Black River Falls Read Online Free

hidden under my sleeping bag.
    From time to time we traded with the other groups that were scattered throughout the woods and hills surrounding Lucy’s Promise. Not long after I moved up to the mountain, I sought out one of them, and swapped almost everything I had for the one thing I wanted.
    I unfolded the T-shirt. Inside was a six-inch hunting knife with a leather-wrapped handle. All along the top of the blade there were these rat’s teeth serrations, the kind you’d use to saw through thick branches. The cutting edge itself was so sharp it seemed to hum.
    I tested the edge with a finger. It whispered through the skin, sending a pinprick of blood curling into my palm. The world became a little brighter and a little more clear. I smeared the blood off on my jeans, then sheathed the knife and threaded it onto my belt. I left camp and started down the trail toward Black River.

3
    I  SAW THE RIVER first. I’d come around the second-to-last switchback and the trees had started to thin. The Black River cut the Quarantine Zone roughly in half, with the mountains on one side and the town on the other. From up on Lucy’s Promise it looked like a dark ribbon. The only bright spot along its course was where the water ran fast over the falls, turning to white foam as it slipped beneath the stone bridge.
    The town appeared next. From where I stood it was just trees mixed with black and russet-colored roofs and a few lines for roads. It grew larger with every step, until I could pick out the red brick of Black River High at the south end of Main Street and the crown of mansions way up at the north end. As soon as we came off the mountain, the kids sprinted down Route 9. Greer chased after them, but my legs wouldn’t move. I stood there, one foot on the asphalt, one on the grass, looking down the road at what had become of Black River.
    The last time I’d been off the mountain was just after the sixteenth, when the QZ had been packed with people. Infected. Uninfected. National and local news teams. Ten different charities. Eight different government agencies.
    The uninfected went first. They were released from quarantine around Thanksgiving. Once another month or two passed without any real developments—no cure or vaccine, no culprit, no other outbreaks—the news vans left skid marks on their way out of town. The Red Cross and the Salvation Army were next, followed by the Gates people and the Clinton people and the World Health Organization. The CDC, USAMRIID, and the rest of the government agencies hung in there until early March. After they left it was just us, a dwindling force of National Guardsmen, and the occasional smalltime charity—a bunch of losers shuffling around an empty dance floor long after the cool kids had found someplace better to be.
    It was the silence that tripped me up the most. The chaos of those early days was long gone, but there was nothing to take its place. There were none of those old summer afternoon sounds. The pre-outbreak sounds. No whirring lawnmowers or blaring radios. No hissing hoses as people washed their cars or watered their lawns. Just wind moving down empty streets and in and out of the open windows of abandoned houses.
    Months of neglect had led to overgrown yards and weed-cracked sidewalks. Roofs with missing shingles. Shutters hanging from broken windows. A family of white-tailed deer, two adults and two fawns, stood on someone’s front walk, nibbling at the grass. Another house seemed completely untouched, except that the front door was hanging open, exposing the empty throat of the hallway and shiny hardwood floors.
    â€œYo! Cardinal!”
    Greer had stopped in the middle of the street and was waving me forward. Benny was standing next to him, looking back, curious, as if maybe I’d forgotten something. Of course it was also possible that he was wondering why a seventeen-year-old kid couldn’t just walk down an empty street. I