Forever Between (Between Life and Death Book 2) (3 page)

Still, they aren’t happy about the idea of us leaving and I’m in no mood to hear another lecture. I
know
they think it’s stupid. I
know
there’s the possibility that it’s a pointless dream. I also know I have to go.

“I’ll go get water,” Charlie says and peels off to do so before I can answer.

I lift my hand in a half-hearted and unseen wave behind him and say, “Okay,” before stopping at the warehouse I need.

The warehouse door swings open with the loud squeal of unmaintained hinges. We don’t oil the door fittings at all, ever. A creaky door is a good thing. The bikes we’ve liberated from some of the fancier apartment buildings downtown gleam in the sunlight that pours in behind me. I leave the door open and dust motes disturbed by my entrance float in the air. It’s funny that something as mundane as dust can make the light beautiful like that for a few perfect seconds.

The bikes are in the cleared center area, along with all of our gear. Emily told me she used to keep the car that got totaled on the day we met right here. We’ve not found another car since then that we can charge enough to make it run reliably. I know there’s got to be a way to put together a new rack of batteries, but none of us knows how to do it, so it’s nothing more than wishful thinking. Hence, the bikes.

We’ve got a fine selection of bikes and a whole host of replacement parts. These are the kind of bikes that my parents would tell me cost almost as much as a used car, meaning I shouldn’t have even asked for a bike and used the brand name in the same sentence. And we’ve got so many there are spares for each of us. We even have kid seats. I have so many I can choose which one to use based on my mood or the color that strikes my fancy on any given day. Well, I can so long as I have wheels for that model and a good tire on those wheels. And that’s the tricky bit.

The tires and inner tubes are our big concern. Those don’t last forever in their boxes. The inner tubes have started going brittle and they crack as soon as they’re filled with air the first time as often as not. We’re supplied okay for the moment and we keep air in all the good ones now. We even squeeze them like we’re all doing some sort of bizarre hand exercises to keep them supple. The kids help with that and they seem to get a kick out of it. There’s so little that children as small as they are can do to really help that I think it makes them feel useful. Making a game out of it is just a bonus.

For this trip, we’ve chosen sturdy bikes suitable for off-road riding, but still passable for street biking. They’re the kind of bikes that will survive an impact or getting dumped if we run into trouble and need to get off quick. We installed panniers on the sides big enough to pack food and a spare set of clothes, so that we can keep our backpacks light. Packs on the front of each bike have been rigged out of smaller bags scavenged elsewhere. And then there are the weapons holsters, definitely not a stock item. All things considered, they’ll do.

Two neat checklists peek out from beneath the backpacks on the floor by our chosen bikes. Emily taught me the power of the checklist. Her mom was military and Emily told me that their entire lives were run off of a series of checklists. Grocery lists were nothing compared to her mother’s aisle by aisle attack plans. I remember her laughing as she described their rapid-fire filling of a shopping cart.

Stories aside, she showed me their value and now I live by them too. I never had organized parents like that. I had parents who made a lot of money and who fought quietly with gritted teeth behind smiles in front of me and then more loudly behind closed doors. I had the kind of parents who looked perfect when they absolutely had to show up at my school for something, and then got on their phones to talk business the minute we left the school again. Neither of them could have told you my favorite food or color even if you put a gun to their heads. They certainly never taught me how to be organized.

I like these checklists. Creating them makes me feel secure, like Emily is still here, guiding my hand and making sure to say, “Fantastic! You rock,” every time I do something well.

While I wait for Charlie, I start unpacking the bags we’ve already packed and lay everything out in a neat line, checking each thing off on my lists as I go. Except for the water—which needs to be fresh—everything is there. Ammo? Check. Spare underwear? Check. Map, plastic bags, can opener? Check, check and check.

A shadow falls over me as I start re-packing the packs. Charlie sets down two bags containing a dozen big bottles of water and then hands me a water filter fit into a bottle, like those used for camping. Then he hands me a little ultraviolent pen, the kind Emily said are used when you have to kill germs in water that you can’t boil. If we get into a situation where we can’t make a fire or have to use water from a questionable source, these will be invaluable.

