Pippa runs a hand over her head. “My people are weak,” she says finally. “We’ve been living on scraps—rats, mostly, and what we could forage in the woods.”
“There will be food up north,” Max says. “Supplies. Like I said, the resistance has friends in Portland.”
“I’m not sure they’ll make it,” Pippa says, lowering her voice.
“Well you can’t stay here, either,” Tack points out.
Pippa bites her lip and exchanges a look with Beast. He nods.
“He’s right, Pip,” Beast says.
Behind Pippa, a woman speaks up suddenly. She is so thin, she looks as though she has been whittled from ancient wood.
“We’ll go.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. “We’ll fight.”
Pippa exhales slowly. Then she nods.
“All right, then,” she says. “Portland it is.”
As we draw closer to Portland, as the light and land grow more familiar—lush with growth and smells I know from childhood, from my longest, oldest memories—I begin to make my plans.
Nine days after we left the safe house, our numbers now hugely swollen, we catch a glimpse of one of the Portland border fences. Only now it is no longer a fence. It’s a huge cement wall, a faceless slab of stone, stained an unearthly pink in the dawn light.
I’m so startled, I stop short. “What the hell?”
Max is walking behind me, and has to dodge at the last second. “New construction,” he says. “Tightened border control. Tightened control everywhere. Portland’s making an example.” He shakes his head and mutters something.
This image—the sight of a wall, newly erected—has made my heart start pounding. I left Portland less than a year ago, but already, it has changed. I’m seized by a fear that everything will be different on the inside of the wall too. Maybe I won’t recognize any of the streets. Maybe I won’t be able to find my way to Aunt Carol’s house.
Maybe I won’t be able to find Grace.
I can’t help but worry about Hana, too. I wonder where she will be once we begin pouring into Portland: the cast-out children, the prodigal sons, like the angels described in The Book of Shhh who were thrown out of heaven for harboring the disease, expelled by an angry god.
But I remind myself that my Hana—the Hana I knew and loved—is gone now.
“I don’t like it,” I say.
Max swivels around to look at me, one corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It won’t be standing too much longer.” He winks.
So. More explosions. It makes sense; we need to move a large number of people into Portland somehow.
A high, thin whistle disrupts the morning stillness. Beast. He and Pippa have been scouting ahead of the group this morning, tracing the periphery of the city, looking for other Invalids, signs of a camp or homestead. We turn toward the sound. We’ve been walking since midnight, but now we find renewed energy and move more quickly than we have all night.
The trees spit us out at the edge of a large clearing. The growth has been rigorously trimmed back, and a long, well-tended alley of green extends a quarter of a mile into the distance. In it are trailer homes propped on cinder blocks and chunks of concrete, as well as rusted truck beds, tents, and blankets strung up from tree branches to form makeshift canopies. People are already moving around the camp, and the air smells like smoking wood.
Beast and Pippa are standing a little ways away, conversing with a tall, sandy-haired man outside one of the trailers.
Raven and my mother begin shepherding the group into the clearing. I stay where I am, rooted to the spot. Julian, realizing I am not with the group, doubles back to me.
“What’s the matter?” he asks. His eyes are red. He has been doing more than almost anyone—scouting, foraging, standing watch while the rest of us are sleeping.
“I—I know where we are,” I say. “I’ve been here before.”
I don’t say with Alex. I don’t have to. Julian’s eyes flicker.
“Come on,” he says. His voice is strained, but he reaches out and takes my hand. His palms have grown calloused, but his touch is still gentle.
I scan instinctively across the line of trailers, trying to pick out the one Alex had claimed for himself. But that was last summer, in the dark, and I was terrified. I don’t remember any of its features but the roll-away, plastic-tarp roof, which won’t be distinguishable from where I’m standing.
I feel a brief flicker of hope. Maybe Alex is here. Maybe he came back to familiar grounds.
The sandy-haired man is speaking to Pippa. “You got here just in time,” he says. He is much older than he appeared from a distance—in his forties at least—although his neck is unblemished. He has obviously not spent any significant amount of time in Zombieland. “Game time is tomorrow at noon.”