The Worlds We Make (12 page)

Half a day. I pictured the map. We could probably at least make it into Georgia. We’d just be coming down from the mountains, back into civilization, a little earlier than I’d hoped. Back into the hornet’s nest. Michael would have more of his people watching the area around Atlanta than anywhere else.

Well, we’d deal with that when we had to.

“Good to know,” I said, “but that’s not what I meant. How are
you
?”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m okay. As okay as anyone could be, given the circumstances.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I just…If something’s bothering you, you’d tell me, right?”

Leo smiled again, but it faltered almost immediately. He tugged at the back of his hat. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Not really.”

Even though I’d tried to brace myself for whatever was going to come, a chill rose up inside me. “
What
doesn’t matter? Leo, just tell me.”

“I don’t want to—” He gestured vaguely as he grappled with the words. “I don’t want to judge you. About taking all the gas that time, about breaking into the compound, about that guy today. You were doing it for all of us. Making sure we get through this. I know.”

“But?” I said roughly.

His mouth twisted. “But you know how I feel about how I made it back to the island. I don’t like seeing you get so…cutthroat, I guess.”

He didn’t like me, like this. My fingers curled into my palms as if I could hold back the sting of that admission. “Why should I be different from anyone else?” I asked.

“You were different, though,” he said. “You were trying so hard to be better than them, even when people were trying to kill us.”

“It’s not like I’ve had a lot of choices,” I protested.

“I know,” he said, but he wouldn’t even look at me. “It’s just, I don’t want the world to be like this, but I couldn’t see how to get by and not be a horrible person, and it seemed like you found a way, like maybe it wasn’t hopeless. But if even you can’t…”

I blinked, fighting to keep my composure. “That isn’t fair.”

“I
know
. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m not saying you’re a horrible person now. I guess I don’t really know what I’m saying.”

Except maybe he was saying those things. Maybe I’d ruined this, our recovering friendship, somehow. How did I fix it? I couldn’t magically revert back to being the optimistic, naive Kaelyn who’d believed I could keep us all alive without getting my hands dirty. But the thought of going on, with Leo looking like that every time I had to make a hard decision, made me cringe.

I crossed my arms, hugging myself. The things he’d said, they weighed on me, like a yoke snapped over my shoulders.

It
wasn’t
fair.

“I want the world to be different too,” I said. “I still think the vaccine can change it. But I can’t be some perfect person.” Emotions swelled inside me: prickling guilt and suffocating sadness, and the cold burn of regret. “If you’re going to believe things can get better, believe it because you do, not because of me.”

“Kaelyn,” Leo started. He’d raised his head, but I couldn’t stop, the words just kept tumbling out.

“The whole time we were heading to Toronto,” I said, “and the whole time we were there, Gav didn’t really think we’d find anyone, that the vaccine would do any good. The only reason he believed, the only reason he came, was because of me. And I couldn’t save him. I couldn’t even save
him
. Do you have any idea how hard it is to know that? I shouldn’t have let him depend on me like that, and I can’t do it again, Leo.”

My voice choked off. I turned away, my cheeks hot with embarrassment.

But it was true, wasn’t it? Gav had followed me like I was some kind of light in the darkness, but I wasn’t. I was just me, and I made mistakes and got down in the muck and not every thought I had was kind. That was the real weight I’d been carrying: the knowledge that he’d left the island for me; he’d died for me. I couldn’t stand carrying the responsibility of another person’s choices too.

“Kae.” Leo’s footsteps scraped over the snow behind me. He touched my arm. I shifted toward him automatically, and he pulled me to him, his head bowing next to mine.

“I’m sorry,” he said by my ear. “I’m so sorry. You’re right. I know you’re doing the best you can. I didn’t mean to make you feel like it’s all on you to save the rest of us. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want to lose you too,” I mumbled into the soft fabric of his coat.

“You won’t,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere—I never wanted to, I promise you. If I get freaked out about what we have to face, that’s my problem. I’ll deal with it.”

The tension in me released. I let myself sink into him. His embrace was so warm and his body so solid and steady that I didn’t want to let go. His pulse pattered where my jaw rested against the crook of his neck. Suddenly I was aware of mine, my heart skipping as he brushed his fingers over my hair, aware of his chin grazing my cheek. I’d hardly have to turn my head to be kissing him.