“Gah!” I exclaim. Neither of those things was on my list. I am so not a pro at this. What else have I forgotten?

Charlie laughs and taps his temple with a finger. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got the best list of all right up here.”

I shove the lists at him and ask, “Anything else I’m forgetting?”

He scans the lists and then looks uncomfortable, a distinct rosy shade rising up on his cheeks.

“What?” I ask, snatching back the papers and searching for something that might be amiss.

“Uh, we’ll be gone a week. What about…uh…you know…” He trails off, his blush rising further.

I know exactly what he’s asking. Will I need “girl” stuff is what he’s wondering? Poor guy was stuck with temperamental Savannah for way too long. She apparently made his life a living hell once a month. Now he never fails to look for lotion, deodorant, and all sorts of girl stuff when we make a scavenging run.

I laugh and slap at him with my list. “You’re such a guy. I’m good. No worries.”

We’re packed within minutes and really, there’s nothing more to delay us except us. It seems rude, maybe even wrong, to just leave like this, but that’s what we need to do. Life is weird now and social conventions have definitely changed. They all know we’re going and saying goodbye—even if only for a short while—freaks the kids out. Too often people don’t come back.

As we pause there, straddling our bikes but not yet in motion, Charlie asks, “Do you want to see her again?”

He’s talking about Emily, of course. In a way, I would like to, but I’ve said what I needed to say to her already. If she’s like Sam, if she can remember, then she knows where I’m going. If not, then seeing her again won’t change anything. The others that we have caged, well, I don’t love them. I hate them and I certainly don’t want to have to listen to their hungry growls yet again.

“No,” I say, nudging my bike forward. “Sooner gone, sooner back. Right?”

“Right you are,” he says, and puts his feet to his pedals. The light of the sun blurs him at the doorway, slims him down and makes him indistinct for just a second. It sends a chill through me, and I silently ward off whatever bad luck might be preparing to stalk us along our journey. Then I spin one of my bike pedals backwards, listening to the harmonious
click-click
that tells me the bike is in fine repair and just waiting on me.

I stop the spin, slamming my foot forward on the pedal until it jolts to a stop, making my back wheel jump a little. Then it’s my turn to ride into the light.

Twenty Months Ago - Campfires without Songs

Emily coaxes our little fire to life, bending low to blow the embers into flames. Fall has finally given way to winter, though so far, it’s been a mild one. The cool nights make our evening fires a pleasant break between the work of the day and the long nights tucked up in our sleeping bags. Flames rise at last and in the orange light, the pale scar around her head stands out starkly against the black of her hair.

“How did that happen?” I ask before I can think twice about it. Jon stirs on my lap, his thumb finding his mouth automatically as he settles in. I look down at his sweet face as an excuse not to look at Emily. I’ve seen her scar many times. She doesn’t take any particular pains to conceal it, but it always seemed like it might be rude to ask about it.

When she doesn’t answer, I look up, expecting a reprimand or even a snub. But there’s nothing like that on her face. Instead, she’s looking at Jon with a soft expression that alters her appearance dramatically, and reminds me of a statue in my old church. The way that statue looked down at the baby in her carved arms is the same way Emily is looking at Jon now. She’s not a particularly pretty girl in general—she’s not at all ugly either—but right now, at this moment, she’s beautiful.

Her eyes rise to meet mine and her features fall into more normal lines. She says, “It was a long time ago.”

“So it wasn’t from this?” I ask, meaning some battle because of the way the world is now.

She shakes her head and feeds a few more small sticks into the fire, building it slowly and well so that we’ll be able to keep it burning low and even for a good while. More heat and less light. After tucking in a final, small branch no bigger around than my thumb, she says, “I got sick when I was little. Brain cancer. This is where they went in to cut it out.”

“Oh, my gosh,” I whisper. I can’t imagine it.

“That’s why my eye is a little off, too.”

