Until We End (6 page)

I started following them to the SUV, but Lonnie hung back and grabbed me by the arm. He slipped a granola bar into my hand with a conspiratorial wink.“Don't let Lu see it,” he whispered.

I smiled back and stuffed the bar into my back pocket, and just like that, I had an ally.

I didn't talk on the way back to my house. Didn't even have to give directions. Brooks drove, and he remembered every single turn. I learned a lot, just listening and watching.

They had a stockpile. Jackson had said something about a cellar somewhere. Maybe under the warehouse? I made a note to check as soon as I got the chance.

Lonnie seemed like he was nice just for the sake of being nice. He sat beside me and laughed at things that weren't actually very funny, like how they had enough peanut butter and jelly to last for a year but no bread. He grinned at me, like he was trying to include me in the joke, but I'd have seriously killed for some freshly baked bread.

Once we got to my neighborhood, though, the sight of my neighbor's empty houses ruined my appetite. I might not have liked my neighbors but I knew them. They were real, live human beings who I'd see at block parties, who sent meatloaves and casseroles when my mom died giving birth to Coby, who shouted hello when I jogged past them. And they were dead.

I watched Lonnie's antics instead of looking at the skeleton of my old neighborhood, wondering how many people like him were left in the world. Probably not very many. Being nice wouldn't get you far post-TEOTWAWKI.

We parked in front of my house. I followed the brigade as they got out of the SUV and walked across the lawn. My heart pounded faster with every step we took, my mind busy cataloguing everything I had inside and wondering how I could steer them away from the most vital supplies.

If they walked too far out into the backyard, they'd see the door to the storage container where my Dad hid his hoard. If they looked in Dad's closet, they'd find his gun cabinet stocked full of weapons. I had to keep them distracted.

My mouth went dry as we entered the house. I tried to make myself detached, an observer, but the sight of the destruction was devastating. This was my home, my whole world for nine months. Coby's world. When I got him back, where would we go?

Lu stopped in the foyer and turned to me. “Food first,” she snapped. “And hurry.”

I led them into the kitchen and pointed out our large, walk-in pantry.

“There's where we keep the food,” I said, struggling to remember everything inside. I thought it was about six weeks' worth of provisions — mostly canned goods. That wasn't bad. A manageable loss.

Lonnie squeezed my shoulder and gave me a sympathetic look before he followed the guys into the pantry. They cleared the shelves one by one, dumping everything into canvas bags they'd brought from the warehouse. Lu stayed outside, watching me.

After a few minutes, Jackson came out and whispered something into Lu's ear. She turned her sharp gaze onto me. “Is this all?” she asked.

I nodded and licked my lips to keep my voice from sticking. “That's all I have.”
Please believe me,
I silently begged.
Please believe me and let's just
leave!

Lu turned in a slow circle, scanning the kitchen. She stopped as she faced the window to the backyard and walked closer to it. “What's out there?”

“The greenhouse. I was getting water for it from the springs when I met Brooks—“

“Yes, I know that,” she interrupted. “Take us out there.”

I clenched my fists. “Fine. But it's basically dead.” I stalked through the house and out the back door, deliberately acting snotty to keep their focus on me. Anything to keep their eyes from straying to the back of the yard and seeing the door to our stockpile. I lifted the latch of the greenhouse and kicked the door open, then turned back to them with a bitchy smile.

Brooks and Lonnie had followed us from the house, and Brooks was looking at me with a raised brow. I made my smile bitchier, just for him.

They filed into the greenhouse and spread out, each of them examining something different. In the pen above us, my chickens beat their wings and clucked worriedly.

Lonnie stood above my compost barrel, holding his nose. “
Cora,”
he said. “Are you storing shit in here or what?”

A twig snapped from one of the plant beds, where Brooks stood looking at my tomato vines. “Cora,” he said, “this is pathetic.”

I huffed and crossed my arms. “You don't have to tell me, okay? I'm a horrible gardener. I know.”

“So,” Lu said from where she stood with Jackson next to the pond, “whose greenhouse was this?”

