by Megan Crewe
“You’d freeze. What if there’s a storm? Kae…” He stopped and studied my face. “You’re not going to listen to anything I say, are you?”
I shook my head. “Not unless it has to do with getting these samples to Ottawa.”
He exhaled in a rush, and his gaze settled on Tobias’s truck. He turned abruptly.
“Give me your keys.”
“What?” Tobias said.
“The keys to the truck. I want to take a look.”
He held out his hand. Tobias blinked, and hesitantly handed over a single key on a ring. The rest of us watched as Gav strode over and opened up the back of the truck. He clambered inside, the metal floor ringing under his boots. The sound seemed to break Tobias’s stupor.
“Hey!” he said, hurrying over. “That stuff’s mine.”
Gav poked his head out.
“You’re pretty well equipped,” he said. “Tent, sleeping bags, an awful lot of food.”
“Like I said, there’s no way I can go back to the base now. I’ve got to get by somehow.”
“And that’s another reason you weren’t here earlier,” Gav said. “Because you were stocking up your truck before you left.”
Tobias’s face reddened.
Gav jumped down and closed the back door.
“Tell you what,” he said, his voice strained. “You make it up to us. You take me and Kaelyn to Ottawa, then drive us back when we’re done there, and we call it even.”
“You really have a vaccine?” Tobias said to me. “We could get rid of this virus for good?”
“I think so,” I said. My spirits lifted. “If you’d help…”
He lowered his gaze from the five pairs of eyes trained on him. “Okay,” he said after a few moments. “Yeah. It’s not like I’ve got other plans.”
“Am I coming too?” Meredith asked, squeezing my arm. My stomach twisted. I didn’t want to bring her places where we couldn’t be sure of being safe. But the island wasn’t safe, either, not anymore. The guys in the helicopter could come back for another round. We’d been lucky to escape the first time.
“We should all come,” Tessa said firmly. “It’s dangerous for any of us to stay on the island, that’s obvious. And I’m sure we can scavenge more food around here so there’s enough for all of us. The most useful thing we can do is bring the vaccine to the right person. The more of us there are, the faster we’ll be able to find someone who can help once we get to the city, right?”
After a couple seconds, Leo nodded. “I want to help!” Meredith said. Tobias shrugged as if it was all the same to him. I paused, unprepared for the sudden show of support, and Tessa gave me a small smile.
Gratitude washed over me. Yes. If we were all together, we could protect each other. Safety in numbers. I would never have asked them to risk it before, but now, with the situation on the island becoming even more precarious, it felt right.
We could get through this together, like we had so much else.
Gav was the only one frowning.
“What about everyone else on the island?” he said. “We can’t all leave without telling someone what happened so they can be prepared in case those psychos with the helicopter come by again.”
“I’ll go,” Leo offered. He shrugged, his chin tucked inside the broad collar of his coat. “I’ve got the most experience navigating a boat, and the waves are getting a little nasty. I’ll go to the hospital and fill them in, and then check on your car. If it’s okay, I can bring it over on the ferry—if not, I’ll at least bring any supplies that survived.”
Gav’s jaw tensed as if he was going to argue, but then he closed his eyes and inclined his head. “If the house is okay, it wouldn’t hurt to grab some of the food there too. But I don’t want to take more away from what’s meant for the whole island.”
His gaze slid to me. He didn’t want to leave me, I realized, not even for a couple hours. That was why he was still coming with me, even though it was clearly killing him not to go back.
The words hurt coming out, but I had to say them. “Gav, I’ll be okay. If you want to stay on the island and help, you should. We don’t all have to go.”
“No,” he said. “I already decided, back when we first talked about it. We can leave tomorrow morning, just like we planned.”
As Leo headed down to the dock, I pulled Gav to the side. “Are you really okay with this?” I said, my voice low. “You can tell me the truth, you know.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Of course it bothers me, leaving the island when it’s practically destroyed. But leaving you would be even worse. From the first day I asked for your help, when you refueled the cars for the food run, you’ve been totally behind every idea I’ve had. Now it’s my turn. I want to do this for you. You need me, I’m here—I want you to know that.”
“Gav…” I said. I couldn’t find the words to express what I was feeling. The passion and determination I’d watched Gav put into keeping the island going—to have all of it offered just to me seemed incredible, impossible. Gripping the front of his coat, I tugged him to me and tipped my face up to meet his lips, trying to put every particle of my gratitude into that kiss. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me tight.
“I know,” I said softly when I eased back, and he smiled and kissed me again.
“If there’s six of us, we’re going to need more supplies,” he said. “Let’s see what we can find here.”
So as the sky started to darken with the coming evening, the group of us raided the harbor office. The concession stand near the ticket booth now held only a few crumpled wrappers, but Tobias broke open the locked storage room in the back with a tool from his truck. Soon we’d added skids of bottled water and boxes of recently expired chocolate bars and honey-roasted peanuts to his stores of food. Tobias started shifting the truck’s contents around to make more floor space. “We’ll be better off sleeping in here,” he said. “Smaller space to trap the heat.” While he worked, Gav, Tessa, Meredith, and I headed down the mainland town’s major street, checking the storefronts.
