Lives We Lost,The

by Megan Crewe

  In his corner, Tobias shrugged.

  Meredith had already sprung to her feet. “We can take a real shower?” she said. “Where?”

  “I’ll show you,” the woman replied, her voice amused, and stepped back to the door.

  Gav shooed me away. “Just come back quick,” he said, and tapped the cold box with his heel. “I’ll keep watch over these for you.”

  Meredith was already scampering out the door. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”

  “Step carefully,” the woman said as we came out of the cabin. “It’s all ice. We spray down the yard regularly to keep it that way —no footprints. It’s one of our precautionary measures. We’ve only had a few unfriendly intruders wander out this way, but we can’t be too careful.”

  I found my balance on the slick ground. We were standing in a clearing surrounded by forest on three sides. A semicircle of cabins like the one we’d just left arced around a larger wooden building. The tall greenhouse Tessa had spotted yesterday stood behind it, glinting in the early morning sun.

  The woman motioned to the forest at our left. “We moved your sleds into the trees where the spraying wouldn’t reach them. But you should find they’re as you left them.”

  “No offense,” Leo said, shading his eyes against the glare off the ice, “but who are you, and where are we?”

  “Oh!” she said, sounding honestly surprised. “My apologies. My name’s Hilary Cloutier. And you’ve met Justin.” She patted her son’s shoulder, and he scowled.

  “This was once an artist colony,” Hilary explained as we started toward the larger building. “A place off the grid for painters and writers and composers to spend a month or two focusing on their craft. There’s quite a large generator under the gathering house. For the most part we rely on natural light, but we have heat and enough power to run the stove.”

  “That’s convenient,” I said.

  “We didn’t end up here by chance,” Hilary said. “I’m a sculptor—I worked here for a month every year. When services started failing and people were panicking in our town, this was the first place I thought of, somewhere we might be safe. Everyone here came for the same reason.”

  A sculptor? “So how do you know I wasn’t just making things up about the vaccine?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Oh, my sister was a nurse. I’m naturally curious. I badgered her with so many questions when we first heard about this mysterious virus. Before, well . . .”

  Her laugh had been a little stiff, and the “was” didn’t escape me. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Have you gotten any crops growing in the greenhouse?” Tessa asked.

  Hilary nodded. “Oh yes. We have precautions there too, of course. In case someone comes through who’d try to run us out and take over if they knew the colony was functioning. We keep the vegetable plants spread out, and let the weeds grow around them so it looks as if it was abandoned. But we’ve produced some carrots and beans and peas and tomatoes, and the pear tree is just starting to bear fruit.”

  “Where are you planning on taking the vaccine?” she said as we reached a door in the side of the gathering house.

  I hesitated automatically, but Meredith had obviously decided these people were trustworthy.

  “Ottawa!” she announced. “We’re going to find scientists and doctors so they can make more vaccine for everyone.”

  “Ottawa.” Hilary’s eyes went distant. “We have a couple from Ottawa with us. Maybe you should talk with them.” She opened the door. “Well, this is our bathing area. The water won’t get too hot—we have all our heat settings turned down so as not to strain the generator—but there’s plenty of it. There should be soap inside, and extra towels on the shelf. Come around to the front when you’re finished. Everyone’s having breakfast.”

  On the other side of the door we found a rack with towels that were drying, and a shelf holding folded towels and bottles of liquid soap. Two hallways branched off from that small room, marked with signs for men and women.

  “Pretty amazing what they’ve got set up here,” I said.

  “They could probably be totally self-sufficient with just the greenhouse,” Tessa said. “Grow fruits and vegetables and grains for bread . . . though the space restrictions would be a problem, depending on the number of people. With lentils for protein and spinach for iron, they wouldn’t even need meat. I’d like to take a look at what they’ve got.”

  “I bet she’ll give you a tour if you ask,” I said as we parted ways with Leo.

