The Worlds We Make by Megan Crewe Read Free Book Online Page A

to thin. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. One small hike in temperature as we continued south, and it would all be melting away. Leaving us with nothing to cool the vaccine.
    I guessed, when that happened, we’d just have to make one long run for the CDC. And hope they had the facilities to keep the samples cool there. And if no one was there at all…
    I shoved that thought aside and headed back in. But as I watched Justin spread the blankets inside the tent, a restlessness worked its way through my bones. I wasn’t ready to sleep yet.
    “I’m going to watch the road, just for a bit,” I said. Tobias had taken the second floor bedroom at the front of the house to keep watch, but it couldn’t hurt to have two sets of eyes on the lookout. Maybe the third floor would be a loft room, with windows at both ends so I could see all around us.
    My gaze passed over Anika, and I nudged Leo. “Keep the cold box with you?”
    “Sure,” he said.
    Upstairs, a yank on the thin chain in the hallway brought down the steps to the next level. The gust of freezing air that came with it carried just a hint of sourness. I hesitated, and then climbed up.
    The room above stretched the entire length of the house, as I’d anticipated. It was set up as a bedroom, with a canopy bed and short bookshelves lining the walls beneath the vaulted ceiling. Everything was a delicate shade of lilac, even the bedspread. Which made the body in the mint-green dress that lay on it stand out despite the gauzy canopy curtain.
    Something clenched inside me. I sucked in a breath and made myself walk to the front window first. From there I could see as far as the closest highway, more than a mile away. Beyond it, the landscape rippled, rolling hills rising into rounded mountains lifting to distant peaks that grazed the clouds. The branches of the trees in a nearby orchard wavered in the wind. Nothing else stirred.
    The world was as still as the corpse on the bed.
    I didn’t want to have to look at her, to see whose house we were appropriating and what had happened to her, but I couldn’t help stopping at the foot of the bed on my way to the back window. Maybe I owed it to her to find out. I turned my head.
    If I hadn’t seen dead bodies before, this one might have been more disturbing. But there was no blood, no open wound, no evidence of violence. The woman behind the curtain looked so peaceful I might have been able to believe she was simply resting, if not for the icy tinge on her coppery skin and the dribble of vomit seeping from the corner of her parted lips. The winter had kept her perfectly preserved. There was no smell of rot yet, only a faint sour tang from the vomit.
    The woman’s eyes were closed, but her head was tipped toward the opposite side of the bed, where she’d laid out a collection of photographs. I eased the canopy to the side so I could make out the images. An older couple standing on the deck of a cruise ship. The woman before me in a wedding dress with her red-haired groom. School portraits of two little boys. What appeared to be a New Year’s Eve party with a group of friends raising their cocktails.
    Beside the photos lay a diamond necklace, a plastic beaded bracelet, a dog-eared novel, a ratty stuffed elephant toy. And an open, empty bottle of painkillers that had rolled against the clock on the bedside table.
    I’d braced myself for a wave of nausea, for shock or disgust. All that washed over me was sadness, fading into a dull sort of resignation.
    There wasn’t any sign she’d even been sick. But maybe this wasn’t such a bad way to go, if you were going to go somehow eventually: in a little world of her own making, a shrine to all the things she must have loved. Better than the way Gav had gone—clawing and shrieking and terrified.
    Except, since when was I assuming it was better to die than go on? Why wasn’t I horrified that the epidemic had brought her to the point that suicide was the best