by Megan Crewe
The transmission cut out, leaving only a dull hum of static. I felt as empty as it sounded.
Tobias switched off the radio and ran a hand over his pale hair. “The CDC,” he said.
“What is that?” Justin asked.
Leo was the one who answered. “Centers for Disease Control. When I was in New York, the scientists there were on the news a lot. It’s in Atlanta.”
Atlanta. My heart sank even farther. This must be how Gav felt when I suggested continuing on to Toronto. How many more hundreds of miles?
“They obviously didn’t do much,” Justin said.
“They were trying,” Leo said. “And . . . they have top-notch security there—they have to. They’ve got samples of all those deadly diseases: Ebola, anthrax, that sort of thing. So maybe the center wouldn’t have gotten overrun like the hospitals here.”
“Should we even trust this guy?” Tobias asked me. “I mean, I know he’s your brother, but do you think he’s right? There’s no one here?”
My gaze slid to Leo, and he met my eyes, his mouth slanting down. I suspected we were both remembering our talk about how people changed.
Leo had changed. Drew had changed. Maybe in some ways for the worse. But whatever Leo thought, that didn’t mean either of them was a bad person now. Drew had risked his life getting off the island so he could find a cure for Mom and for me. Both times on the radio, he’d been trying to protect me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I believe him.”
And I didn’t want to leave him. If we waited, if we could talk to him tomorrow, would he be willing to come with us?
I let out a breath. I had no idea how far it was to Atlanta, but the distance couldn’t be much shorter than what we’d already traveled. A trip that could have been two days and ended up taking two weeks. We had food, but we were going to have to find gas, and avoid Michael and his followers, and keep the vaccine cool as we headed farther south.
And there was Gav.
He didn’t have two weeks. He didn’t even have one. In just a few days, the hallucinations would come on, and we had no way to calm him down, no way of restraining him. But I’d promised him I’d keep trying.
We couldn’t afford to wait for Drew.
“The truck,” I said. “If we’re going to leave, we’ll need to drive. We can’t walk to Atlanta.”
Tobias frowned. “It’s about a half hour from here on foot. If it’s still there. I held on to the keys, but . . .”
But if Anika had told them about us, she’d probably told them everything. They’d have been looking for the truck too.
“Well, there’s no point in going for it tonight,” I said. “Drew said the Wardens are patrolling, and they’d be able to see the headlights from blocks away. We’ll be a little less obvious driving by daylight. First thing tomorrow we go get the truck, and if we can’t use it, we start looking for something we can.”
Gav woke me up so early only the dimmest of dawn light was seeping through the bedroom window. He squirmed over on the bed, wrapped his arms around me, and pulled me close to him. For a minute I was glad. Happy to have a few extra waking moments with him.
He sneezed over his shoulder, and then he tucked his chin against the side of my neck.
“You are so, so pretty,” he said. “And warm. And soft. It’s nice. Did I ever tell you that?”
I started to laugh, but the sound caught in my throat. It didn’t sound like Gav’s normal teasing.
“The only other girl I was ever with like this,” he went on, his breath whispering past my ear, “she was so skinny. All bones and angles. Not comfortable at all.”
A twinge of jealousy hit me, wondering exactly what he meant by “like this.” In bed together? What else had they done in that bed?
Then the rising horror overwhelmed it.
“Gav,” I said softly.
“Wasn’t the same anyway,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken, and yawned. A few short coughs rattled out of his chest. “She was cute, and I thought I really liked her, but she always talked about the stupidest things, and then it turned out she liked Vince better anyway. The first day I came to your house, you didn’t even want to let me in, and you were so mad, but you listened to me and you smiled and I knew. This is the girl. The one I want.”
I turned in his arms and kissed his cheek. He looked at me, but there was a sort of vagueness to his gaze, as if behind his eyes he wasn’t all there.
Because he really wasn’t.
Sometime during the night, the virus had finally broken down that part of Gav that let him decide what he’d say and what he wouldn’t, what was real and what was just impulse. I pressed my face against his coat and squeezed my eyes shut, holding back tears.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think of Gav that way, that early on. My head had been too full of worries about the virus, with feelings for Leo I hadn’t managed to let go of yet. How long had it taken me to see him?
“Even my parents,” Gav said, “they were never interested in listening to me. Hardly even smiled, really. And now they’re gone too. You’re not going to leave, are you? You keep going out and I know you might not come back and I hate it. I want you to stay with me, Kae. I don’t like being alone.”
A sob broke out before I could clamp down on it. My jaw tightened. I swallowed, and breathed, the tears slipping out and the taste of salt rising in my throat. “You won’t be alone,” I managed to say. “I’m staying with you. Don’t worry.”
“It’s not really fair at all,” he said. “Those guys, Leo and Tobias and them, they get to see you all the time, and I’m stuck in here, and I don’t like that you’re even thinking about them.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m only thinking about you.”
