Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories (11 page)

“I’ll put in the radio request now,” I told Nathan. “We’ll squeeze everything out of this city we can get.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said, but his smile was cold. Still, he let me walk away. Without a clue that he’d just set his own downfall into motion.

Nathan had the keys to the store’s padlocks, of course, but I’d never told him I’d found the keys to the front door when I was scoping the place out. The deadbolt slid over with a thunk, and in I went. In the faint lingering sunlight of the dusk, I lugged most of the jugs and tanks of fuel into the temporary holding place I’d picked across the street. Placed the few I was leaving and several empty jugs I’d grabbed at the station at the front of the stacks so it wouldn’t be immediately obvious how much was gone behind them. The guns and ammo I left where they were. If things went my way, I expected us to find better tools of negotiation.

And if they didn’t, if Nathan walked away from this test, well, I was dead anyway.

I thought briefly of Kaelyn. I hadn’t seen or heard any sign of her in the city since I’d arrived. Hopefully she’d made it back home to the island. I’d thought maybe I’d send someone out there to check in with her if I got things under control. I’d have liked her to know I’d at least tried. I’d have liked to explain this to Zack, too. But I couldn’t exactly whip off a couple emails. I was on my own.

The contents of the last jug I splashed around the room a bit. Then I carried it outside and locked up again. I splattered more gas on the wall, the edges of the windows and the door frame, the seams in the siding where that old dry wood showed through. I stuck to the front end—I needed Nate to be able to open up the back to get inside.

Then I backed up and pulled out the box of matches I’d carried with me from Georgia. My survival gear. I struck up a flame. Watched it dance above my fingers. Inhaled the oily fumes and the tang of phosphorus, and tossed the match toward the storefront.

The flame caught, flaring as it licked up the wall. I threw another, and another. No hesitation now, just a quick swipe and a flick of the wrist. The fire crawled and leapt, wafting heat. I was lit in the darkness. My heart hammering, I spun on my heel and hurried away.

I’d just reached the corner next to the fire station when a sound like bursting popcorn carried on the air. Those boxes of ammo. The fire had already reached the back room.

I ran the rest of the way, my breath rasping by the time I burst through the entry hall.

“Where’s Nathan?” I demanded of the guards. Before they could answer, Nate stepped out of the kitchen. I’d been counting on him eating dinner late, after everyone else had finished.

A few other Wardens were already standing in the common room. Tyler poked his head out of the radio area. A couple emerged from the stairwell. Our audience.

“The store,” I said to Nathan. “Where you’ve been keeping everything. It’s burning.”

He froze, panic and fury twisting together on his face. “What did you do?” he said in a low, dangerous voice.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, but I let my voice even out. Let him sense the challenge. Let them all sense it. For Nathan, I suspected, that would be the tipping point. Where he showed who he was at the core: a desperate, obsessive, selfish maniac.

His face was completely white now. “I’ll deal with you when I have time,” he promised. “For now, you’re coming with me.”

He grabbed my wrist as he swiveled toward the entrance to the garage. That wasn’t part of the plan. I jerked my arm back automatically, and his switchblade leapt into his hand.

“Nathan,” I said, loud and clear. “The whole place has gone up. You can’t save anything. You’d have to be crazy to try.”

It was an honest warning. I was playing fair. But Nathan, because he was insane, because fairness and honesty were concepts he didn’t comprehend, took it as a dare.

“We’ll see,” he snapped.

I couldn’t let him take me. I couldn’t let there be any doubt about who made the choice, if he didn’t come back. “Maybe you will,” I said, “but I’m not going anywhere.”

It was a risk. He lashed out with the knife, and I flinched away quickly enough that it only caught my cheek. Nathan took another step, and then looked toward the garage with a curse. A smoky smell was trickling in from outside.

“Don’t let him leave,” he ordered our spectators, and shoved past the door. In a matter of seconds, the screech of tires pierced the wall.

The guards, Janelle and Tyler, the rest of the Wardens around and trickling in at the commotion, ignored his last order and, for the moment, me. They streamed out onto the sidewalk, where the burning smell was growing thicker. A cloud of smoke obscured a swath of stars to the east. The convertible had already raced out of view. I stopped just outside the doors as the others milled about for a minute uncertainly.

Janelle made a move as if she were going to stride down the street and see what was happening. At the same moment, Nathan screamed.

I’d never heard him scream before. I’d never heard anyone scream like that, so livid amidst the pain that his fury was audible even at that distance, but we all knew it was him. It cut off with a creak and a crackling thump. Then we couldn’t hear anything at all.

Janelle and a few of the others glanced back at me then. I felt the glow of the station’s lights silhouetting me where I stood. I clamped down on my nausea and folded my arms over my chest. “I guess we’ve found out even his life didn’t matter as much to him as that stuff,” I said. “Unless you’re on essential duties, take the night off. Things are going to look different around here tomorrow morning.”

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.