The Before Read Free Page A

Not normally.
    I hated her fear even more than I hated my own.
    “Mel and I aren’t going off to Dad’s and that’s final,” I said.
    Normally, that kind of attitude would get my butt grounded for weeks, but today tears sprung up in her eyes and she said, “But, Lily, if you don’t go to your father’s, then I’m going to have to send you off to one of those camps.”
    “No. Those camps are voluntary. You don’t have to send us anywhere.”
    “Just this morning the news said that congress is going to mandate all teenagers be sent away for their own protection.”
    “That’s never going to happen. Come on, congress can’t mandate that. And do you really think people will just ship off their kids? That’s ridiculous.”
    “People have done it before. In World War Two, in London, tons of people sent their kids out to the country to escape the bomb raids.”
    “That’s different. They were at war.”
    “You think we’re not at war now?”
    All my arguments died on my lips. War? Were we at war?
    There hadn’t been a war on American soil since WWII. War was something that happened far from home. In developing countries and desperate places. It didn’t happen in Texas.
    “We’re not . . .” I gestured ineffectively and couldn’t finish the sentence.
    “They’ve called in the National Guard,” Mom said slowly, like someone delivering horrible news, and I noticed again the toll this week had taken on her. I looked behind the ratty clothes and smudged makeup to see the lines of fear around her eyes, the worry in the tightness of her lips, the tears streaming down her face. “They’ve mobilized army troops. People are fighting for their lives. This is war.”
    “Maybe,” I admitted, talking past the anxiety that clutched my heart. War was at our doorstep and I didn’t know how to keep it out. Suddenly, I wanted Mom to pull me into her arms. To just hold me the way she used to when I was young. I wanted comfort she didn’t offer and I didn’t know how to ask for. “I don’t know. But I do know this: If the government mandates we get sent off to Farm facilities, then being with Dad wouldn’t stop that. That think tank he works for is south of here. They’re in the direct line of those . . .” I stumbled over the word for those creatures. “Those things.”
    I didn’t know what to call them. No one did. From the pictures and videos I’d seen, they didn’t look human anymore. They certainly weren’t acting human either. They didn’t just kill indiscriminately. They hunted teenagers. That information had been on the news almost from the beginning, but I’d read other things online—maybe just rumors and speculation—that they didn’t just hunt teens but that they drank their blood. Like horrible monsters, like parasitic ticks. That they cracked open the rib cage of anyone they caught and they drank their blood straight from their hearts.
    Of course every emo girl in the world was calling them vampires. As if there was something romantic about monsters that wanted to drink your blood.
    I shuddered just thinking about them. And every instinct I had told me to get as far away from them as possible. “We can’t go with Dad. It’s ridiculous to even consider going closer to those things!”
    Mom looked uncertain—something else I wasn’t used to seeing. “Then what do we do?”
    From the doorway I heard Mel playing with her Slinky, which she used to self-soothe. She moved it back and forth from one hand to the other so it made a sllluuunk, sllluuunkk sound. I turned to see her standing there. She just stared at us, her head cocked slightly to the side in that strange way she had. She always reminded me of a grackle when she did that.
    She hated when people talked about her like she wasn’t there. Not that she’d ever said as much, but I knew. I would hate it. So I turned to her and gave her the rundown on the conversation with Dad.
    “What do you think?” I asked.
    She frowned and