Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories Page 9

  I turned and ambled to my room. I still felt sick. But at the same time inside me the kid I’d been, the crusader, lifted his arms with a rallying cry.

  I surprised myself by falling asleep almost as soon as I hit the bed. When I got up and walked down to the common room the next morning, the tentative awe on the faces that looked back at me told me the first part of my job was done. I wasn’t a guy who’d kill you if you got in my way; I was a guy could direct you to destroy yourself.

  I didn’t say anything at first, just grabbed a mug of coffee and sat down among the others. The conversation that had been carrying around the room when I’d arrived had quieted, but I still caught a few words from a woman sitting next to Tyler: “...was a lot of gasoline to throw away...”

  I turned toward her. “It was a lot of gas,” I agreed. “Why don’t you and...” I picked another Warden whose expression was more uncertain than the others. “...you come with me to pick it up.”

  I drove us over in the delivery van, and couldn’t help grinning as they blinked at the stacks of jugs I’d saved. No one else had seen Nathan’s entire stash all together before now.

  Before I joined them in helping load the van, I went across the street to see his store. The fire had spread to a few of the neighboring buildings, leaving a row of blackened husks. Nothing remained but crumpled edges of wall and ashes, lumps of metal and melted plastic. The entire second floor had collapsed. The scream we’d heard last night came back to me, and I swallowed thickly. He’d chosen that death, but I’d pushed him to it. That was further than I’d have preferred to go. But it was done. And it meant I could accomplish what I did want, for the first time since I’d come into Michael’s domain.

  And we are burned clean, I thought, with a vaguely religious feeling.

  “Boss,” the woman who’d made the gas comment said, coming up behind me, “it’s not all going to fit.”

  Boss. For a second I wanted to laugh. Suppressing the impulse, I nodded. “We’ll have to make a few trips.”

  I went back with her—good for them to see I didn’t suddenly consider myself above a little manual labor. I left Nathan’s Mercedes parked in the back alley. Anyone who wanted it, they were welcome to it.

  A few of the other Wardens came over to help us unload the fuel into our storerooms at the station, exclaiming to each other at how much we’d amassed without anyone realizing it. Then I called them into the common room for my first official proclamation. I couldn’t have everything I wanted all at once, but I could find a balance between the future I imagined and the power the Wardens were hungry to hold on to.

  “We’re knocking Nathan’s gas and guns off the vaccine price,” I said. “Any kids who show up under thirteen, we inoculate them for free. To compensate for Nathan’s last price hike, any Strikers who show up while we still have doses left from this batch can get theirs for free too. Something Nate didn’t understand is that you have to give people ways to keep living. You start crushing them, and they’re going to fight. We don’t need to fight. We’ve won. The city’s ours. I’d like us all to stay alive and in one piece to enjoy that. Any argument?”

  A couple of the Wardens chuckled and clapped their hands, and several shook their heads. The only person who spoke was Janelle.

  “You’d better let Michael know what’s happened.”

  “That’s next on my list,” I said.

  The relay post responded a half hour later. “Tell Michael that Nathan was keeping his own hoard of supplies, and when the building caught fire, he didn’t believe me that it was impossible to save anything,” I said. “It looks like the ceiling came down on him. He was too wrapped up in his personal interests, and that did him in. But the rest of us are getting on just fine.”

  Michael’s response, relayed back, was simply, “You earned it, it’s yours.” I wished I could have heard the tone of his voice when he’d said it. I pictured him sitting at his executive desk, hands steepled in front of him to hide a slow, satisfied smile.

  I’d give it a couple weeks, so he could see my handle on things was holding, and then I’d ask about Zack and transfers.

  Trang swung by that afternoon, peering around the common room as if to confirm what he’d heard was true and Nathan wasn’t just hiding in a corner. “So I understand you’re the man in charge now,” he said, looking me up and down.

  I raised my chin and met his eyes. “I am,” I said. “And things are going to be different. But your people still need to remember who calls the shots.”

