Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories (12 page)

I pulled the boat up to the tip of one of the docks and lashed it there, the way Dad had first taught me, not far from here, when I was a little kid: twice around the post, tail over and under and through, back and through again. In the instant I tugged it tight I had the sense of him leaning over, hand to his jaw, to inspect it.

Good work. That’ll hold.

Kaelyn clambered out. It was a clear day, but windy, and her dark hair whipped around her face in spite of the scrap of cloth she’d tried to tie it back with. She reached for my hand when I joined her.

It still seemed remarkable, the sense of sureness in the way we touched each other—a statement that we were here
together
. Less than a month ago, I’d been afraid even our friendship was crumbling. I liked the way our fingers looked intertwined: almost the same shade of brown, my skin slightly lighter, hers a little bluer.

“It’s so quiet,” she said.

“Yeah.” The wind was warbling and the waves were hissing over the broken hulls, but I knew what she meant. There was a kind of hush creeping from the vacant buildings of our town.

Hand in hand, we walked across the creaking boards and through the harbor area to the first street. The stores and houses hadn’t come through the epidemic in much better shape than the people. The missiles had turned whole blocks into masses of blackened rubble, and where they hadn’t struck, the charred foundations of the buildings the gang had burned down broke up the rows. Even those buildings still standing did so limply: roofs sagging, windows shattered, doors wrenched off hinges. Here and there an entire wall had collapsed.

Shadowy impressions shifted at the edges of my vision. An impromptu dance performance I’d given on that corner, on a dare, when I was twelve. Begging my parents to stop in that burger place for their fries and gravy when I was nine, every time we passed it. My first kiss, at fourteen, under that tree at the edge of the high school’s field—from a girl named Julie who’d immediately dashed back to her friends giggling, because
she’d
been dared. Little wisps of the past that teased me in the haunted emptiness of the town, as if I could have really seen those moments if I’d looked hard enough.

It was an eerie feeling, but almost familiar. All my life, the vague impression of my birth parents—back in Korea? Alive? Dead?—had peeked from behind my real mom and dad. The specter of whispered words had lingered around the doubtful looks when we went out as a family:
If you’re going to adopt, why not pick a kid who’ll look right with you? Not one everybody can’t help but know?
A casual hesitation had surrounded the smiles and laughter when I pulled out a clever comment or drew the other kids into some activity, hinting that if I’d let them see the parts of me that weren’t so bright or upbeat, the people who’d called themselves my friends might have drifted away with hardly a second thought. An intermittent blurring at the edges of people around me, as if I was seeing them through rippled water.

Here in the town now, with echoes caught on every surface, the whole world might as well have been underwater. There was a new depth to it, too—a distance between me and the memories, as if all that had happened to some other guy. In a lot of ways, I guessed it had.

Kaelyn’s fingers squeezed mine as we approached her uncle’s house, where she and I, and Tessa and Meredith and Gav, had been living before. More ghosts waited for
her
there than anywhere else.

She sucked in a breath and pushed open the door, which had been hanging ajar. The bag of ferret food I’d left out lay empty and gnawed in the middle of the kitchen floor. “Mowat!” Kaelyn called. “Fossey!”

No scamper of tiny feet came running. She bit her lip, considering the back door, which was swinging in the wind.

“They could have gotten out,” she said.

“I’m sure they did.” I doubted there’d been enough food in here to last them the months we’d been gone. “They were smarter than a pretty large number of people I’ve known. They’ve probably been living it up with the whole town to themselves.”

She smiled with only half her mouth. “Pets don’t usually do so well out in the wild.”

A joke popped into my head about how far from wild the town was, but she didn’t look as if that was what she needed. I let go of her hand to put my arms around her, hugging her to me. “You can’t save everyone,” I said.

“I know.” She leaned her face against me for a moment, brushed a kiss to my shoulder, then straightened up.

