Catcher understands everything before I do. It takes me more time to figure out that the Mudo girl is a Breaker. I’ve never seen one before because Infected become Breakers only when there aren’t enough other Mudo around when they turn, and anyone infected in Vista is killed before Returning.
Tearing around the corner of one of the rides, the Breaker sprints into the middle of the park—a girl no older than us, looking almost normal except for the moaning. Her mouth open, teeth bared, hands clawing the night.
I react too slowly, my mind tripping over the fact that she’s running. She pauses slightly, just enough to turn her head left toward Catcher and me and then right toward the rest of the group huddled around the coaster, still loudly cheering on the two brothers, who are almost near the top. Cira’s in the middle of them, her arms raised, clapping.
They’re all oblivious but if either Catcher or I shouts to warn them, it might lure the Breaker toward us.
I clamp my hands over my mouth, terrified to move. Terrified to draw her attention. My fingers dig into my cheeks and screams threaten to pour out, choking me. Only one thought blares in my mind: This can’t be happening.
The Breaker veers toward the others—toward Cira standing at the base of the coaster—and then Catcher moves in a blur. The moonlight reaches only so far, leaving the edges around us soft and faded. He’s a shadow, moving to another shadow. The flashes of his pale skin echo the gleam of the Breaker’s teeth.
I jump from the carousel and am grabbing for my knife when I hear a high-pitched scream. I don’t want to look up but I do. I don’t want to see but I can’t help it. The Breaker crashes into the group at the base of the coaster. They scatter but she grabs a girl, a tall skinny girl, and when she spins into the moonlight I recognize Mellie.
My throat stings, my eyes cloud with tears and my stomach twists in terror but still I see it. The Breaker grasping at Mellie’s hair and yanking her to the ground, sinking her teeth into the flesh of Mellie’s forearm and tearing. A spray of blood.
But that’s all that matters. The bite will infect Mellie. The bites always infect. And the Infected always turn. Mellie is dead already.
Everyone else scatters and screams. The chaos of human flesh causes the Breaker to drop Mellie, the urge to infect more important than lingering over a fresh kill. Mellie’s mouth moves in a whimper and she holds her hand to the wound. Blood spills through her fingers. She shakes and sobs and rocks.
The Breaker lunges for her next target. And all I can do is stand and watch. I try to make sense of it. To reconcile the dry lessons we’re taught in school about the Breakers with the reality of the girl in front of me. And for the first time I fully grasp the stories from the decades after the Return, when the Recruiters would recapture cities only to find a small pocket of Mudo that would reignite the infection all over again.
I understand how the Breakers could keep the living from reclaiming the world.
But none of us had ever seen one. None of us had ever truly understood them. It’s one thing to be told something in the safety of the classroom and another to see it in the flesh. We’re too used to the Mudo that wash up on the shores—slow and sluggish and waterlogged—or the ones that find their way to the Barrier and press against it.
We were taught growing up how to defend against those. But this girl, she’s too fast. A blink and she’s already pulling down another boy. He swings an ax and it lodges in her arm but it doesn’t slow her. Her teeth find his throat before he can dislodge his weapon and he falls, a stream of blood black in the night.
I take a step back, wanting to run away. Knowing the safest thing to do is run. But then I see Catcher. He’s sprinting not toward the Barrier, but toward the Breaker. She veers from her next target, racing to meet him. He holds a knife in his hand, a blade that seems too small and useless against her impending onslaught.
Something inside me pulls tight and loud like a scream as she draws closer to him. It happens too fast. He steps aside at the last minute and she streaks past. He grabs her hair and yanks her head back, his hand against her throat. With a guttural cry he sinks the blade into the base of her skull, his arms jerking with the effort.
It’s as if everything stops in the moment his wide eyes meet mine, her sagging body between us. She was already dead. Had been dead. She was nothing but want and need and infection. But still I can see something in his face and I know it’s echoed in my own: regret and resignation.
She was once a girl. She used to be like us. Her body slips to the ground and he bends over her, pulling out his knife, placing his hands over her eyes.
