Patrick said, “Go check out that bus, Chance.”
Thumbing up a folding knife, he leaned into the windshield past the dead Host and started sawing off the kid’s seat belt. The rear of the station wagon looked caved in and claustrophobic, but the kid seemed to be uninjured.
Alex pulled the Silverado around onto the reeds in front of the rocky brink of the pass. When the headlights swept the bus, the dark windows reflected back the glare, giving up nothing. My boots sank into the reeds as I walked over. Using the tires for holds, I climbed up onto the side of the bus and crouched for a moment, my baling hooks ready. Below, Cassius took up a guard posture, aiming his snout at the darkness.
Toward the front of the bus, the door lay open, pointing at the stars. My breath hitched in my chest. I clicked on my flashlight and shone it between my feet through the windows. This close, the beam penetrated the tinted glass, giving a murky view of the interior. Bags and purses lay jumbled against the far windows at the bottom, their contents strewn all over the place. Slowly, I walked across the panes, shining my light on the shattered glass and the trash below. A wallet. A baseball cap. A few coolers knocked open. Shoes and lipstick tubes. There’d been a lot of workers in there when the driver had transformed, tipping it over.
Which meant that now there were a lot of workers out here.
One of the windows fissured beneath my weight. I jumped to the next. That one spiderwebbed as well, so I hopscotched onto the metal beside the panes. I continued along, my flashlight stabbing across the empty rows of seats.
Finally I reached the end and slid off the bus. Alex joined me and Cassius as we headed back. Patrick was still leaning through the windshield of the station wagon, working on the kid’s belt.
The kid’s breaths came as panicked wheezes.
“What’s your name?” Patrick asked, using that voice he reserved for calming down sheep tangled in barbed wire.
The boy’s lips trembled. “Nick.”
With a snap the belt fell away. Patrick grabbed Nick’s hands and pulled him out carefully through the windshield. As he slid past the corpse of his father, the boy squeezed his eyes shut.
“It’s okay,” Patrick said. “Don’t look. I’ll tell you when you’re clear. Just keep talking to me.”
“Okay. Okay.” Nick’s side rubbed against his father’s body, the stiff hand trailing along his back. He stifled a cry.
“Hey,” Patrick said. “Hey. How old are you?”
“I’m thirteen,” Nick said, barely managing his words. “A freshman at Stark Peak High.”
“A Monarch?” Patrick said. “Monarchs suck.”
A tension breaker about the old rivalry.
Nick made a nervous laugh without smiling.
Patrick slid him down the hood. “You’re clear now.”
Nick opened his eyes and swung around, landing on the ground. A small kid for his age, with thoughtful eyes. He wore a hoodie up over his head, the sleeves too long for his arms. The back of the hoodie sported an image of an old king with a scepter and crown, a cartoon take on his school mascot.
As Alex jogged back over to us, Nick stomped his feet against the cold. “We have to go,” he said. “Now.”
“The Hosts,” I said.
It took him a moment to catch up to the name I used for them. “That’s right,” he said. “There are hordes of them roaming around here. It’s like they’re guarding the pass. We should—”
The faintest crackling sounds came from the edge of the forest beside the barricade. Twigs snapping. Feet squelching into mud. The cracking of joints.
We stood like a phalanx, breath cold in our lungs, watching. Cassius didn’t growl, but his upper lip wrinkled back from his teeth, showing his fangs.
The darkness took shape slowly, resolving into human forms. In the lead a woman wearing a tattered skirt crouched low to the ground. Her hair was still thick enough to cover the holes in the back of her head, so her eyes looked like black coasters.
The others gathered around her, a wall of not-humanity. More Hosts than we’d yet seen assembled in one place, all of them wearing uniforms from the cannery.
They charged.
ENTRY 21
“Over the barricade!” Patrick roared.
Our boots hammered on the hood, over Nick’s dead father, across the roof of the station wagon. One by one, we leapt onto the deadfall of pines, grabbing at branches, needles poking our hands. Cassius bounded up and over effortlessly. Nick slipped on the top of the car, and Patrick went back for him, grabbing his shirt collar and tugging him to his feet.
A skeletal claw closed over Nick’s sneaker, stripping it off as Patrick ripped him free. The shoe moved back across the throng, hand over hand, held high like some kind of relic. The sea of Hosts pooled at the base of the barricade. In the darkness I couldn’t see where they ended.
Nick’s sock dangled from the end of his foot. He stared at it in disbelief before Patrick hurled him around onto the stacked tree trunks of the barricade.