Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories (16 page)

Mya had climbed to the second level, which didn’t have a floor, and seemed to be searching for a way up to the roof. Owen was perched in a hollow window frame below her. Cody edged along a beam nearby, arms spread as he wobbled over the open pit of the basement. My voice caught in my throat.

Cody swayed, and sat down on the beam. Mya paused, gripping one of the wall boards, as Mason came up beside me. She glanced down and spotted us.

“Oh, man,” she said with a sigh.

“Get over here, you three,” Mason said, planting his feet. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Having real fun,” Owen said from his window. “No one’s using this place. Why shouldn’t we?”

“Because it’s dangerous,” I said. “And if you hurt yourself, we don’t even
have
a hospital to take you to.”

“So what?” Mya shrugged. “Everything’s dangerous. Probably we’re all going to die soon anyway, right? So why can’t we just do what we want?”

The words, and her indifferent tone, made my stomach twist. I glanced at Cody, and he stared back at me, chin jutting defiantly.

“I don’t want to hear you talking like that,” Mason said. “Let’s go, all three of you,
now
. You’re already in trouble, but you can be in more, you know.”

Owen groaned, and the three of them scrambled to the lawn, Mya shimmying down one of the supports using the crossbeams like a giant ladder. They reached us rumpled and dirt-smudged but intact, and none of them talked the entire way back to the condo building.

But what did it matter if they weren’t talking like that, if that was what they were thinking?

I knew even going in that it wasn’t likely to make a difference, but I’d still asked Dorrie if I could have a few minutes alone with Cody, away from the other kids, and she’d managed to convince Owen and Mya to tag along with Mason to grab snacks for the group. So there we were, in the bedroom Cody and Owen shared, me and the boy I’d talked into leaving his home and his mom. He’d drawn his knees up onto the cot and was looking away from me with a particularly determined scowl.

“I’m sorry,” I said to his profile. “It’s awful—I know it’s awful. My mom and dad, they both got the flu. But for you, I know it’s even more awful, because you were there with her. And I asked you to leave her. And that was kind of an awful thing to do too. But it would have been even more awful to stay. It isn’t your fault. It’s the virus, the friendly flu, it’s— Sometimes there aren’t any good options. Okay? No one here thinks you did something wrong. We all just want to help you feel all right again—and Owen and Mya too, really. No matter what you’ve done or do, we’ll still be here.”

He didn’t answer, didn’t so much as glance toward me. I swallowed. “Look, if you want to be angry at someone, go ahead and be angry at me. I told you that you should come with us. It can be my fault. You want to yell at me? You can.”

Nothing. His fingers curled into his palms against his leg, skin almost as pale as the white threads along the unhemmed edge of his cut-off shorts. His blond hair was falling into his eyes, in need of trimming. With that coloring he could have been my opposite, but we had enough in common. There had to be a way I could get through to him.

“If there’s anything you’d want, from me or anyone, I’ll do it,” I said. “You just need to tell me. Write it down if you don’t want to say it.”

He turned his head toward me, studying me with those cool blue eyes.

“I don’t know if you agree with what Mya was saying yesterday,” I went on, “but it isn’t true. We’re alive, and we can stay alive, if we’re smart about it. There are a lot of awful things, but there are things to stay alive
for
too. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way now, but—after a while it’ll get easier. I promise. And talking to people, letting them know how you feel, that helps.”

He made an odd sound in his throat. For a second I thought he was working up to speak. Then he spat in my face.

“I think I handled it as well as I could,” I said to Kaelyn a few hours later, as we took a minute to relax after washing a bunch of laundry in one of the rainwater collecting basins set up on the rooftop patio. I leaned against the low concrete wall, looking out over the few blocks of roofs and treetops between us and the lake. “I didn’t get angry, just reminded him again that he could tell me if he wanted anything, and left. But I don’t know if he really listened—maybe I just made things worse.”

“I’m sure it sank in that you’re trying, that you care about him,” Kaelyn said, propping herself against the wall beside me. “Even if he can’t accept that yet, it has to be good for him to know it.”

“I guess.”

