Andrew

ONCE WE’RE CLOSE TO BETHESDA, I PUT Amy and Cara on high alert. Taylor carries Henri-Two and Jamar holds the Kid’s hand. We stopped in Virginia to find more guns for Cara and Amy. At first they didn’t want them, but I reminded them about the escaped zoo animals in DC. And how far out they’d been hunting.

Cara points her handgun at the side of the road. The sun is low in the sky and casts the clouds in beautiful cotton-candy pinks and orange.

“I think we’re okay,” I say. “It doesn’t look like whatever is out here is as human-hungry as the lions in DC.”

There’s a flu victim lying face up on the sidewalk to our left. Their flesh is tight against their skeleton, but there are no bite marks, no gunshots.

“Maybe leopards don’t like human jerky,” Cara says.

My stomach rolls. “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Maybe no talking,” says Amy. “Just in case.”

Cara nods.

Amy is leading us now. She took over as soon as she started to recognize the area. It’s changed since Jamie and I were here. For one, it’s winter, so the leaves have fallen from the trees and most of the grass has gone brown. Dull-green vines grow up the sides of houses and from under car hoods.

Every day since we left Bethesda last June, this area has become more like a jungle. Maybe that’s what the zookeeper who let out the animals hoped for all along.

Amy takes us around a corner, and I see it right away. Henri’s house. It’s still boarded up and the grass is overgrown. But the brick-and-metal fence around it remains. The lock is still on the front gate.

Cara reaches for the padlock, turning it over in her hands. “Should we just shout for her?”

Amy opens her mouth to answer, but the front door swings open.

And there she is. She looks so much thinner. Smaller. Older. It’s only been a few months, but any longer and I might not have recognized her right away. Her white hair is braided and curled into a bun. She squints at us—the shotgun points down at the ground—then recognition lights up her face and her mouth drops open. She puts the gun to the side of the door and marches into the winter afternoon.

“Amy?” Her voice is hoarse, as if she has a cold.

Her eyes flick to Cara, then back to me. They crinkle as she smiles and takes out a key to unlock the gate. Her hands are shaking with excitement, and I immediately lose the ability to talk. Her smile drops a bit when she looks back up from the lock. Amy is sobbing, her hands on the gate. “Mom.”

“Oh, honey.” Henri swings open the gate and wraps her arms around Amy, and I lose all composure I have left as Amy hugs her mother tightly.

“Shh, it’s okay,” she whispers, lovingly rubbing the back of Amy’s neck. This moment makes everything worth it. I was worried it wouldn’t, but here we are. Amy and her mother are back together. Jamie and I traveled so far and lost so much, but we still managed to make this happen, and it’s all worth it. I wish he were here to see it.

Cara turns away, but I can see her wipe tears from her own eyes. Taylor is grinning, and Jamar has wrapped an arm around her, but the Kid’s eyes are locked on me. He watches me wipe at my cheeks, and I nod that everything is okay.

Then Henri holds Amy out at arm’s length, looking at her. “You look great, pumpkin.”

Amy wipes at her eyes. “Please, I look like death warm—” Her voice trails off and I follow her gaze to the front door of the house.

“Amy?”

Another woman stands there, in her forties—she looks just like Amy. And beside her is a girl around Taylor’s age who is a young version of the women in front of me. The girl runs toward us.

“Auntie Amy!”

“Ellie!” Amy loses it again and pulls the girl into a hug. The other woman runs out and joins her, crying. Henri watches them with tears in her eyes. Then she looks at me and laughs, opening her arms wide for me. I hug her, burying my face in her warm sweater.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “Both of my daughters are home with me.”

Both of her daughters. This must be the one who was in Colorado. She was alive after all.

“Your granddaughters, too,” Amy says, turning and looking to Taylor.

Taylor holds out Henri-Two to Amy, who takes her. “Mom, Kristy, Ellie, this is Henri-Two. Er, Henrietta!” She catches herself, laughing and shaking her head. Then she gives me a glare. “Can’t believe you made that nickname stick.”

I shrug. “It fits.”

Henri-Prime takes Henri-Two in her arms. “I think it’s perfect. Just like her.”

Amy introduces us to her sister, Kristy, and niece, Ellie. Henri-Prime holds Henri-Two out for Kristy to take and falls into a fit of coughs. Something passes over Kristy’s and Ellie’s faces, as if they’re worried. But Henri-Prime waves as Amy goes to her.

“It’s fine, just a cough from the cigarettes.”

“You’re not still smoking, are you, Ma?” Amy scolds.

