CHAPTER 16

Mark shook Trina awake and scrambled to his feet, pulling her up with him. The Toad was definitely sick, and he was standing just a few feet from their camp. They didn’t know anything about this sickness, but that only made it scarier. Trina seemed disoriented, but Mark didn’t relent, half dragging her to the other side of the dead coals of their fire from earlier that night.

“Alec!” he shouted. “Lana! Wake up!”

As if the two were still soldiers, they were on their feet in three seconds. But neither of them had noticed the visitor yet.

Mark didn’t waste time explaining. “Toad. I’m glad you came, that you’re safe. But … are you feeling sick?”

“Why?” Toad asked, still on his knees. His face was only a shadow. “Why did you leave me like that after all we’ve been through?”

Mark’s heart was breaking. The question had no good answer. “I … I … we tried to get you to come with us.”

Toad acted as if he hadn’t heard. “I have things in my skull. I need help getting them out of there. Before they eat my brain and start heading for my heart.” He whimpered, a sound that seemed to Mark more like it would come from an injured dog than from a human.

“What symptoms are you feeling?” Lana asked. “What happened to Misty?”

Mark watched as the Toad raised his hands up and pressed them against the sides of his head. Even his silhouette was creepy doing such a thing.

“There … are … things in my head,” he repeated slowly. Deliberately. His voice was laced with anger. “Of all the people on this forsaken planet, I thought my friends of over a year would be willing to help me get them out.” He got to his feet and began to shout. “Get these things out of my head!”

“Just calm down there, Toad,” Alec said, the threat clear in his voice.

Mark didn’t want the situation to explode into something they’d all regret. “Toad, listen to me. We’re going to help you however we can. But we need you to sit down and stop shouting. Screaming at us won’t help.”

The Toad didn’t respond, but his figure seemed rigid. Mark could tell his hands were clenched into fists.

“Toad? We need you to sit down. And then tell us everything that’s happened since we left the village.”

The guy didn’t move.

“Come on,” Mark pushed. “We want to help. Just sit down and relax.”

After a few seconds, Toad obeyed, collapsing to the ground in a heap, lying there like he’d been shot. Several moans escaped him as he shifted, rocking back and forth on his side.

Mark took a deep breath, feeling like the situation was back under some kind of control. He realized that he and Trina were standing right next to each other, but neither Alec nor Lana seemed to have noticed yet. Mark took a few steps forward, to the side of the fire pit, and sat down.

“That poor kid,” he heard Alec mutter behind him, thankfully not loud enough for the Toad to hear. Sometimes the old man said exactly what he was thinking.

Thankfully, Lana’s nursing instincts won out and she took the reins of the conversation.

“Okay,” she began. “Toad. It seems like you’re in a lot of pain. I’m really sorry about that. But if we’re going to help you, we need to know some things. Are you feeling well enough to talk about it?”

The Toad continued rocking and moaning softly. But he answered. “I’ll do my best, guys. I don’t know how long the things in my head will let me do it, though. Better hurry.”

“Good,” Lana responded. “Good. Let’s begin from the second we left you at the village. What did you do?”

“I sat at the door and talked to Misty,” the Toad said in a tired voice. “What else would I do? She’s my best friend—the best friend I’ve ever had. I don’t care about anything else. How can anyone abandon their best friend?”

“Right. I understand that. I’m glad she had someone to be there with her.”

“She needed me. I could tell when it got bad for her, so I went in and held her. Held her to my chest and hugged her and kissed her forehead. Like a baby. Like my baby. I’ve never felt so happy as when I held her, watching her die slowly in my arms.”

Mark squirmed in his seat, sickened by the Toad’s words. He hoped Lana was able to learn something about what was going on.

“How did she die?” Lana asked. “Did she have a lot of pain, like Darnell?”

“Yes. Yes, Lana. She had a lot of pain. She screamed and screamed until the things left her head and crawled into mine. Then we put her out of her misery.”

The forest seemed to fall deathly silent at that last remark, and Mark’s breath froze in his lungs. He sensed Alec moving behind him but Lana shushed him.

“We?” she repeated. “What do you mean, Toad? And what’re you talking about when you say things crawled into your head?”

Their friend pressed his hands against his head. “How can you be so stupid? How many times do I have to tell you? We! Me and the things in my head! I don’t know what they are! Do you hear me? I … don’t … know … what they are! You stupid, stupid kid!”

A wail escaped from his mouth, inhuman and piercingly loud, rising in pitch and volume. Mark jumped to his feet and took a couple of steps backward. It seemed as if the trees shook with the sound exploding from the Toad and every last creature within a mile fled to safety. There was only that one awful noise.

“Toad!” Lana yelled at him, but the word was lost in the shrieking.

The Toad was seesawing his head back and forth with his hands as he continued to scream. Mark looked at his friends even though he couldn’t really see their faces—he had no idea what to do, and neither did Lana, evidently.

“That’s it,” he barely heard Alec say as the man moved forward and past Mark, bumping him along the way. Mark stumbled, then got his balance, wondering what the former soldier had planned.

Alec walked straight at the Toad, then grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him to his feet, dragging him deeper into the woods. The screams didn’t stop, just became more hitched and sporadic as he sucked in breaths and struggled to break free. Soon they were lost in the shadows of the trees, but Mark could hear the scraping of the Toad’s body along the ground. The sound of his wailing faded as they got farther away.

“What is that man up to?” Lana asked tightly.

“Alec!” Mark yelled after him. “Alec!”

There was no response, just the continued cries and shouts of the Toad. And then they ceased, abruptly. Cut off as if Alec had thrown him into a soundproof room and slammed the door shut.

“What the …,” Trina breathed behind Mark.

