The Worlds We Make (14 page)

For a while I found it hard to do anything except scan the riverbanks. I wasn’t totally convinced we’d actually managed to escape. The current whipped us around the humps of rocks jutting from the water’s surface as we slipped past long stretches of forest. Bud-dotted branches rattled in the rising wind.

When the threat of the people in the Humvee finally felt far enough away that I could catch my breath, I started taking stock.

“What did everyone manage to bring?” I asked.

“The water bottles and the first-aid kit,” Anika said from where she crouched in the bottom of the boat.

“Bag of food, rifle,” Justin said, opposite her.

“The radio,” Leo said, on the seat across from mine. He rested his hand on its plastic covering. “And the pack with the tent.”

And I’d gotten the vaccine, and at least a couple blankets. In the warmer weather, we could make do without the sleeping bag, and the jugs of diesel fuel we’d filled wouldn’t do us much good without the tractor. I glanced up at the sky, wondering exactly what direction the river was taking us in, but it was clotted with clouds, as gray as the surface of the water.

“We’re going mostly south, I think,” Leo said. “I haven’t been able to keep track of all the turns.”

We
had
left something important behind. The road atlas. It’d been sitting on the dash of the tractor—I could picture exactly where, but that didn’t do us any good.

A drop of cool water hit my hair. I glanced up, and got another in the eye. As I wiped it away, a light rain began to patter down on us. Justin groaned.

“It figures.”

I shrugged up the hood of my coat, even though its thick padding made me swelteringly hot, and the others did the same. The rain drummed the bottom of the boat. We were going to have to bail it out before too long. Or get out ourselves.

The sooner we got off the river, the harder it’d be for the Wardens to find us again. The thought of our close call made me shiver despite my coat. If the girl from town hadn’t come to warn us, or hadn’t come as soon as she had, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.

I reached for one of the paddles that was leaning against the bow. “Let’s find a spot where we can get off the river and regroup. We could end up drifting right past Atlanta at this rate.”

“Here,” Leo said, holding out his hand, and I passed him the other paddle. Turning to face ahead, I folded my legs under the seat and held the paddle over the water. Drips rolled off the edge of my hood.

For the next few minutes, we saw only trees. Then a clearing came into view on the right-hand bank, with a stubby dock poking into the water and a rusty swing set on the grass. I motioned to it, and Leo nodded. We dug the paddles into the river, pulling the boat toward the shore. At first the current resisted. My arms strained against it. But as we drew closer to the bank, the tugging eased. We pulled up beside the dock just in time for me to catch hold of the corner.

There was nothing to tie the boat with, so I held it in place as the others carried our supplies onto solid ground. “You figure we should just let it go?” Justin asked when everything was unloaded.

I considered the dingy vessel. The rowboat wasn’t anything fancy, but it had served us well. And it was all we had right now. The thought of casting off our only method of transportation made me edgy.

“Let’s keep it but hide it,” I said.

Leo, Anika, and I hauled the boat out of the water and set it under the wide branches of a pine tree at the edge of the clearing, where nobody would be able to see it unless they were almost on top of it. Justin had already started toward the tall house on the other side of the overgrown lawn. We grabbed our things and hurried after him, ducking our heads to the rain.

The inner back door hung open, as if whoever had last been here had left too distracted to think of it, and the latch on the outer screen door snapped when Justin gave it a hard yank. We clustered in the mudroom, peeling off our soppy coats. Then we crept through the house, guns in hand. Only darkness and dust greeted us. There was a note on the fridge, scrawled in hasty cursive.
I’ve
taken Bridget to the hospital. Meet us there.
—
S.

A long empty driveway stretched away from the front of the house, through the forest, to some road beyond our view. I guessed whoever S had been writing to had followed his or her instructions, and neither they nor Bridget had come back home.

I perused the kitchen counters and end tables for any piece of mail that might give us a location, but the family had been too tidy to be helpful. The steel filing cabinet in the dining room looked promising, but its drawers were locked.

Justin sighed and stomped into the living room with his rifle. “Well, we know we have to keep heading south, right?”

“I’m not sure which way is south anymore,” Leo admitted.

“If we had the road atlas,” I said, and stopped. Regrets weren’t going to help. “We just need to know where we are. The address, the nearest town, something. We can probably get a hold of the CDC on the radio, and they should be able to give us directions to Atlanta from here. Once we know where here is.”

“There should be a mailbox at the end of the driveway,” Justin said. “It might be locked too, but we can at least check. And if that doesn’t work, there’ll be signs somewhere down the road. I’ll go take a look.” He took an umbrella out of a stand in the front hall.

“Your leg—” I protested, and he grimaced at me.

“It’s a lot better now,” he said. “It should be, after doing nothing but sitting around the last three days. I’ll be fine.”

He looked so determined I didn’t want to say no. Maybe it was better to let him burn off some steam. Who knew what crazy scheme he’d think up if he spent much longer feeling he wasn’t contributing enough?

“None of us should go anywhere alone, right?” Anika broke in. “I’ll go with him. Make sure he doesn’t keel over. You two can keep searching the house.”

“Right,” Justin said, seeming emboldened by the gaining of an ally. He tapped the watch on his wrist. “We might have to walk a ways if we need to look for a sign, but we won’t take more than an hour.”

“All right,” I said. “Just try to come back faster than that.”

“And keep your eyes open,” Leo added. “The Wardens know we’re somewhere in the area now.”

Justin gave us a quick salute. Anika went back for their coats, and when she returned he handed her a second umbrella. “No more than an hour,” he repeated. “Hopefully a lot less.” They headed out the door.

