by Megan Crewe
“Gav,” I said, but he shook his head. So I got out as well. I wasn’t letting him walk alone.
He kept coughing, on and off, as Tobias started driving. Leo must have explained what we were looking for. We strode along beside the car, Gav and me on one side and Justin on the other, jogging when we needed to catch up. A long series of condo buildings stretched across the streets just beyond city hall. At each one, Tobias stopped and Justin dashed inside to look around. It wasn’t until the twelfth that he came back with a thumbs-up.
The door to the building’s underground garage was jammed open. Tobias parked the truck by the back, and we grabbed as much of our stuff as we could carry. It wasn’t until we’d climbed up to the fourth floor, trying to put some distance between us and potential looters, that Justin mentioned our other problem.
“We’re going to have to hang around in the same apartment as him, when he’s like this?” he asked, gesturing toward Gav, who’d hung back a few paces behind the rest of us.
“I’ll stay in the bedroom with the door closed,” Gav said. “No one’ll have to come near me.”
Justin scowled, but he didn’t say anything else. We dropped our bags in the living room of the condo we chose, and he turned back with Leo and Tobias to get the rest of our supplies. I followed Gav into the bedroom.
All the furniture matched the shiny black wood of the floor, the walls and comforter a contrasting off-white. The air was frigid. It felt as if we’d stumbled into a yuppie ice palace. Gav sank onto the floor next to the dresser, rubbing his mouth through the scarf.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Stop it.”
He couldn’t know, though. Because I hadn’t been thinking anything. I’d just walked beside the truck and carried what I needed to and not let a single thought slip through.
It was getting harder to do that.
I opened my mouth and found that my throat had closed up. Everything felt closed up inside me, as if all my organs were trying to fold themselves into hard little balls. I swallowed and sat down across from him as he coughed.
He looked at me, the lighthearted tilt of his head at odds with the slump of his shoulders. I could see his jaw clenching and releasing. The effort he was expending to stay calm radiated off him.
He laid his fingers across my wrist and tugged gently. As if he didn’t think he could ask for comfort. I shifted forward, and he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me in with a sharp little breath. He pressed his face against my hair as I settled into his lap. I hugged him, blinking hard.
“You’re here,” he said. “So I’ll be okay.”
I closed my eyes, but the tears I’d been fighting slipped out, streaking down my cheeks. I wanted to say that of course it’d be okay, he’d be okay, he could beat this. But I wasn’t sure I believed it enough to say it like I meant it. And saying it like I didn’t would have been worse than saying nothing.
The truth was, I didn’t know anyone who’d survived the virus without some sort of extra immunity. If I could have taken some of my blood and just given it to Gav, maybe he’d be okay, like Meredith had been. But what Nell had done was more complicated than that, using procedures I didn’t know.
“There’s got to be at least one doctor left in this city,” I said. “I’m going to find him, or her, and I’ll make them do a transfusion like Nell did for Meredith. Since my blood’s type O negative, they can use it for you no matter what type you are. It worked for Meredith.”
If I could find a doctor who’d do it in the time we had. If there was a hospital somewhere that hadn’t been stripped of the equipment we’d need. If there was anyplace left in the city with the electricity to run that equipment.
If, if, if.
If Gav hadn’t been so stubborn. If I’d been more stubborn. I could have insisted that he either stay on the island or take the vaccine, and maybe all those other ifs wouldn’t have mattered. Because he wouldn’t have gotten sick in the first place.
I looked at the cold box, which I’d set down beside the bed, holding the priceless material that had dragged us all out here. The vaccine couldn’t do a thing for him now. In that moment, I hated it.
Gav cleared his throat as if trying to hold back another cough. “We came here for a reason,” he said. “I don’t want to be the one who messes that up.”
I eased back so I could see his face, still close enough that I could have counted the green flecks in his hazel eyes, and touched the side of his forehead. His skin was already warmer than it should have been, warmer than made any sense in the icy room.