  “Let’s see how it goes,” he said, but his gaze strayed back to the two associates he’d brought with him, who were getting their shots without payment. The corner of his mouth turned up. We were good for now, I thought.

  “Is this what you had in mind all along?” Janelle asked me later that evening, when the two of us ended up in the kitchen alone.

  I laughed. “Not exactly. But you work with the means you have.” The truth was, if it had really felt like a choice when Michael had proposed it, I wasn’t sure I’d have taken being the boss of Toronto over staying back in Georgia with Zack, in charge of only the radio room. But the chance was in my hands: to adjust our course, to really set things right. Now that I had it, I couldn’t let it go. The sense of that power, and that responsibility, thrummed through me in a way I hadn’t felt in months.

  This was my city, and I’d come home.

  WATER SONG

  I was crossing the strait with Kaelyn, the second time I’d come back to the island since the epidemic started, when I realized it no longer felt like home.

  I hadn’t felt much the first time either, but then it’d been because I was so exhausted and overwhelmed by the wrenching of dread and hope inside me that I’d gone numb. This time, I looked across the bow of the motorboat I was steering, toward the pale strip of beach and the rocky shoreline that rose to the northern cliffs, and it was just another place. A place I knew, but not one I was especially attached to.

  One of Mom’s favorite sayings was, “A place is its people,” and maybe that was why. There wasn’t any uncertainty left to stir up dread or hope. I knew she and Dad were dead, and most of our neighbors, most of the kids I’d grown up with and the teachers I’d had class with, too. I knew Kaelyn and Tessa were alive. And there wasn’t anyone on the island now. Dr. Pierce—Nell, I had to remind myself to call her now—had been talking about moving everyone to the mainland after those stir-crazy soldiers had dropped their missiles, and not long after Kaelyn and the rest of us had left with the vaccine, she and the other volunteers who’d stepped up had followed through on that. When Kaelyn and I had driven to the mainland ferry harbor, we’d found the few dozen remaining islanders squatting in a row of houses nearby. Apparently even the gang who’d been making trouble had left, heading further inland to look for easier pickings.

  Kaelyn had wanted to go back, just to see—telling me she meant to go rather than asking if I’d come, I think to make it easier for me to say no. As if I would have made her go alone.

  The smashed shapes of the boats clogged the island’s harbor, fractured hulls protruding from the water’s surface at odd angles, creeping with algae. Kaelyn had told me that the army had destroyed them in an early attempt to enforce quarantine—a wasted effort. It was hard to know what was happening anywhere other than right in front of us now, but I’d seen the news pieces, the panicked articles, in New York before the worst, and the friendly flu had already been spreading in Europe and Asia. If there were any pockets of civilization it hadn’t touched, they were probably even more isolated than they’d have been before. All we had was ourselves.

  I pulled the boat up to the tip of one of the docks and lashed it there, the way Dad had first taught me, not far from here, when I was a little kid: twice around the post, tail over and under and through, back and through again. In the instant I tugged it tight I had the sense of him leaning over, hand to his jaw, to inspect it.

  Good work. That’ll hold.

  Kaelyn clamb
ered out. It was a clear day, but windy, and her dark hair whipped around her face in spite of the scrap of cloth she’d tried to tie it back with. She reached for my hand when I joined her.

  It still seemed remarkable, the sense of sureness in the way we touched each other—a statement that we were here together. Less than a month ago, I’d been afraid even our friendship was crumbling. I liked the way our fingers looked intertwined: almost the same shade of brown, my skin slightly lighter, hers a little bluer.

  “It’s so quiet,” she said.

  “Yeah.” The wind was warbling and the waves were hissing over the broken hulls, but I knew what she meant. There was a kind of hush creeping from the vacant buildings of our town.

  Hand in hand, we walked across the creaking boards and through the harbor area to the first street. The stores and houses hadn’t come through the epidemic in much better shape than the people. The missiles had turned whole blocks into masses of blackened rubble, and where they hadn’t struck, the charred foundations of the buildings the gang had burned down broke up the rows. Even those buildings still standing did so limply: roofs sagging, windows shattered, doors wrenched off hinges. Here and there an entire wall had collapsed.

