Leo gripped my shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said quietly. “You know that, right?”
The concern in his warm brown eyes jarred loose too many of the feelings I wanted to smother, one after the other, in a jagged chain. The memory of the one kiss we’d shared. The boy lying in front of us who I would never kiss again. All the ways it was my fault: for deciding to come out here, for letting Gav come with me, for not pushing him enough to take the vaccine.
I groped inside for the anger that had steadied me earlier. Think of the Wardens. Think of Michael on his imaginary throne. If it was my fault, it was even more theirs.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Give me a minute?” I said.
Leo inclined his head. “We found a tire yesterday,” he said. “The SUV’s ready, whenever you are.”
After he left, I stood there, staring down at Gav’s body. It looked so vacant, as if there had never been a glint in those eyes, a smile on those lips. My gaze caught on a small lump in the pocket of his jeans. I balked, and then, skin creeping, slipped my fingers inside. Maybe it was a pack of matches or water purification tablets he’d been carrying.
I pulled out a strip of folded cardboard: a flap torn off of a box of cookies. A scrawl of blue ink on the other side caught my eye.
Kae,
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Keep going.
I blinked hard, sucking in a breath that was almost a sob.
He must have found the box and a pen in one of the rooms he’d stayed isolated in back in Toronto, before his mind started to go. Left it in his pocket hoping I’d find it after the virus’s awfulness was over. So he could give me this one last message from the real him.
Keep going.
“I will,” I said. Carefully, I slid the note into the pocket of my own jeans, and folded the sheet over Gav’s body.
I covered his face last. My hands fell to my sides, and for a second I couldn’t move. At least, when he was found, whoever found him would know someone had cared about him. He hadn’t died alone.
Tobias sneezed in the next room. On heavy feet, I walked into the hall and stopped in front of his door.
“Tobias,” I said. “We’re going to head out.”
He gave a startled cough. “Now?”
He didn’t know, I realized. I hadn’t seen him downstairs since the night when he’d helped move the armoire. The thought of explaining overwhelmed me. He’d figure it out fast enough.
“Yeah,” I said. “You good to go?”
“I’ve got my scarves.” He paused. “Maybe I should take some of those sleeping pills. I guess I’d be a lot less contagious if I’m knocked out.”
“We can do that,” I said. Anika had brought us several bottles of the veterinary sedatives as her peace offering, so there were plenty left.
Tobias opened the door, and I found myself glancing away from his wan face. No matter how nonchalant he tried to sound, I knew he was terrified. He’d been terrified since he’d first told me about the itch he couldn’t scratch away. And while I’d been holding vigil over Gav, Tobias had been inching closer and closer to the same horrible fate.
“Fully equipped and ready to march,” he said with a salute, but I could hear the strain in his voice. We didn’t know if we’d find scientists who could treat him, if we made it to the CDC. Or whether the treatment would save him even if we did.
But it was all the hope we had.
“We’re going to make it to Atlanta,” I said, forcing myself to meet his eyes. “As fast as we can.”
The house’s pipes were frozen, nothing but a groan coming out when I tried the faucet, so I brought some melted snow into the bathroom for a hasty scrubbing before changing into some of the fresh clothes the others had scavenged from a store in town when they’d been looking for the tire. Then I checked the cold-storage box. All three samples were secure, the ice packs still frozen. I stuck the bag holding my dad’s notebooks in on top, so it’d be easier for me to grab everything if we had to make another run for it.
“We found a US road atlas in the gas station shop,” Leo said as we headed out to the car. “It should be enough to get us to Atlanta.”
Tobias gulped down a couple pills and got into the back of the SUV, coughing faintly into his scarves. Justin tugged his own scarf up and followed. He sat with a careful gap between him and Tobias. Anika watched beneath the immense hood of her newly acquired parka, her usual mask of eye shadow and lipstick washed away, fear naked on her delicate features. She hesitated by the door, and Tobias’s shoulders tensed.
“Wait,” I said. “I can navigate from the back. Justin, let me sit in the middle.” Where I’d be a barrier between Tobias and the people he could infect.
Justin shuffled out to make room, and Anika scrambled into the front. I took one last look at the house before I slid in beside Tobias. I couldn’t see the window of the room where we’d left Gav. But what lay in there was nothing more than a shell. Justin shut the door, and I turned my gaze forward.
The border was less than fifty miles away. In a couple hours, I’d be leaving the only country I’d ever lived in. The last scraps of my old life.
The engine revved, and Leo aimed the car toward Atlanta.
I charted a course with our old Ontario maps, keeping us off the major roads as much as possible. The Wardens might not have realized we’d stopped, so they were probably well ahead of us now, but I suspected they’d be patrolling every major highway between here and Atlanta until they caught us. They’d heard Leo’s broadcast; they knew where we were heading.
Leo flipped through the radio stations a few times. He used to drive his dad crazy when we were little, switching stations every few songs because he wanted to hear what all of them were playing. Today there was only the dull fizzle of static.
He stiffened when we approached the border, and I remembered his story of his weeks in the containment camp when he was trying to get home. But the booths and the lanes between them were empty. Several of the barriers were broken. And then we rumbled past the darkened windows and left Canada behind us.
