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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Threadrunner Ranch

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Good-bye

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  For our children, Jason and Nicki:

  The future is yours.

  May that future be as bright as the light

  you have brought to our lives.

  It was on the street outside. It was coming through your windows. It was a virus, an infection … By the time they tried to evacuate the cities, it was already too late. The infection was everywhere. The army blockades were overrun, and that’s when the exodus started. The day before the TV stopped broadcasting, there were reports of infection in Paris and New York. You didn’t hear anything more after that.

  —28 Days Later

  One

  Bainbridge Island, Washington

  Snug Harbor Motor Court

  Snow falls lightly as two motorcycles the color of arterial blood cross the threshold of the Snug Harbor Motor Court: a Kawasaki Ninja 250R and a Honda Interceptor, driven by two nut-brown young men with long black hair, Darius Phillips and Dean Kitsap. Behind them rolls the school bus they call the Blue Beauty, although the blue paint is flaking and the bus is far from beautiful. Windows are shattered, the body tattooed with bullet holes. They have been at war, and will not have long to rest.

  Bainbridge Island is the ancestral home of Dean and Darius’s people, the Suquamish Indians, fisherfolk for generations before the first white traders appeared. Now … the Suquamish own homes and businesses and fishing fleets and casinos and restaurants. Those who can’t afford better, like Dean’s family, huddle together in places like the Snug Harbor Motor Court. Nearly four hundred people share a hundred seventy trailers.

  Dean, who leads the way, was born here. His mother and father and six brothers and sisters still live here, while an older brother is in the army, protecting strangers in a strange land. It is the only true home Dean has known. Still, somehow he cannot remember which way to turn.

  There, at the central court—the cleared area houses a barbecue pit and a couple of weather-beaten picnic tables. Normally, children fill the narrow lane, playing in the snow, laughing and waving at the motorcycles and cars as they pass. Today, no one.

  But the ground is cluttered with children’s clothes, as if they are fresh from the laundry. Laid out in sets. So strange … pants, shirts, shoes … and footprints in the snow leading off toward the common play area.

  A removable steel-frame barricade blocks the Blue Beauty from going farther. The bus’s doors wheeze open.

  First out is Terry Whittaker. Tall, dark-haired, wiry. Then Kendra Brookings peeks out and steps down, her nutmeg-colored, heart-shaped face pinched and cautious. Small, fragile-looking, but with a hidden strength that still surprises Dean. A survivor.

  When had Dean learned about her strength? He isn’t sure. And … she wasn’t one of the Round Meadow Five, who had been sentenced to a summer of counseling kids at camp as punishment for their sins. How does he know her?

  Sonia Petansu follows Kendra—thin, pale, angular. Long black hair with a vertical white streak. Cynical protectee of the largest of them, the big black guy everyone calls Piranha, Charlie Cawthone. Last off the bus is Corporal Ursalina Cortez, alert and serious, watching everything, missing nothing.

  Dean moves toward the commons as the others follow him, silent, floating above the new snow, barely leaving footprints.

  Dean finally hears an old woman’s voice. Then he sees the children. They sit in the snow, dressed as they might have been to take a dip in the summer ocean, bare brown skin glimmering in the shimmering flecks, which seem to glide around them without touching. Why aren’t the children shivering in the cold?

  The old woman is telling stories, as she always has, from the time Dean was small. Everyone calls her Storyteller, and perhaps he once knew her real name, but he cannot remember. Storyteller has always been old. Dean’s grandmother once told him that when she herself was a girl, Storyteller had spun her tales, and even then, she had been old. Storyteller has lived there since before the first trailer was towed to its berth.

  Dean sits on the bench near the barbecue pit, where in the summer they roast salmon and beef ribs and enjoy the smell of lush green pine drifting from the Columbia Forest. A boy sitting there looks back and smiles, beckoning him over. His little brother, Raymond. Had Raymond been sitting there a moment ago? Why hadn’t he seen him? Everything seems so strange.

  “Years ago,” Storyteller says, “before your grandparents were born, we knew things that you have forgotten, or pretend to have forgotten.”

  The children listen, rapt. “We knew not to let the children wander. The old ones would say, ‘If you aren’t careful, children, Kalkalilh will come and take you all away.’

  “You have forgotten now, but if we forget, Kalkalilh will return. She is a giant, a huge woman who hides in the woods. Her home is far up in the mountains. In the evening or even in the daytime, but mostly in the evening, she will come prowling around the villages looking for disobedient children playing outside instead of doing their chores. Kalkalilh always has a great big basket strapped on her back, and can you guess what the basket for? She grabs children, throws them into the basket, and scurries as fast as she can back home, up in the mountains. There, she boils them alive and sucks the marrow from their bones.”

