by Megan Crewe
The sooner we got off the river, the harder it’d be for the Wardens to find us again. The thought of our close call made me shiver despite my coat. If the girl from town hadn’t come to warn us, or hadn’t come as soon as she had, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.
I reached for one of the paddles that was leaning against the bow. “Let’s find a spot where we can get off the river and regroup. We could end up drifting right past Atlanta at this rate.”
“Here,” Leo said, holding out his hand, and I passed him the other paddle. Turning to face ahead, I folded my legs under the seat and held the paddle over the water. Drips rolled off the edge of my hood.
For the next few minutes, we saw only trees. Then a clearing came into view on the right-hand bank, with a stubby dock poking into the water and a rusty swing set on the grass. I motioned to it, and Leo nodded. We dug the paddles into the river, pulling the boat toward the shore. At first the current resisted. My arms strained against it. But as we drew closer to the bank, the tugging eased. We pulled up beside the dock just in time for me to catch hold of the corner.
There was nothing to tie the boat with, so I held it in place as the others carried our supplies onto solid ground. “You figure we should just let it go?” Justin asked when everything was unloaded.
I considered the dingy vessel. The rowboat wasn’t anything fancy, but it had served us well. And it was all we had right now. The thought of casting off our only method of transportation made me edgy.
“Let’s keep it but hide it,” I said.
Leo, Anika, and I hauled the boat out of the water and set it under the wide branches of a pine tree at the edge of the clearing, where nobody would be able to see it unless they were almost on top of it. Justin had already started toward the tall house on the other side of the overgrown lawn. We grabbed our things and hurried after him, ducking our heads to the rain.
The inner back door hung open, as if whoever had last been here had left too distracted to think of it, and the latch on the outer screen door snapped when Justin gave it a hard yank. We clustered in the mudroom, peeling off our soppy coats. Then we crept through the house, guns in hand. Only darkness and dust greeted us. There was a note on the fridge, scrawled in hasty cursive. I’ve taken Bridget to the hospital. Meet us there. —S.
A long empty driveway stretched away from the front of the house, through the forest, to some road beyond our view. I guessed whoever S had been writing to had followed his or her instructions, and neither they nor Bridget had come back home.
I perused the kitchen counters and end tables for any piece of mail that might give us a location, but the family had been too tidy to be helpful. The steel filing cabinet in the dining room looked promising, but its drawers were locked.
Justin sighed and stomped into the living room with his rifle. “Well, we know we have to keep heading south, right?”
“I’m not sure which way is south anymore,” Leo admitted.
“If we had the road atlas,” I said, and stopped. Regrets weren’t going to help. “We just need to know where we are. The address, the nearest town, something. We can probably get a hold of the CDC on the radio, and they should be able to give us directions to Atlanta from here. Once we know where here is.”
“There should be a mailbox at the end of the driveway,” Justin said. “It might be locked too, but we can at least check. And if that doesn’t work, there’ll be signs somewhere down the road. I’ll go take a look.” He took an umbrella out of a stand in the front hall.
“Your leg—” I protested, and he grimaced at me.
“It’s a lot better now,” he said. “It should be, after doing nothing but sitting around the last three days. I’ll be fine.”
He looked so determined I didn’t want to say no. Maybe it was better to let him burn off some steam. Who knew what crazy scheme he’d think up if he spent much longer feeling he wasn’t contributing enough?
“None of us should go anywhere alone, right?” Anika broke in. “I’ll go with him. Make sure he doesn’t keel over. You two can keep searching the house.”
“Right,” Justin said, seeming emboldened by the gaining of an ally. He tapped the watch on his wrist. “We might have to walk a ways if we need to look for a sign, but we won’t take more than an hour.”
“All right,” I said. “Just try to come back faster than that.”
“And keep your eyes open,” Leo added. “The Wardens know we’re somewhere in the area now.”
Justin gave us a quick salute. Anika went back for their coats, and when she returned he handed her a second umbrella. “No more than an hour,” he repeated. “Hopefully a lot less.” They headed out the door.
“Let’s take a look upstairs,” I said to Leo. I picked up the cold box, and paused, my palm warm against the plastic handle. So maybe it would be an hour before we were on the road again. Maybe it would be even more. And there was no telling when we’d find another vehicle, or if we wouldn’t at all and we’d be stuck walking the rest of the way. How long would the snow I’d packed in there this morning last?
“Actually, give me a second,” I said. I hadn’t seen a basement entrance. Maybe there was a cellar doorway in the yard? Anywhere underground would be cooler.
I stepped into the mudroom and peered across the lawn. I didn’t see any sign of a door amid the thick grass. My gaze strayed farther, to the rippling surface of the river. When I’d dipped my hands into it upstream, the water had been cold enough to sting. It was probably flowing down from the mountains, swelled by melting snow and ice.
Kneeling down, I opened the cold box just long enough to make sure Dad’s notebooks were tightly wrapped in their plastic bag. Then I pressed the lid on, hooking the latches and testing them to make sure they were firmly in place. I didn’t think water could leak in through the industrial-grade seal, but if it did, it shouldn’t hurt anything inside.
