“You’d freeze. What if there’s a storm? Kae . . .” He stopped and studied my face. “You’re not going to listen to anything I say, are you?”
I shook my head. “Not unless it has to do with getting these samples to Ottawa.”
He exhaled in a rush, and his gaze settled on Tobias’s truck. He turned abruptly.
“Give me your keys.”
“What?” Tobias said.
“The keys to the truck. I want to take a look.”
He held out his hand. Tobias blinked, and hesitantly handed over a single key on a ring. The rest of us watched as Gav strode over and opened up the back of the truck. He clambered inside, the metal floor ringing under his boots. The sound seemed to break Tobias’s stupor.
“Hey!” he said, heading over. “That stuff’s mine.”
Gav poked his head out.
“You’re pretty well equipped,” he said. “Tent, sleeping bags, an awful lot of food.”
“Like I said, there’s no way I can go back to the base now. I’ve got to get by somehow.”
“And that’s another reason you weren’t here earlier,” Gav said. “Because you were stocking up your truck before you left.”
Tobias’s face reddened.
Gav jumped down and closed the back door.
“Tell you what,” he said, his voice strained. “You make it up to us. You take me and Kaelyn to Ottawa, then drive us back when we’re done there, and we call it even.”
“You really have a vaccine?” Tobias said to me. “We could get rid of this virus for good?”
“I think so,” I said. My hopes lifted. “If you’d help . . .”
He lowered his gaze from the five pairs of eyes trained on him. “Okay,” he said after a few moments. “Yeah. It’s not like I’ve got other plans.”
“Am I coming too?” Meredith asked, squeezing my arm. My stomach twisted. I didn’t want to bring her places where we couldn’t be sure of being safe. But the island wasn’t safe, either, not anymore. The guys in the helicopter could come back for another round. We’d been lucky to escape the first time.
“We should all come,” Tessa said firmly. “It’s dangerous for any of us to stay on the island, that’s obvious. And I’m sure we can scavenge more food around here so there’s enough for all of us. The most useful thing we can do is bring the vaccine to the right person. The more of us there are, the faster we’ll be able to find someone who can help once we get to the city, right?”
After a couple seconds, Leo nodded. “I want to help!” Meredith said. Tobias shrugged as if it was all the same to him. I paused, unprepared for the sudden show of support, and Tessa gave me a small smile.
Gratitude washed over me. Yes. If we were all together, we could protect each other. Safety in numbers. I would never have asked them to risk it before, but now, with the situation on the island becoming even more precarious, it felt right.
We could get through this together, like we had so much else.
six Gav was the only one frowning.
“What about everyone else on the island?” he said. “We can’t
all leave without telling someone what happened so they can be
prepared in case those psychos with the helicopter come by again.” “I’ll go,” Leo offered. He shrugged, his chin tucked behind the
broad collar of his coat. “I’ve got the most experience navigating a
boat, and the waves are getting a little nasty. I’ll go to the hospital
and fill them in, and then check on your car. If it’s okay, I can
bring it over on the ferry—if not, I’ll at least bring any supplies
that survived.”
Gav’s jaw tensed as if he was going to argue, but then he closed
his eyes and inclined his head. “If the house is okay, it wouldn’t
hurt to grab some of the food there too. But I don’t want to take
more away from what’s meant for the whole island.”
His gaze slid to me. He didn’t want to leave me, I realized, not
even for a couple hours. That was why he was still coming with
me, even though it was clearly killing him not to go back. The words hurt coming out, but I had to say them. “Gav, I’ll
be okay. If you want to stay on the island and help, you should.
We don’t all have to go.”
“No,” he said. “I already decided back when we first talked
about it. We can leave tomorrow morning, just like we planned.” As Leo headed down to the dock, I tugged Gav to the side. “Are
you really okay with this?” I said, my voice low. “You can tell me
the truth, you know.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Of course it bothers me,
leaving the island when it’s practically destroyed. But leaving you
would be even worse. From the first day I asked for your help, when
you refueled the cars for the food run, you’ve been totally behind
every idea I’ve had. Now it’s my turn. I want to do this for you.
You need me, I’m here—I want you to know that.”
“Gav,” I said. I couldn’t find the words to express what I was
feeling. The passion and determination I’d watched Gav put into
keeping the island going—to have all of it offered just to me
seemed incredible, impossible. Gripping the front of his coat, I
tugged him to me and tipped my face up to meet his lips, trying
to put every particle of my gratitude into that kiss. He wrapped
his arms around me, holding me tight.
“I know,” I said softly when I eased back, and he smiled and
kissed me again.
“If there’s six of us, we’re going to need more supplies,” he said.
“Let’s see what we can find here.”
