Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories Read online

“I’ll get her to ask.”

  I looked around. Most of my things stayed in the greenhouse, so there wasn’t much else in our small room. The empty chair and the bed that was going to be much more spacious with just me in it. Though I’d become pretty comfortable with sleeping leaned against the back wall so Meredith didn’t bump me when she turned over.

  “You know,” Leo said, “Kaelyn would have encouraged you to come with us if she didn’t figure you’d say you wanted to if you did. Not because she—or I—wouldn’t want you along.”

  As he met my eyes, I couldn’t see any hint of distress. Whatever pain I’d inadvertently caused him when I’d first declared I was staying here, it hadn’t lingered, then. It wouldn’t have been like Leo to hold a grudge, but all the same, my next breath came a little easier.

  “I know,” I said. “And she’s right. I really am good here.” Back on the island, all that waited was a vacant house, shattered glass around my little backyard greenhouse, burnt-out buildings, and a gravel pit full of corpses. I doubted even Kaelyn would want to stay long. I’d found a rhythm here. I knew what I could contribute, what was needed of me.

  “I’m glad,” Leo said with a crooked smile. “You should be someplace where you can feel that way. I know it’s pretty hard to find these days.”

  His gaze drifted through the room again, dark eyes thoughtful beneath his smooth black hair, his mouth that used to always be wide with laughter pressing flat. Maybe I’d never expected us to last forever, but I’d been happy, being with him, while it lasted. I’d thought he’d be that sweet high school boyfriend you simply grow apart from and look back on fondly, not the guy you break up with in the middle of a global catastrophe because you needed different things to survive. He should have been off at dance school, wowing audiences and charming a girl who matched him.

  Someone got the story wrong, I thought, amusement and sadness mixing.

  He was going to walk out of here with that basket, and I was never going to see any of them again, Kaelyn or Meredith or him. It would be as though they’d never been here.

  A jolt of urgency shot through me, the need to ground this moment and make it as real as I could. He knew where we stood; he knew this was a final good-bye, so he couldn’t mistake what I was looking for. It couldn’t hurt.

  “Leo,” I said, reaching to touch his cheek and draw him closer. His eyes jerked to me, startled. He stepped back just before my fingers grazed his skin. Taking my hand, he glanced down at it, and then back at me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you. Kaelyn and I... we—”

  I’d been wrong—it could hurt. “Oh,” I said, cutting him off, my face warming. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.” I should have noticed. When they were sitting together, there must have been signs. Too busy thinking my own thoughts, Dad would have said with a bemused shake of his head. I haven’t got much else, these days, I replied to his imaginary voice.

  Leo was still trying to explain. “We’d known each other so long, before, and then, after Gav died, it just...”

  “It’s okay,” I told him, because it was. “I’m not upset. I’m the one who broke up with you, remember? And I wasn’t trying to suggest we get back together. Come on, let’s bring this stuff to the car.”

  The icy breeze whipped inside when I opened the door, but there were no papers left on the desk for it to scatter.

  All of this was okay. And anything that wasn’t, I would make it be.

  By evening, Kaelyn’s news about the vaccine had spread from the few people she and Leo had talked to through the whole colony. Suzanne had taken on Hilary’s leadership role after Hilary died, and throughout dinner people kept stopping by the table where she sat with the other two residents who were in their fifties, the three of them having a sort of authority in their greater experience. Partway through the meal, Suzanne stood up and called for everyone’s attention.

  “I can see we have a lot to talk about,” she said. “Let’s enjoy our food for now, and when we’re finished eating, we’ll have a proper discussion.”

  I stayed because I was already there, but once the dishes had been cleared and people started taking turns saying their piece, I was only paying half my attention. The questions brought up were ones even Kaelyn couldn’t have answered, like when the vaccine would make it across the border and how we could find out when it did. My mind wandered back a few hours, to when I’d watched Kaelyn and Leo and Meredith cross the field back to the car—side-by-side, matching Meredith’s shorter strides. They’d looked like a family. I’d felt out of place, waiting there, so I’d gone back to the greenhouse when they were only halfway to the road. But a feeling had crept up over me that Meredith had looked back when they got to the car to wave one last time, and had seen I was gone.

