“Do it,” he whispered. “Do me a favor.”
“My pleasure —”
“Shut up,” he hissed. Not so far away, girls called for him, a strange here-kitty-kitty note in their singsong voices.
“We’ll find you,” they chanted. “We’ve got a treat for you.”
“Crazy bitches,” Baz muttered.
“What’d you do to them?”
“Nothing.”
Nothing different, he meant, sullenly, than he’d done to any other girl, than he’d been doing his whole life, than business as usual. Nothing that demanded consequence.
Garden Street had gone quiet. A patter of footsteps neared the alley, and the girls’ catcalls swelled in volume.
“Baz, Baz, Baz, Baz” – like a swarm of bees, stingers at the ready.
“Take me with you,” Baz pleaded. “Or shoot me now. Just don’t…” He cast a terrified look back toward President. “They’re crazy.”
“What did you do to them?” Jule asked again.
“Nothing.”
The gun came closer.
“Nothing but what they deserved.”
“There’s a lot of that going around.”
He’d crafted a makeshift holster out of his belt and tucked her knife into it, like a trophy. She took the knife – and then, after a moment of thought, made him hand over the belt.
Terrified, Baz was nearly unrecognizable. He couldn’t even muster up a filthy suggestion as he unfastened the buckle. Without his normal surly confidence, he looked defenseless, childlike. Almost redeemable.
She stood up, careful to keep the gun trained on him, and began to back away. “Follow me, and I’ll shoot you,” she said.
“They’ll kill me!” Baz whimpered, scrambling to his feet. “You can’t just leave me here!”
“It’s just a bunch of girls, Baz. You can’t be afraid of that.”
“Please. Please.”
The girls were close. They were infected, and if they found him, they’d be compelled to tear him to pieces. They had no more choice. By a quirk of luck, Jule did. She could choose to help; she could choose to walk away; she could choose to shoot him in the head. She suddenly got it: She hadn’t been spared because she was superior. She had no iron cord of moral fiber that let her hold out while the weaker fell prey to their impulses. She’d just had some luck that, for the first time in her life, turned out to be good.
She’d had his weight on top of her, suffocating her, his hands holding her down, his sour breath on her mouth, his thick tongue, his body, his need. She had the slash on her cheek, which would heal and scar and always remind her.
She had impulses, too.
Bad ones.
She wasn’t better, only freer. She could choose.
She fired the gun.
The bullet ricocheted off the Dumpster, several feet wide of Baz. As she’d intended. But the sound of the shot – it might as well have been a siren. It might as well have been an arrow.
“Come and get him,” Jule said, just loudly enough.
His face had regressed past childhood now, straight into infancy, the animal fear of a baby left to shriek in its crib, defenseless against the wolves of hunger or loneliness or dark.
Or vengeance.
They moved like wolves, stealing into the alley. They were the God groupies, who’d probably scored front-row seats to Ellie’s burning. They, too, had knives.
Jule left them to their work.
They always found each other again. And eventually they made it to the trees, somehow, all five of them whole and safe. Ahead of them lay the woods, and beyond that the highway, with its barbed wire and mercenaries. Behind them, more than one hundred were already dead, and the fighting continued. Behind them, the Preacher made his last stand atop the roof of the pawnshop, an assault rifle in his hands, clip nearly emptied, Satan’s army drawing near. Behind them, Scott Prevette bled to death, screaming at invisible IRS agents in the curtains and CIA drones dropping from the sky. Behind them, the fire spread, consuming the cop shop, the town hall, and the burned-out remains of Eisenhower High, still a mile from the Ghent house, where Milo cowered underground, far but closing in. Behind them, Oleander was dying.
They moved forward. The woods closed around them, dark and deep.
There was relief in the woods, in the quiet and the rich greens and browns of leaves and bark.
“Too bad we can’t just stay here,” Grace said, giving voice to Jule’s thought. “Wait it out.”
That was exhaustion talking, and fear – but then, Grace was a child. She was allowed to be both tired and afraid.
“If we wait it out, there’ll be nothing left to save,” Jule said.
And again, Grace dared to say out loud what Jule had been thinking – what maybe all of them had thought. “So?”
“They didn’t deserve this,” West said, and didn’t have to say the name Jason. “None of them.”
Some of them, Jule thought.
“We can’t just hide out here and leave them to die,” he said. “Not if we can stop it.”
“Big if,” Jule said.
“Maybe there won’t even be anyone left at the guard posts,” Daniel said. “We could just walk right through.”
Jule did him the favor of not laughing in his face.
