by Megan Crewe
We marched up the ramp to the freeway, hauling the sleds. It was a lot harder to pull one that was loaded down. My arm was already starting to ache when we reached the road. One side was heaped with snow, the other covered with windswept ice. We kept to the latter, the sleds scraping along behind us, leaving no trail.
After a few minutes, we left behind the last of the town’s buildings. Pines and spruces sprang up along the freeway. Leo twisted his sled’s rope one way and another, and finally stepped inside it to let his waist take the weight. Before long, the rest of us had followed suit. It took some time to get used to, but after a while I was pulling the sled along like I’d been doing it my whole life.
Meredith strode beside me, her lighter sled veering a little to the left to bump into mine, her chin tipped up and her face set in the most incredible expression of determination. As if she’d decided she was going to walk all the way to Ottawa in one go. The twin braids I’d twisted her hair into the night before swayed where they poked from beneath her tasseled hat.
Beyond the road, I couldn’t make out a single building now. If not for the freeway and the occasional mile marker, we could have been explorers lost in some vast wilderness. The breeze licked under my scarf, and I shivered.
Before the epidemic, I used to imagine wandering off the beaten track with nothing but some camping gear and a few notebooks, to watch the wildlife away from human activity. But it had never felt this lonely in my imagination. Maybe because back then, I’d always have known there was a town with running water and electricity and people who’d actually be happy to see me no more than a few days’ hike away.
If squirrels and raccoons could manage to survive weather like this every year, we could too, I told myself.
“You made it most of the way back to the island on foot, right?” Gav said to Leo, after we’d been on the road about an hour. Leo nodded.
“After the border,” he said. “There was hardly any snow then, but it still wasn’t a lot of fun. I didn’t have camping gear or a good stash of food like we do, though.”
Meredith peered at him with open curiosity. “How did you do it, then?” she asked.
“Mere,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Leo said. He laughed awkwardly. “I guess it was luck. And all those hunting trips my dad dragged me on—I knew how to make a fire, catch things to eat. And just not giving up.”
“Look,” Tessa said, breaking in. “I think there’s a car.”
There was: a gray minivan stranded in a drift of snow by the shoulder of the freeway, the glint of its side-view mirror catching the sunlight. Gav reached it first. The driver’s-side door opened when he tried it, and he leaned inside. When he reemerged, he was frowning.
“The owners must have taken the key with them,” he said. “I guess they figured they’d be coming back for it later.”
“The cars along here are probably all a lost cause,” Tobias said. “They’d only be left on the freeway if they were out of gas or broke down, right? We’d have a better chance in a town. If there’s one parked in a driveway, the keys might still be in the house somewhere.”
“And maybe the people it belongs to, too,” I said. Alive, or dead.
Tobias looked away. “I’d say it’s worth trying. There’ll be people who just died at home, didn’t want to bother with a hospital—they don’t need a car anymore. I know my stepdad would have said screw you if anyone told him to stay squashed in some room with a bunch of other infected people.”
“Guess it’s a good thing you were off at an army base, then,” Gav remarked.
“Believe me,” Tobias muttered, “I didn’t want to be there, either.”
We tramped on, crossing a bridge over a frozen river. The rope cut into my middle as we climbed the low arch, but after we crested the top, gravity pulled the sleds so that they chased us down the opposite side. We all ran, laughing breathlessly by the time we reached the bottom.
“I wish the road went down the whole way,” Meredith said, setting off another round of tired laugher.
It was only a few minutes later that Leo halted in midstride and motioned for us to stop too.
“You hear that?” he asked.
We hesitated. For a second, I could hear only the breeze ruffling the treetops. Then the faint rumble of an engine reached my ears, getting gradually louder.
“Car coming,” Gav said. “Think we should ask them to give us a ride, if we can all squeeze in?”
“I wouldn’t assume they’re friendly,” Leo said. “I’m not sure we even want them to see we’re here.”