And that’s why he doesn’t see it. Like heat lightning on the horizon, a flicker at the edge of my vision that’s nothing but movement. It’s Mellie crawling to her feet, teeth bared and hands grasping. She’s already bled out, died and Returned.
I hear another scream that rips down my spine. Catcher twists toward the panicked group at the base of the coaster, where the Infected boy, the one bitten in the throat, jumps to his feet, moans frothing from his mouth.
Catcher pushes toward the group but Mellie’s faster. I do the only thing I know that will save him, that will buy him time. I shout and yell, pumping my weapon in the night air.
It works. Mellie turns from Catcher and sprints toward me. I don’t even look to see Catcher’s reaction; I don’t have time to think or give in to the terror pushing against my chest. I plant my feet the way I was taught. I tighten my grip around the handle of my weapon until I remember to loosen my muscles, to relax and wait for her to get within range of my blade.
I see every detail in the moonlight as Mellie moves closer. Her eyes are still clear, her long brown hair whipping freely around her face. Her skin bronzed and smooth, glistening with blood.
All I can think about as she runs toward me is the graceful way she danced earlier. All I can think about is how much I wanted to be like her. How maybe we could have been friends. How I could have tried harder to know her. How this isn’t what’s supposed to happen.
She was supposed to be safe. We were all supposed to be safe and happy and have futures to dream about.
I want to close my eyes; I want to remember her the way she was. To erase the sight of how she wants nothing more than to tear the flesh from my bones. To devour me. I want to give in to the terror that eats at me, claws me to the ground.
Run! my mind screams. Swing! it shouts. Do something! Anything!
The darkness of the night crowds around me, closes me into itself, blocks out everything but the sound of Mellie’s feet beating against the earth, chewing up the distance between us.
My head roars: Swing! Swing! She’s too close! Swing!
I clench my teeth, trying to keep my arm steady. The moment stretches thin, every strand of Mellie’s hair floating behind her head, her mouth slowly opening, teeth glimmering. I focus on her neck. I think about my blade slicing through it. I try to wait. Try to remember the training.
I can’t breathe. I’m choking. She’s too close. I can’t wait. I tighten my arm and slice the knife through the air with the force of my terror and panic.
My body twists. The blade slips easily through nothingness and I realize I’ve swung too early just as she crashes into me. If I’d waited a moment more I could have stopped her. Her arms tangle in mine, her head crashing against my chin as I tumble backward, my skull smacking the cracked concrete.
I hear the thud before I feel it. I see the movement before I understand it. Mellie’s mouth, the one that earlier tonight spoke of dreams and the Dark City, lowers to me.
And then she’s gone. The pressure of her body on my chest explodes. I roll to the side and see it:Catcher. He tumbles across the ground, Mellie’s teeth gnashing, her arms wrapped around him. She tears at him like a cat fighting drowning. I watch as her nails drag along his arm, drawing thin lines of blood. If anything, this drives her into a deeper frenzy.
I try to push myself to my feet but I stumble. I reach for my blade but I can barely tighten my fist around it. I pull my arm back, ready to swing again, but I can’t tell where one body begins and the other ends. It’s flesh and blood and teeth, grunts and moans.
Then there’s a crunch. The sound of an old man cracking all his fingers at once. And there’s nothing left but Catcher kneeling and panting. His hands still grip Mellie’s head, her neck broken and body finally motionless.
He looks up at me, his arms slipping from her hair and dangling by his sides. Blood pools down his forearm and drips from his fingers. But that’s not what I’m staring at. I’m staring at the crescent-shaped wound along the edge of his shoulder.
I’m staring at where he was bitten.
Chapter 4
I swallow. A puddle of blood forms in the dirt where it falls from Catcher’s fingers. Around me all the screams fade to nothing—as if they’ve never existed.
“You …”
“Go home, Gabry,” he tells me.
Behind us I hear the bells start to ring in the town, the signal for the highest alert. They must have heard our screaming back at the guardhouse next to the gate or someone must have run and told them. Now they know there’s trouble out here and it won’t be long until the Militia arrives to investigate.
