“Two dollars and thirty-eight cents. Enough for a Coke and a snack.” He stopped beside me, considering the machines. “If I remember right, you’re a Dr Pepper girl.”
How had he remembered that? Before today, it had been nearly two years since I’d seen him. Even then we’d never eaten together. I’d sat in my quiet corner of geeky kids, while he’d been at the table of popular kids on the other side of the cafeteria.
For a second, I just stared at him, baffled. “Yes. A Dr Pepper would be great.”
He fed about half the change into the tiny slot. A coil within the machine rotated, pushing the plastic bottle off its little ledge. Carter reached his hand through the slot and pulled out the soda, then handed it to me. Then he stepped over to the candy machine. “What else do you want?”
I raised the bottle of Dr Pepper in silent toast. “This is enough. You should get yourself something.”
Nodding, he picked out Rolos from the candy machine.
A moment later, he pulled out one of the blue vinyl chairs for each of us, angling them so they faced each other just slightly, and he dropped down into the one nearest the door. I stood there, stone still, just watching him as he stretched his long legs out in front of him.
He’d never refastened his jacket and it hung open over his pressed white shirt. The shirt was looking a little worse for the wear. It now bore wrinkles and smudges of dirt, mostly in the places I’d elbowed him. He let the tranq gun drop to the floor by the chair as he peeled off a layer of the wrapper on the Rolos and popped one in his mouth.
I set the shiv down on the table as I lowered myself to the chair. Then I twisted the cap off the Dr Pepper. Habit had me glancing at the inside of the lid. I laughed.
Carter’s eyes popped open and he straightened.
I tossed the cap onto the table between us. “I won a thousand bucks.” I held the bottle up, reading the label, listening to the fizzing of the carbon bubbles. “All the Dr Peppers I’ve drunk in my life and I never won jack. Today must be my lucky day.”
Somehow the words didn’t sound as bitter and ironic as I meant them to. Suddenly I was just tired. Or maybe it was the tranquilizer still pumping through my blood.
I took a sip. As the soda rolled over my tongue, I felt a rush of gratitude. Carter may have just beaten the crap out of me, he may have shot me in the back, but he’d bought me Dr Pepper. I know it was effed up, but somehow, it balanced out.
Carter smiled, that odd, twisted smile of his. “Maybe.” Then he set the Rolos down on the table and pushed them toward me. “You want the rest?”
I looked from him to the Rolos to my Dr Pepper. “That isn’t fair. I got the soda.”
We must have realized the absurdity of the conversation at the same moment because we both kind of laughed.
I reached for the candy, then asked, “You sure?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been on the outside more recently than you. I’ve probably had all kinds of stuff you haven’t.”
At some point, the Rolos had melted a little and the caramel had leaked out to sort of glue them to each other, but I managed to pry one free. “About that . . .” I asked, just before popping it into my mouth.
“Yeah, about that.” He gave a little shrug, then scrubbed his hand over his newly shaven jaw, like he was trying to figure out how to tell me something difficult. “You said you had questions.”
Hell yeah, I had questions. Thousands of them—some hugely important. But oddly, the one closest to the surface was: why had he remembered I like Dr Pepper? Why had he gotten so upset when he found out he’d gotten the date of our birthday wrong? Why did he keep acting like he cared for me? Not in a generic, I’m-clinging-to-the-remnants-of-my-past kind of way. But like he actually cared. About me.
The way he was acting was seriously messing with my head. Yeah, sure. The hot guy from school coming to rescue me, that was a nice fantasy. But it was fantasy. Not real. One hundred percent guaranteed to crush your soul. It was like the pencil thing all over again.
Carter was playing me. I had something he wanted and he was charming me to get it. Last time it was my test answers; this time it would be something else. I just hadn’t figured out what yet.
But I knew this: I wasn’t going to just sit back in my chair and swoon like I had last time. I was going to call him on it. “You know I can’t just trust you, right?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Okay, so a braver woman than I might have actually reminded him of the pencil incident, but I couldn’t do that without tipping my hand to the fact that I’d been all weak-kneed crushing on him before. I wasn’t that bold yet. So instead I said, “I can’t just blindly believe that you’re going to be able to get me and Mel out of here. If it was just me . . .” I shrugged. “Maybe. But if we’re going to go with you, you have to tell me everything.”
