"We need to stay away from the main roads," Jack said as he directed Holly to take the service road. "The vampires can be anywhere; some of them can even walk in daylight."

As we drove, I understood why Jack wisely made that decision. The highways were completely blocked off with destroyed and abandoned cars. The service road must have been flooded last night during the storm so they were mostly left alone. As dawn came, the Black Waters evaporated. Now there were only a few puddles of ordinary rainwater behind.

"Good call," I remarked, finally deciding to overlook his bluntness in calling our deceased loved ones vampires.

"I interned at Sylvirua every summer in high school," Jack bragged. "The jocks teased me for being a test-tube head. Now look who's laughing?"

"Save the celebrating for Miami, asshole," Holly muttered as she narrowly avoided a pile of bones that had been picked clean. Only the stripes of red flannel curled around the remains of a bloody spine told me that this had once been a person. "If we get to Miami, I'll have Andrew buy you a martini and apologize for calling you names."

I rolled my eyes. Holly was still dating Andrew Scott, the quarterback of the football team. High school ends, but some people never leave. I didn't care who these two were meeting in Miami. The only thing I knew was was that at least two of my family members were trapped back in Windflower Springs. I desperately needed to get my hands on those Lumin pills so I could save my family members. If they could still be saved.

"If you worked at Sylvirua, you must know where we can get some pills, right? There must be a hidden stash somewhere for employees?" I asked.

Jack snorted. "Yeah, if I did, I'll sell them for a hundred grand each. That is, if the USD is worth anything after today."

"Jacky boy," Holly said in a beguiling tone as we went off-road to avoid an overturned delivery van that had covered the road in boxes of Eggos. "What about that trinket you have around your neck?"

"Holly," Jack snarled. "Stop it. You know that thing means a lot to me."

"It means more to you than your life? Ailith did lend us her car. If not for her, the two of us would be nailing boards on windows and barricading down my house down for the long, dark night."

"Yeah, right, without me, the two of you would be stranded on the highway and probably made into girly mincemeat by now. Don't you know that it's the protocol for the national guard to go around throwing grenades at stalled cars to pick off stray vampires?"

"Stop trying to change the subject, dweeb," Holly snapped and slammed her palm against the steering wheel. "Give us all a goddamn break, Jack. Just give it to her. You told me it was expired, anyway."

Jack sighed. As reluctant as he was — the boy was no match for the bullying powers of a beautiful, popular girl. He reached under his shirt and pulled out a little pendant attached to a gold chain. He dropped it in my hand. It was a medicine tablet encased in a resin capsule. I squinted in the fading sunlight to see what was engraved on it. I made out a smudged T.

"It says Terciel," Jack said. "It's a company that Sylvirua took over many years ago. I found this tablet in one of Sylvirua's storerooms and kept it as a souvenir. This pill is probably over two decades old."

"How do you know this is even a Lumin pill? Didn't Yagerin only start making Lumin pills five years ago when the Blight started to get bad?" I asked.

"No, Terciel made the original Lumins," Jack said. "They were doing it long before the other companies were. This was a prototype that Sylvirua made their pills from. These babies were potent as heck. Too bad, Terciel doesn't exist anymore. There's this cool story that the owner of that company sold Terciel after his wife died. Supposedly he went crazy with grief. He was a genius, though; they say even Charles Liang was afraid of him."

Charles Liang — now that was a name I had heard of. He was the CEO of Yagerin, and his company was the primary supplier of Windflower Regional Medical and most of the continental United States. I remembered seeing Mr. Liang on television. He had a kind, grandfatherly look to him as he explained to all of us that the Blight was harmless as long as we had access to a steady supply of Lumins.

Sylvirua was trying to get a slice of the pharmaceutical pie by starting an outpost in these parts where the Blight was the worst. The only thing I knew was that neither company was popular. They were both accused of handing out faulty, contaminated goods.

There were rumors that all the pharmaceutical companies were experimenting on people by giving them medicine that drove them mad. There were also rumors that Sylvirua was in cahoots with the King of Denmark to limit supply to this part of the world so that they could topple our government and set up a monarchy.

People were looking for anything to direct their anger. The number of conspiracies people thought up for why there wasn't enough medicine to go around was remarkable. Deep inside, I didn't think it was Yagerin or the Sylvirua who were at fault.

Around the world, things were spiraling out of control. Every day there was another storm, another natural disaster, more lives wiped out by the infection. As much as we tried to deny it, the truth was, the Blight was getting worse every day, and there was nothing we could do about it.

"They say the Lumins Terciel made were bloody amazing. Do you know how the Yagerin ones stop working after the infection has been around for 72 hours? The Terciel ones keep going. No one knows how they were able to do it. When Terciel was sold to the Swiss, they could never replicate it. It's the stuff of legends now."

"Who cares?" Holly asked. "All that matters is that we don't have enough Lumins to go around. No one can make enough of them, not the Chinese, not that Yankee company Morendi or this Swiss company Sylvirua. Damn Europeans, they're too busy eating their lingonberry-covered meatballs to save the world."

"Do you always curse this much?" Jack asked Holly in a teasing tone. "I thought Asian girls were supposed to be cute and giggly."

"Only in anime, otaku senpai," I said with a roll of my eyes. I held the tiny tablet up to the light. "Will it work?"

"I dunno," Jack said. "It might or might not. You can give it back if you don't want it."

