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Riot shrugged. “Beats me.” She cut him a look. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay.”
“Let’s say we try that again, and you give me a straight answer.”
Morgie ate some more of the soupy rice. “Better than I did.”
“But—?”
“But not all that good. And it’s freaking me out, because it came on all of a sudden.”
She thought about it and shook her head. “I don’t even know how to guess at this,” she admitted. “You grew up in Mountainside, on a mountain in the middle of California. We’re in Texas. Different everything out here—different animals and plants, different things to be allergic to, different mutations everywhere we look. Maybe there’s different kinds of flu viruses out here.”
Morgie said nothing to that, because what she said was pretty much what he was most afraid of. Back home, the doctors in town managed to scavenge or make some antibiotics for bacterial infections, but they had no real way of making effective antiviral medicines. Luckily, Mountainside was a closed community, so it was mostly a matter of people handing the same strains back and forth, and after fifteen years most people were immune. Or close enough.
Not out here.
Captain Ledger had told them all stories of how diseases—old ones running rampant with no hospitals to combat them, and new strains—killed more people than the zombies ever did. Rotting corpses in rivers and lakes, new diseases born from the wild mutations, and strains made stronger by groups of survivors misusing the antibiotic and antiviral drugs they found. Measles, mumps, whooping cough, rabies, and dozens of other diseases stalked the Rot and Ruin like invisible armies.
Since leaving home, Morgie and the others had been exposed to thousands of zombies in a prison, to mutated animals, to a dying soldier, and to a polluted landscape that was warping—season by season—into something out of a nightmare.
“You better be careful yourself,” Morgie said.
“I never get sick,” Riot replied, but then he saw something flicker in her eyes. A flare of awareness that he was sure he understood. The previous night they’d held each other for hours. They’d kissed and touched. If he was sick, then…
Riot cleared her throat, got up quickly, and took the map from her pack. She spread it out on the dining room table and bent over to study it. Morgie watched her, studying how the lines around her mouth stretched tighter.
“I think we should take it easy tomorrow,” she said without looking up. “Try for Lake Charles, Louisiana. That’s only sixty miles, and all along Route 10.” She paused. “We can stop as often as you need, no problem.”
“Sure,” said Morgie. “Whatever.”
The house was secure, the windows and doors shut, shutters secured, and curtains drawn, but it seemed to him as if there was a cold wind blowing through the spacious rooms. It smelled of sadness and loss.
Or maybe it smelled of memories.
Stop it, he scolded himself. Deal with it, or this is going to kill you.
PART FIFTEEN NEW ALAMO
Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
—MAHATMA GANDHI
58
GUTSY WHIPPED HER MACHETE FROM its scabbard as shadows filled the airlock opening.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God…” That was all Sergeant Holly seemed able to say, and with each repetition her voice lost more of its force, becoming emptier.
Despite what Gutsy knew had to be the source of that childish laughter, she wanted the shadows to be different. At that moment she would have given almost anything for the shapes out there to be adults. Even if they were wild men and this would be where she died, that would be better than what she actually faced.
Gutsy stepped toward the airlock, raising her machete as if it weighed ten tons.
“We have to get out of here,” she said, but there was no answer.
The shadows outside capered like demons as the laughter increased.
“Are they wild men?” Gutsy asked in a fierce whisper.
