“King me.” Jamie wore a snarky grin as she placed another black plastic checker on my side of the board.
Propped up by a heap of pillows, I snorted, and stacked a spare piece on top of hers. I had three ‘kings’ on the faded checkerboard already, despite my lack of effort. Jamie only had two, and something about how thin her tactics had been throughout the game led me to raise an eyebrow her way. “You’re letting me win.”
“Am not.” She shook her head so that the silky blonde hair whipped across Jamie’s shoulders. “This is part of my master plan. You just think you’re winning.”
Warm sunlight caressed the back of my neck from the window behind my bed, but even combined with the blankets, a set of pajamas on loan from Jamie, and a sweater, I still shivered. Two days had gone by since the ambush, and I hadn’t left the clinic more than once or twice in that time frame, those few instances only in a wheelchair pushed by Jamie around the back patio of the building. It seemed I couldn’t retain body heat as well as I’d used to and ran out of energy often. Just getting up to hobble to the toilet was a tiring endeavor, and I usually found my teeth chattering before I got back into bed. My blood sugar levels fluctuated so much that I had dizzy spells, and I drank water like a horse in the desert, unable to keep much in the way of food down. The nurses had to change my bandages daily, as they would grow a gray moldy film under them if not, and it always hurt like crazy.
I glanced at some of the nearby beds, which now stood empty, though a few of the curtains bore stains of rusty red.
Four missing, two dead, five wounded. Do we even bother to count Oscar as missing? Or Kevin?
The aftermath of the patrol had been grisly, to say the least. Most of the missing rangers were never found, which didn’t surprise me. Others had been ripped apart, and one had shot himself inside his truck before they could take him. Oddly enough, the Puppets hadn’t taken any of our equipment, all firearms, equipment belts, and radios left where they lay. It was as if they shunned everything we touched, a visceral disdain for our technology that chilled everyone for how confident it was.
After all, if they didn’t need guns to fight us, what chance did we really have?
“Hannah?”
I blinked and found Jamie watching me with concerned eyes. “Yeah?”
“It’s your move.” She nodded at the board, but by the way her green irises faded a little, I could tell Jamie was trying to be brave. They all did that, put up a confident act that an adult might do for a kid with leukemia who really believed Santa would cure cancer by Christmas.
Christmas. I won’t even get to see it. All those toys I painted with Chris . . . and I’ll be long gone before they even wrap them.
Nothing in the way of a cure had worked so far, despite the fact that the researchers worked day and night on ideas. Sunlight didn’t burn the scum away like it did with regular Puppets. Antibiotics had no effect. Even radiation couldn’t make the tendrils buried into my flesh wither, as if the roots were made from lead. Lantern Rose nectar kept my lungs from bleeding as much, but I still coughed up mucous and blood every time I woke up. It was as if the infection fed off my energy, drained me like an invisible worm, the roots that remained feasting on my blood while continuing to grow, albeit at a much slower pace than before.
Letting out a long sigh, I extended my finger to aimlessly shove another round white plastic chip in a random direction.
“Chris asked about you at breakfast.” Jamie ignored what would have been an obvious jump on the board and moved her piece into a harmless position. “He hasn’t been sleeping, you know. I think he feels responsible.”
I flicked one of my pieces into the next square over, moving for the sake of moving, without a care if I won or not. “It wasn’t his fault.”
A sandy eyebrow arched on Jamie’s forehead, and she rubbed at the back of her neck. “He seems to think you think so. He said the last time he came in, you barely spoke. What’s going on?”
In truth, I didn’t know how to answer that. The first thing I’d done once Chris and I had time to talk was to ask him about my key. He swore up and down that he hadn’t seen it, and when he asked what it was for, I lied and said something about a lockbox I’d bought in the market. Jamie didn’t have it either, but she insisted it had been on my neck when they’d brought me in to the clinic. Since Dr. O’Brian hadn’t seen it, the only logical conclusion was that someone had taken it.
