by Megan Crewe
Nine times out of ten, when we’d tried to help anyone, they’d stabbed us in the back the first chance they got. I wasn’t letting that happen again. I could only look out for our group now.
“They could be armed. It could be a trick. We don’t know them; we can’t trust them,” I said. A woman holding a bundle that looked like a baby stepped to the side of the road, and in that moment guilt tugged at my gut. But only for a second. I jerked the wheel to the side to swerve around her and pressed down on the gas. The engine roared, drowning out the shouts they hollered after us. The SUV jolted forward. I fixed my eyes on the road ahead, nothing left inside me but relief.
The next time I let myself look in the rearview mirror, the drifters and their flashlight had faded out of view.
“Anyone who comes within miles of that place is going to notice the fire,” Leo commented a little while later.
I glanced over my shoulder. The flickering light was finally hidden by the small town we’d passed through, but it had been visible for a long time and it could still be getting larger.
“So what?” Justin said. “If some Warden sees it, why would they think it’s got anything to do with us?”
“If someone patrols by here, they’ll probably take a closer look,” Leo said. “And that group’s probably still out there, walking the roads and flagging people down. The group that saw us.”
“Who could tell the Wardens a black SUV went by less than an hour ago,” I finished for him, my heart sinking.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, hell,” Anika said under her breath.
I bit back an echoed curse. Maybe the fire would die out long before any of Michael’s people happened by here. Maybe that group had already found shelter somewhere. But with a little bad luck and a couple radio calls, Michael could know exactly where we were. For all we knew, he already had every Warden he could spare speeding straight toward us.
“Let’s get off this road,” Leo suggested. “It’d be the first place they’d search.”
“Right,” I said.
Justin jerked open the atlas. “There are lots of little roads all over the place around here,” he said. “We just have to watch out for dead ends. And if we go much farther west we’ll hit a big freeway.”
“So we go east, then,” I said. “And let’s turn every chance we get. I don’t want to give them an easy path to follow.” Until it snowed again, our tire tracks would reveal our route, but at least a winding path would make it harder for anyone to set up an ambush. “You tell me when the intersections are coming, and which way to go to keep us east and south. Okay?”
“Got it,” Justin said. “About a mile from here, you can take a left.”
I pressed my foot against the gas pedal, pushing the car faster than we’d risked before. Twenty miles an hour…twenty-five miles an hour. I eased off only when I felt the tires start to skid on the snow. It was even and fairly shallow here, but it still offered much less traction than the plowed roads I used to take for granted.
We reached the turn and turned again fifteen minutes later. And then the good luck we’d had so far started to run out. The farmland gave way to forest, and the wind sweeping over the trees had left the snow sloped across the road. It was still shallow enough for us to drive through, but the slant threw off the tires. I had to creep along, hugging the ditch, braced against the slightest drift to the side. The dark tree trunks slipped past the faint glow of the headlights like looming phantoms. A bead of sweat trickled down my back, but I didn’t dare stop to unzip my heavy coat.
It was almost an hour before we came to another viable turnoff. A sprinkling of snowflakes fluttered down—not enough to cover our tracks, just speckling my view through the windshield. My ankle was starting to ache from holding my foot steady on the pedals. But we’d hardly covered any distance at all.
Unfortunately, the SUV couldn’t run on determination alone. The fuel indicator had dipped below the ¼ mark.
“We’re going to need more gas soon,” I said. “Is there any extra in the trunk?”
Leo shook his head. “I poured everything we had in before we left the cabins.”
The road ahead of us looked particularly lonely, but so far we’d been more successful siphoning from vehicles left at isolated houses than in towns, maybe because other scavengers had already made the rounds in more populated areas.
“Shout if you see a mailbox,” I told the others.
The first two houses we came across, down lanes between the trees, were car-free. Then the forest receded by a row of country houses only about an acre apart. I eased up and down the driveways, munching on potato chips from the bag Justin had opened as a hurried lunch.
We peered at each house before getting out of the car, but all of them looked abandoned. The weather hadn’t been kind. A huge crack bisected a living room window. The roof over one of the porches had collapsed. We found a little gas: an old truck gave us a couple gallons, which we sucked down our length of plastic tubing into the jugs we carried. Then, after a few empty garages, a van offered a few more gallons. But it wasn’t enough.
As we edged onward, Tobias snuffled and shifted in the back, his most recent batch of sedatives wearing off.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Looking for gas,” I said.
Through the rearview mirror, I watched him fumble with the pill bottle. His face was even pastier than usual. If the pills were upsetting his stomach like they had Gav’s, he wasn’t complaining, but it couldn’t be enjoyable staying constantly knocked out in that artificial sleep.
“Hold on,” I said. “Why don’t you help search these places? It’ll go faster with more people.”
So at the next property, Tobias got out, quickly veering away from us as he coughed into his scarves. Leo and I checked the garage, Justin and Anika headed for the house to peer through the windows, and I sent Tobias to take a look around back.
We repeated the pattern at the next few properties. As we pulled up yet another driveway, the lights caught a line of shadows in the snow. I jammed my foot on the brake.
