“Watch out!” Mia screams the warning behind me, and I whirl in time to see her grab Gisela, yanking her away from a pair of bloodied, blank-faced small children who have crawled out the broken back window of the minivan, and are stumbling toward her. One has blond hair in two long braids, the ends whipping back and forth as she staggers to one side.
We’ve seen blank faces like this before. We’ve seen—
“They’re from Lyon!” Neal snaps, grabbing at Luisa’s arm to keep her from stepping forward. “They’re infected!”
His voice is loud enough that I immediately hear shouts from behind us, hear the news spread back down through the backed-up traffic, but I can’t take my eyes off the mindless stare of the woman trying to escape from the minivan’s window.
“We have to go,” I hear myself say. “We have to go, we can’t catch this from them. We have to get away.”
My heart’s breaking inside my chest, and my mind’s all too ready to imagine—this woman must have tried to get the children out when the flu started showing up, she must have … She’s a good person.She tried.
But now she’s almost an animal, and so are they, and if thishappens to us, then Earth loses the last people who know this is connected to the Undying. Who might be able to stop this thing from happening on a global scale.
We have to go.
And yet we all hesitate for one collective moment, desperately searching for something, anything, we can do. Then the woman snarls again, and as if a spell’s been broken, we’re freed from our paralysis, and we throw ourselves back into our own car.
There are more children now, climbing out of the broken windows of the van, and Gisela’s sobbing as Luisa throws our car into reverse, the tires grinding against the gravel in her haste to get away. As she puts the car into drive I’m suddenly aware of the blast of horns behind us—of people who still have no idea what’s happening here—and then everything’s drowned out by the scream of metal as my side of the car drags along the safety barrier, and Luisa shoves us through the gap between the barriers and the back of the minivan.
And then we’re accelerating, and nobody’s speaking, and I can still hear Gisela crying over the soft sound of the radio as she dials the emergency number and reports what happened. She doesn’t say anything about the three hitchhikers in her backseat.
After that, we’re quiet. I don’t doubt each of the others is doing exactly the same thing as me, replaying the crash over and over in their minds, wondering if there’s anything we could have done for that woman, those children.
It’s about half an hour later when Luisa speaks in a shaky voice. “That was what you saw in Lyon? Their minds gone?”
“Yes,” Mia says quietly.
“The whole city?”
“We don’t know,” Mia admits. “But if they’ve quarantined them, then maybe. Soon, if not now.”
Luisa slowly shakes her head. “By tomorrow, that city will be chaos,” she murmurs. “I am … an electrician, you would say inEnglish. Lyon’s power comes from their solar array, their power plant. Do you know what happens if the workers are too sick to run the plant? There is no power, almost immediately. This means no lights, no TV, no internet. No news, once the phone batteries run out. Electricity is needed to pump water, so nobody can drink. No traffic lights, so the town is in gridlock, and nobody can communicate to fix it. There is no way to process payment without electricity, so looting begins. If you take away power and then quarantine a city, whoever has not lost their minds inside it …”
“We must hope the government works quickly, finds the cure,” Gisela says, reaching across to squeeze her wife’s hand, voice still thick with tears.
Neal, Mia, and I exchange a long look, filled with all our exhaustion, and all our fear. Because the government doesn’t know what they’re up against, and they don’t stand a chance.
Not long after, Luisa turns the wheel to the right, pulling off the road and into a service lane. My body’s instantly back on high alert, and I feel Mia tense beside me, but a moment later, we’re both breathing out. Up ahead is a service station—fuel, food, other conveniences all clustered together, with tired holidaymakers filling up the parking lot and hurrying in to restock before they continue their journeys. Oblivious to the disaster behind them.
“We must eat—time for lunch, I think,” Luisa says, as she gives up on finding a proper parking space, and simply drives up onto a mostly dead, rather sad little grassy area. “We will return here in half an hour, ja? Do you Kinder have money?”
We mumbleyesandthank youas we tumble out of the car and stretch our legs, and look around to get our bearings. All down the side of the car the doors are scratched and gouged from where Luisa forced us past the safety barrier.
I halfway wonder if Mia would’ve rather us pretend wedidn’thave money, in the hope of preserving our meager stash—but one look at her face tells me she has no more desire to bilk these people than I do. Not after what’s just happened to all of us.
“Not to sound mistrustful,” Neal says as we scan our surroundings, “but let’s eat somewhere we can see the car, so we can conveniently turn up if it looks like they’re going to change their minds and bolt. And somewhere cheap, this cash isn’t going to last forever.”
And so we end up in a little diner that has a booth against the glass wall between it and the parking lot, keeping one eye on our ride out of here while we do our best to find something edible on the menu. Which still seems an easier task than speaking freely, now we’re alone.
I glance at Neal, hoping to signal him to break the silence, because I have no idea what to say myself. But his eyes are glued to his phone, giving me a flicker of indignation—the SIM card he brought me doesn’t have any data left, so I can’t use my watch to get to the internet without Wi-Fi. Which, judging from the state of this diner, is not something they’ve got on offer.
So instead, I mumble something about going up to place our order, and head up to the counter. German isn’t my best language—I can understand and speak it fine, but I can never get the accent exactly right. The lady behind the counter, a stout, middle-aged waitress with deeply etched frown lines and her hair in a severe bun, nevertheless smiles a warm, friendly smile when I order our sandwiches in my accented German. She bustles off to deliver the order to the kitchen, leaving me alone at the counter.
My whole body tingles, torn between ravenous hunger at the smell of food, and horror still singing through me from the crash and its aftermath. But we have to eat, as Luisa pointed out.
I linger as long as I can, making a show of inspecting the case of desserts while I pull myself together. It’d be foolish to waste our money on junk, especially after living off of vending machine snacks for the last day, but I can’t help but gaze longingly at the Käsekuchen and Bienenstich. The latter has the perfect layer of caramelized nuts on top, and I can just imagine the way the custard and almond cake taste.
With a sigh, I turn back—and see that Mia’s migrated to Neal’s side of the table, and that they’re sitting with their heads together, practically in each other’s laps. My throat closes for an instant, my heart doing a strange, staggering flip-flop in my chest. It doesn’t matter that it can’t possibly be what it looks like—even after I spy the phone in Neal’s hand, the reason they’re both bent over like that, my heart’s still lurching by the time I slide back into my seat.
