“I’ll check the upstairs,” Tack says, at normal volume, which makes me jump. Someone clicks on a flashlight, and the beam sweeps over the littered floor. Then I remember that I, too, have a flashlight, and I fumble in my backpack for it.
I move with Julian into the kitchen, keeping the flashlight in front of me, rigid, as though it will protect us. There are more signs of struggle here—a few smashed glass jars, more insects and rotting food. I draw my sleeve up to my nose and breathe through it. I pass the beam of light over the pantry shelves. They are still fairly well-stocked: jars of pickled vegetables and meats are lined neatly next to bundles of dried jerky. The jars are labeled with neat, handwritten script that identifies their contents, and I feel a sudden vertigo, a wild swinging, as I remember a woman with fire-red hair, bending over a jar with her pen, smiling, saying, There’s hardly any paper left at all. Soon we’ll have to guess at what’s what.
“Clear,” Tack announces. We hear him thudding back downstairs, and Julian draws me through the short hallway and into the main room, where most of the group is still assembled.
“Scavengers again?” Gordo asks gruffly.
Tack passes a hand through his hair.
“They weren’t looking for food or supplies,” I say. “The pantry’s still stocked.”
“Maybe it wasn’t Scavengers at all,” Bram says. “Maybe the family just took off.”
“What? And trashed the place before they split?” Tack toes a metal cup. “And left their food behind?”
“Maybe they were in a hurry,” Bram insists. But I can tell even he doesn’t believe it; the atmosphere in the house is rancid, wrong. This is a house where something very bad has happened, and all of us can feel it.
I move toward the open door and step out onto the porch, inhaling clean, outside smells, scents of space and growth. I wish we’d never come.
Half the group has already retreated outside. Dani is moving across the yard slowly, parting the grasses with a hand—looking for what, I don’t know—as though she is wading through knee-high water. From the back of the house I hear shouted conversation; then Raven’s voice, rising above the noise. “Get back, get back. Don’t go down there. I said, don’t go down there.”
My stomach tightens. She found something.
She comes around the side of the house, breathless. Her eyes are shiny, bright with anger.
But all she says is, “I found them.” She doesn’t have to say that they’re dead.
“Where?” I croak.
“Bottom of the hill,” she says shortly, then she pushes past me, back into the house. I don’t want to return inside, to the smell and the darkness and the fine layering of death that covers everything—that’s what it is, that wrong-thing, that evil silence—but I do.
“What did you find?” Tack asks. He’s still standing in the middle of the room. Everyone else surrounds him in a semicircle, frozen, quiet, and for a moment, when I reenter the room, I have the impression of statues, gripped in gray light.
“Evidence of a fire,” Raven says, and then adds, a little more quietly, “Bone.”
“I knew it.” Coral’s voice sounds high and slightly hysterical. “They were here. I knew it.”
“They’re gone now,” Raven says soothingly. “They won’t be back.”
“It wasn’t Scavengers.”
All of us whip around. Alex is standing in the doorway. Something red—a ribbon, or strip of fabric—is balled loosely in his fist.
“I told you not to go down there,” Raven says. She is glaring at him—but beneath the anger, I see fear as well.
He ignores her and passes into the room, shaking out the fabric as he does, holding it up for us to see: It’s a long strip of red plastic tape. At intervals it is imprinted with an image of a skull and crossbones, and the words CAUTION: BIOHAZARD.
“The whole area’s cordoned off,” Alex says. He keeps his face neutral, but his voice has a strangled quality, as though he is speaking through a muffler.
Now I feel like the statue. I want to speak, but my mind has gone blank.
“What does it mean?” Pike says. He has been in the Wilds since he was a child. He knows hardly anything about life inside the bordered places—about the regulators and the health initiatives, the quarantines and the prisons, the fears of contamination.
Alex turns to him. “The infected aren’t buried. They’re either kept apart, in the prison yards, or they’re burned.” For just a second, Alex’s eyes slide to mine. I am the only person here who knows that his father’s body was buried in the tiny prison courtyard of the Crypts, unmarked, uncelebrated; I am the only person who knows that for years Alex visited the makeshift grave and wrote his father’s name in marker on a stone, to keep him from being forgotten. I’m sorry, I try to think to him, but his eyes have already passed over me.
“Is it true, Raven?” Tack asks sharply.
She opens her mouth, then closes it again. For a second I think she’ll deny it. But at last she says, in a tone of resignation, “It looks like regulators.”
There’s a collective inhale.
“Fuck,” Hunter mutters.