“Interesting,” Justin said.
“What?” Anika poked her head around his seat.
A trail of footprints crossed the snow between the house and the garage. Human footprints. I turned off the engine, studying the windows as silence settled over us. No light in the house. No smoke above the chimney. Just a looter passing by, then?
Even if it had been a looter, they could have crashed here for the night. The muted glow of the SUV’s lights didn’t reach far enough to tell me if the footprints led away from the house on the other side.
“What do you want to do?” Leo asked.
“Go carefully and keep our eyes open,” I said. “And let’s leave the house alone. We’ll take a look at the garage and then we’ll move on.”
I touched my coat, running my fingers over the shape of Tobias’s flare gun in my pocket. Leo and Tobias both carried real pistols. If someone confronted us, we could probably convince them to leave us alone.
Dragging in a lungful of frigid air, I stepped out. We converged on the garage. A keypad was mounted beside the sliding door, requiring a code we couldn’t provide, and the knob on the side door didn’t budge when I tried to turn it.
Locked up tight. Which meant maybe there was something valuable in there. Something the looter hadn’t gotten to.
Or there was no looter, only an owner protecting his supplies.
A figure materialized at the edge of my flashlight’s beam, and my pulse skipped a beat before I recognized Tobias. He’d ducked around behind the house as usual. He jerked his head toward the backyard. “You should take a look at this.”
We tramped through the calf-deep snow to a log shed almost as large as the garage. The door hung ajar. Tobias held up the padlock he must have busted off it. He hung back, scratching his elbow, while the rest of us stepped inside.
“Holy crap,” Justin said, and Anika laughed.
Our
flashlights revealed a snowmobile parked in one corner of the shed, beside a stack of gas cans. At the other end of the building stood a thick wooden table, with several animal skins hanging on a line above it. Mostly rabbit, two that had once belonged to squirrels, and what looked like a raccoon’s bushy coat. A salty, musky smell reached my nose through my scarf, thicker than the piney scent of the logs.
Some of the skins were fresh. The footprints hadn’t been a looter’s. Someone lived here.
I backed up instinctively. Tobias was still standing guard by the door. He sneezed a couple times, and cleared his throat.
“I don’t think anyone’s home right now,” he said. “There’s a spot where another snowmobile must have been sitting around back, and a trail heading off toward the trees that looks recent. I’ll keep watch.”
Leo nudged one of the gas cans with the toe of his boot. “We could get pretty far on this,” he said, but he just stood there, looking at them.
Justin didn’t seem concerned about politeness. He marched over to the wall beside the table and poked through the tools hanging there. “I bet this could come in handy,” he said, grabbing a wrench. “And these.” He snatched up a pair of wire cutters.
My flashlight grazed Anika’s back—she was stuffing something into her pocket. I smothered the urge to protest. Leo had raised his eyes toward me.
Everything here belonged to someone else. Someone still alive, who’d done nothing to harm us. But we needed it too. We needed it more. Whoever owned all this didn’t have a murderous gang tracking him down. He didn’t need to protect a vaccine that might save everyone in the world who was still living.
“We’ll take all the gas,” I heard myself say. “And anything else that could be useful. But let’s get the gas first—that’s what’s most important.”
“And we don’t know when the homeowner might show up,” Tobias put in.
“If he doesn’t appreciate the cause, I guess we’ll just have to convince him,” Justin said, waggling the wrench.
“You and your violent solutions,” Anika said as they hefted a couple of the gas cans.
“Hey, I know when to back off,” Justin protested. “I haven’t gotten us into any trouble since we left the city. But sometimes you’ve got no choice, right?”
“I suppose sometimes it’s good to have a man of action around,” Anika said drily, but she aimed a crooked little smile at him that looked almost sincere. When he glanced back at her, his cheeks faintly flushed in the hazy light, the smile vanished so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it, and then she was hurrying out to the SUV.
Leo picked up a couple cans too. Tobias backed away from the door as we passed. His gaze followed Anika for a moment before he turned back toward the yard.
We emptied cans into the SUV’s tank until it was full. Then we stacked the extra cans in the trunk. When we were almost done, Justin went to have a look at the garage—to see if he could “crack the code,” he said—and Leo and I made one last trip to the shed.
Only three cans remained by the wall. The space looked horribly empty. Without meaning to, I imagined the owner coming back from his hunting trip and finding his stash gone. The anger and panic he’d feel. I tensed.
“Hey,” Leo said, lowering his flashlight. “We can always leave the last few.”
I didn’t mean to say what I was thinking, but the words slipped out. “Gav would have.”
“Yeah,” Leo said. “I bet he would.”
“They’ll get us that much closer to Atlanta,” I said. And wherever we might have to go after, if it turned out the CDC was a dead end. “Maybe this guy’s got an even bigger stash in the garage. He’d probably take everything we have if our positions were reversed.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to,” Leo said. “It’s your decision, Kaelyn. We’re with you either way.”
