“What did she call you? Malpa?”
“Polish for monkey. She thinks she’s so funny!”
He jotted Lucy’s responses down, and then swept his gaze over her. His eyes widened in appreciation. “I’d say you’re healthy. Very healthy.” Henry scribbled something else.
She blushed. There was no mistaking the fact that he was checking her out. He must be, what, at least twenty-one? Her hand crept up to her messy hair. Boys were so weird. Working in the fields all afternoon had covered her skin with a fresh layer of stink. Plus manure. And blood. And still, he was flirting.
Henry put his notepad away and leaned on the table.
“So. Grammalie Rose was a bit rough on you?”
“Yeah, because of the…” She corrected herself. “Because of Sammy.”
“Hey, it was a shock for me, too, when I first came here, but soon enough you realize that they are just regular people.”
“I guess,” Lucy said. “So how many are there?”
“Three in this settlement. But there are more out there.” He waved his hand in a vague way.
“And they help with the chores?” She fought to keep her voice neutral.
Henry shot her a look. “Yeah, everything but the cooking. Bits of them, you know, fingers and the like, kept falling into the stew, so we put a stop to that.”
Lucy gasped, and then caught the wide grin spreading across his face. She went red. Henry put up his hands in a conciliatory gesture.
“Sorry—couldn’t help myself. Corny as it sounds,” he continued, “we’re like a family. Literally, in some cases.”
She looked at him.
“Emi and Jack are siblings.” His face fell, and Lucy remembered that these were the names of the little kids who’d been grabbed earlier. “And Sammy is Aidan’s brother.”
“Really?” Lucy said. “I mean, how could that be? That one of them is fine and the other is…” She broke off. No one else in her family survived.
Henry raised an eyebrow and she got the feeling he’d read her mind. “There’s no clear answer. Most people died if they got sick. Sammy’s lucky to be alive,” he said.
She nodded, and tried to swallow the lump in her throat.
“If you think about it, Sammy and Aidan beat the odds. Two brothers in the same family.”
“But Aidan didn’t even get sick. He has no scars… does he?”
Henry’s mouth twisted. “Luck again, I guess. Of those who contracted the mutated hemorrhagic smallpox in the second wave, maybe one in a million survived, even with the vaccine. Most died within seventy-two hours. Those are some bad numbers. The regular pox left about one in one hundred thousand alive, so if you look at it like that, you and I, and everyone else here are blessed. Right? A few scars here and there, maybe, but nothing like what the S’ans have to bear. Pretty soon you won’t even notice a difference.” He shot her a grin, and she couldn’t help but grin back at him.
“How do you know so much about it?”
“I was a premed student before.”
“So how many unvaccinated people survived?”
He looked startled. “None. Big fat goose egg.” He made a zero with his thumb and forefinger.
“No, seriously,” she began before noticing his face. The smirk was gone. He shook his head.
“Basically that’s why the majority of the deaths were adults aged thirty to sixty. The kids and teenagers were okay ’cause they were up to date on their shots including the reinstated ones.”
Lucy nodded. She remembered her classmates back in grade school complaining that they’d had to get a whole slew of new injections after the first bird flu cases had been diagnosed.
“…and the older people like Grammalie had been given live smallpox inoculations during the War, but the rest of them… Nope. One hundred percent mortality.”
Her mouth shaped itself into an O. Her hand crept up to her left shoulder and pulled the rolled sleeve of her shirt down so that it covered her upper arm.
None. Zero. That made her an even bigger freak than the S’ans. She remembered the thick folder in the nurse’s office. The countless blood tests. What exactly was wrong with her?
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I just ate too fast.”
“Okay, well give a holler when you’re done,” Henry said, pointing to the cutting board, and sauntered away.
CHAPTER NINE
CAMP SCAVENGER
After Henry had gone back to his potatoes, Lucy forced her fingers to continue cutting up bunnies. Her brain was yammering away at full speed. If what Henry had said was true, she should not be alive. Unless she had been vaccinated when she was a kid and Maggie had been wrong or lying. Her sister wasn’t the type to play tricks on her siblings—that was more like something Rob would have done—but maybe she just hadn’t had the facts straight.
Could she have forgotten? The first time she’d run through the glass doors had completely faded from memory, so maybe something in her just preferred to ignore unpleasant events.
Lucy pressed her fingers against the skin of her upper arm, trying to feel for the raised scar of a smallpox vaccine. She felt nothing. She needed to go somewhere where she could look. Find a mirror. Examine every inch of her skin. But she couldn’t do it with all these people around. She wondered about bathrooms: Did they have them? Were there latrines out in the fields or something? Surely someone here owned a mirror. Perhaps Henry? He looked like he spent time getting his hair just right.
Another part of her brain reminded her that if she did have a vaccine scar, she would surely have noticed it before now.
Her stomach twisted. She had eaten too much too fast. Lucy took a sip of water and tried to think. Maybe she should leave? Go back out in the Wilds? But the Sweepers… Now that she’d seen them in action, she was scared. No one seemed able to stand against them, and by herself she’d be totally helpless. And the dogs—they were hunting people with the dogs.
She wished there were someone she could talk to. She might be sick and not showing symptoms. She could be a carrier like Typhoid Mary, who’d shown no symptoms but had infected people just by cooking their meals. She looked down at the chunks of rabbit glistening on the chopping block, the pile of cotton ball tails. Her stomach heaved again. Cooking would kill the disease, right? If she had it. Lucy imagined her body swarming with virus. She grabbed the edge of the table and pressed her fingers into it until her gut settled. Maybe she could tell Aidan. Or maybe she shouldn’t say a word.
As if the thought had summoned him, Aidan appeared behind her and hopped up onto the table. “Hey,” he said casually. “I was looking for you.”
Lucy fought to control her panic. She made a noncommittal noise and stared at the table. She drew a bowl of water toward her and sluiced the blood from her hands, scrubbing at them with her nails. Slowly, her heart stopped racing. She peeked at Aidan under her eyelashes.
His sweatshirt was damp with sweat; there were mud stains on the knees of his jeans and a few dry leaves caught in his hair. She stared at his fingers, thinking how strong they seemed. That made her heart race again and distracted her from morbid thoughts. He tore off a piece of bread, swooshed it in the oil, and popped it into his mouth. He eyed the portions of chopped-up meat. “Cat?” he asked sadly. Lucy flicked a rabbit tail at him. “Oh good,” he said and flicked it back at her.
“So where have you been?” she asked, looking at Aidan’s dirty fingernails.
“Out,” he said.
Lucy felt a surge of irritation. Which was good. It banished the last of the fear and made it possible for her to meet his eyes without blushing. “With Del?” she asked before she could curb her tongue. Aidan looked at her and then jumped down, ignoring the question. Maybe he picked up on the sneer in her voice? She vowed to keep her mouth shut about the other girl.