Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories (17 page)

A shudder passed from Cody’s hand into mine, and a wordless sound broke from his throat. “I don’t want to get sick!” he wailed, the first words I’d heard him speak since that evening when he’d been pleading with his mom.

I bent down, and he threw his arms around me, burrowing his face in my shirt. My eyes burned. I glanced at Nell over his shoulder, her expression as distressed as I felt.

“It’ll be okay,” I said, but I couldn’t put any conviction into the words. Maybe it wouldn’t be. He’d finally spoken to me, and it was to ask for one thing I had no way of giving him.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Drew turned up with a cooler holding forty doses of the vaccine. Kaelyn looked at him and bit her lip as Nell told him what had happened with the kids.

“We’ve got them quarantined in separate rooms,” Nell said, preparing her equipment to administer the shots. “I don’t think they were exposed for very long. They could easily all be fine. I’ll give them their vaccinations upstairs after I’ve finished everyone else’s.”

“And if they do get sick, we can try the transfusion treatment that worked for Meredith,” Kaelyn put in.

“What are you planning on doing if they get sick and that
doesn’t
work?” Drew asked, with a hesitation in his voice. I wondered what the Wardens had been doing when they found out someone was infected.

“We’ll keep them as comfortable as possible, and hope,” Nell said, but I knew she hadn’t seen a single person survive the virus who hadn’t already caught the earlier, non-fatal version that had partly protected Kaelyn, Howard, and Liz, or responded well to a transfusion—which, from what I understood, had only happened a couple times after Meredith.

“And we’re doing the same for the girl who exposed them,” Kaelyn said. We’d managed to isolate her in a store-top apartment down the street, with some food and water.

“Well, just be careful,” Drew said. “And don’t use more medication than you have to on a lost cause. The city was mostly dry of sedatives and painkillers before the Wardens even started looking, and it’s not as if anyone’s making more.”

“So what do you think we should do with ‘lost causes’?” Kaelyn asked, and he averted his gaze.

“Just be careful,” he repeated.

I noticed she didn’t tell him what we’d learned from Anika about veterinary medications, which were what made up the largest part of Nell’s dispensary at the moment. Anika. Another shadow we carried with us: the image of her fallen body, the blood on her back where a Warden had shot her…

We’d found a decent stash of pills in an animal clinic nearby, so the Wardens might not have figured that trick out for themselves yet. The other obviously valuable buildings in the neighborhood—grocery shops, corner stores, pharmacies, multi-residence buildings like this one—had been thoroughly picked over before we’d arrived. Of course, even the veterinary medications would run out eventually. Maybe it would be smarter and kinder to put a person who couldn’t be cured to sleep, rather than hold out for the miniscule chance they’d survive.

I didn’t think any of us here was quite ready to decide that, though.

I went with Nell when she brought the last few doses up to the quarantine condo. It had two bedrooms and a den, none of those very large, but the kids seemed to have accepted the restriction. Mya’s face was drawn, but she complained about her breakfast and asked for several things from the penthouse suites as if nothing unusual was going on. Owen wanted to know whether the vaccine would stop the virus if he’d caught it, and when Nell admitted it wouldn’t, started talking about how he’d hardly been near the girl. And Cody had sunk back into muteness. He stared at the floor the entire time we were in the room with him, his only response a slight wince when Nell gave him the shot.

“I’ll come back and keep you company a little every day,” I told him. “More, if you want.”

He didn’t respond, but I remembered the way he’d clung to my hand, the panic in his voice. I wasn’t waiting for him to ask now.

Nell’s chosen quarantine period was fourteen days, because she hadn’t seen anyone infected go that long after exposure without symptoms. I spent an hour each of those days with Cody, bringing a game or a deck of cards to play with, and a book I’d read to him when—inevitably—he ignored my offers. I had no idea if it was making any difference to him at all, but it made
me
feel a sliver better, knowing he knew I’d be there. I looked in on the other two too: Owen always snapped at me that he wanted to be left alone, so after a few times I let him be, but on the second day Mya said she wouldn’t mind a few games of Crazy Eights. I stopped by her room each time after Cody’s. She never admitted to being worried, but she never smiled either, not even when she won.

