Until the End of the World (Book 2): And After (19 page)

“You’d think.” I would want to know. “How’s Nelly?”

“He’s fine. He told Zeke to say hi. Zeke says they really needed the help. Everyone loves Nel, as you know.”

No one more than me. I can’t wait to see him tomorrow, when we go to Whitefield. I’ve taken to bothering Peter and Dan now that I don’t have Nelly, but it’s just not the same.

“Well, no matter what, we’ve got to finish that trench,” John continues. “We’re putting up extra posts, but we need this whole place surrounded as soon as we can.” He leans forward. “How are you, hon? I feel like I only ever see you at dinner.”

That’s probably because I avoid people, between guard at night and trips to the lookout. “I’m okay.”

What I should say is that it’s been six weeks, and I still feel like I’m sucker-punched in the gut multiple times a day. That Ana and I have taken to secretly hunting down parties of Lexers and the fact that I like it so much scares me. That I have to restrain myself from screaming at Bits when she clings to me during the night and wakes the moment I move. I don’t—but I’m sure she can feel my frustration, no matter how hard I try to hide it. I can’t breathe around all these people who want things from me. There’s no oxygen, not even in my own bed.

“It takes time, but it’ll get better,” he says. “When Caroline passed, dying didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I didn’t see the sense in sticking around when she was gone.”

I stare at the radio. I don’t want to die; I’m just not all that invested in living. It’s a fine distinction, but at least it’s there.

“I found strength in God,” John says. He raises a hand. “Now, I know we have differing religious views.”

Seeing as how he’s Christian and I’m agnostic, it’s a big difference. He smiles and continues. “But God didn’t do all the work. I had to find the strength from within. You can lie down on the road in front of a pod of Lexers, but if you don’t help yourself by getting up and getting out of there, they’re going to eat you, no matter how loud you pray. You have that strength, hon.”

He clears his throat and tugs on the collar of his shirt with a thick finger. “I also thought I’d never love anyone again, but I was wrong. And the only reason I’m telling you this is because I want you to know that life does go on, even if it doesn’t seem like it right now.”

Maureen. I let out a whoop and plant a big kiss on his cheek.

“That’s enough,” he says, but his eyes aren’t stern. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I do.” I’m not lying in the road—more like standing in the road, cleaver at the ready. It’s the only kind of strength I can manage right now. I change the subject. “So, what can we do about Arizona?”

“Not a darn thing, unless Colorado decides to man up.”

Oliver, a guy in his forties with thinning hair, comes in to relieve John. “Anything interesting happen?”

John gets him up to speed, and I take his arm as we leave the building. “Thanks, John.”

“It’ll be all right, hon. Just hang in there.”

John may have found love again, but I’ll never love someone like I did Adrian. I don’t see how it’s possible. I don’t want it, anyway; I have enough people left to lose.

***

I stiffen when Penny sits beside me at dinner. We’ve barely spoken in weeks. We’re not in a fight, but I can hardly look at her, knowing what she thinks of me.

“I’m feeling so much better,” she says, and takes a bite of salad. The greens are growing like crazy in the spring weather, and even the people who used to turn their noses up at salad have been eating it like chocolate.

“That’s really great,” I say, and lapse back into silence.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Just thinking about going to Whitefield tomorrow. Have to get ready. Oh, and Bits has had a lot of trouble sleeping since the fence thing, so you have to stay with her until she falls asleep. It can take a while.”

I honestly didn’t mean it as a dig, but she flinches. “Listen, I’m sorry that Bits saw the Lexers at the fence. I should have kept them inside, it just happened so fast…”

“I know. It’s fine. I’m just doing everything in my power to keep her from seeing it again.”

Penny tugs on the end of her ponytail. She’s about to say something I don’t want to hear, so I push back my chair. “I’m going to go pack.”

“Okay.”

We’ve been best friends since we were ten, and I know when her feelings are hurt. Well, so are mine. “See you later.”

I walk out of the restaurant feeling justified in my anger, but it doesn’t make me happy or less lonely. I may have lost Adrian, but I feel like I’m losing everyone else, too.

I leap out of the truck into Nelly’s arms. “I’m stealing your boyfriend,” I say to Adam.

“He’s all yours,” Adam says. “Just give him back when you’re done, in approximately the same condition. Except for his hair. Whatever you can do to fix that would be great.”