Soon there were footsteps marching back toward them at a determined pace. For a second Mark panicked, thinking the Toad had somehow broken free and hurt Alec, gone completely insane, and was coming back to finish off the others. Thirsting for blood.

But then Alec appeared out of the dark gloom of the trees, his face hidden in shadow. Mark could only imagine the sadness that must have been stamped in his features.

“I couldn’t risk him doing anything crazy,” the old man said, his voice surprisingly shaky. “I couldn’t. Not if this has something to do with a virus. I … I need to go wash myself in the stream.”

He spread out his hands before him, looking at them for a long moment. Then he marched off toward the brook nearby. Mark thought he heard him sniffle just before he vanished back into the trees.

CHAPTER 17

After all that, they were supposed to go back to sleep. Dawn was still hours away.

No one said a word after Alec had done … whatever he’d done … to the Toad. Mark thought he might explode, so confused was he by what had transpired over the last half an hour or so. He wanted to talk. But Trina turned away from him when he faced her. She slumped to the ground and curled up with a blanket, stifling some sobs. It broke Mark’s heart—they’d gone several months without tears, and now it was happening all over again.

She was an enigma to him. From the beginning she’d been stronger, tougher and braver than he ever was. At first it had embarrassed and shamed him, but he loved it in her so much that he got over it. Yet she also wore her emotions on her sleeve and wasn’t scared at all to let them all out in a good cry.

Lana went about her business silently, eventually lying down next to a tree on the outskirts of their small camp. Mark tried to settle into a comfortable position himself, but he was wide awake. Alec finally returned. No one had anything to say, and the sounds of the forest slowly came back to Mark’s awareness: insects and a soft breeze through the trees. But his thoughts still spun wildly.

What had just happened? What had Alec done to the Toad? Could it really be what Mark thought? Had it been painful? How in the world could things be so messed up?

At least he had the small blessing of a dreamless sleep after he finally drifted off.

“This virus from the darts,” Lana said the next morning as they all sat, zombielike, around a crackling fire. “I think there’s something wrong with it.”

It was a strange statement. Mark looked up at her. He had been staring at the flames, going over the events of the night before, until she’d spoken, and he was suddenly back in the present.

Alec voiced his thoughts bluntly. “I think there’s something wrong with most viruses.”

Lana gave him a sharp glare. “Come on. You know what I mean. Can’t you all see it?”

“See what?” Mark asked.

“That it seems to be affecting people differently?” Trina asked.

“Exactly,” Lana responded, pointing at her as if she were proud. “The people who were hit by those darts died within hours. Then Darnell and the people who’d helped the ones who were shot took a couple of days to die. Their main symptom was intense pressure in their skulls—they acted like their heads were being squeezed in vises. Then there’s Misty, who didn’t have symptoms for several days.”

Mark remembered the moment they’d left her all too well. “Yeah,” he murmured. “She was singing the last time we saw her. Curled up in a ball on the ground. She said her head hurt.”

“There was just something different about her,” Lana pointed out. “You weren’t there when Darnell first got sick. He didn’t die as fast as the others, but he started acting strangely really quickly. Misty seemed fine up until her head started hurting. But something was off up here with both of them.” She tapped on her temple several times.

“And we all saw the Toad last night,” Alec added. “Who knows when he got it—if he had it as long as Misty, or just got it from being with her when she died—but he was crazy like mad cow disease.”

“Show some respect,” Trina snapped at him.

Mark expected Alec to retaliate or defend himself, but he appeared humbled by the rebuke. “I’m sorry, Trina. Really I am. But Lana and I are just trying to assess our situation as best we can. Figure things out. And the Toad was obviously not lucid last night.”

Trina didn’t back down. “So you killed him.”

“That’s not fair,” Alec said coolly. “If Misty died that quickly after her symptoms hit, it’s fair to say that the Toad was going to die also. He was a threat to all of us, but he was also a friend. I did him a mercy and hopefully bought us another day or two.”

“Unless you caught something from him,” Lana said tonelessly.

“I was careful. And I immediately scrubbed myself clean.”

“Seems pointless,” Mark said. He was sinking farther into the doldrums with every second. “Maybe we all have it and it just takes longer to kill you depending on your immune system.”

Alec shifted up on to his knees. “We’ve strayed from Lana’s point. There’s something wrong with this virus. It’s not consistent. I’m not a scientist, but could it be mutating or something? Changing as it jumps from one person to the next?”

Lana nodded. “Mutating, adapting, strengthening—who knows. But something. And it seems to take longer to kill you as it spreads, which—contrary to what you’d assume—actually means the virus is more effectively spreading. You and Mark weren’t there, but you should’ve seen how quickly those first victims went. Nothing like Misty. It was bloody and brutal and awful for an hour or two, but then it was over. They convulsed and bled, which only helped it to spread to more human incubators.”

Mark was glad he’d missed it. But considering what he’d seen Darnell go through at the end, those people might’ve been lucky that it had happened so fast. With way too much clarity, Mark recalled the sound of the boy beating his skull against the inside of the door.

“It has something to do with their head,” Trina murmured.

Everyone looked at her. She’d just voiced something obvious, but vital.

“It definitely had something to do with their head,” Mark chimed in. “They all had massive pain. And loss of sanity. Darnell was hallucinating—plain crazy. And then Misty. And the Toad …”

Trina posed a question. “Maybe they shot people with different things—how do we know it all started the same?”

Mark shook his head. “I went through the boxes on the Berg,” he said. “They all seemed to have the same identification number.”

Alec stood up. “Well, if it is mutating and if any of us have caught it, let’s hope it gives us a week or two before we lose our wits. Come on. Let’s get moving.”