you think you can feel the future, Michael? No: I AM the future.”
Michael tried to back away but the balloon only bucked. “You’re—you’re lying,” he said, his stomach falling. “There are other people.”
Jopek reached into his jacket, pulled out a stapled collection of crumpled white papers. Michael recognized it instantly: the list that Jopek had shown Michael that had Mom’s name on it; the registry of all those who had checked into the Charleston Safe Zone.
Now Jopek pushed the CONFIRMED DECEASED list at Michael’s face.
Michael’s chest swooned. “No please no,” he moaned, and tried to look away.
Jopek grabbed Michael’s chin through the space suit, forced his face back.
Highlighted in yellow: Michael David Faris, killed 11/24 (KIA; Infected; Security Patrol)
“Wh-what?” said Michael.
“Yeah! Huh!” laughed Jopek. “It’s almost like somebody faked the list!”
“Why the hell did you lie? About everything, about who you are?”
Jopek cocked his head, as if vaguely amused.
“The same reason as you,” he replied. “Because I want to.”
That’s not true, hissed Michael’s mind. None of this is. Oh God, it can’t be. Mom. Mom can’t be dead—
“All right, buddy, let’s get down to business.”
Jopek seized Michael and thrust him up, forcing his face over the edge of the basket, and the stench of the Bellows sailed up at him like ripe disease geysering from a well.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A thing can hide right in front of your face, Michael had learned, if you’re searching for something else. So at first, Michael almost didn’t trust what he was seeing.
They were in downtown Charleston.
The unbroken sky had been an illusion: Michael had mistaken the smooth, blue front of a Rush! Fitness for the open air. He and Jopek had not been high up in the balloon, either, no more than fifty feet in the air. Which seemed impossible when you considered how far away those thousands of Bellows had sounded.
Except it was not impossible. Because there weren’t thousands of Bellows roaming the Charleston roads below. The road was covered in Bellows, yes . . .
But all the Bellows were dead.
Actually dead.
Sprawled blindly and choking the road, like the aftermath of a massacre.
“What the hell happened to them?” Michael finally managed to say.
“Head wounds. All of ’em,” replied Jopek. He reached up and turned off the hot-air balloon’s burner. They began descending toward the Hummer, which the balloon was tied to.
“You killed all of them?” Michael said. But as they got closer to the ground, he understood immediately that these monsters, which had overtaken the Capitol last night, had not been destroyed by a gun. The Bellows’ head wounds weren’t bullet holes, all circular and neat: the holes in their skulls were ragged crescents, cleaved into their foreheads or above their ears, a ruptured chaos of black blood and bone.
They were bite marks.
“My guess? That little boy—that new Thing—got hungry in the night,” said Jopek as the balloon touched down and settled atop the Hummer: he got out, tucked the pistols in his belt, secured the balloon with something like heavy-duty bungee cords, and turned off the balloon burner so it would begin to deflate. A moment later, Jopek climbed down off the side of the Hummer, and Michael followed him. “By the way, Michael,” he said, unlocking a gun case in the front seat and pulling out his AK, “you say a word about the other Safe Zone, and I’m afraid I’ll have to kill you. And I’ll make it hurt.”
And he was Jopek again—or at least the person Michael had thought of as Jopek: redneck voice and cocky smile.
Michael nodded. He felt dazed by the Bellows’ massacre. But he still did not understand something basic about his situation: “If I’m infected, why did you bring me?”
But right then, Holly and Patrick got out the double doors in the back of the Hummer. Michael hadn’t expected to ever see them again. It seemed miraculous and absurd, the way they casually unloaded, as if their car had just pulled into a rest stop.
“Hey, Bub,” Michael said, voice uneasy. “Like my new outfit?”
Patrick whispered to Jopek, “Still the Betrayer?” Jopek nodded, ruffling Patrick’s hair. It was the same thing Jopek had done yesterday in the Hummer outside Walgreens, and back then, Patrick had look pleased. But Patrick flinched tensely this time. There was something haunted in his face: that dread-filled and desperate searching for something to believe. Patrick looked like a windup toy whose key has been turned too many times, as if the gears that had supplied the power to carry him through this