Authors: Megan Crewe
Tags: #New Experience, #Social Issues, #Young Adult, #Juvenile Fiction, #Romance, #Science Fiction, #Love & Romance
I peeled off her mitten as gently as I could, fighting to keep my own voice calm. “What happened? When did it happen?”
Meredith winced. Her small palm was slashed with a ragged cut, more blood already welling along its length.
“I think it was when I fell, when we were getting off the road,” she said. “There was something sharp in the snow. It really hurt. But I squeezed and squeezed my hand, and that made it hurt less. I was being strong like you, Kaelyn.” She gave me a pained smile.
Strong like me. I didn’t feel all that strong right now.
“Here,” Tobias said, offering me a roll of gauze, and I flinched. I hadn’t heard him approach. “I think there’s a couple antiseptic wipes in here too,” he continued, pawing through the first aid kit he’d popped open. I ripped open the thin packet he handed me and dabbed the cut.
“That was really brave, Meredith,” Leo said. “You did good. You helped keep us safe.”
She shifted her smile to him, and bit her lip as I started wrapping gauze around her palm. I’d done a pretty awful job of keeping
her
safe. I hadn’t even noticed she was hurt. Tobias said he had a couple of those wipes—were we going to be able to keep the cut clean until it healed? What if it got infected?
I didn’t even have a new mitten to give her. Her old one was too damp to keep her hand warm now. Why hadn’t we picked up extras when we’d gotten the blankets and hats?
“Guess we’ve seen the back-up the guys in town were waiting for,” Tobias said. “They really want what we have.”
“At least they gave up on this route,” Tessa said.
“For now,” Leo said. “There aren’t that many roads. If they want to find us badly enough, they’ll come back.”
Gav kicked at the snow. “Maybe we should go back and settle this now. Convince them we’re not worth messing with.”
I remembered the muzzle of the rifle poking through the van window. “We’re not going anywhere near those people!” I said, more sharply than I meant to. I pulled off one of my gloves, tugged it over Meredith’s hand, kissed her forehead, and stood up. “I’m going to look at the map.”
I grabbed the map book from the front of my sled and stalked off through the trees. After about twenty feet, I stopped and leaned against the flaking bark of a birch tree’s trunk. My legs felt like jelly. For a moment, the firm surface of the tree behind me was the only thing holding me up.
Meredith’s okay, I reminded myself. It was a bad scratch, but ultimately only a scratch. We had supplies, we had the vaccine, we had a map. Nothing had changed.
Except that at least a couple people with a gun were after us, and we didn’t know how long or how far they’d chase us, and any one of us could get hurt worse at any time. By our pursuers, through another accident like Meredith’s, from the cold. We hadn’t even spent one night without heat yet. How many of those nights would there be between here and Ottawa? We had hundreds of miles to go.
Was I strong enough to get all of us through this?
Did I have any choice? If I suggested we turn back toward the island, everyone else would probably agree, but that journey wouldn’t be any less dangerous. And it would mean passing the town where we’d lost Tobias’s truck.
I dragged the crisp winter air into my lungs, hoping it would settle my thoughts, but they whirled on. I opened the map book. If we kept going toward Ottawa, we couldn’t stay on the freeway. As the woman in the red hat had suggested, there were stretches where they’d be able to spot us from miles away.
The ground amid the trees was more uneven than the road, and covered with snow instead of ice, but I didn’t think the going would be much slower. The sleds might slide easier. We could follow alongside the freeway through the forest until we found a new car and could put some real distance between us and the people in the van.
The others’ voices rose and fell behind me, muffled by the trees. As I straightened up, footsteps crunched through the snow. I turned, expecting Gav. But it was Leo who was walking toward me.
“You all right, Kae?” he said.
The concern in his eyes and the way he said my name made my heart skip the way it had that day in the garage. A wave of frustration rolled over me, tensing my shoulders and closing my throat. I didn’t need this too. Not now. Not ever.
“Just wanted a minute to think,” I said.
“What happened to Meredith wasn’t your fault,” he said, even though he had to know just as well as I did that it was.
“It’s my fault all of us are here,” I said. “You told me it’d be bad. You knew people would be this crazy. But I decided to go anyway.”
He didn’t answer, only shrugged, lowering his gaze. I could see him pulling back into that distant place inside his head, and all at once I was twice as angry. I wanted the real Leo. The Leo who could smile through every snide comment our fifth grade teacher made about “foreigners.” The Leo who practiced a spin a hundred times, stumbling, and just laughed and said he had to keep trying. The Leo who’d pulled off his favorite T-shirt to use as a bandage, the time I fell out of a tree and cut the back of my head open, who ran to the nearest house to call for help and then sat with me and held my hand and told me jokes all the way to the hospital.
