LARA
She overslept and woke up with a hangover. It wasn’t quite the pounding-in-your-brain type of hangover she had endured a couple of times in college, when she couldn’t pull herself away from a party fast enough. Lara was always good at either resisting or dodging peer pressure entirely, but there were only so many times you could tell your friends you didn’t want to drink with them before they took it personally.
She sat up in bed and grimaced at the sunlight splashing rudely across her face. She had slept in her clothes, but had somehow managed to kick off one shoe during the night. Not soon enough, as it turned out, because the bedsheets were covered with crumbs of dirt and dried mud.
She stumbled to her feet and into the bathroom for a hot shower, spending the full five minutes to gather herself. Afterward, Lara dressed in fresh cargo pants and a long-sleeve shirt, then grabbed her gun belt. All the while, she stepped over pieces of the broken radio and closet door she hadn’t gotten to yesterday.
She picked up a new radio from the nightstand and debated whether to call Danny, who would already have been in the Tower since five this morning. With Blaine still in the Infirmary, Carly had pitched in, taking over Blaine’s shift in the evenings. Soon Lara would have to start assigning Bonnie, Roy, and the others their own duties. But that could wait, maybe until after Will got back.
If he’s still alive…
She had overslept her eight o’clock shift on the beach, which meant Roy had either failed to wake her up or had decided not to. If it was the former, she had cause to be worried; she needed people she could trust to do what they promised. But if it was the latter, and he purposely didn’t wake her because he thought she needed the extra sleep, then she would have to thank him.
*
She found Bonnie in the kitchen, helping Sarah and Jo fix breakfast for everyone.
Breakfast, unlike lunch and dinner, didn’t involve fish. There were plenty of freeze-dried breakfast items in the freezer, enough to feed, according to Sarah, an army for a few years. That was an exaggeration, but not far from the truth. There were stacks of frozen biscuits, sausage patties, bacon strips, pancake batter, waffles, oatmeal, French toast sticks, popcorn chicken, and a hundred other items she didn’t even know came in frozen form. Sarah had begun to catalog everything—something that was never done when Karen ran the island—and was still going through the shelves three months later.
“Where’s Roy?” she asked them.
“He went to bed about two hours ago,” Bonnie said. “I found him snoring on top of the boat shack this morning. Poor guy, he wanted to stay up there until you came to relieve him. I put Gwen in his place with the binoculars, if that’s okay.”
She nodded. “That’s fine. The beach is just a precaution, anyway. She has a radio?”
“Danny assigned everyone radios this morning.”
“Why didn’t anyone wake me?”
Sarah gave her a sympathetic smile. “Everyone agreed you needed the extra sleep. Besides, Carly and Danny are around. Nothing happened, and you got your rest. Everything’s fine, Lara.”
Lara smiled. “So, Roy was snoring on top of the shack?”
“More like snorting,” Jo said, and the girls laughed.
Lara left the kitchen, imagining Roy with his boyish blond hair snoring on the roof of the boat shack in the morning hours.
She made her way across the hotel grounds, watching and enjoying the sight of Lucy and Kylie giving themselves a tour of the island. Derek, the teenage boy who had let West out of his makeshift jail cell yesterday, was with the girls, along with the younger boy, Logan. When they saw her, they waved—all except Derek, who looked away, whether out of anger or embarrassment, she had no idea.
Adapt or perish, kid.
She crossed over to the Tower and climbed the spiral staircase, the sound of her boots click-clacking against the cast iron metal. She was halfway up the second floor staircase when she heard voices floating through the open door above her.
Danny, talking to a second, muffled voice.
The radio.
She hurried up the last dozen steps and burst onto the third floor. Danny was leaning over the ham radio at the table.
“Will?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Someone else, but here’s a kicker—it came through our emergency frequency.”
“Then it has to be Will and Gaby.”
“That’s what I figured.” He turned back to the radio, pressed the transmit lever. “The boss just showed up. You’ll want to talk to her.”
