The supply drop must have ended hours earlier. The streets were empty and Black River was quiet. I could’ve believed I was the only one left in town until I heard the sound of someone running on the cross street up ahead. Whoever it was, they were moving fast and heading my way. I slipped behind a row of hedges and waited for them to pass.
The footfalls got louder, and then a girl with emerald green hair appeared, sprinting down the sidewalk. She made it to a brick house across the street from where I was hiding and collapsed against a telephone pole, head down, panting. The pale blue button-down she was wearing was dark with sweat. Her cutoff jeans and boots were splashed with mud.
The girl caught her breath, then looked back the way she’d come. That’s when I saw her clearly for the first time. As soon as I did, the world went a little bit still.
She was about my age, with a heart-shaped face and pale, lightly freckled skin that had gone pink from running. She was obviously scared, but she surveyed the road behind her with a fierceness that was so intense it seemed to make the air around her shimmer.
I started around the hedge, but before I could take more than a step, she was off again. At the end of the street she cut right and disappeared. By the time I came out into the road, it was empty in both directions. Whoever or whatever she’d been looking for was nowhere in sight.
I turned to where the peak of Lucy’s Promise rose over the neighborhood. The clouds above it were low and heavy. It took only a few seconds for a storm to turn the trail up the mountain into a river of rocks and mud. I told myself that the girl wasn’t my problem, that I needed to get back home before the rain started. But when I got moving, it wasn’t toward the mountain, it was to follow her.
When I rounded the corner, I saw her dodging into the driveway of a blue house halfway down the block. A second later, two figures appeared at the far end of the street, racing toward the same house. They hadn’t seen me yet. I wasn’t sure why, but I thought I shouldn’t let them. I hid until they were out of sight and then quietly followed.
A rusty pickup truck was parked at the end of the driveway. I moved behind it and looked through the windshield into the fenced-in backyard. It was small and overgrown with weeds. A pile of construction debris—lengths of two-by-fours, a box of nails—sat beside a half-built shed in the corner. Two men were squatting in the grass between the house and the shed, looking into the space beneath the back porch.
One of them was young, in his twenties maybe. Skinny, with shaggy brown hair and a beard. The other man was older. His father? He was thick-chested, with a sizable gut and a sunburned bald patch on top of his head. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on who he was until he pulled a pair of large gold-framed glasses out of his breast pocket and put them on. Mr. Tommasulo. You remember him? The crossing guard for the elementary school down the street? The one who always waved and told us it was a blessed morning as we walked past him on our way to school.
The younger man inched forward, tilting his head toward the space beneath the porch. “We know you’re confused. You have every right to be. There’s a virus. You caught it. That’s why you’ve lost your memory.”
“Dale’s right,” Mr. Tommasulo said in that same bright voice I remembered. “But everything will be better if you come out of there. I promise.”
I eased down the side of the truck and crouched by the front tires to get a better view of the porch. The area beneath it was thick with shadows, but I could just make out the girl. She’d wedged herself in, her back to the house’s concrete foundation. One arm was out in front of her, as stiff as a lance. A shard of broken glass was in her hand.
“Your name is Myra,” the younger man—Dale—continued, loud and slow, like he was talking to someone who barely understood English. “You and I were married last spring in Hudson. We went to Barcelona for our honeymoon. It cost us an arm and a leg, but we went because it’s been your dream since high school.”
“You read a book about that architect fella,” Tommasulo said. “The one who made all those weird buildings.”
“Gaudí,” Dale said. “God, it kills me that you don’t remember, but I know it isn’t your fault. You’re sick. That’s all. But we can explain if you come with us.”
Everything suddenly became clear. I’d always known that I wasn’t the only uninfected person in Black River. Just as there were people who refused to leave their beach houses when a hurricane was bearing down on them, some uninfected had chosen to stay despite Lassiter’s. They were pretty strict about keeping to themselves, but I’d heard that every now and then one of them got careless and ended up infected. Looked like it’d happened again.