“I’m okay,” she gasped.
“No,” Lily argued. “You’re not okay. You’re in labor.”
She shook her head, despite being pale. Despite being weak and shaken. “I’m fine. It’s just those fake contractions. This is normal.”
“McKenna—”
“I’m fine!” Whatever strength her body lacked, she more than made up for with her conviction. “Even if I wasn’t, there’s nothing you can do now. We’ll be at the border soon. We can’t stop until we get there anyway. And I’m fine.”
Lily studied her friend’s expression. Her skin was still bloodless. The circles under her eyes as dark as bruises. She wasn’t fine, but she was right.
There was nothing they could do here.
“We could go back to Base Camp,” Lily said.
McKenna shook her head. “Base Camp is farther away. And there’s not even hope of a doctor there. We should stick with the plan.”
Lily bit her lip, thinking. Despite what McKenna had said, this clearly wasn’t one of those Hicks things, whatever they were. This was real labor.
“Okay, we’ll head for Mexico and we’ll drive fast. Ely will get us there.”
McKenna nodded and they started walking for the door. They ran into Ely outside by the SUV. He shot them an odd look, but Lily just shook her head so he’d know not to say anything in front of McKenna.
She got McKenna situated in the front seat of the car and headed over to the driver’s side to talk to Ely.
“What’s up?” he asked, the question obvious in his eyes.
“I think McKenna’s in labor.”
“You
“She says it’s just a Barton Hicks thing but—”
“Braxton Hicks?”
“What?”
“Braxton Hicks. They’re early contractions. False labor.”
“Yeah. That must be what she meant. She said she thought that’s what it was, but it seemed really intense.”
Ely clenched and unclenched his jaw. “How far apart are they?”
“I don’t know.” Then she thought it through. “No, wait. When we went to the bathroom, she was in there a really long time. She could have had one then. Which means . . .” They’d come out of the bathroom, gathered up their stuff. Walked through most of the store. And McKenna had been walking slowly. “Maybe fifteen minutes?”
Ely nodded. “Okay. We won’t panic until they’re five minutes apart. Until then, we pack fast and we get the hell out of here.”
“How do you know so much about this stuff?”
He gave a humorless chuckle. “Hey, it’s a cliche, but I’m Latino. I’m the oldest of three and I’ve got a shitload of cousins.” His expression darkened. “
He turned and walked away before she could say anything else. She watched him for only a second before heading back to the storeroom for the last of their stuff.
Ely seemed like such a loner. He could have stayed at Base Camp, or even infiltrated the Farms with the other retrieval teams. Instead, he spent all his time on his own, just searching.
He’d gotten a lot of people out of Farms. Carter had said his retrieval rate was higher than almost any other Elite’s. All those people he’d gotten out and none of them had been the family he’d been so desperate to save. How must that have fucked with his head? She’d been so desperate to save just Mel. She’d failed and it had nearly killed her. Wouldn’t it be worse, so much worse, if it wasn’t just Mel, but a whole shitload—to use his word—of family members?
She grabbed the last few things from the walk-in and made her way out of the store toward the waiting car. Only when she looked up at the ceiling, at the signs hanging from the rafters, did this look like a Wal-Mart rather than a battlefield. Somehow, the signs were intact. Big, cheerfully colored signs with pictures of smiling kids and busy moms. Over what must have been the child-care section hung a five-foot-by-five-foot close-up of a gurgling infant.
She nearly stopped cold. That baby. That was what McKenna had in her belly right now. Not that exact baby, obviously, but a real, living person. She’d avoided thinking about her bump that way until now.
It seemed stupid not to look. Just in case. She crept through the store toward the child-care section. It wasn’t a part of the store that she’d ever paid much attention to in the past. In the Before, she’d had zero contact with babies. She stared at the rows and rows of looted products. Most everything had been picked clean. The empty shelves alone were enough to scare the crap out of her. How was it possible that babies needed this much stuff? How on earth was McKenna going to do this? How would she even keep this baby alive once it was born?
Just thinking about it made her heart pound.
So she stopped thinking and just dug through the piles on the floor. There was more stuff in the debris than it looked like at first. No food or formula. Those kinds of thing would have been the first to go, but she did find some clothes, a few blankets. A couple of packages of diapers that looked way too big—but hey, she wasn’t going to be picky—and a pacifier.
It wasn’t enough. Lily couldn’t help feeling like nothing she did would be enough. But it was better than nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Carter
There’s a lot of shit I’ve had to get used to since the Tick-pocalypse. The burn of gasoline in my mouth and sinuses when I suck too hard when siphoning gas. The constant, low-grade hunger and the way it makes you think about food all the time. The relentless cold of living in a cave that’s sixty-five degrees year-round. The muddy taste of boiled, bleached water. The nostalgia for fresh fruits and vegetables. I’ve learned to live with all kinds of crap.
But there’s one thing I don’t think I’ll ever get used to: the sight of a rotting body staked up by a chain outside the fence of a Farm.
Every Farm had them. The Dean of Lily’s Farm had made it sound like some kind of precautionary measure. He’d claimed the decomposing bodies kept the Ticks away as strongly as the scent of fresh blood lured them closer. I didn’t know if the sight and smell repelled the Ticks, all I knew was that they sure as hell repulsed me.
I would never get used to it. I didn’t want to.
It had taken us just about twenty-four hours to get from Utah to San Angelo. I only hoped we’d gotten here soon enough.
As stupid as it seemed to be hanging out a hundred yards from a Farm during the day, I knew from experience that the middle of the afternoon was the best time to sneak up on a Farm. The shadows were starting to lengthen, but it wasn’t dark yet. At dusk, the Collabs started to scramble. By full night, they were alert and trigger happy. This time of day, most of them were still asleep.
I stood, back pressed against a brick wall about fifty yards from the fence—about forty-five yards from the dead bodies. Zeke was a few feet in front of me, crouched behind a shrub as he set up the sat phone antenna. I suppose this must have been the main drag, back when the Farm was still a college. It was a solid block of fast food restaurants, bookstores, and shops. I was in the alley beside a Subway, serving as lookout while Zeke set up the antenna that would allow us to use the sat phone from anywhere within a one-mile radius.
