Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories

by Megan Crewe

  “Not at the house site,” he said.

  “How long have they been gone?” I asked Dorrie.

  “Half an hour, maybe,” she said, her mouth twisting. “I checked all through the building first—I didn’t think they’d have just left. We’ve told them enough times how dangerous it could be out there.”

  “They’re pushing their limits,” Mason muttered.

  I thought about what Kaelyn had said yesterday, and what Mya had said, before. Maybe they were pushing our limits—seeing how far we cared, how much danger we were willing to face for them. How much their lives were really worth to us.

  “Why don’t we split up, so we can cover more of the neighborhood quickly,” Nell suggested. “Dorrie, you could head south; they might have gone to the beach. Mason, wherever you haven’t checked to the north. I’ll go east and Howard can go west.”

  “None of us should be walking around alone,” I said—we couldn’t forget the city was dangerous for us too. “I’ll go with you, Nell.” Owen had been begging Mason to let him come on a scavenging expedition a few days ago. Maybe they’d gone east toward the main commercial strip on an expedition of their own.

  Kaelyn and some of the others had come out to see what was happening. We broke into groups of three, Kaelyn joining Nell and me as we headed down the street, not talking, just listening. The kids were smart—I figured they’d have put at least a few blocks between us and them before they paused anywhere.

  It was hard to be quiet. Glass from broken store windows crunched against the sidewalk under our shoes. We passed cafes and restaurants, clothing boutiques and art shops. I could imagine couples with arms linked and groups of laughing friends strolling once upon a time where we hurried now.

  My gaze snagged on the spot where we’d come across the corpse, the memory bringing a twinge of nausea. At least the kids hadn’t had to see that. We’d managed to protect them from a sliver of the full horror of what we were living through.

  “Do you think we should—” Kaelyn began, and my ears caught a sound that made my body tense. I held up my hand, and she fell silent. There—a voice, too muffled to distinguish words, but definitely a voice, up ahead.

  Kaelyn and Nell had obviously heard it too. We walked on as quickly as we could without drowning the voice out with our steps.

  “Why are you hiding?” someone said, the question carrying through the battered door of a dress shop down the block. “We can play a game, but I don’t really like hide and seek. What are your names?”

  It was a girl’s voice, but not Mya’s. She sneezed, and Nell’s face stiffened. We all reached for the strips of cloth we used as makeshift face masks.

  “Get away from us!” another voice answered—Owen. With all his posturing stripped away, he simply sounded like a terrified little boy.

  “Wait here,” Kaelyn said to Nell. “Leo and I can get them out.”

  “We don’t want to play with you!” Mya shouted as we edged closer to the door. Peering inside, I saw a girl who looked to be in her early teens rubbing her nose as she leaned to peek around the racks of clothes that scattered the store at odd angles like a maze. The kids must have been hiding somewhere deeper inside, cut off from the entrance.

  “Hey,” Kaelyn said gently, and the girl whirled around. She stared at us, her eyes widening, and then her fever-splotched face split with a grin.

  “More of you! Are you all together? I was starting to think there wasn’t anyone around here anymore.”

  “There’s a bunch of us,” Kaelyn said in the same soothing tone. She took a step back, and held out her arms beckoningly, like she would have a wounded rabbit, a frightened puppy. “You should come out here, and we can talk.”

  The girl looked over her shoulder, but the kids had gone quiet. She ambled toward the door, scratching her upper arm. “Did you go to Malvern?” she asked. “Maybe I’ve seen you around school before. So many people there, it’s hard to remember.”

  “No,” Kaelyn said, continuing to ease away, up the street in the opposite direction from Nell and me. She shot me a glance, and I nodded. “I’m not from around here, not really anyway. We can go for a walk and I’ll tell you about it.”

  The door creaked as the girl pushed it open. She wobbled a little, but her gaze stayed trained on Kaelyn. “Where are you from then?” she asked as Kaelyn guided her farther away. “How long have you been here? I stayed home, inside, for a long time, because for a while it was looking pretty scary out here, but then, after Dad didn’t come back... I had to see.”

