“We’re not running,” she says calmly. She turns back to the rest of the group. “We’re going to divide. Spread out around the camp. Hide. Some of us can head down to the old riverbed. I’ll be watching from the hill. Rocks, bushes, whatever looks like it will conceal you—use it. Climb a tree, for shit’s sake. Just stay out of sight.” She looks to each of us in turn. Pike stubbornly refuses to meet her gaze.
“Take your guns, knives—anything you have. But remember, we don’t fight unless we have to. Don’t do anything until my signal, okay? Nobody moves. Nobody breathes, coughs, sneezes, or farts. Is that clear?”
Pike spits on the ground. No one speaks.
“All right,” Raven says. “Let’s go.”
The group breaks up, quickly and wordlessly. People blur past me and become shadows; the shadows fold themselves into the dark. I push my way to Raven, who has knelt down beside the dead regulator and is checking him for weapons, money, whatever might be of use.
“Raven.” Her name catches in my throat. “Do you think—?”
“They’ll be fine,” she says without looking up. She knows I was going to ask about Julian and Tack. “Now get out of here.”
I move through the camp at a jog, find my backpack heaped next to several others at the edge of the fire pit. I sling my pack over my right shoulder; next to the rifle, the strap digs painfully into my skin. I grab two of the other packs and swing them onto my left shoulder.
Raven jogs past me. “Time to go, Lena.” She, too, dissipates into the darkness.
I stand up, then notice that someone unpacked the medical supplies last night. If anything happens—if we have to run, and can’t come back—we’ll need those.
I remove one of the backpacks and kneel down.
The regulators are getting closer. I can pick out individual voices now, individual words. I am suddenly aware that the camp has been totally cleared out. I’m the only one left.
I unzip the backpack. My hands are shaking. I wrestle a sweatshirt out of the backpack, begin stuffing it instead with Band-Aids and bacitracin.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing?” It’s Alex. He gets a hand under my arm and hauls me to my feet. I just manage to zip up the backpack. “Come on.”
I try to wrench my arm away, but he keeps a firm grip on me, practically dragging me into the woods, away from the camp. I flash back to the raid night in Portland when Alex led me like this through a black maze of rooms; when we huddled together on the piss-smelling floor of a storage shed and he gently wrapped my wounded leg, his hands soft and strong and strange on my skin.
He kissed me that night.
I push the memory away.
We plunge down a steep embankment, sinking through a rotten layer of loam and damp leaves, toward a jutting lip of land that forms a natural cave, a hollowed-out spot in the hillside. Alex pilots me into a crouch and practically pushes me into the small, dark space.
“Watch it.” Pike is there too: a few glistening teeth, a bit of solid darkness. He shifts slightly to accommodate us. Alex slides beside me, knees drawn to his chest.
The tents are no more than fifty feet away from us, up the hill. I say a silent prayer that the regulators will think we’ve run, and not waste their time searching.
The waiting is agony. The voices from the woods have dropped away. The regulators must be moving slowly now, stalking us, drawing closer. Maybe they’re even in the camp, threading their way past the tents: deadly, silent shadows.
The space is too narrow, the darkness intolerable. The idea comes to me, suddenly, that we are wedged in a coffin.
Alex shifts next to me. The back of his hand brushes up against my arm. My throat goes dry. His breathing is quicker than usual. I go stiff, perfectly rigid, until he withdraws his hand. It must have been an accident.
Another agonizing stretch of silence. Pike mutters, “This is stupid.”
“Shh.” Alex hushes him sharply.
“Sitting here like rats in a trap…”
“I swear, Pike…”
“Both of you be quiet,” I whisper fiercely. We lapse into silence again. After a few more seconds, someone shouts. Alex tenses up. Pike eases his rifle off his shoulder, jabbing me in the side with his elbow. I bite back a cry.
“They’ve cleared out.” The voice floats down to us from the camp. So they’ve arrived. I guess now that they’ve found the tents empty, they don’t think they need to be quiet anymore. I wonder what their plan was: surround us, mow us down while we slept.
I wonder how many there are.
“Damn. You were right about the shots we heard. It’s Don.”
“Dead?”
“Yup.”
There’s a faint rustling sound, as though someone is kicking through the tents. “Look at how they live out here. Packed together. Mucking around in the dirt. Animals.”
“Careful. It’s all contaminated.”
So far, I’ve counted six voices.
“It smells, doesn’t it? I can smell them. Shit.”
“Breathe through your mouth.”
“Bastards,” Pike mutters.
“Shh,” I say reflexively, even though anger has gripped me, too, alongside the fear. I hate them. I hate every single one of them, for thinking that they are better than us.
“Where do you think they’re headed?”