She shifted closer so our arms touched. “You know you did the right thing, don’t you? Convincing him to come with us? If we’d left him with his mother, either one of them would have managed to get her out and she’d have infected him, maybe even hurt him... or he’d have had to listen to her the whole rest of the time, through the hallucinations too. That’s not something a kid should have to hear.”

Her voice had gone raw. She’d listened to Gav through his entire last day, crouched against the wall beside the room we’d had to confine him in, looking ready to die herself. I turned to slide my arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into me.

“And then who knows if he’d have been able to find food, or clean water, or everything else he’d need to survive,” she went on. “He’d have been all on his own.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’d do it the same way again if I had to. I just don’t know what I can do
now
.”

“You’re trying your best,” Kaelyn said. “I think I remember someone reminding me a little while ago that we can’t save everyone.”

“I think using my words against me is cheating.”

She poked me with her elbow. “I’m pointing out that they were smart words. Some days I think we should consider it a huge victory that we save anyone at all.”

“
You
saved all sorts of people by getting the vaccine to the CDC,” I said. “Drew said the new batch will be here soon, right?”

“Michael’s just finished making arrangements with the CDC. It sounds like they’re going to send that one doctor, Ed—the nice one—up here with their part of the batch. Two or three days, and then everyone here will be protected.”

“From the virus, at least,” I said, but I was relieved to hear it. Two or three days. We could make it that long.

“Then we can start thinking about other things,” Kaelyn said. “When everyone’s vaccinated, it’ll be easier to start coordinating with the other people still around... There might be some things we can get up and running again. I mean, obviously some we’re going to have to give up on, at least for now, but... the electricity here was hydro, it’s not like Niagara Falls has gone anywhere. There’ve got to be people left who can figure stuff like that out, if we get more organized.”

“Yeah,” I said, though it was hard for me to imagine that big a future. So I settled for hugging her and thinking just a few days forward, to the vaccine and the one enormous looming fear it would wipe away. That had to change something—for Cody, for the other kids, for all of us.

The faint sense of relief lasted until the next afternoon, when Dorrie came down to the basement where I was sorting through our most recent scavenging haul.

“Have any of the kids come by here?” she asked.

A creeping sensation tickled up my back. “No. Why?” I said, already suspecting—and dreading—the answer.

“Owen, Mya, and Cody took off again,” she said. “I had to help one of the little guys in the bathroom, and when I came out they were gone. Mason’s already headed over to that house where you found them last time. I’m sure they haven’t gone far.”

In spite of those words, her face was tight with worry. This was her whole job, looking after the kids. Whatever guilt I’d felt the other day, she’d have it ten times worse.

“I’ll help look for them,” I said, setting down the blanket I’d been folding. “This can wait.”

Several of the adults had gathered in front of the building. As we joined them, Mason appeared, alone.

“Not at the house site,” he said.

“How long have they been gone?” I asked Dorrie.

“Half an hour, maybe,” she said, her mouth twisting. “I checked all through the building first—I didn’t think they’d have just
left
. We’ve told them enough times how dangerous it could be out there.”

“They’re pushing their limits,” Mason muttered.

I thought about what Kaelyn had said yesterday, and what Mya had said, before. Maybe they were pushing
our
limits—seeing how far we cared, how much danger we were willing to face for them. How much their lives were really worth to us.

“Why don’t we split up, so we can cover more of the neighborhood quickly,” Nell suggested. “Dorrie, you could head south; they might have gone to the beach. Mason, wherever you haven’t checked to the north. I’ll go east and Howard can go west.”

“None of us should be walking around alone,” I said—we couldn’t forget the city
was
dangerous for us too. “I’ll go with you, Nell.” Owen had been begging Mason to let him come on a scavenging expedition a few days ago. Maybe they’d gone east toward the main commercial strip on an expedition of their own.

Kaelyn and some of the others had come out to see what was happening. We broke into groups of three, Kaelyn joining Nell and me as we headed down the street, not talking, just listening. The kids were smart—I figured they’d have put at least a few blocks between us and them before they paused anywhere.