Everything we’d accomplished—everything Kaelyn had accomplished, carrying her dad’s notes and the vaccine all the way to Atlanta, arranging the compromise between the CDC’s doctors and the Wardens, leading the islanders here—it hadn’t been enough. Maybe nothing we did would ever be enough to keep the people we cared about out of danger. The virus could mutate again. The Wardens could revolt against Drew and slaughter us. Some other group of survivors could decide to attack our little haven without warning.

It was even more impossible to predict the future than some alternate past. All we could do was wait and see.

On my eighth visit, I’d been reading for twenty minutes when Cody got off the cot and sat down next to me. Not leaning in, not reaching out, just sitting close enough that our knees touched. My heart leapt, but I didn’t make a big deal of it. I read until the end of the chapter, and when I closed the book he got up and returned to the cot. I wanted to think his shoulders were a little less slumped.

“You’re more than halfway there,” I said. “You made it through before; you can do it again.”

On the eleventh day, I arrived just as Nell was leaving the condo. Her face was pinched, her eyes wearier than usual. I stiffened.

“Who?” I said.

She sighed. “Owen’s temperature is up. Only a couple of degrees, but... he’s also itching.”

“And the other two?”

“Nothing concerning. But we can’t know for sure yet.”

“No,” I agreed, a guilty relief penetrating the knot in my stomach. Owen must be terrified. He might have frustrated the heck out of me, but he didn’t deserve this. But... at least it wasn’t all three of them. If I’d brought Cody all this way just for him to get infected after all, I didn’t know if I’d be able to forgive myself.

He still hadn’t spoken, but he came to sit next to me as soon as I settled on the floor now. On the twelfth day, he rested his head against my arm. I had the urge to hug him to me, the way my mom used to when I was little and we read together, but I was afraid to push for any more. I watched him, carefully—the way he rubbed his knee, tugged at his hair—tensing until he stopped, wondering if it was beginning.

But the second week ended with a faint smile on Nell’s face. I yanked open Cody’s door as she let out Mya.

“You’re free!” I told him. “Quarantine’s over. We’re sure you’re not sick.”

His face lit up so bright I wouldn’t have been shocked if he’d glowed in the dark. Then it fell when he stepped out and he and Mya looked at one another, registering that it was only the two of them.

“Where’s Owen?” Mya demanded, her chin already quivering.

“He’s in the hospital room,” Nell said. “Howard’s giving him a transfusion.”

“You mean he’s infected.” Mya glared at her. “Are you going to make him better? You have to make him better!”

“We’re going to do our best,” Nell said, and Mya burst into tears.

“That’s not good enough!” she said, covering her face. Cody stared at her, and then at me, and all at once he lunged at me with fists raised. He pummeled me with his hands as I grabbed him. I flinched when one caught me in the gut, but I didn’t let go.

I’d held that other boy, months ago—grabbed him and run from the charge of that wild bear. What Cody was running from, I couldn’t help him get away from. At least I could stand and suffer it with him.

After a minute, his blows softened. He gripped my shirt, tears trickling down his face, and a sob hitched out of him.

“It’s not fair,” he said in a small voice. “It’s not fair.”

“I know,” I said, and oh, I did.

Cody didn’t retreat into silence again, but he seemed to have decided he’d only speak to me. When I went up to the penthouses, he asked me how Owen was, whether the transfusion had cured him, and all the kids watched me while I answered.

“It’ll take a few days before we know,” I said, holding another fact heavy inside me. Nell hadn’t noticed any improvement in Owen’s symptoms so far. The girl who’d infected him was dead, her transfusion giving her just a momentary break from the fever before she’d careened off into the hallucinations that came before the virus finished its awful work.

I had to give the same answer the next day, and the next. If the kids had been lethargic before, now they looked as if they’d sunk into numbness. The older ones meandered around the condos’ living areas, contemplating the toys and games and books but rarely trying any activity for even a minute. Mya and Cody sometimes refused to leave their bedrooms at all. When I’d look in on Cody, he’d be huddled with his face to the wall. I sat beside him, put my hand on his shoulder, and he didn’t tell me to go away. That was as good as it got.

The gloom touched even the toddlers, who squabbled, poking and pinching at each other until Dorrie or Mason had to step in. Meredith still came with me to visit, but when I left, she did too.

