“Don’t you guys think we should go away from Calgary?” I ask. “Head west, toward the coast?”
Topher gives me a meaningful look. He knows what I’m getting at. We’ve talked about my parents and where they might be a hundred times. “We’d never make it across the mountains. Not now.”
“And we don’t have the supplies for such a long hike,” Xander says.
“Hike?” Emily snorts. “Isn’t it like six hundred miles?”
“It’s smarter to see what’s happening nearby,” Lochie says. “We might find supplies, food. We could always come back here.”
“Or head west,” I say stubbornly. The four of them stare at me, and I start to feel like we’re going to have a vote, and I’m going to end up looking like a dickhead. “Fine. You’re right. We should look for other survivors around here first. So we should take food and weapons. Maybe warm clothes. We’ll need them soon.” We could have blankets of snow by late September, if we live that long.
“Right. Lots of weapons. Everything we have.” Topher curls his fingers around Tuck’s crossbow.
“Do you think Sawyer and the rest will go for it?” Xander says.
“I don’t care,” I say. Nothing left to lose, I remind myself. “I’m going. I’m not staying here to starve or freeze without even trying.” A few cells of my weed-addled brain cling to a faint hope that my parents are safe somewhere. And something in me wants to at least try to get back to them. Even if I die on the way, I have to try, because maybe trying will make all that other stuff go away. The suspensions, getting arrested, probation, the judge and his disapproving glare. My utter failure to make something of everything they did for me. And all the things we said to one another that none of us meant. I wanted to make it all better. Tucker would have understood. He knew how important it was. The others see only my surface: tough, reckless, and snarky. I hate to dissuade them of that, even now when a little attitude adjustment might be sensible. But since when am I sensible? “I’d rather throw myself into a Nahx cooking pot,” I add, for effect.
“It may well come to that,” Lochie says.
EIGHTH
Wait.
Wait here.
Stay here for a while. Try to think.
Disconnect and find something to eat, and a drink of water. The hole in my chest is shrinking, and the armor plates have knitted closed. It aches, but I can breathe again, without wanting to scream anyway.
Pain filled up my mind for a while. I couldn’t think at all. Pain is not supposed to do that to me. They even tested me, I think. I don’t remember that very well. Except for the pain part. I might have pretended it didn’t hurt because that’s what they wanted. That was stupid, I now realize.
That was before Sixth joined me. Before the battle. Before I figured out the only thing I’m good at is doing really stupid things. And breaking stuff.
I need to find some others. I’ll tell them she didn’t get up. I’ll tell them I waited with her while the sun rose and set and rose and set again. She didn’t get up. I left her there. I’m scared that was a mistake. Maybe I should have waited for a transport.
I’m not supposed to get scared.
Eighth is defective.
I’ll tell them. Maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe they can take me back to a hub and fix me. Fix my mind. Restore my directives. Or give me new ones. I barely remember what the old ones mean. They buzz in my brain like bees behind glass.
Dart the humans. Leave them where they fall.
I hope no humans find me.
I don’t think I can do that again.
Sweet painless muddy death, my chest really hurts.
RAVEN
This is not a democracy!” Sawyer shouts in my general direction.
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember joining the marines, either.”
We’ve been arguing about leaving the camp for over an hour. Topher and Emily are outside training the others with rifles and crossbows, so our conversation is punctuated with gunshots and the snap-twang of the bows.
“You are a minor, Raven. So are Topher and Xander.”
“So we don’t get a vote?”
We’ve already ascertained that if those of age vote, Mandy, Sawyer, and Felix vote to stay, and Emily and Lochie vote to leave. Three to two. Sawyer knows the vote would go the other way if us “minors” had a say.
“Leaving is suicide,” Sawyer says. Snap-twang goes a crossbow outside. “We’ve seen their ships over the foothills. They’ll pick us off like ducks on a pond.”
“Staying is slow suicide. Those ships will find us eventually.”
“They might not. They haven’t yet. We’re well hidden. And we can survive here. We have excellent shelters and plenty of land to grow things come spring. We’ve kept all the seeds from the fresh fruit and vegetables. We can hunt. We have guns.”
Jesus. He’s hard core. Even Lochie with all his bug eating, is not as dedicated to this post-everything way of thinking. Sawyer and Felix are the real deal. I suppose they’ll expect us girls to breed, too.
As though he’s reading my mind, Felix adds this: “We could be the only humans left on Earth. We have a duty to keep our species going.”
Though this makes me groan, his fatalism is not without cause. Weeks have passed since we’ve managed to capture a video signal. Felix’s theory is that a point-to-point base station up on the mountain has been destroyed. But Sawyer is all I Am Legend about it, without the flesh-eating zombies. Actually, for all we know, the Nahx might be zombies. Though, so far, we haven’t seen any flesh eating.
“So, what?” I snap. “We pair up and start popping out babies?” There’s a bang! ding! from outside as someone shoots down a can. I twitch.
I don’t think Sawyer knows how ridiculous he sounds, or how delusional. Because to me, and maybe to Topher, too, Tucker’s loss cemented this reality: Death is already inevitable. Not inevitable in the sense that everyone dies one day, but the sense that we are all going to die soon. The only remaining question is how. Do we die fighting, or crying in our beds? No one who knows me would be surprised that I choose to go down fighting. I’ve always been a fighter.
Illegal hold, I think, of Tucker pulling me off the dock with him. All of us who would vote to leave loved him in some way, I realize. Me and Topher, obviously. Xander had been friends with both of them for years. He and Lochie bonded instantly when they discovered their mutual love of Belgian beer and hanging upside down from tree branches. And Emily . . . well, girls always loved Tucker.
Tucker is our vanguard, our pioneer into death, even though he was running away from it when it caught up with him. I want to be running too, when it comes for me. At least running, if not fighting. Tucker’s memory deserves that.