“Let’s take a look upstairs,” I said to Leo. I picked up the cold box, and paused, my palm warm against the plastic handle. So maybe it would be an hour before we were on the road again. Maybe it would be even more. And there was no telling when we’d find another vehicle, or if we wouldn’t at all and we’d be stuck walking the rest of the way. How long would the snow I’d packed in there this morning last?

“Actually, give me a second,” I said. I hadn’t seen a basement entrance. Maybe there was a cellar doorway in the yard? Anywhere underground would be cooler.

I stepped into the mudroom and peered across the lawn. I didn’t see any sign of a door amid the thick grass. My gaze strayed farther, to the rippling surface of the river. When I’d dipped my hands into it upstream, the water had been cold enough to sting. It was probably flowing down from the mountains, swelled by melting snow and ice.

Kneeling down, I opened the cold box just long enough to make sure Dad’s notebooks were tightly wrapped in their plastic bag. Then I pressed the lid on, hooking the latches and testing them to make sure they were firmly in place. I didn’t think water could leak in through the industrial-grade seal, but if it did, it shouldn’t hurt anything inside.

I jogged across the yard to the dock. The water at the edge of the bank was only a few feet deep. I set the cold box in it, and it bobbed back to the surface. But the gap between the dock’s wooden supports looked like just the right size. Wiggling the box back and forth, I wedged it between them, far enough under that it was mostly hidden by the dock. When I stood, it was nothing more than a pale sliver amid the rain-dappled water. I checked both ends of the river. No one was there to see my hiding place.

Still, my hands felt terribly empty as I hurried back to the house. This way the samples would stay cold, I reminded myself, and as soon as we had a plan of where to go, I could run back out and get them. The fish weren’t going to steal them.

Leo was waiting in the kitchen when I came in. “I gave everything down here a second look, and nothing,” he said, raising his eyebrows in question.

“I did what I needed to,” I said, swiping my damp hair away from my face. “Let’s see what we can find upstairs.”

We poked through the bathroom and the three bedrooms on the second floor, checking cabinets and drawers and bedside tables. In the yellow room hung with posters of planets and nebulas, the garbage bin was overflowing with crumpled tissues.
Bridget.
I caught myself wondering how old she had been, and pushed that thought away.

The master bedroom offered a few pamphlets for Mexican beach resorts, but nothing local. Leo pointed out a trapdoor in the ceiling of the closet. “To the attic?” he said.

“I guess we might as well look,” I said. “Maybe they stashed some old letters or tax records up there.” And we’d covered every other inch of the house. I glanced around the room for a chair or something else I could stand on.

“Here, I can give you a boost,” Leo said. “If we need to climb right up there to reach something, I saw a stepladder in the mudroom.”

He backed up against the row of shirts and slacks, and braced one leg forward for me to step onto, offering me his hand. My skin warmed. Suddenly the closet felt twice as small. I made myself grasp his fingers without hesitating, keeping my eyes on the trapdoor. As I hopped up, he caught me around the waist. Ignoring the hiccup of my pulse, I pushed up the door and raised my head through the opening.

A waft of dust hit me. I sneezed, my eyes watering. What I could make out of the attic was no more than a crawl space, inhabited only by dust bunnies and cobwebs. With another sneeze, I hopped back down.

“Nothing there,” I said as Leo straightened up. Some of the dust had sprinkled his dark hair. I brushed my hand over the top of his head. “Sorry.”

“I’ll live,” he said. The corner of his mouth quirked up. “I should be used to it. You remember when you insisted we had to explore
my
attic?”

“Oh god.” I covered my face at the memory. “You can’t hold me responsible for that anymore. What were we, seven? Anyway, I think it was your idea as much as mine.”

“No, no,” he said, grinning now. “I kept telling you my parents said I wasn’t allowed in the crawl space, but you were sure there had to be some animal living up there for us to discover.”

“There was that scratching sound we kept hearing in your room!” I protested. “It was a reasonable guess.”

“I don’t think my mom bought that explanation when she found half her clothes knocked on the floor and us stuck in the ceiling.”

“Well, I apologize for ruining your childhood,” I said, swatting at his shoulder. He dodged out of the way, catching my hand before I could try again.

“Ruined?” he said. “I guess I’d have been bored a lot more without you.”

The mischievous spark in his eyes took me back to that time, when we were younger, before arguments and silences and epidemics. When Leo had treated every challenge as an adventure, not a setback. I hadn’t seen that spark very often in the last couple months, and I couldn’t help smiling back. But as I did, his expression changed. An intensity came into his gaze that made my stomach flutter.

He’d looked at me that way before. In the garage back home, right before he’d kissed me.

I let go of his hand and stepped out of the closet, walking until I reached the end of the bed. Leo didn’t move. But I could feel him still looking at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just—”

“It’s okay,” Leo said.

It wasn’t. We’d gotten past the awkwardness of not-quite-spoken crushes for a while, when we were on the road to Toronto. But I couldn’t pretend anymore that it hadn’t come back. I couldn’t even pretend I didn’t know why.

There had been Gav. And then…he was gone. But not entirely. My fingertips traced the edge of the strip of cardboard in my pocket.

“Maybe we should talk about it,” Leo said. He rubbed the back of his neck, his voice sounding strained despite his lighthearted tone. “I’m not going to lie. You know how I feel about you. Nothing’s changed. But I’d never push anything on you. I’m happy with friends. It’s really not a problem.”

“It’s not you,” I said, sitting down on the bed. “I’m the one acting weird.”

“I wouldn’t blame you, if you were angry,” he said.

My head jerked up. “Angry—at you? For what?”

“For taking the vaccine, when Gav wouldn’t? For surviving? I’d understand.”

Fear jolted through me at the thought of Leo getting sick. “Of course I’m not angry about that,” I said. “Do you have any idea how much more scared I’d be if I didn’t know you were safe? I wish he
had
taken the vaccine, not that you hadn’t.”