Through the next day and into the night, we pulled over every few hours—to switch off the driving, to grab food from the back, to quickly siphon gas when we passed a cluster of houses that all had cars parked in their driveways. We never stopped moving for very long, but our progress was slow. The snow tugged at the tires, and twice we had to backtrack around a road where it was heaped too high. I tried to nap in the back during one of my breaks, but every hitch of the suspension startled me awake. Whenever I closed my eyes, I imagined Gav lying there in that room, the cold freezing him down to his bones. By the time the sun peeked over the horizon the next morning, I was chilled through.
As I peered out the window, a new worry broke through my exhaustion. The forestland we’d been traveling through for most of the night was giving way to open fields. Fields across which the Wardens might be watching from the larger roads we’d been avoiding. We hadn’t seen another soul so far, but that didn’t mean anything. The Wardens would be keeping a particular eye out for this SUV, the one we’d stolen from them.
“Anika,” I said, and she blinked to attention at the wheel, where she’d been staring through the windshield as if hypnotized. “You know the Wardens better than we do. You said Michael had headed down this way a little while back—how many people do you think he could have looking for us?”
She seemed to swallow a yawn. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I mean, I was never in with them—I’ve never even seen Michael. But from what I picked up, listening in on the talk on the street, he’s really good at winning people over. And he brought a bunch with him when he headed south. He’s had, like, a month now to get organized—he could have set up groups in a few different cities by now. If he wants the vaccine this much, he’ll have a lot of people keeping an eye out.”
“Maybe we should get another car, then,” I said. “One they wouldn’t reco
gnize.”
Beside me, Leo rubbed his bleary eyes. “That might be safer.”
“They’re going to come after any vehicle they see, aren’t they?” Justin put in, setting the road atlas on his lap. “It’s not like there’s any traffic for us to blend in with. If we stop to find a new car, we’re just giving them a chance to catch us.”
Anika frowned. “This one would be really easy to spot, though. I mean, the black against the snow.”
“So we’d need a white car,” Leo said. “That could take a while. We’ve had trouble just finding any car at all that’s drivable.”
He was right. Since none of us had any skill at hot-wiring, we needed to stumble on not just a white car capable of handling the snow, but its keys too. What were the chances?
Tobias’s breath rattled through his scarves from where he slumped against the opposite window. We had to get him to the CDC as soon as possible.
But we wouldn’t make it anywhere near Atlanta if we got caught because we were driving this dark SUV amid a sparkling snowy landscape. Or because we stopped to look for a different car. Or because one of us fell asleep at the wheel and got us into an accident.
I brought my hand to my forehead. How were we supposed to pick the safest option when every one was so risky?
The shadow of a telephone pole slid over the SUV’s hood, and a compromise occurred to me.
“The black would blend in at night, if we put something over the headlights to dim them,” I said. “We could stop off for the day, find a place to hide, and we can all get some sleep. And then when it starts getting dark, we can keep going.”
“Sounds good to me,” Justin said.
Leo nodded. “I’d feel better about driving more if I could get a little real rest first.”
We drove several miles farther, until we reached a campground with a cluster of abandoned rental cabins in a clump of forest. By then, Tobias was waking from his pill-induced sleep. He peered around groggily as we parked behind one of the cabins.
“Shouldn’t stay in this one,” he murmured. “Tire tracks would lead ’em right to us. We walk”—he pointed—“through the trees so no one sees where the trail ends, and go to one farther down.”
The evasive skills he’d learned in his military training hadn’t failed us yet. So we followed his instructions, looping through the forest to the cabin closest to the road, where we’d hear if anyone else drove into the campground. We crashed on the cabin’s living room floor, bundling in our blankets and sleeping bags inside the army-issue tent, to keep in the warmth in the absence of a fireplace. Tobias, since he’d slept plenty already, sat by the window to keep watch.
When I crawled out of the tent hours later, Leo was already up, fiddling with the radio transceiver in the day’s fading light. “Anything?” I asked.
“Nope. No CDC, but no Wardens either, thankfully.” He studied my face. “Did you sleep all right?”
“Kind of hard not to when you’re that tired,” I said, with an attempt at a laugh that came out strained. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“If you need to talk, about Gav, or—” He stopped when I shook my head sharply. “You’re pushing yourself really hard,” he added.
“I have to,” I said. My eyes flickered toward Tobias at his post by the window, and I lowered my voice. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
“I know,” Leo said. “But you’re not alone here. We’re all in this as much as you are.”
Well, he was, and Justin and Tobias. I wasn’t sure about Anika yet. But the coiled tension inside me loosened a little at his words.
“I know that,” I said. “Thank you.”
He cracked a smile. “Couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”
As Justin and Anika roused, we disassembled the tent and gathered our things. Anika swore at the sleeping bag ties that kept slipping through her fingers when she tried to knot them, and Justin reached over to help.
“I guess I’m officially pathetic now,” she said.
