The Line Between

by Tosca Lee

  Back above ground, he regards us in the chilly barn. “So you see, we have traded secret for secret. And now that you know ours, you are welcome here. Both of you, if you should ever need it.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Yes—thank you,” Chase says, but is interrupted by the appearance of Mel, walkie-talkie in hand.

  “National Guard is moving in. Someone called in a tip. Just came across the scanner.”

  “Thank you, Mel,” Noah says, and turns to us. “We’d better get you on your way.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  * * *

  There was a radio song we used to sing with Mom back in Chicago. We had no clue what the song meant. We just liked to yell out the words.

  Jackie later forgot the song, or so she claimed. I don’t know how that’s possible, given that Mom used to play it all the time and that the chorus only has four words, repeated over and over. I’ve always been prone to getting things stuck in my head. Someone called it an earworm once, which I thought sounded gross and not at all like what it’s really like. More like a playlist with only one song stuck on repeat until it becomes the anthem of your life for hours or days at a time, whether you like it or not. I only recently learned, of course, that earworms are associated with OCD.

  As I climb into the front seat of the truck in the darkness, that song comes back to me.

  There’s something wrong with the world today . . .

  We leave Buddy behind. I didn’t want to—Chase didn’t, either. But we have no idea what we’ll find once we enter Fort Collins. Buddy licks my face as I gather him up, remembering the feel of his little body in my arms that first night in the Jeep.

  “He’ll be here waiting,” Noah assured us. “Healthy and bigger than before. Though I can’t say what condition the cat will be in. Go in peace, my friends.”

  Mel takes us south, points silently to a set of blue lights up the interstate and another on the highway. I glance back at them in the distance as we turn west until the road splits into two trails, where we head southwest, winding first through scrubland and then earth scarred by tire tracks and cattle drives.

  The trail ends at an old windmill standing lone sentry over a cluster of water tanks where the snow has been trampled by cattle into dark, frozen sludge. He turns off the headlights, cuts the engine. Getting out, I follow the two men around to the trailer in back where Mel has hopped up to unchain the UTV already loaded with our bags. The headlights glare against the back windshield of the truck as he backs it onto the ground.

  It’s eerily quiet, the snowscape barren beneath a moon sheathed in clouds.

  “You’re going to head southeast down that dry bed,” Mel says, pointing. “See that line of red lights on the horizon? Those are wind turbines. They’re a mile away on the Colorado side. Zach, who was with me last night, is waiting at the first one to the east.”

  Mel digs into his pocket and hands Chase his pocketknife. “Your pistol’s in the glove compartment. I loaded the magazine. Watch the terrain. Point right toward that light—any farther west and you could end up in a ravine or driving off a bluff. Get there safe. Get the samples there safe.”

  Chase shakes his hand. “We will.”

  “Thank you,” I say, giving Mel a hug. But the minute I do, he stiffens in my arms. It takes me a second to understand, to hear what he has over the rumble of the UTV: a tapping, a whir, swift as a flutter. The distant drone of an engine. Chase curses and my head swivels upward in the same direction as theirs—east, toward a glowing tail of a helicopter, a traveling beam of light.

  “Go! Go!” Mel shouts. But we’re already running for the UTV. Chase grabs the wheel as I slide in beside him. And then we’re speeding down the dry bed as the helicopter roars closer, that cylinder of light sweeping the ground beneath. We hug the eastern edge of the wash, but our lights are a dead giveaway. The helicopter banks, coming right for us.

  Chase veers down a steep tributary, hits a ridge that nearly sends me flying. Turns us west—the wrong way, the ground growing more treacherous beneath us.

  “Cut the lights!” I shout.

  “It won’t be enough.”

  But it has to be. It cannot end like this. We’ve come too far with so much at stake.

  That stupid song comes back to me.

  There’s something wrong with the world today . . .

  Livin’ on the edge

  Come to think of it, I always hated that song.

