Outbreak (26 page)

“Eli . . . what’s going on?”

“I just thought it would be good to have some extra food and water in case we get delayed.”

“Eli . . .”

He averts his gaze, staring purposefully out the windshield as though the road might suddenly disappear.

“Why did you bring so many extra supplies?”

“I just thought it would be smart.”

“In case . . .”

Eli sighs and drags a hand through his hair. When he meets my gaze again, I can tell he’s gearing up for something big. “Listen. Jayden has her heart set on eliminating the drifters’ leaders.”

“I know. That’s why she got us the rover.”

“We have to find Owen.”

I nod.

“No, I mean, we
have
to find Owen. We can’t go back to the compound until we do.”

I roll his words around in my head for a moment, positive I must have misheard.

“What do you mean ‘we can’t go back’?”

“I mean Jayden told us not to come back until we had a dead drifter for her.”

That’s when my mouth goes dry. I can’t speak. I can hardly process what Eli’s trying to tell me. 

“But that’s ridiculous. We don’t even know if we’re going to find Owen. Jayden spotted him heading toward this town, but he could be gone by the time we get there.”

Eli nods but doesn’t say anything. I watch him carefully for a moment. I know there’s a part of this he’s leaving out — some crucial factor he doesn’t want me to know.

“Why would you go along with this?” I prompt. “You’ve never cared about following Jayden’s orders before.”

“We just can’t go back, okay? Can we drop this?”

“No!” Something still doesn’t seem right. “Why can’t we go back, Eli?”

He lets out a stream of air through his nose and looks away. “If we come back empty-handed, Jayden is going to kill you.”

That statement causes a nervous laugh to bubble up inside me, which isn’t the reaction Eli was hoping for.

“It isn’t a joke.”

“Oh, please. Jayden’s been threatening my life for months now. If that’s all you’re worried about —”

“Damn it, Harper! This isn’t a game!” Eli yells, slamming his fist against the steering wheel.

His outburst startles me. He’s gone a little red in the face, and all the veins in his arm are sticking out. “She knows you ran off to 119, and she’s unhinged. You’re just a cadet to her.”

He turns to look at me with his familiar hardened expression. “Have you
seen
what she’s been doing with cadets lately? Do you want to end up like Lenny or worse? Because believe me, she got lucky. Do you know how many went out last month and didn’t come back?”

“N-no,” I stammer, taken aback by Eli’s angry tirade. 

“Four.”

That shocks me into silence. I’d heard a few cadets had died, of course, but I didn’t know how many. I’d been so concerned with which of
my
friends were being deployed and all the drama with my parents and Constance that I wasn’t paying attention to the cadets who were disappearing from other squads.

But I
do
remember how Lenny looked in the medical ward — so small and pale. She almost died on that mission, and Jayden wouldn’t have cared.

I’ve faced so many near-death experiences and threats in the past few months that I’ve grown complacent. But I’m completely disposable to Jayden. In fact, she’d probably enjoy killing me.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, suddenly angry at Eli for hiding the truth. “I didn’t get to say goodbye to any of my friends. I didn’t get to
plan
.”

“You should
always
say goodbye when you’re deployed,” he snaps. “You know what’s out here, Harper. So don’t put that on me.”

That pisses me off. Eli screwed up big time — the least he could do is take some responsibility.

“You still should have told
me!” I cry. “All last night when I was with you . . . you didn’t say a word.”

“I didn’t think you were coming, okay? I thought I had a different partner assigned for this mission. It wasn’t even supposed to affect you.”

“Wasn’t supposed to
affect
me?”

Eli’s outburst was so abrupt and so unexpected that it takes me several seconds to catch up. It hurts that he assumes his deployment wouldn’t affect me if I wasn’t going with him. He knows I see him as more than a partner, and I thought he saw me that way, too. 

But that’s not the biggest surprise. 

“Wait. What do you mean you thought you had a different partner?”

Eli doesn’t answer. He won’t even look at me.

Suddenly, Jayden’s words come crashing back down:
I denied your request . . .

“Did you . . . Did you
ask
for a new partner?”