Someone with a vested interest in whatever it led to.
I hadn’t wanted to believe it, tried to stay objective, but as the days wore on, and more successive treatments failed, I began to have long, dark thoughts. Chris had always been wonderful, borderline perfect . . . but was he too perfect? Had that bit about his mother’s birthday been an act? Had he lied about his Rhodesian heritage to cover up his true origins? Were all those sweet nothings in Afrikaans just a front? I was average at best, awkward and clumsy when it came to boys, yet somehow, I’d landed the man who could’ve been on a magazine cover. It was too easy to be real, and that hurt worse than the roots in my torso did. I couldn’t bear to look him in the eye, felt conflicted holding his hand, and cried every time Chris left my bedside with a hurt look on his handsome face.
In some ways, I’d already lost him.
I bit my lip, and tasted blood as the skin broke far too easily. “Everything’s fine.”
As if to call me out for such blatant falsehood, the lining of my throat twinged against the blood, and I brought my hand up to shield a fluid-filled cough.
Wet, sticky slime spattered into my palm, and I looked down to see brownish yellow mucous, along with the usual spots of red. But along with that, there were slivers of black, about an eighth of an inch long, bunched together in little chunks.
Wood. I’d just hacked up splinters.
“Here.” Jamie tugged a wet wipe from a nearby package and cleaned off my hand and face with careful daubs. She didn’t look at me as she did it, though I could tell from Jamie’s frown that she noticed the shards of rotted fiber but was too kind to say anything. “Your hands are freezing. Tell you what, I’ll plug in your electric blanket, and we’ll let you rest some more.”
I may as well be in a nursing home. An electric blanket, checkers, and gross stuff in my throat. Give me enough time and I’ll start asking if Regan is still president.
Annoyed at my frailty, I picked up the water bottle from my nightstand, and fumbled with the cap. “All I ever do is rest. I’d rather—”
My fingers slid off the bottle, and it rolled onto my lap, dousing me in its frigid contents.
Anger flared in my brain, but it came out as hot tears, the only part of me that could get hot at this point, which trickled down my face in rivulets. Now my hands were betraying me. How long before I’d need a tube down my throat, a diaper around my waist, and machine to breathe for me? This wasn’t supposed to happen, not to a twenty-year-old. It wasn’t fair.
“It’s okay.” Jamie rose to get a towel, her voice patient and calm. “It’s just water after all. Come on, I’ll get you to the bathroom co you can change.”
Humiliated that I couldn’t even hold a plastic bottle anymore, I let Jamie help me out of bed, and limped in my sock feet to the bathroom.
Jamie eased me down on the closed toilet lid and bundled a cardigan around my shoulders. “I’m going to grab some fresh scrubs, okay? Two seconds. I’ll be right back.”
She wedged the door shut behind her, and I leaned back on the icy porcelain to stare at the bland interior of the restroom.
It was a small, simple space, with capuchino-colored walls and a white linoleum floor, a mirror over the sink. Just seeing my face in the mirror made my stomach churn, half of it plastered with white cotton and skin-tone medical tape, the other pale and haggard. I’d only glimpsed shards of my reflection a few times since the first surgery, but it was hard to forget the sight of my skin with the dressings off; angry red lines where the scalp had cut, black lines under the skin where the roots had regrown, and more every day that advanced slowly out from the old stab wound. Everyone treated it like some kind of unspoken secret, the nurses putting fresh bandages on as fast as they could, attempting to distract me so I wouldn’t see how ruined I was.
As I stared at myself, a sad resolution hit me.
Why not?
Pushing myself up with the toilet tank as a support, I painstakingly dragged the scrub top, pajama shirt, and sweater over my head so that I stood bare chested in the light of the bulbs over the mirror. Harsh shivers assaulted me from head to toe, but I wormed my fingers under the bandages, and bit my tongue so as not to cry out.
At last, I let the scraps of crusty gauze fall away, and forced both eyes open.