  The chopper roars toward us, so close I have to duck to see it from beneath the vehicle’s low roof.

  A voice issues from the loudspeaker: “Stop the vehicle. Repeat: Stop the vehicle or we will shoot.” It’s cold and practically mechanical. Detached as the voice of a distant god.

  The headlights will get us killed. “Forget the UTV!” I shout. “Cut the lights—we have to run!”

  I grip the strut as Chase makes an abrupt turn to speed along the earthen face of a low-lying bluff. The instant it blocks the chopper from sight, we skid to a stop. Chase tears open the glove compartment, shoves the pistol into my hand. I swing out of the UTV and grab the carrier, but when I turn back, Chase hasn’t moved. The chopper roars toward us, practically overhead.

  “Chase!”

  “Count to five when I leave!” he yells. “And then run!”

  “What? No! I’m not going without you!”

  “You have to.”

  “No! I’m not leaving you!”

  His eyes meet mine as he throws the UTV into gear. “You’re the bravest person I know, Wynter.”

  “Chase!” I scream.

  He takes off across the snowy wasteland toward the canyons beyond, the chopper trailing him like a kite.

  I stare, breath frozen in my lungs.

  Move.

  I stagger a step, slip on the snow’s frozen crust. Pick my way along the edge of the hill to the winding floor in the darkness.

  A shot cracks across the landscape, echoes along the hills.

  I spin back, stifling a scream. Search the darkness for any sign of the UTV beyond the ridge. The helicopter circles like a vulture as a second shot shatters the air.

  I take off, legs churning. Grapple my way over the next ridge, tear across the dry river floor.

  Sirens wail toward the east.

  A third shot.

  I drop to a crouch at the edge of the next rise, lose my footing and skid down the other side, carrier dragging across the ground. I can’t hear the UTV anymore or even the chopper, the whir of the propeller drowned out by the heart hammering against my ribs.

  I drag a sleeve over my eyes and blink hard at the horizon, searching for the red constellation, low and straight as an arrow. There. I shove to my feet and run, clutching the carrier against me. Cradling the disease that cost me my sister. That ruined Ken’s brilliant mind. That brought me Chase and then took him away.

  The landscape breaks abruptly into a corner field. I hurtle down the embankment, gasp as I tangle on a fence, barbs biting through my sleeves and gashing my cheek. Haul myself up over it, metal piercing my gloves as I scan the distance for lights, telltale flashing blue.

  I cut across the field in a daze, pass through the fence on the far side, barbs snagging my hair, ripping through the nylon of my coat. The turbine rises like a giant with a single Cyclops eye. I sprint for it, tripping over shorn field stubble.

  But when I get there, the road that dead-ends at the first turbine is empty. I bend over, hands on my knees, suck in a breath through my nose before starting off toward the second one as the helicopter veers away. Sirens converge in the distance.

  I reach the second turbine, stagger on to the next. And the one after that.

  I hear the silver Sierra before I see it; it’s traveling with its headlights off. I wave my arms and then pull off my hood and rip open my coat to show the reflective collar of my zip-up beneath. The truck comes to a halt, Zach’s face ghostly in the glow of the dash affixed with a fake in-transit sign, the Nebraska license plates rem
oved.

  He’s barely put the truck into park before he’s out. “I had to wait out the chopper to keep from drawing their attention. Was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  “Chase didn’t,” I say dully.

  “I’m sorry. I am. But once they realize they don’t have you, they’ll be all over the place. Hurry.” He helps me into the driver’s side of the idling truck. “Go hard west till you hit the mountains, all the way to Livermore. Go in from the northwest and you’ll avoid the city. Take 287 down.”

  “What about you?” The plan had been for him to take the UTV back across to the water bins.

  “I’ll be fine. Go!” he says. And then he’s running for the field.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  * * *

  The road blurs. I drive without seeing it or the landscape or the sunrise. Haunted by the sound of those shots. By Chase’s last look at me.

