“He’ll find their families or something.”
“Dude!” Greer said. “They’ve been out there for eight months. That means no one’s looking for them. So what’re Gonzalez and his guys going to do? Stick them in that stupid shelter of theirs? How do you think that’s going to turn out?”
“Greer, I promised him.”
He jumped to his feet. “Well, what the hell did you do that for? It’s not like you talked to me about it. Like you talked to any of us about it. These are two little kids! Alone!”
“What did you want me to do? Go to war with the National Guard? Take the chance of screwing over everybody here just because you want to play superhero again?”
“I’m not trying to play—”
“You think they’ll just ignore this? Why? Because we’re a bunch of kids?”
“We’re supposed to be helping!”
“We are helping!”
“Card!”
“The answer is no!”
Suddenly Makela called out from down in the camp. “Greer, come on! It’s time to go!”
I snapped back to reality, surprised to find Greer and me squaring off with each other, panting as if we’d just run a mile flat out. His gray eyes had gone stormy and were locked on mine. My throat ached from shouting I didn’t really remember doing.
“Gre-er!” she called again.
“I’ll be right there!” he yelled back over his shoulder.
But he didn’t move. He stared at the ground, fists clenched, shoulders hunched. The silence between us was heavy and strange. It was like when a storm tears through a summer day and then retreats so fast it’s hard to believe it ever really happened.
I took a shaky step toward him. “Greer, listen . . .”
He turned away and started down the trail. “Forget it, man. Good luck with your gardening.”
The dogs followed him as he headed back to camp. Soon their footsteps faded, and I was alone again. I tore off my mask and dropped it. My hands were ice-cold and shaking bad, so I curled them into fists and squeezed until I felt as if a bone was about to pop. There was an angry buzz in the back of my skull.
Everything was so damn simple to Greer. A couple kids might be in trouble? Go get them! Who cares that there might be a price to pay? Who cares that one wrong move could lead to everything we’d built being taken away? And the thing was, it wasn’t just Greer. All the infected lived in a world that, as far as they knew, was unbreakable. Every betrayal they’d ever felt? Every disappointment? Every failure? Every disaster? Gone. That’s why they needed me. I remembered how fast the world could fall apart, and I remembered what it was like when it did.
I kicked at one of the branches and started back to my tent. I wasn’t going to be able to get any more work done that morning. As I stepped through the woods, a flash of red caught my eye. Greer’s bandanna. He’d left it sitting on a rock by the trail. Right where he knew I wouldn’t miss it. I knelt and untied the bundle. The two biscuits were still there. Golden. Untouched.
When had I eaten last? Not that morning. The night before? Sometime earlier the previous day? That was the thing about Greer. He was never more annoying than when he was right. Kind of like you.
I took the biscuits off the rock and devoured them.
2
BY THE TIME I made it down to Greer’s camp, it was in full-on riot mode.
“Let’s not forget our ponchos, people!” Greer shouted as the kids sprinted from cabin to cabin, getting ready. “Radio says rain later on, and I don’t want a repeat of last time. Let’s move! We don’t have all day!”
There were eleven of them, five boys and six girls, ranging in age from seven to fifteen. They all lived on the grounds of the old summer camp about a quarter mile down the mountain from my tent. I had lived there myself for a while, but once Greer and the kids showed up, I’d grabbed some camping gear and found a place of my own closer to the peak of Lucy’s Promise.
Greer caught sight of me and planted himself a few feet away, his arms crossed over his chest. “What’s up, Cassidy? You forget something?”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Coming with me where?”
I stared at Greer until it dawned on him.
“What? No. Card, that’s not—”
“I’ll get Snow Cone’s meds, and then I’ll talk to Gonzalez about those two kids. We’ll work something out.”
“Work something out so you can bring them up here?”
“So we can find them a good home.”
“Card—”
The buzz in my head started up again, but I forced it down. “If we bring more people up here, Gonzalez can’t protect us. That’s it. Game over. Benny and DeShaun and all the others get stuck in that National Guard shelter. You want to take that chance?”
Greer looked away, his eyes narrowing on Eliot and Ren, who were play wrestling in the dirt by the main lodge while the girls cheered them on.
“We protect who’s here now.”