Henri-Prime gives her daughter a haughty look. “Not unless tobacco has become a cash crop in the apocalypse.” Amy rolls her eyes as Henri waves to the yard around her. “It’s just the cold, so let’s get inside where it’s warm. Or at least it was . . .” She points to the open door. “Now we’re heating the neighborhood.”

Kristy locks the gate behind us as Henri leads us inside. I introduce Henri to Cara, Taylor, Jamar, and the Kid, then we sit quietly, letting Amy catch up with her family. Ellie plays with Henri-Two, making her squeal with laughter.

But Henri’s eyes are on me. Then they drift over to Cara and the others before coming back to me. She wraps a blanket around her shoulders and looks like she wants to ask me a question. Like where Jamie is, maybe.

She coughs again. Kristy gets up to get her a glass of water and comes out of the kitchen with a pitcher full, offering some to the rest of us. Eventually Taylor and Jamar sit with Ellie and keep Henri-Two busy.

When Kristy asks Amy to help her with dinner, Cara offers to help as well. Ellie asks her aunt if she can bring Henri-Two outside and after Amy says yes, Taylor and Jamar follow them.

Leaving just me, Henri, and the Kid.

“The Kid, huh?” Henri asks, looking at him. “I like your name.”

“Thank you,” he says. Maybe at this point he doesn’t even remember his own name. I’ve been calling him the Kid so long, he just goes with it.

Henri chuckles and falls into another fit of coughs.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “Really?”

She nods. “Yes.” But her voice is so hoarse, and she’s so skinny. “You brought my daughter all the way up here. Which I assume means you went all the way down to her. So, yes, I am more than okay. Really.”

“That’s not—”

“I know what you mean, Andrew. And I’m still telling you that today, for the first day in a very, very long time, I am wonderful.” Still, she coughs again. Like a lie detector test narcing on her.

“Are you sick?” asks the Kid.

“I think so,” she tells him. “But don’t worry, it’s not the flu. You can’t catch what I have, sweetie.”

“What is it?” I ask. She stares at me for a moment, almost like she’s scolding me for asking. Then she shakes her head.

“I guess it could be a cold? Pneumonia? Could be . . .” She trails off and shrugs. “Could be I’m just getting old. Even just surviving can take it out of you eventually.” Before I can ask anything else, she brings up the only topic that she probably knows will get me to stop asking questions. “Where’s Jamison?”

The Kid also turns to me. He asked me the same question and I gave him a half-assed lie about him taking a trip to make sure we were safe. I guess the Kid deserves the truth, too. He’s been with us this whole way; he deserves to know where Jamie went.

So I start with the day we left here. I tell her about going to Reagan Airport and finding out the rumors of the EU convoy were just rumors. Then our trip down to Florida, including the run-in with Fort Caroline, Jamie getting shot, and his revenge mission once he found out they were still looking for him.

“That doesn’t seem very like him,” Henri says once I’m done. I look at the Kid to gauge his reaction, but his face is blank.

“It doesn’t,” I say.

“The two of you have been through a lot,” she says. “So I understand how that can change a person.”

“But it’s not that he suddenly wants to become a mechanic or likes mushrooms. It’s a fundamental shift from who he was.”

She nods slowly and takes a moment to clear her throat. “And that change isn’t something you can ever accept.”

Of course it isn’t. He’s going to kill someone—actively choosing to do it, not because he’s trying to save me or himself. He thinks he’s protecting us, but that’s not true. We could easily hide; the two of us could go back to his cabin. It was his plan all along, so I can’t understand why he couldn’t just do that. Why he had to go looking for Rosewood.

But then it all clicks into place.

This whole time, he’s been keeping everyone we’ve grown close to at a distance. Even after we left, he said he wanted to take Amy to Henri, then go to the cabin, just the two of us. We could have done that, left Faraway together, but he chose to go after Fort Caroline.

I look down at the Kid, who is still latched on to my hand, and my chest aches with a weird combo of love, frustration, and sadness. Jamie finally let himself love everyone else in our group. He went to kill Rosewood because he doesn’t want any of us to get hurt. He doesn’t want what happened in the Keys to happen again.

Maybe that was driven partly by revenge, but a large part also has to be because he was scared. And not just for himself.

For all of us.

My heart aches again for him—with fear and worry but also so much love. I wish I could have reassured him, found a way to convince him to change his mind.

“Maybe?” I finally say to Henri. Maybe one day I can forgive him. Knowing he finally opened his eyes to our found family and just wanted to protect them. Us. “I think I can. Maybe with more time.”

Henri smiles. “Well, that’s the good news about the apocalypse. Nothing but time.”

Still, her eyes are sad. Like she knows that’s not true.

Not for her.