“What can I say to convince you that I’m on the up-and-up?”
“Why don’t you just start at the beginning and I’ll stop you when you’ve won me over.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lily
“What is out there?” I asked abruptly. I know I’d asked him to start at the beginning, but suddenly I couldn’t wait to hear the truth. And I didn’t even wait for him to answer. “We can see through the fences, but we never see any people. Never hear anything beyond the Farms other than the Ticks at night. Are there any people left out there? Any towns, cities? Anything?”
Carter’s gaze dropped away from mine. He frowned and rolled a Rolo across the table with his forefinger.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Not in the big cities,” he said slowly. “I haven’t been everywhere. I don’t know for sure. There are Farms in every state I’ve been in. Lots of them. In the Farms, I’ve heard rumors—”
“Rumors about what?”
“Just people guessing mostly. We know there are factories. Someone’s making the food Greens eat. Someone delivers it. Adults who are Collaborators. We’ve turned some of them, but only a very few. There must still be farms—real ones that grow food—down in the valley and out in California. But in the part of the country I’ve seen . . .”
He shook his head.
I couldn’t imagine the Dallas metroplex empty. There had to be at least five million people in the area. How did that many people just disappear?
I didn’t ask about my mom. I’d known in my heart that she must be gone. My mother was a fighter. She would have fought to the death to protect us. To get us back. She would never have given up once she realized the Farms were not the sanctuaries everyone believed them to be. I wasn’t ready to talk about her yet—I didn’t know if I ever would be.
I leaned back in my chair. “Okay. Now you can start at the beginning.”
Carter looked at me for a long minute, screwing up the corners of his mouth, like he was testing out what he wanted to say. Finally he blew out a breath, met my gaze, and said, “Here’s the part you’re not going to want to believe.”
“Okay, hit me.”
“Vampires are real.” He said it straight-facedly, like this was supposed to be shocking news.
I arched an eyebrow. “Not the mutated genetic freaks that ate their way through the Southwest. But real honest-to-God vampires? Like, the mythical monsters who don’t like garlic and sparkle in the sun?”
I waited for him to laugh. He didn’t. His gaze was completely serious when he said, “They don’t sparkle.”
“O-okay.” I popped another Rolo in my mouth to give myself time to process. “Yes, we have all these Ticks now and some people call them vampires because they’re really strong and hard to kill and have a moral compass that points straight to hmm, humans are yummy. But you’re talking about something different, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” Never once had his gaze wavered, which made me uncomfortable when I was the first to look away.
“Have you seen one of those vampires yourself?”
He must have heard the barely contained sarcasm in my voice, because this made him smile. “Yes. With my own eyes. I’ve seen the fangs. I’ve seen one eat. They aren’t like Ticks. They’re smarter. Maybe smarter than we are. And cunning. And completely amoral. By our standards, at least.”
I studied Carter, the tension in his shoulders. The stubborn set of his jaw, like he was daring me to call him on it. Like he was expecting me to argue with him about the existence of vampires.
The Ticks had a clear scientific origin—at least according to the CDC. Scientists at the Genexome Corporation had been tinkering around with epigenetics. They’d been using certain benign mircoorganisms to switch genes on and off, trying to cure a whole host of diseases and disorders, including autism. Because of the autism link, I’d actually been following their work even before the outbreak. They’d been able to affect brain development, tumor development, and birth defects. Their work was amazing. Until it had gotten out of hand and a supposedly harmless microbe was accidentally released as a pathogen that turned about one percent of the population into horrible monsters. Anyone who was exposed to the pathogen had a one-in-a-hundred chance of morphing into a Tick overnight.
After thinking about it for a minute, I asked, “So are the Ticks and the vampires related?” He frowned and I rushed on. “I don’t mean, like, by birth. But genetically. Do tweaks to the same epigenes create vampires and Ticks?”
Carter looked surprised. “You believe me?”
I waggled my hand in an eh gesture. “A year ago, I’d have thought you were bat-shit crazy. But now? Who’s to say what is and isn’t believable? You could tell me that the UN was run by opera-singing, alien werewolves and I couldn’t argue with you.”
Carter’s lips curved in what might have been a smile, but before he could respond, I sat forward and tapped the table with my forefinger.
“What I want to know is what any of this has to do with the Farm. With me and Mel. Does knowing any of this help get us out?”