The Worlds We Make

by Megan Crewe

  “I’m going to bring the cold box down to the basement,” I said to Leo. “It’ll stay cooler down there.”

  He came with me down the stairs that led from the kitchen, into the wide white-walled room below. A few dents in the walls revealed the crumbly drywall under the paint, and the laminate floor gave way under my feet where it had started to warp. Cobwebs clustered around the corners of the small, high windows. A plush futon stood off to one side, in front of an old TV surrounded by floor-to-ceiling particleboard shelves. They were stacked with dozens of DVDs and hundreds of CD cases. As I set the cold box down beside the stairs, Leo wandered over to the shelves. He blew the dust off a boom box sitting beside one stack of CDs and pressed a couple of the buttons.

  “Still some juice in the batteries,” he said. “I wonder if they have any decent music.” His fingers skimmed over the cases, sliding some out and then nudging them back into place. I sat down on the arm of the futon, relaxing just fractionally into the soft fabric. For a moment, despite the dust and the cobwebs and the vaccine we couldn’t deliver, I was able to let myself pretend that everything was normal. We were just a couple friends picking the right tunes to chill out to.

  “Hey!” Leo said. He opened one of the cases and popped the disc into the boom box.

  “What?” I asked, straightening up.

  “Listen.”

  He skipped through the tracks, turned the volume down, and pressed play. A shimmer of strings soared through the speakers. Then a horn joined in, forming a playful melody that jolted me back eight years in one instant.

  It was a waltz. Like the waltz Leo had practiced to for months, with me as his awkward partner, when we were kids. When life had seemed so simple.

  I couldn’t imagine being as happy as I’d been back then again.

  Leo cleared his throat. When I opened my eyes, he was watching me, his mouth slanted crookedly, his fingers hovering over the controls. “I can turn it off,” he said.

  “No,” I said around the lump in my throat. “There are a lot worse things I could be thinking about.”

  He let his arm drop. The music drifted through the room.

  “Do you remember the steps?” he asked.

  I hesitated. “One two three, one two three?”

  Moving toward me, he offered his hand. “We can work with that.”

  I could see in Leo’s uncertain smile, in the flicker of his eyes, the same sort of desperation I’d heard in Justin’s voice, the same I’d felt in myself when the radio had failed. It wasn’t a dance he was asking for so much as a temporary escape from here and now. An escape we both needed. So I stood up and folded my fingers around his.

  He placed his other hand behind my back, and mine rose to his shoulder automatically. Apparently something from all those months of practice had stuck. All at once we were only inches apart. A jittery heat washed over me, and I might have panicked if Leo hadn’t bent his head next to mine at exactly that moment.

  “Left foot first,” he said. “Back, side, together.”

  I stepped back, staring at Leo’s shoulder, and he followed, his feet matching my pace. After a few stumbles, I started to find the rhythm. We moved faster, Leo turning us as we neared the wall, the patter of our feet almost drowning out the music. He spun us around, and around again, and a laugh jolted out of me. I was following him now, my feet strangely light in my boots, as if I might float right off the ground. My fingers tightened around his. Maybe he could dance us right out of this place, back into the lives we once had.

  But then the music faded, and we came to a halt in the middle of the same dreary basement. I inhaled shakily, catching my breath. Another song began, low and soft.

  “I definitely don’t know how to dance to this one,” I said.

  Leo paused. “There’s always the school-dance shuffle, if you promise never to tell anyone I called that ‘dancing.’”

  I rolled my eyes, even as my cheeks flushed. “I’ve got more practice at the waltz than that,” I admitted. “Actually, I don’t have any school-dance practice at all. I kind of avoided them.”

  And now I’d probably never have to again. I could hardly see the high schools reopening any time soon.

  “Perfect opportunity to learn,” Leo said, his tone light. “I’m a good partner. No groping.”

  I laughed, and suddenly my reluctance seemed silly. It was just me and my best friend, and another way to keep our minds off the silent transceiver a little while longer.

