Lives We Lost,The (20 page)

In the morning, with fresh resolve humming through me, I took over the front door watch from Leo, and sent the guys on a building-wide search for a phone book. Tobias came to relieve me carrying a thick softbound book.

“It’s some kind of commercial directory,” he said. “I figured it might be useful.”
The directory turned out to be a jackpot—whole sections devoted to different sorts of laboratories. I paged through it, marking the most promising-looking locations in the map book. As soon as Leo came back from another scavenging run through the apartments, I grabbed him.
“We should go out and hit these two right now,” I said, pointing to the ones that were closest. “We can be back before it gets dark.”
We stuck to the side streets and walked quietly, listening for cars. One of our targets, a medical testing facility, had been looted, the doors busted open and offices trampled. The other was a neurological research lab in a narrow stucco building that looked untouched, but all of the windows were dark. No one answered when I knocked on the door.
“We just need one,” Leo said as we headed back.
After dinner, as I sat on the couch planning the next day’s targets, Tobias set the radio transceiver on the coffee table by the sliding glass door to the balcony. Leo and Justin snapped apart a couple more chairs and started feeding the fire. Tobias went through his usual process of calling out, switching channels, and calling out again. Leo had just tossed in the last piece when Tobias turned the dial, and a voice snapped through the speaker in mid-sentence.
“—there, please respond.”
I dropped the map book and leaned forward. Tobias hesitated, his hand on the microphone, and then said, “We hear you. Who is this? Over.”
The voice that answered was Drew’s. “I’m looking for Kaelyn Weber. Who is this?”
Tobias offered the mic to me. I took it, my heart thumping. I’d been waiting for this moment since the first time we’d spoken, but suddenly I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know the answers to all my questions.
“Drew,” I said, “I’m here. We’ve been trying to get a hold of you all week.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s almost always someone in here monitoring the radios at the same time as me. Carmen’s on a cigarette break, but I’ve probably only got a few minutes. You’re not still in the city, are you? Tell me you left.”
I was about to ask how he knew we had been in the city at all, but then I realized. Anika had gone straight to the Wardens, as we’d guessed she would. And Drew was right there with them.
There were so many other things I needed to say, but the words burst out: “Why are you with these people, Drew? What the hell are you doing?”
For a few seconds, the speaker gave me only a faint hiss. Then Drew said, “I’m trying to figure out a way to help. Like I came here to do. You have to get in with the people who have power if you’re going to make a difference.”
He sounded almost like Anika. A sour taste rose in the back of my mouth. Before I could answer, he started talking again.
“What about you? The people they sent after you in New Brunswick—they found the bodies, Kae.”
“I didn’t want that to happen,” I said quietly.
“Well, everyone here is gunning for you now. They’re pissed. Hell, I’m glad you’re okay, but I don’t know what—” He cut himself off. “You didn’t say where you are. Kaelyn, you left Toronto, didn’t you?”
“We can’t keep carrying the vaccine around,” I said. “We have to find someone who’ll know how to make more.”
“So you’re still here,” he said. “Kaelyn, they’re out looking for you
right now
. You’re not going to find anyone here who can recreate a vaccine and wouldn’t just turn it over to us anyway. When Michael came through, the first people he wanted on board were the ones with a medical background, and there’s no one else left. I’ve been here almost two months; I’d know if there was.”
I shook my head. I wanted to erase his words, but I couldn’t. “So where are we supposed to go?” I said, my voice catching.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You could try . . . Right up until most of the communications went down, everyone was talking about how the CDC was working on the virus, trying to come up with a treatment. Michael thought they might still be at it—he was planning on heading down there before he got word about you guys and the vaccine. I think—” His voice dropped. “Carmen’s in the hall. Sorry. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
The transmission cut out, leaving only a dull hum of static. I felt as empty as it sounded.
Tobias switched off the radio and ran a hand over his pale hair. “The CDC,” he said.
“What is that?” Justin asked.
Leo was the one who answered. “Centers for Disease Control. When I was in New York, the scientists there were on the news a lot. It’s in Atlanta.”
Atlanta. My heart sank even farther. This must be how Gav felt when I suggested continuing on to Toronto. How many more hundreds of miles?
“They obviously didn’t do much,” Justin said.
“They were trying,” Leo said. “And . . . they have top-notch security there—they have to. They’ve got samples of all those deadly diseases: Ebola, anthrax, that sort of thing. So maybe the center wouldn’t have gotten overrun like the hospitals here.”
“Should we even trust this guy?” Tobias asked me. “I mean, I know he’s your brother, but do you think he’s right? There’s no one here?”
My gaze slid to Leo, and he met my eyes, his mouth slanting down. I suspected we were both remembering our talk about how people changed.
Leo had changed. Drew had changed. Maybe in some ways for the worse. But whatever Leo thought, that didn’t mean either of them was a bad person now. Drew had risked his life getting off the island so he could find a cure for Mom and for me. Both times on the radio, he’d been trying to protect me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I believe him.”
And I didn’t want to leave him. If we waited, if we could talk to him tomorrow, would he be willing to come with us?
I let out a breath. I had no idea how far it was to Atlanta, but the distance couldn’t be much shorter than what we’d already traveled. A trip that could have been two days and ended up taking two weeks. We had food, but we were going to have to find gas, and avoid Michael and his followers, and keep the vaccine cool as we headed farther south.
And there was Gav.
He didn’t have two weeks. He didn’t even have one. In just a few days, the hallucinations would come on, and we had no way to calm him down, no way of restraining him. But I’d promised him I’d keep trying.
We couldn’t afford to wait for Drew.
“The truck,” I said. “If we’re going to leave, we’ll need to drive. We can’t walk to Atlanta.”
Tobias frowned. “It’s about a half hour from here on foot. If it’s still there. I held on to the keys, but . . .”
But if Anika had told them about us, she’d probably told them everything. They’d have been looking for the truck too.
“Well, there’s no point in going for it tonight,” I said. “Drew said the Wardens are patrolling, and they’d be able to see the headlights from blocks away. We’ll be a little less obvious driving by daylight. First thing tomorrow we go get the truck, and if we can’t use it, we start looking for something we can.”

