by Megan Crewe
Anika fumbled with the deadbolt. As I grabbed the handle of the cold box, trying to wrench it away from her, she jerked her arm toward me. Her elbow smacked me square in the forehead. My head spun, and my grip loosened. She pulled the box closer to her as she yanked on the doorknob.
But before the door had opened more than an inch, another arm shot out, slamming it shut. Anika flinched back, and froze.
A tall figure I dimly made out to be Tobias raised his hand. The low firelight caught the black shape of his pistol. His thumb rose and flicked off the safety with a click that sounded incredibly loud in the sudden silence. His voice came out strained but steady.
“I think you’d better give that box back to Kaelyn.”
Anika lowered the cold box to the floor and released the handle. Leo and Justin came up behind Tobias, sleep-rumpled and frowning. I touched the spot where Anika’s elbow had jabbed me, and winced. Stepping just close enough to her to reach the cold box, I tugged it away and opened it.
Despite the scuffle, all the vials were intact.
“Kae?” Gav’s voice wavered from the bedroom. “Everything okay?”
I exhaled and resealed the lid. “Yeah. It is now.”
“They’re going to end up finding you,” Anika said. “It’d be better if you just let me take the vaccine. Then they won’t be after you anymore.”
“What ‘they’?” Justin demanded. “What do you know about them?”
“The Wardens,” she said. “Michael’s Wardens.” Her gaze slid over our faces, and her eyebrows rose. “You don’t even know about Michael, do you?”
“We will if you tell us,” I said.
When she didn’t respond, Tobias shifted forward, the gun still pointed at her face. Anika curled her hands up into the sleeves of her coat and lifted her chin.
“I’ve never seen him,” she said. “Apparently this guy named Michael came from all the way out in BC, started going across the country after the virus hit, and he just sort of takes over places as he goes. Like here.”
“How does one guy take over a city?” Justin asked.
Anika shrugged. “He’s got food and generators and medical supplies, and he gives them to people who help him. The people who help him enough, he calls them Wardens. And then they— the Wardens—they keep an eye on the places he’s been when he leaves.”
“And he’s in Toronto?” Leo asked.
“I don’t think so, not right now. I don’t hear everything—I’m not in with them like that—but it sounds like he’s gone down to the States. The Wardens will be talking with him on their radios, though. And there’s a whole bunch of them, and they’ve got cars and guns—you don’t want to mess with them. They’re looking for you and that vaccine.”
“And you figured you’d get a reward if you brought them what they’ve been looking for,” I said, watching her face. The desperation shone clearly in her eyes.
“I would have!” she said. “I would have been set. You want to be guaranteed you’ll have enough food, you want to be in a building where the heat’s running, you want one of those masks to protect you from getting sick, they’re the only ones who have that now. Of course I want in.”
My skin went cold. The guy who’d asked us what we were doing that first day when we’d gone out for firewood, he’d been wearing a face mask. We’d been within talking distance of one of these Wardens, one of the people who would kill for the vaccine, and we hadn’t even realized. And if Justin had said even a little more, that guy might have realized who we were.
“You’re stupid if you think you’re safe here,” Anika said. “You’re just lucky I found you first. Going around to all the hospitals, shouting at city hall—I was guessing, but it wasn’t a hard guess to make. Once they figure out you’re in the city . . . you’re done.”
“Are you going to tell them?” Justin asked.
“I don’t know,” Anika said pointedly, glancing past the gun to Tobias’s face. “Am I going to have the chance?”
Tobias went a little pale, but his hand didn’t waver. He looked at me. Was it really that straightforward? I gave him the word and he’d shoot her?
My stomach turned. I didn’t like what she’d done, but I could understand being that desperate to survive. She didn’t deserve to die over it.
But we had to make sure we survived too.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” I said. Justin made a sound of protest, but he cut it off when I glared at him. “We’re not going to hurt her,” I repeated to him, and turned back to Anika. “But we can’t just let you take off, either.”
