What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) Read Online Free PDF

shattered chair legs and poked them deep into the stove’s iron belly.
    “What happened to your brother?” Emily asked him. “Did he…?”
    “Yes, he died,” he said softly. “He didn’t survive the fever. I was almost grateful. No one knows what happens to those who survive it, do they? Just that they’re not really like us anymore. They become some sort of thing , not human.”
    “Not human,” I repeated.
    He shook his head. “But that’s probably just a rumor. I’ve never seen these survivors, if they exist.” He stopped talking, stared at the crackling wood.
    After a while Emily asked gently again, “What happened then?”
    “I buried him. He weighed like twenty pounds when he died. I have no idea where the rest of him went. He was a big guy, healthy one day, then there was nothing left.”
    He turned and studied us carefully. “I think we’ve all got it, the sickness. It’s in us. They said it was a blood-borne pathogen on TV, transmitted from person to person. I’ve thought a lot about how I handled the bodies of my parents, my brother. There’s no way I don’t have it, too.”
    I looked at him, started to say something but decided not to.
    “Emily probably got it from her friends who got it from their parents,” he said. He looked at me and said softly, “And if you didn’t have it before you probably got it from her. We’re always cutting ourselves, scraping ourselves. It’s impossible to keep clean.”
    “What are you going to do?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Keep heading north. Find someplace where there are more people. See if someone has an answer.”
    He touched my hand and stared into my eyes so intently I wanted to look away. “If what happened to my brother starts to happen to me, I want you to take that rifle.” He squeezed my hand. “You know what I’m asking.”
    “I couldn’t ever—” I started to say.
    “You could. You could because I won’t be me anymore.”
Nine
    I awake a few hours after Larkin’s scream in the night, lying on his mattress. A little morning light is just starting to seep through the window. I think at first I’m still in the room with all the other children but soon realize that I’m alone.
    Alone.
    Larkin’s not beside me. I haul myself to my feet and look around the room as if he might be lurking in a corner.
    My rifle is sitting propped against the windowsill and I know Larkin must have put it there. He knew what was happening to him. And he retained his instinct to survive. And he survived long enough to drag himself from the room, from the house. I wonder if he really thought I’d try to shoot him once I saw how he was suffering. But hiding the rifle meant—
    He believed he might survive. He wanted to survive.
    But if he’s still alive, he’s become some sort of thing , alien and unknowable. That was what he said all those who didn’t die right away became. No longer human. If the stories were true. He and his brother had heard many stories from panicked people in their hometown.
    What’s better, no Larkin or a Larkin who doesn’t know me anymore? A Larkin who can’t communicate, is as mindless and crazed with hunger as one of the feral dogs howling in the night? But I can also imagine all too well stumbling across his poor, empty shell of a body, like all those we’ve found in the backrooms of cold, dark houses. Seeing such a thing would kill me.
    I look out the window as the sun starts to rise over the rooftops. Larkin’s out there somewhere, probably very close to where we are. On the slightest chance he has survived, I decide that we will search for a few days, maybe a few weeks, then wait out the summer to see if he makes some sign, to give him a last chance to contact us.
Ten
    I have a secret that I’ve told no one, not even Larkin. It marks me as different from him, possibly different from every other person still alive in this world.
    My father and his team of researchers worked frantically to find a vaccine. An