The Worlds We Make (7 page)

We hesitated by the side of the house and peeked around back. No figures waited by the back door, or the vehicles. I lowered the gun.

We tossed our belongings into the SUV—I scrambled into the driver’s seat, and Leo climbed in beside me with the road atlas. As Justin got in the back, Anika cocked her head at the Jeep. She walked over to try the doors. They didn’t budge.

“Come on!” Justin said.

“They’re going to come running as soon as they hear us start the car, aren’t they?” Anika murmured.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not over yet.”

Her hand dipped into her coat, and she grinned. “Then let’s buy ourselves a little more time.”

She pulled out a long, sheathed hunting knife. That must have been what she’d taken from the shed the other night. She jammed the blade into the side of a tire. As the air hissed out, she repeated the gesture with the others. I felt a grin tug at my own lips. Suddenly our escape didn’t seem half as impossible.

“I’d like to see them catch up with us now,” Anika said.

“Great thinking,” I said. “Now let’s get out of here.”

“Sweet!” Justin whispered to Anika as she hopped in beside him.

“Call it payback,” she said.

I shoved the key into the ignition. “Same rule as before?” Leo asked. “Turn at every intersection?”

“You know what?” I said. “Let’s find a stretch of straight road first, and get as far as we can as fast as we can. We can worry about muddying the trail after we’ve got some distance on them.”

I couldn’t help one last glance toward the forest, as if I might see Tobias running across the yard toward us. It was as still and empty as ever. I set my teeth and turned the key.

The sound of the engine reverberated out into the night. I jerked the wheel, backed up the car, turned, then sped down the driveway. In the distance, I heard something that might have been a shout. And then we were racing along the road, leaving both our enemies and Tobias behind.

We’d been roaring down the road for about fifteen minutes before the panicked thumping of my heart eased off enough for me to think clearly, and it occurred to me that we could use the Wardens’ strategies against them.

“Justin,” I said, “the transceiver’s back there?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Why? It didn’t sound like that woman at the CDC is going to be able to bail us out up here.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to anyone. I want to listen. If those were Wardens back at the house, they’ll be radioing the others, right? Since they’re close, maybe we can pick up some of their transmissions, get an idea of how much they know, how many of them we have to watch out for.”

“Ha!” Anika said, sounding as amused as after her revenge on our pursuers’ Jeep.

Leo’s eyebrows lifted. “It’d be nice to get the jump on them for once.”

“I’m on it!” Justin said. He pulled the transceiver onto his lap. As I drove on, the flick of the switch and the hum of static carried from the backseat.

“Go through the frequencies quickly,” I said. “We don’t want to use up too much of the battery.”

“Right.” The dial clicked as he scanned the airwaves. The static popped and fizzed. Leo leaned his head against the side of his seat, his ear cocked toward the back.

“Wait!” he said. “There. Tweak that dial a little.” He pointed, and Justin complied. And a wavering voice emerged from the crackle in fits and starts.

“…headed south…the same SUV they reported…half an hour from…Michael’s looking into the choppers, and…you take Highway Sev—”

After the last incomplete word, the voice disappeared into the static. Justin fiddled with the dials some more, but nothing else came out.

“We lost them,” he said.

“Or they finished talking.” Leo straightened up. “I guess that confirms it.
Someone
saw the SUV, anyway. But—choppers?”

That word had stood out in my mind too. “I guess there must be helicopters around that they could use, if they found someone who knew how to fly them.” My gaze flickered from the road to the star-speckled sky. “Do you think they could fly around at night, when there aren’t any lights on the ground to navigate by?”

“I don’t know. We’ll just have to be extra careful about hiding the SUV when we stop in the morning.”

“It figures,” Anika said, her good humor gone.

“Well, we might as well stick to the original plan for now. No highways. Get away from here fast and then lose the trail,” I said, trying to ignore the knot of tension in my chest. We hadn’t heard enough to know how to avoid the Wardens, only to know they were on to us, and that they had even more resources than we’d realized.

But we had something too. We had the certainty of the CDC waiting for us. We just had to make it there.

We drove on in a straight line for two more hours, and then Leo directed me down a winding series of back roads, skirting the mountains that loomed closer as we continued south through Ohio. The Wardens didn’t cross our path, but they were out there, somewhere, searching. The tension inside me tightened into a sharp ache. It pinched every time I breathed.