Tobias lowered the gun slowly. “We could barricade her in one of the other apartments,” he said.
Leo nodded. “That’d give us a chance to decide what to do next.”
“And leave me to starve?” Anika said, her mouth tight. “Just shoot me now, okay?”
“No,” I said. “We’d let you out, when we’re ready to.”
Justin sighed.
“We’ll need a couch, or something heavy,” Tobias started. His eyes flickered off Anika, and in that second of distraction she whipped out her hand.
She whirled around, a mist hissing from the tiny bottle she held. Justin leapt back, yelping and clawing at his face, and I staggered to the side, dragging the cold box with me, as a few droplets stung my eyes. Pepper spray. She must have had it lodged in her sleeve. Through a blur of tears, I saw Tobias coughing with his arm over his eyes, Anika tugging open the door, her slim figure darting out into the hall. I shoved the box toward the bedroom and ran after her.
The darkness of the hall was broken only by a faint haze that seeped from our open doorway. With my blurred vision, I couldn’t see anything. Anika’s boots scrabbled across the floor. She was already too far ahead. I took a few uncertain steps and heard the thud of the stairwell door closing. Sinking back against the wall, I swiped my sleeve over my eyes, again and again. In the apartment, Justin was moaning.
Leo appeared in the doorway. “Kae?”
“She’s gone,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” My eyes still smarted, but the tears were slowing. “It only hit me a little. You?”
“She missed me,” he said. “I think Justin got the worst of it. Tobias is pretty bad too. He says water won’t help much, so they’re both just sitting there crying.” He hesitated. “But we’d better get moving. She’s probably running right back to those Wardens to lead them here.”
“Right. Hell.” I shuffled back inside.
Justin was crouched beside the couch, Tobias sitting in the armchair. “I’m going to kill her,” Justin was saying, rocking slightly. “And then I’m going to kill her again.”
“Just keep blinking,” Tobias said. “The more you get the tears going, the faster they’ll flush it out.”
“Get the sleeping bags and the blankets,” I said to Leo. “I’ll start packing up the food.”
“We’re getting out of this freakin’ city, right?” Justin said. “I am so sick of this place.”
I paused. I hadn’t even thought about where we were going, only that we had to get out of this building. “We can’t leave,” I said. “We’ll find another apartment, not too close to here.”
“Why?” Justin demanded. “Nothing useful here, anyway.”
My throat tightened. The bedroom was quiet, maybe Gav had fallen back asleep, but the door still hung open across from us. He didn’t have much longer. As long as we stayed, we might come across a person and the equipment to help him recover. If we hit the road . . . it would be like giving up on him for good. Giving him up for dead.
“If there are doctors and scientists anywhere, our best chance of finding them is still here,” I said, lowering my voice. “We’ve got to change how we’re looking, try other strategies, be even more careful than before, but we don’t have anywhere else to go. Unless you want to head back to the colony and help with the planting?”
Justin made a face.
“I should
n’t have let my guard down,” Tobias muttered. “She shouldn’t have had the chance.”
Leo wavered, and then said, “It’s the middle of the night. We’re all tired and a little messed up. We can make a final decision later, right? Let’s just get out of here while we can.”
We had to abandon the truck. As we headed out to the garage doors, Justin stopped, his eyes still red, and said, “We told her. Anika. We told her about using the snow plow to get here.”
“They’ll be looking for it,” I said. “Anywhere we leave it . . .” Tobias turned his flashlight toward the street. Most of the snow had melted during the day, leaving the pavement bare.
“We wouldn’t leave tracks,” he said. “We can drive now, and then one of us can ditch it far away from the new place after we’ve found one.”
We put more than a mile between us and the old building, leaving the shiny condos of downtown behind for concrete low-rise apartments with rusty balconies. Tobias stayed beside the truck with the rifle and his pistol, while Gav slumped in the back, coughing weakly into the many layers of scarf he’d wound around his face. Leo, Justin, and I made our separate ways into the nearest buildings so we could check three places at a time.