It took nearly an hour to penetrate the forest and make it through to the other side. They moved slowly, reassuring each other that it was good to be cautious, but they could all feel the emptiness of the woods, its stillness broken only by the wind and the insects and their footsteps crunching through the brush. The woods were safe, and they couldn’t bring themselves to hurry. Jule knew the way, and could only get lost if she let it happen. There were stories of people who had slipped into the woods never to leave, lost to the forest sprites or – depending on the type of story – devoured by hidden beasts. But those were stories for children. These woods were less than a mile wide. Setting off in any direction meant that, before long, civilization would intrude.
Jule chose a different point this time, a few hundred yards south of where they’d tried before. There were no soldiers in sight, only electrified fencing that rose a few feet over their heads. Without consulting the others, Jule fired at the generator-type box wedged into a joint in the fence, emptying her clip. The box unleashed a hail of sparks, the fence sizzled madly, and then silence fell again. She stepped forward.
“Don’t,” Daniel said, too late. She’d already taken hold of the metal lattice.
Nothing happened.
“Not dead yet,” she said, almost cheerful. Maybe the impossible was possible, and Daniel was right that the massacre of Oleander meant that they would go free. Guilt could wait. “Who’s ready to climb?” She hoisted herself onto the fence.
An alarm sounded, Klaxons shattering the still of the wood, and mercenaries flooded toward them out of nowhere, firing at will. “Run!” Cass screamed, unnecessarily. They were already in motion, retreating to the safety of the woods.
Retreating.
Maybe they wouldn’t be followed. There was nowhere to flee but back into town and its certain death. Why hunt when, eventually, the prey will come to you?
But they could all hear the hunters approach.
Jule swore, loudly, furiously.
“It’s not your fault,” Daniel said, already panting.
“Of course it’s not my fucking fault.” Though she’d been the one to test the fence without asking if anyone had any better ideas, without it occurring to her that a multi-billion-dollar corporation might be equipped with a Plan B. Stupid of her to think of herself as someone free, someone with a choice. All she could choose was the prettiest clearing, the perfect tree under which to make one last, pathetic stand.
She ran faster. They all did. Daniel took her hand; she couldn’t scare him anymore. It was hard to run that way, matching her steps to his, weaving through the narrow pathways of the forest, but she hung on.
“Now what?” Grace asked, sounding not b
ored, exactly, but sullenly vindicated, a child asking Are we there yet? in the middle of a traffic jam.
Jule stopped. The rest of them fell into place around her. “Now we stop running. We hit back.”
“How big an explosion are we talking here, Jule?” West asked.
She still had the satchel and, inside, the chemicals she’d stolen from the basement lab. To be saved for a rainy day.
It was pouring.
“Big enough to light the damn forest on fire,” she said.
“We’d have to get as close to the highway as we could,” Daniel said.
“Another possibility: I might accidentally blow us all up.”
“You said you knew what you were doing,” Daniel said.
“I know what I said.”
“I’m not letting them kill me,” West said. “Not after everything. Even if this doesn’t work —”
“Which it almost definitely won’t,” Jule said.
“—at least it’s on our own terms.”
“At least we’ll have tried everything,” Daniel said.
“This time we choose,” Cass said. “Not them.”
West nodded. After a moment, so did Daniel.
“You’re all morons,” Jule said. But: “Okay, we loop around, back toward the highway, and I’ll be ready when I have to be.”
“I think it’s a horrible idea, in case anyone cares,” Grace muttered, but they had already started to run.
They ran their pursuers around in circles, gradually losing their lead, gradually drawing closer and closer to the edge of the woods, and as they ran, Jule carefully spilled out the bottle of hydrochloric acid in their wake, a trail of poisoned bread crumbs they could never follow home. When the ribbon of highway came into sight, Jule was, as she’d promised, ready. All it took was a little aluminum foil and a lighter. “Close your eyes and get down,” she suggested, just before the world exploded.
18
STREAMS OF MERCY NEVER CEASING
White light. White noise.
An ocean roar that was like the other side of silence.
Cass blinked the fire from her eyes, the white-blue glow that had consumed the world. Rubbed her ears. Stood. Breathed.
The air smelled like death.
There were men on fire, zigzagging through the trees.
Flaming monsters in the shape of men, mouths distorted by screams.
She heard only the roar.
The sky, through the trees, was so blue. Painfully blue.
Pain.
He was upside down, pain shooting up his back, down his shoulder, pain like fire but not fire.
He was upside down.
His head beat in time with his heart.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
He gazed at the blue; he could live in the blue.
