Viral Nation (35 page)

West took her hand and yanked her toward the trees. “Run,” he said as softly as he could.

Clover wasn’t sure that any of them knew where they were going. If they started out wrong, they might get lost and never find their way back to the van. Especially not in the dark. They were breaking branches and kicking pine cones all over the place, besides breathing like a bunch of freight trains.

“We need to stop,” she said.

West pulled her a few more steps.

“No, wait. We’re making too much noise. He’s going to find us.”

He might stop chasing if he couldn’t hear them stampeding through the woods like a pack of elephants. Everyone stopped, except for Geena. Christopher reached for her, but she broke through the brush and for a moment was on her own. West made a hushing noise and a downward motion with both hands.

Clover heard Bennett coming just before the third shot rang out.

Geena yelped, just once. And then there was no other sound except Bennett moving in to see what he’d done. Clover stood, frozen in the trees. Her brain screamed at her to do something, anything, help Geena, run, scream. Her body couldn’t sort those signals out as she watched Bennett walk to Geena and turn her onto her back. He put a hand to the side of her neck, then sat back on his heels and scanned the woods.

West took Marta and Christopher each by one arm and manhandled them behind a boulder five feet to their left. Jude and Clover followed. She leaned against the cool stone and shook. Jude gathered her into his arms and sat them both on the ground.

Bennett searched some, cursing under his breath, then walked back toward the lake, where he must have had a car. If he’d looked even a little harder he would have found them. They were in no condition to be stealthy. Not with Marta burying her sobs in Christopher’s chest and Christopher barely keeping himself from leaving their hiding spot to go to Geena.

Clover stayed where she was and rocked against Jude. She wished that Mango were there, to help her get her thinking straight, and then was grateful he wasn’t. He would have barked or made some other noise and they’d all be dead.

Finally, West let Christopher and Marta go out of hiding.

Christopher knelt beside Geena’s body. There was a small hole in her forehead, above her left eye. Clover wondered if Bennett was that good a shot or poor Geena was just very unlucky, and then hated herself for thinking about that.

A low, painful wail escaped Marta, and Christopher pulled her against him. It hurt Clover to watch them. West lifted Geena. The hole in the back of her head was much larger than the one in her forehead.

“Jesus,” Phire said under his breath. “Oh, my God.”

“We should bring Waverly back to the ranch,” Jude said.

“We can’t,” West said. Geena’s blood seeped into his shirt and Clover looked away. “Bennett will be back for the body. If it’s gone…”

“We can’t just leave him here,” Phire said.

Jude shook his head. “No. West is right.”

“We need the air bladder.” Clover took a few steps toward the dock. “We have to have it.”

“Clover, get back here.” West shifted Geena’s body in his arms. “Let’s just go back to the van.”

“Don’t you think Bennett will notice the van is gone?”

“It doesn’t matter. We can’t carry Geena back.”

“Well—”

“We aren’t leaving her.” Marta’s voice was toneless. As dead as her sister.

“I need that air bladder if I’m ever going to dive through the portal,” Clover said. “We have to have it.”

West transferred Geena’s body to Christopher, who held her to him as if she were a sleeping baby. “Get everyone into the van. I’ll get the bladder and be right back.”

Clover wasn’t sure taking the van was the best idea. It would tell Bennett that Geena wasn’t alone if her body and Waverly’s vehicle were both gone. But no one seemed to care what she thought, and she was too heartsick to force the issue, so after West came back, white-faced and holding the full air bladder, she drove them all home.

“Are you positive it was Bennett?” Bridget asked
much later.

“It was him.” Clover was curled in a corner of the couch in their living room. Jude was next to her, but far enough that he didn’t touch her. She might have shattered if he touched her.

“You’re sure Waverly’s dead?” Bridget ran a hand through her hair. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe Bennett did it himself.”

Clover was not far from the edge of her ability to cope. “Do you think we’re lying to you?”

“Clover,” West said. “She’s shocked, that’s all. We all are.”

“He must have left half Waverly’s skull in the lake,” Jude said. Clover closed her eyes against the image. “He did it all right.”

The others were somewhere else, sitting with Geena, consoling Marta. They all did that, for a while, but Christopher finally took West aside and told him they should go to bed. Not exactly a dismissal, but close. Jude went with Clover after a whispered conversation with Christopher.

“I can’t believe he shot Geena,” Bridget said. “I can’t believe any of this.”

“Too bad that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Clover stood up from the couch and made it outside just in time for the little bit of food she had in her system to come back up in the bushes near the
door. She knelt on the stoop, because her legs weren’t strong enough to hold her up anymore.

The front door opened and Mango was at her side, pressing his body against her for support. She wrapped her arms around his neck, grateful again that she had left him home when they went out with Waverly.

