Requiem

The regulator is lying facedown in the dirt, arms and legs splayed. A pool of blood extends like a dark shadow around him. Dani is standing near him with her handgun out. She must have been the one to kill him.

Coral has her arms wrapped around her waist, looking shocked and slightly guilty, as though she somehow summoned the regulator to her. She is uninjured, which is a relief. I’m glad that my instincts were to save her. I think about centering her in my crosshairs earlier, and feel another pulse of shame. This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

Hatred, too, the zombies warned me about.

Pike, Hunter, and Lu are all talking at the same time. The rest of our group huddles in a semicircle around them, pale and frightened-looking in the moonlight, their eyes hollows, like resurrected ghosts.

Only Alex isn’t standing. He’s squatting, quickly and methodically repacking his backpack.

“All right.” Raven speaks quietly, but the urgency there commands our attention. “Let’s look at the facts. We have a dead regulator on our hands.”

Someone whimpers.

“What are we doing?” Gordo breaks in. His face is wild with panic. “We have to go.”

“Go where?” Raven demands. “We don’t know where they are, what direction they’re coming from. We could be ru

“Shhh.” Dani hushes us sharply. For a second there is total stillness, except for the low moan of wind through the trees and an owl calling. Then we hear it: from the south, the distant echo of voices.

“I say we stay and fight,” Pike says. “This is ourterritory.”

“We don’t fight unless we have to,” Raven says, turning on him. “We don’t know how many regulators there are, or what kind of weapons they have. They’re better fed and stronger than we are.”

“I’m sick of ru

“We’re not ru

“Take your guns, knives—anything you have. But remember, we don’t fight unless we have to. Don’t do anything until my signal, okay? Nobody moves.Nobody breathes, coughs, sneezes, or farts. Is that clear?”

Pike spits on the ground. No one speaks.

“All right,” Raven says. “Let’s go.”

The group breaks up, quickly and wordlessly. People blur past me and become shadows; the shadows fold themselves into the dark. I push my way to Raven, who has knelt down beside the dead regulator and is checking him for weapons, money, whatever might be of use.

“Raven.” Her name catches in my throat. “Do you think—?”

“They’ll be fine,” she says without looking up. She knows I was going to ask about Julian and Tack. “Now get out of here.”

I move through the camp at a jog, find my backpack heaped next to several others at the edge of the fire pit. I sling my pack over my right shoulder; next to the rifle, the strap digs painfully into my skin. I grab two of the other packs and swing them onto my left shoulder.

Raven jogs past me. “Time to go, Lena.” She, too, dissipates into the darkness.

I stand up, then notice that someone unpacked the medical supplies last night. If anything happens—if we haveto run, and can’t come back—we’ll need those.

I remove one of the backpacks and kneel down.

The regulators are getting closer. I can pick out individual voices now, individual words. I am suddenly aware that the camp has been totally cleared out. I’m the only one left.

I unzip the backpack. My hands are shaking. I wrestle a sweatshirt out of the backpack, begin stuffing it instead with Band-Aids and bacitracin.

A hand clamps down on my shoulder.

“What the hellare you doing?” It’s Alex. He gets a hand under my arm and hauls me to my feet. I just manage to zip up the backpack. “Come on.”

I try to wrench my arm away, but he keeps a firm grip on me, practically dragging me into the woods, away from the camp. I flash back to the raid night in Portland when Alex led me like this through a black maze of rooms; when we huddled together on the piss-smelling floor of a storage shed and he gently wrapped my wounded leg, his hands soft and strong and strange on my skin.

He kissed me that night.

I push the memory away.

We plunge down a steep embankment, sinking through a rotten layer of loam and damp leaves, toward a jutting lip of land that forms a natural cave, a hollowed-out spot in the hillside. Alex pilots me into a crouch and practically pushes me into the small, dark space.

“Watch it.” Pike is there too: a few glistening teeth, a bit of solid darkness. He shifts slightly to accommodate us. Alex slides beside me, knees drawn to his chest.

The tents are no more than fifty feet away from us, up the hill. I say a silent prayer that the regulators will think we’ve run, and not waste their time searching.

The waiting is agony. The voices from the woods have dropped away. The regulators must be moving slowly now, stalking us, drawing closer. Maybe they’re even in the camp, threading their way past the tents: deadly, silent shadows.

The space is too narrow, the darkness intolerable. The idea comes to me, suddenly, that we are wedged in a coffin.

Alex shifts next to me. The back of his hand brushes up against my arm. My throat goes dry. His breathing is quicker than usual. I go stiff, perfectly rigid, until he withdraws his hand. It must have been an accident.

Another agonizing stretch of silence. Pike mutters, “This is stupid.”

“Shhh.” Alex hushes him sharply.

“Sitting here like rats in a trap . . .”

“I swear, Pike . . .”

“ Bothof you be quiet,” I whisper fiercely. We lapse into silence again. After a few more seconds, someone shouts. Alex tenses up. Pike eases his rifle off his shoulder, jabbing me in the side with his elbow. I bite back a cry.

“They’ve cleared out.” The voice floats down to us from the camp. So they’ve arrived. I guess now that they’ve found the tents empty, they don’t think they need to be quiet anymore. I wonder what their plan was: surround us, mow us down while we slept.

I wonder how many there are.

“Damn. You were right about the shots we heard. It’s Don.”

“Dead?”

“Yup.”

There’s a faint rustling sound, as though someone is kicking through the tents. “Look at how they live out here. Packed together. Mucking around in the dirt. Animals.”

“Careful. It’s all contaminated.”

So far, I’ve counted six voices.

“It smells, doesn’t it? I can smellthem. Shit.”

“Breathe through your mouth.”

“Bastards,” Pike mutters.

“Shhh,” I say reflexively, even though anger has gripped me, too, alongside the fear. I hate them. I hate every single one of them, for thinking that they are better than us.

“Where do you think they’re headed?”

“Wherever it is, they can’t have gone far.”

Seven distinct voices in all. Maybe eight. It’s hard to tell. And we are about two dozen. Still, as Raven said, it’s impossible to know what kind of weapons they’re carrying, whether there are reinforcements waiting nearby.

“Let’s wrap it up here, then. Chris?”

“Got it.”

My thighs have started to cramp. I ease my weight backward to get some relief, pressing up against Alex. He doesn’t pull away. Once again, his hand brushes my arm, and I’m not sure if it’s accidental, or a gesture of reassurance. For a second—despite everything else—my insides go white and electric, and Pike and the regulators and the cold zoom away, and there is only Alex’s shoulder against my shoulder, and his ribs expanding and contracting against mine, and the rough warmth of his fingers.