by Megan Crewe
I came downstairs to the familiar crackle of the radio’s static. “Attempting to contact the CDC,” Leo said, so wearily I could tell he’d been at it for a while. I found him in the dining room.
“I couldn’t sleep either,” he said before I could ask. “Everything look okay?”
“As good as we could hope,” I said. The thought of telling him about the woman upstairs just made me feel more exhausted. As he turned the dial, I peeked into the living room. The tent’s flap was closed, with Justin and Anika presumably dozing behind it.
“If anyone from the CDC, or with information about the CDC hears this, please respond,” Leo said. “Over.” He paused, and then sighed, rubbing his face.
“Just leave it,” I said. “We’re probably not—”
The static buzzed. “Hello?” a voice said, breaking through. “This is Dr. Sheryl Guzman from the Centers for Disease Control. I hear you.”
The first time I’d heard a voice emerge from Tobias’s radio a few weeks ago, I was flooded with excitement. Now, my skin went cold. That first time, we’d thought we’d found help on the road to Toronto, and it’d turned out to be the Wardens manipulating us into giving away our location. And then they’d come to take the vaccine and kill us. I had no doubt they’d try to trick us again if they had the opportunity. But if we’d reached an actual person at the CDC, that could make the difference in whether we got the vaccine safely to people who could make more. We had to take the chance.
I pulled up a chair next to Leo. He offered the mic to me. I blinked, and then accepted it. The vaccine was my dad’s; I’d said before that this mission was mine. I supposed that meant I should do the talking. Leo gave my arm a reassuring squeeze, and I bent over the transceiver.
“We hear you, Dr. Guzman,” I said. “You’re at the CDC now?”
“I am,” she replied. The volume dipped and rose, but I could hear wariness in her soft southern drawl. “Where are you? What’s this about?”
As long as we only shared information the Wardens already knew, we should be fine. “We have samples of and notes on a new vaccine for the friendly flu,” I said. “A vaccine that works. We’ve been trying to find someone who can make more of it—the CDC seemed like our best shot. We’re headed your way now.”
There was a pause, and for a second I thought the transmission had dropped off completely. Then the static crackled, and the doctor spoke again, angrily. “People like you are why we let the radio monitoring slide. Making up stories isn’t going to get you in here. We’re not that much safer here than you are out there. We don’t have time for this.”
“Wait!” I said. If this was some special tactic by the Wardens to prove their authenticity, it was awfully convincing. “Don’t go. I’m not—We really—” I fumbled for something to say that might make her believe me.
Leo squeezed my arm again. “Your dad talked with them?” he murmured.
Of course! If he hadn’t, they should at least have heard of him. “You know the name Gordon Weber, don’t you?” I said into the mic. “The first vaccine that was released—he was the Canadian microbiologist who worked on it with the World Health Organization. In Nova Scotia, where the outbreak started.”
Another pause, and a sigh. “Give me a minute.”
I set down the microphone. My heart was thudding. I hadn’t thought before about having to prove ourselves to them. I glanced at Leo.
“Do you remember, was my dad’s name in the news when they talked about the epidemic?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I was always listening for people I knew, after I found out about the quarantine. Mostly the reporters quoted people from World Health and the other agencies.”
“Then maybe giving his name will be enough to convince her we’re legit,” I said. “If it really is the CDC.”
He tapped the side of the transceiver, his mouth twisted like he wasn’t sure whether or not to smile. “Yeah. We have to test them too.”
How? The woman on the other end—this Dr. Guzman—wasn’t acting like someone trying to draw us in. But maybe Michael had realized we’d be too suspicious if they used a direct approach again.
In the living room, the tent rustled. “What’s going on?” Justin asked groggily, zipping open the flap. “You get someone on that thing?”
“We’ve got a woman who says she’s at the CDC,” I said. “She seems to think we’re making things up. We’re not sure yet whether she is.”
“What about the notebooks?” Leo said, tipping his head toward the cold box where it sat beside his chair. “Maybe your dad wrote down something we could use.”