He lets out a slow, dread-filled sigh, and embarrassment washes over me.

Eli asked for a new partner. Eli tried to replace me.

“Harper . . . I didn’t do it because I don’t
want
you as my partner. I did it so you wouldn’t have to be stuck out here hunting drifters indefinitely.”

“But . . . we’re always partners.”

“It’s only been a few months,” he says gently.

That stings more than I’d like to admit.

“You hate the Fringe,” he adds.

“Everybody hates the Fringe!” I snarl. I’m working so hard to hold in my tears that I sound a little hysterical.

“It’s different for you,” he says. “I’ve seen what it does to you . . . being out here . . . having to shoot people.”

“I can handle myself.”

“I know you can, but —”

“Eli, if you didn’t want me as your partner, you could have just said so!”

I can’t keep the tears at bay anymore. I’m so angry and humiliated. The worst is knowing that my inability to keep my emotions in check only confirms Eli’s choice to find someone new.

“Harper, no. It’s not that at all. I love having you as my partner. It’s just —”

Eli’s words are cut short by a sharp
crack!

“
What the hell
?”

Eli jerks down under the dashboard and yanks me down, too. 

For a second, I don’t understand why, and I fight against his tight grip. Then everything seems to slow down, and I realize the crack I heard was a gunshot.

With all our bickering, I hadn’t been paying much attention to the scenery, and judging by Eli’s panicked look, neither had he.

There’s another shot, and the metal body of the rover sings as the bullet ricochets off.

“Holy shit.”

Eli is fumbling with the touchscreen, cranking up the rover’s cruising speed. The engine groans as we accelerate, but then the rover swerves. 

We’re whipped sideways, and my stomach shoots into my throat. My body strains against the seat belt, and out of the corner of my eye, I see Eli fumbling with some pedals on the floor. Everything outside the rover is a blur.

“Shit! Shit, shit, shit!”

There’s a slight squeal of rubber on road, and the glass behind me shatters.

A scream escapes my throat, and I hug my knees.

“They blew out one of our tires,” yells Eli, clear panic in his voice.

“Can you fix it?”

“Not without getting shot.” 

The rover comes to a jerking halt, nearly giving me whiplash. Eli unclicks his seat belt and reaches for mine. “We have to move. We’re sitting ducks here.”

I jump as another bullet cracks the window and lands in the upholstery just inches from my head. Eli pushes my shoulders down and reaches behind me, dragging out two rucksacks and flinging one into my lap.

“Come on. We’re gonna make a run for those rocks.”

I didn’t see where Eli pointed. I can’t think. I can barely move.

Fighting every natural instinct to stay in the rover, I push the door open with some difficulty and nearly fall out onto the pavement. My hands are shaking so badly I can’t get the rucksack over my shoulder. Instead, I run after Eli on wobbly legs, dragging it by the strap.

I hear another gunshot and jerk down automatically, but we’re too far away for the shooter to hit his mark.

Dry brush clings to my pant legs as I scrabble up the embankment after Eli. My limbs feel clumsy and uncoordinated, and I trip several times before I reach the cover of the orangish-red rocks stretching up toward the sky.

My vision has narrowed in on the path right in front of me, and somehow I lose sight of Eli.

I glance around in a panic and yelp when a hand shoots out of nowhere and locks around my arm.

“It’s okay,” says Eli, his face swimming into view.

My heart is pounding so fast I’m amazed it hasn’t given out yet. My breaths are coming in uneven gasps, and it’s hard for me to focus on his face.

“Are you hurt?” he asks.

I think I shake my head, but then again, every part of my body is shaking. Eli’s rough hands roam my arms and torso anyway, checking for gunshot wounds. I have the sudden, inappropriate urge to laugh, but it’s on the verge of a sob.

“You’re just in shock,” murmurs Eli.

Those deep blue eyes pull me back to reality. Eli is staring at me with such intensity and concern that it grounds me in place and helps my breathing return to normal.

“We can’t stay here,” he says, glancing up at our rudimentary hiding place. “They’ll come looking for us.”

“Right,” I say, clasping my hands together to keep them from trembling.