  “Okay,” I said. “Why not?”

  I shifted closer, raising my other arm so my hands met behind Leo’s neck. His slid around my waist. We started to shuffle in time with the music. After a few rotations, I let my head sink down to rest against his shoulder. The warmth of his body encircled me. When the music stopped, for good this time, we stopped too, but I didn’t let him go. I had the urge to sink right into him, to see how far away I could get from everything waiting outside.

  Leo eased back, but only slightly, to look down into my eyes. He traced the line of my cheek. My pulse stuttered and my lips parted in an instinctive protest, but he just tipped his face forward so our foreheads touched.

  “I believe that things can get better,” he said. “We’ve gone through so much, and we’re still here. But even if they don’t, I’m glad at least I was here with you.”

  I wanted to say I was glad to have been with him too, but I’d lost my voice. All I could feel was the thumping of my heart, his skin soft against mine, his shoulders firm beneath my hands. It felt good, being this close to him. It always had, hadn’t it? As my initial nervousness faded, a longing welled up inside me. A longing for him to do what I’d thought he was going to do, to close that last small distance between us and kiss me.

  But he didn’t. He stood there, one hand at my back and the other at my cheek, motionless. I could feel his pulse too, drumming against my fingers.

  Well, why would he take the chance, when I’d pushed him away so many times already? He was waiting for me. Letting me choose.

  So what was I waiting for?

  I loved him. As a friend, and much more. I knew that. The second I opened my mind to the idea, the truth of it shone through me. I’d put the feeling aside, and then buried it under grief and guilt, but I knew it. And this might be my last chance to do something about it. We had no idea what lay ahead of us. I could lose Leo or he me as easily as we’d lost Anika. In an instant, at the crack of a gunshot.

  My thoughts leapt to Gav, and my heart wrenched. I still had his last message in my pocket. The message that had told me to keep going.

  Because Gav was gone. He’d known he wouldn’t be around much longer when he wrote that. Would he really have wanted me to spend the rest of my life loving no one but his memory?

  No, I didn’t think he would.

  I lifted my head. Leo sucked in a little breath as my lips brushed his. He returned the kiss as cautiously as I had offered it. It wasn’t nearly enough.

  I slid my fingers into his hair, and pulled our mouths closer together. I wanted, I needed, so much I was suddenly dizzy with it, as if he were water and I was parched. A faint groan hummed through him as I kissed him even more deeply, and he drew me in so my body pressed tight against his. We kissed again, and again, until nothing else was real.

  I came back to the world only when Leo stepped back, gripping my arms and breathing hard. My hands slipped from behind his head to rest against his chest. His eyes searched mine.

  “This isn’t—” he said, and swallowed audibly. “You’re okay with this, right? It’s not just—Everything’s been so crazy, we’ve all been freaked out—”

  I touched his mouth to silence him. “Leo,” I said, “I’ve wanted to do this since we were fourteen years old.”

  He stared at me for a second. “Okay,” he said, and laughed. “Okay.” His head dipped back down, his lips finding mine again.

  And neither of us said anything for quite a while after that.

  It was only a temporary
respite, of course. We were sitting on the futon, my legs across Leo’s lap, his arms still around me, when the intensity of the moment started to fade. I dropped my head from a kiss to lean against his collarbone, feeling the rise and fall of his breath drift over my hair. As we cuddled there, the rest of reality crept back in. My gaze flicked through the room and caught on the blank face of the digital clock perched on top of the TV.

  “Do you think it’s time to try the radio again?” I asked.

  Leo kissed my temple. “It can’t hurt,” he said. “Those doctors have slept enough.”

  I smiled at his jovial tone. “Pleased with yourself, are you?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I always knew dancing was going to get me a girl someday.”

  I snorted and swung my legs off him. He followed me to the stairs, grinning. As I reached for the railing, he caught me and tugged me back against him, his lips grazing the back of my ear in a way that sent a tingle down my neck.

