Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories Read online

  Nothing felt like progress, only treading water. Less than three weeks after we’d arrived, Kaelyn asked me to go for a walk with her. We wandered down to the harbor and sat at the end of the dock where we’d huddled a few months ago, watching the island burn. Kaelyn stared across at it, the distant slice of land hovering over the water of the strait. I wasn’t surprised when she said, “I can’t stay here.”

  As soon as Kaelyn mentioned it, it seemed almost all of the islanders had been thinking about leaving. In ten days we put together a caravan of the largest vehicles we could find and all the supplies we could reasonably carry. Altogether there were forty-three of us that set off early one morning for Toronto. Kaelyn figured that city was the first place in our end of the country the vaccine was likely to get to, considering the extent of Michael’s presence there, and it was one she and I were at least somewhat familiar with.

  Now that we knew there was no one still holding people up at the border, we planned a shorter route than the one we’d taken in January, this time cutting through Maine. With the roads clear of snow, we expected to make the trip that’d taken us nearly two weeks that winter in just a day and a half.

  We stopped in the evening in the first town we came to after crossing into Ontario. The residential neighborhood appeared to be deserted, but Kaelyn and I had learned our lesson the last time. Several of the adults stayed behind with the kids, the vehicles, and an assortment of weapons while the rest of us split up into groups of five to check the abandoned homes and cars nearby for anything worth scavenging.

  Kaelyn led her group off to the south, and I headed north with mine. My thoughts drifted after her as we tried the doors of various houses and siphoned gas from a gray sedan. We’d made sure someone in each of the groups had a gun. I was carrying the .38 we’d lifted from the Wardens who’d come after us before, the ones Justin and Tobias had shot, in the back pocket of my cargo pants. Kaelyn still had the service pistol Tobias had left behind. The difference was, Dad had insisted I become a decent shot and as far as I knew Kaelyn had never fired a gun. I’d walked her through the basics, but we didn’t have bullets to spare for real training. If her group ran into trouble...

  “Leo,” Howard said as he screwed the cap on the jug of gas, “you think we should keep going?”

  I yanked my thoughts back to the task at hand. I was supposed to be protecting these people from trouble.

  “Let’s do another block,” I said, scanning the street. Still no sign of anyone living here, but we hadn’t had any idea the guy who’d infected Gav was around until he’d been right there charging up the driveway at us.

  It was hard to keep my thoughts from looping like that, back to Kaelyn, to what we’d been through together, what she might be facing now. Howard and the others were looking to me as some sort of leader—because I had the gun? Because I’d traveled across the country more than once?—but I really wasn’t one. I’d been following Kaelyn since we set off that first time with the vaccine. That’d been her mission, just like this was. I believed we were doing the right thing, moving everyone to the city, but if I thought about it honestly, I was here because she’d wanted to go. If she’d wanted to stay by the island, I wouldn’t have argued.

  I could still remember, too clearly, the agony in her voice when she’d noticed I wasn’t entirely comfortable with some of the more cutthroat decisions she’d made on the way to Atlanta. When she’d told me that she couldn’t shoulder the responsibility for what I did, what I believed in. I didn’t expect her to. But what could I really contribute that wasn’t just helping someone else? The only mission I’d ever had before was becoming respected enough for my dancing to make a career out of it. There wasn’t much point in trying to pursue that in a world where “career” was hardly a thing—and it wasn’t as if dancing was going to help anyone survive.

  My whole life before had been about performing in one way or another, really. Entertaining people. Mainly because that had seemed like the only remotely special thing I had to offer. Which meant there wasn’t much I could do that mattered now, was there?

  That thought ate at me as we started along the next street over, but I didn’t know how to start dealing with it. As long as I stayed alive and Kaelyn stayed alive, how could I complain? So I focused on the first part of that, eyes alert and ears perked.

  We managed to fill most of our bags with canned goods from a couple of the houses on that block. I was about to suggest it was time to head back as we stepped out of the bungalow on the corner, when a distant shriek made the words snag in my throat.

  I stiffened, reaching for the pistol. The sound had come from north of us, the opposite direction from where the rest of our group was, so it shouldn’t be anyone we knew. My companions exchanged looks, Howard frowning. Like me, he was safe—relatively—if it was someone with the flu, since he was one of the few who’d had it and recovered, but the others weren’t.

  Of course, it might not be someone sick. It might be someone who could use our help. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, and glanced at Howard.

  “We should take a quick look,” I said, and, to the others, “Stay close, but let the two of us go first.”

  I half expected someone to argue, but they nodded and followed my lead.

  We stole through the long shadows of the houses toward the noise. The shriek had cut off, but as we crept closer I distinguished what I thought were two different voices, one pleading and the other sobbing. It could be both someone sick and someone else who needed help.

  As we turned the corner, the voices became clearer. “Just let me out, sweetheart,” the first was calling out. “You need to open the door. Your mommy can’t look after you when she’s shut away like this. You need me.”

  The sobbing broke off briefly as a boy shouted, “I can’t! I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!”

