Until the End of the World (Book 2): And After (39 page)

I pick Oliver’s bent glasses up off the dirt. Oliver shrinks, but Peter doesn’t let go. I’ve seen Peter angry, but I’ve never seen this blank, murderous rage. There’s another meaty thud, and blood rushes over Oliver’s eye before dripping off his chin. I consider stepping in, but I want Peter to get a few more in—one each for Ana, John, Dan and Henry.

Oliver gasps, his mouth open in a rictus of fear. He fixes his good eye on Peter’s fist. “I’m sorry!”

Peter’s fist stops before it connects. He drops Oliver to the ground and bends over him. “Do you know how many people you killed today?” he asks in a scarily quiet voice. “Do you? I hope you have plans to go with Quebec. I guarantee you won’t make it to Alaska.”

Oliver hugs his knees and blinks up at Peter. I hold out his glasses, and it takes him three tries to get them on with the way his hands quiver. The crowd has reassembled around us. Penny, who usually abhors this kind of violence, wears a satisfied expression, but Meghan and her friends look at Peter in shock. Well, fuck them. Fuck everyone who was so scared to leave the farm, the ones who are going with Quebec. They’re going to find out what it’s like out here, and God help them if a fistfight is enough to cause such alarm.

“I forgot!” Oliver says with a whimper. The tears mix with blood to form a watery soup. “I—I was scared. I f-forgot. It was all so fast!”

Peter’s fist retightens, but then he takes in the pathetic mess that lies sobbing on the ground and splays his fingers with visible effort. I take his arm and walk him to the lake. If he punches Oliver again, he’ll regret it. I rinse the blood off his knuckles with a plastic bucket and dry it on my shirt, then seat him in one of the chairs by the water.

“Stay here until they leave,” I say.

Peter nods and watches the lake with a tight jaw. I sit next to him until I hear the engines fade into the distance. We’ve lost so many today that it almost feels the same as when the world ended a year ago. But we hadn’t let that destroy us—we’d built a new world, and now that’s ended, too.

Quebec took all the food, but they didn’t take the time to completely pick over the gardens. While we give Whitefield a few hours to arrive, I pick green tomatoes and snap hidden cucumbers off their vines. It may take the Lexers days to get up here, but we need more than days to cross the thousands of miles to Alaska. Our travels will take us across northern Canada, where the terrain might slow the Lexers down and the roads are less likely to be impassable.

Bits and Hank fill containers with anything that looks remotely edible in the garden we’ve been assigned to plunder. I’m glad we have something to do because the waiting is torture. Peter pulls a carrot out of the ground and tosses it into a bag. The next one’s stuck, and he curses and kicks the greens that rise aboveground until there’s nothing but a tiny stalk. I bring over my trowel and carefully dig up the carrot. My hands are steady, although my insides are so unsettled I can’t imagine a time when I might ever want to eat it.

I look up from where I kneel. “Why don’t you go rest? We can get this.”

Peter shakes his head and crouches to rip a carrot from the earth. He wipes his face with the back of his hand and furiously tears out another. His fingernails are black, and blood runs down his knuckles where his cuts have opened up.

“You’re bleeding,” I say. “Why don’t we clean you up? You need a band-aid.”

“Fucking stop already!” Peter yells. “I don’t want a fucking band-aid!”

Bits and Hank look up, mouths open. Hank takes Bits by the hand and leads her to another row. I’m not surprised by his outburst, though. Of course he’s angry.

“Then you don’t have to have a band-aid.” I hand him the trowel. “Use this.”

He stabs the trowel into the soil. I know about the anger that boils beneath the surface. The blame. The rage at the unfairness of it all. Sometimes it rises up and chokes you. Other times, you put it to good use. Right now, I’m doing neither of the two. The anger is in there, along with grief and despair, but I’ve buried it all with my resolve to think only of the practicalities of survival. Peter’s seething with it, though. It’s choking him. He’s not an angry person. He spent much of his life sad, not angry. The only person he’s ever hated with any intensity is himself.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know you were so vehemently opposed to band-aids, or I never would’ve offered you one.”

The trowel pierces the ground and stays there. I raise my eyes from my carrot to find him staring at me. My semi-joke to defuse his anger was a gamble, and I’m relieved when his shoulders soften and jaw unclenches.