“How are we going to know if we don’t give them a chance?” Tessa asked.
I thought about how easily the guy in the last town had pretended to make peace, and then doubled back to destroy our truck. “I’m okay with not knowing,” I said.
“Let’s go, then,” Tobias said. “Off the road, into the trees.”
“Quickly,” Leo added. “They’re almost here.”
The sound of the engine had grown loud enough that I could hear it even when we were talking. My pulse started to thump in my ears. Gav helped me heft my sled over the ditch, and we scrambled with it through the trees. We slid down a short slope, setting the sled down at the bottom. As he hurried back for his, I went to help Meredith. She tripped coming down the slope and plunged forward amid the snow. Her sled dropped with a thump, but nothing fell out.
“You okay?” I whispered. She nodded, her face turned away.
As the others crouched beside us, the engine noise rose from a rumble to a roar. Tires thumped coming off the bridge. I froze, peering over the top of the slope through the trees.
A pale green van growled down the freeway. A woman with long flax-blond hair beneath a red hat sat in the driver’s seat. She had one hand on the wheel and the other balancing a thin object that poked out through the open window. The tip of a rifle.
I caught a glimpse of at least one other figure in the van, and then it slipped out of sight farther down the road. We waited, silently, as the roar faded back into a grumble. I was just about to speak when it suddenly cut out.
We couldn’t see them, but the breeze carried every sound. The squeak of the door as it opened, the thud as it closed. The clomp of boots on the icy asphalt. A crackle of static. And a hard voice that resonated through the trees, distinctly annoyed.
“You said they were heading for Ottawa?” the woman said. My skin went clammy. They weren’t just dangerous—they were looking for us. They’d talked to the guy in town. Maybe this was the help Leo guessed he’d been waiting for.
The static crackled again, around a voice too distorted for me to make out. “Two-way radios,” Tobias murmured. “Smart.”
Whatever the voice on the other end said, the woman didn’t like it. “Well, I can see ten miles of freeway from where I’m standing, and they’re not on it,” she said. “They must have taken some other route, unless you think they grew wings and flew.”
More crackling.
“You’re the one who didn’t hold them up well enough. You’re the one Michael’s going to be pissed at.”
Crackle.
“Yeah, and up yours,” the woman replied. The van door whined open again, and the engine sputtered to life. Tires screeched on the ice. Half a minute later, the van sped past us in the opposite direction, heading back toward the town.
I sank down on the snow, my breath rushing out, and rubbed the cool surface of my gloves against my face. When I opened my eyes again, I noticed that Meredith had hunched against the trunk of one of the trees. A wet shine glinted on her cheeks.
“Hey, Mere,” I said, “it’s okay now. They’re gone.”
She answered with a whimper and stretched out her hand. My heart stopped.
The palm of her mitten was soaked through with blood.
“I was trying to be quiet,” Meredith said shakily. “I knew we didn’t want those people to find us.”
I peeled off her mitten as gently as I could, fighting t
o keep my own voice calm. “What happened? When did it happen?”
Meredith winced. Her small palm was slashed with a ragged cut, more blood already welling along its length.
“I think it was when I fell, when we were getting off the road,” she said. “There was something sharp in the snow. It really hurt. But I squeezed and squeezed my hand, and that made it hurt less. I was being strong like you, Kaelyn.” She gave me a pained smile.
Strong like me. I didn’t feel all that strong right now.
“Here,” Tobias said, offering me a roll of gauze, and I flinched. I hadn’t heard him approach. “I think there’s a couple antiseptic wipes in here too,” he continued, pawing through the first-aid kit he’d popped open. I ripped open the thin packet he handed me and dabbed the cut.
“That was really brave, Meredith,” Leo said. “You did good. You helped keep us safe.”
