“He saved your life.” Topher stares up the hill. “We need to go,” he says. “Can you walk?”
I try to stand. Every inch of me hurts, stiff with cold or aching with bruises. When I sway and can’t get up, Topher helps me, his arm around my back, holding me upright. I’m self-conscious about the smell of piss, but he doesn’t mention it. Halfway back to the village, I’m feeling stronger, so I ask him to let me go. In the moonlight I can see there are tears on his cheeks. He doesn’t try to hide them.
“I peed my pants,” I say before I can stop myself.
“That’s okay,” Topher says.
We walk in silence. We’re close to the village again now. Just before we reach it, Topher stops me.
“Where did you hide?”
“In the bathroom of the trailer.”
“The one Felix died in? But I went back there. We went back for his body after the Nahx were gone. Where were you?”
“A Nahx found me,” I say. It’s a bit blurry though. Did I dream that?
“If a Nahx found you, you’d be dead,” Topher says. “You hit your head. You wandered off.”
Maybe he’s right, I think. Nahx don’t hold their fire. Nahx shoot first and never ask questions. I don’t tell Topher about the breathing. I don’t tell him about the long minutes the Nahx and I spent facing each other. I don’t tell him that somehow in the time between being knocked unconscious and waking up with Topher hanging over me, I stopped thinking of that Nahx as “it” and started thinking of it as “him.” I’m not sure why that makes a difference, but it does.
Before we even reach the village, I can hear Sawyer crying. What’s left of us gather in front of what looks like a little chapel, with the two bodies laid out in the snow.
“Oh my God,” Xander says when he sees me. He leaps up and throws his arms around me. “You must be a cat, Rave. Seven lives left.”
Sawyer lies with his head in Emily’s lap, shaking with sobs.
“Why don’t we go inside?” I ask. My senses are starting to return, and even I can see that it can’t be safe having a fire out in the open like this.
No one answers. Mandy stirs something in a pot, poking at the fire listlessly. Xander and Topher help me to sit. Sawyer sobs as Emily strokes his hair. Her face is stained with tears.
“We should go inside,” I say firmly. With Felix dead and Sawyer incapacitated, someone has to take command. “Let’s go into the church, at least.”
“What do we do with them?” Mandy asks, indicating Felix and Lochie lying there in the snow, dead, spiderweb veins tattooing their faces.
“What would they want us to do?”
“Get to safety,” Mandy answers. “Keep going.” She picks up the pot of whatever it is and heads up the steps of the chapel. Finding the door locked, she simply steps back and gives it a good kick. It flies open with a bang. Sawyer twitches in Emily’s lap.
The boys lift him up and follow us inside.
The chapel is tiny and cold, but soon the soup Mandy heated is warming those of us who can still eat. I change my clothes and try not to think of Felix and Lochie out in the snow.
When we finish eating, Mandy comes over with her flashlight. Shining the light in my eyes, she ascertains that I don’t have a serious concussion, but her careful fingers find a hard, painful lump on the back of my head as well as the gash on my forehead.
“How on earth did you do this?” she asks, dabbing at the forehead wound with a stinging wet cloth.
“Is it shaped like a lightning bolt, at least?” I ask.
She coughs a little half laugh and decides to leave it without a bandage, since it has stopped bleeding on its own. She checks my fingers and makes me take off my boots so she can check my toes.
“No frostbite,” she declares, giving my nose an affectionate tap. She instructs me to sleep, and helpless to resist, I climb into my sleeping bag and close my eyes. “Check her every hour,” she says to someone as sleep captures me. Hourly, I guess, I’m disturbed, but never enough to fully wake.
When I next open my eyes properly, daylight is streaming through the stained glass windows of the chapel, my nose is pinched with cold, and Topher is asleep beside me, one hand scrunching a handful of my sleeping bag. I look up at the ceiling rafters and sigh, wishing that the slow deconstruction of what I thought was my life might be a little less complicated. It’s easier to hang on to Topher as an obstacle, an antagonist, than cling to him as a lifeline. But all that changed when Tucker died. Slowly, our obsession with each other as the last remnant of the wild boy we both loved is evolving into something else. I’m not sure, but I think in this postapocalyptic world, Topher might be turning into a friend.
I carefully uncurl his fingers, trying not to wake him. He moans a little, but rolls over, snuffling and pulling his cold hand inside his bag. I wriggle out of my own bag, unzip it, and wrap it around my shoulders like a cape. Standing, I consider my traveling companions wrapped up on the floor. Xander and Mandy lie together like spoons in a drawer, curling around each other’s warmth. Emily’s ring-bespangled hand rests on Sawyer’s sleeping bag, but Sawyer has vacated it. He’s sitting on the altar, back against the wall, right under a stylized crucifix.
“You were his last word,” I say, sliding down beside him. Not strictly speaking the truth, but what does truth matter anymore?
He nods. “I heard it.”
“Why did you come back up here? I heard you yelling to go back down the hill.”
Sawyer’s demeanor changes, from heartbroken to officious. He becomes a soldier debriefing after a disastrous mission. “The Nahx trailed us back down into the valley but gave up the chase near the river. They disappeared in their transport. We figured they’d come back to take us out where they left us, but might not think we’d be crazy enough to come back here.”
I nod. It’s a sound theory. It seems to have worked so far anyway. But I doubt the Nahx will stay away for long.
“Where to now, chief?” I ask. If becoming a soldier again helps him recover, I’m happy to play my part. We need him.
Sawyer pulls a small canteen from his thigh pocket and uncaps it, taking a swig. “Back to the camp? Or onward? Shall we vote again?” That’s how he makes it clear I’m not off the hook for Felix’s death. Felix, Lochie, Tucker. I suppose I’m the reason that the Nahx invaded in the first place. Hell, I’m the reason Adam ate the forbidden fruit. Anything else anyone wants to blame on me?
A faint thumping noise saves me from further accusations. Sawyer’s face shows neither fear nor surprise, but the others begin to stir. After a second Topher shoots upright.
“What’s that? Nahx?”
“It sounds like a helicopter,” Sawyer says.