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  He inspected the cuts on my shins, moving my torn black leggings up to see better. Little Jack’s metal tractors had cut bloody crisscross lines into my legs. I leaned forward to help clean them.

  “What happened to you guys?” Pollard asked.

  “The boy in the McDonald’s.” I didn’t say, The boy you killed, but I thought it. There had been other options than shooting Jack. I’d survived as long as they had and never hurt anyone. I hated that he’d pulled a gun first and asked questions…never.

  “We have first aid. Can I clean these cuts and put bandages on them?”

  “Uh.” Overwhelmed by so many new people, I didn’t know how to politely say I'd rather be alone for a few minutes, but my exhaustion gave me the excuse I needed. “Can I rest first? I’ve been on my feet all day.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He jerked to his full height of near six feet. “Do you want a blanket or something?” Without waiting for an answer he snapped open a fuzzy afghan and dropped it over my hips. “Make yourself at home.” He left in a rush.

  I didn’t sleep, but the garbled voices coming from outside, the security of the barricades, and the warm air lulled me into a hazy daydream. I curled up and fantasized I was home in my own bed and not injured in a hot, sort of sour smelling truck stop surrounded by strangers.

  With my eyes closed, I imagined my white ceiling and lavender walls. I could see my dresser and all the stuff spread over the top, every piece of it important to me. A guitar-shaped porcelain dish where I kept my earrings. A miniature bottle of perfume I wore on special occasions. Painted clay frogs I’d made in ninth grade art class. I could practically smell the carpet and feel the soft cotton sheets embracing me.

  Someday I would go back. After I got to Raleigh, found my dad’s lab, and liberated his cure to the 212R virus. I pictured myself, a little older and wiser, packing a bag and setting off along a road alone, headed home to Cherry Blossom Court.

  I heard a tiny clinking sound and turned my head in time to catch Hunny sliding shiny quarters into her dirty socks.

  “What in the world are you doing?”

  Chapter Eight

  Hunny startled wildly, a sure sign of guilt as far as I was concerned. She must have thought I was dead asleep and she was in the clear to steal things.

  “Nothing.” She snapped upright. “What?”

  “Where did you get those? The cash register?” It wasn’t taking money, now worthless anyway, that irritated me. It was the stealing and sneaking and lying. “Is my clicker pen in there? And Russell’s lighter? What else do you have?”

  I pushed myself to my feet as Pollard entered through a swinging door from the kitchen. He’d washed the blood splatter off his arms and face and it improved his appearance tenfold.

  “You’re up.” He grinned at me, and as his expression warmed he appeared younger than ever. Not that much older than me.

  Hunny ran and threw herself at Pollard, her arms circling his waist. “She’s being mean to me.”

  Ha. I snorted, surprised she wasn’t already giving the man her pretty pouty face.

  He tried to disentangle himself, but Hunny held on like a monkey. Finally, he looked at me for help. “What happened?”

  I didn’t give Hunny time to run off or tell a story about how it was all my fault. I yanked up the back of her shirt. She had a Barbie in a puke green ball gown and a TV remote jammed under the waistband of her jeans. She thrashed, but I was quick and emptied both her front pockets. A lighter, a wristwatch, a banana flavored lollipop and a beaded hair clip clattered to the floor. If I could have bent down on my injured leg and removed her shoes and socks I'd have done that too because I had a feeling there was more hiding in there than quarters.

  Squeezing Pollard, Hunny wept noisily. “Don’t be mad at me,” she sobbed into his T-shirt. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”

  “Unbelievable.” I sighed. “You don’t have to steal. Everything’s free now.” It didn’t make sense in my brain.

  What was the point of sneaking around stealing stuff? What kind of rush did she get from dead people’s things? The rules were different now. It wasn’t like anyone was going to arrest her for shoplifting. So, why do it at all?

  I was reminded, again, that I knew next to nothing about any of these people.

  “You stole Russell’s lighter?” Pollard asked above the crying. He just kept shaking his head, looking as flabbergasted as I felt. “What for? There’s at least two dozen on the front counter.”

  Hunny cried louder.