“Leo, he says he’s your friend, but he’s thinking, I can see him thinking, all the time. He looks at you . . .” Gav stirred, suddenly restless. “It’s not done yet. We haven’t found any doctors, we haven’t given them the vaccine. I should be helping, not lying around here. I—”
He paused and twisted to direct a coughing fit away from me. I grabbed the water bottle from the floor. When I turned back to him, he was sitting up. He drank and coughed and drank a little more, and then he pulled himself to the edge of the bed. His arms trembled with the effort of holding himself upright.
“We can go together today,” he said. “You said we need to find a car. I’ll help you look. I followed you all this way so I could help. Maybe we’d already have found one if I hadn’t been so lazy.”
I wiped at my cheeks with my sleeve and gripped his shoulder. The heat of his fever radiated through his shirt. “Gav,” I said firmly, “you haven’t been lazy. You needed to rest, and you still need to, okay? When—when you’ve had enough rest we’ll all go out together.”
He hesitated, shivering, and then sank back onto the blankets.
“Probably not going to find anyone anyway,” he murmured. “Those government pricks, they all ran off on us. Never could trust them. I knew it. I knew there was no point. We could have stayed where it was safe.”
The words gnawed at me. Was that the truth, and not what he’d said to me yesterday when he’d told me he understood why we’d had to come here?
I was probably never going to know.
“Try to go back to sleep,” I said, picking up the now-empty bottle. “I’ll get you some more water in case you need it. Okay? I’ll be right back.”
He lowered his head, his eyelids drooping. I eased out of bed, swapped coats, and slipped out the door.
The fire had died down to just a few tiny flames flickering over the embers, and a chill had crept through the living room. Justin and Tobias lay side by side in their sleeping bags in front of the fireplace. I padded around them to the window and the extra water bottles. As I edged back along the wall to the bedroom, I found myself evaluating the furniture.
The futon. If Gav got set on coming out of the apartment to help, we could hold the bedroom
door closed with the futon. It looked heavy. I didn’t think he was strong enough to push very much now.
And then I thought, I am planning ways to trap my boyfriend inside a room to die.
The apartment door opened and Leo stepped inside. He stopped when he saw me. “The sun’s coming up,” he said. “I was going to wake up Tobias so he can check for the truck, wherever he left it. That’s the plan, right?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. The bottle wobbled in my hand. Leo’s gaze fell to it and then rose to my face again, his brow knitting.
“Kae?” he said, and somehow hearing my name broke the last of my self-control.
I dropped to the floor, clutching the bottle. My arms folded over my knees, and I mashed my face against them. My eyes burned, another wave of tears surging up and spilling out, hot and fierce. I gasped, choking down the sobs, not wanting the others to wake up and see me like this too.
Leo didn’t speak. He just walked across the living room and knelt in front of me, easing his arms around me. I resisted for a second, and then I let him draw me in so my head rested against his shoulder, my tears soaking into his coat. If I’d ever needed my best friend, it was now.
“If there’s anything I can do,” he said after a minute, his voice thick. “Anything at all, Kae, tell me and I’ll do it.”
But there was nothing he could do. Nothing he or I could do except sit there helplessly.
twenty-five It occurred to me an hour later, as Gav dozed and I waited for Tobias to return, that there was one last thing I could do. I closed my fingers around the box of syringes I’d brought from Dad’s lab. We weren’t going to find a doctor in time to help Gav, that much seemed clear. But I could still give him some of my blood, with the antibodies it carried.
I didn’t let myself think any further. I rolled up my sweater sleeve to wash the skin around the crook of my elbow. Then I sat down with one of the syringes, my hand in a fist, studying my arm.
I remembered how Nell had slid the needle in when she’d been taking blood for Meredith. It had looked so easy. But she was a doctor—of course it was for her. Gritting my teeth, I prodded the line of a vein with the needle tip, then pushed it in.
There was a stab of pain, and then a dull ache. I squeezed my hand tighter. The thick dark red liquid seeped into the body of the syringe. It would only hold twenty-five milliliters—a normal blood donation was almost twenty times that. I should be fine. I just wished I could give him more. But it was going to be hard enough convincing Gav to take one shot.
As I slid the needle from my arm, wincing, Gav shifted on the bed. Quickly, I stuck one of the Band-aids from the first aid kit over the puncture and pushed my sleeve back down.
“Hey,” I said, sitting on the side of the bed. Gav blinked at me and smiled in that new vague way that made my chest clench.
“You remember how we helped Meredith when she was sick?” I said quickly. “We gave her some of my blood so the antibodies would help fight the virus. I’m going to do that for you too, okay?”
His smile dimmed. “No,” he said. “You’re not going to hurt yourself for me, Kae. No.”
“It didn’t hurt that much,” I said. “And I’ve already done it. I just need to give it to you.”
He shook his head, pushing himself back. “What kind of selfish jerk would take his own girlfriend’s blood?” he said. “I’m not that guy. I’m not.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re a guy who understands that his girlfriend needs to try anything she can to help him, and that she’s going to feel guilty for the rest of her life if she doesn’t do this. Right?”
His expression softened. “Guilty?” he said. “It’s not your fault. It’s this fucking virus, god, of all the things that could have done us in—”
“Gav,” I said again, gripping his hand, “I need to do this. Please. For me.”
He met my eyes, and then his gaze wavered away. “Please,” I said again.