He was upside down, for no reason, with no cause. He was nobody, and there was good in that. Nobody was safe; nobody was easy.
A girl spoke a name that could have been his, or not. Just a word, just a noise.
The real name, the secret name, came as a whisper on the wind. It came from a distance, was meant only for him. It woke him up.
Jeremiah.
You are Jeremiah.
It brought him back.
In the dark behind his eyes, Daniel smelled smoke, and heard Milo scream, and knew the fire was coming, the fire was eating everything in its path, the fire was snaking its way toward home and would dig its flaming fingers into the earth and find the treasure hidden underneath. Come out of there! Daniel screamed in the silent space, and Milo’s voice was so calm and sure: Not until my brother tells me it’s safe. Not until my brother saves me.
Jule shook him and screamed, “Get up! Get up! Get up!” and hated herself for fooling him into believing her, hated him for letting her light the fuse. Not burned, not bleeding, but so pale and still, and limp in her feeble arms. She had done this. She had let herself believe she could choose, not just for herself, but for him and for all of them. She had let herself forget where she belonged, and who she really was. Prevettes never escape. Prevettes only destroy.
The body made a noise. The lips smiled. “You did it,” Daniel murmured, and opened his eyes.
Grace lived and wanted to die. The end would come; the end was taking forever. She wished it would hurry.
Just not fire, she pleaded with whatever would listen. Bullets, fine. Toxic gases, tank missiles, deranged ministers. Just not fire.
She’d always been afraid of fire.
Time slowed down and then, as if to compensate, abruptly sped up, hastened by the crackle of flame eating through the trees. They dusted themselves off and stood and looked at what they had wrought: flaming soldiers, flaming corpses, flaming trees. A dancing ribbon of fire that, even as they watched, leapt across the highway, reaching hungrily toward the mercenaries who scattered from its grasp, toward the tank that exploded at its touch, and on to the plains of the prairie, and on to the horizon.
The wind was blowing south, out of the forest, blowing the fire in the direction of escape. It crept through the trees behind them, swallowing the dry bark and fading leaves, spreading.
“Well… it was worth a try?” Daniel offered as they maneuvered, in a clump, out of the woods and onto the road, backing away from the fire that now closed in from both sides. “At least we won’t get shot?”
Jule couldn’t stop shaking her head. Everything was shaking. “I did this. I did it. I —”
Daniel took her by the shoulders and held her until she went still. “You tried. You kept us alive a little longer. You did that.”
West hugged his arms to his chest and laughed. “No one ever actually completes a Hail Mary pass. Only in the movies.”
Cass and Grace stood side by side, not touching. Both their faces were glossy with tears.
The flames licked at the trees. Branches fell. There was little time left. Daniel closed his hands over Jule’s. “End of the world, again,” he said. “You still not scared?”
She leaned against him. “I’m fearless, remember?” But when she pressed her lips to his, he could feel them trembling.
There should have been more time.
“It’s not fair,” Grace said.
Daniel was too old to believe in fair. But he agreed: it wasn’t.
“What if the drug does nothing?” Jule said quietly, just for him. “What if they were wrong?”
Daniel didn’t get it. “But everything that happened —”
“What if it was just people?” she said. “Just the way they are.”
“Then what about us?”
“What about us? Maybe they’ve got the right idea with this containment thing. Maybe everyone’s better off this way.”
He put his arms around her and held on, tight. “No.”
She fit so perfectly in his arms, and he cursed himself for not figuring it out sooner. He cursed everything. “People are better than this. We’re better than this.”
“It sounds nice in your world,” she said. “Nicer than mine.”
“There’s room for two.”
She laughed, and while he wasn’t ready to die, would never be ready, it would be easier now, with her laughter the last sound he ever heard. Jule, in his arms, softer than she seemed but tougher than anyone else, made everything easier.
The fire closed in.
The mercenaries were gone, dead or fled.
There was nowhere left to run.
They waited.
Some of them prayed.
It sounded like thunder at first, a low rumble in the distance, then another, a rippling wave of sky-splitting booms. After the thunder, a great wind. They turned their faces to the sky to meet their fate, expecting another tornado or a mushroom cloud or even – Ellie King vindicated after all this time – the fist of God.
God’s voice was tinny and mechanical; God’s fist was shaped like a helicopter.
This is the United States Army, the voice boomed. Lay your weapons down.
Ther
e were more helicopters, a fleet of them, but this first one sank lower and lower, a rope ladder hanging from its side, the words U.S. ARMY blazoned across its torso.