This boy standing in front of me, looking beaten—this boy who’d kissed me with his girlfriend just a building away and then pretended it didn’t matter—this wasn’t my best friend. And I had no idea how to get him back.
“You’re doing what you have to do,” Leo said finally. “Because of the vaccine. We all get that.”
I wasn’t sure that was true, but I didn’t want to talk anymore. So all I said was, “Yeah.” I moved to walk past him, and he caught me with a hand on my arm.
“Are
we
all right, Kae?” he asked.
There were four layers of cloth between his skin and mine, but I could still feel a faint warmth where he touched me. I pulled my arm away.
“Sure,” I said, but the word came out so harsh even I wouldn’t have believed it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low. “What happened in the garage . . . it was a stupid thing to do. But I meant what I said. I’m not going to try—it’s not going to happen again.”
“You shouldn’t have done it in the first place,” I snapped.
Too many emotions to count flickered across Leo’s face, but there was one I couldn’t mistake. Hurt. “I’m sorry,” he said again, stiffly. “I didn’t know it was that awful.”
My fingers curled into my palms. “I didn’t say that. It’s so much more complicated, Leo. Tessa’s my friend.
You’re
supposed to be my friend. I can’t—”
I couldn’t keep discussing this, not when Gav was turning toward us where he stood with the group by the road. “Kae?” he called, peering through the forest.
Leo was looking at me almost curiously. A cold spot formed in the pit of my stomach.
“Forget it,” I said. “We’ve got to get going. It doesn’t matter now anyway.”
I stepped around him and headed back to the things that did.
We made it six more miles before we stopped for the night in a tiny town that was barely more than a scattering of houses, a church, and a convenience store along a road branching off from the freeway. Someone had driven a pickup truck into the side of the store. The store’s window was shattered, and what we could see of the truck’s front end was smashed flat. I wondered if the driver had been sick, hallucinating, when the accident happened.
Even though there were no footprints or tire tracks on the street, we walked down the road slowly, pausing every now and then to listen. No sound reached us but the wind. My eyes ached from the cold and my legs from the walking. Numbness was starting to dull the nerves in my feet despite my two layers of socks and thick boots. Meredith’s head was drooping. But we still had a little farther to go.
To my relief, we found an unlocked house on our second try. We went in, wiping our boots on the inner mat out of habit. No one was going to care about the state of the floors. Pictureless nails dotted the living room, and the closets and beds had been stripped bare. The people who’d lived here must have tried to run from the virus. The emptiness of the town seemed to echo through the walls.
Gav poked at the fireplace. “Looks like its useable,” he said. “There are even a couple logs here that are hardly charred.”
“If the people in that van are still searching for us, won’t the smoke give us away?” Tessa said.
“We’d be okay once it gets dark,” Tobias said. “I—I’ll go have a look at the trees around here. If we can get some spruce branches, or elder, they don’t make as much smoke.”
“Really?” Gav said. “Wood’s wood, isn’t it?”
Tobias shrugged, his head low. “We had a whole section on how to evade the enemy if you’re stationed outdoors. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Within an hour, we had flames dancing in the fireplace, wafting a thin heat and tangy spruce scent through the living room. We all huddled close, taking turns warming cans of soup at the edge of the hearth. The feeling slowly prickled back into my feet.
“We should be careful how much we’re eating,” Leo said. “Now that we’re going to be on the road longer than we expected.”
“We can’t cut back too much if we’re going to have energy for walking,” I pointed out.
“Army rations are pretty filling,” Tobias said. “That’s what they’re made for. I’d figure we’re good for another ten days.” He paused. “It’s water you’ve got to worry about more. We could melt some snow here to fill up the empty bottles before we go.”
After we’d eaten, he and Tessa and Leo went out with the three pots we found in the kitchen, and came back with heaps of snow. “Careful,” Tobias said as he set his by the edge of the fire. “We’ve got to pour a little water in first. Otherwise—you’d never believe it—the damn stuff can burn the bottom of the pot.”
“Are we just going to sleep here?” Meredith asked. “On the floor?”
“We could bring the mattresses down from the beds upstairs,” Tessa said. “Make it more comfortable.”
Tobias nodded. “We’ll stay warmer that way too.”