So as the sky started to darken with the coming evening, the
group of us raided the harbor office. The concession stand near the
ticket booth now held only a few crumpled wrappers, but Tobias
broke open the locked storage room in the back with a tool from
his truck. Soon we’d added skids of bottled water and boxes of
recently expired chocolate bars and honey-roasted peanuts to his
stores of food. Tobias started shifting around the truck’s contents
to make more floor space. “We’ll be better off sleeping in here,”
he said. “Smaller space to trap the heat.” While he worked, Gav, Tessa, Meredith, and I headed down the mainland town’s major
street, checking the storefronts.
Drew might have come through here, I thought, all those weeks
ago when he’d taken off. If he’d made it across the strait alive. Back
then some of these stores might still have been occupied. Now
everyone was long gone. Most of the doors hung open, swinging
in the wind.
Gav pointed out a knitted-goods shop, and Tessa picked out an
extra sweater and thick woolen hats for each of us. I started grabbing blankets while Gav dug a few plastic bags out from behind
the register to hold our loot.
In the convenience store farther down the street, the last newspaper on the rack was dated November 5. I guessed that was when
the owner had fled. Or gotten sick. The front page headline read,
Friendly flu overwhelms hospitals, the article below describing how
medical centers across the country were running out of room. The
grainy photo of patients crowding the hall of a hospital in Halifax
gave me a jolt back through time. A couple months ago, our hospital had looked like that.
All those people staring anxiously at the camera, they were
dead now.
I made myself turn away. The shelves that would have held
food were bare. I picked up a handful of ligh
ters from the box on
the counter, and a few magazines for kindling. Meredith squealed
and rushed over to present me with a can of baked beans previous
scavengers had missed.
Nothing made a sound as we continued down the street except
the twittering of a small flock of sparrows clinging to the useless
telephone wires overhead. I didn’t see a single human footprint other than our own. No smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses ahead of us. The place felt as if no one had lived here in
years.
It made sense. Why would anyone have wanted to stay just
a couple miles away from our quarantined island and its deadly
disease? Maybe some of townspeople had died, but most of them
had probably just gone somewhere else.
Until the virus had caught up with them and they’d died
after all.
“Do you think we should check some of the houses too?” Tessa
asked as we came to a stop at the end of the road where it branched
into two residential streets. “We might find some food.” “There’s only so much room in the truck,” I said. And Leo was
bringing back more. But maybe we shouldn’t pass up the chance
when we were already here.
As I wavered, a sound drifted down the street toward us, faint
but distinctive. My body went rigid.
In one of those houses, someone was coughing.
Tessa and Gav pulled their scarves tighter around their faces.
But the scarves were only intended to keep out the cold, not killer
microbes. My heart thumped. “Let’s go back to the harbor,” I said. Gav paused, and then nodded. “As long as Leo brings food back
from the island, I think we’re okay.”
I flinched when the sparrows leapt from the telephone wires
and darted off, but we didn’t see a soul. Still, when we reached the
truck, I set my bags down and went straight to the cold box, which
I’d left inside the harbor office.
It looked exactly the same as before. I crouched down beside it
and rested my head in my mittened hands.
Meredith and I should be okay, with our post-illness immunity.
But what about Gav and Tessa and Leo? Maybe we could make it
all the way to Ottawa without running into anyone who was sick,
if we stuck to the small towns when we needed more gas, but in
the city—in the city there could be more people still alive than
had ever lived on the island in the first place. We couldn’t assume
none of them would be infected or that we’d be able to easily avoid
anyone who was.
Of course, the only other option was staying here and maybe
getting blown up.
I lowered my hands onto the cold box. Maybe there was another
option. We had five samples of the vaccine. Surely a scientist
wouldn’t need all of them to make more? It wouldn’t be so selfish to give a few to my friends, would it, when they were the ones
helping me get the vaccine where it needed to go?
An engine growled down by the water, and footsteps rushed
past the door. Leo was back.
Outside, everyone else was already on the docks, except Tobias,
who hung back by the truck looking uncertain. Evening was falling
fast, the light draining out of the smoke-tinged sky. A few solar
lamps had blinked on throughout the harbor.
Leo had brought the speedboat back, so I guessed our SUV
hadn’t survived. But along with bags of food, he was handing out
the jugs of gasoline Gav and I had filled.
“How bad was it?” Gav asked as we hauled Leo’s plunder to
the truck.
“The hospital’s still standing,” Leo said, and I let out the breath
I’d been holding. “Your house too. But a lot of other buildings
aren’t. There must have been a blast near the harbor. Your SUV was tipped over, like it’d been thrown a little, and the windshield
was shattered. It’s lucky everything inside survived.”
“Did you talk to Nell?” I said.
