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He’d told me once that he desired me, yet he couldn’t tolerate my touch. But what he gave me tonight was better than a touch or a kiss or sex. Maybe there would be another woman along the way who was his type. But tonight, he chose me by not choosing her. In return, I accepted his abstinence. Truth be told, I was happier than I’d been in a long damned time, sitting beside the fire, not quite touching Jesse at my side.

It took a week to hike out of the mountains and three days to find a set of wheels large enough to fit Tallis and Georges, me, my guardians, and our weapons. I leaned against a truck, which held some promise for quicker, safer travel. Parked on an abandoned highway in some small town, it wasn’t smashed up like the others we’d encountered, but the damned thing wouldn’t start.

I squinted through the sunlight that reflected off the windshield. Would our six person team return to West Virginia someday? Would we bring back victorious stories to share with the three Lakota we left behind? Or would we come back with our heads hanging and fewer in number?

If Georges managed to resurrect the truck’s motor, we’d be underway. He’d been cursing the hood for hours, dicking around with injectors and system pressure and who the hell knew? Half the shit he said was in French.

What did an airline pilot even know about trucks? A delivery truck, to be specific, plastered with decals of a woman pulling steaming loaves of bread from an oven.

My stomach grumbled. What I would've given for a can of spray paint to cover the taunting smile on the bitch's face.

Metal gleamed on the four lane road. Roll-overs. Abandoned cars. A few vans we passed up because we didn’t want to scrape out the mummified occupants. In those final days, no one knew where to go. No safe destination. After the virus killed the children and elderly and transformed the women into nymphs, the surviving men fought, killed, hid, and stole what they needed to stay alive.

Men who once obeyed laws became vicious predators, wandering traumatized, pissed-off, and completely ungoverned to spread their septic misery. Unpredictable, with nothing to lose, they posed the biggest threat.

I could only hope there were still men out there as decent as the one jogging up the highway.

Tallis slowed as he reached me, gas can in hand. “This is the last of it until the next town.”

“Thank—” A pinching sensation ripped through my stomach. I wrapped an arm around my waist and breathed through it.

After two years, I should’ve been used to the ripples of discomfort, but I was still figuring out my evolving DNA and my predatory link to the mutated. The sensations were a sort of communication with them, a language I didn’t understand. When they got stirred up, so did my insides.

Which meant more lurked nearby. We’d already cleared the area and killed dozens. I held the carbine to my chest and scanned the landscape, shielding my eyes from the sun, as my gut vibrated with chaotic signals.

Georges grumbled beneath the hood. Suitcases and rifled supplies had long ago exploded from hatchbacks and scattered the blacktop in both directions. Jesse and Roark squatted on this side of the road, studying a map.

Where was Michio? I clutched my abdomen and concentrated. A single pulsing thread, a sound wave, whatever it was, strummed inside me. Straining. Rabid. Howling without sound.

The surrounding wreckage, my companions, the distant tree line, nothing moved.

I looked at Tallis, who was still standing at my side. “There’s another aphid…somewhere. Where’s Michio?”

He turned and pointed down the road, toward the last of the abandoned vehicles. Michio jumped from the bed of a single-cab pickup truck, too far away to yell, but I could make out his arm waving me over. As I cautiously walked to him, tremors coiled low in my belly, growing stronger, the silent warning of a single aphid.

I slowed a few feet away from the truck, and an ear-grating screech rattled inside the cab. Michio stopped me with a hand on my chest. The look on his face said, It’s okay. Then he glanced at the truck.

A human-sized figure blurred within the cab and slammed against the window. Pincers scraped across the glass, and spittle flung from the snapping mandible.

The internal sensor in my stomach reverberated in sync with its screams, sending shock waves to my teeth. Why hadn’t Michio killed it? I sidled around his arm and raised the carbine.

Tight black curls covered its head, its flannel shirt bloody but not worn with dirt, and its brown skin had yet to turn green.

I moved my finger off the trigger. “It’s newly mutated.”

“Yes.” Michio pressed down on the carbine’s barrel, lowering it to my side. “I want to show you something.”