  Shadowy impressions shifted at the edges of my vision. An impromptu dance performance I’d given on that corner, on a dare, when I was twelve. Begging my parents to stop in that burger place for their fries and gravy when I was nine, every time we passed it. My first kiss, at fourteen, under that tree at the edge of the high school’s field—from a girl named Julie who’d immediately dashed back to her friends giggling, because she’d been dared. Little wisps of the past that teased me in the haunted emptiness of the town, as if I could have really seen those moments if I’d looked hard enough.

  It was an eerie feeling, but almost familiar. All my life, the vague impression of my birth parents—back in Korea? Alive? Dead?—had peeked from behind my real mom and dad. The specter of whispered words had lingered around the doubtful looks when we went out as a family: If you’re going to adopt, why not pick a kid who’ll look right with you? Not one everybody can’t help but know? A casual hesitation had surrounded the smiles and laughter when I pulled out a clever comment or drew the other kids into some activity, hinting that if I’d let them see the parts of me that weren’t so bright or upbeat, the people who’d called themselves my friends might have drifted away with hardly a second thought. An intermittent blurring at the edges of people around me, as if I was seeing them through rippled water.

  Here in the town now, with echoes caught on every surface, the whole world might as well have been underwater. There was a new depth to it, too—a distance between me and the memories, as if all that had happened to some other guy. In a lot of ways, I guessed it had.

  Kaelyn’s fingers squeezed mine as we approached her uncle’s house, where she and I, and Tessa and Meredith and Gav, had been living before. More ghosts waited for her there than anywhere else.

  She sucked in a breath and pushed open the door, which had been hanging ajar. The bag of ferret food I’d left out lay empty and gnawed in the middle of the kitchen floor. “Mowat!” Kaelyn called. “Fossey!”

  No scamper of tiny feet came running. She bit her lip, considering the back door, which was swinging in the wind.

  “They could have gotten out,” she said.

  “I’m sure they did.” I doubted there’d been enough food in here to last them the months we’d been gone. “They were smarter than a pretty large number of people I’ve known. They’ve probably been living it up with the whole town to themselves.”

  She smiled with only half her mouth. “Pets don’t usually do so well out in the wild.”

  A joke popped into my head about how far from wild the town was, but she didn’t look as if that was what she needed. I let go of her hand to put my arms around her, hugging her to me. “You can’t save everyone,” I said.

  “I know.” She leaned her face against me for a moment, brushed a kiss to my shoulder, then straightened up.

  We meandered through the house, Kaelyn grabbing plastic bags that she filled as we went. Mostly with things for Meredith—games and clothes, and the arts and crafts stuff Meredith was still so enthusiastic about—but some for her too. A couple framed photos of her family, a few notebooks labeled with her narrow handwriting. A dress I’d never seen her wear—maybe she’d bought it after I’d left for New York—and a sweater I could tell her grandmother had knitted. Two pairs of jeans, scuffed up sneakers. A burned DVD she paused over, lips twisting, before shoving it in with the rest. Maybe someday we’d be using computers again.

  The backpack stuffed with the few things I’d taken from my house, back when I’d first returned and moved in here, was slumped near the couch. I picked it up, not sure how much I still wanted the contents but figuring I might as well bring it, while Kaelyn poked through the kitchen again. Nell had told us that she and the others had gathered all the practicalities they could find—food, medical supplies, fuel—before they’d moved, so it wasn’t a surprise when Kaelyn came over to the living room empty-handed.

  The air mattress Gav had been sleeping on was a sunken mass in the middle of the rug. Kaelyn looked at it, and her jaw tightened. My stomach tightened with it.

  My comment from earlier came back to me: You can’t save everyone. I had the feeling she was remembering it too, and I wished I hadn’t said it. She was the one clear thing I had in this underwater world. Just herself, my best friend, my girlfriend, no shadows bleeding around her as she turned and reached for the bags she’d left by the door. The one part of my life that still belonged to me from before killer viruses and murderous gangs and all that those had driven us to.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Our eyes met, and I had to wonder what specters she saw when she looked at me.