  “For the record,” he said, “the only girl I really wanted to get was you.”

  I turned in his embrace, and we lost another few minutes I was happy to give up. But the nagging uncertainty of what awaited us upstairs didn’t let me go this time.

  We made our way back to the dining room. Leo’s good humor dimmed as we checked on Justin, who was fast asleep, a faint snore rasping over his parted lips, his limbs tucked around to his body as if to shield himself.

  “Should we wake him up?” Leo asked doubtfully.

  “Leave him,” I said. “He needs it.”

  I hoped if Justin was dreaming, it wasn’t about last night.

  When we sat down at the table and I called out into the transceiver’s microphone, all we heard was the same static as before. I broadcast our message three times, and then turned the radio off again, not wanting to waste the battery.

  “We’ll just keep trying,” Leo said.

  “Yeah.”

  He scooted closer to me. I leaned into him, part of the tension easing out of me. It was funny, and sad, that I’d spent so much time resisting being with him like this, when now that it had happened it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

  Without moving away from him, I started flipping through one of Dad’s notebooks. I’d read Dad’s account of the first few months of the epidemic enough times that coming back to these scrawled notes was comfortingly familiar. I could hear the echo of his voice in the words he’d written. He’d been so smart figuring out the vaccine, experimenting with both the first, not-so-deadly version of the virus and its current mutation, finally constructing the samples we now carried by combining bits of both. If he hadn’t died, he could have handled all this himself. We wouldn’t have had to leave the island, to worry about Michael’s motives or the CDC’s.

  But he had, and now it was up to me.

  I’d reached the day when Dad had injected himself with the prototype when Justin rolled over with an inarticulate mutter and rubbed his eyes.

  “Hey,” he said, and then yawned so wide his jaw creaked. “You get a hold of anyone yet?”

  I shook my head. “Still waiting. I guess we might as well try again.”

  He limped over to the table with his rough walking stick as I switched on the transceiver. The sun was beaming now, casting a golden glow through the window behind him and filling the house with a thin warmth. In the back of my mind, I saw the snow in the cold box disintegrating into slush.

  I sent out our call twice, waiting a minute after each one. I’d just given it one more shot, my heart heavy, when Dr. Guzman’s soft drawl warbled out of the speaker.

  “Kaelyn! Thank god. You were cut off before—I didn’t know what had happened.”

  The relief that rushed through me was so overwhelming it carried away my words. “We…” I started, and realized I couldn’t quickly summarize what we’d been through in the last two days. “We ran into some trouble,” I improvised, “but we’re all right now.” All of us except Anika. I forced myself to go on. “We’re in Atlanta. In the suburbs up north. Can you give us directions? We’ll be coming on foot from here.”

  “Of course! Let me get the map.”

  Leo grabbed a pen and a piece of paper off the kitchen counter and brought them to me. When Dr. Guzman came back on, I gave her the street names from the intersection I’d noted nearby, and sketched a rough map as she walked me through the best route to the CDC.

  “There’s a fence around the complex, with one main gate,” she said. “The militant types have made it their main focus, and there’s an even larger crowd of them out there than we had a few days ago, I’m afraid. But we do have a smaller gate around the back that’s securely barricaded, with a detachable section we’ve kept hidden that allows people to move in and out. No one outside seems to be paying much attention to that spot. If you work your way around to the south end and come along Houston Mill Road, and be cautious, you should be able to make it close unnoticed. We have a military presence here with us—I’ll ask for two or three of the soldiers to be sent out to meet you and escort you the rest of the way. How should I tell them to recognize you?”

  “I’m wearing a purple sweater and jeans,” I said. “And I’ll have the cold box with me.”

  “Excellent. And you’re clear on the route?”

  “I’ve got it.” Based on her directions, I didn’t think it’d take us much more than an hour to get there.

