The Worlds We Make (20 page)

“Hey!” a voice bellowed, so close my stomach flipped over. “Stop right there—one more step and you’re dead!”

As if we wouldn’t be dead if we stayed. I bolted forward, and the others followed. Our boots thudded across the pavement, but there wasn’t any point in trying to be quiet now. The convertible was just a few car-lengths away.

I dug out the car key with shaky fingers. We could still make it.

A shot crackled through the air. Anika let out a startled gasp. I glanced back to where she was running next to Justin, who was staggering now as he tried to keep up, his face contorted. Anika had glanced back too. I saw her flinch, and then she lunged at Justin.

“No!” The word broke from my throat before I had a chance to process what was happening. The idea flashed through my mind that she was betraying us after all, using Justin to save herself. Then, as she hit him and shoved him to the side, the gun thundered again.

Justin stumbled between two cars. Anika lurched and tumbled forward. Her hands didn’t come up to break her fall. Her head hit the pavement with a sickening crack, the impact rippling through her body. And then she was still.

“Anika!” Justin yelled. A dark blotch was spreading across the back of her sweater. Her head had twisted to the side, and her eyes stared blindly. She didn’t so much as twitch. A little cry filled my throat, but in the same moment I saw the figures rushing at us from the edge of the parking lot. Justin threw himself at Anika, and I threw myself at him.

Leo met me there, the two of us grabbing Justin by the elbows. An iron taste was seeping through my mouth where I’d bitten my lip, and a sharp ache filled my chest. But the rising shouts drowned out everything else.

Anika was dead. And the rest of us would be too, if we didn’t get out of here
now
.

Justin stumbled with us the last few feet to the convertible. I yanked open the driver’s-side door while Leo leapt for the back. The key jarred against the ignition and then slid in. I took a quick glance around to make sure Leo and Justin were inside, and then I pressed my foot to the gas.

Nathan obviously knew how to pick a car. The engine responded instantly. The convertible roared forward, swerving around the other cars as I jerked the steering wheel. We had only a twenty-foot run down the drive to the locked gate.

A Warden stood on the other side of the gate, raising a gun. Drew hadn’t said anything about this part of our escape, but I couldn’t stop. So I jammed my foot down harder. The engine thrummed, and the car ripped over the pavement toward that narrow chain-link square.

I tensed, fighting the urge to close my eyes, as we barreled straight into the gate. The convertible’s hood crashed into the metal links, and the gate’s hinges wrenched open with a shriek. The guard on the other side dove out of the way, his shot going wild. The gate clattered against the concrete curb, and we were out, tearing down the road.

The lights of the training center fell away behind us. I became aware of the raspy hitching of my breath, the sweat that was now cooling on my arms and neck. I wiped my damp bangs away from my face.

In the back, Justin was staring out the window, moisture glinting in his eyes. Leo leaned against the front passenger seat.

“You know the way back to the house?” he asked softly.

“I think so.” I tried to dredge up my memories of the drive here in the back of the station wagon, and my thoughts blurred together. I was hungry and dehydrated and sleep deprived, running mostly on adrenaline. And a cool haze of shock was creeping over me. The image of Anika hitting the ground flitted through my mind. I clenched my jaw against a sudden rush of nausea.

She’d been one of us, in the end. A real part of our makeshift family. And I hadn’t protected her any better than I had Gav or Tobias.

I’d done even worse by her. Right up until the last moment, I hadn’t totally trusted her not to give us up somehow, whether strategically or out of weakness. And then she’d sacrificed herself for us, for Justin.

Maybe she’d seen that niggling uncertainty in me. Maybe I’d made her feel she hadn’t done enough after all, like she still had to prove her loyalty. Would she have been so quick to throw herself in front of a bullet if she’d really felt accepted in our group?

I couldn’t ask her now. I’d been so incredibly wrong, and there was no way I could ever tell her that. All I’d done for her was leave her body to the Wardens—the people she hated the most.

“I’m sorry, Justin,” I said, my voice cracking.

He turned and swiped at his eyes. He looked as sick as I felt. My own eyes welled up.

