“It doesn’t matter why it happened,” I said. “We’ve got to get them out of there.”
“I’ll shoot it, properly this time,” the girl said, pushing back her dark curls and raising the BB gun.
“With that toy?” Justin said. He shifted forward, lifting the rifle from the ground, and I grasped his arm.
“You think it’s easy to kill a bear with one shot? If you just hurt it, it’s going to be even more upset.” If Leo, with his hunting experience, hadn’t thought it was a good idea to use his pistol, I didn’t want Justin firing away.
“So what’s your brilliant plan?” the young man snapped.
I didn’t have one. All I knew was that even if this bear had lost some of its natural fear of humans, it wanted easy prey, small prey, weak prey. It wouldn’t want to fight if it thought there was a real danger.
We had to convince it that we were dangerous, that it had to leave. If we came up beside it and made a lot of noise, all of us together—My thoughts stuttered as I glanced at the townspeople. For all we knew, one of them was infected. Justin and Anika had no protection from the virus at all, not even a makeshift face mask. And these strangers could turn on us the second the kid was safe.
Across the yard, the little boy whimpered. Leo murmured something to him, too faint for me to make out, and I remembered what he’d said last night. I don’t want the world to be like this. I swallowed thickly.
I didn’t want it to be like this either. I didn’t want to have to feel like a criminal just for passing through a town. I didn’t want to have to wonder who I might have to shoot. And I sure as hell didn’t want to live in a world where we let two people get mauled and maybe die because the rest of us were too scared of each other to do anything about it.
My hands balled in my pockets. “We have to frighten the bear off,” I said. “Act big and loud and threatening. Make it think it’s not worth sticking around. Come on!”
I gestured to the four of them. The woman looked at the boy I assumed was her son and back to me, started to move, and then stiffened. The young man was scowling, the older man clutching the girl’s arm.
Fine. We’d just have to show them what to do.
I nudged Justin and marched toward the side of the school without waiting to see if he’d follow. The rifle butt tapped along behind me as he hurried to keep up. I kept my steps as light as possible, sticking close to the brick wall, slowing as I came up parallel with the bear. It glanced over at us, then turned its focus back to Leo and the boy.
“Hey!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. I raised my hands and stomped one foot on the ground. “Hey, get out of here! Move it!”
“Take off!” Justin joined in, smacking the rifle against the ground and then waving it at the bear. “Go on, run for it!”
The bear lurched around to face us, backing up a few paces. For a second, I thought we’d succeeded. Then it bared its teeth in a snarl.
“Hey, fur face, take a hike!” a voice hollered. The girl with the BB gun had come up beside Justin. She swung her arms in the air, flashing her own clenched teeth. Then the young man was with her, pounding the pavement with his running shoes and letting out a wordless bellow.
“Leave him alone, you monster!” the mother yelled, slipping into our midst. She clapped her hands against her sides, and I started stomping my feet again, and we all raised our voices in a cacophony of shouts and insults. The bear was watching us, braced, its hackles raised. I took one aggressive step forward, drawing myself up as tall as I could, and it whipped around. In the space of a blink, it had dashed across the schoolyard and was disappearing into the shadows down the street.
“Woohoo!” the girl cried, and the others started to laugh, the tension breaking. Even though my pulse was still pounding, I was grinning so wide my cheeks hurt. Leo handed the boy down to his mother and slid off the storage box. He walked straight to me and tugged me into a tight embrace.
“The unexpected benefits of having an animal-obsessed best friend,” he said, but despite his joking tone, I felt a tremor ripple through his body. I hugged him back, and right then there was nothing awkward about it, just the immense gratitude that we’d all gotten through one more crisis okay.
“You did some pretty quick thinking too,” I said. “If you hadn’t raced in there, I don’t know what it would have done to the kid.”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding almost startled, as if he’d forgotten how he’d ended up in the situation in the first place. “I probably should have handled it better, but the bear was coming at us so fast, my mind went blank. I just didn’t want to make it angrier.”
