So I leave my mother to do whatever she is doing and return to the shadows of the grove.

Chpater 20

IT’S ALMOST full night by the time I get back to the carnage by the fence. There are people walking in a daze around the victims. Some are hunched over a fallen loved one, others are wandering about crying and looking terrified. A few are digging shallow graves.

My mother has finished her project, although she’s nowhere in sight. The man she dragged now sits on a stack of bodies with his arms stretched out over the fence like a terrified and terrifying scarecrow. She has tied him in place with bits of rope that she probably found on one of the guys who lassoed Paige.

His contorted, screaming lips are emphasized by ruby red lipstick. His button-down shirt is ripped open, exposing his nearly hairless chest. On it, a message written in lipstick says:

The creep factor of my mother’s project is pretty high. Everyone goes out of their way to walk far around it.

As I walk past the bodies, a man bends down to check for the pulse of a woman lying beside me.

“Listen,” I say. “These people might not be dead.”

“This one is.” He moves on to the next one.

“They may seem like they’re dead but they could just be paralyzed. That’s what the stingers do. They paralyze and make you seem dead in every way.”

“Yes, well, not having a heartbeat will do that to you, too.” He shakes his head, drops the wrist of the guy he was checking, and moves to the next victim.

I follow him while soldiers point their rifles up to the sky on the lookout for any signs of another attack. “But you might not be able to feel their heartbeats. I think it slows everything down. I think—”

“Are you a doctor?” he asks without pausing in his work.

“No, but—”

“Well, I am. And I can tell you that if there’s no heartbeat, there’s no chance of a person being alive except for a very unusual situation such as a child falling into a frozen pond. I don’t see any children who fell into a frozen pond here, do you?”

“I know this sounds crazy, but—”

Two men pick up a woman wearily and shuffle over to a shallow grave.

“No!” I cry out. That could have been me. Everybody thought I was dead for a while, and if circumstances had been different, they might have dumped me in a hole and buried me alive while I watched, paralyzed but totally aware.

I run over and stand between the men and the hole. “Don’t do this.”

“Leave us alone.” The older man doesn’t even look at me as he grimly carries the victim.

“She could be alive.”

“My wife is dead.” His voice breaks.

“Listen to me. There’s a chance she’s alive.”

“Can’t you give us some peace?” He glares at me out of the corners of his eyes. “My wife is dead.” Tears stream from his red-rimmed eyes. “And she’ll stay dead.”

“She can probably hear you right now.”

The man’s face turns red, making it painful to look at him. “She’ll never come back. And if she does, then she won’t be our Mary. It’ll be some abomination.” He points to a woman standing alone by a tree. “Like her.”

The woman looks fragile, lost, and alone. Even with the brown scarf wrapped around her head and the gloves on her hands, I recognize the shriveled face of Clara, the woman who climbed out of the ruins of the aerie. She wears a dull-colored coat that whispers her desire not to be noticed. I’m guessing people haven’t exactly been welcoming.

She hugs herself as if clinging to the husband and children she longs to find. All she wanted was to find her family.

Mary’s family drags her paralyzed body into the shallow grave.

“You can’t do this,” I say. “She’s fully aware. She knows she’s being buried alive.”

The younger guy asks, “Dad, do you think—”

“Your mother is dead, Son. She was a decent human being and she’ll have a decent burial.” He picks up his shovel.

I grab his arm.

“Get away from me!” He shakes me off, trembling in fury. “Just because you don’t have the decency to do what’s right for your family doesn’t mean you have any right to stop others from doing what’s right for theirs.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You should have put down your sister humanely and with love before strangers had to step in to try to do it for you.”

The older man takes the shovel full of dirt and throws it onto his wife in the hole.

It lands on her face, covering it.

Chpater 21

IN THE DARKENING GROVE, Obi waves over one of his guys. “Please put Ms. Young with her mother and make sure they’re safe and secure for the night.”

“You’re arresting me?” I ask. “For what?”

“It’s for your protection,” says Obi.

“Protection from what?” I ask. “The U.S. Constitution?”

Obi sighs. “We can’t have you or your family loose and causing panic. I need to maintain control.”

Obi’s man points his silencer-enhanced pistol at my chest. “Walk to the street and don’t give me any trouble.”

“She’s trying to save people’s lives,” says a trembling voice. It’s Clara, clutching her oversized coat around her as if wishing she could disappear.