I knew he meant it. But at the same time, there was a rawness in his voice that took me back to the time a couple weeks ago when he’d confessed how he’d stolen from and abandoned friends, people who’d tried to help him, to make it back to the island alive. When he’d admitted he no longer believed he was a good person, and how much that horrified him.
Back then, I’d told him I still thought most people would do the right thing, if they were given a real chance. I’d wanted him to believe that, to believe in me. Remembering that made a sickly heat rise in my chest. Maybe before, I’d have left a few cans for a person I didn’t know.
Maybe if I’d been a little more callous before, a little less naive, Gav would still be alive.
Good and bad didn’t apply here. It was about surviving or ending up dead.
“We take all of it,” I said firmly. In that instant, Leo’s gaze flickered, in a way that sent an anxious twinge through my chest. But he nodded and reached for the remaining cans.
He understood, I told myself as I grabbed the last one. He had to.
On our newly filled tank, we wove through the back roads until the brownish haze of the dawn lit the horizon. Time to hole up for the day. I picked the house: a three-story Victorian positioned like a fort on a small hill. The thought of the view from the windows, overlooking the road and the fields and forestland beyond its long backyard, made me feel a little more secure.
As before, we didn’t park at our chosen hideout, but a few homes down. We crossed the backyard there, tramped to the house on the hill through the forest where our path would be hard to spot, and then set up camp in the Victorian’s living room. After our hurried dinner, I stepped out to repack the cold box with snow. My scooping mittens uncovered tufts of yellow grass.
The snow was starting to thin. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. One small hike in temperature as we continued south, and it would all be melting away. Leaving us with nothing to cool the vaccine.
I guessed, when that happened, we’d just have to make one long run for the CDC. And hope they had the facilities to keep the samples cool there. And if no one was there at all…
I shoved that thought aside and headed back in. But as I watched Justin spread the blankets inside the tent, a restlessness worked its way through my bones. I wasn’t ready to sleep yet.
“I’m going to watch the road, just for a bit,” I said. Tobias had taken the second floor bedroom at the front of the house to keep watch, but it couldn’t hurt to have two sets of eyes on the lookout. Maybe the third floor would be a loft room, with windows at both ends so I could see all around us.
My gaze passed over Anika, and I nudged Leo. “Keep the cold box with you?”
“Sure,” he said.
Upstairs, a yank on the thin chain in the hallway brought down the steps to the next level. The gust of freezing air that came with it carried just a hint of sourness. I hesitated, and then climbed up.
The room above stretched the entire length of the house, as I’d anticipated. It was set up as a bedroom, with a canopy bed and short bookshelves lining the walls beneath the vaulted ceiling. Everything was a delicate shade of lilac, even the bedspread. Which made the body in the mint-green dress that lay on it stand out despite the gauzy canopy curtain.
Something clenched inside me. I sucked in a breath and made myself walk to the front window first. From there I could see as far as the closest highway, more than a mile away. Beyond it, the landscape rippled, rolling hills rising into rounded mountains lifting to distant peaks that grazed the clouds. The branches of the trees in a nearby orchard wavered in the wind. Nothing else stirred.
The world was as still as the corpse on the bed.
I didn’t want to have to look at her, to see whose house we were appropriating and what had happened to her, but I couldn’t help stopping at the foot of the bed on my way to the back window. Maybe I owed it to her to find out. I turned my head.
If I hadn’t seen dead bodies before, this one might have been more disturbing. But there was no blood, no open wound, no evidence of violence. The woman behind the curtain looked so peaceful I might have been able to believe
she was simply resting, if not for the icy tinge on her coppery skin and the dribble of vomit seeping from the corner of her parted lips. The winter had kept her perfectly preserved. There was no smell of rot yet, only a faint sour tang from the vomit.
The woman’s eyes were closed, but her head was tipped toward the opposite side of the bed, where she’d laid out a collection of photographs. I eased the canopy to the side so I could make out the images. An older couple standing on the deck of a cruise ship. The woman before me in a wedding dress with her red-haired groom. School portraits of two little boys. What appeared to be a New Year’s Eve party with a group of friends raising their cocktails.
Beside the photos lay a diamond necklace, a plastic beaded bracelet, a dog-eared novel, a ratty stuffed elephant toy. And an open, empty bottle of painkillers that had rolled against the clock on the bedside table.
I’d braced myself for a wave of nausea, for shock or disgust. All that washed over me was sadness, fading into a dull sort of resignation.
There wasn’t any sign she’d even been sick. But maybe this wasn’t such a bad way to go, if you were going to go somehow eventually: in a little world of her own making, a shrine to all the things she must have loved. Better than the way Gav had gone—clawing and shrieking and terrified.
Except, since when was I assuming it was better to die than go on? Why wasn’t I horrified that the epidemic had brought her to the point that suicide was the best option?
What was wrong with me?
I dropped the canopy and walked away. When I reached the back window, I leaned my forehead against the glass. But the chill didn’t wake up any emotions; it just blended into the numbness.
There wasn’t much to see out back, only the shadowy forest and another line of hills beyond it. My head was getting heavy, my eyelids drifting down. Maybe I was just tired. Too much stress from across the night, catching up with me now.