She shifted her smile to him, and bit her lip as I started wrapping gauze around her palm. I’d done a pretty awful job of keeping her safe. I hadn’t even noticed she was hurt. Tobias said he had a couple of those wipes—were we going to be able to keep the cut clean until it healed? What if it got infected?
I didn’t even have a new mitten to give her. Her old one was too damp to keep her hand warm now. Why hadn’t we picked up extras when we’d gotten the blankets and hats?
“Sounds like that bunch was called in by those guys in town,” Tobias said. “They really want what we have.”
“At least they gave up on this route,” Tessa said.
“For now,” Leo said. “There aren’t that many roads. If they want to find us badly enough, they’ll come back.”
Gav kicked at the snow. “Maybe we should go back and settle this now. Convince them we’re not worth messing with.”
I remembered the muzzle of the rifle poking through the van window. “We’re not going anywhere near those people!” I said, more sharply than I meant to. I pulled off one of my gloves, tugged it over Meredith’s hand, kissed her forehead, and stood up. “I’m going to look at the map.”
I grabbed the map book from the front of my sled and stalked off through the trees. After about twenty feet, I stopped and leaned against the flaking bark of a birch tree’s trunk. My legs felt like jelly. For a moment, the firm surface of the tree behind me was the only thing holding me up.
Meredith’s okay, I reminded myself. It was a bad scratch, but ultimately only a scratch. We had supplies, we had the vaccine, we had a map. Nothing had changed.
Except that at least a couple people with a gun were after us, and we didn’t know how long or how far they’d chase us, and any one of us could get hurt worse at any time. By our pursuers, through another accident like Meredith’s, from the cold. We hadn’t even spent one night without heat yet. How many of those nights would there be between here and Ottawa? We had hundreds of miles to go.
Was I strong enough to get all of us through this?
Did I have any choice? If I suggested we turn back toward the island, everyone else would probably agree, but that journey wouldn’t be any less dangerous. And it would mean passing the town where we’d lost Tobias’s truck.
I dragged the crisp winter air into my lungs, hoping it would settle my thoughts, but they whirled on. I opened the map book. If we kept going toward Ottawa, we couldn’t stay on the freeway. As the woman in the red hat had suggested, there were stretches where they’d be able to spot us from miles away.
The ground amid the trees was more uneven than the road, and covered with snow instead of ice, but I didn’t think the going would be much slower. The sleds might slide easier. We could follow alongside the freeway through the forest until we found a new car and could put some real distance between us and the people in the van.
The others’ voices rose and fell behind me, muffled by the trees. As I straightened up, footsteps crunched through the snow. I turned, expecting Gav. But it was Leo who was walking toward me.
“You all right, Kae?” he said.
The concern in his eyes and the way he said my name made my heart skip the way it had that day in the garage. A wave of frustration rolled over me, tensing my shoulders and closing my throat. I didn’t need this too. Not now. Not ever.
“Just wanted a minute to think,” I said.
“What happened to Meredith wasn’t your fault,” he said, even though he had to know just as well as I did that it was.
“It’s my fault all of us are here,” I said. “You told me it’d be bad. You knew people would be this crazy. But I decided to go anyway.”
He didn’t answer, only shrugged, lowering his gaze. I could see him pulling back into that distant place inside his head, and all at once I was twice as angry. I wanted the real Leo. The Leo who could smile through every snide comment our fifth grade teacher made about “foreigners.” The Leo who practiced a spin a hundred times, stumbling, and just laughed and said he had to keep trying. The Leo who’d pulled off his favorite T-shirt to use as a bandage the time I fell out of a tree and cut the back of my head open, who ran to the nearest house to call for help and then sat with me and held my hand and told me jokes all the way to the hospital.
This boy standing in front of me, looking beaten—this boy who’d kissed me with his girlfriend just a building away and then pretended it didn’t matter—this wasn’t my best friend. And I had no idea how to get the boy who he had been back.
“You’re doing what you have to do,” Leo said finally. “Because of the vaccine. We all get that.”
