with the Saints inside. He wondered how long David had watched him from above and done nothing to help.
“At least I know how to do the right thing even when I’m scared,” Will said. “Which is something you must’a forgotten.”
“Fuck you.”
“No, fuck you,” Will said and turned. He stomped away from the minivan. The distant rumble of thunder echoed the snort of pigs nearby. Will looked up. The clouds above were darker and more knotted than before.
He didn’t know where he was going, but he wanted to get away from David before he said something worse. They should’ve been on the road by now, but the idea of spending days in the van with David seemed impossible. Each scrape of his shoes through the grass was loud. There was another crack of thunder, and with it the truth of his situation fully sank in for the first time.
“… holy shit,” Will muttered, his eyes wandering as his mind reeled.
He was going to be a father.
He felt dizzy. The sky swirled. The distant mountain range looked like a row of dog teeth. That was where Gonzalo was headed, into the Rockies, in search of Sasha. His love for her was relentless. Nothing could stop him from holding her again.
Will breathed deep. The air was crisp and fragrant, and Will wanted to remember how it smelled. He wanted to remember every detail of what it felt like out here.
He was going back in.
9
THE STORM HAD PULLED ITS CLOAK OVER the farm. It was almost eight o’clock. The sun had sunk, and the winds had risen. David walked the pasture fence, and swept the campus with a flashlight.
“Will!” he called out, but his voice was whisked away by a sudden gust. The steady rumble of wind was the only response.
Will had gone missing, and David couldn’t convince anyone that it was worth worrying about. All the parents were too busy rushing to prep for the storm, getting animals and equipment under cover and battening down every hatch. David tried to stay calm by convincing himself Will had gotten swept up in helping. But given their argument, that didn’t sound like Will. David cursed himself. He should’ve kept his mouth shut, but his brother had always been an expert at driving him crazy. It was as if Will was allergic to rational thought.
“Come on …,” he said to himself.
David hated being out after sunset. It reminded him just how blind he was. Darkness wrapped around his field of vision and squeezed. His Cyclops sight forced him to scan his surroundings like a security camera. In his travels through the infected zone, he’d trained himself to be a creature of the day because night felt as vast as the ocean. In the dark, everything had the drop on him.
He’d never gotten over being mauled by Hilary. She’d taken a piece of him when she’d taken his eye. It had been Lucy who’d helped him feel like a human being again. He’d never forget that. Not that it mattered. She’d already forgotten him. She’d had to, he supposed. He was a ghost as far as McKinley was concerned. Life in there had gone on without him. And it hurt. Far worse than he’d ever imagined it would. He felt like an idiot, thinking of her as this angel who’d nursed him back to health. Lucy had someone else’s baby inside her. She was forever connected to whoever that was. She probably didn’t even think about David.
A gust assaulted him, and for a moment the pressure of the wind felt more real than the ground underneath his feet. His jean jacket had a sheepskin lining but even so, the cold wind slithered in through the neck, through the wrist holes, between the buttons, up his back, and threatened to make the light perspiration on his skin frost over.
“Will!” he shouted again, passing his flashlight beam across the wheat field. The wheat whipped in a panic.
Will didn’t understand how afraid he should be of McKinley. Out in the infected zone it was open space. At least there you could run away. In McKinley they’d be trapped. Completely at the mercy of the infected. Maybe if he’d told Will exactly what he’d seen out there, he’d get it. But David had never found the strength to talk about it, let alone think about it.
He could still hear the screaming.
Once Will had been identified by Sam and the parents as Gates’s right-hand man, things had gotten tense for David on the farm. He’d had to go the extra mile on everything to prove his loyalty, especially when it came to delivering on Gates’s demands. When the Saints leader had pushed Sam’s dad’s limits and requested a pool for the quad, David had put himself first in line to retrieve it. He and two other parents traveled forty miles to the Pool Liquidators in Bristol. There was trouble along the way, but nothing like they found at the store. When they’d discovered an aboveground pool in the parking lot filled with a red stew of blood and bodies of hunters, it was already too late. They should have turned around when they saw the buzzards overhead. Instead, they’d been surrounded by a ragged crew of infected. There were eleven of them, more boys than girls, none of them over thirteen years old, the youngest infected David had ever seen, but by far the most frightening. They had attacked like a pack of coyotes. All eleven had rushed Deb Winchester, a proud mother of three with the most boisterous, wonderful laugh David had ever heard. The pack had climbed on her and had crushed her down to the ground in seconds. They had torn off her mask, and her frantic screams had become a low roar as lung sludge had erupted from her mouth.