“Right!” I said. Dad had been so involved in working on the vaccine, he must have recorded information only someone on the inside would have known. Leo passed over the bag with his notebooks, and I pulled out the top one, the earliest volume.
“You figure the Wardens are messing with us again?” Justin said.
“Too early to tell, but there’s no point in risking it.” As I turned back to the radio, I flipped to the pages where Dad talked about the development of the first vaccine, the one his team had sent to the States for further testing. The one that had failed.
The static fizzled. “Are you still there?” Dr. Guzman said.
I snatched up the mic. “We’re here.”
“What exactly does this have to do with Dr. Weber?” she asked. Her tone was more urgent now, her drawl thicker. “Is he there with you? Can I speak to him?”
Justin shrugged off his blanket and crept over to stand by the table. Anika scrambled out of the tent after him, her eyes wide.
“Dr. Weber’s—” Even after all this time, after everything I’d seen, that fact stuck in my throat. I swallowed. “Dr. Weber is dead. I’m his daughter, Kaelyn. I guess you’d know about the quarantine that was set up on our island? When we lost contact with the mainland, my dad was working on a new vaccine. He finished it and started testing it. I have samples and his notes.”
“All right. Can you confirm something for me, then? What was the working name for the first vaccine?”
So she wasn’t finished testing us yet. “Hold on,” I said, scanning the notebook’s pages. The letters stood out in sharp capitals a couple dozen entries in. “FF1-VAX,” I read.
“And which testing facility was it sent to after the initial formulation?”
I searched farther, looking for the dates when I knew the first vaccine had been ready. “Fivomed Solutions,” I said. “In New Jersey.”
“How come she gets to ask all the questions?” Justin grumbled.
“Okay,” Dr. Guzman said. “Okay.” She gave a little laugh. “I’ll have to talk this over with everyone else, but this is good. Where exactly are you?”
“I’d rather not say right now,” I said. “Actually, I’d like you to confirm a few things for us, just so we know for sure who we’re dealing with.”
From her silence, it appeared she hadn’t expected that. My stomach twisted. If this conversation ended up being just another chance for the Wardens to taunt us, I was going to scream.
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“Well, it sounds like you have files on the first vaccine,” I said. I frowned at the page in front of me. “How many samples were sent to Fivomed?”
“Twenty,” she said after a moment.
“And…” Leo tapped a name near the top of the page, and I nodded. “Which Public Health Agency official traveled to New Jersey with the vaccine?”
“Ah, Dr. Henry Zheng, it looks like.”
The tension started to drain out of my shoulders. “Yes.”
“So will you tell me where you are now?”
Even if we were sure this was the CDC, the Wardens could have stumbled on our conversation and be listening in on their own radios. “I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said. “We’ve had some trouble.…There are other people who want the vaccine, and our transmissions aren’t secure.”
She’d passed t
he test, but I still felt wound up inside. Some part of me refused to be relieved. “Look,” I added, “we’re trying to reach Atlanta as quickly as we can. Now you can at least be ready for us. It’s really good to know someone’s there. Is there anything you can think of that would help us get to the city?”
“Well, you clearly already know to be careful,” she said. “I have to admit I’m not sure there’s much we can do for you from here, even if we knew where you are. We haven’t had contact with anyone very far afield in quite some time, and the situation here has been…Well, we’ll do whatever we can once you make it to the city. Will you keep checking in? We’ll have someone monitoring this frequency as often as possible. Any questions you have, we can at least try to advise on.”
“We’ll do that.”
“At the very least, make sure you get in touch before you come into the city,” Dr. Guzman said. “We’ll work out with you the safest route to the center.”
“All right,” I said. And then, automatically, “Thank you.”
“Thank you!” she said with another laugh. “I have to tell everyone else.”
Her voice faded away into the static. I reached to flip off the switch.
“Ha!” Justin said, raising his hands. “We found them. We’re heroes!”