“Looking for doctors is what we were already going to do,” I said. “You’re not messing us up. I’ve just got another reason now.”
I slid down his scarf and kissed him. He hesitated for a second, and then he kissed me back. Afterward, he tucked his head next to mine. A moment later, he started to cough again.
This time, he couldn’t stop. He shifted to the side, hacking and gasping, and I pulled my water bottle out of my coat.
“Here,” I said. “You should drink something. And I’ll see if I can get a fire going. It’s freezing.”
In the living room, the others were already standing around the fireplace. “We can go out and gather some wood,” Tobias said. “There’s lots of trees in the parks.”
Leo nodded. “And we’ve got a whole building full of furniture.”
“We should melt some more snow too,” I said, and they turned around. “We’re getting low on water. And we might as well check the other condos for food. If we’re lucky, no one’s bothered climbing all the way to the top yet.”
In the bedroom, Gav sneezed. Justin’s gaze darted to the closed door. “If we’re not all like him in a week,” he said, grimacing. Then he went still. “Hey. There were three containers of the vaccine. That means three doses, right? I could take it, and Tobias, and there’d still be one left.”
One sample left. One chance, which we could lose as easily as glass breaking. To vaccinate two people who, if they were going to catch the virus from Gav, had already been as exposed as they would ever be.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “But we don’t even know if one will be enough. What if it turns out the one we keep is ruined from the time you took them out? We can’t risk it. Gav will stay in the other room—I’ll be the only one who goes in with him.” I paused, remembering the pressure of Gav’s arms around me, his breath in my hair. “And I’ll find another coat, and use a different hat and gloves, so I’m wearing different clothes in there and out here. That way I won’t spread it, either.”
“He got to have the vaccine,” Justin said, pointing at Leo. “If he did, we all should.”
“I didn’t know how hard a time we were going to have when I decided that,” I said. “If I had…”
Would I still have asked him to take it? And Tessa?
“I would have said no,” Leo said. “Like Gav did. Maybe I should have anyway.”
Tobias dropped down onto the leather couch. “I’m with Kaelyn,” he said. “That vaccine is more important than any of us.”
“Seriously?” Justin said. When Tobias met his protest with a pointed stare, he threw up his arms. “You guys are crazy!”
“You can keep complaining, or we can do something useful,” Leo said. He picked up our pots.
“Guess it’s better than being stuck in here with him,” Justin muttered.
It was easier to ignore the desperate ache in my chest when we were working. Leaving Tobias to guard the condo, the three of us tramped down the stairs and along the street until we came to a small park with a couple of benches and a swing set. As I scooped snow into the pots, Leo and Justin poked around the bases of the trees, picking up twigs.
“We’re not going to get much fire out of this crap,” Justin said after a few minutes. He eyed the trees, then reached up and yanked on one of the branches. With a crack, it split up the middle. After a couple more tugs, he broke it off.
“Not bad,” Leo
said. “How about this one?”
As he twisted his hands around another branch, footsteps rasped through the snow behind us. I turned.
A middle-aged man in a parka was coming across the street. The edge of a face mask poked above the top of his scarf.
He came to a stop on the sidewalk beside us. “Whatcha doing?” he asked. No greeting, no pretense of friendliness. His voice was casual, but there was a firmness in his stance that said he expected an answer.
I tensed, wondering what he’d do if we didn’t give him one he liked. What he’d had to do to get that mask.
“Just gathering some firewood,” Leo said, his tone light but careful. “Got to keep warm somehow, right?”
Justin took a step forward, dragging the branch he’d snapped off. “You got a problem with that?”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“Justin,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“That’s right,” the man said. “You watch how you talk to people. If I wanted to make a problem, I would.”
“Maybe you should watch how you talk,” Justin said, raising the branch. “What we’re doing isn’t any of your business. So take off!”
I shifted between them, shooting a glare at Justin. The last thing we wanted was even more trouble. “I’m sorry,” I said to the man. “He’s just a kid.”
