“The roads are passable?” he asks. “There’s been so much snow.”
“Yes, for the most part. The paved parts are clear.”
“Finn, let them in,” a female voice says out of sight. The door opens wider and I see a girl of the same age. White-blonde hair and bright blue eyes. “You need to get off the road before nightfall. It’s dangerous out there.”
“It is?” I glance behind me and Green emerges from the trees. He heard her. They see him but don’t react. I comment, “We haven’t seen any people all day.”
“It’s not the people you have to worry about,” Finn says meeting eyes with the girl. “It’s the monsters.”
“Monsters?”
“The infection took the whole town over the winter,” she tells us. “They’ve all turned into monsters.”
Chapter 15
Finn leads Jackson and Green to the barn behind the house to show them where to lock up the hor
ses. The boy twitches with nerves, not so much at our arrival but being out of the house at all. He’s incredibly pale, having not spent much time outdoors all winter. He does give Jackson a double glance, eyes skimming over his dark skin, but doesn’t say anything. Not sure they have much diversity around these parts.
The girl, Mary Ellen, invites us in and I try not to stare at her clothing. I knew the Mennonites dressed conservatively but that seems insane to me. How do you fight in an ankle length dress? I think I know the answer to my question. They don’t fight. And they’re in trouble. It’s why they risked opening the door.
We carry in the load of supplies. Jane has had worry lines on her forehead since she heard about the community succumbing to the infection. They were vaccinated. Or at least that’s what Avi told us.
I watch my sister carefully as we settle into the warm living room of the house. She looks calm but she can’t be. The vaccine is her creation—along with my father’s. If something went wrong with these people then something could go wrong with our inoculations as well.
The fire crackles in the fireplace, providing us with much-needed warmth and light. Walker digs out some jars of food from Catlettsburg and unscrews the lid. The bitter smell of vinegar fills the air and my stomach rumbles at the sight of the pickled eggs. Jackson unwraps a package of jerky and one by one we take a piece.
“Thank you,” Finn says, chewing a small bite of jerky. “We’ve been living on spare provisions for weeks now.”
“The salt tastes good,” Mary agrees.
“Can you tell us what happened?” Jane asks. She has a pad of paper and a pencil that she removed from her bag on her knee. “No wait, I have another question first. Did you and the others in your community take the vaccination Avi delivered?”
The two look at one another but Finn nods and Mary is the first to speak. “The community argued over the medicine Mr. Avi brought us. Religiously, many of our faith do not believe in vaccinations. But there was an understanding that if one of us took it—we all had to. We couldn’t risk even one person getting the infection.”
“Why? The rest of you would have still had protection if that person chose not to get the shot.”
She shakes her head. “We already had one incident where one of our members returned from a larger town with the infection. He became rageful and killed a dozen people, mostly children, before he was stopped. A person can survive the bite but not a brutal attack.”
We knew this, of course. Or at least Walker and I did. We’d lost fellow soldiers in this manner since Jane gave us the EVI-1. My sister nods in understanding, but I realize how so much of her research is limited to theory. The more time she spends out in the world, the more she sees it actually tested.
“So it was all or nothing,” Mary Ellen continues. “And after many arguments, the elders decided we would all take the vaccine. That happened on December nineteenth. The day of the first heavy snowfall.”
“When did they get sick?” Green asks. He’s sitting next to me. Close. And as much as I want to move away, to maintain the barrier I’ve built, I’m tired and he’s warm.
“A month passed and we managed well in isolation. It was our first real winter post-Crisis. Even though we were prepared as a community with food and supplies, we too have become reliant on outside sources. A group of our men, our best hunters, decided to go out in search of what we needed. They left in late January only to return a week later, empty-handed and hot with fever.”
“That night while the rest of the town slept, one of the sick men attacked his wife. The following day, members of our church paid a visit and,” Mary Ellen swallows, “the virus spread.”
“It moved slowly—not like the rampage from before,” Finn adds.
“Methodical?” Jane asks. Her pencil had been the only sound other than the fire and Mary’s voice.
Finn nods. “Yes. Methodical.”
“It only took hours for the virus to take the entire town.”
Walker asks, “How did you get out?”