The Worlds We Make (4 page)

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 down, 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.

Nine times out of ten, when we’d tried to help anyone, they’d stabbed us in the back the first chance they got. I wasn’t letting that happen again. I could only look out for our group now.

“They could be armed. It could be a trick. We don’t know them; we can’t trust them,” I said. A woman holding a bundle that looked like a baby stepped to the side of the road, and in that moment guilt tugged at my gut. But only for a second. I jerked the wheel to the side to swerve around her and pressed down on the gas. The engine roared, drowning out the shouts they hollered after us. The SUV jolted forward. I fixed my eyes on the road ahead, nothing left inside me but relief.

The next time I let myself look in the rearview mirror, the drifters and their flashlight had faded out of view.

“Anyone who comes within miles of that place is going to notice the fire,” Leo commented a little while later.

I glanced over my shoulder. The flickering light was finally hidden by the small town we’d passed through, but it had been visible for a long time and it could still be getting larger.

“So what?” Justin said. “If some Warden sees it, why would they think it’s got anything to do with us?”

“If someone patrols by here, they’ll probably take a closer look,” Leo said. “And that group’s probably still out there, walking the roads and flagging people down. The group that saw us.”

“Who could tell the Wardens a black SUV went by less than an hour ago,” I finished for him, my heart sinking.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, hell,” Anika said under her breath.

I bit back an echoed curse. Maybe the fire would die out long before any of Michael’s people happened by here. Maybe that group had already found shelter somewhere. But with a little bad luck and a couple radio calls, Michael could know exactly where we were. For all we knew, he already had every Warden he could spare speeding straight toward us.

“Let’s get off this road,” Leo suggested. “It’d be the first place they’d search.”

“Right,” I said.

Justin jerked open the atlas. “There are lots of little roads all over the place around here,” he said. “We just have to watch out for dead ends. And if we go much farther west we’ll hit a big freeway.”

“So we go east, then,” I said. “And let’s turn every chance we get. I don’t want to give them an easy path to follow.” Until it snowed again, our tire tracks would reveal our route, but at least a winding path would make it harder for anyone to set up an ambush. “You tell me when the intersections are coming, and which way to go to keep us east and south. Okay?”

“Got it,” Justin said. “About a mile from here, you can take a left.”

I pressed my foot against the gas pedal, pushing the car faster than we’d risked before. Twenty miles an hour…twenty-five miles an hour. I eased off only when I felt the tires start to skid on the snow. It was even and fairly shallow here, but it still offered much less traction than the plowed roads I used to take for granted.

We reached the turn and turned again fifteen minutes later. And then the good luck we’d had so far started to run out. The farmland gave way to forest, and the wind sweeping over the trees had left the snow sloped across the road. It was still shallow enough for us to drive through, but the slant threw off the tires. I had to creep along, hugging the ditch, braced against the slightest drift to the side. The dark tree trunks slipped past the faint glow of the headlights like looming phantoms. A bead of sweat trickled down my back, but I didn’t dare stop to unzip my heavy coat.

It was almost an hour before we came to another viable turnoff. A sprinkling of snowflakes fluttered down—not enough to cover our tracks, just speckling my view through the windshield. My ankle was starting to ache from holding my foot steady on the pedals. But we’d hardly covered any distance at all.

Unfortunately, the SUV couldn’t run on determination alone. The fuel indicator had dipped below the ¼ mark.

“We’re going to need more gas soon,” I said. “Is there any extra in the trunk?”

Leo shook his head. “I poured everything we had in before we left the cabins.”

The road ahead of us looked particularly lonely, but so far we’d been more successful siphoning from vehicles left at isolated houses than in towns, maybe because other scavengers had already made the rounds in more populated areas.

“Shout if you see a mailbox,” I told the others.

The first two houses we came across, down lanes between the trees, were car-free. Then the forest receded by a row of country houses only about an acre apart. I eased up and down the driveways, munching on potato chips from the bag Justin had opened as a hurried lunch.