Late in the night, we ended up down a lane swimming with snowdrifts. It took an eternity of pushing and tire spinning to back out and find another route. But as we neared the West Virginia border, the coating on the ground thinned. When we stepped out to rotate positions and fill up the gas tank with the rest of the fuel we’d taken from the hunting shed, I packed the cold box with as much snow as it could safely hold before climbing into the passenger seat.

As we rotated again at about five in the morning, a light drizzle began to fall. Within half an hour, it had dissolved what remained of the snow on the road, leaving a slick sheen of ice on the asphalt. Anika, now at the wheel, pumped a spray of antifreeze over the windshield. She’d eased on the gas, her face whitening every time the tires started to slide. I clamped down the urge to tell her to speed up again. At least now we weren’t leaving a trail for the Wardens to follow.

Staring out the rain-streaked window, my thoughts drifted back to Tobias. Was the weather the same back by the house on the hill? Was he sitting in it right now, wet and cold and just waiting for it all to be over, not even knowing we’d tried to look for him? The image made my gut twist.

It was far too late, and too dangerous, to go back for him. Too dangerous to do anything but keep driving. But that didn’t stop me from hating the fact that I hadn’t found some way to help him.

My frustration must have shown in my expression, because a second later Anika said, “We had to go. The Wardens were right there.”

“I know,” I said.

“I can hardly believe we made it,” she went on, with a brief breathless laugh.

The naked relief in her voice pricked at me. Before I could catch the words, I was saying, “And I guess it’s nice for you not to have to worry about the sick guy in the car.”

Anika’s mouth opened and closed and pressed into a thin line. A rush of shame washed over me. I could hardly blame her for being happy to be alive.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was mean. I’m just so angry we had to leave him.”

“I don’t know,” Anika said finally, quietly. “Maybe you’re kind of right. I
was
nervous, having him with us. I don’t want to end up like that. But I’m not
happy
he took off.”

I couldn’t blame her for being scared of the virus either. It’d seemed like the only right thing to do, bringing Tobias with us. But by trying to help him, I’d put Justin and Anika at far more risk than they’d have faced otherwise, hadn’t I?

I just wanted to keep everyone okay. It shouldn’t have been so hard.

My head was starting to ache now—from my fractured sleep, from the stress of our escape, from the endless patter of the rain. I pressed my hand against my temple.

“We did everything we could,” I said, as much for her as for me.

“You end up leaving people behind, one way or another, right?” Anika said, with a forced lightness. “That’s just how it goes. I don’t even know what happened to half of my friends. When everyone was getting sick, I just started fading out of people’s lives so I didn’t have to worry.…It’s so weird; I used to be hanging out with them, partying, whatever, just about every night—I hated being on my own. And then being alone was the only thing that seemed safe.” She laughed again, more stiffly this time.

I imagined her in another time, perched on a bar stool with a group of friends, grinning as she spun through the whirling lights on a dance floor. Free from all this fear.

“What were you studying?” I asked. “At college?”

She paused. “Special-events planning,” she said. “I thought I was going to be arranging charity galas and movie-release parties. Well, so much for that.”

“But you liked it.”

“Yeah. I—” She cut herself off, her eyes darting over to me and back to the road. Then she shrugged. “Whatever.”

“You never know,” Justin said, behind her.

“Whatever,” she repeated, her voice going flat.

Leo’s coat rustled as he shifted in the backseat. “We still have a future,” he said. “I mean, we’re all going to end up somewhere. Obviously there’s a bunch of things we can’t do anymore, but from what I’ve seen…you’ve got to figure out what’s important to you, what you
can
do, and do it, or
you’re
getting left behind.”

I wondered if he was thinking of Tessa. Who had left who, there? Leo was the one who’d continued on while she’d stayed put at the artists’ colony. But she was the one who’d really broken things off with him. She’d seen a place where she could accomplish what felt most important to her—more important than boyfriends or friends or even the possibility of a vaccine.

I still missed her sometimes, her calm practical way of looking at things that I’d gotten so used to while we were working together on the island, but remembering how she’d lit up in the colony’s greenhouse, I couldn’t wish she’d chosen differently.

“Anyway, I don’t think what’s important to you always has to make sense,” Leo went on, more breezily. “I’m going to keep wanting to dance even if every studio in the world is closed. It’s in my bones. Might as well let it out.”

