Lives We Lost,The (12 page)

My uneasiness over Justin’s arrival faded a bit when he pulled five pears out of the bag he’d brought with him. “Right off the tree,” he said, handing them out as we walked.

I raised the pear to my face and smelled it. Saliva filled my mouth. When was the last time I’d eaten fruit that wasn’t from a can or a jar? I couldn’t even remember.

I allowed myself one big bite, unable to hold in a hum of pleasure as the tart juice slid down my throat, and ate the rest in nibbles so it lasted.

The taste lingered in my mouth long after I’d finished, as we passed through another town that didn’t offer any viable cars. Tobias spotted a transport truck on the freeway in the late afternoon, so we veered over to take a look, but there was no sign of the keys. As evening fell, we found ourselves in a particularly lonely stretch of forest. I was starting to worry that we’d be camping outside that night, when we came across a mobile home in a wide clearing.

The aluminum door was swinging open, whining softly in the breeze, but the owners had built a deck out front with an awning that had kept the snow from getting inside. Squeezed onto the benches in the cramped dining room, we warmed canned stew and peas over the camping stove. With the door closed, the thin heat that rose off the burning kerosene took the edge off the chilly air. After we’d gulped down our meal, Tobias got out the radio.

Tobias shook his head. “It can’t hurt to try, though,” he said. “It’s not like I’ve got much else to do. I’d better take it outside— don’t think it’ll like the metal walls.”

He slipped out, and I heard him set the transceiver down on the deck’s patio table. A moment later, his voice filtered through the door, using the name of the freeway to identify us. “This is Route 2 New Brunswick. Can anyone hear me? Over.”

There was no reply. Tobias paused and then repeated his message. Gav poured a little water into a pot full of snow, and Leo set it over the stove. I padded down the narrow hall to check the bedroom. It held a double bed with a twin bunk over top. We’d manage. At least we had walls around us.