  This is the second time I’ve stared into the eyes of someone about to die.

  I tell myself I barely knew him. That I’m a twenty-two-year-old two months out of a cult bonding with his dimples in a crisis. That any connection between us is just what happens at the end of the world.

  And I tell myself I’m a liar.

  The Rockies emerge from the last of the night, beautiful and foreboding. I’ve never seen mountains before. This isn’t how I wanted it to happen.

  It hurts.

  Magnus was right: this world can’t go on. Not with people like him preying on others. Not without more people like Chase.

  I could throw the samples out the window. Let the world purge itself as, maybe, was always intended. Nothing could stop me and who would know? I imagine lowering the window, the icy blast of the air. One simple, irrevocable act like a step between Heaven and Hell.

  How many more lives could crash to the pavement, shatter like a slide made of glass?

  I reach for the carrier beside me. Test the latch. Still secured.

  For now, Magnus’s prediction might still come true—but it won’t be because of me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  I turn south, wend along the foothills, barely registering the cars nosed into snowy ditches, backward on the median, abandoned on the shoulder; it’s the same as everywhere else.

  I pull up my mask, draw the hood of my coat over my head as 287 takes me directly into Fort Collins where it becomes College Avenue. The first intersection I come to is bottlenecked to a single, narrow pass through the wreckage of a collision where a semitruck lies on its side, trailer twisted at a wrong angle like a broken limb. The SUV crumpled against the curb has strewn wreckage across both lanes. A man in a hoodie stands in the middle, holding an invisible baton, arms weaving in the air. Conducting not traffic, but an orchestra only he can see.

  Up ahead, the gas station is empty. The drug store is dark, the front window shattered, shelves empty. The hardware store is worse; the place looks gutted. Same for the Asian grill, though the thrift store appears unmolested.

  An apartment building ahead is surrounded by portable chain-link fence and posted with a handwritten sign:

  INFECTED

  A police cruiser blocks the right-hand lane and I merge left, noting the spray-painted X on the front door.

  Every other building after that is a bar.

  The university has to be close.

  More wreckage at the four-lane intersection of College and Laporte. More on Mountain Avenue, where I veer around three cars jigsaw-puzzled together and peer down the cross street, looking for the campus.

  Blue lights flash ahead, silent against the indigo sky. I turn toward the mountains, skid to a stop as a truck hauling a camper runs the intersection in front of me without even slowing. I drive past an auditorium where a sign outside the door says WATER. A line nearly a hundred people long has already formed up outside, people in surgical and makeshift masks fixated on phones without service. A few turn to stare, their gazes dull. I wonder how many of them will live through the winter, the month, the week.

  Six Porta Potties line the parking lot with a line of their own. It scatters as one of the booths begins quaking as though it contains a madman . . .

  Which it very well might.

  I cut through a residential area, worried that I’ve missed the university as the road empties into Laurel.

  And then suddenly there it is, right in front of me.

  Orange-and-white-striped barricades block the entrance. A campus security cruiser is parked behind it, the guard sitting inside the truck. I continue down the street without stopping, turn off into a residential area, and park. Locking the truck, I tug my hood low over my head, the carrier under my arm.

  Crossing to the campus, I hurry through a parking lot, skirt the edge of a residential building. I glance up in time to see a curtain move in a third-floor window, but can’t see who’s watching from inside.

  There’s a path around back with another entrance. It’s got a handmade DO NOT ENTER—INFECTED sign on the door. I wonder if the person I saw upstairs really is sick or simply using the only weapon at their disposal.

  Once past the residential halls, I cut north of the stadium toward what looks like a more industrial set of stone and concrete buildings that I imagine hold classrooms, lecture halls. Maybe a lab. Unnerved by the open areas, but even more by the silence.

  I don’t trust it.

  I try the door of the first building but of course it’s locked. I round the corner—and stop short as a couple guys in jeans and hoodies come strolling my direction. They might be my age, though somehow I doubt they belong here any more than I do.

