Epilogue #3
Communities are starting to hunt them now. Instead of just fighting back, we’re proactive. Settlements are coordinating sweeps. One group clears a road while another pushes from the opposite direction.
Borders extend.
Safe routes get safer.
And when someone does get bitten, there’s a chance they don’t have to Turn all thanks to the factory up and running in Newark.
Calling it a factory probably makes it sound considerably more impressive than it is.
Half the equipment had to be repaired or replaced, electricity remains temperamental enough that the people running the place swear more than I do, and everyone with the technical knowledge to keep production going is treated like they’re made out of gold.
But they’re making antidotes. Our antidotes.
Fuck Project Phoenix. Hopefully the formula for the Injection died with the NRI, but the scientist we pulled out of Manhattan before we blew it up gave us the formula for the antidote, the process, and, unfortunately, a list of things we didn’t have.
Specialized equipment. Chemicals. Medical supplies.
Half of it might as well have been on another planet for all the chance we had of finding it in what remained of New Jersey.
For the first few weeks, that was the cruelest joke imaginable.
We finally knew how to save our people. We just couldn’t make the antidote that would save them.
Then someone in contact with Veronica’s people reached out to Canada and got an answer in response.
I still remember standing beside Jack when Veronica’s voice came through the satellite phone with the news.
There was static. A lot of repeating ourselves.
At one point we lost the connection entirely, and my normally composed father said fuck so many times in thirty seconds that I learned combinations I hadn’t previously considered.
Then she called back with the news that we were finally—finally—getting help.
So far as anyone has been able to determine, the Turning happened only in the United States.
Project Phoenix destroyed its own country while the people still claiming to represent our government refused outside help, controlled information, and kept working toward a PP formula that would’ve spread far beyond our borders.
They weren’t trying to fix what they’d done.
They were trying to finish it, and who knows what would have happened if they were able to continue their twisted experiments.
Destroying the NRI in Manhattan didn’t magically fix America, but it did something almost as important: it let us finally admit we needed help to anyone who would listen.
Canada was first because they’re closest. NATO followed once communication became reliable enough to prove there were organized communities of survivors capable of receiving what they sent.
Nobody is marching an army across the border to save us.
There are still too many lurkers, too few secure and safe roads, and too many unknowns for that.
But, instead, they send us what we need, including everything necessary to create the antidote on our own.
Food comes in larger drops at cleared locations. Medical supplies arrive in smaller shipments. Equipment, seeds, replacement parts, and things I never would’ve known existed before someone explained that we couldn’t make antidotes without them are delivered by drone.
The Newark factory takes those supplies, creates an antidote, and turns them into little glass vials that keep people from becoming monsters. And once another batch is created, we put them on bicycles.
Seriously. Humanity nearly wiped itself out trying to engineer the future and create supersoldiers, and, right now, America’s best hope is being pedaled around the Northeast by people wearing backpacks full of flamethrower supplies and padded antidotes.
Gasoline still exists. So do cars. We just don’t have enough of the first to use the second for anything that isn’t essential.
In some bigger settlements, emergency vehicles get priority.
Generators get fuel for communities like Veronica’s camp.
Trucks are used when something is too heavy to move any other way.
The rest of us who venture into the Outside use bikes, and I only wish Mav and I had thought of that before I left the Grave for the first time.
One day that will change. Some settlements are already talking about fuel production, refineries, power grids, and supply chains—and while the girl I was before the Turning would’ve tuned those conversations out, I listen these days.
You know why? Because they’re talking about next year. The year after. Five years from now. Ten.
More importantly, they’re talking like we’re going to be here, and I’m starting to believe them.
The leaders of the largest settlements that first joined together have even started meeting regularly over radio and satellite connections. Somebody called it the Continental Congress as a joke, and, like most stupid names that get repeated often enough, it stuck.
It isn’t really a government. Not yet. Maybe that’s what it becomes some day, and I’m so relieved that Dad and Veronica are a part of it so I might actually put some trust in it.
For now, it’s a bunch of people who are responsible for keeping their own little pocket of humanity alive trying to figure out how all those pockets fit together.
They coordinate food, medicine, roads, communication, territory, and trade.
They argue constantly. My dad complains about them every time he hangs up the phone.
Of course, all that does is make me think we’ve already successfully recreated at least one important feature of American government…
That’s a start. All of it… we’re starting over after the Turning, but for the first time since the world ended, I believe it’s not really over.
That Chase and I might somehow get that happy-ever-after he once promised me in the backseat of his car.
That thought makes me stop.
Chase takes another step before our joined hands pull him back. He turns toward me, immediately searching my face. “Hey. You okay?”
I know there’s a meet at the high school that Dad wants us at.
I’m still one of the best lurker sensors at the Grave, and Chase’s numbers eclipse every other hunter.
Now that I know who I am, no one treats me with kid gloves.
I know the good and the bad about the Grave, and that hope should be tentative.
And yet…
We’re already late. I take a moment longer to let go of Chase’s hand. Turning into him, I cup his chin in my palms and place a small, meaningful kiss on his lips.
He blinks down at me. “Holden?”
“I’m okay.”
His eyes narrow slightly because he’s spent far too long learning all the different ways I can say those words and not really mean them.
So I kiss him again. “I am.”
And, this time, I’m telling the truth.
That’s not saying that it will be easy, or that, one day, everything will be the way that it was before. You don’t rebuild a burnt world by trying to take the ashes and the fragments and turning them into something that can’t exist any longer.
No. You look at what survived. You accept the hands reaching out for yours in love, in aid, in hope.
And you build something new.
I think of the world we live in now. It’s only the beginning.
We’re still surrounded by monsters. We’re still short on almost everything.
There are roads nobody has traveled in since that fateful New Year’s Day, and towns that might be little more than ghost towns.
We have no idea what this country will look like when its scattered pieces finally are big enough to put together again.
But, for the first time since the Turning, that feels like a question we’re actually going to live long enough to answer.
Together.
And I can’t fucking wait.