Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories Read online

  Seeing the shadow of pain crossing her face, I couldn’t finish the question. It was complete enough anyway.

  “Why are you thinking about that?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry. Forget it.”

  As if either of us could. She nudged a pebble with the toe of her sneaker, and I waited, braced for what she might say. I’d started to think maybe she wasn’t going to say anything after all when she dragged in a breath.

  “The thing is, it’s impossible to know, isn’t it? There are so many other things that could have happened differently if he’d still been with us, the rest of the way to Atlanta. And those things would have changed him, and us. It’s not like I haven’t wondered about it. But when I try to picture it, even just heading down to the States with him, it’s... blurry.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and something inside me closed up around a little jab of hurt, even though I couldn’t imagine what good answer she could have given me.

  “Leo.” She tugged my hand so I turned to face her. “The one thing I do know,” she said, “is if you’d come back to the island, and I hadn’t been with him, and you hadn’t been with Tessa, there wouldn’t have been anything to think about. I’d have wanted things to be like this with you. You’re not... replacing him. The two of us being together, it has nothing to do with him. Okay? You can’t think anything else.”

  “Okay,” I said, but the jab of hurt hadn’t completely gone away. I believed her, and yet—it was impossible to know what would have happened then, too, wasn’t it? The only way it had ever happened was that she had turned to me after losing him.

  It was different with me and Tessa. I couldn’t have avoided seeing that after I got back to the island, the way she closed herself off when she realized her parents hadn’t made it instead of turning to me, but it wasn’t as if we’d done much soul-bearing before. She was so straightforward I’d been more comfortable with her within a few months after her family moved to the island than I was with most of the kids I’d grown up with, and I’d cared about her, a lot—I would have been there for her, before or after, if she’d wanted it—but in that straightforwardness she’d always been clear that she didn’t expect, or even want, promises about eternal devotion she wouldn’t have believed we could follow through on anyway. Before I’d left for New York she’d told me that if I hit it off with someone at the academy, she’d understand, she didn’t want us to force a long distance thing, so I’d said the same went for her. I’d accepted that was just how it was with us.

  Kaelyn and Gav... I’d seen him look at her as if there was no one else in the entire world, to him. I’d seen how desperate she was when he got sick, how shattered when he died. It was nice to think I’d helped her put the pieces back together, but he had still been there first. He’d been a guy with a mission as big as hers, the way he’d kept the town together and organized, looking after everyone who needed it. How could he not cast a shadow?

  Now, by the edge of the vast lake with the breeze tickling past us, Kaelyn teased her fingers into my hair and drew my mouth to hers, and I stopped thinking about all of that. When we were kissing, I didn’t care how many shadows lingered around us. I pulled her closer for another kiss, citrus soap smell on her skin and apricot syrup taste in her mouth, and another, until I could almost believe we’d never have to stop.

  Mason helped me herd all the kids except the toddlers over to the dance studio. Even at the day’s brightest, the light from the front window filled only half the room. Cody, Owen, and Mya drifted toward the darker end, Cody listening as the other two muttered to each other. The rest of the kids fanned out, gaping at the space.

  “First let’s warm up,” I said. I modeled some easy moves—touching toes, jumping jacks—and they copied me at varying paces. Then I went to turn on the boom box I’d found in a used CD shop other scavengers had left mostly untouched, along with some batteries and a few recent pop albums I thought the kids might recognize.

  “I don’t know how to dance,” Paulette said, twisting her hands together.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We’re not letting anyone else watch—we’re just going to have fun with it. All you have to do is move with the music.”

  At first I had them just bounce with the beat. Then I led them from a step-touch into a simple grapevine. The little kids started tangling their feet and giggling, and even Meredith looked bored. Owen was ignoring me now, showing off some imaginary karate moves to Cody and Mya.

  I’d had my first lessons more than ten years ago—and I’d wanted to dance, after seeing some performers at a festival in Halifax with my parents. But I didn’t have to get the kids perfectly involved. All I needed was to find some way to get them putting a little of their emotions into the movement.

  “Okay,” I said, pausing the song. “That was just us getting used to the music. Now I want you to find your own moves. Whatever you want—it doesn’t have to be ‘real’ dancing. You can just move in ways that show things you’re feeling, maybe things you’d have trouble talking about. Like, if you’re angry, you could do this.” I punched my hands out at the air. “Or, if you’re sad, you could move like this.” I curled my back so my arms dangled, and let my body sway. “Or if you’re excited, you could do this!” I whirled around. “You see? Anything you want—there’s nothing you can do that’s wrong. Try things out, and if you don’t like how they feel, try something else.”

  “This is stupid,” Mya said. “Who wants to dance about feelings? Oh, this is my sad dance.” She pulled an exaggerated pout and wiggled her arms like a monkey, and Owen cracked up.

  Maybe I hadn’t done the best job of explaining. But Meredith lifted her chin with that steely look and said, “I think it’s cool, if you actually try,” and the others looked at the boom box expectantly.

  Mya started to sneer at Meredith, so I cut off any further complaint by saying, “If you don’t want to move around, you can sit and listen to the music. That’s fine too. It’s been a while since we’ve had any.”