“You have to try everything,” he said, sounding resigned.
“You fell in love with a girl who doesn’t give up,” I said softly. The corner of his mouth curved up. I wondered if, in his virusaddled state, he remembered saying that to me.
“Yeah,” he said, “I guess I did.” He sighed. “All right. Go ahead. But just this once, okay? I don’t want you hurting yourself again. Ever.”
“I got it,” I said.
He turned his head and closed his eyes as I gave him the injection. I watched my blood flow into his arm with a twist in my gut. It hardly seemed like enough. And maybe doing the transfusion this way, instead of using whatever serum Nell had created before, was completely useless.
But I’d tried. At least I’d tried.
I was so focused on Gav that I didn’t notice the voices outside until I’d finished and he’d flopped down on the bed. Tobias had come back. What little hope I’d had in me deflated. He hadn’t immediately announced it was time to go. Which meant he hadn’t found the truck, not in working order anyway.
A few minutes later, Leo knocked on the bedroom door. “Tobias is going on watch, and Justin and I are heading out to see if we can find a car,” he said. “The truck is gone.”
There was a question in his voice—what about time? An image passed through my mind: joining them, barricading the bedroom door, Gav hollering out the window for someone to let him out so he could look for me. I shook it away.
“I’ll go too,” Gav said, scrambling up. I grabbed his wrist. “I’m all right,” he said, even as he wavered on his feet. “I can help.”
“We’re staying here,” I said, tugging him back onto the bed. “We’ll look at the map and figure out the best route out of the city. I’m too tired to do much walking,” I added.
The last bit seemed to convince him. He leaned back against the wall and sneezed. “Atlanta, right?” he said. “Right. I always wanted to go to California first, if I ever got to the States. Sounded like a cool place. Maybe after Atlanta we could do California. Why not?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll get you some breakfast too.”
“Ugh,” Gav said. “I’m so sick of that canned crap. My stomach’s all...ugh.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” I said, hiding the tremble of my jaw with a smile as I got up.
He wouldn’t eat the soup I brought, or even drink a cup of tea. His voice grew hoarser as he rambled on, and in the late afternoon he dozed off again, slumped over the pillow. I stayed with him until I was sure he was asleep, and then pulled the blanket up over him and went out into the apartment. I was in the kitchen, staring at our rows of cans and boxes and wondering what I could give him that he’d eat, when the others came in.
They were talking quietly, but an angry undercurrent ran through their voices. As soon as they saw me, they fell silent. I braced myself.
“What?” I said.
“We didn’t find a car, not one we can use,” Leo said. “Justin thinks we should leave now, anyway.”
“For good reason!” Justin said. His eyes darted toward the bedroom door. When I crossed my arms over my chest, waiting for him to continue, his jaw clenched. “I know what they get like, people who’ve caught it,” he muttered. “He’s going to go crazy soon, yelling and screaming, isn’t he? How are we going to stop this Michael guy from finding us then?”
“They’re still patrolling,” Tobias put in. “When I was on watch, I went around to the side alley to take a leak, and as I was heading back, an SUV came down the street: black, tinted glass. The guy driving rolled down his window and asked if I was on my own. I said yeah, acted friendly. He didn’t look suspicious. But if they come by again and hear something . . .”
“So you want to walk?” I said, feeling cold. I wasn’t sure Gav could, not far enough that it would matter. “You don’t think we’d be kind of obvious, five of us wandering around with sleds full of supplies? Even if they don’t drive right by us, we’re going to leave a pretty clear trail, and it’ll take us at least half a day j
ust to get out of the city.”
“There’s not much snow on the sidewalks right now,” Leo said. “We might be able to make it. If you think Gav’s up to it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I did. He could hardly stand up. Even if I could get him to eat, even if I supported him the whole way . . . “He’s pretty weak. And it might not be easy to keep him quiet—”
“Then maybe we shouldn’t take him,” Justin said. His ears reddened.
“I already told him that’s not happening,” Leo said, touching Justin’s shoulder, but Justin shook him off.
“What happened to ‘the most important thing is the vaccine’?” he said, a whine creeping into his voice. “We know if we’re going to find someone who’ll make more of it, we have to leave, right?” He motioned to the bedroom. “And we know he’s not going to get better. People don’t get better. We’re risking everything, and he—he might as well be dead already.”
One second I was standing there with his words echoing in my head, and the next I was four steps across the room, my hands raised, my mind blank with anger. Tobias stepped forward and grabbed my arm, pulling me to a stop a few inches from where Justin stood. Justin backed away, looking terrified.
“Kae,” Leo said.
My arms sagged, and Tobias let go. It was true. And that was why it hurt so much to hear it. But Gav wasn’t dead yet.
“Would you say that if it was your mom?” I said. “Your dad?”
Before Justin could answer, there was a rap on the front door.
All of us froze. Tobias slid his hand into the inner pocket of his coat and withdrew his pistol. Had whoever was knocking heard us? Or were they just testing every door, moving on if no one responded?
The rapping came again, and with it a familiar girlish voice. “Open up, already. It’s Anika.”
Crap.
