by Megan Crewe
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t think they saw us. But it’s a good thing we were close to the trees.” If they’d snuck up on us while we were in the middle of one of those fields, they couldn’t have missed us.
“They just aren’t going to give up.” Her voice quavered. “I knew it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Once we get to the CDC, there’s nothing they can do.” I hoped.
“If we get there before Michael moves on to tanks and stealth jets,” she muttered.
I eased a few inches forward to keep the helicopter in sight, and my elbow knocked the hard angle of the pistol in my pocket against my ribs. A picture flashed through my mind: pulling out the gun, aiming at the chopper, and seeing it burst into a ball of flame. Just one of our problems blasted away; just one victory over the Wardens. It was a ridiculous image—something from a movie, not any reality I knew—but it gave me a momentary satisfaction.
The helicopter prowled on, appearing to follow the line of the main highway, about a mile from here. My heart stopped for a second when I thought of the SUV, but we’d left it in the shadow of the silo. We hadn’t been walking that long. It should still be hidden.
Finally, the chopper passed us completely. As the drone started to fade away, I rolled onto my side. Anika was staring off toward the sound, still fidgeting with the hair she’d freed.
“You know,” she said, “my parents always used to tell me my life was so easy. I only had to worry about friend problems and boy problems and school. The two of them, and my mom’s parents, they lived through most of the war in Bosnia before they managed to get out and come to Canada.” She paused, and pursed her lips. “But I don’t think that war could have been any worse than this. I guess I wasn’t so lucky after all.”
She laughed without much humor. Hunched there, her back rigid and her eyes shiny with fear, she made me think of the squirrel I’d caught in a makeshift cardboard box trap when I was ten. I’d felt so awful for frightening it nearly to death that I’d let it go right away.
But I couldn’t beat myself up over the horrible situation we’d found ourselves in. I wasn’t the one who’d trapped Anika here. I was just as trapped as she was. At least I was doing everything I could to get us someplace better.
“You’re alive,” I offered.
“Yeah,” she said. “There’s that.”
The helicopter’s rumble dissolved into the breeze. I waited another minute, and then crawled out. Leo and Justin were doing the same. Their clothes were streaked with mud, like mine, but our winter coats had protected us from the worst of the damp.
“You both okay?” I asked, and they nodded. But Justin stayed sprawled on the ground, his hand resting on the knee of his injured leg, while Leo stood.
“Helicopters,” Justin said, gazing off in the direction the chopper had gone. “That’s just crazy.”
“We know how much Michael wants the vaccine,” I said. My hand tightened on the handle of the cold box. In this world, a working vaccine was worth a million times more than helicopter fuel. “Come on. We’ll stick as close to the trees as possible from now on, in case those guys turn around.”
So we took the long way to the next house, around the edges of a field of yellowed bean plants. Anika fell back beside Justin, giving him a hand where the ground was uneven, so quickly he didn’t have time to argue. She kept her expression impassive, but her eyes periodically darted toward the sky.
The farmhouse’s double garage held a dented station wagon, its hood popped and tires stripped, picked over for parts. I checked the tank with the siphon hose just in case, unsurprised to find it empty. But the house’s door had already been broken open, and in a quick search, we turned up a pair of khaki pants that were only a little baggy on Justin.
As we passed a field of sagging hay, the wind shifted. The rancid smell rose up again, more pungent now, like greasy fast-food– restaurant refuse left in the sun to spoil.
“What is that?” Justin asked, making a gagging sound.
“Something dead,” Anika said. She looked faintly green. My own stomach was churning. But turning our search in the opposite direction would mean we’d have to recross all the ground we’d already covered. Well, where it stank this much, at least we weren’t likely to encounter other scavengers. I pulled up my scarf.
At the edge of the hay field, we had to clamber over a metal fence. Leo and I helped Justin over. We descended into another field, which stretched wider than the others we’d passed, dotted with a frost-shriveled crop I didn’t recognize. Up ahead stood several large aluminum-sided outbuildings, but nothing like a home.
“Looks like a big business operation,” Leo said. “I guess we could find something useful.”
The stink intensified as we hurried toward the buildings, until it smelled like a hundred restaurants’ rotten scraps. I coughed into my scarf, swallowing the bile that had started to rise at the back of my mouth. If the business owners had left anything behind, we’d better find it fast.
When we reached the first building, a long structure with scratched-up red paint, I marched straight to the door and yanked on it.
Whoever had worked here last hadn’t bothered to lock it. The door whined open at my tug. The stench hit me like a putrid punch, slamming right through my lungs and into my gut. I doubled over, yanking my scarf aside, and puked what remained of my last meal onto the straw-strewn floor.
Rows of narrow metal stalls stood in the dim light of the barn, and in each slumped the carcasses of what had once been pigs. Flies buzzed over their sightless eyes and picked along their emaciated necks, which were dark with rot and ravaged with sores where they must have tried to force their way free against the bars.
I backed away, wiping at my mouth. Horror welled up over my nausea. The farm’s owners, they’d shut the place down, or the workers had just stopped showing up, and they’d abandoned the animals in here without food or water or hope of escape.