Long stitched incisions crisscrossed my abdomen, like an old-fashioned railroad map. They slithered over my stomach, around my side, up my shoulder, and down my right arm, with one long cut snaked in between my breasts to end at my collar bone. In the outer reaches of the scalpel wounds, the skin shone red and swollen around the stiches, which strained to do their job. Closer to the epicenter, the skin grew paler until the flesh became gray around the blackened stab wound, a spiderweb of shadowy tendrils fanned out beneath the surface. It wasn’t lost on me that the skin bore the same color as Puppet hide, and black ooze leaked from various points between the stiches, too dark to be normal blood. The nurses always swabbed it with ointment to keep it from smelling, but I could still catch the light scent of wood-rot and stagnant water.
Taking another mouthful of air, I fought a bought of light-headedness, and reached for the mask of cotton-weave over my face.
It felt like tearing off a second layer of skin, but as the bandage came free, I blinked with both eyes.
God in heaven.
My left eye was the same hazel orb it had always been, but the other shone milky white, a few ebony sprouts under the skin around the socket. More tendrils ran down my cheek and up my forehead, as if seeking another way to push past my skull. The hair on that side of my head had begun to turn charcoal-black at the roots, an oily hue that chewed at the edges of my natural brown with patient hunger. Whispers echoed in my head, most of them in my right ear, a sickening choir that told me all I needed to know.
I wasn’t getting better.
The roots were waiting, biding their time, until they had siphoned enough nutrients to spread across the rest of my face and invade my brain. Once that happened, they could feast on my thoughts, and I wouldn’t be able to fight them.
Something welled up inside me, a strange sensation that I couldn’t suppress, and before I could stop myself . . . I screamed.
What came out was unlike anything I’d ever heard from my throat before. It rose, high and alien, a screech that hurt my left ear canal more than my right, and yet it clawed its way out as though I had no control over my vocal cords. My diaphragm spasmed, my mind fuzzed over with static, and I vaguely caught the shattering of glass as the mirror fractured.
White tiles rushed up at me, and just as I slammed into them, the bathroom door opened to reveal Jamie’s frightened face.
“Hannah?”
She flung herself down to scoop me up, but the shadows closed in, and I watched Jamie shout for help, the words from her mouth drowned out by a river of static.
I stood in the dark again.
Trees creaked in the wind, the rain familiar now, though still cold. Under my shoes, the gravel crunched like corn flakes, and somewhere in the distance, something shrieked in a bizarre, eerie call. My body felt good here, vaguely whole, both eyes working, my right arm free of pain. The scent of leaves carried on the wind, and thunder boomed in the roiling clouds above, the sound reverberating in my chest like enormous tom-tom drums.
“What would you do?”
Turning on my heel, I saw the man in the chemical suit a few feet away, his lantern in one hand, an umbrella in the other. “Do?”
He drew closer and held the umbrella so that the rain no longer drenched us both. “For love, filia mea. What would you do to save someone you love? What price would be acceptable to you?”
Puzzled, I let my brow furrow, and sidled closer to his lantern, the heat coming off it surprisingly strong for such a little flame. “I don’t know.”
His gray eyes flicked to the roadway, and I followed the man’s gaze.
Out of nowhere, a girl appeared, materializing through the dark as if she’d popped from behind an invisible curtain. She ran full-tilt, her auburn hair whipping in the wind, black uniform shirt spattered with raindrops, until her khaki-clad legs ran into a fallen limb that she hadn’t seen.
Down to the gravel she tumbled, with a rather painful looking thump, her skinned palms gouged with tiny stones.
“Owww, son of a . . .” She grimaced and rubbed at her shins, picked the rocks of her hands, and looked around in growing alarm. Desperate, she dug through her pockets, likely for a phone, but seemed to come up empty-handed.
I waited for her to see us, the lantern unmistakable in the abyssal night, but it seemed the girl looked right through the strange man and myself.
