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“He is so dead,” Kyle said, referring to Parker.
Probably, Hughes figured. It didn’t look like Parker was coming back. In the meantime, Frank absolutely was going to die. They could try injecting him with Annie’s blood and hope for the best, but he was the only one whose blood type for sure didn’t match. And he’d never find out if the experiment with Parker would succeed or fail. Frank would never know whether or not he died for nothing. Perhaps it was better this way, since he probably would die for nothing.
He would be but the first. Hughes, Annie, and Kyle couldn’t last much longer, either. Just a few days earlier, eight people were holed up in the grocery store back on the mainland. Now they were just three. Kyle’s island was a bust. A nice idea, but a bust. Passing Annie’s immunity on to everyone else was likewise a bust. They were stuck on a remote island without any food while winter was coming. Where were they supposed to go now? How were they supposed to live?
Kyle led the way down the stairs. Annie eased Frank down one step at a time. Hughes took up the rear with his shotgun as if Parker might bust through the door at any second.
“Just shoot me,” Frank said. “Get it over with.” He didn’t sound anguished or even in pain anymore. He was just done.
“We’re not going to shoot you,” Hughes said.
They were back in the living room now. Hughes could practically feel the rotten stench of death on his skin like a sickening film. Kyle hurried forward and opened the front door.
“Fucker practically bit my thumb off,” Frank said. “It hurts. I don’t want to wait. What’s the point of living twelve more hours in this kind of pain?”
Hughes wouldn’t shoot Frank even if he were unconscious. He’d ease him out of this world the same way he eased his wife out of this world, and then Carol. By closing Frank’s mouth and plugging his nose after he went into his coma. It made no difference if Frank would feel pain or not. Enough violence had been inflicted on his body already.
“Hand me the shotgun and I’ll do it myself,” Frank said.
That was not going to happen. Hughes wouldn’t allow it. “Frank—”
“I have the right to die how I want.”
“Frank, honey, let’s sit you down,” Annie said.
“I don’t want to sit down!” Frank said. He sounded angry now. “Just give me the damn gun, Hughes.”
Hughes thought about it. The man did have a point. He should be able to die how he wants. Blowing his head off with a shotgun might make sense if he were on this island alone, but he wasn’t alone. Frank was with friends. Nobody wanted to look at his body with his head blown off his shoulders.
“None of you have to watch,” Frank said. “I’ll go into the woods.”
But they’d hear the shot, Hughes thought, and somebody would have to go into the trees and retrieve the shotgun from Frank’s hands.
Hughes could always let Frank have the Jennings J22 he’d pulled from the corpse in the grass. It was a bad gun. Hughes had no intention of ever firing it. He could let Frank take that one to his grave. And yet he still hesitated. Something deep inside him rebelled at the thought of Frank shooting himself. There was a right way to do things, and that was not it.
“Come on, man,” Frank said. “Show a dying man a little fucking mercy, why don’t you.”
Hughes looked his friend in the eye and exhaled. Frank was a brave man. Most people would suck up the pain if it meant they could live another half-day and avoid a violent death, but not Frank. Hughes admired that. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to do that himself.
“Bye everybody,” Frank said. “Take care of each other.” And he took off running down the hill toward the water.
“Frank!” Annie said.
Toward the cliff.
“Let him go,” Hughes said.
“He’s going for the cliff, isn’t he?” Kyle said.
“Probably,” Hughes said.
“The cliff Parker tried to throw me over,” Kyle said. “We should throw his ass over it, too, on top of Frank.”
Frank ran with everything he had, as if he feared the others were chasing him. He didn’t look back or even slow down, but he screamed when he went over the edge.
Annie couldn’t take it. She wanted to get off the island—to where?—and headed off into the trees.
“Where are you going?” Kyle said. She did not turn back to look at him.
“I need to get out of here,” she said. Her tone was final, uncompromising.
A faint trail covered in fir needles led into the forest. The path had probably been used, and was possibly even created, by whoever owned those two houses, but it was nothing like the trails in the national parks or even the national forests. This was more like an animal path. Wet leaves brushed against Annie’s pants as she walked, and she winced in pain when a thick branch from a low-lying bush jammed into her knee.
Carol was dead.
Frank was dead.
Kyle had been damn near pitched over the cliff.
Parker had turned into a monster. No, she and Kyle and Hughes turned Parker into a monster on purpose.
She tried and failed to force down the heat welling up in her chest.
How much longer could their little group last?
Not long. Not like this. There were only three people left now. Herself, Kyle, and Hughes.
She didn’t know how she felt about Kyle anymore, but at this point it hardly made any difference. If they lost just one more person, the group would not be a group. It would be a pair.
No way could two people survive in this world by themselves.
If Parker recovers, they’d need to keep him alive.
The forest was cold but beautiful, and it put her slightly at ease. She could hardly believe beauty still existed in this world. It seemed wrong somehow, impossible, but there it was.
The sky overhead was dishrag gray, so no sunlight slanted down through the trees, but that seemed fitting and right. Gray skies suited these dark evergreen woods. The deep greens softened the color of steel from the sky and were even enhanced by it. Moss covered the branches and trunks and looked almost translucent in the thin light of late autumn. The ground felt spongy and soft under her boots. If there was one advantage to being stranded in the Pacific Northwest at the end of the world, it was the copious amounts of freshwater.
Annie followed the path and wondered how long they’d have to wait before deciding that Parker would never recover. She wasn’t even sure how long she took to recover.
Think back, Annie. How many days were you infected? How much time passed?
She remembered chasing people through a forest. She remembered attacking Lane’s earlier crew and killing one of his men on the front porch of a house. Were Roland and Bobby with him then? She didn’t know. She didn’t see them. Or, if she did, she couldn’t remember. It’s not like she could tell one human being from another when she was infected. To her diseased mind, all human beings were just food.
She did not remember sleeping when she still had the virus. Her sense of time from that period was fuzzy, off, as if she had been drugged or asleep. Yet she had some sense of time passing.
Three days. She couldn’t be sure, but that’s what her gut—or her subconscious—told her.
Three days. She lived for three days as one of those things, then woke on the forest floor with temporary amnesia.
Now she was in another forest, and her sense of time was slipping again. How long had she been out walking? How far did she walk from the compound and her companions?
Annie didn’t know. She could be on the other side of the island now for all she knew. Maybe too far away for the others to hear if she called out for help.
Maybe far enough away that the infected could be lurking in the trees without having any idea that healthy humans—food—were holed up a ways down the trail.
Cold fear took hold of her. She turned around and headed back, careful to make as little noise as possible, turning her body to the side as she passed between bushes to minimize rustling sounds.
She saw the houses through the trees ten minutes later. Her heart rate slowed. Ten minutes. She had only been gone for twenty then. Kyle and Hughes were still out front, standing right where they were when Frank took off down the hill toward the cliff.
“You okay?” Kyle said.
“Three days,” Annie said.
“What’s three days?” Hughes said.
“I was sick for three days,” Annie said, “before I came back.”
“You sure?” Kyle said.
“No,” Annie said. “But I think so.”
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