Nobody pays her any attention.

I throw Obi a look that says, Are you serious? But he’s busy waving over another guy.

He points to Mom’s victim project. “Why is that horrible pile of bodies still around? I told you to take them away.”

Obi’s man tells two other guys to take the bodies down. Apparently, he doesn’t want to do it himself.

The two guys shake their heads and back away. One of them crosses himself. They turn and run toward the school, as far from the bodies as they can get.

As my guard escorts me through the carnage, I hear Sanjay telling people to stow the unclaimed bodies into a van for autopsies.

I stagger away from them. I just can’t watch. Maybe these people really are dead. I certainly hope so.

I get tossed into the back seat of a police car parked on the road. Mom is already there.

The police cruiser has a metal mesh between the front and rear seats. There are bars on the back seat windows. Beneath the rear window, there are blankets and a couple of bottles of water. My foot knocks over a half bucket with a lid, complete with packets of sanitary wipes.

It takes me a minute to understand that they’re not taking us anywhere. This is our holding cell.

Great.

At least the guard didn’t take my sword. He didn’t even pat me down for weapons, so I assume he wasn’t a cop in the World Before. Still, he probably would have taken my sword if it didn’t look like a post-apocalyptic comfort bear.

I sip on a bottle of water, drinking barely enough to quench my thirst but not so much that I’ll need to pee anytime soon.

People frantically rush, trying to finish their jobs before full dark, whether their job is dragging bodies into the autopsy van or burying loved ones. They’ve been glancing at the sky every couple of minutes, but as darkness slithers over them, people begin looking behind them nervously as if worried something will sneak up on them.

I get it. There’s something horrifying about being left alone in the dark, especially with someone you think is dead.

I try not to think about what it must be like for the victims. Paralyzed but aware, left helpless in the dark with monsters and family.

When the last unclaimed body is tossed into the van, the workers slam it shut and drive off.

Those who didn’t go in the van trot across the street to the school. Then the families, whether or not they’re done shoveling dirt on their loved ones, drop their shovels and run after the workers, obviously not wanting to be left behind.

Mom starts to make animal noises of anxiety as she watches everyone leave. When you’re paranoid, the last place you want to be is trapped in a car where you can’t run and can’t hide.

“It’s okay,” I say. “They’ll be back. They’ll let us out when they cool off. And then we’ll go find Paige.”

She yanks on the door handle, then jumps over to my side to try the other one. She bangs on the window. She rattles the screen separating the front seat from the back. Her breathing becomes a pant.

She’s spiraling into serious freak-out mode.

The last thing we need is major hysteria in a space smaller than a sofa.

As the final stragglers run past my window, I yell at them. “Put me in another car!”

They don’t even glance my way as they scramble across the street into the darkness.

And I’m left stuck in a very tight space with Mom.

Chpater 22

ALL KINDS of worries swirl around in my head.

I take a deep breath. I try to shove all the worries aside and focus on being centered.

“Mom?” I keep my voice quiet and calm. What I really want to do is crawl under the seat to get out of her way when she goes nuclear. But that’s not an option.

I hold out a bottle of water. “Do you want some water?”

She looks at me like I’m mad. “Stop drinking that!” She snatches it from my hand and stashes it away below the rear window. “We need to conserve it.”

Her eyes dart around every corner of our jail. Her desperate worry shows in every line of her face, and she is the picture of anxiety. It seems there are more of those lines showing up every day between her eyebrows and around her mouth. The stress is killing her.

She rummages through her pockets. With every smashed egg she finds in her pockets, she gets more frantic. To my relief, someone has taken her cattle prod. I hate to think how much force that took.

“Mom?”

“Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up! You let those men take her!” She grips the metal mesh with one hand and the seatback with the other. She squeezes until all the blood runs out of her hands, turning them into white claws.

“You let those monsters do all those horrible things to her! You sold yourself to that devil and couldn’t even save your sister?” The ridges between her eyebrows mash together so hard they look nightmarish. “You couldn’t even look her in the eye when she needed you most. You were out there hunting her, weren’t you? So you could kill her yourself! Weren’t you?” Tears stream down her tortured mask of a face.

“What good are you?” She screams in my face with such intensity that her face turns crimson like it’s ready to explode. “You’re heartless! How many times have I told you to keep Paige safe? You’re worse than useless!”