Chapter Fifty-Eight
I WAKE UP ON SPIDER-VEINED asphalt. The world around me is silent. Hushed.
Pebbles bite into my head as I flutter my eyes open.
I gasp. There she is, standing like a cherub, glowing against the bright sky.
Disheveled blond hair sprouting out of her ponytail in a thousand directions.
Crinkled denim overalls, still two sizes too big.
Dirt-coated dimples, smiling as big as the sun.
“You’re alive,” I whisper. I almost don’t believe it. “You’re alive.”
My sister throws herself on top of me, knocking the air out of my lungs. She plants a fat kiss on my cheek, and I pull her into a tight hug. I don’t care how much it hurts.
“Oh, Kotie . . . You smell like you rolled around in its shit.”
“Language, Bun!”
“What? Clara says it all the time.”
So this is going to be a problem.
“Hey,” Jasper says, walking toward us. He kneels down and offers a hand. “Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty.”
“Where are we?”
“Breakfast shop on the mountain. Promise you won’t fall off it this time?”
“Haha,” I say. Jasper pulls me to a stand. Defying all odds, the shop is also still standing. In the parking lot, a few feet from us, Clara, Chief, Greeley, and Anika lean on stumps and concrete blocks and stacked bricks, making the most of the wreckage. “Are we safe?”
“No,” Jasper says. “But better up here than back in the Split. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Hand in hand, we walk toward the overlook. Unlike last time, we stay several feet away from the edge. I don’t need to be any closer to see that the Split is gone. The wall is torn down. Zombies crawl like ants over the grounds. There are hundreds of them.
The space between my eyebrows pulses.
Was any of it worth it?
I say, “We can’t stay here. They’ll smell us. They’ll be up here in no time.”
“Like we don’t know that, Captain Obvious,” Greeley scoffs, walking up behind us. As I turn around, I catch her rolling her eyes. “Jasper made us wait for your stupid ass to wake up. As if you’re too heavy to lug over my shoulder.” She swings her arm around. “Though I am fucking sore.”
I turn back to Jasper. “Where do we go from here?”
Jasper thumbs behind him. “Chief’s looking through Chandler’s papers. Hasn’t found anything documenting how to slow the virus, though.”
“I bet she kept the information locked in the basement with Garrett . . .”
Jasper sighs. “Maybe. But we did find her journal.”
Greeley rolls her eyes again. This time, so hard I think they’ll get stuck. “He’s right—between the pages lined with anguish over losing me, we did find something useful.”
Jasper and I exchange a look. “Whatever helps you sleep at night, Gree.” He shakes his head back and forth, and I hold in a laugh. “There’s someone in Maine, Chandler thinks, with a cure—a real one. One that doesn’t just slow down the virus but reverses it.”
No shit? But . . . “Did you say Maine?”
Jasper nods. “Kennebunkport. Ever heard of Camp Bush?” I shake my head no. “Sling always said there was a hideout in California, but we believe he was fed false information. The safe haven’s up north.”
Greeley pumps her fist in the air. “Road trip, road trip, road trip!”
“Change of scenery could be nice,” I say, blinking ash out of my eyes. Though my gut sinks as I consider the implications. Traveling north through the country with a large group feels like a recipe for disaster. “Would all of us go? All the survivors?”
“Blondie,” Greeley says. “There’s only a handful of us left.”
“We don’t know that,” Chief calls. He saunters over to us, papers gripped in his hands. “There could be more survivors. There have to be.” His shoulders slump—a sight I never thought I’d witness.
Oh, Chief. He lost more than any of us. His entire purpose was to save the Split, and now his home and his people are gone.
“Let’s go to Maine,” I say. “Find this person with a cure. We can bring it back here, to South Carolina. Administer it to the remaining survivors.”
My chest fills with something like hope.
As the shrill caw of a zomcrow echoes in the distance, Jasper takes my hand and squeezes it.
Our community is gone, but we’ve survived.
We have no belongings, but we have each other.
And so, together, we will head north. Toward hope.
Because when all else is lost, we can count on that to carry us forward.