  As soon as they were past the front of the store, I ducked inside. “Mya, Owen, Cody, let’s go,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  Mya and Cody emerged from the curtained changing stalls by the back of the store, Owen from under a shelving unit displaying sequined sandals. “She’s gone?” Mya whispered, her gaze darting past me.

  “For now,” I said. “Come on, quickly.”

  I held out my hands. Mya and Owen just rushed past, but Cody grabbed ahold of me, trembling.

  “Here we go,” I said to him, copying Kaelyn’s reassuring tone. When I ushered him outside, Kaelyn and the sick girl had already reached the end of the block. Nell motioned for us to head back to the condo building.

  “We didn’t mean to—it was just, we heard someone talking, and we wanted to see who it was,” Mya was explaining in a thin voice. “She didn’t sound like a bad person. We didn’t know she was sick. We went in and we couldn’t see her right away, and then she got in front of the door—she was trying to hug us, and saying how happy she was to see us—but she was coughing and scratching...” Her mouth clamped shut, her face pale.

  “We got as far away from her as we could,” Owen put in, his hands clenched into fists. “She wouldn’t get away from the door.”

  Nell looked grim. “It’s good that you tried to keep your distance,” she said. “We’ll have to keep you apart from the other kids, the way we did with Cody when he first joined us, until we’re sure you’re okay. All right? I’ll have Dorrie bring your favorite things so you won’t get too bored.”

  A shudder passed from Cody’s hand into mine, and a wordless sound broke from his throat. “I don’t want to get sick!” he wailed, the first words I’d heard him speak since that evening when he’d been pleading with his mom.

  I bent down, and he threw his arms around me, burrowing his face in my shirt. My eyes burned. I glanced at Nell over his shoulder, her expression as distressed as I felt.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, but I couldn’t put any conviction into the words. Maybe it wouldn’t be. He’d finally spoken to me, and it was to ask for one thing I had no way of giving him.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Drew turned up with a cooler holding forty doses of the vaccine. Kaelyn looked at him and bit her lip as Nell told him what had happened with the kids.

  “We’ve got them quarantined in separate rooms,” Nell said, preparing her equipment to administer the shots. “I don’t think they were exposed for very long. They could easily all be fine. I’ll give them their vaccinations upstairs after I’ve finished everyone else’s.”

  “And if they do get sick, we can try the transfusion treatment that worked for Meredith,” Kaelyn put in.

  “What are you planning on doing if they get sick and that doesn’t work?” Drew asked, with a hesitation in his voice. I wondered what the Wardens had been doing when they found out someone was infected.

  “We’ll keep them as comfortable as possible, and hope,” Nell said, but I knew she hadn’t seen a single person survive the virus who hadn’t already caught the earlier, non-fatal version that had partly protected Kaelyn, Howard, and Liz, or responded well to a transfusion—which, from what I understood, had only happened a couple times after Meredith.

  “And we’re doing the same for the girl who exposed them,” Kaelyn said. We’d managed to isolate her in a store-top apartment down the street, with some food and water.

  “Well, just be careful,” Drew sai
d. “And don’t use more medication than you have to on a lost cause. The city was mostly dry of sedatives and painkillers before the Wardens even started looking, and it’s not as if anyone’s making more.”

  “So what do you think we should do with ‘lost causes’?” Kaelyn asked, and he averted his gaze.

  “Just be careful,” he repeated.

  I noticed she didn’t tell him what we’d learned from Anika about veterinary medications, which were what made up the largest part of Nell’s dispensary at the moment. Anika. Another shadow we carried with us: the image of her fallen body, the blood on her back where a Warden had shot her…

  We’d found a decent stash of pills in an animal clinic nearby, so the Wardens might not have figured that trick out for themselves yet. The other obviously valuable buildings in the neighborhood—grocery shops, corner stores, pharmacies, multi-residence buildings like this one—had been thoroughly picked over before we’d arrived. Of course, even the veterinary medications would run out eventually. Maybe it would be smarter and kinder to put a person who couldn’t be cured to sleep, rather than hold out for the miniscule chance they’d survive.