We peered at each house before getting out of the car, but all of them looked abandoned. The weather hadn’t been kind. A huge crack bisected a living room window. The roof over one of the porches had collapsed. We found a little gas: an old truck gave us a couple gallons, which we sucked down our length of plastic tubing into the jugs we carried. Then, after a few empty garages, a van offered a few more gallons. But it wasn’t enough.

As we edged onward, Tobias snuffled and shifted in the back, his most recent batch of sedatives wearing off.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Looking for gas,” I said.

Through the rearview mirror, I watched him fumble with the pill bottle. His face was even pastier than usual. If the pills were upsetting his stomach like they had Gav’s, he wasn’t complaining, but it couldn’t be enjoyable staying constantly knocked out in that artificial sleep.

“Hold on,” I said. “Why don’t you help search these places? It’ll go faster with more people.”

So at the next property, Tobias got out, quickly veering away from us as he coughed into his scarves. Leo and I checked the garage, Justin and Anika headed for the house to peer through the windows, and I sent Tobias to take a look around back.

We repeated the pattern at the next few properties. As we pulled up yet another driveway, the lights caught a line of shadows in the snow. I jammed my foot on the brake.

“Interesting,” Justin said.

“What?” Anika poked her head around his seat.

A trail of footprints crossed the snow between the house and the garage. Human footprints. I turned off the engine, studying the windows as silence settled over us. No light in the house. No smoke above the chimney. Just a looter passing by, then?

Even if it had been a looter, they could have crashed here for the night. The muted glow of the SUV’s lights didn’t reach far enough to tell me if the footprints led away from the house on the other side.

“What do you want to do?” Leo asked.

“Go carefully and keep our eyes open,” I said. “And let’s leave the house alone. We’ll take a look at the garage and then we’ll move on.”

I touched my coat, running my fingers over the shape of Tobias’s flare gun in my pocket. Leo and Tobias both carried real pistols. If someone confronted us, we could probably convince them to leave us alone.

Dragging in a lungful of frigid air, I stepped out. We converged on the garage. A keypad was mounted beside the sliding door, requiring a code we couldn’t provide, and the knob on the side door didn’t budge when I tried to turn it.

Locked up tight. Which meant maybe there was something valuable in there. Something the looter hadn’t gotten to.

Or there was no looter, only an owner protecting his supplies.

A figure materialized at the edge of my flashlight’s beam, and my pulse skipped a beat before I recognized Tobias. He’d ducked around behind the house as usual. He jerked his head toward the backyard. “You should take a look at this.”

We tramped through the calf-deep snow to a log shed almost as large as the garage. The door hung ajar. Tobias held up the padlock he must have busted off it. He hung back, scratching his elbow, while the rest of us stepped inside.

“Holy crap,” Justin said, and Anika laughed.

Our flashlights revealed a snowmobile parked in one corner of the shed, beside a stack of gas cans. At the other end of the building stood a thick wooden table, with several animal skins hanging on a line above it. Mostly rabbit, two that had once belonged to squirrels, and what looked like a raccoon’s bushy coat. A salty, musky smell reached my nose through my scarf, thicker than the piney scent of the logs.

Some of the skins were fresh. The footprints hadn’t been a looter’s. Someone lived here.

I backed up instinctively. Tobias was still standing guard by the door. He sneezed a couple times, and cleared his throat.

“I don’t think anyone’s home right now,” he said. “There’s a spot where another snowmobile must have been sitting around back, and a trail heading off toward the trees that looks recent. I’ll keep watch.”

Leo nudged one of the gas cans with the toe of his boot. “We could get pretty far on this,” he said, but he just stood there, looking at them.

Justin didn’t seem concerned about politeness. He marched over to the wall beside the table and poked through the tools hanging there. “I bet this could come in handy,” he said, grabbing a wrench. “And these.” He snatched up a pair of wire cutters.

My flashlight grazed Anika’s back—she was stuffing something into her pocket. I smothered the urge to protest. Leo had raised his eyes toward me.