“Well, you managed that. And I don’t think the kid’s mom is complaining.”
She was waiting nearby when Leo eased back from me, her son clutching her leg.
“Thank you,” she said. “I—I don’t know what to say. You saved his life.”
A faint blush crept across Leo’s face. “It was Kaelyn as much as me,” he said, but his eyes had brightened.
“The bear will probably steer clear of this part of town from now on,” I said.
“Good,” the older man said gruffly, but then he added, “We’ll know what to do if it causes any more problems, thanks to you.”
“You look as if you’ve been traveling for a while,” the woman put in. “Would you stop and have lunch with us?”
“Yes, you have to!” the girl said, bouncing on her heels and beaming at us. The older man inclined his head. The younger guy was still scowling, but he didn’t argue.
A sort of exhilaration swept through me. We were standing here, talking like people used to, before the friendly flu and the Wardens. Not like enemies, not full of suspicion and threats, just like…human beings.
I’d almost forgotten what it felt like, to smile at a stranger, to invite someone to share a meal. It was so normal. And it was the most incredible feeling in the world.
This was what I wanted. I could survive without computers and malls and processed food. But what was the point in surviving if we could never go back to being regular people with one another? Working in harmony, sharing resources, accomplishing far more than we could have alone.
If you’d asked me a day ago, I wouldn’t have been sure it could ever happen. It had seemed pretty much impossible. But right now…Right now I could see reason to hope all around me.
I let myself linger in that rush of joy for a few seconds longer, and then reality sank in. As much as I longed to stay here and keep the feeling of normalcy alive, we did still have the friendly flu and the Wardens to worry about. We had to get the vaccine samples to Atlanta while they were still cold.
But nothing said we couldn’t come back, when our mission was complete.
“I wish we could,” I told the woman. “But we’re actually in kind of a hurry.” I paused, hating that I couldn’t say why and that if asked I’d have to lie. Protecting the vaccine trumped everything else, for now.
To my relief, the woman didn’t ask. She patted her son’s shoulder and said, “I’d like to do something. I can whip up some sandwiches quickly, for you to take on the road. I have a loaf of bread that just finished baking.”
“That would be awesome,” Justin said. I nodded, my stomach gurgling at the thought of anything fresh after the canned and prepackaged food we’d been eating for most of the last few months. We could wait a couple minutes.
The woman smiled and prodded her son ahead of her down the sidewalk. The older man followed them. His skin was as dark as theirs was pale, so I doubted he was related to them, but from the way he bent down to whisper in the boy’s ear and the boy’s answering grin, I guessed he’d taken on a grandfatherly role. When you lost your real family, you ended up making a new one out of the people you still had.
I glanced at the people who made up my family now. Leo shot me a smile and ambled a short ways down the road, checking the route the bear had taken.
Anika had sidled over to the young man and managed to crack his dour expression.
He’d turned toward her, his eyebrows arched. She flipped her hair over her shoulder with one of her artfully careless gestures and looked at him through her eyelashes.
“Yup,” she was saying, tapping the hood of the tractor. “Right through the mountains. This thing’s not really my dream car, but it did the job all right.”
Beside me, Justin was watching them. Beneath his rumpled ponytail, the back of his neck had reddened. I bumped my elbow against his.
“Relax,” I said quietly. “She’s going to get to know him for all of five minutes.”
The flush spread up to his cheeks. “I wasn’t—” he started, and then dropped his gaze. “I know, I know.”
Anika was certainly making good use of the time. In response to a question I’d missed, she gave the guy’s arm a swat. “Oh, I could handle that. I’m tougher than I look. No, the only problem with it is the fuel. We’ve got to find diesel. That’s why we went for the school bus, but it was basically empty.” She shrugged, letting her face fall just slightly. I wasn’t surprised when the guy jumped at the chance to play hero.