  I didn’t think any of us here was quite ready to decide that, though.

  I went with Nell when she brought the last few doses up to the quarantine condo. It had two bedrooms and a den, none of those very large, but the kids seemed to have accepted the restriction. Mya’s face was drawn, but she complained about her breakfast and asked for several things from the penthouse suites as if nothing unusual was going on. Owen wanted to know whether the vaccine would stop the virus if he’d caught it, and when Nell admitted it wouldn’t, started talking about how he’d hardly been near the girl. And Cody had sunk back into muteness. He stared at the floor the entire time we were in the room with him, his only response a slight wince when Nell gave him the shot.

  “I’ll come back and keep you company a little every day,” I told him. “More, if you want.”

  He didn’t respond, but I remembered the way he’d clung to my hand, the panic in his voice. I wasn’t waiting for him to ask now.

  Nell’s chosen quarantine period was fourteen days, because she hadn’t seen anyone infected go that long after exposure without symptoms. I spent an hour each of those days with Cody, bringing a game or a deck of cards to play with, and a book I’d read to him when—inevitably—he ignored my offers. I had no idea if it was making any difference to him at all, but it made me feel a sliver better, knowing he knew I’d be there. I looked in on the other two too: Owen always snapped at me that he wanted to be left alone, so after a few times I let him be, but on the second day Mya said she wouldn’t mind a few games of Crazy Eights. I stopped by her room each time after Cody’s. She never admitted to being worried, but she never smiled either, not even when she won.

  Everything we’d accomplished—everything Kaelyn had accomplished, carrying her dad’s notes and the vaccine all the way to Atlanta, arranging the compromise between the CDC’s doctors and the Wardens, leading the islanders here—it hadn’t been enough. Maybe nothing we did would ever be enough to keep the people we cared about out of danger. The virus could mutate again. The Wardens could revolt against Drew and slaughter us. Some other group of survivors could decide to attack our little haven without warning.

  It was even more impossible to predict the future than some alternate past. All we could do was wait and see.

  On my eighth visit, I’d been reading for twenty minutes when Cody got off the cot and sat down next to me. Not leaning in, not reaching out, just sitting close enough that our knees touched. My heart leapt, but I didn’t make a big deal of it. I read until the end of the chapter, and when I closed the book he got up and returned to the cot. I wanted to think his shoulders were a little less slumped.

  “You’re more than halfway there,” I said. “You made it through before; you can do it again.”

  On the eleventh day, I arrived just as Nell was leaving the condo. Her face was pinched, her eyes wearier than usual. I stiffened.

  “Who?” I said.

  She sighed. “Owen’s temperature is up. Only a couple of degrees, but... he’s also itching.”

  “And the other two?”

  “Nothing concerning. But we can’t know for sure yet.”

  “No,” I agreed, a guilty relief penetrating the knot in my stomach. Owen must be terrified. He might have frustrated the heck out of me, but he didn’t deserve this. But... at least it wasn’t all three of them. If I’d brought Cody all this way just for him to get infected after all, I didn’t know if I’d be able to forgive myself.

  He still hadn’t spoken, but he came to sit next to me as soon as I settled on the floor now. On the twelfth day, he rested his head against my arm. I had the urge to hug him to me, the way my mom used to when I was little and we read together, but I was afraid to push for any more. I watched him, carefully—the way he rubbed his knee, tugged at his hair—tensing until he stopped, wondering if it was beginning.

  But the second week ended with a faint smile on Nell’s face. I yanked open Cody’s door as she let out Mya.

  “You’re free!” I told him. “Quarantine’s over. We’re sure you’re not sick.”

  His face lit up so bright I wouldn’t have been shocked if he’d glowed in the dark. Then it fell when he stepped out and he and Mya looked at one another, registering that it was only the two of them.

  “Where’s Owen?” Mya demanded, her chin already quivering.

  “He’s in the hospital room,” Nell said. “Howard’s giving him a transfusion.”