I was just heading for the door to get the sleeping bags when a sharp female voice crackled on the other side.
“We hear you, Route 2 New Brunswick. Over.”
I started, jarring my elbow against a cabinet, and Gav stood up. As one being, the four of us inside rushed onto the deck.
Tobias was staring at the radio. Justin shuffled around him. “So say something!” he hissed, and then reached for the mic. Tobias jerked it away from him.
“This is Route 2,” he said, his hand shaking. “Who is this? Over.”
“Group of concerned citizens, trying to look out for each other,” the voice replied. It was tinny and laced with a low buzz of static, but clear enough that I could make out every word. “Where are you calling from? Do you need help? Over.”
“Ask them what kind of people they have in their group,” I said, dropping into the chair beside Tobias. He repeated my question into the mic.
“All sorts,” came the response. “We make no judgments. There are a few doctors here, if you’re needing medical intervention. Over.”
The right kind of doctor would know how to formulate more of the vaccine. “How close do you think they are?” I asked Tobias, my heart thudding.
“I don’t know,” Tobias said. “This is the best radio we had on the base—on a clear day we could get signals from overseas. Depends on how good their transmitter is.”
Gav rested his hands on my shoulders. “Who cares how close they are? They’re
there
.”
“If we can trust them,” Leo said. “We don’t know anything about them. The people in the van—they had radios, didn’t they?”
“Two-ways,” Tobias said. “With those things you’re lucky if you get a couple miles of reception. There’s not much chance they’d be close enough and happen to be listening right when I broadcasted.”
“It doesn’t sound like the woman who was in the van,” I added. Her voice,
don’t kill anyone yet
, echoed in my head, low and flat, without any of the nasal sharpness of the woman on the radio. “But we don’t know if they can help us yet.”
Even if they didn’t have anyone with them who’d know how to replicate the vaccine, could we hope they might know where to find someone who could? Or lend us a vehicle so we could look?
Static fizzled, and a man’s voice cut in. “Still there, Route 2? Over.”
“We’re here. Over,” Tobias said.
“What is it you’re looking for?” the voice asked calmly. “If there’s something you need, we may be able to help. Over.”
He sounded so reassuring that I started to relax. Maybe the walking and the worries about the cold and food and the people in the van could be over now. Maybe I’d get to go back for Meredith as soon as tomorrow.
“Tell him we’re looking for a scientist or doctor who’s working on . . . a cure for the virus,” I said. “I don’t want to say exactly what we have until we’ve gotten a chance to talk with them face-to-face.”
Tobias relayed the message.
“I can’t say we have the friendly flu licked yet,” the voice replied. “But we have people here trying. Where are you located? We can give you directions to us, or we may be able to send someone to pick you up. Over.”
I looked around at the others. “What do you think?”
“I don’t see any reason to think they’re lying,” Gav said. “This is what we’ve been looking for, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t we go check them out?”
“We still don’t know who they actually are,” Leo said. “Even if they’re not the ones who’ve been following us . . .”
Justin scratched his head. “They sound all right to me.”
“They don’t even know we have anything useful,” I said. “They probably figure we’re asking about doctors because someone here’s sick, and they’re still offering to let us come to them. Why would they bother unless they really want to help?”
“I don’t know,” Leo said. “Why are they randomly scanning the radio in the first place?”
“What’s the point in being out here if we’re not going to trust anyone we manage to get in contact with?” Gav said, throwing up his hands. “Hell, if we’re not going to believe anyone, we should have stayed on the island and tried to manufacture the vaccine ourselves!”