“Hey, you could head over to Murphy’s place,” he said, gesturing to the west. “It’s just half a mile outside of town, over by the river. He was a trucker—I’m pretty sure his rig is still parked there, but he took off with some friends. Whatever he’s left behind is free pickings.”
As Anika murmured something demure about not wanting to take what he and the other townspeople might need and he eagerly denied any conflict, the girl with the BB gun cocked her head at me.
“Where’d you all come from, anyway?” she asked.
She looked hungry—not for food, but for information. Reassurance. She didn’t resemble any of the adults who’d come out, so I guessed what birth family she’d had was gone. These days, at eleven or twelve, maybe you had to be one of the adults.
“We came from up north,” I said, stumbling over how much I should tell her.
“Hmmm,” she said. “You must have been pretty cold up there. The winter wasn’t too bad here—we were okay when the gas ran out—but it wasn’t a lot of fun either.”
“Yeah,” I said. Anika guffawed at a comment the guy had made, and I wished I had her skill at chumming up to strangers. But what do you say to a kid who’s probably lost both her parents, maybe siblings, and all her friends, just in the last few months?
“It’s good,” I managed to continue, “the way you’re all sticking together. That’s how we got this far.”
“I guess,” the girl said with a skeptical frown, and then I didn’t have to worry about saying anything else, because the woman was hurrying back to us with a plastic shopping bag in her hands.
“Thank you so much,” I said, accepting it. She’d wrapped each of the sandwiches in parchment paper, but the smell of warm bread wafted through it. My mouth watered.
“It’s the least I could do,” she said. “I hope you all get to where you’re going safely.”
Anika waved to the guy and hopped into the cab. I handed off sandwiches to Leo and Justin, and then climbed in beside her.
“I take it you know where we’re going?” I said.
“Brendan was very happy to help,” she said, flashing a grin at me. She did it for us, I thought abruptly. She’d charmed the information out of that guy to get us where we, and the vaccines, needed to go.
Despite her protests three days ago, she did care. I hoped that meant her pledge to stick with us would hold, no matter what waited for us in Atlanta. She was starting to seem like a real part of our group. A part of this makeshift family.
We dug into our sandwiches together as Anika steered the tractor down the road and out the other end of town. The bread tasted faintly smoky, as if it’d been baked over a fire—which I supposed maybe it had. But it was crusty and chewy and filled with tuna salad, which was more filling than anything I remembered eating recently. And I’d forgotten just how wonderful mayonnaise could be. I finished, licking the crumbs off my fingers, just as a weathered wooden house appeared up ahead. Parked on a dusty stretch of earth between it and the river beyond was a flatbed transport truck.
We parked next to the truck and piled out. The breeze that greeted us was hardly wintery, but chilly enough that it tickled my skin under my open coat. Clouds were crawling across the sky, smothering the sun.
“Are the keys around?” I said, with a vision of speeding along the roads at regular car speed again. Justin glanced into the truck’s cab and shook his head. I ordered him to stay with the tractor, which he agreed to with an exaggerated sigh, and the rest of us tramped through the bungalow. The place was unlocked and dusty with disuse, but either the owner had hoped he’d come back to trucking someday and held on to the keys, or he’d hidden them well. Our search turned up nothing.
It’d only be a few more hours anyway, I reminded myself as we hurried back outside. A damp wind had picked up, licking across our faces, and the clouds had darkened. Time to get going.
Leo took charge of the siphon tube again, and got the fuel flowing out of the truck’s tank in a matter of seconds. After we’d filled the jugs, he started feeding it straight into the tractor. As he worked, Anika and I wandered around the yard to see if there might be a spare tank on the property. We found a shed that held plenty of repair tools, but no fuel. A rickety wooden dock stretched along the bank of the narrow gray river, with an aluminum rowboat bobbing by one corner, empty except for two wooden paddles. I crouched and dipped a hand into the river. The water was startlingly cold.
Anika poked at the rowboat with the toe of her boot. “Well,” she said, “it looked like there was lots of gas in the truck.”