It took seven tries before Leo returned with a crooked smile. “Not the nicest building,” he said, “but it’s got a fireplace.”
We carried our things up as quickly and quietly as we could. The lobby and first floor stank of cat urine, though there was no sign of the cat responsible. By the time we’d climbed up six flights of stairs to the top floor, the smell had receded. We barged into the first apartment we found with an unlocked door. It was a twobedroom, with a shabby polka-dot futon for a couch and stains on the rug. Gav walked straight into the closer bedroom and crashed on the bed, his breath coming in rasps, while Tobias headed back down to get rid of the truck. The rest of us smashed up one of the rickety dining room chairs and sprinkled the varnished wood with our leftover twigs to get a fire going.
“We’ll have to be even more cautious as long as we’re still in the city,” Leo said as the flames started crawling over the wood. “Someone should be watching the street at all times. We need to figure out an escape route in case these guys come looking for us.”
He rubbed his face, his eyelids low, and I suddenly felt how late it was. I’d been running on adrenalin, but it was starting to fade.
“We can figure out an escape route in the morning,” I said. “None of us is going to be thinking clearly right now.”
“Still got to watch,” Justin said. “I’ll go first. Those assholes better hope they don’t find me.”
As he went out, I stepped into the bedroom. Gav looked asleep, but a moment after I lay down next to him, his arm slipped around me. He tugged my waist, and I rolled over to face him. His hand stayed on my side, his thumb tracing a slow loop, the pressure faint through my layers of clothing.
“We safe now?” he asked.
I’d only given him a sketchy explanation when I’d woken him to come down to the truck. I wanted to say yes, of course we were, but looking into his steady eyes, I couldn’t bring myself to lie.
“I don’t know,” I said. The rest of my words stuck in my throat. Had he realized we were considering leaving the city completely?
I’d been trying not to think about what it would mean if we didn’t manage to find someone who could work with the vaccine here. If we’d come all this way, gone through so much, and accomplished nothing. If Gav had gotten sick for nothing, and I couldn’t even save him. I swallowed.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have come at all.”
Gav’s hand stilled. “What?”
“You figured it’d be like this,” I said. “That there wouldn’t be anyone left to help. You always thought . . . And now—”
“Kaelyn.” He touched my face, his fingers sliding along my jaw. When he opened his mouth to say more, he had to turn away instead, to cough against his shoulder. His arm trembled. I moved to get up, to find him some water, but he grabbed my hand, shaking his head as the coughs kept sputtering out of him.
After a minute, the fit eased off. He shifted back toward me. His fingers returned to my cheek, brushing stray strands of hair away from my eyes. My skin tingled at his touch.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
His breath hitched. “Not that. What you said before. I’m sorry . . . I didn’t believe you could do it. I’m sorry I didn’t hide that as well as I wanted to. I guess, in a way, I didn’t want to hide it because I didn’t want to pretend, because I thought I was right.”
“Gav,” I said, but he kept going.
“I wasn’t right, okay?” he said. “I don’t ever want to hear you say you were wrong to do this. I’ve had an awful lot of time to think the last few days. Everything was going to hell on the island anyway, even if I didn’t want to admit it. We had to leave. And I really do believe, if there’s anyone out there who can help us, then you’ll be the person to find them. I fell in love with a girl who doesn’t give up. So promise me. Promise me you’re not going to stop trying, no matter what.”
I found myself gaping at him, speechless.
“Say it,” he said.
I cupped the back of his head and leaned close enough to press my lips against his. He kissed me back, but I could feel the tension in his arm around me. I tipped my head forward, my nose brushing his cheek.
Gav didn’t know how close I’d come to giving up completely when Meredith was sick. I’d never told him about standing on the edge of the cliff, planning the next step forward into nothingness. But I hadn’t given up after all, and we’d made it through. I had to remember that.
