Sophie Littlefield - Banished

“No,” I whispered, horrified. “No one would-”

“ Yes . A dozen of them, deployed the right way, could bring a major city to its knees.”

“But Bryce couldn’t… he wouldn’t…”

“I saw it. I saw the list . On Bryce’s desk. Unstable governments overseas… there were half a dozen or more. And he doesn’t care who he sells to, as long as they show him the money first.”

“But where would he get the…” I stopped, unable to come up with the right word. Raw material? Bryce would need the newly dead, and a lot of them, if he was going to manufacture enough zombies to sell.

Prairie laughed bitterly. “He’s smart, Hailey. He’ll find people that won’t be missed. There are so many more of those than you’d ever imagine… the homeless, and mental patients, people abandoned by their families. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface. If he’s getting help from inside our government, and I have strong reasons to believe he is, he could go to veterans’ hospitals. Soldiers killed overseas-the remains shipped home could be faked, while the real corpses were taken.”

“You can’t think our own government would be involved in something like this!”

“No, of course not, not officially. But there’s corruption at every level. Hailey, Bryce used to get visits from men who looked official. I never paid much attention, since I assumed it had to do with our funding. But thinking about it now, you could totally tell they had once been in the military. They had that air about them. There was someone he just called the General, and we used to joke about that in private-but now I’m thinking that was his principal contact.”

“But why would they let him sell to enemies of the United States?”

“The governments on the list, their battles are on their own soil. They’re extremists, terrorists, at war with each other-or with their own people. I’ve wondered if that wasn’t part of the plan, that some rogue branch of the military might want them to exterminate each other.”

Zombies.

Terrorists.

Shadowy operators, working outside the control of our own government, funding this study in horror.

It was too much. Especially when I thought about the fact that, without even knowing it, I was one of the keys to its success.

A day ago I would never have believed that there could be something worse than being hunted by killers.

But now I knew different. There was something much worse, and it was in me .

WHEN WE GOT HOME, Kaz was in the backyard with Chub, teaching him to throw a lacrosse ball.

“Hailey, watch me, watch me!” Chub shouted, waving the stick around, his voice clear and distinct, the improvements in his speech growing every day. Kaz waved, grinning. But I raced past them with nothing more than a mumbled hello.

Anna had been cooking, as promised, and the house smelled wonderful, but I couldn’t bear to talk to her. I went straight to Kaz’s room, closed the door and lay down on the bed and pulled the pillow over my face, trying to block out the images in my mind.

Vincent in the hospital bed, staring without seeing.

Rascal, after I found the bullet wounds and pushed him to the floor, unhurt and uncaring.

Zombies walking straight into battle, unfazed by the sights and sounds of war.

Public squares full of people, erupting into explosions and flames.

I didn’t know how long I lay there trying not to think. There was a gentle tap at the door. I pulled the pillow off my face but didn’t answer.

“May I come in?”

I couldn’t very well keep Kaz out of his own room, so I sat up and pushed my fingers through my hair, hoping I didn’t look too messed up. “Come on in.”

He opened the door hesitantly and gestured at the bean-bag on the floor. “Mind if I…”

“It’s your room,” I said, blushing. “I mean, I should be asking if you mind.”

He sat, strong forearms draped loosely over his knees, and looked at me. I mean, really looked at me, in a way I wasn’t used to.

“Prairie told me about Vincent and everything. Wow, that’s a lot, you know, to find out. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. At least the healing… well, I was kind of getting used to that part.”

“But the rest?”

“It. Um. I can’t…” I tried to think of a way to describe how I felt-almost like I was guilty of something, because if Bryce did manage to find me, I was pretty sure he could force me to go along with his plan. “The zombie thing. Just, I don’t get how anyone could do that on purpose.”

“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.