The Worlds We Make (15 page)

He lowered his gaze, and his next words seemed to take a long time to come out. “But it’s not just that,” he said, haltingly. “I wanted to do more. When Gav was sick. He was a good guy. He made you happy, I could see that. And maybe I
should
have done more. I go over everything that happened and see where maybe I could have made a little difference. And then I wonder if there was a reason I didn’t—”

I couldn’t stand hearing him talk like that. “Leo,” I interrupted. “Don’t. You didn’t make Gav get sick any more than I did, and after he got sick, there wasn’t really anything we
could
do. I have never, even for a second, blamed you. I promise. Whatever weirdness is going on, it’s got nothing to do with that. Things are just…complicated.”

Part of me wanted to forget the complications and drive away the worry and guilt clouding his face. To put my arms around him and tell him I cared about him just as much as he cared about me. But another part, a bigger part, held me back.

My heart had been so beat up in the last few weeks—did I even know what I felt anymore? What was real? Was I drawn to Leo now because of that old crush reviving, or because he was here, comforting and supportive, and Gav wasn’t, and I’d had no one else to turn to?

I didn’t have to be with
anyone
. It was probably better for me to be with no one, while the memory of Gav’s vacant body was still as vivid in my mind as if I’d taken that last look only moments ago. The knot of grief in my chest had barely loosened.

Even if everything I felt for Leo was real, I couldn’t do that to Gav. If he’d known I’d forget him so quickly…

And then, in an instant, none of that mattered, because the sound of an engine rumbled through the wall.

I jumped up and darted to the window. A brown station wagon was turning the corner of the drive, heading toward the house.

The Wardens who’d come through the town had been driving a white Humvee. But that didn’t mean another group couldn’t be tracking us down. I bit my lip. Leo came up on the other side of the window.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” We could have run for the boat again, but that would mean leaving Justin and Anika. Letting them come back to find us gone and the Wardens waiting for them.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave one more person behind.

“We have to defend ourselves,” I said, bracing myself for Leo’s response. “We can wait by the front door, and if they come in, hold them up. We don’t have to hurt them, just barricade them in one of the rooms. If they don’t fight back. If they do…”

“Then we do have we have to,” Leo said with a nod. His eyes held mine unwaveringly. “Let’s get ready.”

A momentary relief washed over me, only to be swallowed by apprehension as I slid Tobias’s pistol from my pocket. Not long ago, the thought of putting a bullet into one of the Wardens’ heads had appealed to me. Now I only felt sick. But if someone was going to die here, I’d still rather it was them than us.

We hurried down the stairs and across the hall. Leo stepped to the left of the door, his own gun in hand, his body tensed. I positioned myself against the wall on the other side. My fingers curled around the pistol. What if they outnumbered us? What if they’d already passed Justin and Anika on the road and taken them as hostages?

The engine growled to a stop. The car doors creaked open. Footsteps thudded across the paved driveway.

Then a familiar voice filtered through the door.

“I’m telling you, I could be a better driver than the rest of you put together. What do licenses even mean anymore?”

I let out my breath and lowered the gun. Leo was shaking his head.

Justin and Anika were coming up the front steps when I opened the door. Justin turned to me with a grin.

“Look what we found!”

“There’s a road just a little ways past the bend,” Anika said in explanation, gesturing toward the driveway. “About ten minutes walk down that, there’s another house—that’s where we found the car. The key was in the house. It’s got a half a tank of gas.”

“Perfect,” I said. My anxiety fell away. This was exactly what we needed. “Did you figure out where we are?”

“According to the signs, we’re not too far east of some place called Clermont,” Justin said as he limped into the house with his rifle walking stick. The butt of the rifle slid on the edge of the hall rug, and he started to stumble. Anika caught his elbow.

“
That’s
why I didn’t let you drive,” she said, with a gentleness that made me look at her again. Her attention was totally focused on him, a smile curving her lips as he glowered at her halfheartedly.

“I guess I should keep holding on to you, then,” Justin said, hooking his arm around hers, and she kept smiling. And for the first time, I wondered if her flirting wasn’t just teasing anymore. Maybe age differences didn’t matter so much when you weren’t sure how many more days you’d be alive.

The idea hit me with a strange rush of sadness and a sharpened awareness of Leo standing on the other side of the hall.