It was hard to be quiet. Glass from broken store windows crunched against the sidewalk under our shoes. We passed cafes and restaurants, clothing boutiques and art shops. I could imagine couples with arms linked and groups of laughing friends strolling once upon a time where we hurried now.

My gaze snagged on the spot where we’d come across the corpse, the memory bringing a twinge of nausea. At least the kids hadn’t had to see that. We’d managed to protect them from a sliver of the full horror of what we were living through.

“Do you think we should—” Kaelyn began, and my ears caught a sound that made my body tense. I held up my hand, and she fell silent. There—a voice, too muffled to distinguish words, but definitely a voice, up ahead.

Kaelyn and Nell had obviously heard it too. We walked on as quickly as we could without drowning the voice out with our steps.

“Why are you hiding?” someone said, the question carrying through the battered door of a dress shop down the block. “We can play a game, but I don’t really like hide and seek. What are your names?”

It was a girl’s voice, but not Mya’s. She sneezed, and Nell’s face stiffened. We all reached for the strips of cloth we used as makeshift face masks.

“Get away from us!” another voice answered—Owen. With all his posturing stripped away, he simply sounded like a terrified little boy.

“Wait here,” Kaelyn said to Nell. “Leo and I can get them out.”

“We don’t want to play with you!” Mya shouted as we edged closer to the door. Peering inside, I saw a girl who looked to be in her early teens rubbing her nose as she leaned to peek around the racks of clothes that scattered the store at odd angles like a maze. The kids must have been hiding somewhere deeper inside, cut off from the entrance.

“Hey,” Kaelyn said gently, and the girl whirled around. She stared at us, her eyes widening, and then her fever-splotched face split with a grin.

“More of you! Are you all together? I was starting to think there wasn’t
anyone
around here anymore.”

“There’s a bunch of us,” Kaelyn said in the same soothing tone. She took a step back, and held out her arms beckoningly, like she would have a wounded rabbit, a frightened puppy. “You should come out here, and we can talk.”

The girl looked over her shoulder, but the kids had gone quiet. She ambled toward the door, scratching her upper arm. “Did you go to Malvern?” she asked. “Maybe I’ve seen you around school before. So many people there, it’s hard to remember.”

“No,” Kaelyn said, continuing to ease away, up the street in the opposite direction from Nell and me. She shot me a glance, and I nodded. “I’m not from around here, not really anyway. We can go for a walk and I’ll tell you about it.”

The door creaked as the girl pushed it open. She wobbled a little, but her gaze stayed trained on Kaelyn. “Where are you from then?” she asked as Kaelyn guided her farther away. “How long have you been here? I stayed home, inside, for a long time, because for a while it was looking pretty scary out here, but then, after Dad didn’t come back... I
had
to see.”

As soon as they were past the front of the store, I ducked inside. “Mya, Owen, Cody, let’s go,” I said, keeping my voice low.

Mya and Cody emerged from the curtained changing stalls by the back of the store, Owen from under a shelving unit displaying sequined sandals. “She’s gone?” Mya whispered, her gaze darting past me.

“For now,” I said. “Come on, quickly.”

I held out my hands. Mya and Owen just rushed past, but Cody grabbed ahold of me, trembling.

“Here we go,” I said to him, copying Kaelyn’s reassuring tone. When I ushered him outside, Kaelyn and the sick girl had already reached the end of the block. Nell motioned for us to head back to the condo building.

“We didn’t mean to—it was just, we heard someone talking, and we wanted to see who it was,” Mya was explaining in a thin voice. “She didn’t
sound
like a bad person. We didn’t know she was sick. We went in and we couldn’t see her right away, and then she got in front of the door—she was trying to
hug
us, and saying how happy she was to see us—but she was coughing and scratching...” Her mouth clamped shut, her face pale.

“We got as far away from her as we could,” Owen put in, his hands clenched into fists. “She wouldn’t get away from the door.”

Nell looked grim. “It’s good that you tried to keep your distance,” she said. “We’ll have to keep you apart from the other kids, the way we did with Cody when he first joined us, until we’re sure you’re okay. All right? I’ll have Dorrie bring your favorite things so you won’t get too bored.”