by Megan Crewe
“Oh.” I could already tell she wasn’t going to like this. “Um, we’ve had to change the way we’re traveling, which means it’s going to take us a little longer to get down there than I expected before. But I think we should still make it in a few days.”
“I see. I’m sorry to hear that.” She fell silent for a moment, and I thought I heard her mutter something under her breath that was lost in the static. “I wish we could send someone to pick you up, Kaelyn, I really do. The situation here, it’s the most unreasonable—”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“No, it’s not. You need help. And these people, the kind who’d shoot at you—the kind who go around hacking at our walls and staking out our gate—it isn’t right. We can’t take a vehicle out unnoticed. One of my colleagues drove out three weeks ago to try to see what was happening at the hospital, because the phone lines have been down, and he made it just two blocks. They swarmed the car. They—” Her voice broke.
I didn’t want to imagine what might have happened to him. Didn’t want to ask whether he’d made it back. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yes. Well.” She cleared her throat. “I suppose they’ll regret it when everyone else is getting your vaccine.”
“What?” I said.
“Let’s just get you here,” she said. “You be as careful as you can be, all right?”
An uneasiness settled over me. It sounded like she was suggesting they’d withhold the vaccine from people. Even people who’d just been defending their property like the woman in the substation? I wasn’t happy that they’d shot Justin, but I could understand why they had.
She couldn’t mean they’d punish people for just protecting themselves. I hadn’t explained the whole story.
“We will,” I said, but my chest still felt tight.
“Is there any other way I can help?” Dr. Guzman asked.
“No,” I made myself reply. “Thank you for what you already told me. I’ll try to get in touch again when we’re close to Atlanta.”
“Please do. I don’t want anything else happening to you. Look after yourselves.”
I listened to the meaningless buzz of the static for a few seconds before I switched the radio off. Dr. Guzman was our one hope of getting the vaccine to the rest of the world. She might not even have meant that comment; maybe she’d just gotten caught up in her frustration. Why was I worrying about exactly how the CDC planned to distribute it, when we couldn’t even say for sure we’d make it there?
By the time we started climbing the undulating slopes of the mountains the following night, I’d given up hope of finding a faster vehicle. But the tractor was serving us well enough. Its sturdy tires ate up the road slowly but steadily, even as snow returned to the ground in the higher altitudes. I’d convinced Justin to keep lounging in the trailer, where we’d set up the tent and the sleeping bag to fend off the worst of the deepening cold. When I’d checked his wound that evening, it had looked raw and painful, but his skin had no reddish streaks of infection. As long as he took it easy, I thought we could get him through this okay.
With dense forest sheltering us on all sides, we switched to driving during the day, when the sunlight could help us navigate the twisty mountain roads. In places, the snow hardened into a thick crust that cracked under the wheels. I tried not to agonize over the deep tracks left in the tractor’s wake. The Wardens would have to follow us up into the mountains on guesswork before they’d stumble on our trail.
Twice on the first day we heard the whir of the helicopter again. We drove the tractor as far onto the shoulder as we dared and stopped to wait. All I could make out beyond the branches overhead was clear sky. I hoped if we couldn’t see the chopper, that meant no one in it could see us either. Obviously they weren’t giving up anytime soon.
We traded off driving and map duties, someone always sitting in the back with Justin. Leo was at the wheel and Anika leaning against the side of the cab when I spotted a stream of smoke ghosting into the sky from somewhere up ahead. I leaned over the front of the trailer to knock on the back of the cab, and pointed to the smoke. Anika rolled down her window.
“There’s a town about five miles down this road,” she said. “Maybe someone there’s still alive.”
I eyed the smoke warily. If Michael had headed into the States only a little more than a month ago, he’d hardly had time to bring every survivor here over to his side, and I doubted isolated mountain towns would have been his priority. Still, even if the local survivors weren’t with the Wardens, they weren’t necessarily amicable.