“My dad's,” I said. And he would be so disappointed in me for letting the greenhouse die. For letting someone see it. Lu watched me closely.

“Are we taking the chickens?” Jackson asked her.

“That's not a bad idea,” Lu murmured, turning her back on me to examine the chicken coop. “And maybe the goat? How much do they eat?”

“I thought they just ate grass?” Brooks said. “What about the fish?”

Lu shrugged.

I chewed the insides of my cheeks. They spoke so casually of starving me and Coby. When I got him back, our only sustainable food sources would be gone. The food buried in the storage container under the backyard would only last so long.

They poked around for a few more minutes, and I shifted from foot to foot, counting the seconds till we could leave. At two hundred and sixty-four seconds, Jackson started whispering with Lu and I knew I wasn't off the hook.

“This and the food in your pantry was all you had, is that right?” Lu asked.

“Yes,” I snapped.

“Touchy,” Jackson said quietly. Lonnie and Brooks stilled from where they were poking at the fish and looked up at us. Lonnie's face was worried.

“Look,” I said. “I know the greenhouse looks bad now, but—“

“Shut up!” Brooks hissed.

The nerve! “No, you shut up! It wasn't always this bad—“

“Cora,
quiet
.” The look on his face made me stop talking — an expression that didn't seem to fit on him. Fear.

The others had fallen silent, too.

“Do you hear that?” Brooks whispered. Lu held her hand up for silence and nodded.

I listened hard. Then I heard it. In the distance, this faint thumping — it took me a minute to place, I hadn't heard one in so long — a helicopter.

We froze where we stood, no one daring to move or even breathe. The thumping was getting louder, coming straight for us, until it was directly overhead and I could feel the vibration of its blades in my bones.

It seemed to pause for a moment. Then it started moving again, this time in the other direction, the roaring of its engine gradually becoming fainter.

Lu's voice cut into the silence. “
Move.”

We ran back to the SUV. They threw the canvas sacks into the trunk and piled in after me. Lu was driving this time, Jackson in the passenger seat and me sandwiched between Lonnie and Brooks in the back. My heart beat so fast I could barely breathe.

Brooks muttered a set of directions to Lu and a few turns later we were speeding up the entrance ramp to the bypass. I had to sit on my hands to keep from fidgeting, but I couldn't stop myself from my looking behind us every two minutes.

The nerves jangling in my chest begged me to say something, to break the tension, but my tongue was thick and dry and useless in my mouth. What would happen if that helicopter spotted us? It had to be military. What would they do? What would
we
do?

I turned around to look out the rear windshield again, and what I saw made my heart stop.

“There's someone there,” I tried to say. It came out strangled.

“There's someone
following us!
”

A camouflage hummer — an army hummer — was speeding up the highway toward us. Lu swore and stomped on the accelerator, throwing me back in my seat. Jackson twisted back to look, and when he saw what I did, he tore his seatbelt off and dove under the seat, coming back up with a sawed-off shotgun. Brooks reached under his seat and grabbed a monstrous thing that could only be a fully automatic machine gun, while Lonnie pulled out two pistols and held one in each hand like he knew how to use them.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and grabbed my backpack, then curled into a ball on the floorboard between our seat and the center console with my hands on my head. My heart pounded, pumping adrenaline into my veins, giving my vision a crystalline quality.

Brooks and Lonnie had turned in their seats so they faced the rear windshield. The sunroof slid open and Jackson poised himself under it, loading his shotgun. The wind whipped my hair as Brooks and Lonnie rolled down their windows.

Then the sound of gunshots cracked the air. I cringed and tried to make myself even smaller, then looked back up and saw that none of the guys had started shooting. The hummer had opened fire.

I covered my ears and raised my head above the seat, darting a glance at the hummer. It was still coming, gaining on us, getting closer with every frenzied heartbeat.

The rattling gunfire coming from the hummer didn't stop. We were sitting ducks. The guys couldn't start shooting — they'd be cut down as soon as they leaned out of the windows. Brooks and Lonnie's faces, though, were cold masks of indifference. Lonnie's humor was so thoroughly missing that for a sliver of a second, I couldn't even remember what his smile looked like.