Lara took the microphone from him. “How long ago?” she asked him.
“A few minutes.”
She turned to the mic and pressed the lever. “This is Lara. Who am I talking to?”
“My name’s Benny,” a male voice said.
“Benny, how did you get this frequency?”
“Will gave it to me.”
Will. Oh thank God.
“Is he okay?” she asked, somehow managing not to scream the question through the radio. Not that it stopped her heart from racing noticeably inside her chest.
“Last time I saw him,” Benny said.
“He’s not with you?”
“No.”
“What about Gaby?”
“She went to find Will.”
“What does that mean, Benny?”
“Will sent her to find a ham radio, but before she came back, he took off. Gaby decided to go after him, and Nate went with her.”
“Who’s Nate?”
“The guy leading this group I’m with now.”
“Wait, you’re not all from Mercy Hospital?”
“No.” He paused for a moment. “The hospital was attacked. Most of the people there are dead. I think I might be the only survivor.”
Lara exchanged a worried look with Danny. This explained so much. Why Will was out of contact, and who the man with the deep voice was that had answered when she called Jen’s helicopter yesterday.
“They killed everyone?” she asked.
“I think so, yeah,” Benny said. Then he added, “Except for the children.”
“What about the children?”
“They took them,” Benny said. “The ones Will called collaborators. That’s where Will went. To get the children back.”
*
Of course Will would try to get the children back. Will was practical to a fault, but there was a streak of righteous decency in him that she admired and loved. So of course he would decide to go on a fool’s errand to save children he had never met, whose names he probably didn’t even know. Because there was a chance he could succeed, and a chance was good enough for Will.
If you get killed, I’m going to kick your ass, Will.
Knowing why he was doing what he was doing didn’t make it any easier to accept. But she understood it. God, did she understand it. She might have even done the same thing in his position, though she was sure her chances of success would be far less.
“That’s Will for you,” Danny said. “Personally, I think he’s just going after this Kellerson guy because he’s bored.”
She stood at the window next to him, looking out at Bonnie’s girls gathered near the edge of a nearby cliff, throwing rocks at the lake below. Even Derek seemed to have come out of his shell and was skipping his share of pebbles.
She was still trying to digest what Benny had told her a few minutes ago. Will, Gaby, and Mercy Hospital. Most of all, she couldn’t quite wrap her head around the collaborators deciding to kill everyone except the kids.
“Why did they take the children?” she said out loud.
“I’m just a grunt, doc,” Danny said. “You tell me.”
“They have a plan.”
“Collaborators?”
“No, the ghouls. They keep pressing forward, building on what they’ve done. The Purge, the blood farms. The one we saw in Dansby was just the early stage. The one Blaine saw in Beaumont was another one, but further along. Now they’re taking children and killing the adults. Before, they took the adults, too. But that’s changed. Why?”
“I get the feeling Will’s thinking the same thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s one of the reasons he’s not back here yet.”
“I don’t understand.”
“‘Know thy enemy,’” Danny said. “Willie boy really takes that motto seriously.”
*
Benny and the others reached Beaufont Lake around four in the afternoon. They arrived on a single tank of gas, and Benny radioed ahead when they were halfway down Route 27. Lara remembered when they had originally come down the same stretch of road. It had seemed as if the drive would never end.
Danny, with Bonnie, took the pontoon boat back over to the marina to get the new arrivals. Bonnie volunteered, and Lara was more than willing to accept. She had more questions for Benny—about Will, about Mercy Hospital, about what had happened to everyone there—but she needed them to rest up first.
With six new people now on the island, Lara spent the next couple of hours with Carly in the hotel arranging living quarters for them. They needed five rooms for one couple, a mother and her teenage son, a teenage girl, and Benny. They had to bring fresh bedsheets, blankets, and pillows from the supply closets in the back. Eventually, Lara knew they would have to start prioritizing the rooms when the island’s population increased. She had already begun keeping a ledger, noting everyone’s room number, as well as writing down the names of the room’s occupants on the doors themselves using large white envelope labels she had found in one of the offices.
