by Megan Crewe
Late in the night, we ended up down a lane swimming with snowdrifts. It took an eternity of pushing and tire spinning to back out and find another route. But as we neared the West Virginia border, the coating on the ground thinned. When we stepped out to rotate positions and fill up the gas tank with the rest of the fuel we’d taken from the hunting shed, I packed the cold box with as much snow as it could safely hold before climbing into the passenger seat.
As we rotated again at about five in the morning, a light drizzle began to fall. Within half an hour, it had dissolved what remained of the snow on the road, leaving a slick sheen of ice on the asphalt. Anika, now at the wheel, pumped a spray of antifreeze over the windshield. She’d eased on the gas, her face whitening every time the tires started to slide. I clamped down the urge to tell her to speed up again. At least now we weren’t leaving a trail for the Wardens to follow.
Staring out the rain-streaked window, my thoughts drifted back to Tobias. Was the weather the same back by the house on the hill? Was he sitting in it right now, wet and cold and just waiting for it all to be over, not even knowing we’d tried to look for him? The image made my gut twist.
It was far too late, and too dangerous, to go back for him. Too dangerous to do anything but keep driving. But that didn’t stop me from hating the fact that I hadn’t found some way to help him.
My frustration must have shown in my expression, because a second later Anika said, “We had to go. The Wardens were right there.”
“I know,” I said.
“I can hardly believe we made it,” she went on, with a brief breathless laugh.
The naked relief in her voice pricked at me. Before I could catch the words, I was saying, “And I guess it’s nice for you not to have to worry about the sick guy in the car.”
Anika’s mouth opened and closed and pressed into a thin line. A rush of shame washed over me. I could hardly blame her for being happy to be alive.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was mean. I’m just so angry we had to leave him.”
“I don’t know,” Anika said finally, quietly. “Maybe you’re kind of right. I was nervous, having him with us. I don’t want to end up like that. But I’m not happy he took off.”
I couldn’t blame her for being scared of the virus either. It’d seemed like the only right thing to do, bringing Tobias with us. But by trying to help him, I’d put Justin and Anika at far more risk than they’d have faced otherwise, hadn’t I?
I just wanted to keep everyone okay. It shouldn’t have been so hard.
My head was starting to ache now—from my fractured sleep, from the stress of our escape, from the endless patter of the rain. I pressed my hand against my temple.
“We did everything we could,” I said, as much for her as for me.
“You end up leaving people behind, one way or another, right?” Anika said, with a forced lightness. “That’s just how it goes. I don’t even know what happened to half of my friends. When everyone was getting sick, I just started fading out of people’s lives so I didn’t have to worry.…It’s so weird; I used to be hanging out with them, partying, whatever, just about every night—I hated being on my own. And then being alone was the only thing that seemed safe.” She laughed again, more stiffly this time.
I imagined her in another time, perched on a bar stool with a group of friends, grinning as she spun through the whirling lights on a dance floor. Free from all this fear.
“What were you studying?” I asked. “At college?”
She paused. “Special-events planning,” she said. “I thought I was going to be arranging charity galas and movie-release parties. Well, so much for that.”
“But you liked it.”
“Yeah. I—” She cut herself off, her eyes darting over to me and back to the road. Then she shrugged. “Whatever.”
“You never know,” Justin said, behind her.
“Whatever,” she repeated, her voice going flat.
Leo’s coat rustled as he shifted in the backseat. “We still have a future,” he said. “I mean, we’re all going to end up somewhere. Obviously there’s a bunch of things we can’t do anymore, but from what I’ve seen…you’ve got to figure out what’s important to you, what you can do, and do it, or you’re getting left behind.”
I wondered if he was thinking of Tessa. Who had left who, there? Leo was the one who’d continued on while she’d stayed put at the artists’ colony. But she was the one who’d really broken things off with him. She’d seen a place where she could accomplish what felt most important to her—more important than boyfriends or friends or even the possibility of a vaccine.
I still missed her sometimes, her calm practical way of looking at things that I’d gotten so used to while we were working together on the island, but remembering how she’d lit up in the colony’s greenhouse, I couldn’t wish she’d chosen differently.
“Anyway, I don’t think what’s important to you always has to make sense,” Leo went on, more breezily. “I’m going to keep wanting to dance even if every studio in the world is closed. It’s in my bones. Might as well let it out.”
“At least you guys had plans and stuff,” Justin said. “I was just goofing off with my friends and making sure I passed my classes so my parents wouldn’t be pissed.”
“You’re fourteen,” I said.
“Fifteen in a month!” he protested.
“Same thing. My brother Drew used to talk about how so many of the guys he knew who were applying for university, they didn’t really know what they wanted to do with themselves; they were just going through the motions. So you’re normal.”
“Being normal’s not much good to anyone now,” Justin said. “The world isn’t normal. I didn’t take off with you and get myself chased by guys with guns to be normal.”
No. He’d wanted to come with us so he could do more than just waiting and hiding, like he’d been when his dad was shot after the looting had started.
