by Megan Crewe
I peeked sideways at Gav. He was striding along beside me as if nothing was different, as if he hadn’t just thrown himself into what could have been a wrestling match with a guy half a foot taller and at least fifty pounds heavier. A guy who was sick.
I watched the trail appearing from under Tessa’s sled in the snow ahead of me, feeling the minutes slip past, unable to speak. My emotions were so churned up I didn’t know how much I was angry or afraid or just plain upset. Maybe we shouldn’t go into the towns at all anymore. But we were never going to make it the whole way to Ottawa on foot, were we?
The wind whistled through the twigs of the trees. Snowflakes drifted down. One landed on my nose and melted there.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said finally. “You ran right up to him—”
“We didn’t know what he was going to do,” Gav said, an edge in his voice. “He could have wrecked the sleds, grabbed our food—broken the vaccine samples! Isn’t that the most important thing?”
I wanted to say no. It wasn’t more important than Gav’s life. But I’d been letting him risk his life for the vaccine just by agreeing to have him come out here with me, hadn’t I?
“I’m not saying it was smart,” he went on. “It’s not like I had time to think it through. It happened in a second—I reacted.”
“I know,” I said. “I just wish your natural reaction was safer.”
He laughed, a little shortly. “Hey,” he said, “at least I did something useful. More than I’ve done since we left the island, anyway.”
“That’s not true,” I said, but maybe it was. On the island he’d had the food runs, the volunteers he kept organized, the amateur firefighters he joined in with when the gang tried to burn down another building. Now there was only one thing we needed: to get to Ottawa. And so far there hadn’t been a single thing Gav could do to make that trip quicker or less unpleasant.
He hadn’t even wanted to be here, not really. He’d wanted to be back there, helping the island recover from the helicopter’s attack.
“Thank you,” I said. “Maybe I’d rather you didn’t do that again, but I’m still glad all our stuff is safe, and us too.”
I took his hand, and the side of his mouth curled up, just slightly. As the trees thinned around us, the sky came into view. The clouds were choking it now, thick and gray. I blinked away the snowflakes that had started plummeting down even faster.
“I think we should get inside soon,” Leo said. “It feels like a real blizzard’s on its way. How far to the next town?”
The map was all but burned into my brain now. “At least a couple miles,” I said, looking around. “There should be farmhouses along the way, though.”
“I think I see a building over there,” Tessa said, pointing. I followed her gaze. When I squinted, I could make out the faint angles of a structure in the distance, over the fields. It looked strangely translucent, as if it weren’t totally real.
“I don’t know if we should go that far from the road,” I said. “What if we can’t find our way back?”
Her eyes had lit up. “It’s a greenhouse,” she said. “It’ll be warmer inside. I don’t think it’s that far.”
“I’ll take warm,” Tobias said, hunched inside his coat. I looked at Gav and he shrugged, his expression resigned.
“Let’s hurry, then,” I said. The falling snow already felt heavier than it had a moment ago.
The next time I looked up, I couldn’t make out the greenhouse at all. Cold prickled over the skin around my eyes. The freeze was setting in. With each step, my boots either cracked through the forming ice or skidded on it. My sled bumped and jarred. Meredith slid along beside me, pushing out as if she were on skates. Gav had pulled ahead of us.
The snow kept whirling down. It pattered against my face, coating my eyelashes. I wrapped my scarf tighter.
Then I blinked, and Tobias and Gav all but disappeared in front of me. Snowflakes clotted the air. It was like swimming through a blank page, nothing but white all around. My breath came heavy through the wool scarf. For a second I felt as if I were drowning.
Behind me, Tessa yelped. I spun around. Leo stopped by her side as she groped along the ground. “I tripped,” she said, a frantic note in her voice. “I lost the rope. Where’s the sled?”
I scanned the ground, but all I could see was snow.
“It doesn’t matter,” Leo said after a few seconds. “We’ll come back for it. If we stop to look, we’ll lose our direction.”
Meredith was already slipping out of my view. “Mere!” I shouted. Leo and Tessa pushed forward with me. The frigid air pierced through my scarf, stinging down my throat. The rope of my sled dug into my waist, and in that moment I wished I could throw mine away and just run.
Then three figures wavered into sight just ahead. The others had stopped to wait for us.
As we caught up with them, a fourth figure shifted out of the white. It raised an arm, the business end of a revolver pointed straight at Gav’s chest.
“Hello,” a nasal voice said. “Going somewhere?”
We probably could have overpowered him—with six of us against one, the odds were in our favor despite the gun—but the stranger’s next words were “Come on, let’s get out of this crap,” and the idea that he might have somewhere for us to go to overrode every other impulse. Without him, we were still lost in the blizzard.
It was only a few steps before he was opening a door ahead of us. Light streamed through the falling snow.
“In you go,” he said, motioning with the hand that held the gun. “Leave your sleds outside; there’s no room. We’re not the kind of people who’ll take what’s yours.”
I turned and gripped the handle of the cold box before I followed the others through the doorway. I wasn’t letting that out of my sight.