“I’m not—” Justin protested, and I jammed my foot onto his toes before he could make the situation any worse. His voice cut off with a curse. The man’s face crinkled as if he was smiling beneath his scarf.
“You get him to put a lid on it,” he said. “All I’m doing is keeping an eye out.”
And from now on, I suspected he’d be keeping an eye out for us too. I waited as he walked away. Even after he’d gone around the corner and disappeared from view, my arms stayed braced by my sides.
“That hurt,” Justin said. “I was just—”
I spun around. “You were just screwing us over,” I snapped. “You make that guy think we’re a threat, you think he’s just going to leave us alone? Now he’s going to be watching for us when we’re trying not to get noticed.”
“Kaelyn’s right,” Leo said.
Justin’s gaze darted between us. “Look,” he said, “it’s not my fault the two of you are too scared to stand up to a guy.”
“It’s not about being scared,” I said. “It’s about being smart. We are not the biggest fish in the pond here, and making like we are isn’t going to prove anything; it’s going to get us hurt—maybe killed. You know what you do when you’re a little fish surrounded by sharks? You lie low and hope they don’t see you, because they’ll go after the most obvious prey. The only reason anyone was after us in the first place is we caught their attention. And it’s not up to you to decide when we need to stand up for ourselves. This is my mission, those are my dad’s samples, and you need to start acting like you know that. Or you can find some other people to tag along with.”
By the time I’d finished, my throat was raw with the winter air. I wanted to turn away, to let the tension dissipate, but I couldn’t, not yet. He had to know that the challenges and the posturing ended now. We had too much on the line to risk another mistake.
Justin’s face had paled. He blinked, his mouth hanging open, and then he was the one who turned away. I drew in a breath, uncurling my fingers from my palms, feeling suddenly shaky.
“Let’s get a few more of these branches,” Leo said. He glanced at me and I nodded to show I was okay. As he and Justin went back to work on the trees, I left the pots I’d filled and grabbed a recycling bin I’d spotted on someone’s porch. It was empty, and it looked clean enough, considering we were going to boil the water anyway. I carried it back to the park and packed it full of snow.
“Don’t think we can carry much more,” Leo said, hoisting a bundle of branches and sticks. “You good?” he asked Justin.
“Yeah,” Justin said quietly. He stayed silent as we marched back down the street to the condo building. When we reached the door of the apartment we’d taken over, he hesitated. Leo went in, but I stopped and looked back.
“I’m sorry,” Justin said. His gaze was fixed on the floor. “You’re right. It was stupid. But you don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand what?” I said.
He swallowed. “My dad—he was just going to see if there was any food left in the grocery store, and some guy shot him. I wasn’t there to help him because he made me stay home with Mom, like some little kid. I don’t want to be like that anymore, some kid who runs and hides. But I guess I didn’t think; getting in people’s faces isn’t exactly the most mature move ever, either. I just get freaked out, you know, and I want to do something.”
I leaned against the door frame. “I’m sorry about your dad,” I said, meaning it. “I didn’t know.” He’d mentioned him, and I hadn’t seen him at the colony, but it had never occurred to me to ask.
“Yeah, well. I guess I probably couldn’t have done anything for him if I had been there.”
I remembered Meredith’s teary face as she asked me not to leave her behind. Pictured her here, amid the dead bodies and the looters. She’d been worried I was leaving her because I didn’t think she was brave enough, but the simple fact was, I couldn’t have lived with the guilt if I’d kept her with me and then hadn’t managed to protect her.
“Whoever killed your dad, if you’d been there, they’d have killed you too,” I said. “He probably made you stay home just because he cared about you and didn’t want you to get hurt. You can’t be mad at him for that, can you?”
“I…never really thought about it that way.” Justin raised his head. “You still pissed at me?”
“Are you going to listen next time I say to back down?”
His mouth curved up. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m going to work on that.”