  So it was only when Jon joined in that I realized the conversation around me had gotten a little more serious.

  “The first threat has always been the flu,” he said, his voice resonating through the room. Hilary had told me that Jon had come to the colony before the epidemic as a playwright, but he’d also been an actor. It was easy to tell. When he brought out his stage presence, he could make a request to pass the salt sound like some-thing Shakespeare had written. Even though he was one of the youngest residents, people listened to him.

  “That should be our first priority,” he went on from where he was standing by his table. “We’re not safe here, and we know that. Is there anyone who wants to go through what we did with Hilary and April again?”

  April—the woman who’d been infected along with Hilary—had been Suzanne’s daughter. I’d have assumed Jon was playing to Suzanne, but the anguish that leaked into his voice wasn’t an act. He and April had just begun seeing each other, or whatever you could call “dating” in a situation like this, before she’d been quarantined. Of course this mattered to him. But something about the way he said, We’re not safe here, made me stiffen.

  “We’re safer here than just about anywhere else,” Lauren said from across the room. “Kenneth and I saw what happened in the cities. You think there are fewer sick people wandering around somewhere like Ottawa?”

  “You left Ottawa months ago,” someone else piped up. “It’ll be different now. Anyone who’s still there must have been smart enough to avoid getting infected—anyone who wasn’t will be dead.”

  “From what we’ve heard, the ‘smart’ people are nearly as dangerous as the friendly flu,” another remarked.

  “And it could be months longer before the vaccine gets up here,” Kenneth put in. A few heads nodded at that. He’d faced the possibility of infection directly—that gave his opinion an extra weight.

  “How long can we keep going here?” Jon said. “Our resources aren’t infinite. We’re better off making our own decision while we have a choice than waffling until we’re backed into a corner.”

  My skin chilled as it completely sank in. This was about more than just how to get the vaccine to us, or who would arrange it. What they were really discussing was all of us leaving.

  Suzanne raised her hand, and everyone fell silent.

  “It’s true,” she said. “We may be forced to leave eventually. There will be a point when we have to travel too far to find supplies to justify the effort. Hiding our presence here is going to be much harder in just a couple weeks, once the snow’s fully melted and more outsiders are on the move. That doesn’t mean we should uproot ourselves now, but it is something to consider.”

  “So maybe we’ll have to make do with less,” Kenneth said. “At least here we can grow our own food all year round. It’s not as if the grocery stores will be open next winter.”

  “We can grow plants indoors anywhere,” Jon said. “All we need are windows.”

  “Since when are you a gardener?” Lauren said, and suddenly everyone was looking at me.

  “What do you think, Tessa?” Kenneth asked. “How easily could we grow the amount of food we’re producing here somewhere else—in a c
ity?”

  A moment ago I’d been watching the conversation from the sidelines. I hadn’t been prepared to be yanked into the middle of it. “I, ah,” I said, gathering my thoughts. And then my mind clamped shut with a hard certainty. I didn’t want to be in the middle of this. I didn’t want this conversation to be going on at all. I knew the greenhouse, I knew the tools I had here, I knew I could work with them. That was the job I’d agreed to.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The set-up we have here is meant to be used for this sort of agriculture. I can’t say what it’d be like starting from scratch somewhere else not knowing what we’d be starting with.”

  “Well,” Jon began. My hands clenched under the table. Before he could continue, Suzanne raised her arms again.

  “We’ve only just gotten the news,” she said. “We’ve barely had time to think anything through. There are resources in the book room we can consult. We all have our own areas of expertise, to whatever degree they may be useful.” She, as a former painter, offered a slanted smile. “Consider the possibilities on your own and with each other, and we’ll revisit this discussion in a few days.”