“Why did she
do
that?” he said. “I never asked her to.…”

“She was protecting you,” I said. “You didn’t have to ask her. No one made her. She just wanted to.”

He exhaled. “You don’t think—could she still be—”

I remembered the limpness of her body as she’d fallen, the blood on her back, her unblinking eyes. A fresh wave of nausea rolled through me. “No,” I said.

“Fuck,” he said. “God fucking damn it.” He hit out at the car door, his elbow and fist smacking the window, and then kicked it for good measure. I stayed silent, letting him have his rage. It was all I could give him.

The road we were following curved into a town, and my gaze caught on the welcome sign. I recognized that name. Connor had turned here. There’d been an ice-cream shop by a corner. I spotted the posters in the store window just in time, and took a right. I thought we’d kept on this new road for a while. Maybe a whole hour? But I was driving faster than Connor had been.

There’d been no signs of pursuit behind us. I hoped that meant Drew’s trick with the water had worked, and not just that the Wardens were taking some other route to cut us off.

The headlights lit the unmowed grass along the shoulder an eerie yellow gray. We sped past the twisting branches of a patch of forest and the vacant buildings along the main street of another small town. This one’s name didn’t jog my memory. I blinked hard and stretched my arms, one and then the other. The haze in my mind receded only a little.

“Justin,” I said, and hesitated. “I don’t want to ask this, but—I’m not sure I’m going to recognize all the landmarks on the way. Do you think you could climb up front and tell me if I miss anything you remember?”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I can do that.”

He clambered between the seats and slumped into the one beside me. Leo fumbled with something in the back.

“There’s water,” he said, passing a bottle forward. “And some snack bars. We’ll do better if we’re not starving.”

I choked down one of the bars and a half a bottle of water, passing it back and forth with Justin. He pointed to a sign we whizzed past, that advertised a cottage resort fifty miles ahead. “We take a left when we get to that place.”

“Thanks,” I said, and he gave me a stiff nod.

None of us spoke again until the turn, and afterward only to confirm the next few adjustments of our course. I could feel the empty space in the car that should have been Anika’s weighing on all our minds. There were practicalities we maybe should have been discussing, but it seemed, at least to me, that we owed her that period of silence.

When we finally reached the long driveway that curved through the trees toward the house by the river, my pulse kicked up a notch. I slowed, watching the high beams light trunks and bushes and the empty lane ahead of us. No other vehicles were parked there, or in the yard around the house. Still, I didn’t want to spend a second longer here than we had to. I eased the car to a stop, jumped out, and ran down to the river.

For a moment, in the darkness, I thought the cold box had vanished. A broken sob burst from my lips just before my groping hand touched the smooth plastic surface of the lid beneath the dock.

The water was just as icy as before. By the time I’d hauled the cold box onto the bank, I was shivering and the skin on my arm had numbed. I hoped that meant the last batch of snow I’d packed in there had stayed frozen well enough to last the rest of the way to Atlanta.

When I got back to the car, Leo was sitting in the driver’s seat. “I figured you could use a break,” he said. Justin had moved to the back again, so I got in beside Leo, setting the cold box by my feet.

“What do we do now?” Justin said.

“We get to Atlanta as fast as we can,” I said. “And then we call up Dr. Guzman and find out how to get to the CDC in one piece.”

Leo shut off the high beams as we turned the car back down the driveway. In the thin glow of the regular headlights, the world became a ghostly landscape of muted shapes and shadows.

“You know which way to go?” I asked.

“Toward Clermont, and then onto the 129 south. Keep an eye out for signs, okay?”

“Go right when you get to the end of the driveway,” Justin put in. “That’s the way we went when we saw the sign for Clermont.” He tipped his head against the window. Remembering walking this way with Anika, I guessed. That was the last time he’d had with her before the Wardens came. I wanted to say something hopeful, but I couldn’t find any words that would make what had happened the slightest bit better. And who was I to talk, after the way I’d misjudged her?

A short distance down the road, we turned onto a highway. Leo started to speed up, straddling the middle lanes. Several minutes later, we merged onto a freeway heading south.