“I think we’ll have more than enough,” I said.
Leo was still filling up the tractor when we returned. As I leaned over the side of the trailer, checking for empty water bottles I could fill, an odd squeaking sound reached my ears. I peered around the corner of the house.
A small figure on a bike was careening toward us down the road from town. I recognized the girl I’d talked to there. Her curly hair was billowing behind her. I stepped out to meet her as she screeched to a halt beside the house.
“Someone’s going to come,” she said, panting. “In a white Humvee. We were still outside, after you left, and they roared right in—They wanted to know if we saw some people in a tractor. We told them we hadn’t, but they kept asking questions. I don’t know if they believed us. So I thought I should tell you before they came looking. They kind of scared me.”
She hadn’t even finished speaking when I picked up the growl of an engine in the distance. A white blotch was traveling down the road the way she’d come. My heart stopped. If they’d mentioned the tractor—the people from the helicopter must have spotted us at the farm and sent another group our way.
“Thank you,” I said to the girl. “Now get out of here before they come after you too!”
She nodded and shot off on her bike. “Let’s move!” Justin said as I hurried back. He clutched the side of the trailer.
“Wait!” Anika said, her face paling. “We can’t outrun a car in this thing.”
“We don’t have anything else,” I said, but my pulse skittered. She was right. Could we just hide?
As I spun around, Leo hefted a bag out of the trailer and pointed toward the dock. “We do,” he said. “The boat. They can’t follow us on the water.”
The roar of the Humvee’s engine already sounded far too close. In the split second I had, I couldn’t think of a better plan. I yanked out the cold box and a bundle of blankets. “Grab what you can and let’s go!”
We fled across the yard to the river. I clambered into the rowboat, shifting to the side to make room for the others. The boat bobbed dangerously low as they scrambled in with what we’d salvaged of our supplies. Gravel rattled under tires on the other side of the house. I fumbled with the latch that hooked the boat’s rope to the dock. It was caked with rust. Anika leaned over beside me and chopped through the cord with her hunting kni
fe.
I let go. The boat swirled away from the dock, the current sweeping it past the end of the yard and into the shadows of the underbrush that lined the bank farther down. The sound of the engine cut out, and doors slammed. I gripped the edge of the seat. The yard and the dock vanished from sight an instant later as the river tugged us around the bend.
For a while I found it hard to do anything except scan the riverbanks. I wasn’t totally convinced we’d actually managed to escape. The current whipped us around the humps of rocks jutting from the water’s surface as we slipped past long stretches of forest. Bud-dotted branches rattled in the rising wind.
When the threat of the people in the Humvee finally felt far enough away that I could catch my breath, I started taking stock.
“What did everyone manage to bring?” I asked.
“The water bottles and the first-aid kit,” Anika said from where she crouched in the bottom of the boat.
“Bag of food, rifle,” Justin said, opposite her.
“The radio,” Leo said, on the seat across from mine. He rested his hand on its plastic covering. “And the pack with the tent.”
And I’d gotten the vaccine, and at least a couple blankets. In the warmer weather, we could make do without the sleeping bag, and the jugs of diesel fuel we’d filled wouldn’t do us much good without the tractor. I glanced up at the sky, wondering exactly what direction the river was taking us in, but it was clotted with clouds, as gray as the surface of the water.
“We’re going mostly south, I think,” Leo said. “I haven’t been able to keep track of all the turns.”
We had left something important behind. The road atlas. It’d been sitting on the dash of the tractor—I could picture exactly where, but that didn’t do us any good.
A drop of cool water hit my hair. I glanced up, and got another in the eye. As I wiped it away, a light rain began to patter down on us. Justin groaned.
“It figures.”
I shrugged up the hood of my coat, even though its thick padding made me swelteringly hot, and the others did the same. The rain drummed the bottom of the boat. We were going to have to bail it out before too long. Or get out ourselves.