Tessa and Meredith kept an eye on the melting snow while the rest of us headed upstairs. Gav and Leo took the queen mattress out of the master bedroom and hauled it down while Tobias and I grabbed the double down the hall. I tried not to notice the knickknacks on the shelves, the books on the bedside table.
By the time we’d pushed the mattress to the top of the stairs, sweat had broken out on my forehead. “Better take your coat off if you’re getting hot,” Tobias said. “When your clothes get damp, it’s a lot harder to keep warm later on.”
I nodded, and dropped the coat over the railing so I could pick it up below. “You know a lot about surviving in the cold.”
“I’ve been through training,” he said. “In Canada. Wouldn’t have lasted long if I didn’t pick up a few things.”
I looked at him then—really looked at him, for the first time since he’d told us what was going on in the harbor, when all I’d been able to see was yet another soldier who should have been protecting us and failed. He was only a few years older than I was. He had parents out there, maybe brothers or sisters, friends—people he didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. He’d had to leave the one certain shelter he had. Training or not, some part of him must have been scared. And he was still here.
“Thanks,” I said. “For helping us, with everything. I hate to think what a mess we’d be in without you.”
His head jerked around with a start. Then his stance relaxed and he gave me a shy smile. “Just doing what I know how to do.”
As the rest of us lay out the blankets, Tobias turned on the transceiver radio he’d insisted we bring and took it out onto the front steps. Ten minutes later, he came back in, sprinkled with snow and shaking his head. “I’m not picking up any signals tonight.”
We slept the same way we had in the truck, each wrapped in a blanket of our own and then squeezed together in a row under the unzipped sleeping bags. My body balked at the cramped positioning for just a few minutes before exhaustion took over, and I drifted off with Gav’s breath by my ear. It hardly felt like any time at all before the early morning sun streaming through the window woke me.
The fire had dwindled to embers, but the room still held a little warmth. The muscles around my middle throbbed when I sat up, from pulling the sled yesterday. I squirmed out from between Gav and Meredith, who were starting to stir, and went to check on the vaccine.
The temperature in the cold-storage box looked fine, but the freezer packs were getting sloshy. I took three of the four out and set them in my sled, hoping they’d refreeze while we walked that day, and broke a bunch of icicles off the house’s windows to refill the box.
By then the others were up. We gulped down a couple tins of canned peaches between us and gnawed on granola bars while we packed the sleds. As we carried them back outside, Meredith gave an excited yelp. “I see a car!” She gestured to a shape buried in the snow several driveways down the road. “Do you think there are keys in the house?”
“Can’t hurt to check,” Gav said. We all marched over. While he and Tobias started wiping down the car, Tessa and I climbed the front steps. The door opened easily.
“If you were a car key, where would you be?” I said.
Tessa scanned the hall. “No key rack. No hall table. Maybe a drawer in the kitchen?”
A pair of wooly mittens lay in a basket just beyond the shoe rack. I picked them up so I could replace Meredith’s damaged pair. My heartbeat kicked up a notch as we crept farther into the house. What I’d said to Tobias before was true—the fact that the car was still here meant the owners probably were too. The fact that they hadn’t complained about us barging into their house meant, if they were, they were dead. But thankfully we came upon nothing except a dusty counter, a coffee machine with the pot still a quarter full but ringed with ice, and, in the third drawer Tessa checked, a car key.
“Got it!” she said, sounding so triumphant I couldn’t help grinning as we hurried outside.
The car, an old maroon sedan, was pretty much unearthed. Tessa unlocked the door and climbed inside. Beside me, Gav shifted restlessly. The engine coughed, sputtered, and then rose into a steady rumble. Meredith let out a little cheer.
Tessa backed it up two feet, three, and then the wheels started spinning against the snow pushed up in their wake. My heart sank. She eased the car back and forth a few times, making only a few inches of progress, then cut the engine and got out to study the problem.
“The snow’s too deep,” Leo said, stating what we were all realizing. “We’d have to shovel a path right down to the freeway.”
And then we’d only be okay as long as part of the road was just ice or shallow snow. We could hardly count on that.
“So we’re going to need something bigger,” Tessa said. “Like the truck.”
“It’s not going to work?” Meredith said, a tremble in her voice.
“Looks like no.” I rubbed her back. “Don’t worry, Mere. We’ll just have to wait until we find one that’s better equipped for the weather.”
As if we hadn’t been lucky just to find this car and its keys. I glanced to the west, the way we were headed, and Ottawa seemed to shrink far away into the distance.
“Then we’ve got some more walking to do,” Gav said, reaching for his sled. “Better get started.”