“Just a little,” Justin said, and to my surprise he flashed a grin at her. Apparently sometime in the last few days, he’d finally forgiven her for trying to screw us over. When she’d come back asking for a second chance, he’d been the loudest opposition.
Tobias was watching them. He turned his head when I noticed him, snapping open the cap of the pill bottle. I remembered how he’d turned pink in Anika’s presence when she’d first joined us, his gaze following her wherever she went. It’s nothing, I wanted to tell him. She’s four years older than Justin. The two of them—it’s never going to happen. But she hadn’t shown the slightest interest in Tobias either. So I kept my mouth shut as I tramped with the others back to the SUV.
I took the wheel first. Beneath the swathes of fabric we’d fixed over them, the running lights provided just enough illumination for me to follow the road as it wound along a stretch of farmland. I didn’t think their pale glow would stand out across much of a distance.
After an hour, the road ended at a T intersection. Beside me, Justin squinted at the road atlas. “Looks like we should take a left, and then turn onto the first road to the east,” he said.
“How close is this taking us to the highways?” I asked when we reached the second turn.
“Not too close,” Justin said. He measured with his fingers. “I think there’s still at least a mile between us and the nearest one.”
“We don’t know for sure the Wardens are sticking to the highways,” Anika said. She paused, fidgeting with her gloves, and then added, “If Michael was smart enough to do everything else he’s done, he’s probably smart enough to figure out we’d try to slip by on the side roads.”
“Well, if we meet any Wardens, we’ll just blast through them like last time,” Justin said, as if he’d been the one doing the shooting when we’d fled Toronto, not Tobias.
“I’ll be happier if we don’t run into them at all,” Leo said. “Any ‘blasting’ is going to make other people want to see what’s going on. The Wardens aren’t the only dangerous ones around.”
True. There’d been plenty of dangerous people back on the island, where no one had heard of Michael.
“I’m surprised he trusts anyone that much,” I said. “I mean, the people who catch us, what’s to stop them from just using the samples themselves?”
“Michael would probably have them killed,” Anika replied, matter-of-factly. “Anyway, I think he’s given some people the idea that, if he got the vaccine, he’d somehow let everyone who’s loyal to him get a piece of it.”
Did he think he could split up the samples and just a fraction would be enough to protect people? Or—Drew had said Michael had recruited doctors. Maybe he figured one of them would have the know-how to duplicate the vaccine in small batches with whatever equipment they’d scrounged up, so he could dole it out to whoever paid the highest price.
I realized I was gripping the steering wheel much more tightly than I needed to. Screw Michael. Justin was right. We’d beaten the Wardens before, and we’d do it again if we had to.
As I flexed my fingers in an effort to relax, a muted boom echoed across the field to our right. My head snapped around, my foot hitting the brake. We slowed to a halt.
In the distance, to the west and ahead of us, a streak of light flickered. It flared brighter as another booming sound rang out, and a second light leapt up beside it. They wavered, dipping and swaying, like lines of flame.
“Wow,” Justin said. “Something big just blew.”
Leo leaned between our seats. “I wonder what?”
I strained my eyes, but all I could make out through the darkness was the quaking of the distant fire. “It could be anything. Maybe just an accident. There must be factories around here, with all kinds of chemicals stored in them that no one’s looking after anymore.”
More than just factories. How many nuclear power plants were operational in North America? Would the workers have taken the time to make sure they were safely shut dow
n, in the midst of the epidemic panic? A shiver ran through me. Just one more in a long list of possible horrors the future might hold.
“Are we going to keep driving this way?” Anika asked, bringing my thoughts back to the car. I hadn’t even turned off the engine—we were wasting gas.
I lifted my foot and the car eased forward. “I think whatever’s going on, it’s far enough away that we don’t have to worry,” I said, hoping that was true. “We might as well get past it before it gets much worse.”
My hands were clenching the wheel again, and this time I knew there was no point in trying to relax. The lights edged closer to the snow-blanketed road. Whatever the fire had caught on, it was obviously spreading. Within ten minutes, it had crept across a space twice as large as before. A dim glow hazed the clouds above it.
We were almost directly across from it when another light glinted off the snow, about fifty feet ahead of us. The circular gleam of a flashlight.
“Hey!” Justin said. A moment later, I made out a cluster of figures huddled around the person holding the flashlight, a couple of them child-sized. They waved to us, obviously having seen the SUV before we saw them. I slowed.
“Where did they come from?” Justin said, craning his neck. There were no buildings in sight.
“They could be getting away from wherever the fire is,” Leo said. “Or they could have started it. Be careful, Kae.”
They were calling to us now. I could hear them faintly over the sound of the engine: “Please stop! Help us!”
“What do they expect us to do?” Anika murmured. “The car’s full.”
“I guess we could give them some food?” Justin said doubtfully.
We had hardly enough for ourselves. But wherever these people had come from, they looked as if they had even less. As if they had nothing but one another now, stranded in the snow.
A pang shot through me. But as I wavered and we rolled toward them, I thought of Gav. Gav, who would have been saying right now, “We should at least talk to them,” who felt it was somehow his responsibility to help every person he saw who needed it. Who had felt. My resolve hardened.