AFTER RATTLER LEFT, his old truck spinning gravel as he peeled out onto the road, Derek got more and more agitated. I suspected that it was because he wasn’t drinking. As much as I knew he wanted to, he was too afraid of Rattler, who had made him promise to watch us around the clock and keep us out of trouble.
“Ought to just lock y’all up in them rooms upstairs,” Derek muttered several times.
The minutes ticked by. I had found a stack of old Time magazines in a drawer, and Kaz and I tried to read them while Derek played with the change from his pockets, pushing the coins into patterns on the table. I thought I’d go crazy from boredom, but I didn’t want to provoke Derek into following through with his threat. At least I had Kaz for company as long as he let us remain downstairs.
A little before noon, there was a knock at the front door.
“What was that?” Derek said, his hands shaking with nervous energy as he set his coffee cup down harder than necessary, bitter brew sloshing onto the table.
I could see the front door of the run-down house from the kitchen. Staring through the gloomy, dusty sitting room, I thought I could see it tremble on its hinges as the sound came again: a methodical, rhythmic pounding.
“We don’t got to answer that,” Derek said. He swallowed hard, pushing his chair back from the table and brushing at his lap. “We wait a bit, why, they’ll leave like as not, whoever that is.”
“Mr. Pollitt,” I said in a low voice, “if someone’s come all the way out here, odds are they aren’t going to give up just because we don’t answer the door. This house… your family’s home… it’s been, uh, empty for a while now and I’m guessing everyone knows it. Let’s say they saw us drive in, maybe they’re worried about a break-in or something, being a good neighbor and checking it out. If you don’t talk to them, they’re going to make some calls. Trust me on this, they’re not going to let it lie.”
No matter who was there-a neighbor, a traveling salesman, someone from the phone company-there was a chance it could turn into an opportunity for escape, as long as Derek didn’t panic and do something crazy. The farm road was thinly populated, and even a little extra traffic-Rattler’s and Derek’s driving back and forth to town as they stocked and outfitted the house-might easily have been noticed. I wondered how Rattler could have expected any different-people in Gypsum knew everything about each other-but then I realized that he just didn’t care. He meant to keep me and Prairie here under lock and key as long as necessary, but he was banking on it not taking all that long, on our staying willingly soon enough.
Despite everything-despite Prairie rejecting Rattler over and over when they were children, despite her leaving town with no intention of ever returning, despite his having brutalized her sister and fathered me, even despite my having tried to kill him-he had faith in his vision of us as a family. A family that would swell with more children and grow to include any Banished he deemed worthy-those whose blood was pure. The rest would be relegated to the grunt work, like Derek.
Rattler’s belief in his vision gave him power, and his power terrified me. We would need every advantage we could find to fight him.
“Hailey’s right,” Kaz told Derek. “Do you want me to get the door?”
“Stay there, boy,” he ordered Kaz. “I guess this is still my damn house, I’ll answer my own goddamn door.” With his hand on the knob, he turned and glared at us. “Y’all keep quiet. And ease on back where they cain’t see you.”
We complied, flattening ourselves against the kitchen wall, out of sight of the front door. Kaz stood close behind me, his warm breath on my neck. As soon as Derek turned his back, I peeked around the corner. I wondered if I should scream when Derek opened the door, yell that we were being held hostage, but Derek had his gun in his hand, and I didn’t doubt he’d use it-on the visitor, if not on us.
He opened the door and I could see a tall figure standing in the bright morning sun, but I couldn’t make out his features in the blinding light.
“Yeah?” Derek said. “I help you with somethin’?”
So it wasn’t someone he knew, a neighbor or someone from town. My dread grew as I wondered if Prentiss could have found us already, if even now a team was circling the house, covering all the escape routes.
But the visitor said nothing. He didn’t appear to have a weapon; his hands hung loose at his sides. After a moment he took a step, crossing the threshold and stopping inches from Derek.
“Hey, what the… Holy shit,” Derek yelped, and suddenly he stumbled backward, scrabbling to aim his gun at the intruder. “Don’t you come any closer!”
But the man took another step, out of the pool of sunlight and into the cool dimness of the house, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw that something was terribly wrong.
“I’ll shoot, I’ll shoot you!” Derek said, but his hand was shaking badly and he was practically tripping over himself trying to get away from the man.
That was when the smell reached us. It was the sickly-sweet smell of dying flesh, of infection-racked tissue losing its battle with rot and gangrene. Bile rose in my throat and I thought for a moment that I would throw up on the kitchen floor, but Kaz tightened his hand around my arm.
“Is that-” he said, but then a shot rang out and Derek staggered backward and the man stopped coming and wobbled on his feet, a new hole in his soiled white button-down shirt.
Derek had shot the… thing, the thing that Prentiss had sent here, the thing that had once been a man but was now just a body. And not a fresh body, by the looks of it.
