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the garage, Justin and Anika headed for the house to peer through the windows, and I sent Tobias to take a look around back.
    We repeated the pattern at the next few properties. As we pulled up yet another driveway, the lights caught a line of shadows in the snow. I jammed my foot on the brake.
    “Interesting,” Justin said.
    “What?” Anika poked her head around his seat.
    A trail of footprints crossed the snow between the house and the garage. Human footprints. I turned off the engine, studying the windows as silence settled over us. No light in the house. No smoke above the chimney. Just a looter passing by, then?
    Even if it had been a looter, they could have crashed here for the night. The muted glow of the SUV’s lights didn’t reach far enough to tell me if the footprints led away from the house on the other side.
    “What do you want to do?” Leo asked.
    “Go carefully and keep our eyes open,” I said. “And let’s leave the house alone. We’ll take a look at the garage and then we’ll move on.”
    I touched my coat, running my fingers over the shape of Tobias’s flare gun in my pocket. Leo and Tobias both carried real pistols. If someone confronted us, we could probably convince them to leave us alone.
    Dragging in a lungful of frigid air, I stepped out. We converged on the garage. A keypad was mounted beside the sliding door, requiring a code we couldn’t provide, and the knob on the side door didn’t budge when I tried to turn it.
    Locked up tight. Which meant maybe there was something valuable in there. Something the looter hadn’t gotten to.
    Or there was no looter, only an owner protecting his supplies.
    A figure materialized at the edge of my flashlight’s beam, and my pulse skipped a beat before I recognized Tobias. He’d ducked around behind the house as usual. He jerked his head toward the backyard. “You should take a look at this.”
    We tramped through the calf-deep snow to a log shed almost as large as the garage. The door hung ajar. Tobias held up the padlock he must have busted off it. He hung back, scratching his elbow, while the rest of us stepped inside.
    “Holy crap,” Justin said, and Anika laughed.
    Our flashlights revealed a snowmobile parked in one corner of the shed, beside a stack of gas cans. At the other end of the building stood a thick wooden table, with several animal skins hanging on a line above it. Mostly rabbit, two that had once belonged to squirrels, and what looked like a raccoon’s bushy coat. A salty, musky smell reached my nose through my scarf, thicker than the piney scent of the logs.
    Some of the skins were fresh. The footprints hadn’t been a looter’s. Someone lived here.
    I backed up instinctively. Tobias was still standing guard by the door. He sneezed a couple times, and cleared his throat.
    “I don’t think anyone’s home right now,” he said. “There’s a spot where another snowmobile must have been sitting around back, and a trail heading off toward the trees that looks recent. I’ll keep watch.”
    Leo nudged one of the gas cans with the toe of his boot. “We could get pretty far on this,” he said, but he just stood there, looking at them.
    Justin didn’t seem concerned about politeness. He marched over to the wall beside the table and poked through the tools hanging there. “I bet this could come in handy,” he said, grabbing a wrench. “And these.” He snatched up a pair of wire cutters.
    My flashlight grazed Anika’s back—she was stuffing something into her pocket. I smothered the urge to protest. Leo had raised his eyes toward me.
    Everything here belonged to someone else. Someone still alive, who’d done nothing to harm us. But we needed it too. We needed it more . Whoever owned all this didn’t have a murderous gang tracking him down. He didn’t need to protect a vaccine that might save everyone in the world who was still living.
    “We’ll take all the gas,” I heard myself say. “And anything else that could be