Jude sat next to her. And when she was sick again, he whispered something soothing in Spanish but still didn’t touch her. When her stomach was empty and settled at least enough for the dry heaves to stop, she said, “She wrote that article. How can she be dead?”

“Knowing she’d write it changed things,” Jude said. “Just knowing something is supposed to happen changes everything.”

Clover felt another wave of nausea but had nothing left in her. “We shouldn’t have come.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Clover. You weren’t the one running around the woods in the middle of the night with a gun.”

She petted Mango’s head. The repetitive motion helped. “What if Bennett finds us here tonight?”

“I don’t think it would occur to Langston Bennett that there is an
us
, much less to come looking for us.”

“But Geena? He’ll know she came from somewhere.”

“I don’t know, Clover. We’ll figure out our next step tomorrow. Christopher, Marta, Phire, and Emmy are spending the night in the main house, with Geena. Do you want me to stay with you?”

Clover nodded. Jude opened one arm. She curled into him and let her tears come.

The next morning, Christopher, Phire and Jude took
turns digging an actual grave in front of a fake gravestone in the cemetery. They dug it deep. As deep as Christopher was tall, so that animals wouldn’t dig it back up again.

Marta washed her sister and wrapped her in a white sheet.
This is where ghost stories come from
, Clover thought. She felt so out of place, and so tense from working so hard to keep from saying something that would hurt someone, that all she really wanted to do was go home and hide in a corner somewhere. Knowing that she’d never go home again didn’t help.

Christopher stood in the grave and West handed Geena down to him. Her body was so small. Like she’d shrunk when her spirit left it. Christopher laid her carefully on the freshly turned earth, then climbed back out of the hole. Everyone stood around the open grave.

“Geena wanted to write that story,” Marta finally said. “She talked about it a lot. She wanted to be smart enough to have something important to say. I’m going to do it for her.”

“She liked to braid my hair,” Emmy said. “And she told the best stories.”

Phire wrapped an arm around Emmy when she started to cry. “I trusted her.”

Marta looked up at Phire and nodded. He didn’t give his trust easily.

“I wish I had time to know her better,” Bridget said.

Marta wrapped her arms around Christopher’s waist and buried her face against his chest, and silent sobs shook her whole body.

“Geena was one of the bravest people I’ve ever known,” Jude said. “It was her idea to leave Foster City in the first place. She saved my life.”

“Mine, too.” Christopher had one big hand against Marta’s nearly bald head, smoothing his fingers over it in an effort to soothe her.

“She was my friend,” Clover finally said. It was the most important thing she could think of between her and Geena.

Once everyone had said something, Christopher led Marta away
and Phire brought Emmy and followed him. Clover slipped her hand into Jude’s while West sprinkled lime he’d found in a shed over the body at the bottom of the grave and then started to shovel the dirt back in. It took a long time, but the four of them finished burying Geena.

“What did you find while we were gone?” West asked
Bridget when they were all sitting around the main house later. He was exhausted. Every muscle either burned or ached. Some of them did both. He wasn’t sure he cared what she found, but he guessed it needed to be discussed tonight.

Bridget stood up from the couch and went to a corner of the room where she’d stashed a box. She lugged it to them and pulled out several black and white spiral-bound notebooks. “Two per year,” she said. “For almost fourteen years. The most recent ends about five months ago.”

“The notebooks with future information and the book with the letters in it are on the other side of the portal,” Clover said.

“What do they say?” Marta asked. Her face was swollen and splotchy, but for the moment, she seemed to be able to be part of the conversation. West wasn’t sure what he’d do if it had been Clover shot in the woods, but whatever it was, he’d probably regret it later. And Marta might have something like that in her, too. Christopher was staying close to her, though. Keeping a good eye.

“They’re pretty random. Notes to himself about things like how he’s organizing a search of nearby houses. Lists of supplies. Information about the crops and animals here. I’ve seen a couple notes about things that don’t make a lot of sense to me. Lists of cities, names, dates.”

“We’ll have to read them all,” Clover said.

“The most recent books say a lot about us. The stuff he used to get us here. Stuff we never even told him. This is so messed up.”

“He can’t ungive himself the books or unknow the things he’s written in them, just because we don’t tell him in this time line.”

“That’s so weird,” Phire said. Emmy was asleep with her head in his lap.

“Waverly keeps the most important junk on the other side, right? About where Stead is, and where he hid the notebooks,” Marta said. “We need to find that.”

“Maybe it’s not in the future. Or at least not all of it. He said he keeps his notes about the Company and Stead where all the information is,” Clover said. “That’s what he said. Maybe he means it’s somewhere on the nets.”

“Tomorrow,” West said. “We all need sleep now.”