  Not long ago, I would have been overjoyed that our journey was almost over, that we could finally set everything right. But from the moment I’d started speaking with her, my gut had been twisting, because I didn’t really believe that anymore. Her earlier remarks, Michael’s insinuations, and my own worries were tangling together in my head. I couldn’t do this right until I knew for sure where she stood.

  “Dr. Guzman,” I said, my hand tensing around the mic, “when we were talking before, you said something about—the people who’ve been attacking the CDC, who’ve been harassing us—that they’d lose out on the vaccine.”

  “Don’t bother yourself about that,” Dr. Guzman said firmly. “The delinquents will just have to deal with the beds they’ve made for themselves.”

  I shifted in the chair, and an edge of cardboard dug into my hip. A thought I hadn’t known had been niggling at me until that instant spilled out.

  “It’s just, there was someone, a guy in our hometown,” I said. “He grabbed all the food that was left in the stores, and then was deciding who would get what.…”

  I trailed off, trying to find the best way to explain what Gav had done, and Dr. Guzman jumped in.

  “You won’t have to deal with anyone like that anymore,” she said. “The people who’ve crossed the line, they’re going to find there are consequences now.”

  “Right,” I said. So it was as easy as that? She’d use just a few incomplete thoughts to judge whether a person was worthy of saving? “But there are some people who might have done things that weren’t the best, just because they didn’t know how else to stay alive. I mean, it’s a hard line to draw.”

  “I’m sure we can work out the specifics once you’re here with the vaccine,” Dr. Guzman said, a note of impatience entering her voice. “Oh—you will be bringing your father’s notes, won’t you? You haven’t lost them? You said you had them with you.”

  “I still do,” I said, my throat raw. She wasn’t really listening. She was just saying whatever she thought she had to, to get me and the vaccine there. Which meant I couldn’t have trusted her answer even if she’d given a real one.

  “Good. It’s unlikely we’ll be able to replicate the vaccine without his exact instructions, even with samples. I should let the soldiers know to be prepared for you. I’m looking forward to meeting you, Kaelyn. Be safe.”

  “Yeah,” I managed, and switched off the radio.

  Justin gave me a puzzled frown, but Leo’s expression was knowing. “Kae,” he said, “she didn’t hear the whole story.”

  “She didn’t want to,” I sa
id. “All she cares about is getting the vaccine. Do you really think they’re going to take the time to find out the whole story, for everyone like Gav? What do you think she’d say about Drew?” How would they react to half the things we’d done getting down here, if they hadn’t been more concerned about us bringing them the vaccine than anything else?

  “I don’t know,” Leo admitted.

  “It’s still better than giving the vaccine to that prick Michael,” Justin said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.” I looked down at Dad’s notebook, thinking of the dogs tearing each other apart over a corpse. Of the way the girl from the town by the river had raced to warn us, because we’d helped her neighbors. Of Tobias’s panicked comrades dropping missiles on our island in some warped act of vengeance, and Tobias, risking his life to rescue us—a bunch of strangers. Of Michael, sending his followers to storm the CDC, the soldiers shooting back, the bodies that would pile up before anyone outside this city so much as saw the vaccine.

  A vaccine that was still in my hands.

  The sense of purpose I’d felt before flooded me, twice as strong. For such a long time, the responsibility of carrying the samples had felt like a burden. But it was actually a gift. I’d spent all this time intending to just hand it over to people with more authority than me, but I didn’t have to. It was up to me. I didn’t have to let them—Michael and the Wardens, the CDC’s scientists and soldiers, any of them—decide how the world should be. I could at least try for the world I wanted.

  I had to.

  As I smoothed my fingers over the indentations left by the pressure of Dad’s pen, months ago, the threads of thought that had been winding through my head started to meld into an actual plan. These notebooks didn’t just hold a record. Dr. Guzman had referred to them as Dad’s “instructions.” They told every protein that needed to be cloned, every procedure that needed to be followed, every bit and piece that needed to be intertwined.

  Because the vaccine wasn’t just one thing. It was made of many parts, working together.