There was a moment of silence, and Leo lowered his head. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m being paranoid. But I still think we should go cautiously.”
“We will,” I said, and turned to Tobias. “Tell them the name of that town we passed—that was, what, about four miles back? If they can come to us, that’ll be easier.”
“We should be able to manage that,” the voice said after Tobias gave the directions. “Give us an hour or so. You hang tight. Over.”
Tobias set down the mic, but when he reached to turn off the radio, I said, “Let’s leave it on for now. What if they need more information?”
I glanced over at the sleds we’d pulled out of view behind the trailer. We weren’t going to be able to take all our supplies with us—I doubted they would fit in whatever vehicle they sent. Maybe we’d be able to come back for them later?
A shiver of excitement raced through me. “We did it,” I said aloud, needing to hear the words to make it completely real. “We found someone.”
“
You
did it,” Gav said. He wrapped his arms around me, kissing the spot behind my ear.
“It was Tobias who actually made contact,” I pointed out.
“I wouldn’t have had any reason to contact them if it wasn’t for those,” Tobias said, tipping his head toward the cold box.
I set my hands on it. “Maybe we should hide them until we’re totally sure these people are legit,” I said. “We’ll meet their doctors, I’ll ask them some questions, then we’ll decide what to do.”
Nothing about this was certain, after all. Even if these people were friendly, it could be another dead end. But at the very least, they seemed willing to try to help. Maybe I could finally hand off this responsibility to someone who actually knew what they were doing.
“If that’s what you think we’ve got to do,” Gav said.
“Yeah,” I said, picking up the box, but I couldn’t help grinning.
“I guess after this you’re all going home,” Justin said, sounding dejected.
Leo gave his shoulder a light shove. “If you’d been through everything we have, you’d be happy about it.”
“For all we know, we might still—” I started, and a voice leapt from the radio speaker.
“Hello?”
I spun around as Tobias snatched up the mic. “Route 2 still here. Over.”
“Good. Good.” A rushed breath hissed through the speaker. “I need to ask you something that might sound kind of strange. Do you have a vaccine?”
It wasn’t either of the people we’d spoken to earlier, the woman or the man. The voice sounded like a younger man’s, or an older boy’s. His words hit me like a slap, but I stepped forward, feeling there was something I should be hearing that I wasn’t quite grasping.
“What vaccine?” Tobias said, raising his eyebrows at me. “Over.”
“Look,” the new voice said, “whether you do or not, they think you’re the ones who have it. The people they sent to pick you up, it’s the vaccine they’ll want. I don’t know if they’ll believe you if you say you don’t have it. They’re going to expect you to just hand it over. And they’re going to hurt you if you don’t.”
My heart thumped, painfully hard. “Who
is
this?” Tobias asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” the voice said. “It is you, isn’t it? Look, these aren’t people you want having the vaccine. The best I can tell you is to head east. There’s an island down by the south end of Nova Scotia—people there were still working on the virus—my dad—”
With those words, recognition clicked. Before I even knew I was going to move, I’d yanked the mic from Tobias’s hand.
“Drew?” I said
There was a pause. “How do you know my name?”
I laughed, tears springing to my eyes. “Drew, it’s Kaelyn. The vaccine, it’s Dad’s. But he—there wasn’t anyone left who could make more, that’s why we brought it out here. Where are you?”
“Kaelyn? But you—you were sick. I thought you must have— Shit. She’s coming back. Kae, get out of there. Wherever you told them to find you, leave. Please. I’ll try—I’ll try to get back on another day, around this time. Please just— Crap.”
The static fizzled and faded away into a faint hum that said nothing at all.

