Forever Between (Between Life and Death Book 2) by Ann Christy Page B

plants to stand as fossils of their former selves. In some places green spots show where self-seeding has perpetuated new generations. We both look at those with care—since we also plant food amongst weeds—but it’s all cotton, tobacco, real weeds, and kudzu as far as either of us can tell.
    Along this stretch, we also keep our eyes tuned for anything that looks both orderly and green. A farm is a great place to get stuck if you can defend it and have the freedom to grow food. This land is fairly flat, and we should be able to see any evidence of organized planting on a large scale.
    There’s nothing except the occasional burned barn or house and a whole lot of vines. Some of the houses have already become living mountains of greenery. Old school telephone poles are totems of green leaves. It’s amazing, really. Kudzu was bad around these parts before. In the summer, you could almost watch it grow. Eradication—or at least control—was an invisible, but huge, part of our local government. A few years without those efforts has made some things almost invisible. It’s even growing over and through deaders, binding them in place better than anything I could do.
    We see a few figures in the distance as we round a curve in the road. They are far into the fields and not together. The way they lope toward us tells me that they’re in-betweeners. But, they’re too far from us to cause alarm. It’s almost the opposite. In-betweeners with free reign means the chances of there being people nearby are far less. Anyone nearby wanting safety would take pains to get rid of them. No one likes a free-range in-betweener in the neighborhood.
    We don’t take any breaks at all. There’s no place either of us feel is safe to do so. We do see some things that make us decide we should come back and take a look if at all possible. There’s a feed and hardware store that looks fairly pristine. For sure, the rodents would have gotten any feed corn or oats that people didn’t, but salt licks are something we would be very interested in. We also pass a row of silos, rusting and covered in kudzu, but still of interest. They might have something edible inside. Tons of soybeans, or corn, or anything edible would be a huge prize. It would be nice to find so much food that the logistics of carrying it home became our main problem.
    By the time the sun takes its late afternoon dip, I’m exhausted to the bones and I can tell Charlie is too from the breathy shortness of his already abbreviated responses. His body moves from side to side with each push on the bike’s pedals just like mine does.
    I push myself hard for a minute so that I can ride next to him, then ask, “Find a spot?”
    He nods, but his face is grim. He’s the one with the map in his head, but the last sign we passed indicated the military base was still more than thirty miles out. To get around it to the hospital complex—which is also where the dental unit, regular medical unit and the base services like shopping are at—we have to travel all the way around the base and then go a little further out. We may have made our forty miles today, but not by much. I know Charlie was hoping we would be able to get much more, so that delays by the base wouldn’t be catastrophic.
    We’ve passed the only town of any significance between us and the hospital, so we’re going to have to scope out one of these rural properties for a place to stay tonight. Charlie starts watching them with greater care, his eyes cataloging everything. I do too, but all I see is ruin. I don’t trust that though. From a moving bike and fighting fatigue, I could easily miss some small, but vital, clue. My butt bones hurt enough for me to make a bad decision and I know it.
    An old three-story house—or two-story with a very tall attic—sits alone behind a huge field of skeletal cotton. There’s not much in the way of spontaneous crop seeding, just tall weeds. A few barns for equipment sit even further