“… holy shit,” Will muttered, his eyes wandering as his mind reeled.
He was going to be a father.
He felt dizzy. The sky swirled. The distant mountain range looked like a row of dog teeth. That was where Gonzalo was headed, into the Rockies, in search of Sasha. His love for her was relentless. Nothing could stop him from holding her again.
Will breathed deep. The air was crisp and fragrant, and Will wanted to remember how it smelled. He wanted to remember every detail of what it felt like out here.
He was going back in.
9
THE STORM HAD PULLED ITS CLOAK OVER the farm. It was almost eight o’clock. The sun had sunk, and the winds had risen. David walked the pasture fence, and swept the campus with a flashlight.
“Will!” he called out, but his voice was whisked away by a sudden gust. The steady rumble of wind was the only response.
Will had gone missing, and David couldn’t convince anyone that it was worth worrying about. All the parents were too busy rushing to prep for the storm, getting animals and equipment under cover and battening down every hatch. David tried to stay calm by convincing himself Will had gotten swept up in helping. But given their argument, that didn’t sound like Will. David cursed himself. He should’ve kept his mouth shut, but his brother had always been an expert at driving him crazy. It was as if Will was allergic to rational thought.
“Come on …,” he said to himself.
David hated being out after sunset. It reminded him just how blind he was. Darkness wrapped around his field of vision and squeezed. His Cyclops sight forced him to scan his surroundings like a security camera. In his travels through the infected zone, he’d trained himself to be a creature of the day because night felt as vast as the ocean. In the dark, everything had the drop on him.
He’d never gotten over being mauled by Hilary. She’d taken a piece of him when she’d taken his eye. It had been Lucy who’d helped him feel like a human being again. He’d never forget that. Not that it mattered. She’d already forgotten him. She’d had to, he supposed. He was a ghost as far as McKinley was concerned. Life in there had gone on without him. And it hurt. Far worse than he’d ever imagined it would. He felt like an idiot, thinking of her as this angel who’d nursed him back to health. Lucy had someone else’s baby inside her. She was forever connected to whoever that was. She probably didn’t even think about David.
A gust assaulted him, and for a moment the pressure of the wind felt more real than the ground underneath his feet. His jean jacket had a sheepskin lining but even so, the cold wind slithered in through the neck, through the wrist holes, between the buttons, up his back, and threatened to make the light perspiration on his skin frost over.
“Will!” he shouted again, passing his flashlight beam across the wheat field. The wheat whipped in a panic.
Will didn’t understand how afraid he should be of McKinley. Out in the infected zone it was open space. At least there you could run away. In McKinley they’d be trapped. Completely at the mercy of the infected. Maybe if he’d told Will exactly what he’d seen out there, he’d get it. But David had never found the strength to talk about it, let alone think about it.
He could still hear the screaming.
Once Will had been identified by Sam and the parents as Gates’s right-hand man, things had gotten tense for David on the farm. He’d had to go the extra mile on everything to prove his loyalty, especially when it came to delivering on Gates’s demands. When the Saints leader had pushed Sam’s dad’s limits and requested a pool for the quad, David had put himself first in line to retrieve it. He and two other parents traveled forty miles to the Pool Liquidators in Bristol. There was trouble along the way, but nothing like they found at the store. When they’d discovered an aboveground pool in the parking lot filled with a red stew of blood and bodies of hunters, it was already too late. They should have turned around when they saw the buzzards overhead. Instead, they’d been surrounded by a ragged crew of infected. There were eleven of them, more boys than girls, none of them over thirteen years old, the youngest infected David had ever seen, but by far the most frightening. They had attacked like a pack of coyotes. All eleven had rushed Deb Winchester, a proud mother of three with the most boisterous, wonderful laugh David had ever heard. The pack had climbed on her and had crushed her down to the ground in seconds. They had torn off her mask, and her frantic screams had become a low roar as lung sludge had erupted from her mouth.
David dug his hands down into his jacket pockets and turned to head back to the minivan. The wind surged. A speck of something hit David in the eye and he stopped dead in his tracks. He rubbed, frantically. It was only a fleck of dirt or hay, but anything getting in that eye turned him to jelly. When he had nightmares now, they were black.
Rain began to fall and created a thick wall of sound. It pelted his face, forcing him to squint his one good eye. David slowed his search. Will would come back to the minivan eventually. Then, they could go. This was wasted energy.
David heard an odd noise on his blind side. A clap of metal on metal. He listened for it again but heard only the huff of the wind and the rhythm of rain. Clap. There it was again. Clap-clap. David’s eye followed his flashlight beam. The sound didn’t match anything he knew on the farm. It came at random, a few claps in a row, then nothing, then one, and on and on, like a blind kid trying to play with a paddleball.
He went toward the sound, and his flashlight guided him to the crane. The base of it was a vehicle the size of a Greyhound bus, and four massive arms stretched out, planting it in the ground to give it a wider base. At the rear of the vehicle was the operating booth for the crane arm itself.
Clap-clap. The door to the booth was wide open, flapping in the wind.
David quickened his pace. Something wasn’t right. The crane was always locked up at night. David stepped on something hard; it tripped him up. He looked down. A crowbar in the grass.
He clambered up the short ladder into the operating booth. He dropped into the plush orange seat. The control board arced and filled the dash in front of him, below the wraparound windshield. His seat rumbled underneath him. The motor was still on.
David hadn’t heard its chugging over the sound of the wind and pelting rain until he’d gotten close. He prayed for some sensible explanation for this. He looked at the wall behind the operator’s seat, where the crane operator’s gas mask hung. It was gone.