I can only shake my head at that. It’s almost funny in an entirely inappropriate way. I mean, she survives brain cancer only to have the world get taken over by dead people. What a frigging joke that is. She’s looking into the fire again, another small stack of slightly larger sticks at the ready. She seems entirely unconcerned with anything other than that fire.

“Well, it worked,” I say. “I mean, you can do everything and do it better than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

She shoots me a sidelong grin, her teeth so perfect she must have had braces, and answers in a teasing voice, “Not exactly. You won’t believe it when I say what did work.”

“Uh oh, I’m not sure I want to know. Was it voodoo or deader gallbladder extract or something?”

As always, her laugh is soft and quiet, but it’s no less genuine for being so. Emily tosses her head back, her throat works and she laughs, but all that comes out of her mouth are a series of small punctuations to her laugh. Her lips stay curved into a smile afterwards, and one of her eyebrows quirks up, so I know she’s going to tell me and it’s going to be something weird, like maybe it really was voodoo.

“Nanites,” she says, and waits for my reaction.

Nanites? Holy crap,
is all I can think for a moment. A rapid fire repeat of the words,
holy crap
, runs through my mind. Nanites as in, groaning and people-eating nanite-infected humans of the sort that Sam became, the ones she calls in-betweeners. Nanites, as in the deaders who cover the world with their smell and their teeth and their dangerous appetites.

But all that comes out of my mouth is, “Uhh.”

She takes pity on me then, or maybe she sees a little of the confused fear I feel on my face, because the smile fades and she adds, “Different nanites. There used to be lots of good kinds before all this happened.” She waves the stick in her hand around us, meaning the world beyond our industrial haven.

I’m still fearful because I’ve learned since coming here to live with Emily exactly how the nanites did this. Before, I didn’t know. Neither did Sam. We thought it was a disease of some kind, though we knew the nanites had started it from news on TV. Of course, then there was no TV so it all became guesswork after that.

I’d been with my parents on summer vacation, far from home, when everything went bad. None of us saw the news until an embassy notice went out advising all travelers to return. From there, we’d learned that medical nanites had caused a problem, but like every other official announcement, the extent of the problem was down-played. By the time things were really awful, there wasn’t any news to get.

Cable went out quickly, and my parents had nothing as low-rent as an antenna so that we could receive broadcast signals. Even during the crisis they’d fought over the lack of an antenna, my father calling my mother a snob and her lobbing back that he should have stayed in the gutter, a favorite insult of hers. Then, from almost one moment to the next, the problem showed up in our neighborhood and we’d barely escaped with our lives.

After I lost my parents and found Sam, I was able to hear what the others thought, but they were almost as clueless as me. Sam had a whole pile of fiction he’d collected and read, looking for some clue as to what might possibly have spread the infection like it did, but in the end, he took all those books to another apartment in our building to keep them away from us. Fiction is just that, fiction.

“Are you still…Do you still…” I try to find a nice way to ask if she’s still infected with nanites, but words don’t come properly.

“No. They aren’t those kinds of nanites. Then again, we’re probably all infected at this point,” she says, understanding what my questions are before I do. She tosses down her stick and places our boiling rack over the fire, then she settles our big pot for drinking water on top of that. It will take a long while before the water boils hard enough that she’s satisfied, so we’ve got time to talk.

“Tell me,” I urge, but quietly. Jon lets out a sort of muffled, hard sigh and I see that he’s dropped off to sleep, his thumb slipping almost all the way out of his mouth. He’s two and I wish he would stop sucking his thumb. It’s not like we can take him to an orthodontist to fix the bowing of his front teeth I can already see happening. On the other hand, he’s been through the wringer just like everyone else, so I can’t bear to force the issue. When he’s more deeply asleep, I’ll pull his hand down. For now, I try not to jostle him too much and settle for stroking his baby-soft hair.

Maybe it’s because I’m not looking at her or maybe it’s just because of the dark. Perhaps it’s because we’re in an open space on the loading dock of one of the warehouses and not in the small intimate confines of the offices. Whatever the reason, Emily finally shares something of herself with me.