At the End of Everything, page 7
At the back of the room, Casey frowns and pushes through to try to get to us, but I quietly shake my head. Not now. Please.
He settles down on one of the tables and folds his arms.
When the last group of people enters the room, Maverick climbs on a table and counts heads. He nods in Hunter’s direction. “We’re all here.”
“Good,” Hunter says. “Let’s start. Grace?”
“What?”
“You go first,” he says, his voice calm and reasonable.
A headache takes up residence behind my eyes, and all I want to do is punch him. Just once. But everyone is looking at us, so I tighten my fists, and with a painful smile, I nod. “Fine.”
I clear my throat and wait for silence to settle around us, and then I start. “A couple of days ago, there was an outbreak of the plague. We’re all here together because the guards have left us.”
Nine
Logan
Nothing goes according to our routine anymore. I don’t understand how Grace and Hunter find words for what happened tonight, but they do. When Grace sways, Hunter steps in to provide details, and together they tell the whole story. One word at a time. I couldn’t do it. I don’t have the signs. It’s all balled up in a restlessness inside of me, and not even stimming will make me feel better.
Next to me, Leah coughs. She slumped in one of the chairs, her wounded hand cradled against her chest. We cleaned it as well as possible with our foul-smelling soap, and then we tied a clean shirt around it. We should find bandages in the infirmary after this.
I nudge her with my toe, make her look at me. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
Leah blinks and doesn’t focus. She isn’t. I understand her as well as I do myself and maybe even better. She’s the other half of me.
She shakes her head and keeps her voice down. “I’m fine. I promise.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Wow, thanks.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know.” She tries to smile, but it looks crooked.
“I’m worried,” I tell her.
Every time I blink, every time I close my eyes, every time I let my thoughts wander, I see the same scene over and over and over again.
The soldier, raising his gun. Reid, falling to the ground. And Leah, rushing past me to get to him, to fight with the soldiers, to leave me behind. We promised to never leave each other. No matter what happened, no matter where we were. We promised to never leave each other.
“I propose to stay here,” Grace says at the front of the room. She licks her lips, like she’s nervous. “None of us came to Hope out of our own volition, but like it or not, it’s the safest place we have. We have a roof over our heads. We have food to keep us going. We can sit it out until help comes, instead of becoming fugitives on the run.”
“What about our families?” someone asks.
“I’d imagine your families would want you to be safe too,” Grace says. “You can call home if you want to, but they’ll understand we’re protected here. Besides, there is no easy way to leave now. Not unless you want to risk getting shot.”
Leah coughs again, but the sudden rumble of voices around me drowns out the sound.
I shuffle closer to my sister and squeeze her hand.
At the front of the room, Hunter physically turns away from Grace and addresses the crowd. “You’ve heard her. Those who want to stay here and die can do so. But the truth is, no one will come for you. No one will help you. The world outside might be dangerous, but we know what to look out for now, and at least we’ll be free. We’re leaving as soon as we’ve gathered enough supplies.”
“Where will you go?” someone else from the crowd asks. Josie, probably, but I’m not entirely sure. Too many people stand between us.
Hunter shrugs. “Anywhere but here. If you have parents, you can call them, and we’ll help you find your way back home. It doesn’t have to be simple; we’ll figure it out.”
Past the roadblocks? How?
“Anywhere but here sounds good to me.” Josie pushes past several others toward the rest of the west wing crew. Two of the boys elbow each other and laugh and leer.
“I’ll take my chances here, thanks,” another person calls.
“Can you promise us we won’t get shot on sight?”
“Can you promise us we won’t die of that disease anyway?”
The questions go back and forth.
Anywhere but here sounds terrible to me, but I look at Leah all the same. She wanted to see the world again earlier tonight. “If you still want to leave, I’ll follow you.”
She doesn’t immediately answer. She needs time to add up all the pros and cons. Figure out what’s best.
Meanwhile, all the boys from the west wing band together. Another girl joins them and comes to stand next to Josie. Saoirse Sullivan. The only girl in Hope with flaming-red hair and more freckles than I could possibly count.
Hesitatingly, Joshua Taylor walks over to the group as well. Joshua’s latest tall tale was that he got caught running messages for a mafia boss. Two weeks ago, he told the new kid that he got caught in a sting operation. Leah says she also heard him confess to building a bomb once. Probably none of those are true.
He and Saoirse are kind. Hunter’s crew will protect us. I can easily imagine the pros that Leah is gathering now. I pull at a bit of rough skin around my cuticles until it bleeds.
Leah covers my hand with hers. The shirt we used as bandages has shifted and opened. The scratches are wider now, like she pulled at them the way I do. Her hand is red and warmer. Her eyes are still distant, but she pulls me close enough, our foreheads touch. “You want to stay here, right?”
I nod.
She sighs deeply. “Yeah. I think—I don’t know what’ll happen to us outside. I don’t know how to protect you. I don’t know…” Her voice trails off, and I wait until I’m sure she doesn’t want to say anything else.