I was trying to find the right compassionate words to say when Anika’s mouth twisted as if she was trying to suppress a grin. “If it helps,” she said, “I think you’re pretty weird.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Justin grumbled, and I couldn’t help giggling, and just for a moment, the tension in the car split with tired laughter.
Then my gaze slipped to the fuel indicator. Any lingering traces of amusement vanished.
“The gas is getting low,” I said. I’d been so distracted by the fading snow and the rain and my guilt about Tobias that I hadn’t been paying attention to it since I stopped driving. In the last few hours, it had dipped to almost empty. We’d burned through the stash we’d stolen yesterday. “We’ll have to do some more scavenging.”
“We’ve covered a lot of distance since the Wardens caught up with us,” Leo said, but he sounded as apprehensive as I felt.
We drove into a tiny town that appeared to have been completely abandoned. All the driveways and garages were empty, the yards and streets strewn with soggy litter, as if no one had lived there for years. Had everyone fled after a few of their neighbors got sick? The sight of it made my skin crawl.
“Come on,” I said. “We shouldn’t stay in any place too long.”
After the town, we passed two farmhouses, one with a truck with a dry tank, and another offering no vehicles at all. The droppings on the front hall floor suggested the house had become home to several nonhuman squatters. The drizzle was lightening, though moisture still tapped my cheeks when I hesitated before getting back into the SUV. Sunlight was creeping through the clouds along the horizon. In less than an hour, the field and forest below us, and the mountains to our left, would be lit with daylight.
“Maybe we should stop for the—” I began, and a sharp sound rang out across the field. All four of us jerked around.
Nothing moved on the stretch of snow-dappled field, but as I eyed the dark clump of trees about half a mile distant, the sound came again. The distant staccato of a barking dog. A couple dogs,
actually.
Anika stepped toward the car door. “They could be ones that’ve gone wild,” she said. “Hunting.”
I shook my head, thinking of the coyotes I used to watch on the island, the puppies I’d helped look after at the vet clinic where I’d volunteered. Had that really been less than a year ago?
“A dog wouldn’t bark like that if it’s hunting,” I said. “It would scare away the prey. They sound playful.” But grown dogs didn’t usually bark much when playing with one another. Were there people over there? People who were doing well enough that they could provide for pets?
“We should take a look,” I said. The last place we’d found where someone was living, we’d also found gas.
“Are you sure we want them to know we’re here?” Leo asked.
“No. But if we’re quiet and don’t get too close, we can at least scope them out.”
“I’m in,” Justin said.
Anika shook her head. “I don’t like dogs.”
“Well, someone should guard the SUV anyway,” I said. “Why don’t you and Leo stay here, and Justin and I will see who we’re dealing with?” I might understand her a little better now, but it still didn’t seem wise to leave her with free access to our only vehicle and the vaccine.
“Works for me,” she said.
“Here.” I handed the flare gun I’d been carrying to Justin, since I had a real gun now.
“You don’t need to tell me,” he said. “I won’t shoot anyone unless there’s nothing else I can do.”
“Good,” I said, “because I don’t even know how well that thing will stop someone.”
I took out Tobias’s pistol. The memory of seeing it on the counter, realizing why he’d left it there, flashed through my mind, and my throat tightened.
“Can you show me how to use this, quickly?” I said to Leo. “Just in case we run into trouble?” I might not be looking to attack anyone, but if these strangers spotted us, who knew whether they’d be friendly?
Leo accepted the gun, handling it carefully but with practiced efficiency. “The safety has to be off for you to shoot, but leave it on the rest of the time,” he said, demonstrating with a snap. “You look along here to aim. You should steady it with both hands or the bullet will probably go wild.”
I practiced, pointing the pistol at the garage, trying to copy the wide stance I’d seen Tobias take. Leo stepped closer, looking over my shoulder. He nudged my hands up slightly. “Be careful, okay?” he said by my ear, his voice low. “I don’t want anyone shooting at you.”
His breath warmed the side of my face, and for an instant my body snapped into vivid awareness of how little space there was between us, how his arms had almost encircled me to adjust mine. An unexpected heat tingled over my skin, and the gun dipped in my grasp, bringing my mind back to the task at hand. I moved to the side, stuffing the pistol into my pocket where it would hopefully stay.
“I know,” I said without looking up. We needed to find gas—that was what I had to be thinking about. “We will. Thanks. We won’t take long.”
Justin shifted restlessly at the edge of the driveway. “Okay, let’s go,” I said, and he raised his head. We headed out across the field.
The snow that dusted the grass had dissolved into little more than slush, which hissed against the soles of our boots. One of the dogs barked again. It sounded far away, though the trees must have muffled some of the sound. The breeze was pushing against our faces, cool and cedary, so our scent wouldn’t be carrying to them. That would let us get closer.
“Can we talk?” Justin murmured.
“For now,” I said quietly. “What is it?”
