The Way We Fall

by Megan Crewe

  “Eventually,” he said. “That could be a really long time.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I stepped closer to him, hooking my hand around his elbow and gazing over the strait. Through the fog, the buildings across the water seemed to melt into the gray of the sky.

  “What would you be doing if everything was normal?” I asked. “If there was no quarantine, no virus.”

  He paused. “Doing just enough work to scrape by in class,” he said. “Picking up odd jobs in the evenings to make sure I had enough money to get out of here the second I earned that diploma. Trying to convince Warren he should come with me.” He stopped, the silence more heartbreaking than anything he could have said. After a moment, he slid his arm around my waist. “Probably hoping a certain girl would come too,” he added.

  I smiled, but my throat had gone tight. “You think you’d have noticed me if I wasn’t the girl with the inside scoop on the epidemic?”

  “Sure,” he said automatically. “Can’t imagine missing you.” He turned, pulling me closer, and leaned in to kiss me.

  He said the words so easily, as if there couldn’t be any doubt, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I would have opened up to him if I hadn’t seen how he acted when the town was falling apart. I want to believe that we’d have ended up together no matter what, that our feelings go beyond the awful circumstances that’ve thrown us together, but it’s not like either of us can say for sure.

  But maybe that doesn’t matter. Because when he was kissing me, and I was kissing him back, I didn’t care. And for a few minutes I wasn’t terrified of how long “eventually” might take.

  Last night we had to go on a little trip.

  Meredith woke me up after midnight, with a yelp like she’d been bitten. Nightmares. It took me a whole minute to wake her up, and then she was sobbing so hard it was another five before I figured out what she was babbling about.

  She forgot one of her stuffed animals at Tessa’s house when we moved. A fluffy cat she named Purr that Aunt Lillian gave to her when she was three. She couldn’t stand the thought that she’d left Purr alone in the dark, that “those guys” might come back and hurt him.

  “He’s fine,” I told her. “No one will come back—they took everything they wanted.”

  “He doesn’t know that,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s really scared.”

  I said we’d go get him in the morning, but she wouldn’t calm down, just kept insisting he needed her to come, with tears still trickling down her face. I started to get choked up too. She’s lost so much already, and there I was arguing with her over something so small. Something that was one of the few things I could actually give her.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go get him. It’ll just take a few minutes.”

  “He doesn’t know you,” she said. “And I don’t want you to go by yourself. It’s so dark.”

  By then, we’d woken up Tessa too. When she peeked in to see what was going on, there was more babbling and more tears, and somehow all three of us ended up piling into the car to rescue a toy cat. It seemed like the easiest solution at the time. None of us was really thinking straight.

  The town was eerie in the middle of the night, with only the headlights guiding us. They didn’t catch any color, just turned everything ghostly gray. And the world beyond them was pure black.

  Meredith couldn’t stand to be alone in the backseat, so I thought to hell with road safety, and let her sit on my lap. She curled up with her arms around me and her head tucked under my chin. As I watched Tessa drive through the darkness, it felt good to have someone to hold on to.

  With the electricity cut off, we couldn’t turn on the lights at Tessa’s, but there was a flashlight in the car we’ve used when scavenging. We followed the thin beam to the guest bedroom. Purr was lying half hidden under the nightstand. Meredith snatched him up and squished him in her arms.

  Good, I thought. Now we can go back to sleep. I wasn’t totally sure it wasn’t a dream.

  We were almost at the front door when a figure swayed into our light.

  I flinched back, and Meredith shrieked, and Tessa just went still. The figure stepped closer, and Quentin’s face shifted into the flashlight’s beam, thin and yellowed. A sour odor rolled off him—the smell of someone who hasn’t washed in a long time. He was holding something in his right hand that glinted. A carving knife.

  “What are you doing?” I said. The light shivered. My hand was trembling.

  Quentin squinted at us, then sneezed three times against the back of his hand.

  “Oh,” he said, his voice scratchy. “It’s just you.”

  “You’re sick,” I said, nudging Meredith behind me.

  “Why are you in my house?” Tessa demanded.

  “They would have shot me,” he said. “I wanted to talk to Kaelyn. No one was here, so I thought I’d wait. That was…That was a while ago.” He looked at me accusingly and added, “Took you long enough.”

  We hadn’t left any food in the house. I wondered what he’d been eating. If he’d been eating. Had he brought bottled water with him, or had he been drinking it from the tap, unboiled? He stepped to the side, wavering, as it occurred to me that he might be sick from more than just the virus. Maybe not even the virus at all.

  “You should go to the hospital,” I said.

  Quentin shook his head. “No way,” he said, and coughed. “Too many sick people. Who knows what I’d get?”

  “You’ve already got something,” I said. “At least they’d try to help you.”

  “You’ll help me,” he said. “Your dad knows stuff. He made you better. You can tell me what to do.”

  “I don’t know anything!” I said. “I told you that before. I can’t do anything for you.”

  “You have to!” he said. “I’m sick!”