  At the other end of the hall, we stepped into a change room lined with open shower stalls. I might have felt awkward showering with company, but seeing Tessa strip off her clothes like it was nothing, I figured if it didn’t matter to her, it wouldn’t matter to me.

  The first blast of lukewarm water from the showerhead jolted a breathless giggle out of me. Grinning, I scrubbed the grapefruitscented soap over my body from head to toe. I hadn’t showered in weeks, not since the water filtration broke down on the island. I’d forgotten what a glorious feeling it was: the drumming of the spray on my skin, the slippery froth of soap under my fingers, the lightness of hair that’s squeaky clean.

  When I’d worked myself thoroughly, I joined Meredith and helped her rinse the lather out of her thicker hair. Then I examined her injured palm. The cut had scabbed over, the edges already starting to flake away over healed skin. No infection redness.

  “You took good care of it,” I told her. She tipped her face into the spray, smiling.

  “Do we really have to go right away?” she asked as we were toweling off. “Maybe Tobias can call someone on his radio from here, and they’ll come get the vaccine from us.”

  Something in my chest twisted. I could hardly blame her for hoping. “I wish he could, Mere, believe me,” I said. “But I don’t know if anyone’s still trying to reach out on the radios. Our best bet is to keep going.” My nose wrinkled involuntarily as I pulled on my travel worn clothes. At Tobias’s advice, we’d been using a little melted snow to wipe ourselves down and rinse our underthings each night on the road, so they weren’t gross, but they weren’t exactly clean either.

  “Okay,” Meredith said, but she shot one last longing look at the showers before we headed out. She didn’t have to go, I realized abruptly. If we asked Hilary to take her in . . .

  And left her with strangers? Hilary might seem nice, but I’d hardly known her half an hour.

  Leo was waiting for us in the towel room. “Ready to go?” he asked, his shoulders hunched inside his coat. I wondered whether he thought we could completely trust the people here.

  “We should take our breakfast over to the quarantine cabin and eat with Gav and Tobias,” I said as we stepped outside, “so they know we haven’t forgotten them.”

  We half walked, half skated along the icy ground to the other side of the building, and almost slid into Justin as we came around the corner. I caught my balance on the wall.

  “Hey,” Justin said, his voice low. “Are you really going to take off again today, to keep looking for someone to clone that vaccine of yours?”

  “That’s the idea,” I said.

  He opened his mouth as if he was going to continue, but then Hilary leaned out of the doorway behind him. “There you are,” she said. “Come in. You must be starving. Justin brought a tray to your friends.”

  “I was just talking to them,” Justin said.

  “You can talk inside where it’s warm, can’t you?”

  He sighed, but he followed us in without comment.

  We stepped into a huge room with wood-paneled walls that matched those in the quarantine cabin. Several rough picnic tables stood in rows across the tiled floor. Two older couples were gathered around one of the tables, murmuring to each other. The clatter of dish-washing echoed from a doorway at the other side of the room, which I guessed led to the kitchen. A rich doughy smell filled the air. My mouth started to water.

  Leo had gone still beside me. I follo
wed his gaze to a small black shape sitting on a ledge near the kitchen door. A speaker, I recognized, as a faint melody reached my ears beneath the voices and the clinking of dishes. It had a small MP3 player mounted in it. The song was one I vaguely remembered as being on the radio a lot a few years ago, a dance-pop one-hit wonder.

  “One of our younger members brought the player,” Hilary said. “The speaker was already here. I can’t say the music is to my tastes, but it’s all we have. We decided it was enough of a morale boost to outweigh the electricity usage. Would you like to sit near it?”

  “No,” Leo said, shaking himself as if coming out of a daze. “That—that’s okay.” But as we walked across the room, I caught him swaying slightly with the beat.

  He used to live on music. It must have been weeks, maybe months, since he’d heard any. I had the urge to grab his hand and squeeze it.

  Then Tessa did exactly that. My throat tightened and I looked away.

