by Megan Crewe
But when everything else slipped away, I could still feel the long road between me and wherever the vaccine needed to be, stretching into the distance in my head. Like a leash that kept tugging at me even when I couldn’t move. It was a rigid little knot in the middle of my chest.
My arms tightened around Gav. I kissed him harder. His hands edged up my back, and I didn’t want them to stop. But the knot wouldn’t loosen. It only tugged tighter as I tried to ignore it.
I lowered my head and leaned into him, tucking my face against the crook of his neck. His heart was thumping even faster than mine.
“Kae?” he said, and then, “I didn’t mean it like—I wasn’t trying to push.”
“I know,” I said quickly. “There’s just… There’s too much in my head. Too many worries that won’t shut up. Can I, like, get a rain check? Until after we’re done, we’ve handed off the vaccine, and this is over?”
Gav laughed and hugged me. “Is that a promise?” he said into my ear. I smiled against his skin. Then I eased back just far enough that I could kiss him in my reply.
Beyond the bedroom window, the snow kept tumbling down.
Three days later, the blizzard was still raging. Every now and then the snow lightened up enough that we could make out the swaying trees by the road, but they soon disappeared again. And the wind never stopped howling.
“I didn’t know a storm could last this long,” I said, when we were sitting at the dining table eating lunch. Or what passed for lunch these days. Mine consisted of a can of tuna. It wasn’t much, but if we’d been eating normally, we’d have run out of food already.
“I lived up north for a couple years when I was a kid,” Tobias said. “This isn’t too unusual.”
The tuna stuck in my throat, but I forced it down. I was trying not to think about the small stack of jars and ration bars left in the kitchen. Leo’s snares were useless in this weather. I found myself eyeing the paper wrapper on the can, wondering if there were any calories in that. Or in the frozen grass outside.
Stomachs could adapt. Koala bears managed to live completely on poisonous leaves. Of course, they’d had thousands of years to evolve, and we had less than a week.
“If it keeps up much longer, we can try to get to one of the other houses nearby, check for more food,” Gav said, but none of us had caught so much as a glimpse of the neighboring buildings since the storm had started. The rope we used to get the firewood wasn’t going to stretch that far.
“We’ll see,” I said, trying not to think about that either. Trying not to think about how aimless the rest of the day would be. To pass the time, we’d get out the cards or the board games Justin found: Risk and Battleship and Clue. Gav might play, or he might go upstairs to pace and stare outside, as if a supermarket was going to appear in the snow. After dinner, Tobias would get out the radio. The static was warped and whistling now, and he admitted that the storm was scrambling any signals heading our way. But we kept trying, kept hoping to hear Drew’s voice come crackling out of the speaker.
I got up to throw away the can. And outside, the endless wind beat at the walls, and the endless snow rasped against the windows, on and on and on.
I’d lost count of the days by the morning I woke up to blue sky outside the bedroom window, like a surprise Christmas morning.
I leapt up and padded over to the glass, half afraid it was some sort of trick, a mirage. It wasn’t. The fields stretched out crisp and white, reflecting the rising sun. Not a single cloud marred the perfect sky.
It was the best present I could ever remember getting.
I wavered a little on my feet, hunger-driven faintness catching up with me. All I’d eaten the day before was a can of corn and a small portion of the stew Gav had mixed up over the wood stove, after frying some meat I’d decided not to ask about. As I’d choked it down, I hadn’t been able to stop picturing the cat frozen in the snare.
But none of that mattered now. I threw myself onto the bed beside Gav, as if it really was Christmas morning and I was ten years younger, and shoved his shoulder.
“Wake up!” I said as he winced. “The storm’s over. We can leave!”
His eyes popped open and he shot up.
“Let’s get out of here, then,” he said as he scrambled out from under the blanket.
I pulled on my boots and hurried down the hall, banging on the bedroom doors. “Storm’s stopped!” I called. “We’re heading out!”
By the time Gav and I had carried our blankets from the bedroom down to the sleds, the others were up. We gathered in the kitchen, my gut twisting as I looked at the row of food left on the counter. Five ration bars. Two cans of peaches. Three cans of peas. That was it. But we’d be on the move again today. We’d find more. We had to.
“Save the ration bars,” Tobias said. “We can break ’em up if we need to. But we’d better all eat before we get walking, or we won’t make it far.”
“Maybe we should check the barn before we go,” Leo said as I peeled the lid off a tin of peaches. “There might be something useful in there.”
I’d been so excited about leaving I’d forgotten there was part of the property we hadn’t explored. “Good idea,” I said, sipping syrup out of the can. My stomach clenched. I’d never realized that when you got this hungry, eating could hurt more than going without. When I wasn’t eating, the hunger faded into a dull wooziness in the background. At the taste of food, it grew claws.
“Let’s do it quickly,” Gav said. “We’re losing daylight.”
We had to shove the front door a few times before we could push it through the snow that had been blown onto the porch. Slogging through the knee-high drifts, we crossed the yard to the barn. The wall that faced us had a wide, garagelike door on one side. Justin hurried over to a button on the frame and jabbed at it. The door creaked up, the gears whining. I sucked in a breath.