  I spotted him, a small, pale figure cowering by an open second-story window in the house one over from the corner, and sped up to a jog. He glanced out just as I reached the house, and stared down at me, his cheeks shiny with tears. He looked about Meredith’s age, maybe a bit older—seven or eight.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, checking him for signs of infection. His eyes were red-rimmed, but that was probably from the crying. As he continued staring at me dumbly, he didn’t scratch or sneeze or cough. The other voice had fallen silent, but I thought I heard the rattle of a door in its frame.

  “What do you need?” I tried again.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Cody!” the woman’s voice yelled, and he flinched away from the window. “Please, sweetheart, please!” A childish wail split the air. I couldn’t tell who’d made it.

  “I don’t think the kid’s sick,” I said to the others. “And it looks like he’s alone, other than...”

  The door was rattling again, louder, followed by a volley of coughs. My skin prickled. Someone was sick up there.

  The boy didn’t return to the window, and my companions didn’t move. Well, to be careful, it was better I handled this anyway. “I’m going inside,” I said. Without giving myself a chance to rethink it, I headed to the front door. It opened at my push and I hurried up the stairs.

  The boy must have heard me coming. He was standing in a doorway when I reached the second floor hallway, framed by the hazy glow of the setting sun through the window I’d first seen him at. His bedroom, I guessed from the bit of furniture I could see. His blond hair was tangled, his face sallow.

  A door at the opposite end of the hall was the one rattling. “Cody!” the woman cried, and it shuddered. “Talk to me! Open it up! I need to see you!”

  “Your mom?” I said quietly.

  The boy inclined his head, his body rigid. I took another step toward him.

  “She locked herself in that room?”

  Another incline.

  “You don’t know how to let her out?”

  Another.

  I could imagine what might have happened. She’d realized she
was sick, and shut herself away from him so she wouldn’t infect him. Maybe the door was locked with a key and she’d tossed it somewhere neither of them could reach. Maybe she’d gone as far as nailing it shut and throwing away any tools she could have used to pry it open. There were a lot of ways she could have made her situation permanent. Made the room beyond that door into a coffin.

  My stomach knotted. We couldn’t help her, any more than we’d been able to help Gav or Tobias. Even if we figured out a way to get to her, Nell didn’t have the equipment here to attempt a blood transfusion, the only treatment that had worked for anyone, and letting this woman out would put nearly every one of the islanders at risk. Not to mention the son she’d been so determined to save.

  We could help her do that.

  “She’s got the friendly flu,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do for her. I’m so sorry—I wish there was.”

  He nodded, and I wondered how many deaths he’d already witnessed in the last few months. His dad’s? A sibling’s? The images of Gav’s body surrounded by the papers he’d torn up during his hallucinations, of following Tobias’s footprints through the snow in vain, passed through my mind, and I swallowed hard.

  “You can stay with her, if you want,” I told him, “but you can also come with us. We’re only here for one night. There are a bunch of us—kids, your age—and we’d look after you. I know it’s awful to think about leaving her, but... if you stay here, soon you’ll be alone.”

  He looked at me with those desperate eyes. I held out my hand. “They’ll be making dinner right now,” I added. “How long has it been since you ate?”

  His hand lifted to his belly, and his mouth worked. He peeked at the locked door. His mother screeched, and he winced, fresh tears trickling out—and I decided I wasn’t giving him a choice.

  “Come on,” I said, as gently as I could, and took him by the elbow. I was prepared to scoop him up and carry him away, but he let me tug him toward the stairs, and down, and out to the sidewalk where the other four were waiting. He balked there, turning around. His mom was pounding on the door now, shouting his name.

  She’d never know he was gone. She’d keep calling out to the echo of him she’d sense beyond the door, until her voice gave out.

  “This is what she’d have wanted,” I said. “She locked herself in there so you could keep living. I promise you, if she could stop being sick for a minute, she’d tell you to go.”

  He lowered his head, and walked with us back to the caravan.

  Kaelyn poured over a map of Toronto during the morning’s drive, but it wasn’t until she finished directing me, at the head of our caravan, to the section of the city where she wanted us to stop that I found out what she’d been looking for. We parked on the street in front of a wide brick building—a dance studio. Kaelyn was grinning.

  “I figured we’ll actually live in that condo building,” she said, pointing to a five-story building in yellow stucco half a block away. “But I thought you’d appreciate this being so close.”

  We had nothing, really, and somehow she’d managed to give me the most enormous gift. She looked so pleased I had to kiss her. Meredith kicked the back of my seat.

  “You can make out later,” she said. “I want to see where we’re going to stay.”

  A bunch of us inspected all the buildings within two blocks first, to make sure no one else was squatting nearby, and then we moved into the condos. It turned out to be an ideal set-up: just two entrances, one through the lobby that we could easily guard, and a back door we immediately barricaded. The social room in the basement with adjacent kitchen gave us a place where we’d be able to cook and eat communal meals once Howard got one of the generators we’d hauled with us hooked up to the electrical system. Someone had looted the place already, breaking the locks on the condo doors and carting off most of their contents, but that made it easier for us to move in without feeling like we were displacing the real owners. With twenty-eight apartments in all, we had lots of space to spread out in.