  Hilary stopped at a table where a woman who looked to be in her thirties was sitting. “I thought you would like to speak with Lauren,” she said, nodding to me and then to the woman. “She and her husband, Kenneth, are the couple from Ottawa I told you about. Justin and I will get your oatmeal while you talk. You were there until December, isn’t that right, Lauren?”

  The woman nodded, pushing her hair back behind her ears. Her face was drawn, her eyes deep-set, giving her an almost skeletal appearance. “Much good as it did us,” she said.

  Excitement sparked inside me, overriding my discomfort. If we got the details from someone who’d actually been living there, maybe we could make up for some of the time we’d lost. “I guess Hilary told you we’re heading that way,” I said as we sat down. “Where was the government operating from when you left? Should we just go to the parliament buildings to find someone in charge?”

  Lauren laughed. “Government? Operating?”

  “Well, it’s the capital,” I said. “There’s someone still there, isn’t there?”

  “There were riots at Parliament Hill a couple of weeks before Ken and I left, when the epidemic was getting severe,” she said. “Violent riots. People were being turned away from the hospitals, you know—having to camp out in tents in the parking lots and on the sidewalks—people were dying on the street. . . .” She cringed. “The rioters, they broke right in. MPs and senators were shot. The buildings were damaged. After that, all the government officials still left cleared out. I don’t know where they went. Maybe Toronto? Maybe they all had their own little hideaways like we do. Even the soldiers who’d been protecting the place vanished.”

  My heart plummeted. “But . . .”

  She looked around the table at us, her eyes darkening. “I can see you had your hopes up, and I’m sorry. But Ken used to work near Parliament Hill, and he saw them packing up out front and driving off. I can tell you for sure, there’s no one trying to help the rest of us in Ottawa, not anymore.”

  twelve Lauren’s words sent my thoughts into a tailspin. No one with authority left in Ottawa? Even the highest level of government had fled?

  Then we’d come all this way for nothing.

  I was so hungry my stomach was practically gnawing on itself, but I had to force down the porridge Hilary brought. As soon as I’d finished, I went to the quarantine cabin to tell Gav and Tobias what we’d learned. Gav nodded as I repeated Lauren’s account, as if he wasn’t at all surprised. Which maybe he wasn’t. One of the first things he ever said to me was that we couldn’t trust the people in power to look out for us, that they were always going to look out for themselves first.

  “Come here,” he said when I was done, holding out his hand, and Tobias turned the other way, looking awkward. I sank down on Gav’s lap and let him fold his arms around me. Tears welled up in my eyes. I blinked them back as well as I could. I was the one who’d dragged us out here. I couldn’t break down now.

  “I’m so sorry, Kae,” Gav said, hugging me close. “At least we know now, before we went any farther.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured. And we’d found out in a place with power and heat and food, and space enough for us to stay as long as we needed to. Hilary had suggested as much over breakfast. But none of that took away the ache in my chest.

  When I’d pulled myself together, I found Tessa and Meredith in the greenhouse with Hilary. It was hard to tell they were actually growing any plants on purpose, with all the boards lying around and the weeds sprouting between the actual crops. “We’re not harvesting as much as we could otherwise,” Hilary said, “but it’s safer to leave it looking as uncultivated as possible.”

  We walked from board to board to keep from leaving footprints. Meredith swayed, arms out, as if they were a series of balance beams, while Tessa ambled between the plots, asking questions like, “Have you tried spacing onions between the carrots?” and “What do you have for fertilizer?” Hilary just about jumped for joy when Tessa said they could get lettuce seeds to sprout if they just put them in a spot with more shade.

  When we went back to the gathering house for lunch, Leo was still there, sitting with his eyes closed as the music washed over him, looking more relaxed than I’d seen him since we’d left the island.

  The decision should have been easy. If there was no point in going to Ottawa, of course we’d stay in the colony, at least until the weather warmed up and we had a better chance of making it back to the island alive. But when I lay down next to Meredith in the empty cabin Hilary had offered us for the night, the ache inside me had only gotten bigger.