“I’m sad about Owen,” she said to me. “But I feel
more
sad when I’m there. It’s like the whole room is full of sad.”

I knew what she meant. We were drowning in it.

On the fourth day after Owen’s transfusion, I passed Nell in the hall on the way to breakfast, and she just shook her head. If the treatment had been going to work, I had the feeling it would have by now.

“You know what,” I told Kaelyn. “I’ll grab some-thing to eat later. I’m going over to the studio for a bit.”

Once there, I stood over the boom box, sorting out my thoughts. I’d encouraged the kids to dance out their feelings here just a few weeks ago, as if it were simple. It should be. There was music in sadness—how many songs had been written about loss and loneliness? I needed something to loosen the lump in my throat, the twist in my chest.

I put on an album by a particularly mournful emo band and slipped from my warm-up straight into a routine I made up as I went. I moved with the slow beat, the quavering melody, but no matter how I threw myself into it, the worry inside me didn’t release. My mind kept returning to the kids in their playroom, doing anything but playing. To Owen on his bed downstairs, coughing and sneezing and probably already veering into manic chatter.

Finally I stopped, panting and damp with sweat, and crouched down beside the boom box. For a few long minutes I just hunched there, my face tipped against my knees, listening to the ragged rhythm of my breath. Then I wiped my eyes and switched off the music.

I could try to bring the kids over here again, but that hadn’t seemed to work any magic before. Dancing was my thing—that didn’t mean it would be theirs—and it didn’t always work even for me, obviously.

Outside, the morning sun was baking the pavement, the breeze from the lake taking only a bit of the edge off the rising heat. It was one of those early June days when you’d think summer had already arrived. Seagulls squawked overhead, wheeling against the cloudless sky, and a sudden homesickness hit me, even though I knew the home I missed didn’t exist as anything but a town full of ghosts now.

As I approached the condo building, my eyes caught on the form of whoever was standing guard just behind the front door. I stopped, my skin tightening at the thought of walking in there. Letting that door shut behind me, and the next, and the next. I saw in my mind all those closed doors shutting Owen away from the others, holding the kids from running away, waiting to quarantine anyone else who was exposed...

How could we not be drowning? Of course Cody and the others had wanted to run. We were smothering ourselves with fear, calling it safety, when really we were never going to be safe. Nothing had ever been totally safe, even before—not riding in a car or playing on the beach—but we’d done it anyway, because that was how you lived. You didn’t wait to be pulled into some perfect world, you learned to breathe in the world you had.

I was sweating again, the sunlight searing my hair. I knew what we would do, living in this world, on a day like this.

There was a store we’d looked through briefly but dismissed as not very useful a while back that I nonetheless remembered. It wasn’t useful I needed today. I filled one of the shopping bags still hanging behind the counter with an array of sizes and patterns, marched back to the penthouse condos, and dumped my haul in the middle of the living room floor.

“We’re going swimming,” I announced.

The kids stared at the heap of bathing suits. Paulette moved first, digging through them to find the few that would fit her, and the little kids scrambled over to join in. Cody took a hesitant step toward them, and then paused, wavering. Mya looked to Dorrie.

“Kaelyn said the water might not be safe,” Dorrie said with a faint frown.

“The sewage system hasn’t been used in months,” I said lightly. “That’s months for any bacteria to wash away. These guys have survived a heck of a lot—I think they can take on the tiny bit of dirt that’s left so we can have a lot of fun.”

“Yeah!” said one of the five year olds, with the first real grin I’d seen in days.

“Please, Dorrie,” Paulette said, clutching a blue tankini. “It’s so hot.”

Dorrie held my gaze. I hoped she was thinking through some of what had occurred to me earlier. She sighed, and shook her head in bemusement.

“All right, no scaredy-cats here.”

The little kids gave a cheer. I went to grab some of the extra towels from the storage area, to change into the swim trunks I’d found for myself, and to find Meredith. When we returned, even Mya and Cody had put on suits. Meredith pounced on a purple one with frills that I’d figured she’d like, and in a few minutes we were all tramping down to the beach. Dorrie insisted we slather ourselves with sunscreen, which I had to agree was probably smart. Then we treaded across the rough sand to the water’s edge. Dorrie had brought Mason and Howard to play lifeguards, but they hung back, giving us space.