Leo let out a ragged breath, smiling more openly than I’d seen in a while. I started to grin back at him. “I guess we are,” he said. “The CDC came through.”
Gav wouldn’t have believed it. He’d wanted to, for me, but he’d been so sure everyone in power had abandoned us. My grin faltered. If only he’d had a chance to see this moment.
If only we’d been able to come straight down to Atlanta, instead of having to hide from the Wardens and sneak around them. Maybe Dr. Guzman and her colleagues could have saved him.
“There’s really going to be a vaccine,” Anika said. She grasped the edge of the doorway as if knocked off balance. “I mean, for everyone. We’re all going to get it. We’re going to be okay. I kind of thought—Michael thought he was going to get to be king over everything. He’s going to be so pissed!”
She crowed the last words, but at the same time she looked almost as if she was going to cry.
“Good thing you hooked up with us, eh?” Justin said, and she swiped at her eyes.
“Oh my god, yes.”
I wanted to feel that exhilaration too. I wanted to feel more than this tangled knot of hurt and frustration. This was even worse than my absence of guilt over leaving those people behind in the snow, my absence of horror at the woman’s body upstairs. Why wasn’t I happy? The scientists we’d come all this way to find—now we knew they really existed.
But somehow they still seemed so far away.
Coughing echoed through the ceiling, and my focus snapped back to the present. Now we knew where to go to make sure no one else had to die.
“I’m going to tell Tobias,” I said.
I walked upstairs alone. The floor creaked after I knocked on the closed bedroom door.
“Are we heading out already?” Tobias asked hoarsely. “We just got here.”
I hadn’t considered leaving, but all at once I wanted to say yes. We were going to get in the SUV and keep driving until we were face-to-face with Dr. Guzman at the CDC. But the Wardens were still out there looking for us.
“No,” I said. “But there’s good news. We managed to reach someone at the CDC on the radio.”
I’m not sure how I expected him to respond, but I expected something. All I got was silence.
“Tobias?” I said. “There are scientists still working there. I’m sure they’ll have the equipment to do a blood transfusion—they can do the same procedure for you that cured Meredith, with my antibodies.”
“If we can get to Atlanta,” he said slowly.
“We’ve managed to get this far.”
“But it’s going to get harder,” he said. “I’ve been keeping track, Kaelyn. It was four days ago I first got the itch. That means my mind could start to go as soon as tomorrow, doesn’t it? We’re not making it there that fast.”
“They could still cure you,” I said. Maybe. My dad had tried a similar treatment on other patients and hadn’t succeeded, but if Meredith had been lucky, Tobias might be too. “Meredith was already hallucinating when—”
“That’s not what I meant,” he rasped, cutting me off. “I saw what Gav was like. What if you can’t convince me to keep taking the sedatives? How’re you going to keep a low profile if I’m shooting my mouth off and running around like a lunatic?”
“We’ll manage,” I said.
I was going to say we’d managed with Gav. But we hadn’t. My throat tightened. I closed my eyes, willing back the grief. I had to think about the people who were still alive. About Tobias. Because he was right. If the virus broke down the part of his brain that controlled his inhibitions before we made it to the CDC, the rest of the trip was going to be hard. Really hard.
If I’d offered to let him take one of the vaccine samples when we were leaving the island, like I had with Leo, we wouldn’t even have to worry about this. I couldn’t have known we’d need to make it this far, or that the soldier who’d been a stranger then would end up helping us so much. Tobias himself had said that he didn’t think it was right to risk using up another of our few samples, when we’d first arrived in Toronto and Gav had gotten sick. But right then I wished I’d made that offer, and that he had taken it, so this awful conversation would never have had to happen.
To mention that regret seemed even more awful. “We’ll manage,” I said again.