I jogged across the yard to the dock. The water at the edge of the bank was only a few feet deep. I set the cold box in it, and it bobbed back to the surface. But the gap between the dock’s wooden supports looked like just the right size. Wiggling the box back and forth, I wedged it between them, far enough under that it was mostly hidden by the dock. When I stood, it was nothing more than a pale sliver amid the rain-dappled water. I checked both ends of the river. No one was there to see my hiding place.
Still, my hands felt terribly empty as I hurried back to the house. This way the samples would stay cold, I reminded myself, and as soon as we had a plan of where to go, I could run back out and get them. The fish weren’t going to steal them.
Leo was waiting in the kitchen when I came in. “I gave everything down here a second look, and nothing,” he said, raising his eyebrows in question.
“I did what I needed to,” I said, swiping my damp hair away from my face. “Let’s see what we can find upstairs.”
We poked through the bathroom and the three bedrooms on the second floor, checking cabinets and drawers and bedside tables. In the yellow room hung with posters of planets and nebulas, the garbage bin was overflowing with crumpled tissues. Bridget. I caught myself wondering how old she had been, and pushed that thought away.
The master bedroom offered a few pamphlets for Mexican beach resorts, but nothing local. Leo pointed out a trapdoor in the ceiling of the closet. “To the attic?” he said.
“I guess we might as well look,” I said. “Maybe they stashed some old letters or tax records up there.” And we’d covered every other inch of the house. I glanced around the room for a chair or something else I could stand on.
“Here, I can give you a boost,” Leo said. “If we need to climb right up there to reach something, I saw a stepladder in the mudroom.”
He backed up against the row of shirts and slacks, and braced one leg forward for me to step onto, offering me his hand. My skin warmed. Suddenly the closet felt twice as small. I made myself grasp his fingers without hesitating, keeping my eyes on the trapdoor. As I hopped up, he caught
me around the waist. Ignoring the hiccup of my pulse, I pushed up the door and raised my head through the opening.
A waft of dust hit me. I sneezed, my eyes watering. What I could make out of the attic was no more than a crawl space, inhabited only by dust bunnies and cobwebs. With another sneeze, I hopped back down.
“Nothing there,” I said as Leo straightened up. Some of the dust had sprinkled his dark hair. I brushed my hand over the top of his head. “Sorry.”
“I’ll live,” he said. The corner of his mouth quirked up. “I should be used to it. You remember when you insisted we had to explore my attic?”
“Oh god.” I covered my face at the memory. “You can’t hold me responsible for that anymore. What were we, seven? Anyway, I think it was your idea as much as mine.”
“No, no,” he said, grinning now. “I kept telling you my parents said I wasn’t allowed in the crawl space, but you were sure there had to be some animal living up there for us to discover.”
“There was that scratching sound we kept hearing in your room!” I protested. “It was a reasonable guess.”
“I don’t think my mom bought that explanation when she found half her clothes knocked on the floor and us stuck in the ceiling.”
“Well, I apologize for ruining your childhood,” I said, swatting at his shoulder. He dodged out of the way, catching my hand before I could try again.
“Ruined?” he said. “I guess I’d have been bored a lot more without you.”
The mischievous spark in his eyes took me back to that time, when we were younger, before arguments and silences and epidemics. When Leo had treated every challenge as an adventure, not a setback. I hadn’t seen that spark very often in the last couple months, and I couldn’t help smiling back. But as I did, his expression changed. An intensity came into his gaze that made my stomach flutter.
He’d looked at me that way before. In the garage back home, right before he’d kissed me.
I let go of his hand and stepped out of the closet, walking until I reached the end of the bed. Leo didn’t move. But I could feel him still looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just—”
“It’s okay,” Leo said.
It wasn’t. We’d gotten past the awkwardness of not-quite-spoken crushes for a while, when we were on the road to Toronto. But I couldn’t pretend anymore that it hadn’t come back. I couldn’t even pretend I didn’t know why.
There had been Gav. And then…he was gone. But not entirely. My fingertips traced the edge of the strip of cardboard in my pocket.
“Maybe we should talk about it,” Leo said. He rubbed the back of his neck, his voice sounding strained despite his lighthearted tone. “I’m not going to lie. You know how I feel about you. Nothing’s changed. But I’d never push anything on you. I’m happy with friends. It’s really not a problem.”
“It’s not you,” I said, sitting down on the bed. “I’m the one acting weird.”
“I wouldn’t blame you, if you were angry,” he said.
My head jerked up. “Angry—at you? For what?”
“For taking the vaccine, when Gav wouldn’t? For surviving? I’d understand.”
Fear jolted through me at the thought of Leo getting sick. “Of course I’m not angry about that,” I said. “Do you have any idea how much more scared I’d be if I didn’t know you were safe? I wish he had taken the vaccine, not that you hadn’t.”
He lowered his gaze, and his next words seemed to take a long time to come out. “But it’s not just that,” he said, haltingly. “I wanted to do more. When Gav was sick. He was a good guy. He made you happy, I could see that. And maybe I should have done more. I go over everything that happened and see where maybe I could have made a little difference. And then I wonder if there was a reason I didn’t—”
I couldn’t stand hearing him talk like that. “Leo,” I interrupted. “Don’t. You didn’t make Gav get sick any more than I did, and after he got sick, there wasn’t really anything we could do. I have never, even for a second, blamed you. I promise. Whatever weirdness is going on, it’s got nothing to do with that. Things are just…complicated.”