“I don’t need you to protect me.” I pull back enough to make room for my signs. “We can stay here for now. Until it gets better outside. It can’t stay like this forever.”
“If it gets better, the guards might come back.”
I frown. “We’ll have to be careful to find the right moment then.”
“Yeah, we will.”
“We’re in this together.” My signs hold somewhere between a statement and a question. Our only option is for us to be in this together. Right?
Leah nods. “Always.”
“And always.”
My shoulders drop a little. My jaw unclenches. In the end, this is really all that matters. The two of us, together. Even in here. Even if the world is ending.
Hunter’s new crew counts seven when he stomps out of the room. Four boys from the west wing—excluding Hunter himself—plus Joshua, Josie, and Saoirse. Everything I know about all of them bounces through my head. Josie and her knives. Saoirse and her fourth nonviolent offense. Hunter, who killed someone.
It means Andrew Riker will be the only one left in the west wing. He’s quiet. The only boy in the west wing who didn’t join Hunter’s group. Leah thinks he’s intimidating. He has a history of violence.
I like him because he barely speaks more than I do.
It means there’ll be twenty-two of us left. Seven in the south wing. Seven in the east wing. Seven in the north wing. Andrew on his own.
“We’ll figure out how to go from here in the morning,” Grace says. She appears to ignore the fact that the sky outside is a little brighter than it was. I like it. I want to go back to normal too. “None of you are obligated to stay, but I hope you do. We can be safe here, together, until help comes. We’ll hack into the computers to find more information.”
At the front of the crowd, someone raises their hand. “I can help with the computers.” I almost smile. Isaiah Wood. He’s a soft-spoken Black boy everyone knows as the Professor because he knows everything about everything. Of course he can hack into the computers.
Grace nods. “We’ll make it through, I promise. They’ll find a way to stop the spread, and this will all be over soon.”
She makes it sound like she knows what she’s doing, but she can’t possibly. No one can.
“Diseases don’t just go away.” Emerson’s voice is so soft, I doubt Grace hears. I doubt anyone hears, except for maybe Leah and me. “You can’t promise we’ll survive.”
“We can only try,” Leah whispers.
And even when you think you’ll make it through, sometimes you don’t.
* * *
I dream about the fire, that night. We’d stayed in the warehouse often enough that we both knew how to get around without being seen. I’d never been the best at stealth or any sort of coordination, but here I only had to follow Leah.
She carried the gasoline.
I carried the matches.
We snuck inside through the same busted door we always used, past the aisles full of mostly empty storage racks. This building had fallen into disuse years ago. The owner obviously didn’t care for it. But with an open door and a roof that protected against rain and walls to hide from prying eyes, there was always someone who could make good use of the place.
Leah first heard of the warehouse through gossip on the streets of Hot Springs. A girl who was passing through told her about the location. She said it was a safe house when she stayed there a year or two ago.
It wasn’t a safe house when we were there. Just another location you had to pay to enter. But it was winter, and we had nowhere else to go, so we did. We paid with stolen food and stolen goods, with kisses and with touches, until the touches became something else and I couldn’t say anything.
Leah spread the gasoline across the floor and the racks. The smell of it cloyed at my nose and choked me. I stuffed part of my sleeve into my mouth to keep from coughing and betraying our presence. Some nights I choke on the sleeve and wake with tears in my eyes.
Other nights, I simply skip ahead to the next image seared into my mind.
Leah emptied the jerrican and quietly placed it in a corner. In my dream, it’s always the same thing. I want to scream at her and shout at her not to do that, because it won’t burn, and it can be traced back to us. But I never try.
Instead I feel the sensation of the matches between my fingers. It was one of those small matchboxes, crumbled and used. It held exactly three matches, and I fumbled the first when I took it out, letting it slip between my fingers.
Leah growled, low in her throat, and I winced.
“Are you sure we should do this?”
Her signs were never quite as supple and smooth as mine. I once told her she signed with an accent, and she’d laughed at that. She told me she couldn’t have an accent, because we were the ones who invented the language.
“We have to. For everyone who comes here and thinks it’s a safe place.”
I sucked my cheeks in. “Maybe it won’t be so bad for others.”
“I’m not willing to find out.” She took the matches from my hands and lit both with one strike, like Granddad used to light his cigars. She handed me one, kept the other to herself, and smiled.
“Together, okay?”
“Always.”
“And always.”
We stood hand in hand as the fire spread along the gasoline, deeper into the warehouse. The flames looked like sprinters stuck in a race together, rushing down the lines, and it was fascinating. We stood there until the fire roared so loudly, I could cough without anyone noticing—
And then I heard someone else cough too.
The smoke swirled around us, making shapes and nightmarish visions, but the coughing became louder and louder. It clawed at me, like I could feel it in my own throat, like I was suffocating on the hot air too.
I open my eyes and find the room is bathed in light. It’s dawn. It’s well past dawn. The lights in our room are on, because no one thought to flip the timer switch when they left us.
And the coughing hasn’t stopped.