“Clermont,” I repeated, bringing myself back. I tried to picture the pages of the road atlas, the lay of the land around northern Georgia, but the name didn’t click. I didn’t know whether we needed to go east or west from here. And wandering around trying to figure it out would just use up the gas and give the Wardens more time to spot us.

“Let me try to get in touch with the CDC quickly,” I said. “Dr. Guzman wanted us to contact her when we were close to Atlanta anyway.”

The others followed me into the living room. Leo unwrapped the transceiver and set it on the coffee table. Outside, the rain had picked up again, drumming against the porch awning.

When I pressed the call button, the static fizzled more harshly than I remembered from before. But Dr. Guzman’s voice cracked through it to answer my broadcast loud and clear.

“Kaelyn?”

“Yes,” I said. “We’re almost there. We’ve just gotten a little off track.”

“What happened?” she asked sharply.

“We’re okay,” I said. “But the people who were chasing us, they almost caught us this morning. We lost our road atlas—we had to leave it behind. I think we’re close to Atlanta. I just need some help figuring out how to get there from here.”

“I can do that,” she said. “You’re all still all right? And the vaccine?”

“Everything’s fine, other than us being lost,” I said. “I think we should get moving soon, though. I don’t know how close they might be behind us.” Or whether they’d catch this transmission and soon have an even better idea of where we were.

“Of course, of course. Let me just get a map.…” There was a crackle as she stepped away. “Listen,” she said when she returned. “I’m going to give you directions for how to approach the center once you get to the city, and you need to follow them exactly. When you’re inside our walls, you’ll be safe, but until then…Oh, I wish there was an easier way for us to send someone to you. But even if we could manage to take a vehicle out without getting overwhelmed, it would definitely be followed, and I don’t know how well we could protect you if we led some of these people to you out in the open. We just don’t have the means to spread ourselves that thin and keep the center secure.”

Michael knew we were headed her way. He’d probably been expecting we’d arrive in Atlanta before now. “Has it gotten worse?” I asked. “You said there were people trying to break in?”

“It’s—” She cut herself off with an indrawn breath. “It’ll be fine. We’ll get you here. They’re all just hurting themselves in the long run. Where are you now?”

The memory of her comments a few days ago, about who would get the vaccine and who might not, made my skin prickle. But now wasn’t the time to get into that. “We’re just east of a place called Clermont,” I said. “Near a river.”

“Clermont…That’s not far at all! You still have access to a vehicle?”

“Yes, and we’re ready to go.”

“All right. We may be talking face-to-face in just a couple hours. You’ll want to go toward Clermont and get yourselves onto 129 heading south. From there on you should see signs for Atlanta. When you have a choice, stay on the—”

Whatever she said next was lost in the sudden
bang
of the doors slamming open. “Don’t move!” a voice bellowed as we sprang to our feet. The mic slipped from my hand and dropped to the floor. Before I could grope for the gun I’d set on the couch beside me, two figures had barged into the living room from the front hall, another hustling through the dining room from the back, and I found myself staring into the mouths of a shotgun and two pistols.

The four of us froze. My mouth went dry. This was it. The moment I’d been afraid of for so long, and I hadn’t been the slightest bit prepared.

“Kaelyn?” Dr. Guzman said through the radio’s speaker. “Kaelyn, are you there?”

The larger of the two men jerked his head toward the other, a skinny guy not much older than me, who bent without lowering his gun and flicked the switch off. The woman moved behind Anika. Leo’s hand twitched to his side, and the larger man—the group’s leader, I guessed—tracked it. He stepped forward, yanked out the pistol Leo had stuck behind his belt, and then grabbed my gun off the couch. His black hair was dripping, his amber skin flecked with water. The face masks all three of them wore were drooping with moisture. They must have walked through the rain. That was why we hadn’t heard them coming.

“Get that one too,” the man said, motioning to the rifle by Justin’s feet. The woman tugged it away with her heel and kicked it toward the dining room. Then she patted down Anika with her free hand, tossing aside the hunting knife before checking Justin. She arched an eyebrow at the flare gun she found in his coat pocket and chucked it after the knife. The other guy smacked his hands down Leo’s sides, and mine.

When he was done, the leader shifted his shotgun so it pointed at each of us in turn.

“Where is it?” he demanded. “Where’s the vaccine?”

Justin’s gaze darted through the room and then caught mine. He didn’t know. None of them knew, I realized. I’d only meant to keep the samples cold, but I’d effectively hidden them as well.