We shuffled out of the blizzard and into a narrow wood-paneled room, hardly big enough for the seven of us to stand comfortably. A platform on one side held a bare double mattress, and a plastic crate stood in one corner. Otherwise, the room was empty. A light fixture shone dimly overhead. Whoever these people were, they had electricity.
The stranger shut the door with a bang. “Sit down,” he said. “It looks like we’ll be here awhile.”
Melted snow was already puddling under my boots, the frost on my eyelashes dripping away like tears. The room was heated too.
Meredith plopped down on the edge of the mattress, so I joined her, tucking the cold box between my feet. Tessa sank down beside me. The guys stayed standing, Gav crossing his arms in front of him. To my relief, he was keeping a healthy distance between himself and the revolver.
“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded. “Who are you?”
“I’m supposed to be asking you that,” the stranger said. “You’re the ones that came barging onto our turf.”
He hunkered down on the crate and pulled back his hood. I registered his face, and looked again in surprise.
He was just a kid. At least a couple years younger than me, I guessed, his face soft and boyish and his forehead dotted with zits. Beneath his orange hat, which was stitched with a hockey team logo, his dark hair was pulled back in a limp ponytail that curled at the base of his neck. When we all stayed silent, he tapped the gun against his leg and narrowed his eyes.
“I saw you coming as soon as you were out of the woods, you know,” he said. “I could have shot you.”
“You even know how to fire that thing?” Tobias asked.
“I’m a good shot,” the boy said. “You’d better believe it. Practiced on the firing range with my dad every month after I turned thirteen. You’d have been dead if you’d looked like some of those asshole raiders. Good for you that you didn’t. So, where are you coming from?”
“South of Halifax,” I said.
His eyebrows rose. “You walked all the way from the coast?”
“We had a truck,” Gav said. “It broke. We’ve been walking the last few days.”
“Wher
e do you think you’re going with all that stuff?” the boy asked, motioning to the door.
“Why do you need to know?” Leo said quietly. “Are you planning on letting us leave when the storm’s over?”
“We only came this way to find shelter,” Tessa said. “We didn’t mean to disturb anyone.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” the boy said. “I don’t get to decide that on my own. I was just keeping watch.”
“So who does decide?” I said. “You’re saying ‘we,’ and ‘our’—where is everybody?”
He looked at me as if I’d asked the most stupid question he could imagine. “In the other cabins,” he said. “You won’t see most of ’em for a while even if you stick around. This is the quarantine cabin. New people don’t go any farther until we know they’re not sick. We all had to do it.” He stopped, some of the color washing from his face. “Oh, shit, I forgot.” He fumbled with his coat with his free hand, digging out a crumpled face mask and jerking it over his head.
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “None of us are sick.”
“I’d rather not take the chance,” he replied. His gaze dropped to the cold box at my feet. “How come you didn’t leave that with the rest of your stuff? What’ve you got in there?”
I slid my legs in front of it instinctively. “You don’t need to worry about that, either,” Gav said, a threat plain in his voice.
The boy stood up. “Look,” he said. “I told you we don’t steal here. But I’ve got to check. You could have guns in there or something.”
While it was hardly normal room temperature in the cabin, it felt well above freezing. I didn’t want him poking around in the box, letting the cool air out. Who knew when I’d be able to repack it with ice? But as he stepped forward, Gav moved in front of him, and I could see that neither of them intended to back down. So I did the only thing I could think of that might stop the situation from getting worse, if the boy was being honest about the people we were dealing with.
“It’s vaccine samples,” I said quickly. “But they’ve got to stay cold—every time I open the box there’s a chance they’ll start spoiling.”
The boy cocked his head, but he didn’t come any closer. “I heard the vaccine was a dud.”
“This is a new one,” I said. “We’re trying to find someone who can replicate it, to make enough for everyone. That’s why we were walking by here—that’s why we’ll leave as soon as the storm’s over. If you’ll let us.” I paused. “Unless you’ve got doctors here who might be able to do it.” From what I’d seen of the area, it hadn’t looked developed, but I hadn’t expected electricity or heating, either.
The boy didn’t give an indication one way or the other. “You could be lying,” he said.
“So could you,” Leo answered.
“We’ve have to be some special kind of idiots to keep our guns sealed away in a box instead of on us where we could actually reach them, don’t you think?” Tobias said.
The boy rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “All right, calm down. But don’t think you’re going anywhere soon. Like I said, that’s not my decision.” He sank back down onto his crate. “You should probably get comfortable. From the looks of outside, I think you’re here until morning.”
The sunlight beaming through the cabin’s open door woke me. My neck pinched when I raised my head. Sometime during the night, four of us had slumped across the mattress at odd angles: Meredith huddled in a ball against my shoulder, Gav at my other side with his arm bent around his head, Tessa squished into the corner. Leo had come over beside her, dozing against the bed’s platform. Even in sleep, his face looked tense. Tobias still sat by the wall, his skinny legs drawn up in front of him, his eyes alert and wary as he watched the woman in the doorway.
She stepped inside, studying us through dark-framed glasses that rested at the top of her face mask. Her hair, chestnut brown laced with gray, brushed the tops of her broad shoulders. The boy with the revolver hovered behind her.
