One last good shove sent him stumbling a couple feet away from me.
I looked around at our neighbors, probably none of them particularly bad people, but all staring, all watching, waiting for me to do something. Some dim part of me could sort of imagine what they saw: a slender, otherwise unremarkable woman with murder in her eyes, pushing their friend around. Bringing the horror and barbarity of whatever happened outside their big strong walls right to their street.
Everyone’s the villain in someone else’s story, I reminded myself. Might as well be over-the-top about it.
“Go back to sleep,” I said to the group. “Leave us alone. And be glad it’s me and not the goddamn living dead standing here.”
The man scrambled across the hedges and raced into his townhouse.
I scooped up his little gun and carried it inside with me. I checked the chamber out of curiosity and almost stopped in my tracks. One bullet. What the hell did he think he was going to do with one bullet? Fire it into the ceiling? Shoot himself in a panic?
This is who we’re dealing with, I reminded myself. Scared people. I was one of them once.
Sometimes I was pretty sure I still was one of them.
Dax waited for me just inside, his hands locked around Evie’s collar. “That was probably the most badass thing you ever did,” he informed me.
“Thanks,” I said. “And lock the door…please.”
I went into the kitchen, deposited the gun on the counter, grabbed my kit, and went back into the living room, where Logan and Tony were sitting next to each other in front of the coffee table. A quick inspection of Logan’s hand revealed a broken finger and severely torn-up knuckles, but nothing worse.
I dabbed at the blood with a piece of gauze.
Dax and the dog joined us. “Vibeke threatened to kill our neighbor,” he said. “Might want to send them a casserole or something tomorrow.”
The other men looked at me. “You did what?” Tony asked. Blood still dripped from one nostril, winding its way down his face and landing on his robe.
“He had it coming.” I cracked Logan’s finger back into place.
He yelped and tried to jerk his hand away, but I had a good grip on him. “Don’t look at what I’m doing,” I said. His knuckles were easy enough to clean up, though they’d probably swell up and turn black and blue within the hour.
He stared numbly at the dog while I worked. “She’s gone,” he said quietly. “Jesus, she’s gone…I need…where’s your bathroom?”
“The working one is upstairs,” Dax said.
Logan didn’t ask me to let go of his hand. He just turned and swept away, taking the stairs two at a time. The bathroom door slammed before I fully registered what had happened.
After a moment, Dax went up after him. Evie paced back and forth at the bottom of the stairs, no doubt unsettled by the all the emotional tension our group was sending off.
That meant it was just me, Tony, and the the river of crimson on his face.
“You gonna pinch that?” I asked him. “It’s dripping.”
“Gonna help me out, medic?”
I shrugged and brought my kit over to him. I pushed gauze into his hand, then pushed his hand up to his nose.
“Better?” I asked.
“Much.”
He had a bruise on the side of his head, presumably where Logan had punched him. I touched it gingerly, retreating when he flinched away. “You need an ice pack,” I said. “That’s gonna get ugly.”
“Just like everything else around here.”
Alyssa had known things were going wrong in Hastings. She’d probably nursed that feeling for quite some time, and finally been able to do something about it. That was why she’d helped us. Encouraged us. Tried to secure help for the rest of the people trapped here.
And now she was gone.
Dead.
I put my head in my hands, no longer caring that I had the blood of two men splashed across them. My entire body shook.
After a few seconds, Tony put his hand on my shoulder. “You can cry,” he said. “I know you were friends. Might help.”
I tried. I was pretty sure I’d choked down more than my fair share of tears since all this shit started, and now I simply expected them to come spilling out without further warning. It might have felt good to cry. To mourn—for Alyssa, and for everyone else trapped in this shit show of an apocalypse.
But while my throat ached and my chest grew heavy, my eyes—my stupid eyes—remained dry.
Chapter Nineteen
Logan came to the Plague Tent with me at the crack of dawn, intent on recovering Alyssa’s body. I tried to explain to him that it might not be possible—that bodies were disposed of quickly to prevent just the sort of problem that had doomed Elderwood—but he insisted he needed to see her again, to say goodbye properly. That much I understood. How many people had I never seen again since all this started?