Gav woke me up so early only the dimmest of dawn light was seeping through the bedroom window. He squirmed over on the bed, wrapped his arms around me, and pulled me close to him. For a minute I was glad. Happy to have a few extra waking moments with him.

He sneezed over his shoulder, and then he tucked his chin against the side of my neck.
“You are so, so pretty,” he said. “And warm. And soft. It’s nice. Did I ever tell you that?”
I started to laugh, but the sound caught in my throat. It didn’t sound like Gav’s normal teasing.
“The only other girl I was ever with like this,” he went on, his breath whispering past my ear, “she was so skinny. All bones and angles. Not comfortable at all.”
A twinge of jealousy hit me, wondering exactly what he meant by “like this.” In bed together? What else had they done in that bed?
Then the rising horror overwhelmed it.
“Gav,” I said softly.
“Wasn’t the same anyway,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken, and yawned. A few short coughs rattled out of his chest. “She was cute, and I thought I really liked her, but she always talked about the stupidest things, and then it turned out she liked Vince better anyway. The first day I came to your house, you didn’t even want to let me in, and you were so
mad
, but you listened to me and you smiled and I knew. This is the girl. The one I want.”
I turned in his arms and kissed his cheek. He looked at me, but there was a sort of vagueness to his gaze, as if behind his eyes he wasn’t all there.
Because he really wasn’t.
Sometime during the night, the virus had finally broken down that part of Gav that let him decide what he’d say and what he wouldn’t, what was real and what was just impulse. I pressed my face against his coat and squeezed my eyes shut, holding back tears.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think of Gav that way, that early on. My head had been too full of worries about the virus, with feelings for Leo I hadn’t managed to let go of yet. How long had it taken me to see him?
“Even my parents,” Gav said, “they were never interested in listening to me. Hardly even smiled, really. And now they’re gone too. You’re not going to leave, are you? You keep going out and I know you might not come back and I hate it. I want you to stay with me, Kae. I don’t like being alone.”
A sob broke out before I could clamp down on it. My jaw tightened. I swallowed, and breathed, the tears slipping out and the taste of salt rising in my throat. “You won’t be alone,” I managed to say. “I’m staying with you. Don’t worry.”
“It’s not really fair at all,” he said. “Those guys, Leo and Tobias and them, they get to see you all the time, and I’m stuck in here, and I don’t like that you’re even
thinking
about them.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m only thinking about you.”
“Leo, he says he’s your friend, but
he’s
thinking, I can see him thinking, all the time. He looks at you . . .” Gav stirred, suddenly restless. “It’s not done yet. We haven’t found any doctors, we haven’t given them the vaccine. I should be helping, not lying around here. I—”
He paused and twisted to direct a coughing fit away from me. I grabbed the water bottle from the floor. When I turned back to him, he was sitting up. He drank and coughed and drank a little more, and then he pulled himself to the edge of the bed. His arms trembled with the effort of holding himself upright.
“We can go together today,” he said. “You said we need to find a car. I’ll help you look. I followed you all this way so I could help. Maybe we’d already have found one if I hadn’t been so lazy.”
I wiped at my cheeks with my sleeve and gripped his shoulder. The heat of his fever radiated through his shirt. “Gav,” I said firmly, “you haven’t been lazy. You needed to rest, and you still need to, okay? When—when you’ve had enough rest we’ll all go out together.”