  He staggered toward us, reaching for me with the hand that held the knife. In the same instant, Tessa’s arm shot forward. Sparks crackled and burst between us, and Quentin cried out. He collapsed on the floor, limbs twitching, the knife spinning from his fingers. Tessa stared down at him, then at the thing she was holding, which looked like an electric shaver.

  “What is that?” I asked when I found my voice. “What did you do to him?”

  “Stun gun,” she answered. “Or maybe it’s a Taser. I’m not sure. I found it in one of the summer houses when I was going on my own. Thought it would be useful to have it on me, just in case.”

  She looked at Quentin again. He was trying to get up, not very successfully.

  “I expected that to feel more satisfying than it did,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

  She stepped around him and headed for the door. Meredith bolted after her. Quentin was saying something, so slurred I couldn’t make out the words. He pulled himself onto his hands and knees, his arms wobbling with the effort. Watching him, my stomach twisted. No matter what he’d done, how many screwed up decisions he’d made, he was still that kid I’d gone to school with since kindergarten.

  “We’re going to leave him here?” I said.

  Tessa turned back toward me, expressionless. “Why not?” she said.

  “He’s sick,” I said, but I couldn’t blame her if she didn’t care about his health. So I added, “If we leave him, he won’t stay here. When he gets sick enough he’ll go out and try to find other people, pass the virus on. If we get him to the hospital, they’ll make sure he stays there.”

  “Don’t want hospital,” Quentin muttered.

  “No one asked you,” I said. I held Tessa’s gaze for a moment. Her lips pressed flat, and then she nodded.

  I put Meredith in the car first, and brought an extra mask to put on Quentin. Then we dragged him over to the backseat. Thankfully, he’d recovered enough from the shocking to stay on his feet, but he was too sick to put up much of a fight. He tried to push past us when I opened the door, and Tessa held up the stun gun.

  “Get in or I zap you again,” she said.

  She h
anded it off to me when we were ready to go, since we’d taken her car and she had to drive. I kept it trained on him the whole way to the hospital. Quentin mumbled something about his rights and illegal weapons, but mostly he just slumped there, shivering and coughing. He started to protest again when we parked in front of the hospital, but one of the volunteers spotted us through the windows and came out to help.

  And then we went home and fell back into our beds.

  I felt like I must have dreamed it when I woke up this morning. But I was still wearing my shoes, and Meredith had Purr tucked tightly under her arm in her bed. And when I went downstairs to make breakfast, the stun gun was lying on the dining room table. Because that’s what our life is now.

  Oh fuck fuck fuck.

  Meredith’s hot and she’s crying because the inside of her elbow won’t stop itching.

  She cried louder when I went to put on my coat, so I’m still here and Tessa’s gone to tell Dad.

  If there is a God I would punch him in the face ten times harder than I ever kicked Quentin.

  When is the virus ever going to be satisfied? When does this stop?

  Why can’t it just leave us alone?

  Meredith keeps apologizing to me. She coughed so hard that she threw up the tea she’d been drinking and said sorry over and over the whole time I was wiping it up. She said sorry when I started to cough because my throat was dry from reading the third book in a row to her. She says sorry when I need to bring her a new box of tissues, and sorry when I check her temperature and even with the Tylenol it’s still four degrees higher than it should be, and sorry when she can’t stop sobbing because she wants her mom and dad.

  Every time she says it, I feel the horrible weight of all the things I’m not doing—I can’t do. And I wish she wouldn’t say it. And then I feel even worse for being bothered by this when she’s the one

  I feel like I’m condemning her if I write “dying.”

  She might not, right? There’s that one guy who recovered even though he never had last year’s fever. Meredith could be the second one. It’s possible.

  Not a single particle of me believes it’ll happen. But it’s possible.

  Gav came back from the hospital with Tessa and Dad yesterday. He was here again this morning. He takes over reading to Meredith and making her tea when there’s too much for me to do at once.

  He wrapped his arms around me in the kitchen, and my eyes prickled, but I didn’t cry. Crying seems like condemning her too.

  He hasn’t said anything, which means Warren isn’t any better. Which means Warren could very well be dead. I don’t have the strength to ask him.

  This is what we do. We make tea and read books and watch people die.

  Most people think the scariest thing is knowing that you’re going to die. It’s not. It’s knowing you might have to watch every single person you’ve ever loved—or even liked—waste away while you just stand there.

  It has to end sometime, I keep telling myself. And that’s true. And some point, there’ll be no one left.

  And then it won’t matter that I survived, because anyone who might have cared will be dead.

  I could only manage to spend an hour with Meredith this morning before I lost it. She’s in Stage Two now. Throwing her arms around me, grabbing my hands, chattering about how much fun we’ll have, asking why we can’t invite Tessa and Gav in to play too. Even though I know it’s not absolutely safe, I’ve been taking off my mask when I’m in there with her, because she hates seeing me with my face covered.

  I was doing a pretty good job of distracting her, I think. I let out Mowat and Fossey and had them run around with her for a while, and then we made a huge necklace out of the last of her beads, which she draped around and around my neck until the strands hung at the right length.

  I’ve still got it on. The beads click whenever I shift my weight.