David dug his hands down into his jacket pockets and turned to head back to the minivan. The wind surged. A speck of something hit David in the eye and he stopped dead in his tracks. He rubbed, frantically. It was only a fleck of dirt or hay, but anything getting in that eye turned him to jelly. When he had nightmares now, they were black.
Rain began to fall and created a thick wall of sound. It pelted his face, forcing him to squint his one good eye. David slowed his search. Will would come back to the minivan eventually. Then, they could go. This was wasted energy.
David heard an odd noise on his blind side. A clap of metal on metal. He listened for it again but heard only the huff of the wind and the rhythm of rain. Clap. There it was again. Clap-clap. David’s eye followed his flashlight beam. The sound didn’t match anything he knew on the farm. It came at random, a few claps in a row, then nothing, then one, and on and on, like a blind kid trying to play with a paddleball.
He went toward the sound, and his flashlight guided him to the crane. The base of it was a vehicle the size of a Greyhound bus, and four massive arms stretched out, planting it in the ground to give it a wider base. At the rear of the vehicle was the operating booth for the crane arm itself.
Clap-clap. The door to the booth was wide open, flapping in the wind.
David quickened his pace. Something wasn’t right. The crane was always locked up at night. David stepped on something hard; it tripped him up. He looked down. A crowbar in the grass.
He clambered up the short ladder into the operating booth. He dropped into the plush orange seat. The control board arced and filled the dash in front of him, below the wraparound windshield. His seat rumbled underneath him. The motor was still on.
David hadn’t heard its chugging over the sound of the wind and pelting rain until he’d gotten close. He prayed for some sensible explanation for this. He looked at the wall behind the operator’s seat, where the crane operator’s gas mask hung. It was gone.
David looked up through the broad windshield and up the tall crane arm that extended up into the sky. Someone was climbing the crane arm and they were almost to the tip. David burst out of the booth and strained to get a better look. He saw the person wore a gas mask and a backpack. He saw he was male.
He saw it was Will.
“Stop!” David screamed up. Rain peppered his mouth. Will didn’t
hear, or he didn’t want to listen. Will lowered himself onto the metal cable that hung from the crane, and he zipped down it, past the roofline, to where David couldn’t see, but he knew where he was going. The crane’s tip was over the quad.
David’s heart punched at his ribs. Will didn’t just do that. David’s world caved in on him. How could Will be so stupid? He waited for the parents on watch to sound an alarm. There was only howling wind and slapping rain. How could Will go in with only a gas mask to …
Oh dear God.
He knew which gas mask Will was wearing, the one from the crane. David had worn it too. That mask had seen heavy use, and the filter hadn’t been replaced in a while. A fresh filter was guaranteed for forty-eight hours of continuous use. After that, you were pushing your luck.
Will’s filter might not last him until morning.
David cursed Will with every foul word he could think of because it was the only resistance he could summon. His feet were already moving. He’d already turned off the crane’s motor so that no one would hear. He’d already grabbed a gas mask with a fresh filter for himself from the van, and was shoving other essentials into a backpack. A fresh filter for Will and the crane remote. It was big and orange, and it could move the arm and lower and raise the cable. He’d use it to pull them back out. He stuffed in a hatchet and an energy bar that he had no idea how he’d eat with a mask on his head.
He was wasting time. Will was getting farther into the school by the second. The longer David took, the harder it would be to find him and replace his filter. The more infected he might run into. He wanted this over within ten minutes, in and out.
“I’m gonna kill him,” he said.
He stood at the base of the crane arm, staring up the long crane arm as it disappeared into the sky. The sky had darkened since he’d gathered his supplies and now the charcoal clouds began to churn. He couldn’t see the tip of the boxy crane arm anymore. The arm just got thinner as it got higher until it seemed to disappear. Another gust blew David’s hair to the side. He heard the stray dogs outside the farm moan in sympathy with the wind.