“But …” But what about you? I want to say. What about the bite? What about the infection? I want to ask what will happen but I already know. Even though the bite’s not severe, he’s infected. The infection will eventually kill him. Icy ribbons of shock twine through me.
Infection means death. It always means death.
“Go home,” he says again. His voice is breathy, as if he hears my thoughts. I can tell from his face that he knows as much as I do. He knows what will happen to him.
“The Militia’ll be here soon. Don’t let them find you,” he adds. “You’ll get into too much trouble.”
I take a step toward him. What’s left of our group huddles at the base of the roller coaster across the expanse of concrete. One boy holds a shirt to another girl’s leg, tears streaming down both their faces. The twins are slowly climbing down the lattice of the coaster, Cira and Blane are hacking at the body of what was once a friend while another boy clutches his stomach and vomits.
The entire night is blood and sobs and infection and the glare of the moon on flashing blades. I retch at the squelching sound they make as they stab again and again and again. Hysteria tickles at the base of my skull. Everything’s out of control. I want to cry, to collapse and close my eyes and cover my ears and pretend none of it’s happening.
I need to get as far from here as possible.
But no one else has run away.
“I can’t leave you,” I tell him. Even though I want to escape. I want to forget what’s happened and climb the stairs to my room and huddle under the covers, where it’s safe. Where it’s always been safe. But I can’t leave everyone. “They know I was here, they’ll—”
He shakes his head, cutting me off.
From deep inside I can feel the scream, I can feel it nudging out everything that was me before this moment. I can’t stop staring at his shoulder. Can’t stop imagining the echo of the Breaker teeth snapping.
“What’ll happen to you?”
“Go home” is all he says. As if his lips never brushed mine. As if I were nothing and no one to him.
I want to drop to my knees and press my mouth to the wound. I want to take the infection into myself, to fill the void that seems to be taking over everything.
But I don’t. I just stare at the bite and think about how I swung too early. If I’d just waited. If I hadn’t been so afraid. I’d known to wait and I couldn’t. It’s my fault he’s infected.
“What about Cira?” I ask. “I can’t leave her.” I feel around my neck for the necklace she’d given me. It was supposed to protect us and it didn’t.
He shakes his head but desperation bubbles inside me. I call out to my friend, “Cira!” She looks at me and even from here I can see the splash of blood across her face. She stands over the mutilated body of the dead boy, a long knife clutched in her hand so tight that her knuckles glow white under the moon.
I wave for her to come. But it’s as if she doesn’t see me. “Cira!” I shout again. “Cira, over here!”
She screams and brings the blade down into the boy’s body again and again. As if she can punish him for having been infected. For having turned Breaker.
My throat convulses and I press my hands to my mouth, my fingers digging into my cheeks as my eyes water. I whimper.
Catcher pulls my attention back. “Please, Gabry” is all he says. His voice is filled with such anguish that it slices into my heart. I glance at everyone else, their heads in their hands, their faces streaked with tears, their mouths open, wailing.
“For me,” Catcher adds.
It’s as though he’s giving me permission to do the one thing I’m desperate for. So I turn and run, leaving everyone else behind. Back through the ruins, crossing in and out of shadows and hiding from the Militia until I hit the Barrier and pound at it with my fists. My knuckles rub raw and still I hammer at the old worn wood that’s so thick it swallows up every sound.
As if it’s the Barrier’s fault for everything that happened. And maybe it is, I think, sinking down to the ground, my eyes shut tight. We never should have crossed it.
I keep seeing Catcher; I keep seeing the blood. Tears crowd my eyelids but they can’t blur the memories that ache inside me with such a sharp fierceness.
I almost turn around. I almost go back. By leaving I’m abandoning them and it’s not fair. In the distance I hear the Militiamen as they shout and run toward the amusement park. The bells in the town still ring their slow steady rhythm. My heart beats in time with each hit of the hammer to metal and I press my forehead to the Barrier, the dry wood smelling faintly of rot.