He turned it to show me that it was full of whipped cream. Whipped cream a hundred years old. Older. He took another bite. “It’s not bad.” He finished it and crumpled up the wrapper. “So how old do you think it was?”
I picked up the torn box. “Best by August 18, 2036,” I read.
“Whoa. That’s old,” he admitted.
I picked up Yellowed Newspaper #1,000,000 and skimmed it, wondering when he would suddenly double over and start barfing. Some words caught my eyes and I went back and reread them.
“Oh, my God,” I said, looking up. “Oh, my God.”
40
“WHAT?” HE ASKED, LEANING OVER to see. “What is it?”
Wordlessly, I held up the paper to show him the headline. His forehead wrinkled as he tried to decipher it, and I took it back.
“‘CDC Scientists Confirm Use of Biological Weapons,’” I read.
“What’s the CDC?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But this sounds bad.” I read on: “‘The New World party has released a biological weapon into the water supplies of cities across the US’!”
“US,” I said. “The United States! What the United used to be, right?” I went on: “‘The vaporized particles, based on organophosphates, dissolve readily in water and are quickly absorbed by plants, animals, and humans.’”
The cold feeling in my gut told me we’d finally found a real clue.
“Oh, crap,” he said. “So, don’t drink the water, or eat, or breathe. This must have killed… a ton of people.”
My heart pounded and adrenaline-fueled alertness woke my brain cells. “Who did this?” I asked out loud. “Who was the New World party? Tim! Look for more newspapers!”
We tore open boxes, cut bags apart, rifled through piles, but for a good hour we found only more useless junk—grocery store receipts, stacks of paper called Tax Returns, a cookbook that I set to one side to look at later.
“Here, newspapers!” he said, hauling out a stack from an old trunk.
He scanned the dates. “This one’s from… 1926,” he said. “It’s pretty much dust.” He tossed it in my lap and I gave it a quick look.
“‘Ederle Swims the English Channel,’” I read. “That makes no sense—oh, Ederle is a person.” It was from too long ago and I tossed it.
“Hey, look! A dartboard!” he said, holding up a round target. “The bars in my home cell always had dartboards.” He smiled at it and leaned it against one wall. “Just gotta find some darts,” he muttered.
I was on fire now, pawing impatiently through stacks as fast as I could, getting filthy. I refused to take a twenty-minute workout break and worked right through lunch, though he put a sandwich on the floor next to me. My arms actually ached toward the end of the day and I’d almost given up when I pried open an old footlocker and found more newspapers.
“Bingo!” I said, “2037!” I spread one on the ground and skimmed headlines—disturbing headlines. I read slower. This couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be true… I flipped to the next paper and the more I read, the colder my skin got and the more my stomach hurt.
“You’ve gone white,” he said. “You’re making me nervous.”
I’d almost forgotten he was here, and now I looked at him as if I’d never seen him before. I blinked a couple times and drew in a breath, feeling like I was about to throw up.
“How… how much of this stuff do you think is from after 2037?” I asked him weakly.
He glanced around. “Probably… maybe most of it? Like, it can’t all be ancient. Why?”
I could hardly say the words. “Because everything, everything after 2037 was infected with a… plague,” I said, looking at all the bags and papers we’d handled. “A fatal plague.”
41
BECCA
WE WALKED MOST OF THE night, taking a couple hours before dawn to rest. It was those cold half-sleeps when I was curled in a shivering ball that made me miss Tim the most. I thought about him, his big, warm body, his strong arms, the scent of his skin, and hot tears came to my eyes. I tried to put him out of my mind.