Drew might have come through here, I thought, all those weeks ago after he took off. If he’d made it across the strait alive. Back then, some of these stores might still have been occupied. Now, everyone was long gone. Most of the doors hung open, swinging in the wind.
Gav pointed out a knitted-goods shop, and Tessa picked out extra sweaters and thick woolen hats for each of us. I started grabbing blankets while Gav dug a few plastic bags out from behind the register to hold our loot.
In the convenience store farther down the street, the last newspaper on the rack was dated November 5. I guessed that was when the owner had fled. Or gotten sick. The front-page headline read, Friendly flu overwhelms hospitals, the article below describing how medical centers across the country were running out of room. The grainy photo of patients crowding the hallway of a hospital in Halifax gave me a jolt back through time. A couple months ago, our hospital had looked like that.
All those people staring anxiously at the camera—they were dead now.
I made myself turn away. The shelves that would have held food were bare. I picked up a handful of lighters from the box on the counter, and a few magazines for kindling. Meredith squealed and rushed over to present me with a can of baked beans that previous scavengers had missed.
Nothing made a sound as we continued down the street except a small flock of twittering sparrows clinging to the useless telephone wires overhead. I didn’t see a single human footprint other than our own. No smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses ahead of us. The place felt as if no one had lived there in years.
It made sense. Why would anyone have wanted to stay just a couple miles away from our quarantined island and its deadly disease? Maybe some of the townspeople had died, but most of them had probably just gone somewhere else.
Until the virus had caught up with them and they’d died after all.
“Do you think we should check some of the houses too?” Tessa a
sked as we came to a stop at the end of the road, where it branched off into two residential streets. “We might find some food.”
“There’s only so much room in the truck,” I said. And Leo was bringing back more. But maybe we shouldn’t pass up the chance when we were already here.
As I wavered, a sound drifted down the street toward us, faint but distinctive. My body went rigid.
In one of those houses, someone was coughing.
Tessa and Gav pulled their scarves tighter around their faces. But the scarves were intended to keep out only the cold, not killer microbes. My heart thumped. “Let’s go back to the harbor,” I said.
Gav paused, and then nodded. “As long as Leo brings food back from the island, I think we’re okay.”
I flinched when the sparrows leapt from the telephone wires and darted off, but we didn’t see a soul. Still, when we reached the truck, I set my bags down and went straight to the cold box, which I’d left inside the harbor office.
It looked exactly the same as before. I crouched down beside it and rested my head in my mittened hands.
Meredith and I should be okay, with our post-illness immunity. But what about Gav and Tessa and Leo? Maybe we could make it all the way to Ottawa without running into anyone who was sick, if we stuck to the small towns when we needed more gas, but in the city—in the city, there could be more people still alive than had ever lived on the island in the first place. We couldn’t assume none of them would be infected or that we’d easily be able to avoid anyone who was.
Of course, the only other option was staying here and maybe getting blown up.
I lowered my hands onto the cold box. Maybe there was another option. We had five samples of the vaccine. Surely a scientist wouldn’t need all of them to make more? It wouldn’t be so selfish to give a few to my friends, would it, when they were the ones helping me get the vaccine where it needed to go?
An engine growled down by the water, and footsteps rushed past the door. Leo was back.
Outside, everyone else was already on the docks except Tobias, who hung back by the truck looking uncertain. Evening was falling fast, the light draining out of the smoke-tinged sky. A few solar lamps had blinked on throughout the harbor.
Leo had brought the speedboat back, so I guessed our SUV hadn’t survived. But along with bags of food, he was handing out the jugs of gasoline Gav and I had filled.
“How bad was it?” Gav asked as we hauled Leo’s plunder to the truck.
“The hospital’s still standing,” Leo said, and I let out the breath I’d been holding. “Your house too. But a lot of other buildings aren’t. There must have been a blast near the harbor. Your SUV was tipped over, like it’d been thrown a little, and the windshield was shattered. It’s lucky everything inside survived.”
“Did you talk to Nell?” I said.
He nodded. “All the shaking made the generator conk out. She was trying to figure out whether they could fix it or if they’d have to start moving patients.”
“What about Mowat and Fossey?” Meredith said. “Are we just leaving them?”
“They came racing to see me when I came in,” Leo said. “Seemed pretty happy having the run of the place. I put the bags of food on the floor so they can eat as much as they need to.”
“Thanks,” I said, with a second wave of relief, and he shot me a half smile. The memory of our kiss flashed through my mind. My face flushed, and I dragged my eyes away.
“Nell didn’t seem too upset when I told her what we were going to do,” Leo went on, showing no sign that he’d noticed my reaction. “She said…” He hesitated and glanced at Meredith, who was scratching at the pavement with the toe of her boot.
“Meredith,” Tessa said, “could you check the boat and make sure we got all the supplies?”
She frowned, and then seemed to shake herself. “Of course!” she said, and jogged toward the docks. Leo lowered his voice.
“She said it’s probably good for us to get out of there for a while—the town’s in such bad shape she might end up having everyone move across the strait anyway. And she said she really hopes we find the people we need.”