For a few seconds, we stood there frozen, but Drew’s voice didn’t return.
“You know him?” Tobias asked me.
“He’s my brother,” I said. “He left the island a few months ago. I didn’t even know if he was alive.”
And he’d thought I was dead. But we were both alive and I’d found him. He could be so close. If only I’d been able to talk to him longer—Leo’s voice, low and urgent, broke through my shock. “He said we have to leave. Whoever’s coming, they could be halfway here by now. Where can we go?”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “How would Drew even know about the vaccine? Who
are
these people?”
Gav had gone to the side of the deck. On the other side of the clearing, about a hundred feet away, the open ground gave way to pine forest.
“I’d sooner trust a guy from the island than a bunch of people we never talked to before tonight,” he said. “The forest looks pretty thick—we could take off through there.”
I peered over the railing, and my stomach dropped. “The snow,” I said. “Look at the mess we’ve already made around the trailer. If we take off for the trees—for anywhere—our footprints are going to be like a neon sign pointing our way.”
“There’s snow everywhere!” Justin said.
Tobias walked down the steps and around the home, surveying the landscape.
“There’s the fence here,” he said. “It looks old, but I’d bet it’ll hold a person’s weight. We could climb along it as far as the forest—won’t leave any tracks that way.”
“What about our supplies?” I said. “We can’t carry the sleds like that.”
“We can push them under the home,” Leo said, following Tobias. “There’s a gap between the cinder blocks. We’ll hide them and come back for them later. That’s probably the best we can do. Just . . . bring the vaccine. They’ll take that for sure if they find it. If they don’t, if they just find the place looking abandoned, maybe they’ll think it’s the wrong one.”
He sounded doubtful, but he was right. It was the best we could do. I hurried inside to grab the cold box and the bag with Dad’s notebooks. Tobias shoved his radio into one of the kitchen cupboards. Then we tramped around the home and studied the fence.
The line of weathered wood ran from near the freeway to some point beyond the trees on the other side of the clearing. It didn’t look very sturdy. I turned my head, straining my ears. I hadn’t heard a motor yet, and the man on the radio had said they’d be here in an hour. But maybe he’d lied.
“Let’s do it one at a time,” I said. “So we don’t put too much weight on it.”
“You should go first, with the vaccine,” Leo said.
“You sure you don’t want me to carry it, Kae?” Gav asked, offering a hand.
The thought of letting go of the cold box made my chest tighten. “No, I can manage. Can you take the bag?”
He accepted it from me, and I turned to the fence. It shouldn’t be that hard. How many branches had I clambered across as a kid, searching for bird nests and squirrel hollows?
I placed the cold box on the top railing and gripped the wood with my other hand. Bracing one foot against the lower railing, I swung my leg over. I teetered for a second, then steadied myself against the post behind me. So far so good.
Testing my balance, I found I could let go with both hands and hold myself in place with my legs pressed tightly against the sides of the fence. I lifted the cold box, set it down a foot farther along, and shuffled after it. One step at a time.
The first post I came to proved difficult. The cold box started to tip as I hefted myself over, and my breath rushed out in a gasp. I groped after it, clutching at the fence with all the strength in my legs. For a second, I tipped too.
My leg twisted around the post, shin slamming into the wood, catching me. The cold box jerked to a stop, dangling by its handle from my fingers, just a few inches above the snow. The sudden jolt made my shoulder throb. Gritting my teeth, I yanked the box back onto the fence and scooted forward another foot.
“Kae?” Gav called.
“I’m good,” I said. “Getting the hang of it.”
My shoulder kept aching as I climbed onward, but I was more careful at the posts now, and the box stayed in place. I scrambled past the first few trees, then hopped off into the snow, swallowing, my throat raw with the cold. Back by the mobile home, Gav was already stepping onto the fence.
The guys came less tentatively, having less to carry and having seen how I’d managed. When Gav was halfway to the trees, Justin followed. The boards creaked but held. As soon as Gav jumped down beside me and hollered back, Leo climbed on. He shuffled along quickly, hardly brushing the top rail with his hands.
Gav handed the bag back to me, and we crouched down amid the underbrush, where we could still make out the mobile home across the clearing. Night had fallen, the snow graying as the stars glinted into sight overhead. Justin paced back and forth behind us.
After he’d done it a few times, I said, “Stay still. You can’t be moving around when they show up, or they might hear you.”
He made a noise of annoyance, but after a couple seconds he hunched down beside us.
Leo reached us a moment later. “I feel like I’m in a James Bond movie,” he said. “It’s not as much fun as it looks on the screen.” The tension in his voice drained the joke of all humor.
When Tobias had joined us, Justin tugged his hood lower.
“So what do we do now?”
“What do you think?” I asked Tobias. He was the only one here with training in avoiding an enemy. “Should we go farther in?”
He eyed the trees. “I’d figure now that it’s dark out, if we just stay still, they won’t be able to see us without coming right into the forest. And there’s no reason for them to do that, since we didn’t leave tracks. I’d rather stay where I can keep an eye on them.”
We huddled there, silent, as the indigo of the sky deepened into black. A few wisps of snow drifted down from the branches overhead. Gav folded his hand around mine and squeezed it. And somewhere in the distance, an engine rumbled faintly. In a moment, I heard it again, getting louder.