I wasn’t sure that was true, but I didn’t want to talk anymore. So all I said was, “Yeah.” I moved to walk past him, and he caught me with a hand on my arm.
“Are we all right, Kae?” he asked.
There were four layers of cloth between his skin and mine, but I could still feel a faint warmth where he touched me. I pulled my arm away.
“Sure,” I said, but the word came out so harsh even I wouldn’t have believed it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low. “What happened in the garage…it was a stupid thing to do. But I meant what I said. I’m not going to try—it’s not going to happen again.”
“You shouldn’t have done it in the first place,” I snapped.
Too many emotions to count flickered across Leo’s face, but there was one I couldn’t mistake. Hurt. “I’m sorry,” he said again, stiffly. “I didn’t know it was that awful.”
My fingers curled into my palms. “I didn’t say that. It’s so much more complicated, Leo. Tessa’s my friend. You’re supposed to be my friend. I can’t—”
I couldn’t keep discussing this, not when Gav was turning toward us where he stood with the group by the road. “Kae?” he called, peering through the forest.
Leo was looking at me almost curiously. A cold spot formed in the pit of my stomach.
“Forget it,” I said. “We’ve got to get going. It doesn’t matter now anyway.”
I stepped around him and headed back to the things that did.
We made it six more miles before we stopped for the night in a tiny town that was barely more than a scattering of houses, a church, and a convenience store along a road branching off from the freeway. Someone had driven a pickup truck into the side of the store. The store’s window was shattered, and what we could see of the truck’s front end was smashed flat. I wondered if the driver had been sick, hallucinating, when the accident happened.
Even though there were no footprints or tire tracks on the street, we walked down the road slowly, pausing every now and then to listen. No sound reached us but the wind. My eyes ached from the cold, and my legs from the walking. Numbness was starting to dull the nerves in my feet despite my two layers of socks and my thick boots. Meredith’s head was drooping. But we still had a little farther to go.
To my relief, we found an unlocked house on our second try. We went in, wiping our boots on the inner mat out of habit. No one was going to care about the state of the floors. Pictureless nails dotted the living room, and th
e closets and beds had been stripped bare. The people who’d lived here must have tried to run from the virus. The emptiness of the town seemed to echo through the walls.
Gav poked at the fireplace. “Looks like it’s usable,” he said. “There are even a couple logs here that are hardly charred.”
“If the people in that van are still searching for us, won’t the smoke give us away?” Tessa said.
“We’d be okay once it gets dark,” Tobias said. “I—I’ll go have a look at the trees around here. If we can get some spruce branches, or elder, they don’t make as much smoke.”
“Really?” Gav said. “Wood’s wood, isn’t it?”
Tobias shrugged, his head low. “We had a whole section on how to evade the enemy if you’re stationed outdoors. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Within an hour, we had flames dancing in the fireplace, wafting a thin heat and tangy spruce scent through the living room. We all huddled close, taking turns warming cans of soup at the edge of the hearth. The feeling slowly prickled back into my feet.
“We should be careful how much we’re eating,” Leo said. “Now that we’re going to be on the road longer than we expected.”
“We can’t cut back too much if we’re going to have energy for walking,” I pointed out.
“Army rations are pretty filling,” Tobias said. “That’s what they’re made for. I’d figure we’re good for another ten days.” He paused. “It’s water you’ve got to worry about more. We could melt some snow here to fill up the empty bottles before we go.”
After we’d eaten, he and Tessa and Leo went out with the three pots we’d found in the kitchen, and came back with heaps of snow. “Careful,” Tobias said as he set his by the edge of the fire. “We’ve got to pour a little water in first. Otherwise—you’d never believe it—the damn stuff can burn the bottom of the pot.”
“Are we just going to sleep here?” Meredith asked. “On the floor?”
“We could bring the mattresses down from the beds upstairs,” Tessa said. “Make it more comfortable.”