“Is there another route we can take?” I asked.
She looked down at the road atlas, frowning. “Sort of. We’d have to go back to that turnoff we passed, like, an hour ago.”
“Let’s do it,” I said. “I’d rather take a little more time than risk being noticed.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Overnight, we kept the tent in the trailer and bundled up there after a hasty dinner of canned stew. The next day, we wound through North Carolina until I figured we were less than eighty miles from the Georgia border. Soon we’d have to leave the shelter of the mountains. But not long after that, I could be putting the vaccine into the hands of experts. My nerves started to jitter with excitement.
Evening was starting to fall when a building came into view up ahead. A small church. I hit the brake. Leo leaned forward as we both squinted through the windshield. Beyond the church was a squat concrete building with a windowed front, and the faces of several houses half hidden by the trees.
“This place isn’t in the atlas,” Leo said. “Too small, I guess.”
There was no sign of smoke here, and no sound other than the low rumble of the tractor’s engine. And we’d have to backtrack a couple hours to avoid the place.
“It looks abandoned,” I said. “Let’s just keep our eyes out.”
As we drew closer, I made out the sign over the concrete building’s windows, THE PINES CONVENIENCE & GROCERIES. The glass in the door had been smashed, but I still saw shapes on a few of the shelves.
“Maybe we should stop, see if there’s anything we can use,” I said.
“Might as well, now that we’re here,” Leo agreed.
I parked the tractor in front of the store and climbed out. “Stay put,” I ordered Justin when he leaned out of the tent. “We’re only taking a quick look.”
Shards of glass crunched amid the snow under my feet as I opened the door by its battered handle. Leo came up behind me, and we surveyed the rows of shelves. A few bags of bread, the plastic fogged with green mold. A jar of pickles that had cracked open on the floor. In the long-dead freezer, a lonely pizza box that on further inspection turned out to be empty. Cartons of toothpicks scattered in an aisle. I grabbed two bars of soap that remained, and tucked them into my pocket, then pointed out a jug of laundry bleach near Leo. But it looked like any canned goods had been cleared out a long time ago.
“Well, we’ve got enough to last us already,” I said, retreating. As long as we didn’t get lost, or find the roads blocked up ahead, or have the tractor break down.
“Hey!” Anika said outside, with a squeak of panic. My pulse hiccupped. I dashed the last few steps to the door.
“Hello!” a bright voice called from beyond the trailer. A stout white-haired man was hurrying toward us along the road, waving his arm as if there was any chance we wouldn’t see him. He grinned through his tangled beard, and then turned his head to sneeze. His nose was rubbed red. The snow was soaking the green plush slippers he’d walked out in.
“Don’t go anywhere!” he said. “I need to talk to you. It’s been so lonely—there hasn’t been anyone by in a long time. Where are you from? Are you visiting for a while? I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about Mildred? I—”
He cut off his string of chatter to cough hoarsely into his bare hand, but he kept coming. “Stop!” I shouted. He was only ten feet away now. Ten feet from Anika and Justin. The two of them had ducked inside the
tent, but any second now Justin would get some grand heroic idea, and a sneeze or a cough would carry. “Stay there!” I said, stepping forward.
“No, no, you don’t understand,” the man said, still hustling toward us. Totally unaware of how dangerous he was, of how he could kill a person just by breathing near them.
Like the guy who’d infected Gav.
My lungs constricted. Before I’d made any conscious decision, Tobias’s pistol was in my hands.
“Stop!” I repeated, pointing it at him. My thumb fumbled for the safety. At the click of it sliding off, the man slowed. His face paled.
“Now then, you don’t have to be that way. I was only—”
He sneezed again, and I stepped closer, my arms rigid. “Go away,” I said. “Get away from us, now.”
He drew to a halt a few paces from the end of the trailer. His fingers leapt up to scratch at his chin. His bleary eyes tracked the gun. “I just wanted to talk,” he said, a whine creeping into his voice.
