Banished

“Yeah…”

“Did you know? About Rascal?”

“No. I mean, I thought there was something wrong with him, and I was kind of surprised. I knew Prairie could heal animals, because she fixed our cat’s leg once when it fell out of a window, a long time ago. And when I met you I could tell you were a Healer too. So I thought it was strange that you weren’t able to fix your dog. But I never knew about the… reanimated dead thing until Prairie told me just now.”

“Reanimated dead?” I grimaced.

“Well… that’s what Prairie said. I think she has a hard time saying ‘zombie.’ ”

“But Kaz, if you’d seen him-”

“Hey, it’s okay with me, you can call them whatever you want. I mean… decomposing flesh walking around, that’s kind of the definition of a zombie.” He flashed me a tentative smile and I felt a little bit better. “Besides, other than that little issue, I think it’s cool, what you can do. Your gift.”

That surprised me, but then I remembered that he’d grown up knowing he was Banished. “What about you?” I asked. “Do you… you know, have visions?”

“Sometimes. Usually only when something really bad’s going to happen. Like when I was a kid I had this vision of our garage burning down. I made Mom go look, and some paint rags had caught fire in the corner. Or when our downstairs neighbor had a heart attack, I saw it a few days earlier, how she was lying on the floor of her apartment, dead. Stuff like that.”

“Can you make yourself have a vision of something you want to see?” Like whether a crazed one-eyed redneck is coming after you.

Kaz shook his head. “No, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t, you know, summon it or whatever. It just happens sometimes… I get a dizzy feeling and then there’s a sort of extra layer on top of my vision that fades in and out. If I close my eyes, I just see the vision. Otherwise it makes me feel like I’m going to hurl, like motion sickness.”

“So you don’t want to have it while driving or something.”

“Yeah. That would be bad.” Kaz grinned at me and I realized he’d done the nearly impossible: he’d lifted my spirits.

“Thanks,” I said. “For taking care of… burying Rascal.”

“Oh, that was no big deal. No problem.” For a minute I thought he was going to say something else about it, but then he just stood, offered me his hand and pulled me up off the bed. “You missed lunch. I saved you some.”

After all that, unbelievably, it was a good afternoon.

Prairie and Anna were having a serious conversation when we came out of the room, and Chub had managed to corner Anna’s cat and was trying to pick it up and hug it, an experiment that ended with him getting a couple of scratches on his forearms, which made him cry. I thought about healing them, but then I decided that healing should be reserved for when it was really necessary. Chub still needed to experience the little hurts and challenges of childhood so he would grow up strong and self-sufficient.

After Kaz microwaved me some lunch, we all walked to the park, Kaz carrying a couple of lacrosse sticks and a duffel bag. He tried to teach me how to throw and catch, and we lost a few balls in the hedges circling the park. We pushed Chub on the swings and fed stale bread to some ducks, and by the time night was starting to fall, I’d managed to forget for a while, which was what I suspected Anna and Prairie had intended.

On our way to a pizza place that Anna and Kaz raved about, Prairie caught up with me.

“I’m going up to the lab tomorrow, early. There’s only one guard on duty on Sundays. I’m thinking I can wait until he goes to the bathroom or something and get past him. Then I have the prox card to get in the lab.”

She didn’t look all that confident. I figured there was more to the plan, but that she didn’t want me to worry. “Do you want me to come along?”

“No… I think it’s best if I do it alone.”

I didn’t argue. Maybe I should have, but it had been so nice to not think about it for a few hours, and I wasn’t ready to give that up. Instead, I tried to put it out of my mind, telling myself there would be plenty of time to worry later, but when we returned home and got Chub bathed and put to bed, I was exhausted. I hadn’t had more than a few hours of sleep in days, and it hit me hard. I crawled into Kaz’s bed, Chub on his nest of blankets on the floor, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke to someone shaking my arm.

“Hailey, wake up.” It was Kaz, whispering, his face hard to see in the moonlight. “There’s a problem. I’ll get Prairie. Meet me in the kitchen.”

I got up quietly so as not to wake Chub. I splashed water on my face and went to the kitchen. When Prairie and Kaz came in a minute later, she looked completely awake, as though she’d never gone to sleep.

“You’ve been through so much already,” she said when she saw me. “Kaz, I wish you’d let her sleep.”

“She has a right to hear this.”

“What?” I demanded as a door opened down the hall and Anna came into the kitchen.

“What are you all-”

“I had a vision, Mom,” Kaz said. “They need to know.”

Anna tensed up, and I remembered that Kaz said his visions always signaled something bad. “What is it?” she whispered, her face going pale.

“Bryce… he’s medium height? Brown hair, going gray here?” Kaz gestured along his hairline.

“Yes.”

“I saw him, in a room… looked like a motel room? Or a dorm room? There were people in the beds… hurt people. Hurt bad, Prairie, they weren’t even conscious.”

“What was he doing?”

“It wasn’t what he was doing. He was just sitting there, taking notes or something on his laptop-”

“What was it?” Prairie demanded, her voice going high and thin. “What did you see?”

“I’m sorry, Prairie… he’s got another Healer.”

CHAPTER 23

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, another Healer?”

“I couldn’t see her all that clearly. She had long hair, and she was leaning over them, chanting or talking. I couldn’t hear. I don’t hear anything with the visions.”

“What made you think she was healing them?”

“Well, first of all, it was so obvious they were… dying.” Kaz hesitated. “I mean, they were unconscious, and one of them had his head shaved and what looked like a recent scar. And the other one had a breathing tube and a body cast. Young guys.”

“Military,” Prairie said. “Had to be. Only question is whose.”

“And the Healer, this woman, she put her hands on them, on their faces.” Kaz demonstrated, cupping the sides of his face with his hands. “And after… it was hard to tell because the visions jump around, but, after, they, ah, woke up.”

“Woke up?” Prairie repeated sharply.

“Yes, they moved, you know, opened their eyes, sat up. That was about it, all I saw.”

Prairie was silent, but I could tell she was thinking hard.

“Who could it be?” Anna asked after a moment. “There was no one else in your village? You are sure?”

“No one.” Prairie was vehement. “Clover’s dead. Hailey’s here. Alice is broken. Mary’s dead. There’s no one else. I don’t see where he could have found one.”

“One of ours, then,” Anna said. “The Healers must have made it out of Poland after all.”

“We have to go now.” It was me speaking, to my amazement. “Prairie, we have to stop him. You have to destroy the research. We can’t let him find her, we can’t let her make zombies.”

“But we can’t-”