  The greenhouse was wonderful, but it wasn’t completely supporting the twenty or so people living in the colony. The oatmeal, the crackers with our soup, the pasta at dinner, those had been scavenged. What were they going to do when all the houses in the area were bare? When the oil for their generator ran out?

  Hilary acted like they were going to get by like this forever— like they could live here in a bubble, untouched by the rest of the world. But life didn’t work that way. Every group of living things was part of its ecosystem. It had to deal with predators and competitors, with the demands of the environment. Maybe the colony could keep this up for another few months. Maybe another year. But sooner or later, no matter how many precautions they took, the rest of the world was going to come crashing in. Like a helicopter dropping missiles on an unsuspecting island.

  Were they really okay living like this, as if a few months ago they didn’t have real houses and jobs and lives?

  Dad and Nell and the volunteers at the hospital had kept working even when the halls were overflowing and we had no support from the mainland at all. Surely there were other people out here who hadn’t given up? What if the only thing standing between fixing the world and it staying like this was whether I kept carrying the vaccine until I found those people?

  But as I closed my eyes, another question followed me into sleep.

  What if I kept going and we didn’t make it, and everyone who’d come with me died because of the choices I made?

  The next morning, we all gathered in the quarantine cabin. Leo sat on the mattress, Tessa beside him. Tobias was standing by the small window, and Gav leaned against the wall, his elbow propped on the cold-storage box. I sank down next to him while Meredith hopped onto the bed.

  “I think it’s pretty clear there’s no point in going to Ottawa,” I said. “If the situation was as bad as Lauren says more than a month ago, it’ll only have gotten worse. So we need to decide what we are going to do.”

  Tessa nodded. “I think Hilary and the others would like to know where we stand. Whether we want to stay.”

  “So.” I looked at my hands, and then around at the others, trying to gauge their reactions. “That’s one option. Staying, at least until the weather’s better for traveling. They have room. And we could keep trying to contact someone through the radio.”

  Tobias stepped away from the window. “So we just throw in the towel?” he said.

  “I—” I said, caught off gua
rd by the vehemence in his voice. He didn’t let me continue.

  “The chances we’re going to catch the right person on that radio at the time they happen to be on, this far in the middle of nowhere, are pretty much none,” he went on. “People need that vaccine now, don’t they? That’s why you left your island in the first place. Just because one city is a no-go doesn’t mean they all are.”

  “What’s it to you?” Gav said. “A week ago you didn’t even know there was a vaccine. All you wanted to do was hide on your little army base and wait for the rest of the world to pick up the pieces for you.”

  Tobias flushed. “Okay, that’s true,” he said. “And I sure didn’t plan on joining up with a bunch of teenagers. But for once in my life I know I’m doing something important. I want to keep doing that—don’t you?”

  He sounded so determined that I felt ashamed for considering giving up. But he was here on his own, and I had my friends and Meredith to consider too.

  Of course, if he wanted to keep going, maybe I didn’t need to drag all of them along. Maybe I could do what I needed to without risking their lives in the process.

  “You didn’t let me finish,” I said, sitting up straighter. “I said that was one option. The other is to keep going. I’ve been thinking. . . . Lauren said the government might have moved to Toronto. It’s the biggest city in the country. That means the most hospitals, the most doctors—the most police to keep the peace. And if we can find a car, it’s only about five hours farther than Ottawa.”

  There was a pause, and then Leo said, “Sounds worth a shot.”

  “Toronto,” Gav said, with a weariness in his voice that spoke of the hundreds of miles we had left to travel. Before I could say anything, Tessa broke in.

  “I’m not going.”

  Leo’s gaze jerked toward her. “What?”

  “I’m staying here,” she said steadily. “If I keep going with all of you, I’m just another mouth to find food for. Here, I can help. The colony needs someone who knows about farming, if they’re going to make it.”