And I’m not. I’m not going to let them or it win.

The house was much warmer than the guest cabin, and feverish with the odor of sex. Both fireplaces were going. In a place this size, there had to be a couple woodstoves, too. In the dance of orange light and dark shadow, she saw a tangle of bodies, mostly naked, and the glint of empties. Someone had definitely puked in the far right corner. A girl, one of Leopard’s crew, was sandwiched on an ottoman between two writhing boys. Acne slouched on a sofa with his pants puddled around his ankles, a girl’s head bobbing between his legs.

Too much information. She’d actually braced herself as she entered, expecting her mind to do its slewing swoon again. But nothing happened, which made her wonder if her hypotheses were all wrong. Maybe this had nothing to do with hunger, sexual or otherwise. Because if ever there was a time and place . . . she sidestepped two drunken boys fondling one another on the stairs . . . this is definitely it.

Once on the second floor, Slash turned right. Which was interesting. From the odor, she knew Beretta was behind her, in the far room to the left. So this was not about him. They passed a display table with doilies and bric-a-brac, a blur of framed photos. Bedrooms up here, too. She caught Spider’s scent almost at once, from behind a closed door. From the mélange of odors, she thought there might be two others in there with her, and one, she thought, might be . . .

Almost on cue, the knob turned, and then Spider and Leopard ghosted into view. Spider’s blonde hair was tousled, and Leopard had an arm twined about the girl’s waist. Both were completely naked and reeked of sex and garbage. When he spotted Alex, Leopard actually leered, his eyes dragging lazily up and down Alex’s body, lingering, taking inventory. As Sharon would say, no mystery what itch that boy wanted scratched.

Oh shit. Alex’s heart stilled. God, please, I really could do without a little side trip, thanks. Concentrate on something else, anything else. She screwed her eyes to the hole in Spider’s cheek and stared so hard it was a wonder Spider’s face didn’t burst into flames.

What Spider did instead was smile, and that was somehow much worse, because her grin was slow and so satisfied Alex halfexpected the girl to purr. Spider’s was the kind of gleeful smirk every kid’s seen a hundred times on the lips of the most popular girl in school: So sucks to be you.

A minute later, after Spider and Leopard had closed the door again, Slash led her to the threshold of the room at the very end of the hall. Here, the odors were very strong, too: a boy’s sweat and blood and . . .

Oh God. Her heart tried climbing out of her chest, and for just a moment, the slightly metallic aftertaste of prefab spaghetti sauce took on a rankness that brought a surge of sour bile into her throat.

Because now she thought she understood just exactly why Spider had smiled.

45

Slash left a few seconds later, probably heading downstairs to knock back a few, hook up, make up for lost time. That she left Alex alone should have made her less anxious—nothing to see here, folks, move along—but Alex could feel the tension fizzing on her skin like an electrical charge.

Just take it easy. She wet her lips, grateful for the taste of her own salt. Anything was better than the scummy sludge coating her tongue. It might be nothing. There are so many of them in the house, the stink’s everywhere.

This room, she saw, had belonged to a boy with eclectic tastes. A poster of LeBron James competed for space with Derek Jeter. A baseball mitt butted tennis balls. There was a red and white electric guitar in a corner. A poster of some drummer she’d never seen playing in a band she’d never heard of was taped to a closet door.

Daniel was on the bed, propped against the headboard in a tumble of blue and brown striped sheets that his blood had stained dark purple. A Coleman lantern fizzed on a nightstand. In the harsh, unforgiving white light, the shadows beneath his eyes were black. His eyes were distant and unfocused and did not meet hers even when she said his name twice and touched his face. His skin was waxen and greasy with sweat.

Daniel’s wound was low on his left flank, a through-andthrough, which probably accounted for why he was still alive. Working as gently as she could, she cleaned away the blood on his stomach, most of which had dried to a crust and now peeled away in large rust-flakes. She splashed peroxide over the purple lips of the entry wound. The liquid hissed and bubbled into pink foam. Daniel reacted to that. His lids twitched, and something fleet and fast chased over his face. His eyes ticked away from whatever horror they were watching, swept past her face, then wavered back.

“Hi,” he said.

That settled something in her mind. Daniel was right here, right now, and he needed her help. Besides, her brain kept snagging on what Daniel had said on the snow: You said you’d let him go. If Daniel could actually hear and talk to the Changed, that alone was worth the risk.

“Hi,” she said. “Can you roll onto your side? I want to clean off your back. I’m pretty sure the bullet went right through, but I want to be certain.”