  We spent the rest of the day wiping down every surface in the building with hospital-grade disinfectant, which might not be enough to kill the virus if it had lingered somewhere but was the best we could do. The next morning, though, Kaelyn and I checked out the studio.

  The lock on its door was broken too. Light spilled across the wooden floor from the large front window. One wall held a ballet barre in front of a row of mirrors, the others blank except for a small bulletin board with a few audition postings and performance announcements tacked to it.

  I kicked off my shoes automatically and padded on my socked feet into the middle of the space. The floor was smooth and firm beneath me, but with the spring all good dance floors had. I’d never had a surface this good to practice on until those couple months in New York City before the world went to hell. I bobbed up and down on my feet, and then pushed off into a couple pirouettes. Sloppy—I hadn’t warmed up, and these weren’t the best clothes for dancing—but satisfying in a way I’d missed.

  “What do you think?” Kaelyn asked.

  “It’s perfect.” I looked over at her where she’d stopped not far from the door to give me room, at the light in her eyes as she smiled at my approval, and a swell of affection rushed up through me. I walked back to her, cupped her face, leaned close.

  “Have I mentioned recently that I love you?” I said.

  Her smile widened. “I’m totally okay with you mentioning it again.”

  I kissed her, gently, and then, as her fingers curled against the back of my neck, more intensely. My heart thumped faster than I could blame on the pirouettes.

  Of course, we weren’t really alone. The door’s hinges sighed as it opened, and Mason peered in.

  “Ah,” he said, looking awkward, as Kaelyn and I stepped apart. “Kaelyn, Nell wants to talk to you.”

  “Sure,” Kaelyn said. She gave me another smile, one that promised Later, and headed out.

  After she’d gone, I sat and stretched in deep slow movements, both warming up and cooling off, absorbing the feel of the space. “Think of your stage as a participant in the dance,” one of our instructions at the academy had liked to say. “The better you know it, the better you can partner it.” I stripped off my socks when I stood up again, and was tempted to kick off my jeans too, but Mason had shown how easily I could be interrupted and I wasn’t keen to have someone walk in on me in my boxers.

  When I was limber enough, I tested out a short section of choreo we’d been working on in jazz class right before I’d taken off for home. I didn’t know how much longer the school had stayed open after that. There’d already been a few people sick when I left, and many more throughout the city. Most of them, the students I’d danced alongside, the teachers who’d led us, would be dead now.

  In a distant part of my mind, I could hear the instructor counting off the beats, see figures reaching and turning in the edges of my vision. My footfalls echoed through the empty room, and I halted. My throat had tightened.

  Dancing used to be my one clear thing—the one act that felt true, all the way down. I was meant for it and it was meant for me, nothing there to doubt. Even more so after Kaelyn had moved away when we were eleven, leaving me with all those island-born kids who couldn’t help seeing me as an outsider no matter how much they enjoyed my company.

  But dancing had its own shadows now. I could still do it, obviously—I still loved it—I couldn’t imagine giving it up. It just didn’t make a difference to anyone except me. And that hollowed it even for me, knowing there was no one to dance with, no one to dance for, not the way there used to be.

  I wanted to be doing things that made this world better... not worse, like some of what I’d had to do before to make it this far. If this was all I had, all I could offer that couldn’t have been filled in by any person who happened to be around, then my being alive and here meant pretty much nothing.

  I was doing some good, I reminded myself. I’d saved a kid from an angry bear in t
hat town in Georgia. I’d made sure Cody would have a chance at a life.

  I put my socks and shoes back on, and headed up the street to see what else needed to be done at the condo building. I was almost there when a silver sports car turned the corner up ahead and cruised toward me.

  I froze, my nerves prickling with the urge to run. Anyone driving around that casually was almost definitely a Warden. Our group had parked all our vehicles in the building’s small underground garage, but there were other signs of our occupation: voices carry-ing through open windows, the sheets we’d been boiling draped over balcony railings, garbage bags full of the previous inhabitants’ personal effects, which no one wanted staring at them, lined up on the front lawn to be hauled elsewhere later that day. I glanced at the nearest driveway, but whoever was in the car had to have already seen me. If they were going to make trouble, the others might need me—or at least my pistol.

  The car slowed as it passed the condo building, and I made out a woman’s face behind the reflections on the windshield. She came to a stop beside me, pulling a surgical mask up over her mouth and nose.

  “New in town?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “but we know Michael makes the rules here. We’re not going to get in your way.”

  If she was surprised that I knew the score, her eyes didn’t show it. “How many of you and where are you from?”

  “About forty—ten just kids—and Nova Scotia.” I wasn’t sure what she might make of that information. Remembering the Wardens Kaelyn and I had encountered on our way from Atlanta, the way they’d backed off when they’d recognized who we were, I added, “Kaelyn Weber’s here with us. Whoever’s running things, they should mention that to Michael before you decide anything about us.”