Just a few feet away, inside, stood a truck with a snowplow mounted on its front. Tobias let out a low whistle, and Gav laughed. I just stared. This really was some kind of Christmas.
“Are there keys?” Justin said, bounding inside. The others guys followed him, peering through the truck’s windows, examining the tires. I stepped into the shelter of the barn. A second car was parked deeper inside: a small two-door with patches of rust along the bumper.
The surge of excitement faded into an uncomfortable chill. There was only room for the two vehicles here, and I hadn’t gotten the impression from the house that the family was wealthy enough to own three. Why would they have left on foot?
Maybe a friend had brought them to the hospital. Or maybe some of them had made it back, headed out on foot to search the neighbor’s houses for food, and been lost in a storm like the one that had brought us here.
“Got it!” Gav shouted from the far corner. The key jingled against the ring as he lifted it off the hook. “Let’s make sure this thing runs.”
He hopped in and turned the key. The engine rumbled. “Still has a third of a tank,” he said, leaning out. “We can get pretty far on that and what we siphoned from the van.”
The smell of exhaust clouded the air as Gav pulled the truck out of the barn. He fiddled with the controls, raising and then lowering the plow. “That is sweet!” Justin said. He clambered into the passenger seat and peered over the back. “Room for all of us too.”
Of course there was. The family would have gotten a truck that could hold all of them: Mom and Dad, brother and sisters. The photo in the upstairs hall swam up in my memory. I turned away from the sunlight.
The garage area took up only part of the barn. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dim interior, I could see a door set in the side wall. I stood there for a minute, while the guys experimented with the plow. This was the last room on the property that we hadn’t checked.
I balked for a second, without any real reason. Someone needed to look. It might as well be me. Forcing my legs to move, I walked over and pulled open the door.
On the other side, a
short row of empty stable stalls led toward a broad, high-ceilinged room. Bales of hay were stacked against the far wall. The light from the high windows made them shine pale gold. I took a step forward, my body relaxing, and my gaze stuttered over a dark stain on the cement floor just beyond the stalls.
A dark stain, and, in the shadows, the curve of an upturned hand.
I strode past the first two stalls and jerked to a halt. I must have made a sound, but I didn’t hear it, only felt myself clapping my fingers over my mouth, as if I could cram the shriek back in. As if that would make what I was seeing less real.
The hand on the floor belonged to a small figure with her head turned away from me, long dark hair fanned out around her bluish face. Three other bodies lay closer to the wall amid the shreds of hay that scattered the floor, reddish stains beneath them. Two had the hoods of their coats pulled up, obscuring their faces, but the other, the man, was sprawled as if holding his hand out to me, dried blood caked in his hair and around his head, the angular shape of a revolver just inches from his outstretched arm.
Feet pounded across the concrete in the room behind me. I stumbled backward, bracing myself against the frame of a stall.
“What happened, Kae?”
Gav’s voice sounded as if it were coming from far away, much farther than the thudding of my pulse inside my head. I spun around.
“Hey,” he said, his eyes widening when he saw my expression. I opened my mouth to tell him, and all that came out was a sob. He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me to him. “Hey, whatever it is, we’re all okay.”
They aren’t, I thought as I shivered against him. We had eaten their food and burned their wood and slept in their beds, while they were lying out here in the cold and the blood.…
Someone brushed past us. The footsteps stopped with a sharp intake of breath.
“What is it?” Gav said.
“Four of them,” Leo’s voice replied. He swallowed audibly. “Four bodies. Looks like…looks like the whole family.”
“There were five,” I said, curling my fingers into Gav’s coat. “In the photo there were five.”
Gav squeezed me closer. “From the virus?” he asked Leo.
“Shot,” Leo said. “I think by the dad, and then he shot himself.”
“What?” Justin said, pushing past us. “What’s going on?” I looked up as he barged past Leo. He flinched, backpedaling, when he saw the bodies.
“How could he do that?” I said. The scene was burned into my brain, too neat for me to blame it on some crazed hallucination. He’d brought them out here purposely, in order to kill them. His own kids. His wife?
“We don’t know what happened, Kae,” Gav said quietly. “Maybe they were all sick, and he thought this was better than making them go through the worst of it before they died.”
“He had the plow,” I said. “They could have at least tried to find help.” Instead he’d just decided, for all of them, that it wasn’t worth going on.
Maybe I should have understood. There was a time when I hadn’t wanted to keep trying anymore. When I’d thought I was alone and there wasn’t any point. But I’d been wrong. I hadn’t been alone—I’d had Gav and Tessa and Meredith. If I hadn’t kept trying, Meredith would probably have died, and the vaccine samples might have lingered in the research center’s lab until there was no one left to find them.
And even at my lowest moment, I’d made the choice only for myself. I would never have brought anyone with me over that edge.
“Let’s just go,” Leo said. “We can’t do anything for them.”
That much was true. “Yeah,” I said, turning my head away.
Justin had regained his usual enthusiasm by the time we’d walked out to the truck. “I’m the first driver!” he called, holding up the key he must have taken out of the ignition when Gav left it.