“I’ve just been thinking, since we heard from the doctor at the CDC. You don’t think they had anything to do with the virus, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” he said, “like, in the movies, when there’s some killer flu on the loose, it’s usually because government scientists were experimenting and accidentally let it out or something.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t think the CDC does that kind of work. Biological weapons would be more a military-lab thing.” I paused, considering the early response on the island. “The Public Health and WHO people that helped my dad, they didn’t know anything about the virus beforehand—it was a big deal when they isolated it. If someone had made it, they would already have had samples, records. And in my dad’s notes he talks about the friendly flu being a natural mutation of the virus I caught before, the one that gave me partial immunity.” It was by using part of that earlier version in combination with bits of the new one that he’d finally been able to create an effective vaccine.
“It just seems strange,” Justin said, “the way it came out of nowhere.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No one knows where Ebola came from. And it took a long time for doctors to figure out AIDS. Viruses just appear—they can be lurking somewhere isolated until people stumble along, or a sudden mutation makes them more deadly or lets them leap from some other animal to us. We’re probably lucky that nothing this bad ever hit us before.”
Justin nodded, but his face had fallen. It would have been easier to blame an actual person for the virus than having to think nature was just screwing with us the way nature tended to do.
I glanced back toward the house when we reached the edge of the forest. Leo held up his hand. I waved in return, and stepped between the trees.
The cedars were interspersed with elders and maples, and to my relief the leaves they’d dropped during the autumn had turned into a wet mush that dampened our footsteps. Still, I walked cautiously, easing around bushes and low branches. A few paces in, I stopped, and Justin stepped beside me. A faint canine whine reached my ears. Not close yet. We walked on.
We’d been sneaking along for maybe five minutes longer when the daylight ahead of us started to brighten. The trees were thinning. I crept from trunk to trunk, peering between them. After several steps, I made out a clearing maybe ten feet ahead. Within it, a boxy-looking metallic structure that glinted in the morning sun stood behind a tall chain-link fence.
Justin raised his eyebrows at me. I tapped a finger to my lips and eased forward. A couple steps from the clearing, I came to a halt.
The fence appeared to stretch around the entire clearing, surrounding a whole row of the boxy metal structures. A grid of bars and railings, like some futuristic jungle gym, loomed over them, and farther in I could see a squat concrete building with a high voltage warning sign mounted on the door. No wires crossed over the fence, but the place reminded me of the electrical substation on the island. Wires could run underground.
And it was running. A faint hum of electricity hung in the air. The substation was connected to a plant somewhere—a plant that was still operating.
A movement caught my eye. As I turned my head, a girl who looked no more than ten years old ran into view on the other side of the fence. A golden retriever panted as it raced after her. She waggled a rawhide bone. Behind her, beyond the substation’s buildings, I spotted a cluster of dark green tents set up along the fence. Two shacks that looked as if they’d been constructed out of crates and broken furniture stood nearby. A woman slipped between the tents, moving toward a spot beyond my view. The breeze carried a wisp of smoke to my nose, the tang of burning wood.
It was a smart place to set up camp. They had the fence for protection, and access to electricity as long as the plant was in operation. Maybe they were the families of the plant workers who were keeping it that way. But the substation made a smaller, less obvious target. I couldn’t imagine Michael’s group would fail to go after a functioning power plant if they realized one existed.
Of course, maybe they already had. Maybe these people were indebted to the Wardens. It seemed like half the survivors we’d run into since leaving the island were.
I gestured for Justin to follow me, and stalked along the border of the clearing, away from the tents. Around the curve of the fence, the c
amp had an odd kitchen setup: three fridges, a basin with a tap, but no oven. I guessed they were cooking over the fire. Farther on, a rectangle of soil had been broken up and tilled in rows, as if they were hoping to start a garden when the weather got a little warmer. Then I caught sight of a small delivery truck and a gray sedan, parked on the grass between the concrete building and the fence.
If they had vehicles, they’d have gas.
A few steps more, and I made out a line of huge plastic drums on the other side of the truck. Several smaller gas cans were stacked on the grass around them.
Justin pointed, and I nodded. “Think they’d be up for a little trading?” he asked under his breath.
I made a gesture of uncertainty. What did we have that they didn’t? Other than the vaccine samples, which I couldn’t offer. From the number of tents, it looked as if there were several more of them than there were of us. Had they survived this long through kindness and generosity? For all we knew, the second we presented ourselves, they’d attack us and grab everything we had.
“I don’t trust anyone anymore,” I said.
Justin shrugged. “Then we take it.”
As he said it, I realized I’d already made the same decision, somewhere in the back of my mind. We’d cleaned out that one hunting shed—stealing a little from people who had so much was no worse. I saw our options with a cold certainty that brought back the ache in my chest. It was either them, or us. There was no middle ground left anymore.
The only question was how we were going to get what we needed.
I studied the clearing. The fence stood seven or eight feet beyond the last of the trees. The gas cans lay only a few steps farther on the other side. But the fence itself was at least twice my height, topped with loops of barbed wire.
“Hey!” Justin whispered. “The wire cutters. They’re back at the SUV. We can hack right through.”
Perfect. “Go get them, quickly,” I said. “We don’t have a lot of time.” Any minute the breeze could shift and the dogs catch our scent. And they might not react kindly to strangers.