We meandered through the house, Kaelyn grabbing plastic bags that she filled as we went. Mostly with things for Meredith—games and clothes, and the arts and crafts stuff Meredith was still so enthusiastic about—but some for her too. A couple framed photos of her family, a few notebooks labeled with her narrow handwriting. A dress I’d never seen her wear—maybe she’d bought it after I’d left for New York—and a sweater I could tell her grandmother had knitted. Two pairs of jeans, scuffed up sneakers. A burned DVD she paused over, lips twisting, before shoving it in with the rest. Maybe someday we’d be using computers again.

The backpack stuffed with the few things I’d taken from my house, back when I’d first returned and moved in here, was slumped near the couch. I picked it up, not sure how much I still wanted the contents but figuring I might as well bring it, while Kaelyn poked through the kitchen again. Nell had told us that she and the others had gathered all the practicalities they could find—food, medical supplies, fuel—before they’d moved, so it wasn’t a surprise when Kaelyn came over to the living room empty-handed.

The air mattress Gav had been sleeping on was a sunken mass in the middle of the rug. Kaelyn looked at it, and her jaw tightened. My stomach tightened with it.

My comment from earlier came back to me:
You can’t save everyone
. I had the feeling she was remembering it too, and I wished I hadn’t said it. She was the one clear thing I had in this underwater world. Just herself, my best friend, my girlfriend, no shadows bleeding around her as she turned and reached for the bags she’d left by the door. The one part of my life that still belonged to me from before killer viruses and murderous gangs and all that those had driven us to.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Our eyes met, and I had to wonder what specters she saw when she looked at
me
.

Meredith squealed as she dug through the bags—“You remembered my favorite skirt! And the markers with the scents!”—forgetting to pout about being left out of the trip. “Did you bring Mowat and Fossey?” she asked when she was finished. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” Kaelyn admitted. “They had to leave the house to find more food while we were away. They probably wouldn’t want to go back in their cage now.”

“Oh,” Meredith said. A hint of the pout came back.

“Why don’t we take those markers and some paper over to see if Dorrie’s kids want to try them out?” I suggested.

When she hesitated, touching the box fondly, Kaelyn added, “We’ll be able to find more if those get used up, Mere, I promise. You know how much those kids could use a distraction.”

“Of course,” Meredith said, lifting her chin. The steely determination that came into her eyes was something new since we’d picked her up at the artists’ colony, at least as far as I could remember. A determination to show how mature she could be, it usually seemed, which had its advantages but also didn’t look quite right on her seven-year-old face. She snatched up the box and a sheaf of paper.

Outside, the two women who’d taken over the house next door were standing on their porch, discussing whether it was warm enough to try planting anything in the yard. Howard was ambling along the sidewalk with a couple of the older guys, taking in the spring air. Some of the orphaned kids Dorrie and her brother Mason looked after were sitting out on their lawn, nudging toys around or just sprawling, watching their surroundings. As we headed over I saw Mason call back one of the smaller ones who had wandered off the grass. I didn’t see why they couldn’t roam a little more—this street, at least, was safe enough—but I guessed it was easier to keep track of them by keeping them close.

After all, while there was more life here than in the town across the strait, this place was haunted in different ways. If you looked for them, you’d notice the figures positioned on the front steps of a house at either end of the block, hunting rifles across their knees, ready to defend the little we had if they needed to. And when the wind blew a speckling of dirt into our faces and Meredith coughed, everyone’s head jerked around, every body tensing, until they saw it was okay after all.

Nell had mentioned that the last of the infected islanders had died a month ago and no one had gotten sick since then, but we all knew that didn’t make those who weren’t vaccinated like I was, or who hadn’t survived the virus like Meredith had, truly protected. We didn’t know how long the virus might linger on any surface. We didn’t know that an infected person from outside this little enclave wouldn’t wander our way.

When Dorrie came out of the house, she asked Kaelyn, “So they didn’t say when they’ll get the vaccine out this way?” as if Kaelyn hadn’t already answered that question a dozen times since we’d arrived here. As if the people who’d asked wouldn’t have passed on her answer. Everyone wanted to confirm it directly with the source.