  Then Meredith looked out the window, and her face suddenly went solemn. “Why doesn’t Mommy come back, Kaelyn?” she asked. “Doesn’t she know I miss her so much? She always told me she loved me. If she loves me, why isn’t she here?”

  “I’m sure she’d be here if she could,” I said, and swallowed. For a second I was afraid if I tried to say anything else, all that would come out was a wail.

  “I’m going to get you a snack,” I managed, and got out of there. Dad put a lock on the outside of the door this morning, just like he did for Mom, and for me too, presumably. I could hear him fiddling with the tap in the kitchen downstairs—he found some filters that might at least make the water taste better, even if we still have to boil it.

  I took a couple of deep breaths as I pulled off the protective gown I wear when I’m with Meredith, and looped it over the doorknob. After I’d bought myself a little more time washing my hands super-thoroughly, I decided I’d better get that snack ready before she got too restless.

  Gav looked up from the living room couch as I came down the stairs. “Kaelyn,” he said, “what are these for?”

  He was holding a pile of rumpled papers. It took me a moment to recognize them. All those charts I’d written up and pored over in the records room. I’d shoved them into the coffee table drawer.

  When I sat down next to Gav on the couch, he scooted over so our legs touched.

  “I was comparing the medical charts of the people who got better and some who didn’t,” I said. “I wanted to figure out what made the difference.”

  “And you didn’t find anything?” he said.

  “No, I did, actually,” I said. “It just wasn’t anything the doctors can use.”

  I explained about the fever, and how it was caused by almost the same virus. “When you get sick, your body makes antibodies, right?” I said. “To fight off the disease. So I already had extra antibodies that could attack the mutated virus, at least a little bit. More than most people have.”

  “That’s why everyone who gets better is safer than the rest of us,” Gav said, nodding. “Because you’ve got the right antibodies to fight the virus off if you’re exposed again. You told me about that when you insisted on being the one who drove people to the hospital.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Except the immunity only works as long as the virus stays the same. If it mutates again, like the flu always does…”

  We sat for a minute contemplating that awful thought. Then Gav looked at the papers and said, “It’s too bad they can’t take some of the antibodies out of you and give them to someone else who needs them.”

  I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. My pulse was suddenly racing. I read this story, years and years ago, in a kids’ book about animal contributions to science, that I hadn’t remembered until he said those words. About these doctors who put some sort of virus in a horse so that its body would produce antibodies. And then they’d used those antibodies to cure people who caught the virus.

  If they could do a procedure like that with a horse, I thought, why couldn’t they do it with me?

  As soon as it crossed my mind, I knew it was pointless. If I could come up with the idea, someone at the hospital would have given it a shot ages ago. Did that mean the procedure hadn’t worked? They’d already stopped trying by the time I recovered? Why?

  “I have to talk to my dad,” I said.

  Gav followed me into the kitchen. Dad was bent over the sink, peering at the fixture he’d screwed into the faucet. He’d just turned on the tap, and a stream of water that was maybe a little less brown was gushing out. Unfortunately, a bunch of tiny streams were also trickling from the space where the fixture was attached.

  He frowned and turned off the water. “Your mother was always better at this sort of thing than me,” he said.

  “Here,” Gav said. “I think I see the problem.”

  Dad stepped to the side to let him adjust the fixture. “Dad,” I said, as he dried his hands on a dish towel, “Gav made me think of something.”

  I repeated our conversation about antibodies, and the story I knew about the ho
rse. “You tried it, didn’t you?” I said, and when he nodded, I asked, “What happened?”

  His face fell. “There has been some success with that sort of procedure in other cases involving unfamiliar viruses,” he said. “When our first recovered patient was well enough that we felt we could safely draw blood, we attempted to give some patients in the early stages a boost with a serum. It slowed down the disease’s progression, but that was all.”

  “If you were trying to use one sample for a bunch of patients, you couldn’t have given each of them very much,” I said. “Did you ever try giving them a larger dose?”

  “We used a reasonable amount, Kaelyn,” Dad said, sounding like he was pleading with me. “And after contributing that one sample, our survivor started to feel weak and had to be readmitted to the hospital the next day. There are only six of you—maybe seven now. Not to mention—”

  “Okay,” I said, before he could come up with even more arguments, “I realize you can’t do it for all the patients. But maybe you could get enough for one person. I’m blood type O negative; I can donate to anyone. We talked about it in school last year. So use me. I’ll give you as much blood as you can safely take, for Meredith.”

  I held out my arm. He looked at it, and then took my hand in both of his.

  “We can’t,” he said. “This isn’t as simple as a regular blood transfusion, Kae. Meredith is already very sick. If we inject her with a large amount of what is effectively a foreign substance, she’s at a far higher risk of allergic reaction. It will almost certainly raise her fever even higher. There’s a possibility her body will reject the foreign cells outright. Even if it doesn’t, the most likely outcome is she’ll only suffer more. And we don’t know how giving the blood will affect you.”

  I pulled my hand away from his. “So it’s not that we can’t,” I said. “It’s that you’re scared to.” I was so angry at him for saying no, for shutting down yet another idea, that my whole body went rigid.