Once before, I had seen the undead close-up, when I had accidentally stumbled into their storage room next to the lab. The fire was raging by then, burning down the entire building, but the zombies sat motionless in their chairs until they saw me, and then they stood up and came for me. They cared about nothing else; they had been told to kill, and that was all they meant to do. I fought them with everything I had, but it was a losing battle until Kaz found me and threw himself into the struggle, and together we pushed and shoved and kicked and bit-oh God, yes, I even sank my teeth into their dead cold flesh-and we managed to lock them in there finally to die completely, to burn and burn until only piles of bones remained.
As I stood frozen, staring in shock, I realized something that had escaped me in the lab: I would never be able to look at one of these creatures and forget what they had once been. This one had been a man, a young man, with a full head of longish hair that was bleached at the tips; his hair still looked normal, like it might have once been something he was proud of. But the rest of him was ruined. When the dying are healed, they do not live forever in the undead state: what remains rots and disintegrates, though more slowly than ordinary dead flesh. This man had been not-dead for a while, long enough that his skin had started to crack and peel in some places; in others it was swollen and black and oozing, literally rotting away. His eye sockets sagged, his unseeing eyeballs a sickly yellow, and his mouth hung open, his lips shrunk back against his gray teeth so it looked as though he was leering at me.
Except he-it-didn’t look at me at all. Once it regained its balance, it took another clumsy step forward, toward the center of the house, ignoring Derek, who was trying to aim again, gibbering with fear.
“Don’t you even-I shot you, damn it-stop right there-”
He still hadn’t figured it out. He managed to steady his aim and shot the intruder again, hitting it this time in the gut, blowing a hole that left the fabric of its shirt ragged and flapping, but this time it barely bothered to register the blow, instead swiveling and heading toward Derek.
I tried to scream, but somehow the sound got stuck in my throat. I had to warn Derek, tell him he was no match for the killing machine that had been cobbled together from the ruins of a human, but as I struggled to form the word no, Kaz dragged me backward, his powerful arms circling me from behind, my feet sliding across the old scarred wood floors. He was saying something, yelling into my ear, but I couldn’t make it out over Derek’s screams as the thing wrapped its blistered, peeling hands around his neck and started to squeeze.
Derek fought hard for a man who’d already given so much of his life over to alcohol and despair. I watched him struggle, flailing at the thing’s hands, trying in vain to kick at its legs. Right until the end, Derek gave his all, but finally he sagged backward, his head lolling to the side, and the thing let him drop to the floor, the formless bag of bones that had been Derek coming to rest in an awkward pose next to a spindly side table.
A scream filled the air, and when the thing took two more steps into the foyer, I realized that the sound was coming from me, but I couldn’t stop. As the zombie shuffled toward the center of the house, I saw what was strapped around its waist, half a dozen cylinders taped in place, a cord leading to one of its hands.
Bombs.
And then I understood.
Prentiss had somehow found this place-this humble house in which Rattler planned to begin building his empire-and he meant to burn it to the ground. It made a crazy kind of sense: Prentiss couldn’t compete with Rattler’s powers, his visions, his ability to summon and manipulate the Banished. He couldn’t force Rattler to work for him or to provide fodder for his experiments; he’d already tried to recruit him, offered Rattler money to bring the Banished to him.
When that hadn’t worked, he’d sent a team to capture Rattler at his house. Only Rattler had a vision that they were coming. He lay in wait, sly and strong and quick-witted, for Prentiss’s men-and then he killed them all.
So Prentiss had switched tactics. Somehow he knew that Rattler was hiding out in Derek’s father’s house, so he sent in one of his zombies to blow it up. He expected Rattler to see it coming, but he knew that Rattler couldn’t stay on the run forever. He expected Rattler to slip up eventually, and when that day came, Prentiss would be there to capture him and force him to do his work.
But Prentiss didn’t know everything about the visions. They couldn’t be predicted or controlled. They showed danger and destruction and pain and loss before it happened, but Rattler didn’t care about the shack and he didn’t care about Derek, not really. And more important, his mind, his entire being, was focused on Prairie right now.
Any visions Rattler had would be of her.
Kaz was trying to drag me toward the back door, my feet slipping along the splintered wood, but when I understood what was going to happen next, I grabbed his hand and ran. I glanced back once to see the thing that had been a boy with surfer hair stop and hold the cord up in front of him, his eyes unfocused and uncaring, his grotesque face indifferent, and then Kaz threw open the screen door and pushed me out into the bright morning and I stumbled on the leaning steps and Kaz was dragging me across a weedy yard with a clothesline strung between a tree and a shed that was missing a door and the last thing I noticed as he threw me to the ground next to the shed was the sweet smell of soil and mold and a pile of flowerpots mounded in the shade.
And then the world exploded.