He nodded. “All the shaking made the generator conk out. She
was trying to figure out whether they could fix it or if they’d have
to start moving patients.”
“What about Mowat and Fossey?” Meredith said. “Are we just
leaving them?”
“They came racing to see me when I came in,” Leo said. “Seemed
pretty happy having the run of the place. I put the bags of food on
the floor so they can eat as much as they need to.”
“Thanks,” I said, with a second wave of relief, and he shot me a
half smile. The memory of our kiss flashed through my mind. My
face flushed and I dragged my eyes away.
“Nell didn’t seem too upset when I told her what we were going
to do,” Leo went on, showing no sign that he’d noticed my reaction. “She said . . .” He hesitated and glanced at Meredith, who was
digging at the pavement with the toe of her boot.
“Meredith,” Tessa said, “could you check the boat and make
sure we got all the supplies?”
She frowned, and then seemed to shake herself. “Of course!” she
said, and jogged toward the docks. Leo lowered his voice. “She said it’s probably good for us to get out of there for a
while—the town’s in such bad shape she might end up having
everyone move across the strait anyway. And she said she really
hopes we find the people we need.”
All the heat washed out of me. No one had been interested in
leaving the island when we’d realized the strait was now unguarded,
because it hardly seemed worth giving up a place we knew for some unknown across the water. Nell must be desperate to be consider
ing evacuating.
“Nothing left in the boat!” Meredith called as she came running back.
“Thank you for checking,” I said, giving her a squeeze. “I guess
first thing.”
“I’ve got a kerosene camping stove in the truck,” Tobias said.
“A hot dinner sounds pretty appealing right now.”
“I saw spaghetti in the bags,” Meredith said. “Can we have
that?”
“Sure,” I said. “Go on and get out a few cans.”
“We heard someone coughing when we went farther into town,”
Gav said to Leo as Meredith scrambled into the back of the truck
after Tobias. “There are people still here. We’ll have to keep an
eye out.”
A weariness passed over Leo’s face. For all I was trying not to
focus on him, I felt a pang of concern. He’d only just come home
a few weeks ago, and now we were dragging him away again. If he
didn’t think he could take it, he’d say so, wouldn’t he? “We’ll want to alternate watches while we’re sleeping, then,” he
said. “We can’t be too careful.”
He was right. And maybe I could take away one of the fears
that must be haunting him, that was going to haunt me as long as
he and Gav and Tessa were unprotected.
“I think the three of you should take the vaccine,” I said. Gav, who’d been about to speak, stopped with his mouth half
open. Tessa blinked at me.
“There are five samples,” I continued. “So we’d still have two. We’re obviously going to run into people who are infected—we
almost did today. I don’t want one of
you to catch it.” “We will run into people,” Leo said cautiously. “I’d be surprised
if we don’t. But are you sure you don’t want to hold on to them,
Kae?”
“We don’t even know if the vaccine works,” Gav added. “If it does, then it’ll be a good thing you took it,” I said. “And
if it doesn’t, then it won’t matter that you did. Either way, it can’t
hurt. We don’t have any other way of protecting ourselves while
we’re on the road. And I can’t see why anyone would need more
than one sample to understand what Dad did, when we have all
his notebooks too.”
“They make vaccines using parts of the virus, don’t they?” Tessa
said. “Is there any chance we could get sick from it?”
I hesitated. “I guess. My dad tried it on himself and he was fine
for almost three weeks. He wouldn’t have used it if he wasn’t sure
he’d gotten it right.”
“If anyone was going to get it right, I’d say it’s your dad,” Leo
agreed.
“Okay,” Tessa said. “I’d rather take a chance on the vaccine than
see what happens if we’re exposed without it.”
Leo wavered a moment longer and then said, “All right. Let’s
do this.”
“Then we’ll have three samples left,” Gav said. “Because I don’t
want it.”
“Gav,” I started, and he motioned for me to wait.
“Give us a moment?” he said to the others.
He took my hands as Tessa and Leo drifted away to help Tobias
set up the stove. “Kae,” he said. “I can see why you want to do this. It just doesn’t feel right to me. If I get some false sense of security from a vaccine that turns out not to be effective, maybe I’ll make a mistake I wouldn’t have otherwise. I don’t want to have that idea
in my head, that I’m safe.”
“So just take it and assume it does nothing,” I said. “We have
no idea how bad it’ll be in the city, Gav.”
“I know,” he said, and swallowed. “But I still—you know, my
mom was one of the first to catch it? When we started hearing
the news, all she’d say was, ‘Someone’ll come up with a cure in a
few days, it’ll all be fine, it always is.’ She was so convinced that
the doctors and the scientists could solve all our problems that
she didn’t take precautions, she didn’t worry. And now she’s lying