“You’re fourteen,” Tobias said. “There’s no way you have your license.”
“I’ve practiced,” Justin said. “My dad used to take me out on Sunday mornings and we’d drive around the side roads. It’s not like there’s any cops around to pull us over and check.”
“I’m going to bet you didn’t practice on unplowed freeways,” Leo said.
“Anyway,” Gav said, “I found the key. I’ll drive first. Let’s get going.”
He held out his hand, but Justin stepped back, folding the key into his fist. “Give me a chance,” he said. “I thought you all wanted me to pull my own weight.”
Tobias sighed. “I guess your dad did teach you how to shoot a gun, all right.”
“I don’t think this is the best time to find out if that goes for driving too,” Leo said.
“Come on!” Gav said. “We’re wasting time.”
He snatched at Justin’s hand, and Justin shoved him away. But Gav had been in plenty of skirmishes before. A sound of protest hadn’t even left my mouth when he grabbed Justin’s other arm and twisted it behind his back. As Justin thrashed out with his free elbow, the key slipped from his fingers. A silver glint arced through the air and dropped into the snow beyond the edge of the driveway, vanishing. My heart stopped.
Gav’s grip loosened, and Justin yanked his arm away. “Now look!” he said. “What the hell was that? You made me lose it.”
“If you hadn’t been acting like a five-year-old in the first place,” Gav snapped, scanning the snow. “I should have—”
“Stop it!” I shouted. My voice seemed to echo in the silence that followed. I pushed my hands back through my hair. If we kept squabbling like this, we were never going to make it to the city. The truck could be useless now.
My mind tripped back to the man in the barn, the decision he’d made for his family, and I pushed the image away. Putting my foot down about this didn’t make me the slightest bit like him. I was keeping us alive.
“We have to get to Toronto,” I said. “Nothing else is important. So the people who’ve passed their driving tests will drive, and the people who haven’t won’t, and we’re not going to fight about it. We’re not going to do anything at all unless it gets us closer to the city or stops us from starving to death. And anyone who doesn’t like that can just stay here and do whatever they want to do instead. Okay?”
I must have sounded more fierce than I felt inside. “No argument here,” Leo said meekly, and Gav said, “Sorry. I got carried away.” Tobias nodded, his eyes downcast. After a moment, Justin’s shoulders slumped and he mumbled, “Right. Got it.”
We converged around the area where the key had fallen, sweeping our hands over the snow. I glanced up at the sky, inwardly pleading, Don’t let the day end like this.
Leo gave a cry of victory and held up the key. I rocked back on my heels with a gasp of relief. Gav straightened up, accepting the key from Leo when he offered it. He reached out to squeeze my shoulder.
“Toronto, here we come.”
The last hours before we reached Toronto ticked away with the shrinking numbers next to the city’s name on the freeway signs we passed. 156. 117. 78. 33.
As we rolled closer, buildings replaced the fields and forests that had lined the roads for most of our journey. The sun sank, darkness setting in, but none of us said a word about stopping. We’d hardly rested since we’d piled into the truck yesterday morning, just stopping once that afternoon in a small town to siphon gas and search the houses for food. Otherwise, we’d been trading off driving and navigating duties, with whoever ended up in the backseat doing their best to nap.
Tobias was driving now, finding his way by moonlight and the sweep of the truck’s high beams. I peered out the windows from my seat in the middle of the back, only groggily awake, but too wound up to sleep. Here and there, lights flickered in the distance. Maybe lanterns, maybe fires. My hopes leapt with each glimpse.
Light meant people. We’d spent so much of the trip trying to avoid meeting anyone else, but now our mission depended on it. On finding the right people, here.
The sign at the city limits was so en
crusted with snow I almost couldn’t make out the words: WELCOME TO TORONTO. “We’re here!” I said. “We made it!”
Justin pounded the dashboard up front, Tobias pumped his fist in the air, and Leo let out a weak “Woo-hoo!” Gav, who’d been dozing against my shoulder, shifted.
“My turn to drive?” he murmured.
“Go back to sleep,” I said, leaning the side of my head against his. “The driving’s almost done.”
He straightened up instead, blinking.
“Where do you think we should turn off?” Tobias asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I was the only one of us who’d lived in Toronto, but the size and busyness of the city had intimidated me so much I hadn’t wandered much outside our west end neighborhood. I squinted through the glass, my head foggy. “There’s no point in trying to look for people at night. I guess we should find a place to crash and get started in the morning.”
Justin responded with a jaw-popping yawn. “Sleep sounds good.”
“We don’t want the truck to catch anyone’s eye,” Leo said. “It’d look like a pretty great prize.”
“Let’s take the next exit, then,” I said. “It’ll be harder to find someplace secluded downtown.”
“Here we go,” Tobias said. We fell silent as he eased the truck off the freeway and down the exit ramp.
We passed a set of dead streetlights and crawled along a wide road lined with strip malls. All of the windows were smashed, and trails of footprints looped through the snow in the vacant parking lots. Tobias clicked off the high beams, leaving only the dim glow of the truck’s running lights and the moon overhead.