“We don’t have it anymore!” Anika burst out. “These other guys took it from us. We barely got away from them.”

She let out a squeak as the woman snatched at her hair and wrenched her head back, placing the pistol against her temple.

“Oh, really?” the woman said.

Justin’s hand leapt toward Anika. The younger guy swung his gun toward him, his damp coppery hair dark as dried blood in the dim light. The leader poked me in the side with his shotgun, but his attention was fixed on Anika now.

“I’m finding it hard to believe you,” he said. “Maybe if I fire a few rounds into your friends, you’ll remember better?”

Anika quivered. I didn’t think this was the response she’d been going for. Her lips parted, a shaky breath escaping over them, and in that moment I could see her searching for the words to give up the vaccine. But she didn’t know how. And our captors had no clue. They could murder me to threaten her and never know they were killing the only person who had the answer.

My heart thumped. I could tell them that, but then they’d hurt the others to get me to talk. As long as they thought some of us were expendable—

Then we had to make them believe none of us were.

The idea had hardly formed in my mind before my mouth was moving. “You don’t want to do that,” I said. “You shoot any of us and you’ll never find what you’re looking for.”

Three hostile pairs of eyes turned on me.

“What are you talking about?” the leader growled.

“There’s more than one sample,” I said, scrambling to put my thoughts in a coherent order. “And notebooks, with information on how to make more. Whenever we stop somewhere, we all take one part of the set and hide it without telling anyone else. You need all of us, or Michael’s not going to be happy.”

The copper-haired guy stiffened at the mention of their boss. The woman snorted. “Sounds pretty stupid to me.”

“Maybe,” Leo jumped in. “But it’s true. You think we trusted each other enough to be sure that none of us would sneak off with everything if we could? We all want a piece of the reward.”

“Yeah,” Justin said. “I didn’t want these guys skipping out and leaving me empty-handed. It was only fair if we each had something.”

The leader eyed us one by one. I suspected it wasn’t too hard for him to imagine distrusting his colleagues. “Check the house,” he said to the other guy. “If they hid anything, find it.”

As the copper-haired guy shuffled off, the woman tapped her gun against Anika’s forehead. “And if we can’t, we just rough ’em up until they talk. No big deal.”

Anika cringed. “No way,” I said quickly. It was one thing for her to have played along with our team, and another to withstand torture for us. But Anika had as much to lose as me or Justin or Leo. “We’re not that stupid. As soon as you get what you want from us, you’ll kill us. Hurt me all you want, but I plan on staying alive.”

“I didn’t come this far to die for nothing,” Leo said, quietly but firmly.

“Me neither,” Justin added, jutting out his chin. Anika looked at him, and her shoulders squared.

“I’d rather die than tell you assholes anything,” she said.

The woman whipped back her pistol and cracked Anika across the head, grabbing her when she staggered. All Anika let out was a muffled gasp. Her hands balled into fists at her sides. Justin’s face had tightened, his eyes seething.

“Hold it, Marissa,” the leader said as the woman raised her gun again. “Let me think.” His forehead had furrowed. I guessed he’d expected us to be easily intimidated. He didn’t know what we’d already been through to get this far.

“Last we heard, there were six of you,” he said after a moment. “Where are the others?”

Gav and Tobias. I kept my mouth pressed shut.

Marissa sighed and reached back to squeeze some of the rainwater from her long brown braid. “One of them was sick, the report said, right? He’s probably dead now.”

“And the other one?” the leader said, glowering at us. We all stared back at him, silent. His jaw clenched. Good. Let him worry about that instead of finding the vaccine.

God, I wished Gav and Tobias
were
here. Or rather, somewhere outside the house, strategizing a way to overpower these thugs. They’d known how to fight. I’d kept the four of us alive, but I didn’t know how to get us out of this. Even if one of our captors made a mistake, gave us an opening, I didn’t think any of us had the skill to disarm them and get the upper hand.

We’d just have to wait, and see what opportunities we got. As long as we were alive, we had a chance.

“Well, this is fun,” Marissa said drily.

The leader turned his glare on her. “Let’s see what Connor turns up. If we find the vaccine, we don’t need them to talk.”

But when the other guy trudged back downstairs a few minutes later, of course he’d found nothing. From the dust streaking his windbreaker, it looked like he’d even crawled into the attic.