Rachel Hawkins - Grim

“We’re going to save the others,” Levi says. “The children still in stasis. We’ll build them new bodies, like mine. They’ll have a chance at life without the Disease.” Levi’s hand hovers over the control for the airlock door. “You could stay with us. We could be a family.”

I never had a family and cannot fathom what Levi is feeling. But seeing him like this is almost enough to make me reconsider our plan.

Dr. Saxon shakes his head. I’m not sure whether he is brave or terrified, but I regret that he won’t accept Levi as he is. And though I know I’m making the right choice, I also regret what I must do.

Levi turns away.

“You promised you’d save us, Pip.”

I touch the glass, watching them. Maybe we could have found a way to live together, but I don’t think so. And I believe that if Dr. Saxon was standing beside me, able to see what I see, he would agree.

I open the outer airlock door. The horde moves like a swarm of gnats. They trample each other to be the first to board the ship, even though they know that it will only delay the inevitable.

Except, when the airlock doors open, the Jakob-Wilhelm is not there.

I force myself to watch their soundless screams as the last of the old human race is devoured by the icy fangs of the great abyss. Gone, but never forgotten.

“Trust me, Dr. Saxon. This is better.”

* * * * *

I drop my sleeping bag and sit down hard on the slime-covered boulder, refusing to take one more step. My legs ache, my back aches, even my shoulders ache from all the walking we’ve had to do.

“Forget it,” I tell Hansen as he flashes me a reproachful glare. I recognize the look—like he thinks I got us lost on purpose. As if it’s somehow my fault the GPS on my phone doesn’t work all the way out here in this godforsaken forest. “I’m taking a break. If you don’t want to wait, then go on without me. See if I give a rat’s ass.” I dig in my pocket for my crushed Marlboro pack, and then sigh as loud as I can to get my point across. I focus all my energy on extracting my very last cigarette in the whole wide world. It’s bad enough that my hands are shaking from caffeine withdrawals. I have no idea what I’m gonna do when the nicotine cravings start kicking my butt, too.

Like it’s made of glass, I settle the cigarette between my lips, and then cram my palm into my left eye. It hasn’t stopped twitching since we woke up this morning to find that our bitch of a stepmother had up and left us in the middle of the freaking woods.

And now it’s just the two of us out here. Me and my little brother.

I watch as Hansen loosens his pack, his expression softening as he lowers himself to the ground in front of me. I hate the way he looks at me, like I’m suddenly this fragile thing in need of coddling.

“Here,” he says, unzipping his bag and handing me the dirty T-shirt he’d worn just yesterday. When we’d been pretending to have a good time for our dad’s sake, acting like we didn’t notice how weary he was from the radiation treatments that were making him sicker by the day. When we silently wondered why our money-grubbing stepmother had dragged him out here to camp in the first place, when he should have been home, hooked to an IV and a catheter instead.

“Dammit.” I curse and rip the shirt from his hands, realizing why he’d given it to me. I wipe my eyes, no longer pretending the tears don’t sting as I clutch the cotton that still smells like campfire smoke and AXE body spray—the cologne Hansen practically showers in on a daily basis. “I wonder if he even realizes what she was up to. That she abandoned us out here. I wonder if he’s even noticed that we’re not even with them.”

Hansen just shrugs, and I want to punch him for always being so whatever when it comes to our dad, and the fact that the cancer is killing him. As if my little brother’s already given up on him. This isn’t a whatever kind of moment. This is a big deal...a really, really big deal.

We are lost in the middle of a thousand acres of tree-filled wasteland, abandoned in the middle of the night by our parents, the only two people in the world who even know we’re still out here. Check that, abandoned by a stepmother who’s been counting the days till our father will finally bite it, and then she’ll be set for life. She knows that once he’s gone, she can buy whatever she wants, travel anytime she wants and never, ever have to change another disgusting Depends again.

And without us to share that inheritance with, her gold-card limit just tripled.

For me, at least, losing my dad will probably be harder than losing our mom was.

At least when she died, she left Hansen and my dad and me together. We were still a family. What will Hansen and I be once Dad dies? Orphans. My throat tightens at the dismal feel of the word.

My fingers tremble as I light my cigarette, grateful for the first time for the shitty gold-plated lighter the step-bitch gave me for my last birthday, the one with my name—Greta—engraved on the side of it. Maybe she thought she was giving me the gift of early-onset emphysema.

Three drags, I tell myself. Only three and then I’ll stub it out and save the rest. I have to be smart. Ration it. Because that’s what people do when they’re lost in the wilderness—they ration their supplies.

But three’s harder than I thought it would be, and four is damn near impossible.

By my fifth drag, I finally find the will to rub the cherry into the dirt, careful not to crush the remaining cigarette as I drop it back into the pack.

“We gotta get going,” Hansen tells me, looking up at the sky as if he’s some sort of Boy Scout who can gauge the time of day by pinpointing the sun’s position. “It’ll be dark soon. We should probably find a place to stop for the night.”

“No shit, Hans, but in case you haven’t noticed, there’s not much out here.” I brush the slimy gunk off the back of my shorts, the only clothes the bitch left me with—the ones I fell asleep in. Other than our sleeping bags and the tent we were sleeping in, she took nearly everything when they left. All I have left is that last cigarette butt and my cell phone, which is useless this far away from civilization.

I assume she thought we’d starve or freeze or get eaten by wolves by nightfall, all of which could still happen.

Hansen, at least, has been using his backpack as some sort of lumpy pillow, and has the random assortment of crap he was keeping in there: some dirty clothes, an iPod that’s already dead, a toothbrush, which I’ll probably get desperate enough to share by morning, and some other stuff that’s useless in this situation—crumpled plastic wrap, a cheap ballpoint pen that’s leaking blue ink, a key he found on the street, some notes and a half-full can of AXE body spray. “I don’t know who you thought you were gonna impress out here,” I’d harassed him when I realized he’d packed the disgusting cologne for our “family campout.”

But it’s his love of junk food that’s kept us going for most of the day, and in the same way I’d decided to conserve my cigarette, we’d decided we should ration the candy, too.

“I didn’t mean like a Holiday Inn or anything, Greta. I just meant we should find a place to camp is all. Man, sometimes you’re such a...” He stops himself before actually saying it, somehow remembering that word is off-limits in this situation. We made a pact when our dad first introduced us to her—Bitch was her name, and hers alone. If only he hadn’t been so lonely after Mom died. If only we’d been enough for him. “You don’t have to be so rude,” Hansen insists instead, sounding whinier than any self-respecting fourteen-year-old should, and it reminds me of when we were little and Hansen would hold my hand whenever we’d pass the big kids at the bus stop. They liked to tease him because he had a stutter back then—and still does sometimes, when he gets really stressed-out.