Handing me the umbrella, the man in the chemical suit paced forward, and bent down to whisper in her ear with a compassionate smile. “It’s in your left pocket.”
As if she just remembered something obvious, the girl beamed, and dug into her left front pants pocket to produce a small metal penlight.
“Mee-maw, you’re the best.” She gasped, as if in thanks to some relative who I figured had gifted the tiny light to her, and the girl swept its weak beam around the immediate area.
Satisfied with himself, the man stepped back to stand beside me, and his silver eyes met mine. “True love is not the passionate pursuit of another, but the unconditional maintenance of their wellbeing, without any expectation of recompense. It means enduring pain, suffering, and loneliness for their sake. It means doing what is best for them, even if they blindly despise you for it. It means being willing to forgive without an apology, and fight for a future you may not benefit from.”
Not far off, I caught a flicker of movement in the shadows, and saw someone step from the trees.
My blood ran ice cold as I recognized the silhouette.
She had the same black New Wilderness shirt, the same khaki pants as the auburn-haired girl, but this girl’s eyes were hazy white, and she wore a smile far too wide to be normal.
Worst of all, the auburn-haired girl hadn’t seen her yet.
I looked to the man, half choked up in fear. “That’s a Puppet. It’s a monster, it’s going to hurt her. Aren’t you going to do something?”
With that same, starry twinkle in his eye, the stranger pointed to the nearby underbrush. “Just watch.”
“Kendra?” The auburn-haired girl caught the slinking Puppet with her flashlight beam and stood up.
The Puppet stopped, and I could see its wicked grin spread further, the being tensing its legs, ready to pounce.
“Kendra? Jeez, you okay? I saw that thing grab you, what was . . .” Sensing that something was off, the girl paled, and moved to take a step backward.
As I expected, the Puppet flew at her, tackled her to the gravel in a furious gnashing of teeth. The poor girl whimpered and struggled, but it was clear she couldn’t hold out for long.
My heart thudded, in my chest, and I took a step forward, unsure what I would do, but knowing I had to do something.
From the dark, another shadow bounded forth, and a flash of yellowish tan blurred in the night.
Whack.
Down went the Puppet, and a wooden baseball bat rose high, swinging down again to smash the Puppet’s head like a pumpkin.
Whack, whack.
My eyes widened, and I felt my jaw go limp.
The young man stood over the dead Puppet, his chest heaving in exertion from the swings. He wore a gray coat over his ranger uniform shirt, a black trucker’s hat on his head and a pump-action shotgun slung over his shoulder. A backpack sat across his back, and in his hands, a wooden bat dripped with black Puppet blood. His eyes were a dark, cocoa brown, the same shade as his hair, and he had fresh scratches on his face as if someone had raked their fingernails across his skin.
“I . . . I know him” I stammered, too shocked to keep quiet. “I saw him in a . . .”
“In a dream?” Finishing my thought for me, the stranger in the chemical suit raised one gray eyebrow. “Or a memory?”
The boy slid his bat into a loop on his knapsack and reached down to drag the stunned auburn-haired girl by her jacket collar, casting fearful glances over his shoulder as they both vanished into the murky trees.
“Did you see it?” The stranger in the chemical suit faced me, his head cocked to one side with inquisitive patience.
“See what?” Frowning, I tried to slow my racing heart, and shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“They didn’t either.” He nodded toward the place where the two had disappeared. “Not all of life’s paths are clear to those who trod them. But every road taken has consequences, and those consequences affect everyone. In the end, every choice is made in love, or hate, for the change it brings. She didn’t know how loved she was . . . and neither did he.”
Staring down into the flame of his lantern, I found myself relaxed at how the yellow fire danced, a soothing warmth to it that made all my anxiety fall away. “So . . . what am I supposed to do?”
He laughed, not a harsh, malicious laugh, but one that reminded me of when my dad would play soccer with me in the backyard as a little girl. “Choose. You’re traveling this road as much as anyone. The only thing for you to do, is decide which direction to walk.”