Part of me wanted to forget the complications and drive away the worry and guilt clouding his face. To put my arms around him and tell him I cared about him just as much as he cared about me. But another part, a bigger part, held me back.
My heart had been so beat up in the last few weeks—did I even know what I felt anymore? What was real? Was I drawn to Leo now because of that old crush reviving, or because he was here, comforting and supportive, and Gav wasn’t, and I’d had no one else to turn to?
I didn’t have to be with anyone. It was probably better for me to be with no one, while the memory of Gav’s vacant body was still as vivid in my mind as if I’d taken that last look only moments ago. The knot of grief in my chest had barely loosened.
Even if everything I felt for Leo was real, I couldn’t do that to Gav. If he’d known I’d forget him so quickly…
And then, in an instant, none of that mattered, because the sound of an engine rumbled through the wall.
I jumped up and darted to the window. A brown station wagon was turning the corner of the drive, heading toward the house.
The Wardens who’d come through the town had been driving a white Humvee. But that didn’t mean another group couldn’t be tracking us down. I bit my lip. Leo came up on the other side of the window.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” We could have run for the boat again, but that would mean leaving Justin and Anika. Letting them come back to find us gone and the Wardens waiting for them.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave one more person behind.
“We have to defend ourselves,” I said, bracing myself for Leo’s response. “We can wait by the front door, and if they come in, hold them up. We don’t have to hurt them, just barricade them in one of the rooms. If they don’t fight back. If they do…”
“Then we do have we have to,” Leo said with a nod. His eyes held mine unwaveringly. “Let’s get ready.”
A momentary relief washed over me, only to be swallowed by apprehension as I slid Tobias’s pistol from my pocket. Not long ago, the thought of putting a bullet into one of the Wardens’ heads had appealed to me. Now I only felt sick. But if someone was going to die here, I’d still rather it was them than us.
We hurried down the stairs and across the hall. Leo stepped to the left of the door, his own gun in hand, his body tensed. I positioned myself against the wall on the other side. My fingers curled around the pistol. What if they outnumbered us? What if they’d already passed Justin and Anika on the road and taken them as hostages?
The engine growled to a stop. The car doors creaked open. Footsteps thudded across the paved driveway.
Then a familiar voice filtered through the door.
“I’m telling you, I could be a better driver than the rest of you put together. What do licenses even mean anymore?”
I let out my breath and lowered the gun. Leo was shaking his head.
Justin and Anika were coming up the front steps when I opened the door. Justin turned to me with a grin.
“Look what we found!”
“There’s a road just a little ways past the bend,” Anika said in explanation, gesturing toward the driveway. “About ten minutes walk down that, there’s another house—that’s where we found the car. The key was in the house. It’s got a half a tank of gas.”
“Perfect,” I said. My anxiety fell away. This was exactly what we needed. “Did you figure out where we are?”
“According to the signs, we’re not too far east of some place called Clermont,” Justin said as he limped into the house with his rifle walking stick. The butt of the rifle slid on the edge of the hall rug, and he started to stumble. Anika caught his elbow.
“That’s why I didn’t let you drive,” she said, with a gentleness that made me look at her again. Her attention was totally
focused on him, a smile curving her lips as he glowered at her halfheartedly.
“I guess I should keep holding on to you, then,” Justin said, hooking his arm around hers, and she kept smiling. And for the first time, I wondered if her flirting wasn’t just teasing anymore. Maybe age differences didn’t matter so much when you weren’t sure how many more days you’d be alive.
The idea hit me with a strange rush of sadness and a sharpened awareness of Leo standing on the other side of the hall.
“Clermont,” I repeated, bringing myself back. I tried to picture the pages of the road atlas, the lay of the land around northern Georgia, but the name didn’t click. I didn’t know whether we needed to go east or west from here. And wandering around trying to figure it out would just use up the gas and give the Wardens more time to spot us.
“Let me try to get in touch with the CDC quickly,” I said. “Dr. Guzman wanted us to contact her when we were close to Atlanta anyway.”
The others followed me into the living room. Leo unwrapped the transceiver and set it on the coffee table. Outside, the rain had picked up again, drumming against the porch awning.
When I pressed the call button, the static fizzled more harshly than I remembered from before. But Dr. Guzman’s voice cracked through it to answer my broadcast loud and clear.
“Kaelyn?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’re almost there. We’ve just gotten a little off track.”
“What happened?” she asked sharply.
“We’re okay,” I said. “But the people who were chasing us, they almost caught us this morning. We lost our road atlas—we had to leave it behind. I think we’re close to Atlanta. I just need some help figuring out how to get there from here.”
“I can do that,” she said. “You’re all still all right? And the vaccine?”
“Everything’s fine, other than us being lost,” I said. “I think we should get moving soon, though. I don’t know how close they might be behind us.” Or whether they’d catch this transmission and soon have an even better idea of where we were.