The impulse shot through me before I’d even processed the thought. It would feel good—it had felt good, when Leo had kissed me all those weeks ago, even if I hadn’t wanted to notice. I hadn’t felt like that in ages.

The notion passed through my head in the space of a second, and then my chest clenched up.

It was Gav I was supposed to be kissing. He’d died for me, and here I was considering taking Leo’s affection in his place? Somehow that was even more awful than the idea of having betrayed Gav while he was alive.

Leo’s hands dropped as I stepped back, out of his arms.

“It’s okay,” I said. I met his eyes, their brown so deep in the fading light, and then had to look away.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. “I really am sorry, Kae. Nothing’s going to change how important you are to me.”

He was still watching me, with concern and caring and I didn’t want to know what else. What had he been thinking of in that long embrace? What might he have been hoping for—and had I given him reason to hope? A different sort of guilt stabbed at my gut.

“It’s okay,” I repeated. “I just got a little overwhelmed. I’ll be fine.”

We stood there a moment longer, awkwardly. “I think we’re going to need kerosene to get this going,” he said, motioning to the pile of kindling. When I nodded, he headed toward the tractor. And I was left with a jumble of emotions I had no idea how to untangle.

With the needle on the fuel indicator sinking, we puttered down from the mountains in the middle of the following morning. I didn’t want to delay our search for gas like we had with the SUV. We’d made it into Georgia, at least, about a hundred miles northeast of Atlanta, and we would have had to emerge from the forested slopes before much longer anyway.

As we returned to lower ground, the snow thinned, until we were driving on dry pavement. Sitting in the trailer with Justin, I unzipped my coat and he pushed aside his blanket, watching the trees pass by beyond the tent’s open flap.

“Do you think the vaccine will be okay until we get to the CDC?” he asked.

“It should be.” I’d packed the sides of the cold box with snow before the last of it had disappeared. On a flat clear road, I thought the tractor could cross a hundred miles in five hours. But that was assuming we found more fuel quickly. And that no one else found us.

Justin stirred restlessly. “Maybe we should scan the radio again,” he suggested. “See if the Wardens are talking near here.”

I doubted we’d just happen to stumble on a transmission at the right moment, but it’d give him something to do. It’d been hard for him, staying still to rest his leg during the long haul through the mountains. I could see the pent-up energy in the jerks of his movements.

“Good idea,” I said.

As he set up the transceiver and started turning the dial, I watched the sky and the side roads, ears perked. The radio emitted only static, and the only motor I heard was our own. When Justin sighed and packed up the radio again, the forest had given way to yellow fields on our right.

“What do you think?” Anika called back, gesturing toward a barn up ahead through her open window.

“Let’s check it out,” I said.

Leo steered the tractor down a lane leading into the farm, stopping at a chained gate. We hopped out and clambered over the fence, leaving Justin guarding the trailer. The barn door hung open, but it held no vehicles and no fuel tanks, and the small garage nearby was equally empty.

We were just heading down the lane on our way back to the tractor when a rumble reverberated through the air. A helicopter was roaring into view from the south. I jerked to a stop. I hated to be separated from the vaccine samples, but the barn behind us was so much closer. Leo and Anika scrambled after me as I spun and dashed for the building. My breath was raw in my throat when I reached the barn. After the others joined me inside, I peeked around the doorway.

The helicopter whirred past a minute later without slowing. It was the same blue and white as the one we’d seen before, but I didn’t know if that meant it was the exact same one or part of a matching set Michael had acquired. I glanced at the tractor. Justin had been smart enough to hide in the tent. From above, it would look like just another abandoned vehicle. As long as we’d managed to get to the barn before anyone had spotted us, I thought we were safe.

The chopper veered to the west. I waited, but it didn’t circle back. When it had whirred out of view, I wiped the perspiration from my forehead and stepped outside.

“It’s going to be a lot harder to go unnoticed now that we’re out of the forest,” I said as we hurried to the tractor. “Everyone keep your eyes and ears peeled.”

“They just don’t quit, do they?” Justin muttered, poking his head out of the tent when I climbed into the trailer.