  “You mean he’s infected.” Mya glared at her. “Are you going to make him better? You have to make him better!”

  “We’re going to do our best,” Nell said, and Mya burst into tears.

  “That’s not good enough!” she said, covering her face. Cody stared at her, and then at me, and all at once he lunged at me with fists raised. He pummeled me with his hands as I grabbed him. I flinched when one caught me in the gut, but I didn’t let go.

  I’d held that other boy, months ago—grabbed him and run from the charge of that wild bear. What Cody was running from, I couldn’t help him get away from. At least I could stand and suffer it with him.

  After a minute, his blows softened. He gripped my shirt, tears trickling down his face, and a sob hitched out of him.

  “It’s not fair,” he said in a small voice. “It’s not fair.”

  “I know,” I said, and oh, I did.

  Cody didn’t retreat into silence again, but he seemed to have decided he’d only speak to me. When I went up to the penthouses, he asked me how Owen was, whether the transfusion had cured him, and all the kids watched me while I answered.

  “It’ll take a few days before we know,” I said, holding another fact heavy inside me. Nell hadn’t noticed any improvement in Owen’s symptoms so far. The girl who’d infected him was dead, her transfusion giving her just a momentary break from the fever before she’d careened off into the hallucinations that came before the virus finished its awful work.

  I had to give the same answer the next day, and the next. If the kids had been lethargic before, now they looked as if they’d sunk into numbness. The older ones meandered around the condos’ living areas, contemplating the toys and games and books but rarely trying any activity for even a minute. Mya and Cody sometimes refused to leave their bedrooms at all. When I’d look in on Cody, he’d be huddled with his face to the wall. I sat beside him, put my hand on his shoulder, and he didn’t tell me to go away. That was as good as it got.

  The gloom touched even the toddlers, who squabbled, poking and pinching at each other until Dorrie or Mason had to step in. Meredith still came with me to visit, but when I left, she did too.

  “I’m sad about Owen,” she said to me. “But I feel more sad when I’m there. It’s like the whole room is full of sad.”

  I knew what she meant. We were drowning in it.

  On the fourth day after Owen’s transfusion, I pa
ssed Nell in the hall on the way to breakfast, and she just shook her head. If the treatment had been going to work, I had the feeling it would have by now.

  “You know what,” I told Kaelyn. “I’ll grab some-thing to eat later. I’m going over to the studio for a bit.”

  Once there, I stood over the boom box, sorting out my thoughts. I’d encouraged the kids to dance out their feelings here just a few weeks ago, as if it were simple. It should be. There was music in sadness—how many songs had been written about loss and loneliness? I needed something to loosen the lump in my throat, the twist in my chest.

  I put on an album by a particularly mournful emo band and slipped from my warm-up straight into a routine I made up as I went. I moved with the slow beat, the quavering melody, but no matter how I threw myself into it, the worry inside me didn’t release. My mind kept returning to the kids in their playroom, doing anything but playing. To Owen on his bed downstairs, coughing and sneezing and probably already veering into manic chatter.

  Finally I stopped, panting and damp with sweat, and crouched down beside the boom box. For a few long minutes I just hunched there, my face tipped against my knees, listening to the ragged rhythm of my breath. Then I wiped my eyes and switched off the music.

  I could try to bring the kids over here again, but that hadn’t seemed to work any magic before. Dancing was my thing—that didn’t mean it would be theirs—and it didn’t always work even for me, obviously.

  Outside, the morning sun was baking the pavement, the breeze from the lake taking only a bit of the edge off the rising heat. It was one of those early June days when you’d think summer had already arrived. Seagulls squawked overhead, wheeling against the cloudless sky, and a sudden homesickness hit me, even though I knew the home I missed didn’t exist as anything but a town full of ghosts now.

  As I approached the condo building, my eyes caught on the form of whoever was standing guard just behind the front door. I stopped, my skin tightening at the thought of walking in there. Letting that door shut behind me, and the next, and the next. I saw in my mind all those closed doors shutting Owen away from the others, holding the kids from running away, waiting to quarantine anyone else who was exposed...