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retrieved a small glass vial from the case. It was the same type of vial that I’d seen nurses take from refrigerators in nursing stations when preparing to give me an injection. I’d never seen my father handle one. “This is experimental. It may not work. I believe it will but I can’t be sure.”
    “You want to inject us?” my mother said softly.
    “If they knew I had this…” He shook his head. “It’s a chance. It’s a virus that might make you sick, might mutate into something even more deadly but it just might alter the structure of your immune system enough, genetically, to keep you safe.”
    My mother and I said nothing. We stared at the little vial with its rim of silver metal. It was half full with a liquid the color of iced tea.
    He said, “We ran out of time to do any more trials. This is all I have left.”
    My mother put her hand on my shoulder, rubbed it gently. “Maybe just me,” she said.
    My father pinched his eyes closed and took a deep breath. He had to work hard to keep his voice steady. “She’ll get sick, too. You’ll both have to leave here eventually, when you run out of food. Maybe by that time things will have calmed down. I will try to reach you somehow if I can. You can start looking for other survivors, find a rescue station. We can make contact.”
    “But what if it…kills us?” She let her voice trail off.
    “Maureen,” my father said gently. We knew there was nothing more to say.
    My father washed his hands again and took out a plastic bag packed with syringes and more latex gloves. He worked quickly with well-practiced motions, drawing the serum into each syringe. He told us that he’d only given injections of this to lab animals before. They had survived.
    My mother offered her arm first, then I stepped forward. I felt the prick of the needle, looked away as my father pushed what he’d helped to create at his lab into my bloodstream, then back at his worried eyes as I felt him gently swiping my skin with a sterile swab.
    My father stooped to kiss my forehead, thought better of it. A few minutes later, he was gone.
Eleven
    I keep my eyes fixed on the sun rising over the houses of Oxbow Ferry, rubbing the spot on my left arm where my father had given me the injection. Almost two years have passed. I wonder if the fact that I’m still alive and unchanged is proof that the vaccine worked. But I’m a year younger than Larkin. There’s still plenty of time for the disease to reach me.
    I wonder what it’s like, the first symptoms. You can’t eat, can’t drink, can’t hold anything down. Only want to sleep. That much I know. But the first time it touches a person, what’s that like? I imagine a hollowness inside, a scooped out feeling like someone’s just opened you up and is removing your insides. Like you’ve been put under and are being operated on without your approval.
    For the first time, I hope my father’s experiment turns out to be a failure. The notion that I might be cut off from Larkin forever makes my heart hurt. I can’t make myself accept what’s just happened. There isn’t time to understand, to adjust to it. How do I go on from here? I look at my rifle leaning against the windowsill as if it holds a clue.
    It can’t be true that the vaccine was effective. If my father’s lab had created a miracle serum capable of saving thousands of people, of allowing their bodies to fight off the plague infecting their blood, there would be healthy people out there right now. They would have found us. They would be organized, hard at work at the task of cleaning up the world.
    But there aren’t healthy people out there. There’s only a few stragglers, a few kids with the disease lurking within them, biding its time. A ticking time bomb flowing through their veins and arteries.
    I want Larkin to have survived and I want him to contact us, as changed as he is. I want to see him again, touch his skin—his white, dry, altered skin. I won’t care about any