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I was worried for nothing, though. Dumbo had Ben on his feet and Megan by the hand, urging both toward the road, having an easier time of it than I was with Sammy hooked under my arm facedown, arms and legs flailing, yelling, “We gotta go back, Cassie! We gotta go back!”
Across the on-ramp, down the steep hill to the overpass, Stage One complete, and then I deposited Sammy on the ground and whacked him hard on the butt and told him to knock it off or he’d get us all killed.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” I asked.
“I was trying to tell you!” he sobbed. “But you wouldn’t listen. You never listen! I dropped it!”
“You dropped—?”
“The bag, Cassie. Running out, I . . . I dropped it!”
I looked over at Ben. Hunched over, head down, forearms resting on his upraised knees. I looked at Dumbo. Slump-shouldered, wide-eyed, hand holding Megan’s.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” he whispered.
The world went breathless. Even the snow seemed to hang suspended in the air.
The hotel blew apart in a blinding fireball of neon green. The ground shuddered. Air rushed into the vacuum, knocking the four of us off our feet. Then the debris roaring toward us, and I threw myself over Sammy. A wave of concrete, glass, wood, and metal particles (and—yes—bits of Ben’s effing rats) no larger than grains of sand barreled down the hill, a gray boiling mass that engulfed us.
Welcome to Dubuque.
49
HE DIDN’T LIKE being around the smallest kids at the camp. They reminded him of his baby brother, the one he lost. The one that was there the morning he went out looking for food and wasn’t there when he returned. The one he never found. At camp, when he wasn’t training or eating or sleeping or washing down the barracks or shining his boots or cleaning his rifle or pulling KP duty or working in the P&D hangar, he was volunteering in the children’s housing or working the buses as they came in. He didn’t like being around the little kids, but he did it anyway. He never lost hope that one day he’d find his baby brother. That one day he would walk into the receiving hangar and find him sitting in one of the big red circles painted on the floor, or see him swinging from the old tire hung from the tree in the makeshift playground next to the par
ade grounds.
But he never found him.
At the hotel, when he discovered the enemy was planting bombs in children, he wondered if that’s what happened to his brother. If they found him and took him and made him swallow the green capsule and sent him out again to be found by someone else. Probably not. Most children were dead. Only a handful were saved and brought to the camp. His brother probably didn’t live many days past the day he disappeared.
But he could have been taken. He could have been forced to swallow the green capsule. He could have been thrown back out into the world and left to wander until he stumbled onto a group of survivors who would take him in and feed him and fill the room with their breath. It could have happened that way.
What’s bothering you? Zombie wanted to know. They had gone across the parking lot to find a CO2 canister in the old diner. Zombie had given up talking to him unless he was giving an order, and he’d given up trying to get him to talk. When he asked the question, Zombie really didn’t expect an answer.
I can always tell when something’s bothering you. You get like this constipated look. Like you’re trying to crap a brick.
The canister wasn’t that heavy, but Zombie was hurt and took the point on the way back. Zombie was nervous, jumping at every shadow. He kept saying there was something wrong. Something wrong about this Evan Walker and something wrong about the situation in general. Zombie thought they were being tricked.
Back in the hotel, Zombie sent Dumbo upstairs to get Evan. Then they waited inside the elevator for Evan to come down.
See, Cake, this goes back to my point, right back to it. EMPs and tsunamis and plagues and aliens in disguise and brainwashed kids and now kids with bombs inside them. Why are they making this so damn complicated? It’s like they want a fight. Or want the fight to be interesting. Hey. Maybe that’s it. Maybe you reach a certain point in evolution where boredom is the greatest threat to your survival. Maybe this isn’t a planetary takeover at all, but a game. Like a kid pulling wings off flies.
As the minutes passed, Zombie got more nervous.
What now? Where the hell is he? Oh Christ, you don’t think . . . ? Better get up there, Poundcake. Throw his ass over your shoulder and carry him down here if you have to.
Halfway up the stairs, he heard a heavy thump over his head, then a second, softer thump, and then he heard someone scream. He got to the door in time to see Cassie’s body fly past and hit the floor. He followed her trajectory backward and saw the tall girl standing beside the room with the busted door. And he didn’t hesitate, he burst into the hall and he knew the tall girl would not survive. He was a good shot, the best in his squad until Ringer came, and he knew that he would not miss.
Except Cassie tackled him and the tall girl slipped from his sights. He would have killed her if Cassie hadn’t done that. He was sure of it.
Then the tall girl shot him through the wall.
Dumbo tore open his shirt and pressed a wadded-up sheet into the wound. He told him that it wasn’t bad, that he was going to make it, but he knew he wasn’t. He’d been around too much death. He knew what it smelled like, tasted like, felt like. He carried death inside him in the memories of his mother and the ten-foot pyres and the bones along the road and the conveyor belt carrying hundreds into the furnace of the power plant at camp, the dead burned to light their barracks and heat their water and keep them warm. Dying didn’t bother him. Dying without knowing what happened to his brother bothered him.
Dying, he was taken downstairs. Dying, he was thrown over Zombie’s shoulders. And then in the parking lot Zombie fell and the others gathered around and Zombie pounded the frozen pavement until the skin on his palms burst open.
They left him after that. He wasn’t angry. He understood. He was dying.