He hesitated, shivering, and then sank back onto the blankets.
“Probably not going to find anyone anyway,” he murmured. “Those government pricks, they all ran off on us. Never could trust them. I knew it. I knew there was no point. We could have stayed where it was safe.”
The words gnawed at me. Was that the truth, and not what he’d said to me yesterday when he’d told me he understood why we’d had to come here?
I was probably never going to know.
“Try to go back to sleep,” I said, picking up the now-empty bottle. “I’ll get you some more water in case you need it. Okay? I’ll be right back.”
He lowered his head, his eyelids drooping. I eased out of bed, swapped coats, and slipped out the door.
The fire had died down to just a few tiny flames flickering over the embers, and a chill had crept through the living room. Justin and Tobias lay side by side in their sleeping bags in front of the fireplace. I padded around them to the window and the extra water bottles. As I edged back along the wall to the bedroom, I found myself evaluating the furniture.
The futon. If Gav got set on coming out of the apartment to help, we could hold the bedroom door closed with the futon. It looked heavy. I didn’t think he was strong enough to push very much now.
And then I thought,
I am planning ways to trap my boyfriend inside a room to die.
The apartment door opened and Leo stepped inside. He stopped when he saw me. “The sun’s coming up,” he said. “I was going to wake up Tobias so he can check for the truck, wherever he left it. That’s the plan, right?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. The bottle wobbled in my hand. Leo’s gaze fell to it and then rose to my face again, his brow knitting.
“Kae?” he said, and somehow hearing my name broke the last of my self-control.
I dropped to the floor, clutching the bottle. My arms folded over my knees, and I mashed my face against them. My eyes burned, another wave of tears surging up and spilling out, hot and fierce. I gasped, choking down the sobs, not wanting the others to wake up and see me like this too.
Leo didn’t speak. He just walked across the living room and knelt in front of me, easing his arms around me. I resisted for a second, and then I let him draw me in so my head rested against his shoulder, my tears soaking into his coat. If I’d ever needed my best friend, it was now.
“If there’s anything I can do,” he said after a minute, his voice thick. “Anything at all, Kae, tell me and I’ll do it.”
But there was nothing he could do. Nothing he or I could do except sit there helplessly.

It occurred to me an hour later, as Gav dozed and I waited for Tobias to return, that there
was
one last thing I could do. I closed my fingers around the box of syringes I’d brought from Dad’s lab. We weren’t going to find a doctor in time to help Gav, that much seemed clear. But I could still give him some of my blood, with the antibodies it carried.

I didn’t let myself think any further. I rolled up my sweater sleeve to wash the skin around the crook of my elbow. Then I sat down with one of the syringes, my hand in a fist, studying my arm.

I remembered how Nell had slid the needle in when she’d been taking blood for Meredith. It had looked so easy. But she was a doctor—of course it was for her. Gritting my teeth, I prodded the line of a vein with the needle tip, then pushed it in.

There was a stab of pain, and then a dull ache. I squeezed my hand tighter. The thick dark red liquid seeped into the body of the syringe. It would only hold twenty-five milliliters—a normal blood donation was almost twenty times that. I should be fine. I just wished I could give him more. But it was going to be hard enough convincing Gav to take one shot.