How long had the pigs survived, pushing at the bars, gnawing at the straw? I closed my eyes, imagining the sounds they must have made as they slowly gave up and died.
Justin leaned inside and then jerked back with an, “Oh, gross.” He pressed his fist against his mouth. Anika hung back, her arms folded tightly over her chest and her lips pressed flat.
“Hey.” Leo touched my shoulder, and I leaned toward him. His hand smoothed my hair back from my face. “At least it’s over—they aren’t in pain anymore,” he said raggedly.
I nodded, wanting to sink into him but knowing I couldn’t feel comforted with that smell still all around us. “Let’s keep moving,” I forced out.
We made it about halfway past the barn before Justin’s control broke. He ducked around a bush with a heave of breath and the choking sound of vomit, then rejoined us with averted eyes.
“It’s so stupid,” Anika said. “They should have let the animals out if they weren’t coming back.”
“I don’t know if the owners of a place this big would come by very often,” I said. “They could own a bunch of farms and run them from an office somewhere. And the employees might have been worried they’d get into trouble, if the epidemic stopped after all.”
“It wouldn’t have been that hard,” Leo said. “Things were so chaotic, no one would have known who’d opened the stalls.”
“Yeah,” I said, the sour taste of stomach acid lingering in my mouth. Maybe the pigs wouldn’t have survived the winter anyway, but at least they’d have had the chance.
How many other farms around the world had turned into coffins? My stomach rolled again. Sometimes it seemed people had brought almost as much death as the virus had.
And our little group wasn’t exempt, were we? The people we’d passed on the road might have frozen. Whoever we’d stolen the gasoline from might die because he didn’t have enough left to get to his hunting grounds. Maybe we should have left some.
But if we had, would we have made it this far, or stalled somewhere the Warde
ns would have caught us? I bit my lip. We had to get the vaccine to the CDC—that was the only sure thing I knew.
The smell started to ease off once we’d left the barn behind. Another identical structure stood off to its left, but I was afraid to discover a similar array of cow or goat or sheep carcasses. The immense building with the maroon-shingled roof up ahead looked promising. That huge square door suggested something drivable was kept inside.
We crossed a wide cement lot, the butt of the rifle tapping along with Justin’s lurching steps, until we reached the garage-like door. There was no discernable way to open it. So we veered around the side of the building until we found a person-sized entrance. It was locked, but there was a large window in the wall just a few steps away. Leo set down his load and picked up a rock to smash it. When he’d cleared away the shards of glass, I boosted him inside and he unbolted the door.
“I think our day just got better,” he said as he opened it for us.
We stepped into a dark cavernous room. I found a light switch on the wall beside the door, but nothing happened when I flicked it up and down. We all pulled out our flashlights.
The beams glanced over steel frames and giant tires. My breath caught. Before us stood an assortment of farming vehicles, most of which I didn’t know the names for, which I assumed had been used for plowing and seeding, harvesting and processing the crops.
We circled the room, our cautious footsteps echoing through the shadows. The vehicles decreased in size as we approached the far wall, where several farm tractors only a little larger than the SUV waited in a row. No proper cars though. I guessed, since no one lived on-site, it wasn’t likely that any personal vehicles would have been left behind. But I’d started to hope for at least a van or a pickup truck.
As I paused, Justin limped over to a door beyond the last tractor. He lifted the latch and tugged it open.
“Now we’re talking!” he said.
We joined him, filling the small storage room with the combined glow of our flashlights. Dozens of keys hung from hooks on the wall beside the door. Repair tools and a couple spare tires sat on a metal shelving unit. And next to it stood five rectangular tanks stamped with a flammable warning sign and the words diesel fuel. Each one of them looked large enough to hold a hundred gallons.
A jolt of excitement raced through me before I came back to reality.
“We can’t put diesel in the SUV,” I said. “It runs on regular gas. The wrong kind of fuel would mess up the engine, wouldn’t it?”
“Probably,” Leo said with a sigh in his voice. “But everything around here should work with it, I guess.”
“And we’ve got the keys,” Justin said, waving to the hooks.
I studied the farm vehicles in the dim light that seeped through the grimy windows. The plows and harvesters and tractors—how fast did they even go?
How many options did we have?
“We should keep looking around, see if there’s any regular gas or a car we can use,” I said.
Justin shrugged, but as he shuffled back into the main room, his face spasmed with a wince so intense he couldn’t suppress it. He was so good at acting tough, I’d let myself forget it was only a few hours ago he was shot.
“Wait,” I said. “We don’t all need to go. Justin, you should stay here, give your leg a break.”
“I don’t think any of us should hang around here alone,” Leo said. “There could be other people interested in this place.”
“True. You know what, I want to take a closer look at what’s in here, in case this is all we’ve got. Can you two do a quick circuit of the rest of the buildings? I think they’re all pretty close.”
“Sure,” Anika said without much enthusiasm, and Leo dipped his head.
“We’ll keep an eye out; stay out of sight,” he said.
“Of course,” I said.
His fingers brushed my forearm, giving me a brief squeeze. I found myself searching his expression for some sign of how he felt. Some reassurance that he wasn’t disappointed in me after the debacle at the compound. But he just looked tense. Well, we were all tense, weren’t we?
