Still, it controlled him. A whole day removed from the trauma of thinking I was going to lose Chase, I can marvel over how me kissing him was enough to keep him from Turning quick enough that Maverick and I were in danger. It’s like I was his lifeline, and during those terrible minutes, I believed I could be.
What happens now? No fucking clue. I can tell that Maverick is antsy. He says we’re so close to Manhattan, he can taste the thick smog and dirt and scent of old piss in the air that used to be old New York.
We don’t know what to expect. Maverick’s never made it to Manhattan before, and I haven’t been since last Christmas, a week before the Turning. We have a ton of people living in New Jersey, but between the number of New Yorkers who received the Injection, how many others were trapped on the island when every exit out was blocked and shut down as soon as the world went to hell, and the lurkers infesting most high-rises before devouring the survivors… I don’t think it’s going to be the New York I remember.
I don’t know if there will be any survivors at all.
That’s what Maverick is banking on. Because, if there’s one good thing about having a full day where we didn’t march, didn’t move, and just lingered around this campsite, it’s that I need something to distract me from my worries—and I get that by interrogating Mav about the next stage of his plan.
We’re close, right? It’s about time I know what’s expected of us once we sneak into the city. Are we supposed to just load up on hairspray, matches, and lighters, staring the lurkers down and flaming as many as we can? Between the three of us—and that’s assuming Chase is in fighting form—we can probably take ten at a time, but if there’s double, triple, even twenty times that?
We’d be fucked, and as boastful of my abilities as I am, even I’m not that cocky.
It doesn’t help that I’m not in the greatest shape myself. The pointer finger on my hand is definitely broken. Since last night it’s swelled to three times its size, turning a mottled sort of greenish purple where Chase’s teeth left an imprint on my skin. He had teased me once when he found out that I carried a pair of tweezers with me in my pack, but I definitely needed them to pick the glass shards out of my hand. It would’ve been so much easier if I had some aspirin to dull the pain, maybe a hot washcloth like when Jack bandaged up my hand, but I’ve got neither and I refuse to complain about it. Anytime the urge to bitch comes over me, all I do is take a look at the back of Chase’s healing arm and I shut up.
I changed into a spare shirt I snagged from one of the houses we scavenged. My old tank top is so stiff from Chase’s dried blood, I can’t wear it now, and I tried to wipe some of the dirt and the blood away from his arm. Because he never came back with any water during his second trip to the river, it’s hard to clean, but I managed to knock off some coppery flecks. New skin, raw pink skin, stretches where the bite used to be.
He’ll be okay. He has to be. And my finger might give me trouble when it comes to flaming lurkers… but that’s not what Maverick has in mind.
Bombs.
Not firebombs, either.Realbombs. Well, handmade bombs that he’s been gathering the supplies for in every house we’ve scavenged since the Grave, but still.
Maverick wants to find a way over the Hudson, head toward the Upper East Side of Manhattan specifically to start, place strategic bombs along multiple blocks, and blow them up. It’ll be broad daylight so that the lurkers will be hiding. He expects a majority of them will be lurking in the shadows of the subway system, but there has to be plenty infesting the skyscrapers. The bombs will destroy their individual nests, either due to the fireburning them or the sunlight outside if they have to scatter into it like cockroaches.
How many bombs can he build? He believes he has the supplies to create at least four IEDs, and if it works, we can escape Manhattan and build some more. But, first, we have to go after his initial target. To Mav, that’s a non-negotiable.
Why the Upper East Side? Of course I ask him that, and I’m actually surprised by the answer—though maybe I shouldn’t be.
Tucked in that part of the city, in a tall building with tinted windows, there’s a lab. A science lab with ties to our fucking useless government. His wife, Lindsay, was a low-ranking biochemist that worked there for a few months, and she was involved in the initial trials of what eventually became the Injection.
That’s why he took it. That’s why he convinced his needle-phobic wife to take it, too. A cop through and through, he trusted in the governmentandhis wife’s abilities.
And they failed him.
The National Resilience Institute is a ghost. Maverick believes that every scientist, military personnel, and government official that worked there suffered the same fate as his wife: Turning on New Year’s Day. Either it’s infested with lurkers or it has information inside that was used to create the Injection that eliminated so many people.
It needs to go.
“What if it has the answer to the antidote?” I asked, stroking Chase’s hair. He’s still unconscious, and I don’t give a fuck what Mav thinks about this thing between me and my twin’s fiancé. “Is it worth blowing that up, too?”
“If they could make more antidotes, they would’ve,” was his flat response.
I get it, too.
This is about taking out lurkers, of course it is, but at the same time… this is revenge. Maverick Brooks came all this way, went through all of this trouble, sacrificed so much all because he wants to erase the lab that destroyed our lives as we know it—and to make sure they can never do it again.
And I’m okay with that.
Thirty-six hours after he stumbled toward our camp, clutching his arm, Chase jolts awake as though he only just fell asleep.
We had to tell him that he made it throughtwonights. It’s dawn now, and when he’s terrified he still has some lurker in him, I point out that we sat in the sunlight together all day yesterday and nothing happened to him. His arm is back to normal. He needs to piss, to eat, to get clean… but other than that, he’s okay.
I try to hide how relieved I am so that he doesn’t get the wrong idea, but fuck it. Iamrelieved.
I don’t know what I would’ve done if I had to kill Chase.
Maverick goes with Chase down to the river’s shore. When they come back a half an hour later—that I spend stupidly fretting over Chase while I grab a power bar and some stale chips out of my pack so he can have breakfast—with a pair of full steel water bottles each between them, Chase has washed the blood from his skin and dunked his head in the iffy river water. I toss him a fresh shirt, feeling flushed when he rips off the bloody one, giving me a front row seat to the view of his muscular, sculpted chest.
