The Lives We Lost: Fallen World 02 Page 13

  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 birds’ 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 hoisted 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 sound 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 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 took 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 shakily. 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 gun. 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, as we stood there, alone in the clearing where three corpses marked the snow.

  Three people dead, because of us. Because we’d killed them.

  As the realization sank in, my legs wobbled. I dropped to the ground, hugging my knees. Gav crouched with me, the gentle pressure of his arm around me feeling terribly distant. An acid taste rose in the back of my throat. In that moment, it was all I could do to keep my dinner down.

  “Wow,” Justin said to Tobias. “That was some shooting.”

  Tobias whirled on him. “What the hell were you doing?” he said. “That was a fucking mess, and it’s your mess. I could have missed that last shot. I could have gotten to you too late to stop the other guy from shooting you!”

  “They were going to find us,” Justin protested. “Now we’re safe. I saved us. None of you had the balls to do anything.”

  “We didn’t need to do anything yet,” Leo said quietly. “They were looking like they might turn back. And if we were going to do something, there are better plans than running out into plain sight and then freezing up.”

  Justin flushed. “I got her,” he said, pointing to the woman’s body. “That one I did perfect. I didn’t know—I’ve never shot anyone before. It shook me up a little. Next time that won’t happen.”

  “Next time?” I said, raising my head. “How many people are you planning on shooting? We came all this way so we could stop people from dying. We’re not supposed to be killing anyone!”

  Gav dragged in a breath, straightening up. “Well, it’s done now, right? It was done stupidly, but it’s done. It sounded like they’d have been happy to kill us, once they got the vaccine.”

  “They might have just given up,” I said, knowing that was more a wish than a possibility.

  “I don’t think they’d have moved on too quickly,” Tobias said. “They knew we were here. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have handled it better.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay?” Justin snapped. “Next time I’ll let all of you get shot instead, if that’ll make you happy.”

  I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. My thoughts were so scattered I couldn’t seem to catch hold of any of them. The space around me felt strangely empty.

  The cold-storage box. I’d left the vaccine samples in the forest.

  I got up, a little shakily, and walked back through the trees to pick up the box and my bag. The others were standing in the same semicircle when I returned.

  “If there’s anyone within a few miles of this place, they probably heard the gunshots,” Leo said. “Someone might come to see what’s going on. And whoever sent those people, when they don’t report back, another group might head here to check things out. We can’t stay.”

  He was right. I hugged the bag. “Where are we going to go?”

  Gav looked toward the road. “The van,” he said. His face had gone hard. “One of them must have the keys. We might as well use what we have.”

  “We know it can handle the snow,” Tobias said, nodding.

  Every bone in my body resisted the thought. The thought of getting into the van where the woman had sat with her rifle—the woman who was lying there dead—made me shudder.

  “Won’t it draw attention to us?” I said. “Anyone who sees us going by might recognize it. This group seems to have people all over the place. How can we stay out of sight if we’re using a van they’ll know?”

  “We could only drive when people wouldn’t see it easily,” Leo said. “Travel at night, rest during the day.”

  “I don’t want to stay in a house with that van outside like a signpost,” I said. “That’s crazy. It’s the one thing they’ll be lo
oking for.”

  “So we take it just for tonight,” Gav said. “We could get pretty far before the sun comes up.”

  “What the heck else can we do?” Justin demanded.

  I bit my lip. The answer was: nothing.

  “Okay,” I said. “We get as far as we can and ditch it before it starts getting light. Right?”

  Everyone nodded. Tobias turned to Justin. “You’re the reason these people are dead,” he said. “You should be the one looking for the keys. See up close what killing someone really means.”

  Justin’s face looked a little pinched, but he pressed his mouth into a flat line and trudged over to the woman’s body. Not wanting to watch, I hurried toward the mobile home. There was a thump as he rolled her over, and I cringed. The body of the second man was a dark blot amid the snow. I walked past it without letting my gaze stray from the place where we’d hidden the sleds, my hands curled tight in my pockets.

  The others caught up with me at the home. We hauled the sleds out from underneath it one by one. I set the cold box in mine and pulled it over to the road. The green van was waiting there, parked on the gravel shoulder of the freeway. I hesitated, and then tried the door.

  They hadn’t even locked it. Not that we could have driven it anywhere without the keys. A two-way radio lay on the dashboard. As I went around to open the back doors, it crackled.

  “Brunswick Third Division, an update?” a woman’s voice said. The same nasal voice that had spoken to us on the transceiver. The one who’d offered us help. Leaving the sled by the back of the van, I pulled myself into the passenger seat and picked up the two-way. When it started to crackle again, I switched it off.

  The seat was more comfortable than the one in Tobias’s truck. I guessed the woman in the red hat’s “division” had been able to be pickier.

  Brunswick Third Division. That suggested there were at least two other groups on patrol, didn’t it?

  We’d gone from huddled in the dark while three predators stalked us, to better off than we’d been since we left the island. Even if Justin hadn’t gone about it the best way, I had to admit that what he’d done had helped us. Was there something wrong with me that I still wished it hadn’t happened? Maybe I was too soft for this survival stuff. Too stuck in the morality of the life I’d left behind to do what I needed to keep the lives we had.