  The high-pitched noise set me even further on edge. I palmed the handle of my short sword, waiting for Pollard’s reaction. With his itchy trigger finger I feared he'd have an equally hot temper. I had dealt with bullies before.

  “Let go of me,” Pollard said gently. “No one’s mad at you. I’m just surprised is all.”

  Simone and Russell, attracted by the noise, walked in through the kitchen. I watched to see how they would respond. I hadn’t seen Russell fire a gun at the McDonald’s, and Simone wasn’t obviously packing heat, but that didn’t mean they both weren’t violent gun nuts with pistols under their shirts.

  Russell immediately spotted his recovered property.

  “Cool, where did you find my lighter?” He picked it up and flicked the wheel. A tiny flame burst to life.

  “Never mind,” Pollard grumbled. Because Hunny wouldn’t let go, he finally lifted her right off her feet and set her on a chair. She tried one last time to latch onto Pollard, but he carefully avoided her clutches.

  “Listen,” he barked, silencing the entire room. I flinched at the harsh tone of his voice. But then his words quieted and his expression softened. “We’re a team here, you got it? And if you’re going to be part of our team, know that we don’t steal from each other. We help each other. We share and compromise and protect each other. If you want something, then ask.” He folded his arms. “Understand?”

  And they listened to him. Everyone consented, even Hunny. Though Simone was clearly the oldest member of the little group, Pollard was in charge. I glanced from Russell to Simone. They looked up to Pollard. Either he had qualities worth respecting or he was some cult leader. People looked up to them too.

  Hunny, red-faced and hiccupping, nodded.

  “Do you understand?” he asked again.

  “I understand.”

  “Now apologize to Russell, and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

  In the tiniest voice possible, Hunny apologized, and the tension in the room eased.

  The little girl found a quiet spot behind a magazine stand to nurse her wounded pride, and Simone and Russell strolled into the store area.

  Though she was embarrassed now, Hunny would do well here. These people seemed decent. They could keep her fed and safe and maybe even convince her to brush her tangly hair. I felt good about the decision to continue my journey as soon as I could walk without falling down.

  “Ready for that first aid?” Pollard asked me.

  I wiggled my toes. The dried blood pulled and itched. “Yeah, that’d be really nice.”

  Pollard collected a cardboard box stuffed with alcohol, cotton balls, antibiotic cream and dozens of standard size Band-Aids. And he had a handgun holstered on his hip.

  I pictured the thing going off inside the McDonald’s.

  He caught me staring. “You don’t like guns?”

  That was an understatement. “No.”

  “It’s for self defense. I only use it when I have to.” He sat beside me on the bench. “Roll up your pants.”

  Like it was no big deal. Just roll up your pants. But as I slowly exposed my legs to him, the warm, stale air of the truck stop diner tickled my calves, and it felt like a big deal. Like getting undressed.

  “How old are you?” I blurted out, keeping my eyes on my knees. That felt safer because Pollard was suddenly far into my personal space.

  “Nineteen. You?”

  I chanced a look at Pollard and was thrown off guard by how blue his eyes we
re. “Seventeen.”

  “You were going to start your senior year in the fall?” he guessed.

  I was. Until the world went topsy-turvy. “Exactly.”

  “My senior year was fun,” Pollard said, unscrewing the bottle of rubbing alcohol. “I miss it.”

  “High school?” Weren’t people always relieved to finish high school?

  “No. The old world.”

  Well, I missed my old life, too. Plenty. But that world was gone, and by the look of things—forever. I was more interested in the new communities we could build after my dad’s elixir took effect.

  Pollard set the bottle of rubbing alcohol beside me and counted out fluffy cotton balls. I reached for the medicine, unused to people doing things for me.

  “I’ll do it.”

  The corner of his mouth compressed. “Will you just relax and let me help you?”

  What he didn’t seem to understand was, I couldn’t calm down. Even my fingers were twitchy. Too much isolation, maybe. Or too much excitement in the last twenty-four hours. But short of ripping the materials out of his hands, I had no choice.