“No,” I said, “and I don’t think they will.”

Leo and Anika switched spots in the tractor, and the engine started with a sputter that seemed to echo across the fields. I winced. It settled into a low growl as we rolled on.

Leo leaned out the window. “This road passes through a town in a couple miles,” he said. “It looks pretty small on the map. We could try to detour around it, but that might take a while.”

The last thing I wanted to do was spend extra time out in the open on these roads. But my memory leapt back to the old man racing toward us in his slippers, snuffling and pleading for attention, in the last settlement we’d passed through. I shivered.

“What do you think?” I asked.

He hesitated. “I think I’d rather be spotted by some random strangers than whoever’s in that helicopter, if those are our options.”

“True,” I said. “Okay, let’s drive through.”

I stood up by the front of the trailer to watch the buildings ease into sight. The place was bigger than that tiny hamlet in the mountains, but still little more than a main street dotted with the flat gray roofs of commercial-looking buildings and a few dozen roads of blue- and peach-shingled houses branching off from it. We were too far away to make out much, but no one seemed to be moving around. And as we crested one last hill, giving me a view over the entire town, I spotted a distinctive yellow shape in a wide parking lot.

“There’s a school bus,” I said. “Just a couple blocks off the main street. They run on diesel, don’t they?”

“I think so,” Leo said.

“So let’s take a look,” Anika said.

I nodded, and sank back down. Justin hauled himself out of the tent and leaned against the side of the trailer, peering at the thinning forest by the road. I studied the landscape on the other side. We passed what looked like an orchard, and a smaller farm where we stopped briefly but found only a rusted-out junker of a car and a house that looked—and smelled—like it now belonged to raccoons.

“Here we go!” Anika said as we passed the town’s welcome sign. It had been bashed in half, leaving only the bottom section that announced a population of 2,630. The actual number was a lot smaller now, I was sure.

As we rumbled by a hardware store at the edge of town, I reached into my pocket, taking out Tobias’s pistol. As uncomfortable as the confrontation in that other town had made me, the threat of the gun had worked.

“Turn left after a few blocks,” I called to Anika. “The bus wasn’t far.”

The tires crunched over a tree branch that had fallen on the road. The wind rose, making the unlatched shutters on a store-top apartment flap open and closed. The shops were all dark, most of the doors hanging on loose hinges.

Anika turned a corner, the trailer rocking as it followed. The houses off the main street looked equally vacant, windows blank and paint flaking. A flicker of motion behind the railing on one porch made me flinch to attention, but I kept staring at it as we drove on, and nothing emerged. Maybe it’d been a bird or a squirrel or a piece of trash in the breeze. Maybe I’d imagined it.

We were approaching the end of the second block, watching for the parking lot and the bus, when the tractor jerked to a halt. “What’s
that
?” Anika murmured. I leaned over the side of the trailer.

A dark form was stalking along the edges of the front yards, heading our way. For a second I thought it was an immense stray dog. Then it lumbered out of the shadow of a tree, and I saw the distinctive rounded face with its pale muzzle, the portly body that swayed as it walked on.

A bear. Not a large one as bears went, but even so I guessed it weighed more than twice as much as I did. Its sides were well padded, but its thick brown-black fur was matted in patches—patches that were hardened with what looked like congealed blood. It might have been driven out of the forests in a quarrel over territory and headed into town to see what the pickings here were like, now that the people had cleared out.

Anika kept her foot on the brake as the bear ambled by. Justin shifted forward, and its head twitched toward us. But it wasn’t looking for a fight. It just eyed us for a moment and then continued on, stopping two lawns farther down to sniff at a tattered fast-food wrapper caught in the brambles of a hedge.

“You think we’re okay?” Leo asked me.

“Black bears don’t usually mess with people,” I said. “As long as we don’t bother it, it should leave us alone.”

“I’m still glad we’re going in opposite directions,” Anika said.

We edged down the road. Just a half a block later, I caught a glimpse of a school sign.

“There!” I said, pointing.

We pulled up outside the two-story brick building. It was shaped like an L, bent around a small concrete area painted with schoolyard game lines. A lane led past the yard and building to the parking lot I’d seen from the hill, where the school bus stood. A heavy bar blocked off access from the road.