  The children gasp, frightened. Perhaps Dean gasps with them. Fear whispers across his skin. Has he heard this story before? Has he seen the old woman with the basket with his own eyes?

  “Since the children of the village did not want to die, they obeyed their parents, as good children did in those days …”

  Dean looks down at his brother Raymond, whose hand slips into his. The fingers are small and cold. Dean rubs Raymond’s hand to try to warm him, but Raymond’s skin feels like a block of ice.

  “But Kalkalilh was clever, and lured the parents away, so that the children were hungry and crying. Bigger children had been left to watch over the smaller ones, boys who were nearly men, and one of those older children was Dean. He was a great carver. He always had a sharp knife in his possession.”

  She looks at him when she says the words, and Dean’s fingers touch hi
s belt. There is indeed a knife there. He doesn’t remember carrying a knife.

  He looks around, and doesn’t see the others who followed him here. His cousin, Darius, is gone. And the motorcycles, and the battered bus. No Kendra. No Terry. None of them. All gone. Only he remains with the children in the snow.

  “A strange old woman came out of the woods, and in her hands were strips of dried salmon. ‘Come, children, take this jerky.’ And when the smallest girl reached to take the food, the cannibal woman grabbed her and threw her into the basket strapped to her back. And then grabbed up all the other children and headed off to her home in the mountains. Even Dean was trapped in the basket.

  “But Dean was clever, and used his knife to cut a hole in the basket’s straw, and one at a time, he pushed out the others and told them to go home. As each child thumped onto the ground, Kalkalilh said, ‘What was that, Dean?’ and Dean would say, ‘Nothing, Gramma. It is only the sound of your feet on the ground.’ And she believed his lie, so she continued walking until she arrived at her home. Dean tried to free all of the children, but a few remained trapped in the basket with him.

  “Kalkalilh started a fire in her hearth, melting pitch to seal the eyes of the children, so that they would be unable to see if they dared try to escape.

  “And Dean whispered to the children: ‘As she starts to smear the pitch on your eyes, look down so that it smears on your foreheads and will not blind you.’ And they agreed to do as he said, although they were very scared.

  “When the cannibal woman finished smearing the pitch onto the children’s foreheads, believing she had blinded them, she laughed while a bleached skull rolled on the ground. Then she sat down and started to paint her face in preparation of dancing to celebrate the succulent feast.

  “While she danced on the opposite side of the fire from the children, Dean said, ‘Come closer to us, Grandmother, as you are dancing.’ And she did. When she came between the children and the fire, they all jumped on her and shoved her into the roaring hot flames. As soon as her hair hit the fire, she screamed as the lice on her head went up like a big puff of smoke. Dean used the fire tongs and kept pushing her further into the fire, saying, ‘I am trying to help you.’

  “And she screamed, and the children laughed and laughed …”

  At the trailer park, Dean and the children laughed at the thought of the old woman dancing in the flames. Dean laughed until tears ran down his face while snow drifted to the earth and never touched him.

  But Raymond’s hand was so cold that it burned his skin, so he let his brother go. And when he glanced at Raymond’s face, his brother’s eyes were bright red.

  The color of blood.

  Two

  December 19

  Central California coast

  The choking burr of the bus’s engine had lulled Kendra to sleep, but a voice muttering about something called a “Kal-kal-il” eating children woke her. She saw Dean twitching in the seat in the row across from hers, both arms wound around his face as if to keep out the sunlight.

  “Raymond …” he whispered. She had heard the name before. His brother?

  Dean was the only one of them who had been home since Freak Day, and he’d never talked about what he had seen. Kendra decided that any dream about his brother couldn’t be a good one.

  She leaned over him, shaking him to wake him. His long jet-black hair was wound around his face like a veil.

  “Dean?” she said, touching him gently on the elbow. He opened his brown eyes warily, blinking. She recognized his confusion well; each day felt like you were waking into a dream. Which dream was worse?

  “You were talking about someone eating children,” she said.

  He stared at her blankly, still trying to place her. “Snug Harbor,” he said.

  Piranha leaned over the seat, big brown hands clutched on the safety rail raised above each seat. “Where your parents lived?” he asked in his basso voice.

  “Yeah,” Dean said. He was stretching and twisting, almost like a snake shedding its skin.

  “Never told us what happened there, man,” Piranha said.

  “No.” Dean’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t.”

  He stood and walked up to the front of the bus. He had begun his nap an hour ago, chaining his Honda to the back of Blue Beauty, leaving his cousin Darius to scout ahead of the bus on his bike alone.