We drove around a broken-down Greyhound bus, and later a stalled van. I scanned the darkness whenever we passed an exit, watching for lights. The cars in the training center’s parking lot might have been temporarily useless, but Michael had other allies in Georgia, people he could have sent our way by radio. We were hardly in the clear yet.

We were only a couple miles from the city limits when something glinted up ahead. “Stop!” I whispered, as if anyone would be able to hear us from that far away. Leo pressed the brake, bringing us to a quick but quiet halt. I stared into the blackness, and then rolled down the window. No sound reached my ears. But a moment later, I saw the glimmer of lights again. Someone was on the freeway down there.

“Time to move onto the smaller roads?” Leo suggested.

“Looks like it,” I said.

He turned the car around and drove back to the last exit we’d passed, which wound down into a suburban neighborhood. The houses were set so far back on their treed lawns that I could barely make out their silhouettes in the dark. The roar of the convertible’s engine echoed in my ears. The night around us was too quiet for comfort.

“If they’re just sitting and waiting, they’ll still be able to hear us when we get close to where they’re staked out,” I said. “And the farther we get into the city, the more people Michael might have in position. We should ditch the car. I think it’ll only be a few more miles to the CDC buildings. If you’re okay to walk?” I glanced back at Justin.

“I’ll manage,” he said shortly.

Leo drove the car up one of the long driveways, pulling it onto the lawn behind a row of spruces that would hide it from the road. For the first time, we opened the trunk. Tobias’s transceiver sat there, still in its plastic case. My heart leapt with gratitude for Drew. He’d also left a bag with more of the snack bars and some juice boxes, and a couple of the two-way radios the Wardens used.

I wished I’d thought to ask him for some sort of map. But I couldn’t feel disappointed looking at how much he’d managed to accomplish right under Michael’s nose.

“Hold on,” Leo said as I turned away from the car. He squirmed under it on his back and fiddled with something underneath. A thin stream of liquid pattered onto the grass.

“Emptying the oil,” Leo explained as he scrambled back out. “If the Wardens find the car, they won’t be able to drive it far.”

“I’d like to smash the whole thing,” Justin muttered. He settled for smacking one of the doors with his knee. Then we left the car behind, stalking across the vast lawns.

The trees and shrubs provided almost as much shelter as if we’d been wandering through a forest. I sent a silent thank-you to the Atlanta suburbanites for their fondness for greenery. The world around us was still except for the murmur of our feet over the grass and the rustling of leaves overhead. Justin found a narrow branch that had fallen by the base of an oak and turned it into a cane, adding a soft
thump
to the sound of our passing.

A thick-leafed vine crawled across the faces of most of the houses, looking like dark splotches of mold in the moonlight. The air was crisp, the breeze chilly. I started to hunch inside my sweater, missing my coat.

We’d made it four blocks from the car when a breathless shout broke the quiet. “Is anyone there? Is anyone—is anyone out there? Hellooooo!”

I jumped, and Leo grasped my arm. A string of harsh coughs carried from wherever the shouter was, somewhere behind us. My fingers tightened around the handle of the cold box. One more person the vaccine was coming too late to save.

We walked even more carefully after that. An engine rumbled by somewhere to our left, and we went right for several blocks before continuing south. Justin limped along at a steady pace, but I could tell from the wobble in his steps that he was getting tired. And we were losing the cover of night. A faint glow tinged the sky to the east.

It was time we figured out exactly where we were going.

I was studying the homes on our side of the street when a low growl reverberated through a hedge up ahead. I edged across the lawn and peeked over.

Several thin, furry bodies were pacing around the lawn on the other side. Dogs. As my vision sharpened in the dim light, I saw that most of them were gathered together in a pack, facing a lone husky that stood over a lumpy shape on the grass. It took me another second to recognize the thing they were fighting over. My gaze caught the bend of a knee, the flesh torn down to the bone. I grimaced, swallowing down the bile rising the back of my mouth.

It looked as if the husky had found the body first, and the other five dogs had come across it and wanted dibs. As I watched, a ragged mutt and an Irish wolfhound charged right up to the corpse. The husky’s growl deepened. It snapped at them, even though it should have known it was outnumbered. Its coat was matted and its body gaunt. When had it last found such an easy “meal”?