Page 120 of Doomsdate

“It’s not drugs, Dad.”

“You were always very healthy. Perfect attendance! T cells of steel!”

“I wasn’t that healthy. You just wouldn’t let me stay home!”

“Your fevers never exceeded 102 degrees!” Mom adds. “The fact is, you’re a fighter, Everett. A winner. You’re going to kick this virus right in the bee-hind—”

This goes on until Gemma convinces them to let me rest to ensure primo virus-ass-kicking, and Maisie turns the radio down low. She settles back onto the blankets across from me.

“So, what do you want to do?” she asks, running her thumb across my hand. This is the one touch we’re allowing ourselves—my hand on hers outside my cage.

I arch an eyebrow. “I could get you off one more time—”

“The fact that you think I could come right now is frankly ridiculous,” she says, but my proposition has had the desired effect of making her laugh, the joy of which I hold deep inside, next to my heart.

This is how I want to remember her. Laughing.

“What else?” she asks, her smile gentle.

“Well, if watching you come isn’t feasible, how about a movie?” I roll over on my stomach and bat my eyelashes. “I know just the film.”

Maisie groans, but she finds Misery on my laptop and presses play. As we watch Rob Reiner’s arguably most upsetting movie, save maybe 2007’s cursed Bucket List, the grays and blues of the film’s palette dancing across Maisie’s beautiful face, I fall into a hazy, aching sleep thinking, If this is how it ends, it really isn’t misery at all.

Chapter Twenty-five

Maisie

Something soft bats my nose, persistent. A plaintive, tremulous mewwwr? I rise reluctantly through the depths of sleep upward, toward the noise. I fell asleep? I don’t remember falling asleep.

A loud hisssss followed by an angry yowl brings me all the way awake. I lurch up to sitting, heart pounding hard.

Chicken’s zombie alarm.

Ice-cold terror spills down my spine as I glance furtively around the small, metal-walled bunker. Nothing moves, nobody’s there. Gramps’s body is outside the hatch. Chicken hides behind my back.

Then I remember.

“Everett!” I scramble up to my knees and reach for the Taser, my heart breaking in real time. His cage is silent, still, dark.

I turn on my phone’s flashlight.

Slowly, I lean down and peer into his cage.

Bright, round moons of light shine up at me.

I sob out a scream and jam the Taser through the bars, aiming directly for Everett’s heart. I can’t bear it, I can’t see him lunge for my flesh, a mindless monster of another’s making.

I can’t, I can’t.

The prongs make contact with the rounded muscle of his chest. I press the button, releasing an arc of blue energy.

Everett screams, his body convulsing. “Jesus FUCK!”

I scream in shock also, falling backward on my ass, Taser sparking freely in the air. “Everett?!”

“GOD fucking DAMMIT, that hurt!”

“Oh, Everett! I’m so sorry, I thought you were—your eyes! They’re glowing!” I lean closer, terrified this is all some delusion, that I’m hearing Everett only in my head from wishful thinking and that a zombie version of my beloved awaits me in the cage.