Chapter 13: What It Does

I did not go back to the cabin.

I went across the yard to the barn with pump house dust on my socks and climbed the ladder to the loft.

The lantern was low.

Jonas sat on the edge of his cot with the fire scanner murmuring in his lap, and he turned it off when he saw my face.

"It's not yet," I said.

"What is?"

"Not yet. You said you'd wait for it."

He moved over, and I sat beside him on the cot, close enough that our knees touched.

I told him in order, because that was the only way I could get through it.

I told him I had died on a roof on the forty-first day of the end of the world.

I told him about the zip ties, and the captain saying I volunteered, and two hundred people watching.

I told him Keaton had done the cutting himself, and that Bridget had held my hand while he did it.

Jonas did not interrupt.

When I got to the east gate, his hand closed on the edge of the cot until the knuckles went white.

"Then I woke up in my own bed on the twentieth of September," I said. "With a text from Bridget about the plan."

He sat quiet for a long time.

"You want me to believe you came back from the dead," he said at last.

"I want you to believe one thing. The Anchor kept a wall of names, and I read it every morning."

"Reese."

"Column two, near the bottom. Hale, J. Volunteer firefighter. Someone had written next to it in marker. He held the ramp so the bus could cross."

His face changed.

"I never told anyone about the bus," he said. "I decided to go back for it on the ride over. I hadn't told my sister."

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Fed Me to the Dead, So I Woke Up Before the End from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.