“No,” Kaelyn said, her smile slanting. “But it’ll probably be a while. They’ll cover the more populated places first.”

Assuming that, between the Wardens and the CDC, they had enough raw materials to keep making the vaccine that long. Assuming Michael kept up his end of the deal and the Wardens didn’t start fighting with the doctors at the CDC again. Maybe if we’d waited a month or two longer they’d have been producing enough for us to take a batch back here with us, but Kaelyn had already been worried about how Meredith would be coping. We hadn’t known whether she and Tessa were even still alive.

So now we did whatever else we could to pitch in. We went out with the scavenging parties, methodically making our way through the streets to the west. We washed or wiped down every item we carried back. We brought Meredith over to play with the orphaned kids, who seemed standoffish with her—whether because of her long absence from the island or because they envied the family in Kaelyn she had to go back to afterward, I wasn’t sure. We helped round everyone up to present ourselves to Nell every evening so she could take our temperature and test our reflexes. “Just a precaution,” she said to Kaelyn. Still, when I stopped outside a house a bunch of us were about to search and scratched the side of my neck, everyone froze, staring, until I held up my hand and said, “It’s okay, just a regular itch!” And even then I saw them eyeing me, making sure I didn’t continue, for several minutes after.

Nothing felt like progress, only treading water. Less than three weeks after we’d arrived, Kaelyn asked me to go for a walk with her. We wandered down to the harbor and sat at the end of the dock where we’d huddled a few months ago, watching the island burn. Kaelyn stared across at it, the distant slice of land hovering over the water of the strait. I wasn’t surprised when she said, “I can’t stay here.”

As soon as Kaelyn mentioned it, it seemed almost all of the islanders had been thinking about leaving. In ten days we put together a caravan of the largest vehicles we could find and all the supplies we could reasonably carry. Altogether there were forty-three of us that set off early one morning for Toronto. Kaelyn figured that city was the first place in our end of the country the vaccine was likely to get to, considering the extent of Michael’s presence there, and it was one she and I were at least somewhat familiar with.

Now that we knew there was no one still holding people up at the border, we planned a shorter route than the one we’d taken in January, this time cutting through Maine. With the roads clear of snow, we expected to make the trip that’d taken us nearly two weeks that winter in just a day and a half.

We stopped in the evening in the first town we came to after crossing into Ontario. The residential neighborhood appeared to be deserted, but Kaelyn and I had learned our lesson the last time. Several of the adults stayed behind with the kids, the vehicles, and an assortment of weapons while the rest of us split up into groups of five to check the abandoned homes and cars nearby for anything worth scavenging.

Kaelyn led her group off to the south, and I headed north with mine. My thoughts drifted after her as we tried the doors of various houses and siphoned gas from a gray sedan. We’d made sure someone in each of the groups had a gun. I was carrying the .38 we’d lifted from the Wardens who’d come after us before, the ones Justin and Tobias had shot, in the back pocket of my cargo pants. Kaelyn still had the service pistol Tobias had left behind. The difference was, Dad had insisted I become a decent shot and as far as I knew Kaelyn had never fired a gun. I’d walked her through the basics, but we didn’t have bullets to spare for real training. If her group ran into trouble...

“Leo,” Howard said as he screwed the cap on the jug of gas, “you think we should keep going?”

I yanked my thoughts back to the task at hand. I was supposed to be protecting
these
people from trouble.

“Let’s do another block,” I said, scanning the street. Still no sign of anyone living here, but we hadn’t had any idea the guy who’d infected Gav was around until he’d been right there charging up the driveway at us.

It was hard to keep my thoughts from looping like that, back to Kaelyn, to what we’d been through together, what she might be facing now. Howard and the others were looking to me as some sort of leader—because I had the gun? Because I’d traveled across the country more than once?—but I really wasn’t one. I’d been following Kaelyn since we set off that first time with the vaccine. That’d been her mission, just like this was. I believed we were doing the right thing, moving everyone to the city, but if I thought about it honestly, I was here because she’d wanted to go. If she’d wanted to stay by the island, I wouldn’t have argued.