“You go check it out,” Justin said, hefting the rifle. “I can protect our stuff.”

I pushed the gun back into my pocket, grabbed the jugs and the siphon hose, and hopped out of the trailer as Leo and Anika climbed down from the cab. We ducked under the bar and hurried along the lane to the parking lot. Dead leaves wisped across the concrete, but otherwise the only sound was the rasp of our boots.

When we reached the bus, Leo took the tube from me as I worked open the gas cap. He fed it into the tank while Anika jogged around the school to see if there were any other vehicles around. She had just returned, shaking her head, when Leo yanked the other end of the tube away from his mouth and into the waiting jug. He spat onto the pavement. Dark liquid coursed down the tube into the jug.

“Go get the barrel!” I said to Anika, my spirits lifting. I readied the second jug so Leo could switch to it as soon as the first one filled. But the gas hadn’t quite reached the top when the flow slowed to a dribble, and then cut out completely. Leo picked up the tube, wiped the end, and tried to restore the suction, but after a minute he lowered it with a frown.

“Well, it’s a start,” I said with forced cheerfulness. Anika had paused by the tractor, and I waved for her to stay there.

I considered the buildings around us as we walked back down the lane, wondering if we had any chance of finding another diesel vehicle here. Or a completely new vehicle, one that could cover a hundred miles in an hour instead of several. My mind was wandering off toward Atlanta when a sharp mechanical
snap
carried down the street.

Leo and I froze. Then I heard a growl, and a gasp, and the patter of racing feet.

I pushed under the bar and tossed the jugs into the trailer. Justin was standing up, and Anika hovered by the tractor door.

“Let’s go!” I said.

Justin gestured at something beyond my view. “The kid—”

A scrawny boy who couldn’t have been more than five years old pelted across the street and onto the sidewalk, heading straight for us. Then I saw why. The bear was loping after him, picking up speed with each stride, closing the distance effortlessly as another low growl rattled from its lungs.

The boy was staring over his shoulder, his face blotchy with fear. The toe of his sneaker caught on a crack in the pavement, and he shrieked as he stumbled to his knees. The bear gathered itself to spring. I started forward instinctively, but Leo beat me there.

He dashed in, scooped up the kid, and whipped around. In the same moment, the bear bounded onto the sidewalk between them and the tractor. Anika yelped, flattening herself against the door.

Leo’s head jerked around, and then he was sprinting across the schoolyard, the little boy clinging to his neck. The bear whirled in pursuit.

Leo had trained in dancing, not running, but he was still fast. He’d cleared half the yard before I realized what he was aiming for. There was a large metal storage bin by the wall of the school, about the size of a Dumpster.

He reached it and yanked on the lid. When it refused to budge, Leo set the boy on top of the box and then heaved himself up after him, the lid clanging under their weight. He tugged the kid against the wall as the bear skidded to a halt. It looked up at them, and rose onto its back legs with a huffing sound. It loomed there in front of them, making a tentative swipe at their ankles and then shuffling to the side when they proved out of reach.

I stepped into the yard, my heart thudding. Going for the box would have worked if the bear had given up, but now Leo had trapped himself in a corner. He glanced up at the roof, at least fifteen feet over his head. Too high.

Justin clambered out of the trailer. He limped up beside me, but before I could say anything, other footsteps clattered on the sidewalk farther down the street. I turned, fumbling for my pistol.

A woman with the same red-blond hair as the little boy was hustling toward us, followed by an older man, a guy who looked to be in his early twenties, and a preteen girl. The girl was holding a gun that looked oddly plastic. Because it was plastic. A BB gun. Suddenly the snapping noise and the bear’s pursuit of the boy made sense. He must have shot it.

The group came to a halt several feet from us, by the corner of the school building. The woman put her hand to her mouth when she saw the scene in the yard. “Ricky! My god…”

The younger man glared at Justin and me. “You should have stayed out of here,” he said.

The comment seemed so bizarre that I gaped at him before I could find the words to answer. “It’s not our fault he shot the bear,” I said.

“He snuck out ’cause he heard your engine,” the guy retorted. “He shouldn’t have been outside the house on his own in the first place.”

“Then maybe you should have been keeping a better eye on him,” Justin said, returning the glare.