“Kaelyn?” Justin said, peeking out, but I didn’t dare let my gaze waver.
“We don’t want to talk,” I said to the man. “We want you to leave us alone. Go back to your house.” He just stood there, staring. A tremor passed through me. I took one more step, trying to make my face look menacing. “Go.”
With a shudder, he scuttled backward. “It’s not right,” he muttered as he turned around. “A person can’t even have a friendly conversation—shoot me, will you? Shoot me? I’ve lived in this town my whole life, and I can tell you…”
His rambling faded away as he veered onto the road beside the church and passed out of view. I exhaled in a rush, my arms falling to my sides, the gun almost slipping from my fingers.
“Kae,” Leo said, and I flinched. When I looked around, he tilted his head toward the tractor. His expression was inscrutable. “Let’s get going. I’ll drive.”
“Is he gone?” Anika asked from inside the tent.
“Yeah,” Justin said. “Kaelyn scared him off. It was kind of awesome!”
I shoved the pistol back into my pocket and made myself walk over and climb in beside Leo. I didn’t feel awesome. As he turned the key, a question rang in my head, so loud I was sure he had to be thinking it too.
What would I have done if that man had kept coming?
It wouldn’t have come to that. Leo might have tackled him, or I would have. I hadn’t wanted to shoot him. I was just doing whatever I could think of to get him to leave. It had worked. Everyone was safe.
So why did I feel awful?
Because pulling the trigger would have been so easy. Suddenly I could imagine all the things the people in the island gang could have been thinking, when they shot infected people in the streets. He was going to die soon anyway. I’d have been ending the danger completely. Stopping the virus right in its tracks, with a single twitch of my finger.
But that man hadn’t been just the virus. He was a person too, a person whose only crime was being infected. And I’d pointed a gun at him without a second thought.
The road was completely cloaked in shadow now, the sun dipping below the tops of the trees. “We should stop soon,” I said.
“As soon as we get some distance from that place,” Leo said with a nod.
We drove in silence for about another hour, until the sky started to gray. Without waiting for confirmation, Leo pulled the tractor over to the side. When I got out, the faint trickle of running water reached my ears from somewhere in the distance. It sounded wonderfully peaceful.
“I’ll refill the water bottles,” I said. I scooped them up, along with our pot, and treaded through the crisp layer of snow amid the trees. Down a small slope, I found the stream, the first we’d come across that was deep enough that it hadn’t frozen through.
I almost stepped in the water before I saw it, pulling back my foot at the creak of fragile ice. Kneeling on a mossy stone, I tapped a hole in the ice with a stick. Clear water burbled by underneath. I pulled off my mitten to dip my fingers in, and winced at the cold. It looked sparkling clean, but we’d use some of Tobias’s water purification tablets on it all the same.
The simple motions had calmed me. I reached back to grasp the first of the bottles, inhaling the crisp air deep into my lungs. I was just about to lean forward and dip the bottle into the water when a movement upstream caught my eyes.
Some thirty feet away, blending into the shadows of the dusk, a lean gray-and-white form bent its head to the stream. Its conical ears twitched as it lapped water from a gap in the ice. I stared at it, afraid to blink, afraid it would vanish and I’d be left uncertain of whether I’d really seen it. Awe washed over me.
It was a wolf—larger and thicker-furred than the coyotes I used to study on the island. I’d never seen one outside of a zoo before. And down here in the States, from what I knew, hardly anyone had seen a wolf in the wild in decades. They’d been hunted almost to extinction.
It might not even be completely wild. There were sanctuaries—the employees might have opened the gates when the epidemic hit to give the animals all possible chance of survival. Still, having an opportunity to see it, to share this stream with it just for a minute, felt like a gift.
I shifted to keep my balance, and a twig snapped under my heel. The wolf flinched. Its golden eyes found mine through the trees. I held its gaze, my heart thumping, wanting to apologize for disturbing it. It considered me for a second, and then spun on its graceful feet and trotted deeper into the woods.