  “Pull over, Terry,” Dean said. Terry was driving, as usual; as busted up as the Blue Beauty was after the pirate attack, Terry might be the only one of them who could manage the bus. Kendra usually sat in the seat behind Terry, but she’d moved closer to the supply boxes in the rear when she realized she couldn’t stop staring at the back of his head, replaying their crazy, wonderful kiss on the beach in McKinleyville. If she distracted him as much as he did her, he might not be able to keep his eyes on the road. They didn’t have the luxury of a high school crush.

  Terry pulled over. They were on a stretch of farmland along the 101, maybe twenty miles south of Ukiah. Stalled cars were scattered along the road, but they didn’t expect to run into real blockages until they got closer to San Francisco.

  They heard Dean shift his bike down off the rack. Darius, who had ridden up ahead of them, had circled back around to his side. Kendra watched Dean sadly, wondering what he had seen in his dream. She had nightmares too, and the images felt anything but harmless. Sometimes her dreams felt more real than the waking world, even if she didn’t know which was more horrible. She was glad she didn’t see her parents, or her grandfather, in her dreams—even though she missed them so much it was sometimes hard to breathe. But how could she select a handful of people to miss when the whole world might be gone?

  Kendra watched Dean and his cousin talk through her window, wondering what they were saying. They were cousins, but so alike that everyone simply called them the Indian Twins.

  “Hope he’ll be okay,” she said as he boarded his bike, giving the starter a confident thrust with his scuffed boot. But she was really talking about herself.

  No one answered Kendra. Maybe no one had heard her over the radio. Maybe none of them would be okay.

  The radio was loud; a persistent nattering from a man who called himself Reverend Wales, from a town ahead called Domino Falls. “… looked upon the burden, folks, and I said, YES, I can help build a haven. YES, I can give people hope. YES, the threads that bind us all can weave a new world from the wreckage of the old …”

  Domino Falls. It sounded more like a game of chance than true sanctuary.

  The Twins gave Terry the thumbs-up sign. Then they rode off ahead of the bus, together.

  At times the 101 was a broad clear stretch of freeway, and at others, when winding through one of the abandoned coastal towns, it was little more than a two-lane road dotted with interstate signs. Here, just on the outskirts of a town composed of a pair of gas stations, a convenience store, and a motel, it was the latter. Doors were ajar, windows shattered. The empty towns always creeped Terry out. He didn’t know what had happened here, but it was just more evidence of bad news.

  Up ahead, the two cherry-red motorcycles had pulled over to the side of the road. Darius waved to Terry to slow down. Terry cursed under his breath. They had agreed that they had enough gas to keep going without stopping. They’d been lucky at the last checkpoint, but stopping could always lead to trouble.

  “Something’s up,” Terry said, keeping his voice even. He didn’t want to panic the others, especially Kendra, but they had to be ready. Behind him, the familiar scurrying and clicking of metal told Terry that his little army was indeed prepared for anything.

  “What’s up?’ Piranha said.

  “Not sure yet.”

  “If that’s a freak, it’s my shot,” Ursalina said.

  Had Terry seen him all along? A few yards ahead of the bikes, a short, stout stranger in a gray shirt and a conical birthday hat was waving his arms at the bus.

  Did freaks wave? Why were Dean and Darius letting him get so close?
Any stranger was a freak or a pirate until proven otherwise. Both were deadly, but the pirates were worse. Pirates laid traps—like this fool in a birthday hat.

  The Blue Beauty creaked to a halt. The man didn’t seem to be armed, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a sniper hiding nearby. Or a band of pirates out of sight. At the Siskiyou Pass, pirates had blocked the road and nearly killed them all. As Terry thought about it, phantom gunfire crackled in his ears.

  “Why’d the Twins stop?” Piranha said. “So what if there’s a dude in the road? We said we’d keep going.”

  Ursalina checked her rifle’s action. “Some people never learn,” she muttered.

  Terry shrugged, sighing. “Maybe it’s the birthday hat,” he said, and slipped the gear into Park. The engine growled disapproval. He didn’t dare kill the engine, or the Beauty might not start quickly enough when they needed to go. Hell, she might not start at all. “Everybody stay close. Watch for movement.”

  After the bus stopped, they all slowly climbed down, weapons ready.

  Hipshot was the last, but the black terrier mix they’d inherited from Camp Round Meadow seemed reluctant to dismount. Not good. But Hippy wasn’t barking a warning either. That … was telling. The man in the road wasn’t infected. Hippy would know. Ursalina had told them that the soldiers at her base had called dogs PAWS—a Predator Advance Warning System. Dogs could smell the freak in people even before they turned.

  Once they reached Dean and Darius, Terry gave them an irritated look.

  “What can I say?” Darius said, grinning. “I can’t pass up a chance to party.”