His jaw tensed, as if he were gnawing on a scrap of leather. “You haven’t been in town since—”
He cut himself off. No one liked to mention the night of the sixteenth, especially to me. To tell you the truth, I hated it—the way they tiptoed around me like that.
“Look, I’ve got my mask and my gloves. And it’s not like I’m going to stand in the middle of Monument Park. I’ll go see the doc, talk to Gonzalez, and come right back.”
“But—”
“Can we just go? Please? Seriously, Greer, we don’t have all day.”
Greer spun away from me and headed back to the kids. I hadn’t meant to snap at him. I’d apologize later. I just wanted to get this over with.
“Yo!” Greer called out. “Rugrats! Anyone not with me in five seconds stays here and cleans bathrooms! Five—four—three—two—one!”
The chaos stopped at once, and everyone snapped into a single-file line at the head of the trail that led off the mountain. As always, Carrie was in the lead, since that meant she got to be closest to Greer. She stared up at him adoringly as he gave the group their final inspection. He sent Astrid back to her cabin to put on more sunscreen and told Isaac to get a bigger backpack. Once they returned and Greer double-checked the four wagons they used to haul things up the mountain, it was time to go.
“Okay, troops! Let’s move out!”
I started to follow, but stopped when I saw Benny standing off by himself a few feet from the trail. He was all hunched up, head down, skinny arms hugging his chest. It was like he thought that if he tried hard enough, he might be able to make himself disappear.
Lassiter’s didn’t have any after-effects. Once it did its work erasing someone’s memories, it left them perfectly healthy. Unfortunately, that rarely meant they were okay.
At seven, Benny was one of the youngest kids in camp. From what we could figure out, he got separated from his mom and dad when they were all infected on the night of the sixteenth. Once the quarantine was in place, the Guard tried to reunite him with his folks, but as far as Benny was concerned they were trying to make him live with two complete strangers who acted like they were his parents. He ran away. The Guard dragged him back. He ran away again. Greer found him nearly a month later, hiding out in an old muffler shop. He’d been living on creek water and a vending machine he’d smashed open with a brick. Greer brought him up to Lucy’s Promise and, I don’t know, I guess the Guard finally decided they had bigger things to do than chase around one pissed-off seven-year-old.
The rest of the kids on Lucy’s Promise had similar stories. Families that fell apart when the memories that bound them together were gone. Parents who died in the chaos of the sixteenth. Parents of kids who never got infected and left the Quarantine Zone to keep it that way. Some of them just couldn’t stand living with all the other infected down in Black River. You remember that animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer movie we used to watch when we were little? The one with the Island of Misfit Toys? I guess that’s what the sixteenth had turned them into. Misfit toys. Lucy’s Promise was their island.
“What’s going on, Ben?” I asked.
He scrunched up his face, still not looking at me. At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer at all, but then I got a dry little whisper.
“Isaac and Eliot say there are ghosts.”
“What? Where?”
Benny pointed his chin toward the trail that led to Black River.
“In all those houses down there,” he said. “And up here too. In the trees and stuff. They say if you’re not careful, the ghosts’ll reach out and—”
“Isaac and Eliot were teasing.” I made a mental note to have Greer give them a talking-to. A vigorous one. “There aren’t any ghosts.”
He gave me a deeply skeptical look. “How do you know?”
“Because I know.”
“But, well, what if I get lost? Or somebody grabs me, or they make me go back to that shelter—”
“Do you think any of us would let somebody grab you?” I said. “Or let you go back to that place?”
His forehead wrinkled as he considered it, but clearly he wasn’t convinced. I checked behind me and found the trail deserted. The rest of the group was already past the first turn. I squatted down so I could look Benny in the eye.
“You know, when I was your age, I had nightmares a lot.”
Benny cocked his head. “You did?”
“Oh yeah. Bad ones, too. They’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and then I’d be too scared to go back to sleep. And since I shared a room with my big brother, that meant he couldn’t go back to sleep either. So he came up with this thing to help me get over being scared.”
“I’m not—”
“No, I know. You’re not scared. But still . . . you wanna try it?”
The way Benny looked at me it was clear that every atom in his body was primed for some kind of trick. But in the end, he nodded.