The rhythmic pounding of the gunshots blended with the sound of my heart thudding in my ears, until I couldn't differentiate the two. It would be so easy for one of the bullets to pierce the SUV and my heart, stopping its beating forever.

A pop sounded, even louder than the gunshot, one of the bullets finding its mark and puncturing a tire. Lu shouted a curse that rose above the den, twisted the wheel and sent us flying.

My body pitched through air and slammed into the door as the car went fishtailing across three lanes, the squeal of screeching tires drowning out every other sound. We hit the cement highway divider with a sickening metal crunch, a crack reverberating through my skeleton as my head snapped back and hit the window, splitting my skull with pain.

My vision flashed red and white, flaring with spots, my stomach still spinning even though the cement divider had brought us to a stop. I gasped for breath, groaning at the pain that lanced from the crown of my head down to my jaw.

I tried to open my eyes, but the pain was too much, cutting into every movement.

Then a pair of hands were on me, and, over the pain, I heard someone shouting my name. The person shook me, rattling my teeth and making me choke on blood that leaked from my tongue, and the initial shock receded enough for me to crack my eyelids and cough, spitting onto the floorboard.

Brooks knelt beside me, focused on something outside the window. I tried to turn my head and see what it was, but I moved too fast and an electric shock of pain made me limp.

When he spoke, I could barely hear him. “Can you move?” Brooks' expression was so terrifying it made me forget the throbbing in my head for a moment. I'd thought there was something primal in him before, but the look on his face at that moment — savage — confirmed it.

He must have taken my awed silence for a
no,
because he started moving away from me. His voice sounded fuzzy, like my ears were stuffed with cotton. “Don't pass out,” he said, opened the door behind me and got out of the SUV.

No way was I passing out. I started moving — gingerly, carefully — and managed to push myself up to my hands and knees. Shutting my eyes so hard the dots behind my lids burst into a kaleidoscope of colors, I fought to concentrate through the agony.

Basic human instinct is to fight pain. But I didn't fight it. I took the pain inside of me, letting it rip my nerves to shreds and swallowing it whole, inhaling slow and belly-deep through my nose and exhaling softly through my mouth. It was a technique that I'd perfected during my long runs pre-TEOTWAWKI. It let me run faster and harder and stronger every time and it
would
see me through this. I'd make sure of that.

My mind and muscles steadier, I crawled across the seat to see what was going on. A loud
crack
sounded from outside and I just about jumped out of my skin, then my senses flooded back with the reek of burnt rubber and the firecracker burst of gunshots.

I flattened myself against the seat and inched up to peek out the window. It took me a moment to absorb what I was seeing and when it finally sunk in, I fell back onto the seat with my heart hammering in my throat.

Brooks and the brigade had taken cover further up the highway behind the cement divider, pointing their guns at the hummer, which blocked the road. Five soldiers wearing camouflage army regs and white masks were squatting behind the hummer with their rifles pointed toward the brigade.

I had a perfect view.

Adrenaline helped to clear my head. I looked around for my backpack, found it halfway under the passenger seat and ducked down to pick it up. I had to stay low. The soldiers thought we were outnumbered and outgunned. But they didn't know there was one more person in the SUV. Me. And I was armed.

I got the nine-millimeter semi-automatic Glock 17 out of my hot pink backpack, loaded a large magazine and slid across the seat to the door on the opposite side of the standoff. Every movement sent a throb through my head, but I absorbed it, ignored it. Cracking the door open inch-by-inch, moving as slowly as I possibly could, I crept out of the car.

Voices shouted over the ringing in my ears and the constant rattling of gunfire, but they were confused, seeming to come from everywhere at once. I dropped to my belly on the asphalt and stared at everyone's feet to get a better vantage point.

From my place on the asphalt, I could make out two bodies — two of the hummer's soldiers — sprawled on the ground and covered with blood. The other three were circling their hummer, using it for cover. I couldn't see any of the brigade, but I took that as a good thing.