Thump.
Will turned backed to the crowd to see P-Nut lying on his stomach, a thick froth of black blood gushing from his mouth.
Thump-thump-th-thump. Kids went limp and crumpled to the ground like rag dolls, spraying black blood and glops of tissue from their mouths as they fell. Black blood arced through the air. Mouths became geysers. Bodies piled onto bodies. Other students fled. He saw them shoot a kid with the same blinking blue dart they’d hit Will with, then the diode turned red and the kid coughed black sludge and dropped.
“Stop!” Will cried. “What are you doing?”
The campus was chaos. Infected fled past David, away from the white fog, where thick streams of black blood flung through the air like a casino water-fountain show. David dashed toward Will. His brother was trying to tear one of the hoses away from a man in a haz-mat suit. David couldn’t process what was happening. He saw parents trying to help the kids escape. He saw Bobby’s mother shoving him into a pickup truck. He saw other parents fighting the men in the white haz-mat suits, trying to stop the massacre.
He was still so far from Will. He watched his brother lunge at the man holding the hose, and tear at the material of his haz-mat suit, trying to rip it open. He could see the panic in the way the man jerked back and strained to get away from Will. One of the guy’s buddies rushed up to help, and he had a rifle.
The man leveled the rifle at Will.
A spray of red burst from Will’s head, and David heard the shot a moment later. The tiny shape of Will’s skull looked wrong for a second, like an apple with a bite taken out of it, then Will dropped like a bag of rocks.
The shock wiped David’s mind blank. He wasn’t aware of turning around and running. He just knew his feet were pumping and he couldn’t catch his breath, and he was halfway to the wall, and Will was dead. So many were dead. The aluminum ladder glinted in the sunlight up ahead. Fleeing infected were climbing it and jumping the wall. David reached the ladder and climbed. When he got to the top, infected were running for the woods. He looked for Lucy below him, and he saw tire tracks that tore a path through the tall grass, all the way to the road.
28
IT WAS GOING TO BE A BEAUTIFUL DAY. DAVID could feel the first crispness of fall in the morning air. It was a primal thing, the way a change in the weather could alter a person’s mood. The whisper of leaves, the sparkle of the sun, the trees turning the color of pumpkins and roses made him happy. He welcomed that feeling.
The gravel in the driveway crackled under his boots. He opened the back of the Jeep and tossed in his bag. The car was the exact same year and model as the one he used to have, the one he used to drive Will to school. His father had bought it for him, in an effort to restore a sense of normalcy, but it just made him think of Will. In the Jeep, when the music was loud enough, and the wind whipped hard enough to strip everything away, David could feel Will sitting beside him, in the passenger seat, laughing at how hard he was rocking out.
David clicked the back door shut, trying not to make too much noise.
“David,” his dad said.
Too late.
David turned around. His father stood on the porch, still in his plaid pajamas. A beige mug of coffee steamed in his hand and he blocked out the morning sun by holding a folded magazine up to his brow. He still had a little bit of bed head. David loved his dad, and felt so lucky that he’d been able to track him all the way to Nebraska, but he hated seeing the guy in his pjs. He couldn’t explain it.
He’d found his dad in a town at the border of the infected zone, where the military had been releasing McKinley graduates earlier in the quarantine. His dad had spent a year and a half watching other parents get reunited with their children, until the day the government had told the parents that there had been a gas leak in McKinley, and that all of their children were dead. When David had shown up on his father’s doorstep, his dad had fallen to his knees. He’d thought he’d lost his son forever.
“Where are you going?”
“I, uh, I’ve got to take another trip.”
His dad stepped down from the porch. David’s instinct was to get in the Jeep, but that would come off as rude. And he didn’t want to make his dad feel insecure. He knew how guilty his dad already felt for not being among the parents who’d helped the school, or that he hadn’t somehow, some way stopped that bullet from entering Will’s brain. David didn’t want to make his dad feel worse by thinking his only remaining son hated him.
“You just got back from your last trip, David. Why don’t you stay? I’ve still got a month of leave at work. We haven’t had one solid week yet to just … hang out.”
His dad tucked the magazine under his arm and rubbed the back of David’s head. He glanced at David’s eye patch, then looked to the ground, and looked back to David’s good eye. He did that occasionally, as if the sight of the injury overloaded his brain, and he had to descramble it.
“I’m sorry about that. I really am, but there’s a lot that goes into getting a farm on its feet.”
“But you’re not even at the farm.”
“I’m piecing together the workforce.”
“There’s plenty of people around that are out of work, David. All you’ve gotta do is put a job post online.”
David wasn’t sure, but it felt like this was the thousandth time they’d had this conversation.
“Dad—”
“I know, I know. That’s not the point. But you’ve got enough trouble as it is being registered as a former infected. I just … I just worry that you’re only making things harder for yourself by going state to state and consorting with more of them.”
“These people I’m ‘consorting’ with—they’re my friends. And a lot of them don’t have any place to go, because they’ve been registered and no one wants anything to do with them.”
“I understand that. I’ve seen kids like that around, begging for change, but you’re not like that, David. You’re a good kid. And you’ve got me. I mean, why can’t these other kids go be with their families?”
“I am their family,” David said.
His dad tried to answer, but couldn’t. So, he took a sip of coffee. He looked down the wooded driveway to the road at the bottom of the hill, then to the Jeep.
“How you doing on gas?”