“Sure.” Wincing, he eased over. From the way his flesh jumped, she knew the peroxide hurt, but he said nothing. The Coleman’s light bleached his skin bone-white. The quarter-sized exit wound stared at her like a wet, black fish eye. After patting the wound dry, she smeared on antibiotic ointment and used surgical tape to tack down gauze. She fed him an erythromycin, then made him drink half a bottle of water in small sips. With the remaining water, she wet one of the towels and sponged his face.

He said, thickly, “It was my fault.”

She paused, the cool cloth pressed to his cheek. “Because you led the ambush?”

“Yeah.” His eyes stumbled to her face. “Mellie told me not to do anything stupid, but I did.”

“Mellie?”

“The woman who gathered us all together. Kind of like the mom in the Terminator movies, you know? Only more like a group grandmom.”

“She taught you how to fight?” When Daniel nodded, she asked, “Where’d you get all the guns?”

“Oh, lying around.” Daniel sounded as used up as old chewing gum. “You can find almost anything you want. We even got some grenade launchers.”

She remembered those Uzis and that kid from Leopard’s crew with the bandolier. Definitely loaded for bear. “Where’s Mellie now? Is she dead?”

“No.” Daniel’s head rolled on the pillows. “Gone.”

“Why’d she leave?”

“She said she’d lost a couple kids before we joined up with her outside Hurley.”

“Where’s that?”

“Wisconsin. At the border. Bounty hunters is what she thought.”

“Bounty hunters?” Scooping up kids as barter made a terrible kind of sense. Harlan had seen Spared as a meal ticket, and that was months ago. Rule certainly thought Spared, especially girls, were of immense value. “For whom?”

“Depends. There are so many stories, I never know what to believe. Some said military, like . . . you know . . . army? One girl, Sandra, thought people were trying to figure out why we were still okay. Like, experimenting.”

Her stomach dropped. It suddenly occurred to her that maybe, for all its problems, Rule had the right idea. There had been no question that she was safer in the village than outside, and the Changed were only one of many enemies.

Wait, what am I thinking? Lena was right. The Council saw us as baby-makers. We were still barter, something to be used.

“So they got rewarded for bringing kids in?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. I was the oldest, so Mellie left me in charge. She said to take the others to this camp she knew about, where we’d be safe.”

And how, she thought, would Mellie know? The idea of a grandma scooping up kids and leading them to sanctuary gave her pause. What made Mellie more trustworthy than any other oldster? Probably best to save those particular questions. Secondguessing wouldn’t do Daniel a whit of good, and she needed information. “Camp? Where? What kind?”

“With other kids here, in Michigan, but way south of where you . . . we are now. Maybe . . .” Daniel’s eyebrows tented with effort. “Another week? On foot?”

Other kids. Sharon had talked about groups of children fighting the Changed. So they were gathering together? And south meant they’d gone north, but how far? “So where are we, exactly? I mean, are we close to any towns? Because I’ve lost track. We’ve been on the move for . . .” She thought back to the notch she’d made that morning. “Eight days. Nine, now. It must be past midnight, and Sunday now. I figure we went six or maybe seven miles a night, depending.”

“I don’t know much about Michigan. I’m from way west, in Wisconsin, near Mellen?” When she shook her head, Daniel added, “About halfway between Clam Lake and Hurley?”

The names meant nothing to her. Other than her aunt’s hometown of Sheboygan, the rest of Wisconsin was just a through state, a long expanse of highway she blasted through to get from Chicago to Michigan. “Why come here? Why not stay in Wisconsin?”

“We heard it was better, safer in the U.P.”

Well, not so much. “Okay. So where are we?”

“Real close to the border. Maybe . . .” Daniel let out an almost disinterested sigh, as if the math was just too much. “Two days away? On foot?”

She hated peppering him with questions, but she had to know. “Which direction? Do you remember any towns? Is the border west?” Wisconsin was due west of Rule. “North?” She thought that might be right. Was Hurley west of the Waucamaw? God, she wished she’d paid closer attention to the maps she and Tom had found.

“We’re east of the border now. Wisconsin’s a straight shot due west,” Daniel said. “The camp we were heading to is”—his parched lips moved as he did a mental tally—“about a week out and south of this old mine, which Mellie said was where all these Chuckies were hanging out and—”

“What?” Hadn’t Chris’s grandfather operated a mine? Yes, that was right; some of the older miners had been living in a wing of the hospice. Chris read to them when he was in town. “Do you know the name of the mine?”