Velveteen by Saul Tanpepper Read Free Book Online Page A

bite someone who tried to run, but he fell down and I knew he was dead. No one came to pick him up or take him away. No one came to bury him in the ground, like they did Remy. But they didn’t have to. He finally just got up on his own and walked away.
    He was all better.
    I knew Ben Nicholas wasn’t going to come back, not like those people outside, because
    there are no such things as zombie rabbits
    he’d had the wrong disease— we had the wrong disease.
    It was too late for me to make Ben Nicholas not dead, but that didn’t mean it was too late to help him. All I needed was
    a long, long time
    more time. Enough to make him Real. Because that’s how nursery magic works: it takes
    forever
    a long, long time.
    And the right disease.

    I don’t remember Mama and Daddy putting me in the car, the day we tried to leave the island, but I do remember the drive. The windows were rolled up tight because they were afraid that the people would try to get in. The car was full of my dying smell, full of Mama’s sickness — and Daddy’s, too, because he was also sick by then — though it was still sleeping inside their bones. They were talking low and fast in the front seats, not exactly arguing. Even so, their sharp whispers felt like fingernails on my skin. I tried not to listen, but I didn’t have my pillow and couldn’t block my ears.
    “ We have to turn around, Lyssa!”
    “We’ll all die if we don’t get off the island.”
    “We’re going to die if we keep trying. We waited too long.”
    “You don’t know—”
    “They’re checking IDs at the bridge. You know we won’t get through, not now. Not us.”
    I wanted to tell them to turn around. I didn’t want to leave Ben Nicholas behind. But I was too tired, too weak.
    Then, sometime later:
    “—one bite. No cure. That’s how it goes.”
    No cure. Just like Miss Ronica had said. They were talking about me.
    “No, Rame! I won’t believe it. There has to be some way.”
    “There isn’t.”
    We were surrounded by then. The cars weren’t moving and they were all around us. I watched the walking ones stop a man who was running. He was quickly pushed down as they bit him. He didn’t stay down for long before he got up and started biting someone else. Then that person wasn’t sick no more, either.
    “Don’t look, honey,” Mama whispered. I thought she was talking to me, but she was talking to Daddy. He was quietly crying as we drove very slowly across someone’s front yard, pushing people down and rolling over them. It was a very bumpy ride.
    The next thing I knew we were home again, and I was in bed. Shivering, even though it was baking hot in my room. My mouth was dry. The sickness outside was beginning to go away. Now there was more sickness inside than out.
    Mama and Daddy were hiding somewhere upstairs. Not yet quite
    dead
    ready to stop running.
    I struggled to lift the blankets off my body, to get up and out of bed. I fought the terrible weariness in my bones, the fire in my muscles, the tears pouring from my eyes.
    For you, Ben Nicholas.
    I tried to push away the roar inside my head.
    I needed more time.

    I made sure to find a very slow one. Not much older than me. I didn’t want her to bite me too much. It hurt real bad at first, and I might’ve screamed when it happened, but then it stopped feeling like anything at all.
    Pretty soon, I wasn’t sick no more.

    This time, when the door to my room opens, I’m ready for
    mama?
    the light.
    I try to speak, but my tongue and lips don’t work. But it doesn’t matter, because she’s not Mama. It’s not her heartbeat I hear; it’s not her smell. This one is sick with that old disease I remember from before.
    Just like the other heartbeat and the other smell, the last time the window broke. He was sick, too, but one thing he wasn’t was Daddy.
    Does that mean it’s not yet time? The door is open, so—
    first things first
    I reach out to
    cure her
    touch the girl’s arm, to ask her if she’s