“Sorry,” he says. “I just…I should’ve gone and—”

I look into his red-rimmed eyes. “No. It’s not your fault. Don’t do that to yourself. We got Bits. Ana wanted to save her as much as we did.”

He lowers his head and yanks me forward by my shoulder. I hold him as he cries, his breaths coming in hot bursts on my neck. I know what it’s like to need someone to cling to. I should’ve asked my friends for comfort after Adrian died.

I hear a rustle and spot Bits peeking at us from behind a bean bush.

“It’s okay, Bits,” I say, and hold out my hand. She steps softly on the earth but halts when Peter raises his head.

“Come here, baby girl,” he says. “Sorry I scared you.”

She balls up in his lap and he rests his chin on her head. The blood is still running, but it’s slowed to an ooze. I take out my handkerchief and press it to his knuckles.

“I think I might need a band-aid,” Peter says. He doesn’t exactly smile, but some life has returned to his eyes.

The VW and pickup are stuffed to the gills, and those of us who are left cluster beside them. We’re giving Whitefield one more hour to arrive, and then we’ll leave a note with their two options of destinations. It’s late afternoon, but we won’t stop for night. The plan is to drive straight through, taking turns behind the wheel as long as it’s safe to do so. In a perfect world, it would take four straight days of driving at highway speeds. But this world is highly imperfect.

“We need zombie Doppler,” Mike jokes. He cringes and his eyes dart around our group. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, Mike,” Penny says with a weak smile. “Ana would be the first one to laugh.”

Mike puts an arm around Rohan and sucks in his cheeks.

“My dad said we had to joke after my mom and sister died,” Hank says from where he sits on the edge of the VW’s cabin. “He made me tell him every joke I knew. I didn’t want to, but he made me. We laughed so hard we had to stop in case we attracted zombies.” He kicks the dirt with a sneakered foot.

“So it worked?” I rest my arm around his shoulders. He leans into me with a nod. “Well, then—Knock Knock.”

He throws his head back with a groan. “This isn’t the interrupting cow one, is it?”

I push his foot with mine and pretend to be disappointed. “Am I that predictable?”

“You only know one joke, Cassie,” Bits says.

“Well, we’ll have plenty of time on the road for Hank to teach me more.”

Everyone wears a smile now. They range from Rohan’s fully-toothed grin to a tiny crease at the corner of Peter’s lips. Maureen winks at me. She knows I know they’ve all heard my one joke a thousand times.

A tiny meow comes from the VW’s interior. I scramble behind me for the box I stowed in the back and forgot, but Bits beats me to it with a cry of pure joy. She holds Sparky under her chin and looks at me with glowing eyes. “You really did get her! I didn’t think you would. It was three bursts.”

I nod noncommittally. I wouldn’t have done it had Bits been at the VW, not with what was coming. I can’t take any credit for Sparky’s survival.

Peter scratches a finger under Sparky’s chin. “Of course she did. We couldn’t leave Sparkle behind.” His raised eyebrows order me to agree. “Right?”

“Absolutely,” I lie.

“Anyone hungry?” Maureen asks. “I was planning to pack up—”

The rumble of a motorcycle drowns out her next words. Zeke pulls into the lot and stops, followed by a camper and a truck. There’s no way all of Whitefield is in those two vehicles, and my only prayer is
Nelly
.

Zeke takes off his helmet and hollers, “Y’all are a sight for sore eyes, let me tell you.”

He steps over his bike and moves to Penny and Peter. I hear him say Ana’s name and then turn to Maureen. Jamie and Shawn must have given them the news at the gate. Tony and Margaret leave the pickup, followed by Kyle, who swings Nicole to the ground. The camper door opens and a woman named Marissa emerges with her two children, along with five more adults I don’t know well. I take a steadying breath that escapes in a rush when Adam steps out, followed by a flash of blond hair and familiar broad shoulders. I’m through the assembled people before Nelly’s shoes hit the dirt. He picks me up in a bone-crushing embrace and sets me back down.

“Jamie told us. I don’t….” Nelly runs a hand through his hair. “Are you…”

“We’re okay.” My lips tremble, and I take a deep breath. “Better, now that you’re here. They’re okay, for now.”

“I didn’t think we were going to make it.” I start to ask why, but he squeezes my hand. “I’ll tell you later. I need to—” He points his chin in the direction of the others. I watch him walk away, and I turn to Adam.

“Hey, you,” I say. “Come here.”