With that, the man strode away into the night, and for some reason, my legs refused to move, a sinking force like gravity pulling me down.
“Wait!” I cried out, desperate for him to stay, though I couldn’t be sure as to why. “Which way do I go?”
“Visit the old marine.” Calling over his shoulder, the man with the chemical suit looked back at me with a wink. “You’re looking for memories, Hannah. What better place to start than a tomb?”
Inky fog swirled around him, obscuring the man from sight, and the ground gave way beneath my feet.
I sucked in a breath, tasted chlorine and mucous.
My head throbbed from where it had bounced off the bathroom floor, and fresh gauze hugged tight to my skin. Judging by the light overhead, it was dark again, maybe sometime around mid-evening, the ward quiet save for the hum of a few nearby machines. Soft new pajamas covered my body, and slumped in a chair next to my bed, Sandra sat with her head hung low in sleep. No one else stood within view of my tiny alcove, and the checker game lay unfinished on my nightstand, a white card atop it with my name written on the front in swirling letters.
Curious, I picked it up, and flipped the front open.
Oh wow.
Dozens of little notes were scrawled in various styles of handwriting, but I picked Jamie’s out with ease, her rushed, jagged letters next to a winky-face inked into the cardstock.
Get some rest, Brandi-Badass. We still have a game to finish.
Chris’s annotation lay close to it, the lines cleaner, the impression lighter, and I could tell he’d put effort into being neat.
Missing you, pragtige.
I sniffled, tears threatening to overwhelm me, but in the next moment, another few words caught my eye, written by one of the veterans of Carter’s old militia.
Hang tough, ranger. You can beat this. Semper Fi.
Like a bolt of lightning, an idea shot through my brain, and I pulled myself to an upright position. Semper Fi was a marine slogan, one the ex-military guys tossed back and forth all the time. I’d never paid it much mind before, but now it caused Jamie’s words from my first day to zoom around in my mind like ricochetting bullets.
‘Carter’s militia scrounged some anti-air rocket launchers . . . they fought the choppers off . . . Randy and three others died . . . We built a roof over it and left it as a memorial . . .’
The old check-in building. Randy, the first commander of New Wilderness, lay buried there. From what I’d heard about him, he’d been an old rough-and-tumble marine, the original head ranger who had organized the fortification of the reserve in the early days of the Breach’s onslaught. It was because of his tenacious defense that New Wilderness survived the first wave of mutants in the first place. Ever since his death, the burned-out husk had been dedicated to everyone who died here, and I’d seen people take flowers, candles, and other things inside it. I had to go there, and I had to do it while I still had strength.
Swallowing, I looked at the dozing Sandra, and steeled myself with a deep sigh. I couldn’t wake her, she wouldn’t let me leave the clinic in my condition, which meant I’d have to sneak out without falling down or breaking my stitches open. My wheelchair would get me caught instantly, so I would have to hobble the entire way on my own. A tall order, to be sure.
I can do this. I’m not useless. Not yet.
Limbs shaking from the effort it took to slide my legs out from under the covers, I wrapped the blankets around myself like a shawl, and stuck both feet into a set of slippers by the foot of my bed.
The world swayed, but I gritted my teeth at how the muscles in my stomach ached from standing. Instead, I swiped Sandra’s long brown overcoat from where it lay over the bedframe, and with it as my disguise, I shuffled down the dim line of beds to the workshop door.
Every step was torturous, the cold seeped into my bones, and my wounds cried out for me to lie back down, but I couldn’t give up. Few nurses were around, a handful of them at the front desk, chatting about something with their backs to me. On the other side of the tiny glass window in the door, a faint red exit sign glowed in the silent room. I had to go through with this, even if it killed me sooner than the roots would have.
I wouldn’t live to see Christmas, but I would at least see the truth . . . whatever it might be.