The Defectors (Defectors Trilogy) (4 page)

I ran until the light that fanned through the canopy of trees was a faint velvety blue. I’d only made it twelve miles, but I thought that was decent for such a late start. Trying to put as much distance as possible between myself and the PMC, I had waited too long to stop. Darkness was coming quickly now, and I would not have much time to settle in for the night.

I chose a small grove of trees overlooking the trail to make my temporary camp. Higher ground provided a good vantage point to see carriers coming before they got too close. I pulled out our map and smoothed it out on the rough carpet of dead leaves. It didn’t show any creeks nearby, and it was too dark to go exploring. I would have to ration the water I had left in my canteen.

I began to feel a steady hum of panic in my chest. I’d been in the dark woods plenty of times, but never alone. My hands shook as I unzipped my pack, and I had the sudden realization that I didn’t know what I was doing. Earlier that day, Greyson had been arrested, I had run from the PMC, and I’d smashed a car window. Maybe I had gone off the deep end. I wondered if succumbing to basic survival instincts made everyone feel this crazy.

 
As I made my bed, I kept looking over my shoulder and squinting through the darkness for any carriers that might be lurking in the shadows. Now that I was no longer running, every snapping twig and cracking branch made me jump. I gathered some dry leaves to stuff under my thin sleeping bag for a makeshift mattress and looked in my pack for something to eat.
 

I didn’t want to build a fire that might attract carriers, and food that didn’t require cooking left me very few options. Throat still itching with thirst, the salty nuts and jerky seemed pretty unappealing, but I knew some protein would help my muscles recover. The food wasn’t very satisfying. I still felt empty inside from dehydration.
 

It was completely dark by now. The rush of wind through the leaves and the sound of an owl not too far off did nothing to ease my comfort as I settled into my sleeping bag. I tried to breathe deeply and count each breath to relax. I told myself I needed to rest to regain my strength for the next day, but it was impossible. I didn’t like the idea of closing my eyes in the darkness unprotected and alone in the forest.
 

Just as my heart rate returned to normal and my careful breaths began to slow, I heard a distinct crunch of leaves coming from the direction of the trail. My neck tightened, and I swallowed back a yelp. Someone or
something
was crashing through the underbrush, but there were multiple distinct patterns to the cadence. As the sounds grew louder, I realized there had to be more than one thing.

I held my breath, not daring to move. The footfalls were much too heavy to belong to any deer, and no human with any sense would be making that much racket, for fear of attracting carriers. That left only one possibility.

I listened, straining to hear beyond the thunderous pounding of my own heart.

Sure enough, I could make out the ragged intake of breath from sick, infected lungs clotted with mucus. They were close — just below my camp and down on the trail. A pack of carriers was on the move.

They couldn’t know I was there. If they did, they would be running toward me to tear me apart. They saw me as a threat, and their only instinct was to kill.

My thoughts went to the food in my pack. Could they smell it? I didn’t think carriers had a heightened sense of smell, but I had heard so much about them on the news that carriers almost didn’t seem real to me. Not the ones that looked like zombies with the oozing sores and decaying flesh, anyway. Not until now.
 

There was a heavy, putrid stench of death on the air — sickness and decay that wasn’t natural. It was the smell of rotten garbage and raw, rancid meat.

They continued to crash through the leaves on the side of the trail — maybe looking for a small dead animal they could eat or a piece of granola bar a cyclist had dropped. They didn’t speak. All I could hear was the wretched gurgle of their breathing.

I lay perfectly still for what felt like an hour. The carriers moved slowly, and it took them a long time to decide there was no food along the trail. Finally, I heard their footsteps dying away. They were moving on.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. My muscles ached from being tensed so long, and my hands were shaking.

I hadn’t ever been that close to real carriers. Since the mandatory identification bill, the PMC had managed to contain the carriers within city limits. They were trying to mitigate disaster after what happened in New York and Los Angeles.

When the virus first broke out, it spread rapidly from person to person, overtaking entire cities. No one had seen anything like it before. First people became sick, and then they lost their minds. They became more violent, disfigured, and uncontrollable as the virus ran its course. Then they died.

Speculation ran wild about how it was transmitted, but still no one had identified patient zero. People locked themselves in their homes, afraid to venture outside or shake hands with a stranger.

There was no cure, and the federal government froze, unsure how to proceed with a virus we knew so little about. Congress brought in the Private Military Company to round up the carriers who were wreaking havoc all across the United States. The food shortage and the oil crisis came to a head, and the country began its plummet into chaos. It was the perfect storm and a perfect opportunity for the PMC to reach for power.

The country desperately needed resources and a safe haven from a virus that showed no signs of stopping. The U.S. reached out to the Canadian federal government for aid, but there was no way to guarantee the containment of the virus.
 

Finally, an American scientist developed a vaccine, and Congress passed a bill requiring every man, woman, and child to be immunized. As proof, the Citizen Identification Device was inserted to guard against identity fraud and the misidentification of people who might be infected. The PMC was charged with enforcement.
 

Plenty of people refused the vaccine. To some, rights of privacy were more important than protecting themselves from the virus, even if that meant imprisonment.
 

I didn’t have the courage to resist. The virus terrified me.
 

But now that I had my CID, it felt like a noose around my neck, tightening a little more every time a rover latched on to my identity. It came with a heavy fear I carried inside — fear for Greyson, fear for my parents, and fear for myself. It was a high price to pay.

Now the fear was all I had, and I used it to drive me forward. I used to run marathons, and now I ran until my legs were too tired to carry me. I managed about fifteen miles a day. I probably could have done more, but I rested frequently and took walking breaks to avoid injury.

I was moving at a good pace, and my lungs no longer burned. At least, I no longer took notice. When my eyes grew weary of searching through the trees or glancing over my shoulder to check if I was being followed, I looked up at the patch of sky that snaked over the trail and listened to the cadence of my feet on limestone. The sound comforted me.
 