  I pressed play and returned to my spot in front of them. Meredith stepped in a slow circle, waving her arms like swooping wings. The little kids started bobbing with the rhythm again.

  I should use myself as a model. What was I feeling? Nervous, hopeful. Letting go of any thought of technique, I twisted at my waist and reached, one way, and then the other.

  “Can I go down on the floor?” Paulette asked.

  “Whatever you want,” I said.

  She lay down and curled up, then stretched her limbs wide. A couple of the other kids sprawled on the floor nearby, squirming and rolling, though their expressions were solemn. I couldn’t tell if this was helping them at all, but at least they were doing more than staring at the walls in their apartment.

  “Watch this!” one of the younger kids said and did a handstand, kicking her legs in the air. I dashed over to spot her before she toppled over.

  “Leo,” Meredith said, “does this look good?” She raised her arms over her head in an approximation of a fifth position pose and spun on her feet.

  “Don’t worry about looking good,” I said. “It’s whether it feels good to you that matters.”

  A little boy tugged at my shirt, wanting to show me a stomping move he punctuated with a fierce grunt, and Paulette asked about doing leaps, and I had to catch the handstand girl before she fell off the barre after she clambered onto it. A whole five minutes might have passed without me looking around at the entire group when Meredith said, “Hey, where’d Mya and them go?”

  My head jerked up. The shadowy end of the studio was empty, but there was another door there that led to the changing rooms. I walked over, expecting a prank—the three of them jumping out to startle me, probably—and found the dim rooms with their benches and clothing hooks empty. Beyond them, a short hall led to a door out the back of the building. I peered out across the small parking lot and the street, but there was no sign of the trio.

  The music was still playing w
hen I hurried back into the main room, but the other kids were all just standing, waiting. “They ran off,” Paulette said flatly. “That’s stupid.”

  I turned off the boom box. “I think I’d better bring you back to the condo building,” I said. My heart was beating hard. I’d barely had them for half an hour, and I’d managed to lose them—some help I’d been.

  “I’ll look for them with you,” Meredith offered, and I shook my head.

  “I’ll get a couple of the grown-ups. You’re safer inside, Mere.”

  Mason was talking to Nell, Liz, and a few of the other adults in the condo building’s lobby. When I told him about the missing kids, he grimaced.

  “They would have,” he muttered. “Those three... I shouldn’t have left you to try to keep an eye on all of them by yourself. Come on.”

  Liz joined us, and we returned to the dance studio, checking to confirm the three weren’t just hiding. Then we set off from the back entrance, splitting up across the street to peer through store windows, down alleys, over fences.

  “They’ll come back when they get hungry,” Liz said when we regrouped at an intersection. “It’s almost lunch time.” But none of us seriously suggested giving up the search. Maybe we would have given them a chance to come back on their own in the world before, but now...

  A high-pitched shout carried on the breeze, and I thought, Mya. Spinning, I jogged down the street in the direction I thought the shout had come from. A laugh followed it, and then a little shriek that could have been excitement—or pain. I ran faster.

  On the far corner, movement flashed amid the skeleton of a partly-constructed house. The winter weather had darkened the new wood, and the protective plastic sheets drifted in ripped swaths like flaking skin.

  Mya had climbed to the second level, which didn’t have a floor, and seemed to be searching for a way up to the roof. Owen was perched in a hollow window frame below her. Cody edged along a beam nearby, arms spread as he wobbled over the open pit of the basement. My voice caught in my throat.

  Cody swayed, and sat down on the beam. Mya paused, gripping one of the wall boards, as Mason came up beside me. She glanced down and spotted us.

  “Oh, man,” she said with a sigh.

  “Get over here, you three,” Mason said, planting his feet. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Having real fun,” Owen said from his window. “No one’s using this place. Why shouldn’t we?”

  “Because it’s dangerous,” I said. “And if you hurt yourself, we don’t even have a hospital to take you to.”

  “So what?” Mya shrugged. “Everything’s dangerous. Probably we’re all going to die soon anyway, right? So why can’t we just do what we want?”

  The words, and her indifferent tone, made my stomach twist. I glanced at Cody, and he stared back at me, chin jutting defiantly.

  “I don’t want to hear you talking like that,” Mason said. “Let’s go, all three of you, now. You’re already in trouble, but you can be in more, you know.”

  Owen groaned, and the three of them scrambled to the lawn, Mya shimmying down one of the supports using the crossbeams like a giant ladder. They reached us rumpled and dirt-smudged but intact, and none of them talked the entire way back to the condo building.

  But what did it matter if they weren’t talking like that, if that was what they were thinking?