Tobias shifted on the other side of the door. “I’m glad,” he said, and for the first time since I’d given him the news, he sounded like it. “Your dad’s vaccine will get made; people will be protected. I was a part of making that happen. Pretty amazing when you think about it, for a guy who spent his whole life with everyone thinking he wouldn’t amount to much. Anika—and Justin—they won’t have to be so scared anymore.” He paused to cough weakly. “I’ve been doing everything I can to make sure they’re safe. I don’t want anyone getting sick because of me.”
“We know that,” I said. “We’ve all been so careful. I’m sure they’re okay, Tobias. They’ll stay okay.”
“It’s a strange feeling, seeing people be afraid of you,” he said, the lightness in his voice fading. He went quiet, as if he was talking more to himself than to me. “I never asked for anything. If Anika would rather talk to that kid than me—”
A sneezing fit interrupted him. “We could be there as soon as a couple days,” I said firmly, before he could continue. “We’re going to crush this virus right out of existence. Hold on to that, okay?”
“You’re right,” he said after a moment. “I will. I’m just rambling. You should all sleep while you can. I’ll keep on watching.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I—we all—really appreciate it.”
“I know,” Tobias said. “Thank you, Kaelyn.”
I lingered outside the door a few seconds longer, half-expecting him to add something. When he didn’t, I headed downstairs.
Justin and Anika were back in the tent, the fabric muffling their murmuring voices. Leo was standing in the hall as if he’d been waiting for me.
“You’re happy, aren’t you?” he said quietly as we grabbed our blankets. “You knew we’d find someone, and—there they are.”
“I’m not sure I’ll be really happy until we’re right there in the CDC,” I said. Tobias’s worries buzzed inside me. “It still feels like a long way to go.”
As soon as I’d said it, I wished I hadn’t. Leo’s face fell, just fractionally, before he caught it and pushed his mouth back into a smile.
“Well, we haven’t let ‘a long way to go’ stop us yet,” he said. “It’s getting to be our specialty.”
“No kidding,” I said, managing a small smile in return.
Justin and Anika fell silent as we ducked into the tent. I slid under the spread sleeping bags,
setting the cold box between me and the thick canvas wall. As soon as I was lying down in the darkness within, exhaustion crashed over me. I let it drag me down into sleep, like a swimmer too tired to fight the undertow.
I drifted and dreamed, the images slipping by in blurs and fragments. I was being suffocated by the sense that I needed to reach out, that someone—Gav?—waited in the fog just inches from my fingers, when a shrill dinging pealed into my ears and through the haze. I jerked upright, my pulse hiccupping.
The others were scrambling up too. I kicked away the sleeping bag and fumbled with the tent’s flap. The room outside was dark with the passing evening. My head snapped around, following the dinging noise. The kitchen. I stumbled out and hurried down the hall.
In the fading light, I didn’t immediately recognize the objects in the shadows on the counter. But as the others came up behind me, my vision adjusted. I groped for the off switch on the back of the old-fashioned alarm clock that I didn’t remember being here in the morning. Its hands marked the time as seven o’clock.
“What the hell?” Justin said, pushing his rumpled hair away from his face. “Did you set that, Kaelyn?”
“No,” I said, and Leo broke in.
“Is that…” His voice trailed off, and we all stared at the counter.
Just beyond the alarm clock lay a large black pistol. A pistol that, I was pretty sure, belonged to Tobias. Beside it sat a flashlight, a pack of batteries, a compass, and a granola bar. Things he’d been carrying in his coat.
My heart plummeted. I turned and ran to the stairs. “Tobias?” I called as I pounded up them. “Tobias!”
The door to the bedroom was open. I jerked to a halt on the threshold, one glance confirming what deep down I’d already known.
He was gone.
Leo and Justin had followed me upstairs. Justin pushed past me into the room, swiveling to survey the furniture as if Tobias might be hiding somewhere.
“What the hell!” he said. “He acts like he’s so mature and responsible, and then he just takes off on us?”
“I don’t think it’s like that,” I said. The words Tobias and I had exchanged earlier swam up through my memory with an uncomfortable chill. “He was worried he’d get us caught before we made it to the CDC, once he got sicker. He did this to help us.”