“Then I’m not pissed,” I said. “But I am cold, and tired of carrying all this snow. Let’s get in there and see if we can make this place livable.”
We stepped inside to the sound of Gav’s coughing echoing through the bedroom door.
Over the next few days we developed a routine. In the mornings, Leo and I would hike to a couple of hospitals or clinics, while Tobias and Justin scavenged through another few floors of the condo building. We all met back at the apartment to eat, and then the four of us headed over to city hall to look for a way in. Then another hospital. In the evenings, after dinner, Tobias fiddled with the radio and I prayed to hear Drew’s voice.
All our efficiency hadn’t helped us yet. Out of the dozen medical buildings we’d visited so far, Leo and I hadn’t found one staff person. No medication, either. On the fourth day, we came across two bodies sprawled on the floor in a ward, bullet holes in their jackets, an icy glaze over their eyes.
We just kept going.
“Any luck?” Gav asked when I came into the bedroom to have lunch with him, a rasp in his voice that never quite left now.
“We’re still looking,” I said, forcing myself to sound optimistic, and started talking about how Tobias and Justin had managed to scrounge up another bag of food. I didn’t mention the medicine cabinets they’d checked, all bare, which was why we didn’t have even the most basic painkillers or decongestants to help Gav’s symptoms.
When the rest of us headed out for city hall that afternoon, I looked around at the empty streets and darkened windows and tried to summon up a little of the hope that had carried me so far. Every time I stepped out into that wreck of a city, it got harder.
“Everything all right?” Leo asked as we tramped along the streets.
The question made me laugh. “Yeah,” I said, even though it wasn’t. Nothing was all right. Hell, even if we found someone who could replicate the vaccine samples, I wasn’t convinced anymore that the vaccine would fix all I’d hoped it could. The world we used to have, the world I wanted back, was seeming more and more like a dream. I hadn’t caught a glimpse of it here.
Even if we defeated the virus no
w, Leo couldn’t take back the things he’d had to do. I couldn’t go back to being a person who’d never seen someone die, who’d never stolen food and clothes and cars. Everyone still living had been changed—we couldn’t have survived and not been. And even if we could change back, it wouldn’t undo all the other damage the virus caused. Who was left to run the power stations? To stock the stores, now that the manufacturing plants were closed and the farms gone fallow and the transport trucks were stalled with empty tanks?
When we’d been on our little island, almost holding it together, I’d been able to imagine the problem was little too. But it wasn’t just the island. It was the whole world.
I shoved those thoughts away as we reached the hall. The temperature had risen above freezing, the icicles over doorways dripping with a steady patter. We spread out, rapping on the doors and calling out to the people I still suspected might be inside and alive, then took turns trying to pound one of the boards on the broken windows loose. After an hour, no one had answered us, and the board hadn’t budged. Finally, Tobias backed away, shaking his head.
The shrinking drifts of snow scattered around the courtyard revealed more than I wanted to see. The green sheen on a coat shielding a slumped back. A bluish hand and the cuff of a sleeve.
Two socked feet, bent at painful angles. Because someone had wrenched off a pair of boots?
I winced and turned. “Let’s go,” I said, “before we bring out more scavengers.” Two days ago, a couple of lurking figures had started trailing behind us on the way back. Wondering where we were staying and what supplies we had, probably. And whether they could take them from us. We’d managed to lose them by weaving through a series of apartment buildings and parking lots, but I wasn’t eager to see them or anyone like them again.
We were halfway across the courtyard when an engine sputtered somewhere down the street. Close.
Leo froze, and I remembered his warning the last time we’d heard a car. Tobias reached for his gun. Justin started forward, almost eagerly, but I grabbed the back of his coat.
“Better not to get noticed,” I reminded him. It would be a lot harder to lose a vehicle than to lose people on foot. I turned, searching for someplace to hide. The car was coming too fast, the sound of the engine thundering in the still air. My gaze slid over one of the half-buried bodies, and I found my answer.