She sighed and released the tension she’d been holding in her shoulders. She hadn’t realized just how scared she’d been that he would refuse to go with her after what happened.
“So, we figure out a plan,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Together we can do anything. I’m so glad I didn’t lose you in that hospital. I was so scared, Noah.”
“Me too,” he said in a whisper. “If I’d had any idea just how much planning Lily must have done to set that trap for us, I never would have agreed to it. I still don’t understand how she set all of that up ahead of time, but she must have had some way to communicate with the rotters, even when she was there inside the compound with us.”
“What I don’t understand is why Crash had been dreaming about Lily in the first place,” she said. “He was right about the rest of us, and he seemed sure the fifth was hiding in that closet. He dreamed about her. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Lily wasn’t the one I was dreaming about in that closet.” Crash stood in the doorway leading back to the small bedrooms.
Parrish sat up with a start, her katana glowing again.
“A little warning would be nice, guys. It’s not nice to just sneak up on people in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.”
Crash smiled and shrugged. “Sorry.”
Noah looked up, confused. “Wait, what do you mean Lily wasn’t the one in the closet? There was someone else there?”
He ran a hand through his messy black hair and shook his head. “I’ve been going through it in my head, over and over, trying to make sense of what happened that night we met her.”
He sat down across from the two of them, and Parrish pulled her knees under her body to make room for him. When he sat down, she noticed that the lightning bolt on the fatalis stone began to glow brighter.
“I’ve been giving this a lot of thought,” Crash said. “I think Lily could see inside my dreams. She must have seen the fifth in the closet, and she knew from watching my dreams that for whatever reason, I couldn’t see the fifth’s face. Unlike the rest of you, I didn’t have any solid information about who or where they were. She took advantage of that and set herself up to seem like the fifth. I think she basically recreated the situation from my dream and made me believe it. Then she used me to get to the rest of you.”
Parrish sat in silence, taking in this new information and trying to piece together the puzzle for herself.
“So she set all of this up and then acted like a scared victim so we’d welcome her in and take care of her,” Noah said.
“This whole time we looked at her like she was the weakest one in our group,” Parrish said, frustration building up inside her. She wanted to scream. “She acted like she’d been through some kind of major trauma and needed us to take care of her, when what she was really doing was plotting how to kill us. I mean, how much of what we’ve been through over the past few weeks is because of her? The rats? The horde on the drive here? The super zombies on the roof that night in DC were definitely because of her, right?”
“Definitely,” Crash said, nodding. “She created them, somehow, from regular rotters. And then she did it again before we got to the hospital. I don’t know when or how, but it was definitely her this whole time, no doubt with some help from the Dark One herself. That’s what Lily called her, right? The Dark One?”
Parrish and Noah both nodded. They’d gone over everything Lily said back at the hospital several times, but it all still seemed so unreal.
“So, what do we do now?” Parrish asked, knowing there was no easy answer to that question. “Why has all of this been put on our shoulders?”
She ran her thumb across the infinity symbol again, watching the light inside flicker as if there was a fire inside it.
“I mean, why do we have these strange abilities if we don’t even know how to use them?” she asked. “What are we supposed to do with them? We obviously aren’t normal humans. If these visions we’ve had are to be believed, we never were human, which don’t even get me started on that. But if we’re here for a reason or if our sole job is supposed to be to stop the Dark One, we’re doing a pretty crap job of it so far. Is there even much of a world to save, anymore?”
She thought of Zoe all alone in that hotel room. What if Lily had already gotten to her by now? What then?
“There are survivors everywhere right now,” Crash said, patting her knee.
When he touched her, the light inside the stone flashed brighter for a moment.
“We might not be able to see them or talk to them right now, but I believe there are compounds and groups like the one we found here that have found a way to survive,” he said. “If we can help save them, it will be worth it.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Karmen said.
Parrish looked up as Karmen walked over and sat down next to her, looping her arm with Parrish’s arm, as if they were the best of friends.
Which, in a world where nearly everyone else was dead, she supposed they were.
“What do you mean?” Noah asked.
“We didn’t come from this world, did we?” Karmen said. “I don’t understand everything we’ve seen in these weird visions, but I know for certain the red sand beach I’ve seen over and over isn’t here in this world. And the Dark One didn’t come from here, either. Neither did Lily.”
“And neither did we,” Crash said.