Tobias reached into his coat and drew out a large black pistol.
Justin whistled softly through his teeth, and Gav elbowed him. Tobias rested the gun on the tops of his knees, the muzzle pointed away from us. I found myself staring at it.
“I’m not going to use it unless I have to,” he murmured. “But if I have to . . .” He glanced at Leo. “You still got the flare gun?”
Leo nodded, his jaw clenched.
We waited. The engine’s growl crept steadily nearer. Lights flickered by the freeway. The growl ebbed, and cut out. Car doors slammed.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice called out. “We’re here about a call on the radio. Picking you up, as promised.”
The hinge of the mobile home’s door rasped as it opened.
“No one,” a man said a moment later. “Maybe this is the wrong place.”
“It’s a mobile home, a little more than four miles outside town, just like they said it’d be,” the woman replied. “And look at the footprints. Someone was here.”
They came around the side of the home, the glow of the flashlights on the snow splashing back at them, and my breath caught in my throat. The woman in the lead straightened her red hat over her blond hair, tucked her rifle under her arm, and nudged at one of the cinder blocks with the toe of her boot. Two men ambled along beside her.
It was the woman I’d seen in the van.
Of course it was. Drew had said they just wanted the vaccine. How could the people we’d talked to on the radio have known there was a vaccine if they hadn’t already heard? These people and the ones we’d talked to, they must all be connected, more organized than I’d ever have guessed. How many of them were there, working together?
And what was Drew doing with them?
“They’re around,” the woman said. “Must have gotten spooked.” She raised her voice. “Hello? Route 2? We’re here responding to your radio call.”
The flashlights skimmed the clearing. The woman shifted her rifle, and one of the men drew out a pistol.
“They going to be armed?” the other asked, so quietly I barely made out the words.
“Paterson didn’t think so,” the woman said. “But who knows? You remember how to handle this.”
We can hurt ’em, just don’t kill anyone yet.
“But once we’ve got it?” the first man murmured.
“Yeah,” the woman said. I guessed that was the ‘yet.’ My fingers clutched the handle of the cold box.
“Hello?” the woman called again. They started into the clearing. She walked straight down the middle, the man with the pistol following the fence and the other edging along the far side of the field. They were all heading our way. I held as still as I could, tucking my chin into my coat collar, my heart pounding. They hadn’t stopped to think about footprints. They just knew we’d been here, and there were only so many places we could have gone.
If I hadn’t been sure I’d done the right thing, leaving Meredith at the colony, I was now. The woman was halfway across the clearing. In a minute the beam of her flashlight would be grazing the trees.
Then she stopped. She looked up at the forest, then at her companions, scanning the entire area. She was going to turn around, I thought. She was going to go back, stake out the mobile home, check along the road, I didn’t care, as long as they turned and walked away. Please.
“We can’t help you if you won’t talk with us,” she said. Keeping up the charade. They didn’t know we’d seen them before, I realized. That we would recognize them as the enemy.
She took one casual step toward the trees, not even looking our way anymore, and Justin broke from our huddle.
“Give me the gun,” he said to Tobias, so low and fierce Tobias seemed to respond automatically, his hand twitching upward. He blinked, catching himself, not quickly enough. Justin yanked the pistol from his grasp.
“Justin!” I hissed, throwing out my arm to try to grab him, but he dodged me.
“There’s only three of them,” he said. “Three. We can take them.
I
can take them.”
The woman was walking toward us faster now, gesturing to her companions. She’d heard him.
“If someone’s there,” she said, raising the rifle, “come out. We can have a nice calm conversation.”
Tobias lunged at Justin, and Justin ran. The rest of us scrambled to our feet as he raced toward the edge of the trees. The flashlight beam wavered over him, and the woman strode forward, her mouth twisting into a fake smile.
“Hey, kid—” she said as Justin jarred to a halt at the edge of the clearing. I saw in her expression the moment she registered the gun. She yanked up her rifle. In the space of a heartbeat, Justin squared his shoulders, aimed the pistol with both hands, and fired.
The sound of the shot rattled my eardrums, and my pulse hiccupped. The woman fell, blood streaking down her face. She’d only been ten feet away, and he’d hit her right between the eyes.
Justin inhaled a shaky breath. The two men were running toward us now, and he didn’t move, just stared. “Justin!” Gav shouted. As the four of us reached the field, Justin lifted his arm and pointed the pistol, single-handed, at the guy with the handgun. In the time it took Tobias to grab his shoulder, he fired once, twice, three times.
The first two shots went wild, but the third hit the man in the thigh. He doubled over, groaning, but he was still holding his gun. As he raised it, Tobias ripped the pistol from Justin’s trembling hand, sighted, and shot the guy in the head. The man slumped.
“The other one! The other one!” Justin started babbling, waving his arm toward the third figure, who had spun around and was charging back toward the road. Toward their van. “He’s seen us! We can’t let any of them go, right? He’ll come back with more, and—”
“Shut up!” Tobias snapped. He took two steps forward, stopped, and fired at the second man. I didn’t see where the bullet hit, but the guy’s body flinched and toppled over. I brought my hands to my ears.
Gav slid his arm around me. Tobias exhaled, dropping his gun hand to his side. The weight of the silence settled over us, alone in the clearing where three corpses marked the snow.