Lives We Lost,The by Megan Crewe Page A

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 lighters 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