  Meredith squealed as she dug through the bags—“You remembered my favorite skirt! And the markers with the scents!”—forgetting to pout about being left out of the trip. “Did you bring Mowat and Fossey?” she asked when she was finished. “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know,” Kaelyn admitted. “They had to leave the house to find more food while we were away. They probably wouldn’t want to go back in their cage now.”

  “Oh,” Meredith said. A hint of the pout came back.

  “Why don’t we take those markers and some paper over to see if Dorrie’s kids want to try them out?” I suggested.

  When she hesitated, touching the box fondly, Kaelyn added, “We’ll be able to find more if those get used up, Mere, I promise. You know how much those kids could use a distraction.”

  “Of course,” Meredith said, lifting her chin. The steely determination that came into her eyes was something new since we’d picked her up at the artists’ colony, at least as far as I could remember. A determination to show how mature she could be, it usually seemed, which had its advantages but also didn’t look quite right on her seven-year-old face. She snatched up the box and a sheaf of paper.

  Outside, the two women who’d taken over the house next door were standing on their porch, discussing whether it was warm enough to try planting anything in the yard. Howard was ambling along the sidewalk with a couple of the older guys, taking in the spring air. Some of the orphaned kids Dorrie and her brother Mason looked after were sitting out on their lawn, nudging toys around or just sprawling, watching their surroundings. As we headed over I saw Mason call back one of the smaller ones who had wandered off the grass. I didn’t see why they couldn’t roam a little more—this street, at least, was safe enough—but I guessed it was easier to keep track of them by keeping them close.

  After all, while there was more life here than in the town across the strait, this place was haunted in different ways. If you looked for them, you’d notice the figures positioned on the front steps of a house at either end of the block, hunting rifles across their knees, ready to defend the little we had if they needed to. And when the wind blew a speckling of dirt into our
faces and Meredith coughed, everyone’s head jerked around, every body tensing, until they saw it was okay after all.

  Nell had mentioned that the last of the infected islanders had died a month ago and no one had gotten sick since then, but we all knew that didn’t make those who weren’t vaccinated like I was, or who hadn’t survived the virus like Meredith had, truly protected. We didn’t know how long the virus might linger on any surface. We didn’t know that an infected person from outside this little enclave wouldn’t wander our way.

  When Dorrie came out of the house, she asked Kaelyn, “So they didn’t say when they’ll get the vaccine out this way?” as if Kaelyn hadn’t already answered that question a dozen times since we’d arrived here. As if the people who’d asked wouldn’t have passed on her answer. Everyone wanted to confirm it directly with the source.

  “No,” Kaelyn said, her smile slanting. “But it’ll probably be a while. They’ll cover the more populated places first.”

  Assuming that, between the Wardens and the CDC, they had enough raw materials to keep making the vaccine that long. Assuming Michael kept up his end of the deal and the Wardens didn’t start fighting with the doctors at the CDC again. Maybe if we’d waited a month or two longer they’d have been producing enough for us to take a batch back here with us, but Kaelyn had already been worried about how Meredith would be coping. We hadn’t known whether she and Tessa were even still alive.

  So now we did whatever else we could to pitch in. We went out with the scavenging parties, methodically making our way through the streets to the west. We washed or wiped down every item we carried back. We brought Meredith over to play with the orphaned kids, who seemed standoffish with her—whether because of her long absence from the island or because they envied the family in Kaelyn she had to go back to afterward, I wasn’t sure. We helped round everyone up to present ourselves to Nell every evening so she could take our temperature and test our reflexes. “Just a precaution,” she said to Kaelyn. Still, when I stopped outside a house a bunch of us were about to search and scratched the side of my neck, everyone froze, staring, until I held up my hand and said, “It’s okay, just a regular itch!” And even then I saw them eyeing me, making sure I didn’t continue, for several minutes after.