  I ruined a tomato the next morning. I was kneeling on the boards beside their plot, picking and pruning as I worked along the row of pots that kept their roots protected from any chill in the soil. Soon it’d be warm enough to transplant them, I was deciding. Then I reached and twisted off a small green globe without thinking.

  I stared at it in my hand. It barely fit the hollow of my palm. The people on cooking duty could still cut it up and add it to something, but it could have grown at least three times as big. A waste. Why had I done that?

  The door’s hinges squeaked. I looked up, ready to direct Meredith to the beans, but it was Suzanne coming in. Because Meredith wasn’t here anymore. This was the third time I’d forgotten that. Wherever my head was, I wanted it back.

  “What needs doing today?” Suzanne asked, surveying the plots. She’d been coming by for an hour or two most days the last few weeks. To soak up the warmth she said, though she was pretty handy too.

  “It’s about time to open the vents,” I told her. They dropped the temperature a little, but let out some of the humidity. A few of the plants had been going moldy before I’d arrived. “Then the bean seedlings are ready to go in.”

  The vents creaked overhead. Suzanne padded over to the plot I’d worked over a couple of days ago in anticipation of the planting. “We’ll be able to grow even more once it warms up, I suppose?” she said.

  “We’ll have more options,” I said. “And we could grow some things outside too. We’ll have to be careful about the heat in here in the summer.”

  She made a humming sound, and I wondered if she thought we’d still be here in the summer. I turned back to the tomatoes. Grip. Twist. Pinch. The ripe ones formed a solid weight in my hands, the warmth of the sun in their smooth skin. Sometimes the loamy green smell of the air in here, so different from the cold prickle of pine outside, filled me up like a sort of drug. I’d look down at a plot I’d just started on and find myself at the end. Meredith would say she’d called my name a couple of times and I hadn’t answered. “What were you thinking about?” she’d ask, and I couldn’t remember. Maybe nothing. Maybe I’d just been floating along, existing only in the work.

  I wanted to sink into that zone now, but I was too aware of the rustle of Suzanne’s clothes. The tap of the seedling trays against the boards. The sigh of her breath.

  “I hope you didn’t feel cornered last night,” she said after a while.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “We do value your opinion. You’ve been a great help already.”

  “I like working with plants,” I said with a shrug.

  “You did a lot of this, before?”

  “I wanted to do it for my whole life,” I said. “Develop new, more diverse varieties of common crops. Help farms increase sustainability.” There weren’t enough people left now for diverse plant genetics or overworked land to really be a problem, of course.

  “Well, for someone as young as you are, you certainly have yourself together,” Suzanne said. “Be proud of that, all right?”

  We know you’ve got yourself together, Dad said, the last time we spoke on the phone. Just hold on without us a little longer, all right?

  That had been months and months ago. I’d seen the phone he must have been speaking into in the harbor office, when Tobias had brought the bunch of us across the strait from the island after his soldier colleagues had dropped their missiles on the town. Someone had left the dead receiver off the hook in the empty room that smelled like stale potato chips.

  “If you ever—” Suzanne started, her voice like a burr prickling against my skin. I stood up.

  “Terrance said they found some fertilizer on that last scavenging run,” I said. “I should go see where they’ve put it.”

  I didn’t realize I’d left behind the basket of tomatoes I’d filled until I was halfway across the courtyard.

  Jon caught me just as I came out of the bathing area entrance after my evening shower. I’d taken only a couple of steps away from the gathering house toward my cabin when he said my name. He was standing at the edge of the courtyard in the declining light, his hands tucked casually into the pockets of his wool coat. His head cocked to the side, bare except for his dark brown curls. He smiled when our eyes met, a little smile that acknowledged the potential awkwardness of the situation while promising he meant well, and I knew what he wanted to talk about.