I put my forehead against Nelly’s and whisper loud enough for Adam to hear, “I love him. He’s just perfect.”

“Nel says I’m a lot like you,” Adam says.

“Number one being that he’s a slob,” Nelly says. “I thought I got away from it, and here I am again.”

Nelly lowers me to the ground with a long-suffering sigh, but his eyes are crinkly, and when he looks at Adam they soften even more. I feel the tiniest bit envious, but mainly, I’m happy for them. Nelly catches me smiling at the way he watches Adam and shoves me. I shove him back.

“Well, I left the kids working silently,” Adam says, “and I have a feeling they are no longer silent, so I’m going to head back. I’ll leave you two to your third-grade antics, although maybe I need to stay here and supervise.”

I shove Nelly again. He grabs me in a headlock and asks, “What do you mean?”

Nelly releases me after Adam’s strolled away, shaking his head at our mature behavior. “So, I hear we really are going out partying,” I say.

We’re heading to North Conway tomorrow. Whitefield’s greens are growing, too, but they could use more staples. And they need practice; it’s the first patrol for everyone but Nelly, Kyle and Zeke. Ana thinks she’s going to the outlet mall to get clothes, but she’s living in a dream world.

“Yeah,” Nelly says. “I’d rather not, though.” He waits for me to agree, and when I don’t, he makes a sound deep in his throat. “You want to go, don’t you? Penny thinks—”

“Don’t tell me. C’mon, we brought beer.”

He drops the subject and rubs his paws together. Whitefield’s alcoholic beverages were burned along with the food.

“Maybe we’ll get some more tomorrow,” I say.

“Now you’re speaking my language.”

***

“I know I asked yesterday,” John says. His eyes land on each of the Whitefield patrol volunteers. “But I want to make sure that if you don’t think you’re up for it, you stay here. It’s a crapshoot—we could run into nothing or find ourselves up the creek without a paddle, and we need to be sure we’ll have each others’ backs.”

Christine pulls her hair into a ponytail and murmurs assent. She was in the Air Force years ago, which is where she met Brett. I watch her holster her gun with a trembling hand, but of course she’s nervous—she should be.

Besides Zeke and Nelly, there are five men, Christine and Margaret. Margaret is in her forties and holds a gun in her ropy arms like she was born with it there. The guys I don’t know well except for Kyle and Tony, a former dockworker with dark hair and deep-set eyes.

Jamie’s dark, curly hair is in a bun atop her head and her green eyes sparkle. “So, who’s going where?”

“The Hannaford supermarket is near Shaw’s, and they’re both near Walmart,” Zeke says. He looks at the crudely drawn squares on the map. “So, half of us to Shaw’s and half to Hannaford’s. Last we knew, the Hannaford still had baking supplies and stuff in the back, and the Shaw’s was in decent shape.”

John points a finger. “Cassie, Peter, Ana, Christine, Margaret, Kyle and Tony will come to Hannaford’s with me in the bus. The rest are with Zeke in the van.”

We pile into the small school bus and pull out of Whitefield. Christine listlessly watches the state forest go past from our bench seat.

“You okay?” I ask.

The sunlight emphasizes every sleepless night and crying jag she’s had in the past weeks. I probably look the same, although out here I don’t feel like I do.

“I’m fine,” she says, but her eyes are flat. “Did you know it’s been over a year since I left the gates? I had to get out of there.”

“Maybe if you like this it could be one of your jobs. Maybe it’ll help.”

I nod encouragingly and Christine returns her gaze out the window. “I had friends like you in Iraq, Cassie. People who could find the positive in everything. I tried, but I had the worst nightmares. Brett made them so much better, but now…”

If she thinks I’m Little Miss Sunshine, then she must be bad. I touch her gloved hand and lie through my teeth. “It’ll get better. It has to get better, you know?”

I try unsuccessfully to think of something else to say that isn’t a cliché. Her lips move while she fingers the gold cross around her neck. It’s not the praying—if I were a praying kind of gal I’m sure I’d be at it all the time—but something tells me she’s not up to this.

The forest gives way to residences and then the town of North Conway. Rows of wooden houses-turned-tourist shops have shuttered or shattered windows.

Ana calls out the store names as we go past. “Leather—Dansko, Ugg—tell me that’s not necessary! We need boots, don’t we? Toys. Oh, my niece needs toys!”