Even though I knew that, a little pain pierced my chest as he turned toward the door. My hand dropped to my hip pocket, to the fold of cardboard there.
Keep going.
How? Would Gav have climbed into a tractor and declared it the solution, or been as overwhelmed as I felt? I tried to picture him here, but the image of his rigid face just before I’d pulled the sheet over him swam up instead. I shoved it away, the pain digging deeper inside me.
Gav had never really been confident, not after we came over to the mainland. He’d tried to pretend, for me, but he’d have been so much happier if he’d stayed on the island. And he’d probably have still been alive.
The door clicked shut behind Leo and Anika, and Justin started toward one of the tractors. I jerked out of my regrets.
“Hey!” I said. “Sit down. Here, there’s a chair in the corner.”
He made a face at me, but to my surprise, he didn’t protest. Maybe his leg was hurting even more than I’d guessed. I had to keep a closer eye on him.
I walked over to the tractor he’d been checking out. There was only one seat in the sealed cab, but there might be enough room for a person to lean against the back window. Definitely not space for four, though, especially with the supplies we needed to carry. The tractor beside it was the same size. I paced around them, frowning.
“We could take two,” Justin said from his corner. He was following my movements with his flashlight.
“Then we’d need twice as much gas, and we’d be twice as noisy.”
He craned his head. “We could use that trailer over there. A couple people and our bags could ride in it while the tractor pulls it.”
The beam of his flashlight had hit what looked like a low-walled metal box on wheels, about the same length and width as the tractor. A hitch protruded from its front end.
“It’s totally open,” I said. “If it gets cold again…”
That wasn’t really the problem, though, was it? The problem was the weather getting warmer as we headed farther south. If the temperature outside continued rising, I didn’t think we could assume the snow in the cold box would stay frozen for more than ten or twelve hours. None of the vehicles in here looked like they could move fast enough to cross six hundred or so miles in that time. And none of what we’d gone through would be worth it if the vaccine samples spoiled.
Frustration bubbled up inside me. We knew where to go. With a real car, with gas, we’d have been so close. Without that, with the Wardens on our tails, Atlanta might as well have been across the ocean. Why did every part of this journey have to be so hard?
I kicked at a tire and was rewarded with a stinging pain in my toes. Tears that had nothing to do with my foot welled in my eyes. I stepped away from the light, gripping the edge of the tractor’s hood.
“What’s our biggest problem?” Justin said after a minute, tentatively. “I mean, we’re probably not going to find something perfect, right? So what’s most important?”
Focusing on the details steadied me. “We have to keep the vaccine cold,” I said. “And we have to make sure the Wardens don’t catch us. With that helicopter, they might be able to see us from fifty miles away.”
“So we need cover. A road where there are more trees blocking the view. Right? That sounds like what Tobias would say.”
It did. I set down the bags I’d been carrying and pawed through them for the road atlas. With it open on the floor, I stared at the spread of the whole country. Green splotches marked the largest forests, the national and state parks, including a huge one that stretched from West Virginia down through Virginia and along the North Carolina–Tennessee border, ending in Georgia just a short distance from Atlanta.
Only a few small towns speckled that area. Because it wasn’t just forest, it was mountains, I realized, thinking of the giants that loomed to the east of us. The roads wou
ld be winding and difficult. But a higher altitude would mean colder weather. If there was still a little snow down here, there might be a lot on the slopes. There might be snow all the way to Georgia. Then it wouldn’t matter if the trip, in one of these slow tractors, took us a few days instead of one.
“Don’t let this go to your head,” I said, “but you’re a genius.”
Justin chuckled. It sounded pained. My head jerked up, but to my relief he didn’t look sick or suffering. Just sad. He lowered his gaze, the glow of his flashlight bouncing off the floor and tinting his face a sallow yellow.
“I wish he was here,” he said. “I wish we hadn’t had to leave him.”
Tobias. “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I wouldn’t have, if there’d been any other way.”
“I know. But it still bothers me. You know, I don’t think I ever really respected him. Like, he was amazing with a gun, but I always thought he was kind of wimpy about everything else. The way he’d get so freaked out if we saw anyone sick…But he wasn’t a wimp. He was obviously really smart about things like getting away from the Wardens. And he gave himself up for us, so he wouldn’t hold us back. How freakin’ brave was that?”
“Yeah,” I said again, my throat tight.
Justin leaned forward, resting his arms on his lap. “I’ve been thinking about my mom too,” he said. “How I ran off on her to come with you guys. I thought I’d been a wimp, hanging around the colony, all of us hiding from anyone who looked a little scary, but it was a pretty chicken move not telling her I wanted to leave, wasn’t it? She probably doesn’t even understand why I did it. The note I left—I didn’t really go into a lot of detail.”
“Maybe it was chicken,” I said. “But you’ve helped us protect the vaccine, and that’s a good thing. You really have done a lot, Justin. I’m glad you’ve been with us.” I hadn’t realized quite how true that was until the words came out of my mouth. I closed the atlas and stood up. “When you get back to the colony, you can tell her all that. I think she’ll understand then.”