“Terrifying?” I asked, confused. My voice sounded different, deeper. The rest of the dancers started moving, a slow waltz, slower than the two of us. They continued to repeat the word “beautiful” as if in a trance.
“Terrifying,” Ash repeated, a distorted smile on his face. “And beautiful.” He stopped for a moment and brought my hand to his face, pressing his full lips against a small blue hand.
I gasped, pulling backward, and stared, horrified, at the small blue hands that seemed to be attached to my own arms, blue, blue, blue. I wrapped my arms tight around my stomach, the sudden urge to vomit so strong, so immediate. I met Ash’s smiling face and turned heel. I ran away, ran through the slow dancers, through the branches that I had left scattered on the floor, through the echoing hallways of the school and into the girls’ restroom.
I stopped in front of the mirror and leaned over the sink, scared to look up. My heart was pounding in my chest, my ears, and my head, all the way down to my toes. I lifted my eyes and stared at the blue monster glaring at me in the mirror. Her hair was wild, covered in vines, her eyes were pure black, and there was no mistaking the blueness of her skin. I opened my mouth to scream and immediately saw the razor sharp teeth.
I woke up screaming.
A hand immediately went to my mouth, shutting off my screams. I went into a panic mode and clawed at the hand pressed against my mouth.
“Z, hey, it’s me. It’s okay,” Ash said softly. “It’s fine. It’s okay. You had a nightmare but it’s okay. I just didn’t want you screaming. I’m going to lower my hand now, all right?”
I nodded, my heart pounding. He lowered his hand, and I let out a breath.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, reaching to brush a loose strand of hair behind my ear. His face was only a few inches away from me, looking at me carefully. There was so much concern on that beautiful face, and I found myself straining toward it. I wanted to be held, rocked back to sleep when it would only be happy dreams. I may have left the nightmare of my dream, but the nightmare still existed in reality.
I shook my head, trying to reorient myself. I reached for Ash, to stop the spinning of the world around me, to stop the pounding in my head. I felt a slight relief that my hands were the normal olive tone that I was used to, and not blue. I had a sudden urge to look in the mirror to make sure that my eyes were still normal.
“Is she okay?”
I straightened up, finally noticing that my dad was sitting in the front seat. I met his eyes and I felt my heart squeeze again. What was wrong with me? I spent eighteen years keeping complete control of my emotions, and now I felt them threatening to pour over. “I’m fine, Dad. I’m glad you’re back. Did you get…what you needed?”
He sighed, leaning his head back against the headrest. The keys sat in the ignition of the car, but he showed no signs of wanting to turn the car on. “I grabbed a few things that I hadn’t been able to grab before. We have a lot of things in the back. I also got clothes for Ash.” He nodded toward the trunk. “We have gas. I couldn’t take chances that gas stations would remain open. There’s food, but not a lot of it. There’s plenty of weapons and ammunition back there.”
He reached forward, turning the car on. The sound of the car starting in the middle of the darkened forest was loud, almost startling. “We should go.”
“Wait,” I said, clamoring over the seat to take my place in the passenger seat. “Dad, I need to know what’s going on. Ah, no,” I continued as he started to interrupt him. “It’s unfair to me, to both of us, for you to hide it. I need to know.”
Dad’s hands gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white. He looked back at Ash. “And you?”
I glanced back at Ash, who looked nervous. “I want to know. My parents were there, and they were sick. The same people who took Madison came and took them, and I don’t know why, and I don’t know what’s going on.”
Our eyes met, and I gave him a small smile, probably one of the first genuine smiles that I had ever given him. He answered with a smile of his own, and I realized again how ridiculously beautiful he was when he smiled. We both turned back to my dad.
He stayed quiet for a long moment, so long that I thought he was going to refuse, that he would put the car in “drive” and that would be it. Instead, he turned the car off. “What do you want to know?”
“EVERYTHING,” I BLURTED OUT. “WHERE did they come from? What is going on? Where are we going? What are we going to do?”
“Yeah, everything,” Ash echoed, scooting forward on the seat to get closer. His eyes were intent on both of us.
Dad ran a hand through his hair, and I noticed for the first time that there were streaks of gray there that hadn’t been there before. My dad was not even forty, yet the world had given him gray hairs.
“They estimate about a third of the population has gotten the Z virus…”