Everything here belonged to someone else. Someone still alive, who’d done nothing to harm us. But we needed it too. We needed it
more
. Whoever owned all this didn’t have a murderous gang tracking him down. He didn’t need to protect a vaccine that might save everyone in the world who was still living.

“We’ll take all the gas,” I heard myself say. “And anything else that could be useful. But let’s get the gas first—that’s what’s most important.”

“And we don’t know when the homeowner might show up,” Tobias put in.

“If he doesn’t appreciate the cause, I guess we’ll just have to convince him,” Justin said, waggling the wrench.

“You and your violent solutions,” Anika said as they hefted a couple of the gas cans.

“Hey, I know when to back off,” Justin protested. “I haven’t gotten us into any trouble since we left the city. But sometimes you’ve got no choice, right?”

“I suppose sometimes it’s good to have a man of action around,” Anika said drily, but she aimed a crooked little smile at him that looked almost sincere. When he glanced back at her, his cheeks faintly flushed in the hazy light, the smile vanished so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it, and then she was hurrying out to the SUV.

Leo picked up a couple cans too. Tobias backed away from the door as we passed. His gaze followed Anika for a moment before he turned back toward the yard.

We emptied cans into the SUV’s tank until it was full. Then we stacked the extra cans in the trunk. When we were almost done, Justin went to have a look at the garage—to see if he could “crack the code,” he said—and Leo and I made one last trip to the shed.

Only three cans remained by the wall. The space looked horribly empty. Without meaning to, I imagined the owner coming back from his hunting trip and finding his stash gone. The anger and panic he’d feel. I tensed.

“Hey,” Leo said, lowering his flashlight. “We can always leave the last few.”

I didn’t mean to say what I was thinking, but the words slipped out. “Gav would have.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “I bet he would.”

“They’ll get us that much closer to Atlanta,” I said. And wherever we might have to go after, if it turned out the CDC was a dead end. “Maybe this guy’s got an even bigger stash in the garage. He’d probably take everything we have if our positions were reversed.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to,” Leo said. “It’s your decision, Kaelyn. We’re with you either way.”

I knew he meant it. But at the same time, there was a rawness in his voice that took me back to the time a couple weeks ago when he’d confessed how he’d stolen from and abandoned friends, people who’d tried to help him, to make it back to the island alive. When he’d admitted he no longer believed he was a good person, and how much that horrified him.

Back then, I’d told him I still thought most people would do the right thing, if they were given a real chance. I’d wanted him to believe that, to believe in me. Remembering that made a sickly heat rise in my chest. Maybe before, I’d have left a few cans for a person I didn’t know.

Maybe if I’d been a little more callous before, a little less naive, Gav would still be alive.

Good and bad didn’t apply here. It was about surviving or ending up dead.

“We take all of it,” I said firmly. In that instant, Leo’s gaze flickered, in a way that sent an anxious twinge through my chest. But he nodded and reached for the remaining cans.

He understood, I told myself as I grabbed the last one. He had to.

On our newly filled tank, we wove through the back roads until the brownish haze of the dawn lit the horizon. Time to hole up for the day. I picked the house: a three-story Victorian positioned like a fort on a small hill. The thought of the view from the windows, overlooking the road and the fields and forestland beyond its long backyard, made me feel a little more secure.

As before, we didn’t park at our chosen hideout, but a few homes down. We crossed the backyard there, tramped to the house on the hill through the forest where our path would be hard to spot, and then set up camp in the Victorian’s living room. After our hurried dinner, I stepped out to repack the cold box with snow. My scooping mittens uncovered tufts of yellow grass.

The snow was starting to thin. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. One small hike in temperature as we continued south, and it would all be melting away. Leaving us with nothing to cool the vaccine.

I guessed, when that happened, we’d just have to make one long run for the CDC. And hope they had the facilities to keep the samples cool there. And if no one was there at all…

I shoved that thought aside and headed back in. But as I watched Justin spread the blankets inside the tent, a restlessness worked its way through my bones. I wasn’t ready to sleep yet.