“Be able to what?” Selina snarls. “Kill Jonas?”
Dan swallows. “I just mean we’re the only ones who get how serious this is.”
The police car is getting closer, and now it actually does turn on the sirens.
Selina shakes her head, suddenly feeling very adamant. “I’m done running around playing soldiers. I’m going to tell them everything. They need to handle it.”
“They won’t believe you!” Dan pleads. “Not until it’s too late.”
“You don’t know that. Allan was a policeman and he understood it.”
“No, don’t …”
Selina turns away from him to wave at the police car.
Dan runs into the forest.
The police car stops and an officer jumps out. “Stop, police!” he shouts and runs after Dan.
Selina looks at the other officer, a woman, who steps out and comes over to her. She’s not holding her hand on her gun, like Selina has seen so many times in American movies, but she still looks very vigilant as she approaches slowly and scans the scene with her eyes.
“What happened here?” she asks, her gaze stopping at Selina. “You guys had an accident?”
“I guess you could say that,” Selina mutters and points to Allan.
The female officer hasn’t seen Allan yet, as he has been blocked from her view by Jonas’s car. But now, as she sees him, she runs to him and is just about to crouch down, then seemingly changes her mind. “Oh, God …” She points to Jonas and Selina. “You two, stay where you are!”
Selina nods. Jonas doesn’t seem to hear the command, but he’s obviously not going anywhere.
The officer pulls a radio from her belt and says with a voice slightly trembling: “I found the rest of Allan.”
The other officer comes back out of the forest, dragging Dan along. Dan doesn’t make any attempt to escape, he just stares resignedly at Selina. There’s a twig in his hair.
An ambulance arrives, and the paramedics check on Allan and quickly pronounce him dead before covering him with a blanket. Then they talk to Selina and Dan, checking them for any physical injuries. They exchange a word with the male officer, who then takes Selina and Dan to the police car and puts them in the backseat.
Through the window, Selina sees the paramedics tend to Jonas, who is still sitting on the asphalt.
The female officer gets into the car and looks back through the metal grid at them. “I’m taking you two to the station, where they’ll ask you further questions about what happened here.”
Her voice is calm now, and Selina notices she avoids the word “arrested.” Selina isn’t really sure if you even can get arrested when you’re only sixteen.
“How about Jonas?” she asks.
The officer looks at her. “The paramedics are taking a closer look at him. He seems to have gotten quite the scare.”
Again there’s a word the officer deftly avoids: “shock.” The officer turns the car around, and Selina looks out at Jonas’s face as they roll past. He’s looking at the paramedics, his eyes dazed.
What had he even been doing out here? He lives in the town. The only thing she can think of is that he might have come to visit her. Strangely, that thought almost makes her tear up, and she thinks about the stupid goodnight kiss in the car last night.
“It won’t be more than a couple of hours,” Dan whispers.
Selina glowers at him. “Before what?”
“Before he dies, of course. We need to explain to them how dangerous he is.”
Selina feels the anger contract in her chest. “Don’t you start again.”
The officer hears them and turns her head. “Please don’t speak to each other.”
Selina is more than happy to obey. She looks out at the fields gliding by. Out there everything is normal. The wheat is green and lush, the swallows are flying about playfully. No zombies in sight, no dying Jonas. All of that suddenly seems like a distant dream.
Dan pokes her thigh.
Selina sends him a burning look, which he apparently misses, because he hands her his phone. She takes it reluctantly and reads the message he has typed.
Promise me you’ll tell them what’s going to happen to him. We need to convince them. Or it all will have been for nothing. The future of the world is at stake.
Selina already knows it all. But for some strange reason, she doesn’t want to hear it anymore, doesn’t want the responsibility. She just gives Dan the phone back and looks away once more, feeling how he’s looking at her in silent amazement and desperation, but she doesn’t care, she just wants to look out at the fields.
Then he pokes her again, offering her the phone again. She shakes her head, but he keeps on trying to hand it to her. She folds her arms. He holds the phone in front of her face so she can’t help but read the new message. It’s very short.
Please … Jennie was my sister.
The words hit her like a punch in the gut. She finally looks at Dan and realizes he has tears in his eyes. And when she sees how tired and scared he looks, she feels terrible about how she has talked to him. Of course, she knew he had been through some stuff before they met up, but she had no idea he had lost a sister. Maybe he even watched her die.
Selena deletes his message and writes a new one.
How did it happen?
Dan takes back the phone and types for several minutes. When he hands her the phone once more, she reads a short summary of the last twenty-four hours of his life—and they sure haven’t been boring.
Selina feels the car slowing down. She looks up and sees they’ve reached town. The police station is just a few blocks away. She writes a short answer.
Sorry about your sister. Will tell them about Jonas. Here’s my number. Call me afterwards.
Dan puts the phone away just as they pull over by the station.
ELEVEN
It’s not at all what she excepted. None of it. The