“At least you guys had plans and stuff,” Justin said. “I was just goofing off with my friends and making sure I passed my classes so my parents wouldn’t be pissed.”

“You’re fourteen,” I said.

“Fifteen in a month!” he protested.

“Same thing. My brother Drew used to talk about how so many of the guys he knew who were applying for university,
they
didn’t really know what they wanted to do with themselves; they were just going through the motions. So you’re normal.”

“Being normal’s not much good to anyone now,” Justin said. “The
world
isn’t normal. I didn’t take off with you and get myself chased by guys with guns to be normal.”

No. He’d wanted to come with us so he could do more than just waiting and hiding, like he’d been when his dad was shot after the looting had started.

I was trying to find the right compassionate words to say when Anika’s mouth twisted as if she was trying to suppress a grin. “If it helps,” she said, “I think you’re pretty weird.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Justin grumbled, and I couldn’t help giggling, and just for a moment, the tension in the car split with tired laughter.

Then my gaze slipped to the fuel indicator. Any lingering traces of amusement vanished.

“The gas is getting low,” I said. I’d been so distracted by the fading snow and the rain and my guilt about Tobias that I hadn’t been paying attention to it since I stopped driving. In the last few hours, it had dipped to almost empty. We’d burned through the stash we’d stolen yesterday. “We’ll have to do some more scavenging.”

“We’ve covered a lot of distance since the Wardens caught up with us,” Leo said, but he sounded as apprehensive as I felt.

We drove into a tiny town that appeared to have been completely abandoned. All the driveways and garages were empty, the yards and streets strewn with soggy litter, as if no one had lived there for years. Had everyone fled after a few of their neighbors got sick? The sight of it made my skin crawl.

“Come on,” I said. “We shouldn’t stay in any place too long.”

After the town, we passed two farmhouses, one with a truck with a dry tank, and another offering no vehicles at all. The droppings on the front hall floor suggested the house had become home to several nonhuman squatters. The drizzle was lightening, though moisture still tapped my cheeks when I hesitated before getting back into the SUV. Sunlight was creeping through the clouds along the horizon. In less than an hour, the field and forest below us, and the mountains to our left, would be lit with daylight.

“Maybe we should stop for the—” I began, and a sharp sound rang out across the field. All four of us jerked around.

Nothing moved on the stretch of snow-dappled field, but as I eyed the dark clump of trees about half a mile distant, the sound came again. The distant staccato of a barking dog. A couple dogs, actually.

Anika stepped toward the car door. “They could be ones that’ve gone wild,” she said. “Hunting.”

I shook my head, thinking of the coyotes I used to watch on the island, the puppies I’d helped look after at the vet clinic where I’d volunteered. Had that really been less than a year ago?

“A dog wouldn’t bark like that if it’s hunting,” I said. “It would scare away the prey. They sound playful.” But grown dogs didn’t usually bark much when playing with one another. Were there people over there? People who were doing well enough that they could provide for pets?

“We should take a look,” I said. The last place we’d found where someone was living, we’d also found gas.

“Are you sure we want them to know we’re here?” Leo asked.

“No. But if we’re quiet and don’t get too close, we can at least scope them out.”

“I’m in,” Justin said.

Anika shook her head. “I don’t like dogs.”

“Well, someone should guard the SUV anyway,” I said. “Why don’t you and Leo stay here, and Justin and I will see who we’re dealing with?” I might understand her a little better now, but it still didn’t seem wise to leave her with free access to our only vehicle and the vaccine.

“Works for me,” she said.

“Here.” I handed the flare gun I’d been carrying to Justin, since I had a real gun now.

“You don’t need to tell me,” he said. “I won’t shoot anyone unless there’s nothing else I can do.”

“Good,” I said, “because I don’t even know how well that thing will stop someone.”

I took out Tobias’s pistol. The memory of seeing it on the counter, realizing why he’d left it there, flashed through my mind, and my throat tightened.

“Can you show me how to use this, quickly?” I said to Leo. “Just in case we run into trouble?” I might not be looking to attack anyone, but if these strangers spotted us, who knew whether they’d be friendly?

Leo accepted the gun, handling it carefully but with practiced efficiency. “The safety has to be off for you to shoot, but leave it on the rest of the time,” he said, demonstrating with a snap. “You look along here to aim. You should steady it with both hands or the bullet will probably go wild.”