“I won’t stop trying,” I said into the dark space between us. “I promise.”
Only then did he relax. He kissed me again, and shrugged up the covers, and we fell asleep face to face, our breaths mingling.
twenty-four In the morning, with fresh resolve humming through me, I took over the front door watch from Leo, and sent the guys on a building-wide search for a phone book. Tobias came to relieve me carrying a thick softbound book.
“It’s some kind of commercial directory,” he said. “I figured it might be useful.”
The directory turned out to be a jackpot—whole sections devoted to different sorts of laboratories. I paged through it, marking the most promising-looking locations in the map book. As soon as Leo came back from another scavenging run through the apartments, I grabbed him.
“We should go out and hit these two right now,” I said, pointing to the ones that were closest. “We can be back before it gets dark.”
We stuck to the side streets and walked quietly, listening for cars. One of our targets, a medical testing facility, had been looted, the doors busted open and offices trampled. The other was a neurological research lab in a narrow stucco building that looked untouched, but all of the windows were dark. No one answered when I knocked on the door.
“We just need one,” Leo said as we headed back.
After dinner, as I sat on the couch planning the next day’s targets, Tobias set the radio transceiver on the coffee table by the sliding glass door to the balcony. Leo and Justin snapped apart a couple more chairs and started feeding the fire. Tobias went through his usual process of calling out, switching channels, and calling out again. Leo had just tossed in the last piece when Tobias turned the dial, and a voice snapped through the speaker in mid-sentence.
“—there, please respond.”
I dropped the map book and leaned forward. Tobias hesitated, his hand on the microphone, and then said, “We hear you. Who is this? Over.”
The voice that answered was Drew’s. “I’m looking for Kaelyn Weber. Who is this?”
Tobias offered the mic to me. I took it, my heart thumping. I’d been waiting for this moment since the first time we’d spoken, but suddenly I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know the answers to all my questions.
“Drew,” I said, �
��I’m here. We’ve been trying to get a hold of you all week.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s almost always someone in here monitoring the radios at the same time as me. Carmen’s on a cigarette break, but I’ve probably only got a few minutes. You’re not still in the city, are you? Tell me you left.”
I was about to ask how he knew we had been in the city at all, but then I realized. Anika had gone straight to the Wardens, as we’d guessed she would. And Drew was right there with them.
There were so many other things I needed to say, but the words burst out: “Why are you with these people, Drew? What the hell are you doing?”
For a few seconds, the speaker gave me only a faint hiss. Then Drew said, “I’m trying to figure out a way to help. Like I came here to do. You have to get in with the people who have power if you’re going to make a difference.”
He sounded almost like Anika. A sour taste rose in the back of my mouth. Before I could answer, he started talking again.
“What about you? The people they sent after you in New Brunswick—they found the bodies, Kae.”
“I didn’t want that to happen,” I said quietly.
“Well, everyone here is gunning for you now. They’re pissed. Hell, I’m glad you’re okay, but I don’t know what—” He cut himself off. “You didn’t say where you are. Kaelyn, you left Toronto, didn’t you?”
“We can’t keep carrying the vaccine around,” I said. “We have to find someone who’ll know how to make more.”
“So you’re still here,” he said. “Kaelyn, they’re out looking for you right now. You’re not going to find anyone here who can recreate a vaccine and wouldn’t just turn it over to us anyway. When Michael came through, the first people he wanted on board were the ones with a medical background, and there’s no one else left. I’ve been here almost two months; I’d know if there was.”
I shook my head. I wanted to erase his words, but I couldn’t. “So where are we supposed to go?” I said, my voice catching.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You could try . . . Right up until most of the communications went down, everyone was talking about how the CDC was working on the virus, trying to come up with a treatment. Michael thought they might still be at it—he was planning on heading down there before he got word about you guys and the vaccine. I think—” His voice dropped. “Carmen’s in the hall. Sorry. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