My fingers itched for a pen. I had to record this, every detail, every motion the wolf had made. As if I was going to forget.
Then I caught myself. Record it for who? Everyone still alive was too busy trying to stay that way to care what wolves or any other animal did.
How long had it been since I’d thought about the career I used to dream about before the virus? How long had it been since I’d thought about anything beyond making it to Atlanta?
What was the point when, like Justin said, for all we knew we weren’t going to make it that far, no matter what I did?
Gritting my teeth, I plunged the bottle into the icy water, filling it quickly and turning for the next. But when they were all full and I stood with the bag of them over my arm and the pot in my other hand, my gaze wandered back to the spot where the wolf had stood.
Whether anyone else cared or not, whether I lived past the next few days or not, I was glad I’d seen it. A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth.
I was still smiling as I came up the slope toward the spot where the tractor was parked. Leo was building a pile of sticks several feet ahead of it, where we’d light a fire once it got completely dark, to warm ourselves and our dinner. He looked up at the sound of my boots.
The returning smile that crossed his lips didn’t quite erase the wariness in his eyes. The way he watched me as I approached, I suddenly felt as if I were some elusive animal he’d never expected to see.
I’d let myself explain it away so many times, but here it was again—that sense that something wasn’t quite right between us. I wasn’t just imagining it. And I couldn’t keep ignoring it, trying to avoid the disappointment or disapproval I was worried lay underneath. I remembered what it was like falling into that trap of refusing to talk. Our nearly two years of silence after that one immense misunderstanding. I’d hated it. If my best friend had a problem with something I’d done, I needed to know, now.
“Hey,” I said, setting the bottles down by the campfire. “How’re you doing?”
“Everything seems to be going all right,” he said, straightening up. He glanced back toward the trailer, where Justin was cleaning the guns—one of the few jobs he could do without being on his feet—and explaining each part of the process to Anika. “I think we’re going to have to look for more fuel soon, though. I refilled the tank as much as I could. The barrel’s empty now. I’d guess we’ve got maybe half a day’s driving left.”
Half a day. I pictured the map. We could probably at least ma
ke it into Georgia. We’d just be coming down from the mountains, back into civilization, a little earlier than I’d hoped. Back into the hornet’s nest. Michael would have more of his people watching the area around Atlanta than anywhere else.
Well, we’d deal with that when we had to.
“Good to know,” I said, “but that’s not what I meant. How are you?”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m okay. As okay as anyone could be, given the circumstances.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I just…If something’s bothering you, you’d tell me, right?”
Leo smiled again, but it faltered almost immediately. He tugged at the back of his hat. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Not really.”
Even though I’d tried to brace myself for whatever was going to come, a chill rose up inside me. “What doesn’t matter? Leo, just tell me.”
“I don’t want to—” He gestured vaguely as he grappled with the words. “I don’t want to judge you. About taking all the gas that time, about breaking into the compound, about that guy today. You were doing it for all of us. Making sure we get through this. I know.”
“But?” I said roughly.
His mouth twisted. “But you know how I feel about how I made it back to the island. I don’t like seeing you get so…cutthroat, I guess.”
He didn’t like me, like this. My fingers curled into my palms as if I could hold back the sting of that admission. “Why should I be different from anyone else?” I asked.
“You were different, though,” he said. “You were trying so hard to be better than them, even when people were trying to kill us.”
“It’s not like I’ve had a lot of choices,” I protested.
“I know,” he said, but he wouldn’t even look at me. “It’s just, I don’t want the world to be like this, but I couldn’t see how to get by and not be a horrible person, and it seemed like you found a way, like maybe it wasn’t hopeless. But if even you can’t…”
I blinked, fighting to keep my composure. “That isn’t fair.”
“I know. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m not saying you’re a horrible person now. I guess I don’t really know what I’m saying.”