They looked alike, I realized. The hair, the shoulders, the way they stood. Mother and son, if I was going to guess.
I pushed myself upright, my feet bumping the cold box at the edge of the bed. The woman’s gaze fell to it, then lifted to meet my eyes. Gav stirred, yawning.
“Justin told me you have a vaccine,” the woman said briskly, and Gav flinched upward at the unfamiliar voice.
“That’s right,” I said.
“A working vaccine?”
“It hasn’t been thoroughly tested,” I said. “But my dad was confident enough that he tried the vaccine on himself. He never got sick.”
The woman scrutinized us. “May I see it?” she asked.
I didn’t like it, but we couldn’t expect them to take everything at our word. At least this woman seemed like someone who could make decisions. “Quickly,” I said. “We have to keep the samples cold.”
She nodded, crossing the room. Meredith shifted beside me, blinking awake. I popped open the lid and pulled up the top of the plastic container that held the vials.
“All right,” the woman said after only a second, and I closed the box. “I suppose, if that really is a vaccine, you know enough about it to tell me what it does?”
It was a test, I suspected, but one I could easily pass. I’d read more about vaccines in the last couple weeks than I’d ever wanted to know.
“The vaccine contains an inactive form of the virus,” I said. “One that can’t make you sick, but still provokes the immune system to produce antibodies to fight it. Which means if you’re exposed to the actual virus later on, your body can recognize it right away and make the antibodies fight it off fast enough to kill it before it gets a real hold.”
“What if we have someone here who’s infected,” she asked, “and we’d offer you supplies in exchange for one of those samples? Presumably you don’t need all three.”
I thought of our dwindling stash of food, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to lie.
“It wouldn’t do them any good,” I said. “Like I said, the vaccine prepares the immune system in case you get infected later. If a person’s already infected, it’s too late—it can’t help. I’m sorry.”
The corners of her eyes crinkled with a smile before I’d even finished speaking, and I realized that had been part of the test too. If we’d been lying in the first place, we wouldn’t have hesitated to trade some of our fake vaccine for whatever else we needed to survive. There probably wasn’t anyone sick here.
“Wonderful,” the woman said. “I thought by now—” She shook her head, as if recalling herself. “I wish I could offer you more while you’re here, but most of our facilities—the dining area, the showers—are shared, and I’m afraid it’s our policy that any newcomers have to stay in the quarantine cabin for two weeks before joining the rest of us. We can bring you a hot breakfast to eat here, though. I take it you don’t intend to stay long?”
“No,” I said. At the mention of showers, I could suddenly feel every inch of oil and dried sweat that must have been clinging to my skin and hair. And to be able to wash Meredith’s hand properly… “We’re safe,” I continued, getting up. I gestured to Leo and Tessa. “About as safe as anyone can get. Tessa and Leo have taken the vaccine, and Meredith and I are immune. We both had the virus weeks ago, and recovered.”
At the mention of their names, Tessa sat up, wincing, and Leo opened his eyes.
“Both of you?” the woman said, her eyebrows arching.
“Kaelyn was lucky,” Meredith said. “And the doctors used her blood to help me.”
“We’d be so grateful if you’d let us just get cleaned up before we go,” I said. “My cousin cut her hand—I haven’t been able to really take care of it.”
Her eyes softened. “And you two?” she asked, glancing at Gav and then Tobias.
“No vaccine, haven’t been sick,” Gav answered for both of them. “But we’re fine. You see us coughing or sneezing?”
�
��Well, I’m afraid I can’t justify bending the rules that far,” the woman said. “We can bring a few buckets of warm water and some soap out here, if that would help, as well as the food. For the other four of you, though, I think we can rescind the quarantine, as a special case.”
“What if they wear masks?” I said. “We can’t just go off and leave them stuck in here.”
The woman’s jaw tightened, but before she could speak, Gav nudged my arm. “It’s okay, Kaelyn,” he said evenly. “I get it. It’s not like we’ll be sticking around.” Then, to the woman, “We’ll be happy just to get some food and water. Thank you.”
In his corner, Tobias shrugged.
Meredith sprang to her feet. “We can take a real shower?” she said. “Where?”
“I’ll show you,” the woman replied, her voice amused, and stepped back to the door.
Gav shooed me away. “Just come back quick,” he said, and tapped the cold box with his heel. “I’ll keep watch over these for you.”
Meredith was already scampering out the door. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”
“Step carefully,” the woman said as we came out of the cabin. “It’s all ice. We spray down the yard regularly to keep it that way—no footprints. It’s one of our precautionary measures. We’ve only had a few unfriendly intruders wander out this way, but we can’t be too careful.”
I found my balance on the slick ground. We were standing in a clearing surrounded by forest on three sides. A semicircle of cabins like the one we’d just left curved around a larger wooden building. The tall greenhouse Tessa had spotted yesterday stood behind it, glinting in the early morning sun.
The woman motioned to the forest at our left. “We moved your sleds into the trees where the spraying wouldn’t reach them. But you should find they’re as you left them.”
“No offense,” Leo said, shading his eyes against the glare off the ice, “but who are you, and where are we?”