John gives a firm shake of his head at every outburst, until Ana’s arms are crossed and she mutters every store’s wares to herself. I know she’s saving her nuclear argument for the outlets, but there’s no way it’s going to happen with John in charge. Peter watches from his seat behind her, mouth half lifted and hands behind his head. She’s amusing when you’re not the one being bombarded with whatever scheme she’s cooked up.

I can’t blame her, though. There’s so much stuff here for the taking—useful stuff and stuff that would be nice to have, like overpriced handmade-by-an-artisan-out-of-sustainable-wood baby toys and boots that aren’t just functional. I remind myself that there are only three things worth dying for: other people, food and water.

There are a few Lexers roaming around, but the 157th killed a lot of them off this winter. So many charred bodies are piled in the center of the village green that the air still smells vaguely burnt and fatty when we pass. Cars are parked haphazardly along the two lane road, many pushed out of the way to create the center lane along which we follow Zeke’s van. The houses and businesses become more dispersed until we finally enter Consumer Heaven. The hotels that boasted park-like grounds are overgrown with weeds and decorated with broken windows. Maybe people tried to take refuge in the rooms, or maybe they were escaping.

When we near the turn for the outlet village, Ana’s shoulders tense and her mouth opens. John keeps his eyes trained on the road and says, “No.”

Ana turns with a grin when Peter and I snicker. “You win some, you lose some, right?” She rests her chin on the back of her seat, brushes Peter’s hair behind his ear and whispers, “Be careful, okay?”

“
You
be careful,” Peter says.

He cups her face in his hands and leans in for a kiss. I feel the ghost of Adrian’s hands on my cheeks. The wave of longing is so intense that I dig my nails into my palms to distract myself. The gloves make it more ineffective than usual, so I pinch my thigh until it hurts. Adrian’s everywhere on the farm, but he rarely follows me past the gates, which is how I like it.

“Here we are,” John says, and turns onto a side road.

“We should hit EMS and L.L. Bean sometime.” Kyle points out the two stores that sit behind a Starbucks on the main road. “And I wouldn’t mind a coffee.”

“I’d kill for a latte,” I say. “There’s even a drive-thru, so we wouldn’t have to worry about being eaten alive.” Everyone but Christine laughs.

“I’ll take a cappuccino,” Tony says with an Italian accent. “And a cannoli. My mother made the best cannoli.”

He kisses his fingers and raises them to the sky. Last year he’d had a round belly to match his round face, but the work and lack of extra food has left him only with the spiky, dark hair and cherubic cheeks that make him look younger than his forty-some years.

“We could make cannoli,” Peter offers. “We already make ricotta cheese. The rest is easy.”

“You could? I’m gonna hold you to that,” Tony says. “You Italian, Pete?”

Peter grins. “No, just your run-of-the-mill whiteboy.”

Tony slaps the seat in front of him, his cheeks puffed out with laughter. The bus slows to a stop next to the van, and Zeke points to the Hannaford on our right. It’s at the closest end of the shopping center, which is good in terms of a quick getaway. I can just make out the village-type buildings of the outlets through the trees to our left, but Ana doesn’t glance that way now that she has a new mission.

Zeke rolls down the road. He radios that the rear is quiet and continues on to Shaw’s. Splitting up isn’t always smart, but since we have two patrols’ worth of people, we should be okay. The parking lot holds cars and two kinds of bodies—ones that were stripped of their meat and the ones who ate them and then froze to death.

Whitefield killed off the Lexers in the store, and they were waiting for the roads to clear to pick up what they didn’t bring back on snowmobiles, but they hadn’t gotten around to it before they were attacked. The plywood they’d nailed over the shattered doorway has either been pried off or fallen, so there’s no telling what’s in there now.

“Let’s get them up here first, then we’ll worry about opening the back,” John says. We push the wood out of the way, and John shows Christine, Tony and Margaret how we make noise at the front of a store. “It’s better to call the Lexers to you and finish them off.”

After a few minutes of quiet calling, footsteps sound from inside the store and ten Lexers appear from out of the gloom.

“This is easy,” John says. “Back into the lot, and get them as they feed out.”

All three hold a spike or blade of some kind, as well as wear a gun. Margaret’s spike hits a Lexer through the missing lens of his glasses. She takes a couple more and lets Tony do the next few. Christine watches with a pale face.