  He laid an old shirt under my legs before pouring the alcohol directly onto my gnarly looking cuts. It stung like crazy. I tapped my feet in a quick, country two-step rhythm. Tuppa-tuppa-tuppa-tap.

  “Sorry.” Pollard dabbed at the blood with cotton balls. “Does it hurt?”

  “Mmm.” A lot.

  “It’ll keep it from getting infected.”

  Thanks to my dad I knew all about sanitation and infection. If I’d thought of packing first aid when I left my home the day before I wouldn’t have been there. I would have been in downtown Raleigh. I vowed to never take off without emergency supplies again. Huge rookie mistake.

  He poured another stream of rubbing alcohol over the worst cut, burning a trail of fire down my calf and wetting my socks. More than ever I needed a shower. A long hot shower with body wash and a loofah. I flopped back onto the booth and covered my eyes with both hands. But those days were long gone. The best I could hope for was a sponge bath or a dip in a bug-infested creek.

  I missed the sweet-smelling personal hygiene products of the past. Bubblegum body wash. Peppermint hand lotion. Coconut conditioner. After the apocalypse one of the first things I was putting on my to-do list was recreating scented soap.

  Pollard laid his palm on my good knee, and it was a solid reassuring weight. “Are you all right?” His fingers squeezed lightly. “You’re not going to pass out or anything are you?”

  I didn’t move a muscle. I was too afraid he’d leave his hand there, and at the same time afraid he’d take it away. No one had touched me kindly in a long time. And Hunny’s clinging hugs didn’t count. Not really.

  “I’m not going to pass out.”

  He removed his fingers and dabbed some more with the cotton balls. “Where did you come from?”

  Thinking about my history helped me forget the sting below my knees. “Charlotte, originally,” I answered. “But two years ago we moved to Parrish Meadows, a suburb a couple miles south of here.” When my family burst and splintered, leaving my dad and me on our own.

  The easiest thing for Dad to do at the time, because neither of us could live in the old house without having coinciding nervous breakdowns, was sell the house I’d grown up in, pack the belongings that didn’t hurt too much to touch, and go somewhere brand new. A house with no history, no past, and no secrets.

  It hadn’t solved all our problems, but the new house on Cherry Blossom Court had helped me feel closer to my old self.

  “What about you?” I countered, meeting his blue eyes again.

  “I started college last year in Louisville.”

  As he bent over my legs, his blond hair obscured his eyes. I had the insane desire to brush it out of his way.

  “When everyone started getting sick,” he continued, “I drove home. But the roads were so bad it took me a week to drive to Durham. A week. And I only stopped when I absolutely had to.” He groaned as if it still aggravated him. “I talked to my family on the phone the whole way. They all had fevers, my sister Opha the worst.” Pollard replaced the alcohol in the box and searched for bandages. “But then they stopped answering my calls. When I finally got home they were gone, and it was clear what had happened.”

  I felt a pang of sympathy. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I lived with my dad too. Before things got bad.”

  Pollard bobbed his head. “Is Hunny your sister, then?” he asked.

  That was a stretch. We didn’t look anything alike. She had short, blonde curls and I had my mom’s straight, glossy black hair. “No. She and I ran into each other yesterday. The lady who was taking care of her was killed. So I let her follow me around.” But that was over. As far as I was concerned, Hunny was Pollard’s problem now. He just didn’t know it yet.

  He spread antibiotic cream over my each of my scrapes, and I flinched at his unexpected touch. The two jagged, still oozing cuts on my left leg were just as deep as the defensive wounds on my forearms. And every one of them stung.

  “Does that hurt?” he asked.

  “A little.” I sat up. More than anything the feel of his fingers on my bare flesh unsettled me. “Thanks for taking us in.” They had saved our butts back in that drive-thru. I owed him and Russell a lot. If they hadn’t burst in, I might be dead. Hunny too.

  “We need to stick together.” He smoothed a bandage onto my leg, and then another and another. “There aren’t many people left.”

  “Have you seen anyone else?” I asked, perking up.

  Pollard blew out a long stream of breath. “It’s been a while. Finding you and Hunny was definitely a surprise.”