My biggest worry was that, by day three, I was already running dangerously low on food. I had started with two bags each of beans and rice, a bag of nuts, dried fruit, and — stupidly — a bag of M&Ms. When I had left, I hadn’t taken very much, and the added weight of my pack was already extremely difficult to run with. But I was burning so many calories that I had consumed the food twice as quickly as I had estimated.

I needed to restock, but now I was surrounded by farmland, and the towns along the way were mostly deserted. The few times I chanced leaving the trail to seek out some food, the gas station and general store shelves were bare, no doubt already looted by the carriers passing through. This morning, I just had a handful of nuts left, some raisins, and half a bag of rice and beans.

The wads of cash I took seemed silly now. Being miles away from any grocery store or restaurant made me fully appreciate the fact that you can’t eat money. Food itself had more value than currency, just as Greyson had predicted.
 

The day we raided the grocery store, a loaf of bread cost eighteen dollars. Ground chuck, if there had been any left to buy, cost nearly forty dollars a pound. The foods that had once been cheap were now too expensive to transport, and much of it spoiled before it arrived. I hated to take food from my parents’ stockpile, but at this point, I wouldn’t have a choice.

I knew I had to be getting close to home. It was hard to tell by the thin, faint veins of ink on my map, but I thought I recognized the winding trail I had run in high school. If I could reach that stretch, I would only be five miles away from home at most.

The sun was sinking lower behind the trees, and I had to make a choice: either I could make camp and go to sleep, or I could press on in the hopes of reaching home before collapsing from exhaustion. I’d lost track of my mileage for the day; my head was fuzzy from thoughts of Greyson’s fate and a lack of food.
 

My body needed calories, and I didn’t have the courage to lie down on the cold forest floor again. My body felt so depleted I was not entirely sure I would be able to fend off or outrun even the weakest carrier who might cross my path.

I couldn’t be far. The light was too dim to read the map properly, but the last time I’d checked, I couldn’t have been more than a few miles away from the trailhead I knew so well.

I tried to mentally calculate how many miles total it would be from the start of the familiar trail to the trailhead by my house, plus the miles I’d already put in that day. My brain felt rusty and sluggish. I thought I had run at least fifteen, but I wouldn’t be able to do another five on top of that. I didn’t think I could even walk another two.

Then I heard it: the gentle rush of a tiny waterfall in the bluff. It was so quiet but so familiar that I instantly knew I was home. How many times had I passed that little spring? How many times had I come up to it — hot and sweaty and exhausted — just to splash a handful of cold water on my salty face?

Sure enough, in the darkness, I could just make out the wooden bench that sat on the trail next to it. I knew it had weathered over the years, but it stung with such familiarity and nostalgia, it could have been exactly the same as the last time I saw it.

I sank down on the bench and felt the tears in my throat. I gasped a little, and the volume of my own voice after three days of silence made me jump. The tears stung hot and heavy on my cheeks, and I just sat there and cried.
 

I’d made it. Greyson should have been with me, but at least I was there.
 

Wiping the streaks of tears and salt from my face, I composed myself and got to my feet. I couldn’t let my parents see me like this. I would scare them enough with my matted hair and dirty clothes.

After sitting for just a few moments, the aches in my muscles had begun to sink in. I couldn’t run, so I walked the familiar path to the trailhead tucked in the back of my neighborhood.

It was eerily dark and quiet on the street where I grew up. I wasn’t surprised that none of the streetlights was illuminated; energy costs were too high these days. But I was alarmed at the dark windows in every house I passed. There were no trash cans on the curb, no cars parked in the driveways, and no kids yelling from backyards. I wondered if everyone else had left besides my parents.

Rounding the cul-de-sac, I stopped dead in front of my childhood home, and the blood ran cold in my veins.

I stood outside my home, staring up at two ugly painted Xs with a line drawn through them. They dripped along in unforgiving black spray paint across the garage door I had shimmied under after school every time I had forgotten my key.
 

“
XX
” signified the presence of carriers. The look of it filled me with shame. The bile was rising up in my throat, and I felt the blood drain down to my feet.
Mom.

The houses on either side looked completely abandoned. Once meticulously manicured lawns were overgrown, and entire driveways were hidden beneath blankets of fallen leaves. A dog barked sadly in the distance for owners who would never return.

My house looked vacant, too. My dad’s car, which was always parked in the driveway, was nowhere to be seen. The front windows were black like two gaping, dead eyes. If I hadn’t known better, I might have been able to convince myself they were just on a long vacation.

Forcing my heavy feet to move, I tried the front door. It swung open easily, as if it were only half-closed.
 

The first thing I noticed was that the rug just inside the door was displaced. The crocheted poppies looked dirty, sullied by unfriendly feet.

The coat rack had been knocked over, and the dainty glass table where my dad always set his car keys and left smudged fingerprints was smashed to a million pieces.
 

“Dad?” I called toward the living room.

No one answered. I told myself that he was there. He had to be.
 

I took the stairs two at a time and flew past my old room by the landing. It was nearly empty since I’d moved away, but my parents had left all my old band posters tacked to the baby-blue walls — eerily out of place in a house where PMC presence hung like a black cloud.

I ran into the bedroom my parents had shared before my mother was infected. There was a chain lock on the outside of the door that wasn’t there before, but my father had still cared for my mother with dignity despite the danger of infection and her dangerous lapses in humanity. The room was in shambles, but whether from my raging mother or an intruder, I could not tell. The bedclothes had been pulled back, and —

“No!” I cried, although there was no one to hear me.
 

On that side of the bed — my mother’s side — an enormous blackened bloodstain stood out on the wrinkled white linens.