I closed my fist around the tablet and furrowed my brows at him. Of course, I want it! It was my last hope of saving my sister. Jack grinned back sheepishly.

"After you two get to Miami, I'm going back for Grace," I said. "If there's a chance she can be saved, I have to go do it."

"In the morning," Holly said, raising an eyebrow at me without taking her eyes off the road. "It's suicide to go at night."

"Okay," I said and finally smiled at her. Holly wasn't a complete bimbo. She might just be my best friend at the end of the world.

"You sure are a good sister, Ailith," Jack said. "I don't think I would cross the street to save my older brother."

"My sister is important," I said as I placed my hand over my chest. Strangely, my heart wasn't acting up even though my nerves were shot. "She's like my parents' only child. I've never been very...healthy. As long as she's okay, everything is okay."

"What's wrong with you?" Holly asked, bluntly.

"I have a heart condition. I was born with it. The doctor had to fix the hole in my heart with stem cells, and I don't know how long it will be good for. Who knows, these weird little cells can act up and I could drop dead any minute now. So, you can see, Grace is more important."

"So, you're like a chimera?" Jack asked. "That's so cool! Do you have a scar on your chest and everything?"

"Yeah, but you can go to hell if you think I'm taking off my shirt to show you," I snapped in the general direction of the backseat.

"Sorry," Jack said. "I didn't mean it that way at all. Actually, a lot of women are chimeras. Did you know that when women are pregnant, some of their baby's cells enter their mom's bloodstream and get incorporated into their bodies forever? You could have cells in your brain that aren't even yours. Isn't that creepy? It's like, you're thinking with someone else's cells."

"You know what's creepy?" Holly asked. "That you think any woman is going to let you get that far so that you can put your sketchy chauvinistic cells into her brain. Ignore him, Ailith."

*

In the late afternoon, after taking several detours to avoid blocked roads, we came up to a police barricade along the service road. Men in uniform were standing around holding rifles in their hands.

"Let us go, pretty please?" Holly asked as she flashed her brightest smile at the officer. "We weren't even in Windflower last night when the Blight happened. We came here this morning. None of us were caught in the downpour."

"Is that true?" The officer asked as he shone his flashlight into each of our eyes. I felt my pulse speeding up as the seconds ticked by. The police officer's light lingered for ages on my eyes.

"It's getting dark," Holly whined. "Can you please just let us go, sir? We're running low on gas, and it's dangerous around here at night."

Holly interrupted the officer's intense study of my eyes by tossing her name badge onto my lap. It was a badge declaring that she was a Sales Associate at Tiffany's in Bal Harbor. I noticed the badge was old, scratched, and faded, but the police officer didn't seem to care. He lifted his visor and squinted at it. He nodded back at Holly.

"These two were with you last night, in Miami?" The officer asked. "Are they coworkers of yours?"

"Yup," Holly said. "We were all in Miami last night. These two came along with me this morning to check on my house in Gable Hill, in Windflower. My parents are on vacation in Europe, and I went to see if anything was damaged in the storm. We have a pool in our basement and if there is a flood down there, the entire house could collapse with mold."

"Are you insane, young lady?" The police officer demanded and threw the badge back at me. "Don't you know this entire area is a disaster zone? You sneaked back here to check on an empty house? You're lucky to be alive right now. I could have you all imprisoned for reckless behavior."

"Well, I know now, this place is a wreck," Holly said with a toss of her light brown hair. "Can we go, please? It's sale season, and we have a busy day tomorrow. If I know anything, it's that natural disasters make men want to propose. And what's a proposal without a little blue box?"

"You haven't heard?" The officer asked. "Miami is on military lockdown. No stores or restaurants are open. No one is allowed on the streets after sundown."

"Oh no," Holly said with a dramatic sigh. "Don't tell me that. I had a date tomorrow! He's my mother's hair stylist's son. My mom has been planning this forever! He is going to take me to Nobu! Are you telling me we're going to lose our reservation?"

When the officer didn't reply, Jack immediately interjected. His voice was abnormally high and cheerful, as though he desperately wanted to stress how harmless, normal, and healthy the three of us were.

"Who the hell takes a first date to Nobu?" Jack asked with a weak snicker. "This dude sounds like a w-wanker. Maybe he's overcompensating for being small in other areas."

"Shut up, loser," Holly snapped and then batted her long-lashed eyes at the police officer. I didn't think the officer noticed. "Men these days. Officer — sir — I bet you get tons of calls about assholes like Jack here. He probably thinks he has a right to a girl's body if he so much as buys her a caramel macchiato."

"No, if I take you out for a caramel macchiato," Jack bantered back. "I'm making you pay. Feminists want equality, right? Then you can pay for my time."

Jack and Holly's bickering did not impress the police officer. His deadly serious lips showed no signs of smiling. His eyes were on his buddy, who was pointing a thermal detector at us. After what seemed like forever, the other officer finally lowered his boxy laser gun and gave us a thumbs up.

I sighed with relief. At least we had a small reassurance that we weren't infected. The thermal scanner was used to monitor people's body temperatures as a cursory measure to see if their bodies had dropped below 35 degrees Celsius. That was a state that was medically categorized as hypothermia, which would make sense if one was buried under a snowdrift on Mount Everest. But in a walking, talking person these days — it was better known as Blight Infection.

"All right, kids," the officer said with an impatient wave of his hand. "Call the emergency hotline if you have any symptoms. Get going. Keep your light beams on high and drive fast."