at home, maybe cruelty shouldn’t surprise him. “God . . . ,” Michael said.
Holly suddenly took a deep, nearly angry breath. “If God is around,” she said shortly, “maybe He should be trying harder.” She breathed hard again. “Like, Christ, with this shit with Bobbie . . .” She stopped herself, then said, “Hold this,” and taped a new cotton square to his neck.
Her voice sounded far away, as if already mentally deciding what to put where in the first aid kit. Bring out the awkward: “Well, thanks” and “So, yeah.”
“So yeah,” Holly said, “we should probably get back to bed now. I don’t think the captain really wants us walking around. You and I should totally hang out tomorrow, though. Did that bandaging ordeal hurt as much as you thought it would?”
Michael held in a sigh. He didn’t want the respite from the crappy world to be over. “Nah,” he said.
“Tell the truth,” said Holly.
“You’ll be hearing from my attorney.”
“Heh. But . . . thanks for this, Michael,” she said. Seriously, no jokiness at all. “It was really sweet of you.”
Michael made a “no big deal” gesture, and bent over to move the stool out of his way to hide his blush.
They went out the door and headed back to the Senate, and Holly was saying, to fill the quiet: “Yeah. So. The virus. The government was working on a cure. The CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, basically the FBI of the germ world, they even had this lab in town. They had to keep moving the lab to different places, though; people kept trying to overrun it and get the cure for their infected families. The CDC scientists were supposedly on the verge of getting a working formula that would reverse the virus’s effects on the brain. I don’t know how soon after getting bitten you’d have to take the cure for it to work; the scientists were hopeful, though. But then Charleston got overrun. I don’t know if the CDC even was able to get the ‘cure’ out of the city during the crazy evacs.” Holly sighed. “Anyway—it’s hard to make a cure, because viruses evolve and go through mutations.”
“Like how a cold changes all the time?” Michael said.
“Exactly, because a virus’s job is to survive. So it keeps changing, but on a deeper level—that’s my dad’s fave phrase: ‘on a deeper level’—it’s not changing at all. It’s becoming what it already is. The environment becomes hostile; maybe antibodies are introduced, new proteins or something. So the virus does what viruses do: it adjusts. But it’s not reacting, because what it mutates into was already a part of it. Coded, like a secret, all along.”
They were walking past windows: light and shadow.
“But what’s it heading toward?” Michael asked. “Like, does it have a ‘goal’?”
Holly nodded. “I guess, sort of, it’s heading ‘home.’ Viruses do that literally, sometimes: there are some that actually make infected animals migrate to the place on Earth where the virus originated. Which gives me the jibblies. But even if it doesn’t do that, the goal of every virus is to ‘go home’ to itself: to make the ultimate, purest form of itself. It’s why the Zeds’ behavior is changing, why they seem to be growing . . . not smarter, but savvier. Like you said, they tore out their eyes, they’re just using sound now—which, holla, dork points for figuring that out. But yeah, as with every virus, this one is evolving to its most powerful-slash-purest form.”
Michael asked if that form had a name.
Holly said, “The endgame.”
Michael stopped, a few feet from the Senate. That odd, soaring feeling again—like things syncing together. Like . . . clockwork.
“What’s up?” Holly asked. “You okay?”
And now was as good a time as any to admit how much he liked her. In the long, empty, snow-lit hall, it would have been easy to imagine that they were the last two people left on Earth, that he could just say good night and see Holly tomorrow, and continue his limited-time crush at the world’s most bizarre sleepaway camp. And maybe that was cheesy pop-song stuff, but to Michael nothing felt false about it. It was right then that Michael understood, in his bones and heart and breath, that this moment was what he’d wanted: to be just a normal teenager, to not have to worry about anything other than the mystery of a cute girl’s feelings for him, to just let an adult instruct and protect him.