It was mundane things like that that kept her from spending every second worrying about Will and Gaby. They were out there, in God knew how much danger, chasing men who had already tried to kill them.
If she didn’t keep her mind constantly occupied with something else, like the tedious running of the island, she was almost certain she would go insane.
*
It was almost five when everyone was back on the island and she could breathe easier. Sending people on land always left her anxious, especially to a launching point as obvious as the marina. You never knew who could be lurking in the grass, harboring ill-intentions.
Like West…
She let Benny and the newcomers eat first. They were tired from the long drive, from being squeezed into a vehicle for most of the day. She remembered how that felt, too.
She asked Roy, who had woken up, to go back to the beach and stay on the boat shack. Afterward, she went to the third floor of the Tower and sat down at the table with the radio. She had renewed hope that Will would contact them, because the first thing Benny had told her when they met was that Gaby had taken a second radio with her.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that she hadn’t heard from them yet. The fact that they had a radio and hadn’t contacted Song Island introduced a whole new set of possibilities, each one more confusing than the next.
Had Gaby even managed to find Will? According to Benny, Will had an hour’s head start on her and Nate. If they hadn’t caught up to him yet, it explained a lot. Moving by himself, on a motorcycle, Will would be able to travel faster on the highway. Gaby and Nate, on the other hand, had left in a Volkswagen Beetle.
She waited with Maddie in the Tower, staring at the radio and willing it to make a sound, but the damn thing refused to obey her mental commands.
“How long are you staying up here?” Maddie asked after a while.
“Why? Are you tired of me already?”
“Not at all, boss. Just wonderin’.”
“I’m waiting for Benny.”
“Speaking of which, what do you think of them?”
“Stan’s an electrician, so he’s going to be invaluable. And Kendra was a gardener at Home Depot, so she’ll come in handy when we start growing things around here.”
“It would be nice to have some fruits and vegetables to go along with all the fish,” Maddie said.
Lara heard footsteps on the spiral staircase and looked over as Benny poked his head up through the opening. His face was covered in sweat from the climb and he looked older with the stubble, though she guessed he was only eighteen or nineteen. He had dimples that reminded her of a boy she used to like back in middle school.
“You guys could use an elevator in this place,” Benny said as he climbed up onto the floor. “I thought I was going to have a stroke halfway up.”
He was breathing hard and moving on a crutch—really, a baseball bat with a car seat’s headrest duct taped at the top. One of his leg was encased in splints made from two pieces of wood, with more duct tape wrapped around them.
“How’s the leg?” she asked.
“Hurts.”
“But you’re not in any major pain?”
“I pretty much loaded up on painkillers on the way over here, so it’s mostly numbed over, thank God.”
“I’ll look at the leg later, then get Danny to make you some proper crutches.”
He nodded gratefully. “You’re a doctor, right?”
“I’m just a third-year medical student.”
“Three more years than I got.”
She smiled. If she had a dime every time someone said that to her…
“Sit down, Benny.”
She gave him her chair. Benny sat down and glanced up at the glass skylight.
“You knew Gaby, too?” Lara asked.
“Yeah, we—” He stopped short, then actually blushed a bit. “Yeah, we got to be pretty good friends.”
Lara and Maddie exchanged a knowing look.
“So you wanted to ask me some questions?” Benny said.
“Tell me what happened at Mercy Hospital,” Lara said.
“What do you wanna know?”
“Everything. The men that attacked the hospital. What did they look like. How many were there. How Jen died. Everything you can tell me, Benny.”
Benny nodded. He took his time, gathering his thoughts.
“They came out of nowhere,” he began. “One moment they weren’t there, and the next they’re all over the tenth floor. It was bloody. It was so bloody…”