  But there wasn’t anything I could do to prevent it, so I stopped and watched him walking over. He had a distinct way of moving, more studied than Leo but still graceful. A classically attractive face: high cheekbones, straight nose, strong jaw. He looked a lot like I’d imagined my college boyfriend might look like, when college was a thing in my future, which I’d found almost funny when it had first occurred to me weeks ago but now was only annoying.

  “What?” I said, a little of that annoyance bleeding out. I hadn’t meant it to. But my hair was damp—the two women who’d come into the changing room had kept looking at me while they chatted, and I’d left without drying it completely—and the air was cold enough that my breath frosted in it. I hadn’t thought I’d need a hat for this short walk.

  Jon didn’t meander around the subject, at least. His little smile disappeared, and he said, “I haven’t changed my mind. I believe what I said yesterday. Suzanne respects you. If you said we could manage, away from here, she’d listen.”

  “Why would I say that?” I asked.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” he said, frowning. “A greenhouse in The Middle of Nowhere, New Brunswick, doesn’t have magical properties a greenhouse in Montreal or Ottawa or Toronto won’t. And in a city we’d be able to scavenge everything we needed while we settled in.”

  “You don’t know what we’ll find,” I said, and added, honestly, “I haven’t given it much thought.”

  “You’re already protected,” he said. “But don’t you care at all what happens to the rest of us?”

  “Why should my opinion matter more than anyone else’s?” I said. It wasn’t as if I was even really part of the community. They had a history with this place and with each other in their shared artistic interests, and I’d been fine with that. “If you want to go, you should go. And whoever else wants to, too. Whoever wants to stay can stay. Why do you have to turn it into a fight?”

  He was silent for a moment, tucking his chin behind the collar of his coat. His eyes, studying me, were very dark. I couldn’t make out what color they were in this light—couldn’t remember if I’d ever taken note before.

  “We’re stronger together,” he said. “We need each other. We need the skills everyone brings to the table—skills like yours. That’s worth fighting for. I’m trying to make sure we don’t break what we’ve already managed to construct.”

  There was a poetic elegance to those last words, as if, if he explained it prettil
y enough, it would change what he was actually doing.

  “This isn’t a play,” I said. “Things are going to break whatever we do. You can’t just script us into a happy ending. Good night.”

  I left the light off inside my cabin, shedding my coat and crawling onto the bed. When I closed my eyes, his were still looking at me, dark and expectant, until I finally drifted to sleep.

  Whenever I walked into the gathering hall’s main room for a meal, people were talking about it. In the shower rooms, too, and outside when there were tasks to help with in the courtyard. I didn’t join the conversations, but voices were raised often enough that I heard plenty. Another scavenging run went out, on the two snowmobiles kept hidden in the woods, and when they returned with sleds full, everyone had an opinion about how long the trip had taken and how much had been found. The haul didn’t look especially different from the last several runs to me.

  Meredith had always been curious about the colony residents, so when she’d been with me, we’d usually taken a table with a couple of others and I’d mostly listened while they talked. I’d liked sitting with Hilary the most—she’d had an enthusiasm for food that complimented mine for the garden, and sharing bits of my ideas had ended up happening naturally. But then, after she’d gotten sick…

  When I could, I ate alone in the midst of the commotion. When Kaelyn had delivered the news that the vaccine worked, she must have imagined it would be a relief. But people seemed more worried than before, even though nothing here had changed.

  Three days after Kaelyn and Leo had come by, Lauren was working in the kitchen when I dropped off the greenhouse harvest. She looked over the contents of my basket with the perpetually mournful look created by those deep-set eyes in that narrow face.

  “The white beans should start coming in a few weeks,” I said. “Extra protein.”

  She nodded, and then peered at me as if she’d just remembered who I was.

  “A few weeks,” she repeated. Her fingers gripped the edges of the basket, so tight her knuckles whitened. “You’re not going to leave, are you?”