All the heat washed out of me. No one had been interested in leaving the island when we’d realized the strait was now unguarded, because it hardly seemed worth giving up a place that was familiar for some unknown across the water. Nell must be desperate to be considering evacuating.
“Nothing left in the boat!” Meredith called as she came running back.
“Thank you for checking,” I said, giving her a squeeze. “I guess we should eat, and then call it a night. We’ll want to head out first thing.”
“I’ve got a kerosene camping stove in the truck,” Tobias said. “A hot dinner sounds pretty appealing right now.”
“I saw spaghetti in the bags,” Meredith said. “Can we have that?”
“Sure,” I said. “Go on and get out a few cans.”
“We heard someone coughing when we went further into town,” Gav said to Leo as Meredith scrambled into the back of the truck after Tobias. “There are people still here. We’ll have to keep an eye out.”
A weariness passed over Leo’s face. For all that I was trying not to focus on him, I felt a pang of concern. He’d only just come home a few weeks ago, and now we were dragging him away again. If he didn’t think he could take it, he’d say so, wouldn’t he?
“We’ll want to alternate watches while we’re sleeping, then,” he said. “We can’t be too careful.”
He was right. And maybe I could take away one of the fears that must be haunting him, that was going to haunt me as long as he and Gav and Tessa were unprotected.
“I think the three of you should take the vaccine,” I said.
Gav, who’d been about to speak, stopped with his mouth half open. Tessa blinked at me.
“There are five samples,” I continued. “So we’d still have two. We’re obviously going to run into people who are infected—we almost did today. I don’t want one of you to catch it.”
“We will run into people,” Leo said cautiously. “I’d be surprised if we don’t. But are you sure you don’t want to hold on to them, Kae?”
“We don’t even know if the vaccine works,” Gav added.
“If it does, then it’ll be a good thing you took it,” I said. “And if it doesn’t, then it won’t matter that you did. Either way, it can’t hurt. We don’t have any other way of protecting ourselves while we’re on the road. And I can’t see why anyone would need more than one sample to understand what Dad did, when we have all his notebooks too.”
“They make vaccines using parts of the virus, don’t they?” Tessa said. “Is there any chance we could get sick from it?”
I hesitated. “I guess. My dad tried it on himself and he was fine for almost three weeks. He wouldn’t have used it if he wasn’t sure he’d gotten it right.”
“If anyone was going to get it right, I’d say it’s your dad,” Leo agreed.
“Okay,” Tessa said. “I’d rather take a chance on the vaccine than see what happens if we’re exposed without it.”
Leo wavered a moment longer and then said, “All right. Let’s do this.”
“Then we’ll have three samples left,” Gav said. “Because I don’t want it.”
“Gav,” I started, but he motioned for me to wait.
“Give us a moment?” he said to the others.
He took my hands as Tessa and Leo drifted away to help Tobias set up the stove. “Kae,” he said. “I can see why you want to do this. It just doesn’t feel right to me. If I get some false sense of security from a vaccine that turns out not to be effective, maybe I’ll make a mistake I wouldn’t have otherwise. I don’t want to have that idea in my head, that I’m safe.”
“So just take it and assume it does nothing,” I said. “We have no idea how bad it’ll be in the city, Gav.”
“I know,” he said, and swallowed. “But I still—you know, my mom was one of the first to catch it? W
hen we started hearing the news, all she’d say was, ‘Someone’ll come up with a cure in a few days, it’ll all be fine, it always is.’ She was so convinced that the doctors and the scientists could solve all our problems that she didn’t take precautions, she didn’t worry. And now she’s lying somewhere in the quarry with all the other thousands of people the virus has killed.”
“You’d never be like that,” I protested.
“No,” he said. “But taking the vaccine is going to change how I think. No one has that much control over their mind. You know that.”
I did. I also knew how much it would hurt him if I said I wasn’t letting him on the truck unless he took the vaccine, that I’d rather he stayed on the island. It wasn’t fair of me, was it, to force something on him that he felt so strongly about, so that I didn’t have to worry as much? It was his decision. He was already doing so much for me.
“You have to be incredibly careful,” I said. “No playing the hero.”
“No hero business,” he agreed. “We’re both coming back here safe, Kae. I promise.”
The resolve in his eyes made everything else around me fade away. The cold. The long road ahead. The other boy who might be watching us right now. I slid my hand around his neck and kissed him. Gav kissed me back, his gloved fingers cupping my cheek. And for the space of that moment, at least, I believed what he’d said too.
Our first day on the road, we passed homes and warehouses and off-ramps leading into towns, but we only stopped twice, by stretches of vacant land, to pour all our extra gasoline into the tank and to switch drivers. Now and then I caught a glimpse of what looked like chimney smoke in the distance, but that was the only sign of anyone still living. The truck’s tires hissed endlessly over the snow-covered freeway.
For the first time, the gravity of what Leo had told us about the mainland completely sank in. The rest of the country hadn’t been callously ignoring our island’s plight. They’d been so overwhelmed they couldn’t even save themselves.