  I knew even going in that it wasn’t likely to make a difference, but I’d still asked Dorrie if I could have a few minutes alone with Cody, away from the other kids, and she’d managed to convince Owen and Mya to tag along with Mason to grab snacks for the group. So there we were, in the bedroom Cody and Owen shared, me and the boy I’d talked into leaving his home and his mom. He’d drawn his knees up onto the cot and was looking away from me with a particularly determined scowl.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to his profile. “It’s awful—I know it’s awful. My mom and dad, they both got the flu. But for you, I know it’s even more awful, because you were there with her. And I asked you to leave her. And that was kind of an awful thing to do too. But it would have been even more awful to stay. It isn’t your fault. It’s the virus, the friendly flu, it’s— Sometimes there aren’t any good options. Okay? No one here thinks you did something wrong. We all just want to help you feel all right again—and Owen and Mya too, really. No matter what you’ve done or do, we’ll still be here.”

  He didn’t answer, didn’t so much as glance toward me. I swallowed. “Look, if you want to be angry at someone, go ahead and be angry at me. I told you that you should come with us. It can be my fault. You want to yell at me? You can.”

  Nothing. His fingers curled into his palms against his leg, skin almost as pale as the white threads along the unhemmed edge of his cut-off shorts. His blond hair was falling into his eyes, in need of trimming. With that coloring he could have been my opposite, but we had enough in common. There had to be a way I could get through to him.

  “If there’s anything you’d want, from me or anyone, I’ll do it,” I said. “You just need to tell me. Write it down if you don’t want to say it.”

  He turned his head toward me, studying me with those cool blue eyes.

  “I don’t know if you agree with what Mya was saying yesterday,” I went on, “but it isn’t true. We’re alive, and we can stay alive, if we’re smart about it. There are a lot of awful things, but there are things to stay alive for too. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way now, but—after a while it’ll get easier. I promise. And talking to people, letting them know how you feel, that helps.”

  He made an odd sound in his throat. For a second I thought he was working up to speak. Then he spat in my face.

  “I think I handled it as well as I could,” I said to Kaelyn a few hours later, as we took a minute to relax after washing a bunch of laundry in one of the rainwater collecting basins set up on the rooftop patio. I leaned against the low concrete wall, looking out over the few blocks of roofs and treetops between us and the lake. “I didn’t get angry, just reminded him again that he could tell me if he wanted anything, and left. But I don’t know if he really listened—maybe I just made things worse.”

  “I’m sure it sank in that you’re trying, that you care about him,” Kaelyn said, propping herself against the wall beside me. “Even if he can’t accept that yet, it has to be good for him to know it.”

  “I guess.”

  She shifted closer so our arms touched. “You know you did the right thing, don’t you? Convincing him to come with us? If we’d left him with his mother, either one of them would have managed to get her out and she’d have infected him, maybe even hurt him... or he’d have had to listen to her the whole rest of the time, through the hallucinations too. That’s not something a kid should have to hear.”

  Her voice had gone raw. She’d listened to Gav through his entire last day, crouched against the wall beside the room we’d had to confine him in, looking ready to die herself. I turned to slide my arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into me.

  “And then who knows if he’d have been able to find food, or clean water, or everything else he’d need to survive,” she went on. “He’d have been all on his own.”

  “I know,” I said, “and I’d do it the same way again if I had to. I just don’t know what I can do now.”

  “You’re trying your best,” Kaelyn said. “I think I remember someone reminding me a little while ago that we can’t save everyone.”

  “I think using my words against me is cheating.”

  She poked me with her elbow. “I’m pointing out that they were smart words. Some days I think we should consider it a huge victory that we save anyone at all.”

  “You saved all sorts of people by getting the vaccine to the CDC,” I said. “Drew said the new batch will be here soon, right?”

  “Michael’s just finished making arrangements with the CDC. It sounds like they’re going to send that one doctor, Ed—the nice one—up here with their part of the batch. Two or t
hree days, and then everyone here will be protected.”

  “From the virus, at least,” I said, but I was relieved to hear it. Two or three days. We could make it that long.

  “Then we can start thinking about other things,” Kaelyn said. “When everyone’s vaccinated, it’ll be easier to start coordinating with the other people still around... There might be some things we can get up and running again. I mean, obviously some we’re going to have to give up on, at least for now, but... the electricity here was hydro, it’s not like Niagara Falls has gone anywhere. There’ve got to be people left who can figure stuff like that out, if we get more organized.”

  “Yeah,” I said, though it was hard for me to imagine that big a future. So I settled for hugging her and thinking just a few days forward, to the vaccine and the one enormous looming fear it would wipe away. That had to change something—for Cody, for the other kids, for all of us.

  The faint sense of relief lasted until the next afternoon, when Dorrie came down to the basement where I was sorting through our most recent scavenging haul.

  “Have any of the kids come by here?” she asked.

  A creeping sensation tickled up my back. “No. Why?” I said, already suspecting—and dreading—the answer.

  “Owen, Mya, and Cody took off again,” she said. “I had to help one of the little guys in the bathroom, and when I came out they were gone. Mason’s already headed over to that house where you found them last time. I’m sure they haven’t gone far.”

  In spite of those words, her face was tight with worry. This was her whole job, looking after the kids. Whatever guilt I’d felt the other day, she’d have it ten times worse.

  “I’ll help look for them,” I said, setting down the blanket I’d been folding. “This can wait.”

  Several of the adults had gathered in front of the building. As we joined them, Mason appeared, alone.