We peeked around the corner and I clapped my hand over my mouth. If this was a test, it was a really, really bad one. The girl was obviously dead, on her back, open eyes staring glassily at the sky. Her face had large open sores on it, her hands were covered with blackened bumps. What skin we could see was pale and greenish, and a thin trickle of blood marked one ear.
“What the hell?” he whispered.
Leaving the victim we couldn’t help, we went to find the hand we’d seen. It belonged to Yui, a kid we both knew, a good fighter. He, too, was covered with awful, bloody pustules and sores.
As I stared at him, it came to me. “Tim—it’s the plague. They died of the plague. We were the ones supposedly infected, but they all got sick instead.”
Yui had been the guard to one of the arsenals, so we weaponed up and moved cautiously through the rest of the compound, stretching the necks of our shirts up over our mouth and nose. There wasn’t a living soul. Every single person in the camp was dead, covered with the telltale sores of plague. Everyone except me and Tim.
And Ms. Strepp. We couldn’t find her anywhere.
68
OUR TRAINING HAD PREPARED US for everything. We knew how to fight in a hundred different ways, and to the death, if necessary. We could survive in the wild, besiege enemy camps, and easily march fifteen miles in one night.
All of this flew through my head like mosquitos while I processed the situation.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shitty, shittiest shit!”
Tim rested his automatic rifle on the ground, his eyes bleak. “Yeah.”
Still on high alert, we checked the entire training compound again. We counted dozens and dozens of bodies in various stages of decomposition; kids we’d hung out with, drank with, danced with, trained with.
“Thank God Becca and Nate aren’t here,” I said, and Tim nodded.
“We have to load up and bug out,” he said, his voice muffled by his T-shirt. “Gather food, weapons, whatever, grab one of the transports and go!”
“Yeah,” I agreed quickly. “Maybe you could load up while I search Ms. Strepp’s office for answers?”
“Got it,” Tim said, “but don’t take too long. I want us out of here ASAP.”
I ran to Ms. Strepp’s office and opened her computer. To my shock, it wasn’t locked. I started scrolling rapidly through files, not even knowing what I was looking for. Making a quick decision, I printed every file that had certain key words in it: my name, Tim’s name, the word plague, and the word plan. The machine was still spitting out pages when Tim burst through the door.
“Let’s go,” he said urgently. “I don’t want to be breathing this air!”
“Okay, okay,” I said, grabbing handfuls of printouts. I scrolled through the last files and saw one with Becca’s name on it. I hit Print, snatched it up, and ran outside. Tim was already in the driver’s seat of one of our All-Terrain Transports.
I threw my stuff in the back, then leaped into the passenger seat. Tim punched the gas and we roared off, watching the compound of death get smaller in the rearview mirro
r.
69
BECCA
“I GOTTA PEE,” BUNNY SAID.
We hadn’t driven that far. I was silently cataloguing my various injuries and bruises now that the extreme adrenaline of the car theft was waning. Other than where my body hurt (everywhere), my only thought was getting Ansel to explain the secret of how to get into the city. The capital of the United was a high-value target, and I knew that Strepp would want us to scout it at all costs. Who knows what we could learn. What damage we could do.
Jolie wrote, I-P-2 in my hand.
“Nate, find a place for a pit stop,” I directed him.
It took a few minutes, but Nate found a dirt road that was almost totally overgrown. He turned in and we crunched through the woods until we couldn’t be seen from the highway. Each of us wandered a couple yards off and took care of business, and then I heard Mills say, “Hey, guys, come look at this!”
When we joined him, he was pointing to a natural shelter, flicking his flashlight around its opening.
“Oh good, a cave,” Nate said flatly. “Probably a popular wolf takeout place. I’m going back to the car. Try not to get eaten.”