“You’re okay,” he murmurs, rubbing his hands down my arms again.

I give a shaky nod and hoist the rucksack over my shoulder.

I realize neither one of us is wearing a mask, but I guess it doesn’t matter if Sawyer’s correct about our superhuman radiation resistance. We can’t return to the rover anyway.

I’m not sure how far we are from the town where Owen was headed, but we don’t really have any choice but to keep moving. 

Eli tugs on my arm, and we start to jog along the highway, staying in the shadow of the rock formation. It’s difficult to move gracefully with the weight of the overstuffed pack on my shoulders, and I stumble several times on the uneven terrain.

“How far behind us were they?” I pant.

“Hard to tell. But the town’s not too far off,” huffs Eli, tugging on the straps of his pack and picking up the pace a little.

Thankfully, the looming wall of solid rock opens up to a narrow pathway, and Eli leads us through. The reddish glow of the sunlight reflecting off the rock creates a hypnotic effect in the shelter of the cliff, and I follow Eli without noticing if we’re even moving in the right direction.

Something about being enveloped between two enormous sheets of rock gives me a disproportionately high sense of security. But then the gap between the cliff and the outshoot of rock narrows, and Eli swears.

I nearly careen into his back as I round the bend. Eli is standing at the end of the tunnel in front of the opening — a fissure in the rock no more than six inches wide.

“Shit,” he mutters, glancing behind us for the approaching drifters.

“Should we go back?” I pant.

He shakes his head, looking panicked. “If they followed us, we’ll run straight into them.”

But he squeezes past me anyway and starts moving back through the tunnel. At first I think he’s doubling back to face them head-on, but then I notice his eyes are fixated on the top of the rock formation some forty feet above us.

“There,” he mutters, pointing to something I can’t quite see.

“What?”

Eli pulls me closer and moves my chin to where he’s pointing — a break in the cliff about halfway up the wall. I squint harder and see a narrow ledge that runs for about four feet before disappearing into a small opening.

“We’re going to wait this out,” he says.

I shake my head, lost for words. “Eli . . . how the hell are we going to get up there?”

“We have to climb.”

Now I
know
he’s completely lost it.

“It’s okay,” he says, correctly interpreting my panicked expression. “I used to do some free-climbing with my dad and Owen. It’s not a big deal.”

I open my mouth to say that it’s a
very
big deal, but I don’t see another solution. If we stay where we are, the drifters are sure to find us. 

Eli has already started searching for something to grab on to. “I’m going to climb up first and tell you where the handholds are.”

“What?”

I’ve never climbed a rock wall in my life — let alone a fucking cliff. But as I watch, I see what he’s talking about: There seem to be small crevices and imperfections in the otherwise smooth rock formation. Eli’s hands and feet find the cracks easily, and he slowly propels himself up the wall.

At one point, he gets stuck and has to backtrack to find a new path. That’s when I hear footsteps and faraway voices echoing off the cliff.

Eli freezes on the face of the rock, sprawled like a spider with one arm extended over his head and one leg poised for his next ascent.

I can’t make out what the drifters are saying or how close they are, but if they followed our path on the other side of the tunnel, it’s only a matter of time before they double back and find the path we took.

The pool of light spilling from the opening in the rock suddenly darkens, and my heart thunders in my chest. I hold my breath, and the drifters leave. Unfortunately, I can’t tell if they’re still nearby or if they kept moving toward town.

A scuffing sound draws my attention back to Eli, and everything slows down as I watch his leg slip off a protruding rock. 

I clap a hand over my mouth to muffle my gasp and watch in horror as Eli fumbles to find his footing. He’s hanging by his arms and breathing hard, legs flailing uselessly in midair. I can’t fight the terrifying images that come to mind, and when his forearms flex, I worry he’s going to lose his grip.

“Harper!” he gasps, still unable to slow his momentum as he swings against the wall. “Can you see another foothold?”

Scrambling over to stand under him, I spot a small bump near his left foot. “Up and to the left,” I whisper.

His foot clumsily searches for the bump, but after a minute, he makes contact and rights himself. 

Taking a second to breathe, he reaches up for the ledge and hoists himself over.