“Hey, yourself.” Adam steps into my hug. “Nel was so worried.”

“What happened? Where’s everyone else?”

“We don’t know.” His voice cracks. Unlike Nelly, Adam wears his heart on his sleeve. “We had almost no warning. The fence went down before everyone could get to their spots. We got split up. No one answered the radio. We called the whole way here.”

I look around our group of twenty-odd people. It’s such a sorry number. It makes me despondent, until I see Nelly raise Bits in the air and draw a smile out of Hank. It may be a sorry number, I tell myself, but maybe quality, not quantity, is just as important.

The sun is rising over the flat expanse of Who Knows Where, Canada. I’ve spent the night alternately staring at the road while driving or staring at where Penny and the kids sleep on the pullout bed. The outskirts of Montreal were nerve-wracking, but the last couple of hundred miles have been fairly easy since it was barely populated before. James spent the night driving or poring over our maps. He finally passed out with his face mashed against the sink.

We’ve managed to eke out some gas from cars. We’ll need a lot more of it to get to Alaska, though, even with the tank in the truck bed. Tony and Margaret began fumbling with rubber hoses in the dark, until we showed them John’s end-of-the-world siphoning method—a screwdriver into the gas tank with a container underneath. He would’ve been proud.

I rest my feet on the dashboard and watch the pickup and RV ahead. Besides Nelly and Adam, only Tony, Margaret, Zeke, Kyle and Nicole came west from the Whitefield group. It almost killed Zeke to leave his motorcycle in Quebec. He was afraid its roar would attract Lexers from miles away. I know it’s only a bike, but I understood. Another thing left behind.

Peter’s at the wheel. He glances behind us to make sure everyone’s asleep and then speaks. “I shouldn’t have done that to Oliver. I told him he was a murderer. I could see how sorry he was.”

His face is tight. I knew he’d feel guilty and don’t want him to, so I swing a fist in the air. “If you didn’t punch him, I would’ve.”

“I might have sent him to die up there.”

“He was going north with the others, anyway,” I say. “Maybe we should have gone, too.”

“To nothing? Not enough food, no fences? Lexers coming straight for us?”

“What if we can’t find more gas? Or the roads are blocked? Or—”

“Or we run into a pod,” Peter says. “Or crazy people. Or there’s a tornado. Or a flash flood. Or the bus breaks down. There—now we’ve named everything that could happen.”

“Nope,” I say, and caress the VW’s dash, “Miss Vera won’t break down. Will you, Miss Vera? You know how much I love you, don’t you?”

“Miss Vera? You named the bus Miss Vera?”

“Vera the VW. Miss Vera Winifred Bus, get it?”

“You are a very weird person,” Peter says. But he laughs his first laugh since yesterday, which is what I was going for. “We know where we’re going and that they’ll take us in.”

“We know where we’re going, but we might not get there.”

The orange of the sun makes even this lonely stretch of highway look like something special, so I reach into my jacket and pull out the phone. I take a picture of the road stretched out before us and then snap a picture of Peter’s hands glowing orange on the wheel, the knuckles on his right slightly swollen and scabbed.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“A pictorial essay of our trip. That way they’ll know our story when they find the bodies.” I lean over and take a picture of myself with Peter.

Peter shifts the gears with more force than necessary. “Cassandra, stop being so pessimistic.”

If the past day has shown us anything, it’s that the worst is always a possibility. A probability, actually. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but you won’t get hurt as badly if you expect and prepare for the worst. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.

“I think the word you want is
realistic
,” I say.

Peter sighs. I know I’m being argumentative, but if we’re going to get to Alaska we need to be practical. We don’t have room for fairy tales and blind faith. I can’t believe this will end well, not when all the signs point to the truth that it won’t.

The truck’s blinker flashes and we slow to the side of the road. Nelly stretches his arms above his head before strolling to our window. Barnaby follows, but not before eating something disgusting off the road and then coughing it back up.

“Pit stop?” Nelly asks.

“I have those terrible coffee packets,” I say. “Want me to make some?”

“Oh, God, yes.”

The others wake at the sound of Nelly’s voice. Sparky roams around the bus with plaintive meows. “Sparky needs to pee,” Bits calls. “And maybe poop.”

“How are we going to do that?” Peter asks me. There are no fences here, and we can’t waste time searching for a scared cat if she runs off.