  That’s what I’d been afraid of. How would I ever locate a doctor to replicate my dad’s cure if there weren’t any uninfected people left? I knew a lot of stuff, just from living with a chemist and volunteering at a hospital, but there was no way I could read the formulas, analyze the chemicals, and create new batches. I might as well try to build a rocket ship out of trash from the parking lot dumpster.

  “But Russell and Simone are good people,” Pollard continued. “You’ll see.”

  Probably not since I was leaving first chance I got, but I didn’t argue. “How do you know them?”

  “I didn’t before the plague, but we’ve become like family since grouping up. It’s been over a week, I guess. Russell and Shelly—” he cleared his throat, “were hiding on the roof of a grocery store. Russell’s a good kid. A little immature, but he’s only fifteen. He’ll grow.”

  “And Simone?”

  He cracked a smile. “I searched the police station on Jefferson for ammo and I found her locked in a cell. They’d arrested her for public intoxication, and then left her there with a sandwich and a cup of coffee.”

  “Oh.” Mason had been in a juvenile detention center when the red virus struck. Had he been locked in a cell and forgotten? Had he died of dehydration and rotted in his bunk? God, I hoped not. I hoped there had been a riot and he’d escaped. Even if I never saw him again, I wanted to believe he was out there in the world. Alive.

  “Simone was very, very happy to see me.” He rested his hand on my knee for the briefest moment, his blue eyes twinkling. “Take it easy, okay? I’ll go put this stuff away.”

  I smiled despite the exhaustion creeping up on me.

  While he packed the first aid kit, I rested flat on the bench and closed my eyes. But I felt too vulnerable to sleep around a group of strangers. The truck stop’s exits were sealed. It would be so easy to go from guest to prisoner in a place like this.

  Maybe it had been a mistake grouping up with them, even temporarily. Teaming up with other survivors was the last thing I needed to be doing. I wish I’d been clear-headed enough at the McDonald’s to walk away. But the gunshots and little Jack and the blood and Ben stalking me had all messed with my emotions and my logical thinking.

  Hunny slithered into the dining room and, with eyes averted, crawled into my la
p. I sat up and lightly finger-combed her blonde curls, thinking how pretty they’d look clean and tangle-free. Like doll’s hair.

  “I’m sorry I stole your pen.” She produced my Hello Kitty ballpoint from up her sleeve and offered it to me.

  Huffing a laugh, I shook my head. “If you’d asked me I probably would have given it to you. I only keep it so I can write songs, but I haven’t been able to write since the red virus.” Except for that sad snippet of an elegy that had come to me on the highway. And I couldn’t bear to finish it.

  Hunny clicked the pen up and down, up and down. “What kind of songs?”

  “Country music,” I said. “That’s my favorite.”

  “Can you sing one of your songs for me?”

  My stomach clenched. I wrote music, but I wasn’t a great singer. I heard melodies and riffs and beats and hooks in my head, but my voice couldn’t capture all the nuances I dreamed about. I’d given up any fantasy of having a singing career a couple years earlier. I would have been happy songwriting full time and letting the pros handle the vocals.

  “I don’t sing,” I told her. “But I want you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Stop stealing from survivors. The whole world is one big free-for-all. You don’t have to steal from me or any of these other people.”

  She tucked her head under my chin and mumbled, “I want things. I used to have a lot of things.”

  Like a warm, wiggly puppy she curled into my body heat, and my arms instinctively circled her. I inhaled the scent of her hair, a stray curl tickling my nose. Mom used to hold me on her lap. I’d been an idiot to take her hugs and kisses for granted.

  “Yeah.” I wanted stuff too. I wanted my family back and my guitar and electricity. I wanted clean water to flow when I turned on a faucet and fresh food and movies and music. I wanted it all.

  I might actually get my wish if I found my dad’s cure. But I’d never get there sitting around daydreaming.

  “Go pick out a drink for me, will you?”

  Hunny gave me a last squeeze and ran into the store section of the building. I stood and tested my knee. It was starting to hurt again, but the scrapes on my arms and ankles felt much better. I pushed my leggings down and shook blood back into my feet.