I reach for my throat. Breathe in deeply and savor the cool air. Sit up.
In the bed next to mine, Leah is coughing continuously. She’s thrashing around, and I don’t understand how she can still be asleep.
I move. Out of my own bed and two steps to hers. I crouch down next to her and reach for her hand. She always wakes when I touch her.
Today she doesn’t.
I squeeze her hand. Rub circles with my thumb and feel her fingers claw around mine. I reach up and touch her cheek because she keeps coughing and shaking.
She’s as hot as the warehouse was. She’s radiating heat. And when I pull my hand away from her cheek, my fingers come back wet.
Red.
Bloody.
Her eyes spin rapidly beneath her lids, and she’s twisting and turning away from me. She coughs again, and a bit of spittle lands on my face. A thin line of bright-red blood trickles from the corner of her mouth toward the pillow.
I grab her shoulders and shake hard to wake her up. Desperation grasps me and tumbles out of me, and I’m whimpering. I don’t know how to make the sound make sense. I don’t know how to stop.
She. Still. Won’t. Wake.
Leah. Leah. Leah.
She stops thrashing. The trickle of blood stems. Her eyes still. Her hands fall limp to her side. Briefly, I’m convinced she’s stopped breathing too. In my head, I scream.
She gasps like her lungs have forgotten how to take oxygen from the air, like she’s drowning on dry land.
And she stills again.
I want to pound her chest. I want to shake her. I want her to wake up, because she promised me always and always, and I’m so terrified, I can hardly remember how to breathe myself. I want to scream.
I do the only thing that makes sense to me. I reach down and hug her, as close as I can, and hold her because I refuse to let her slip away. She doesn’t struggle, but when she coughs, her entire body racks, and the bed around her is stained with red.
I gently place her back on the bed, turn around, and run.
Ten
Grace
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a knock on my door.
Casey lies on my bed, hands behind his head, and I lie curled up across his chest. Casey snores a little, and his arm twitches. His heart beats steadily underneath my cheek. I hear it. I feel it.
We never do anything but sleep in the same bed, and it’s the safest place in the world for both of us. We soak up each other’s presence. Find comfort and courage in each other. This is the only place where Casey can relax at night, ever since the guards found out that he can only sleep when it’s quiet.
I’ve always wondered if this is what it’s like to have a brother.
When someone pounds on the door, Casey’s heart skips a beat. He tenses, from sleep to fight-or-flight in a second.
I sit upright before I’m fully aware of what I’m doing. “Who is it?” My voice croaks. It’s morning. I must have slept some, though it seemed an impossibility. I rub at my eyes.
“What’s going on?” Casey’s voice isn’t any less ragged. I reach for his hand and squeeze it.
Heavy pounding. It reverberates through the room.
“Calm down, I’m coming.”
I stumble across the room, trying to catch up. Last night feels like a cruel nightmare. Maybe I dreamed it all. Except if I did, we’ve been left in our rooms way past movement line. My head still feels sore. I push open the door, and Logan stumbles in.
That’s when everything falls to pieces.
The twins are Hunter’s pets. We share our school hours, but we’re in different wings. I’m okay with that. I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that they apparently tried to kill someone.
But I also can’t wrap my mind around the fact that one of them is here, now. Still in pajamas. Her hair a wild bird’s nest. “What do you want?”
Logan signs at me frantically, panic in her pale-green eyes. Her hands are stained with blood, and they tremble when she isn’t signing.
All the warnings from the soldiers flood my brain. A plague. So contagious that everyone’s confined to their houses.
“No. Go away.” I shake my head. We were supposed to be safe here. I want to stay because it’s safe here. Fuck, no.
“What’s happening?” The bed creaks, and Casey gets up too. He walks toward the two of us and pauses. “Oh.”
Logan signs again. Palms up, her fingers curled toward her. She pulls the hands toward her heart. Then another sign. One hand balls into a fist, and she wraps it with the other. Her right hand is the bloodiest of the two, with red stains crawling up to her sleeves.
I have no idea what she’s saying. I never learned sign language, and I can only pay attention to the blood.
I take a step back. “Are you ill? You’re bleeding.”
She blows out a breath and shakes her head. She reaches for me.
I take another step back. I would slam the door in her face if I could. Does it matter if we keep our distance? Have we all been infected already?
“She needs help.” Casey takes a step closer to me, and his comforting presence does nothing to waylay the anxiety creeping up on me. It presents like it always does: in the desperate need to destroy before I’m destroyed.
“If you’re not sick, is someone else?” he asks.
Logan’s shoulders drop, and she nods.
“Your sister?”
Another nod. Logan swallows. She reaches out a hand again and gestures.
Casey walks past me, and I grab his shirt. I suddenly understand the soldiers so well right now, and I hate it. I hate it. “If this is it…if this is that disease, we can’t help. We’ll have to stay away.” I refuse to look at Logan when I say that, but it’s true. “It’s not like we have medical care. The kindest thing we can do is keep our distance and make sure no one else gets infected.” The words taste sour in my mouth.