  “Hey,” the first one says, lifting his chin. He’s got a shaved head and a single patch of hair shaped to a point beneath his lower lip, silver chains around black boots. “You got any food?”

  “No. Can you tell me which way the veterinary college is?”

  “Yeah. For some food,” he says, his gaze going to the samples.

  “I told you I don’t have any.”

  “What’s in the case?” he up-nods toward the carrier.

  “Nothing you want to eat.”

  “We also accept cash.”

  I pull the pistol from my pocket and thumb off the safety. “Accept this.”

  They step back in unison, hands out before them.

  “Whoa,” he says. “No need to get twitchy.”

  They walk backward several steps, and the one spits before turning to saunter quickly the other way.

  I glance up at the hall in front of me, follow the walk around back, looking for some kind of sign, pistol naked in my hand. I have no idea where the veterinary college is, let alone the microbiology building. Find myself walking aimlessly past a broad, arched entrance where I try the first door I come to. Locked.

  But when I lift my eyes, there’s a sign taped to the window:

  WINTER →

  I turn away and then stop. Ashley wouldn’t know my name’s spelled with a y. I follow the arrow to the next set of doors, where another sign points to the next building over. It’s marked MICROBIOLOGY. I rush toward the entrance, which is cordoned off with yellow tape and a sign that says QUARANTINE: DO NOT ENTER. But fixed to the glass is another arrow pointing to a side entrance.

  When I reach the black metal door I groan inwardly at the sight of the keypad. Beside it is a simple note: J.’S BIRTHDAY.

  Jaclyn was born on July 3—every birthday of hers I can remember before Julie moved away involved sparklers instead of candles on a cake coated with ashes. It was the only cake I ever refused to eat, finding the prospect unappetizing even as a kid.

  I enter the digits one at a time—0 . . . 7 . . . 0 . . . 3—flashing back as I enter the numbers to that night at the Narrow Gate, Truly in my arms. And I know that even if I can’t see her, Jaclyn is with me now, as she was then.

  Except that, as before, nothing happens. I glance around me in exasperation and enter the code again, prepared to back up and start shouting if I have to. Then, rememb
ering the security system at Julie’s house, I try the # button.

  The door clicks open.

  I find a second note inside next to the stairwell door: C321. A flashlight has been stuck to the wall beside it with a piece of adhesive Velcro. Pocketing the pistol, I grab the flashlight, turn it on, and take the stairs up two floors. Striding down a tiled hallway, I peer through the glass frames in dark office doors until I spy a denim-clad pair of legs resting on a couch in C321.

  I rap, softly. The legs don’t move. For a moment I assume the worst—that all of this has been for nothing. The thought is so terrible, so unthinkable, that I begin pounding on the door.

  The legs jerk to life, feet swinging to the floor as the figure briefly disappears outside my line of vision. A few seconds later a lantern lights up the office interior and a man with long, tousled hair and a badge hanging from his neck strides into view.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Neal,” I say loudly, the words echoing down the hallway.

  He searches my eyes through the window and I suck in a breath. I don’t even need to read the name on his badge to know that it’s him.

  Truly has his mouth. She has his eyes.

  “Wynter?”

  I nod and yank down my mask. Because though I bear less of a resemblance to Jackie than my mom, the likeness is there.

  He stares, and then swiftly loops his mask over his ears.

  “Are you sick?” he asks, words muffled through mask and door.

  “No,” I say, and hope I’m still telling the truth.

  He unlocks the door and lets me in, glancing out into the darkened hall before locking it behind me.

  “You made it. I’d started to worry you wouldn’t.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Me, too.”

  He doesn’t look like how I imagined a professor or a veterinarian would, Def Leppard T-shirt haphazardly tucked into a pair of faded jeans that disappear into a set of shearling slippers. He’s clearly disconcerted. Nervous, maybe. Which doesn’t keep him from stealing glances at me.