Free Lives We Lost,The by Megan Crewe

the virus.”
The man raised his eyebrows. “Vaccine? There’s never been no vaccine for the friendly flu.”
I didn’t see much point in lying about it now.
“We have a new prototype,” I said. “My dad was a scientist—he made it. We’re trying to get to the city to find someone who can make more. We just need a little help getting there.”
The man studied us for a moment.
“Well,” he said to his companion, “maybe we should just let them be for the moment, don’t you think?”
Without another word to us, they turned and ambled back the way they’d come. A prickle crept up the back of my neck. I was glad they were leaving us alone, and he seemed to be saying we could take what we needed after all, but something about his manner felt threatening.
“They weren’t so unreasonable,” Tessa said after the two had turned out of view. I tore my eyes away and hurried on to the nearest car.
The gas cap resisted my tugging fingers. Gav tried the door, grimaced, and raised the branch to smash in the driver’s-side window. Leaning inside, he popped the cap. I unscrewed the seal and fed the tube down into the tank. Then I brought the other end to my mouth, bracing myself for the taste of gasoline I was going to get if I wasn’t fast enough, and sucked in. Meredith hovered by the bucket.
All that came up was air. I wiggled the tube around, trying to get it deeper, and sucked again. Nothing.
“It’s dry,” I said.
“Let me see.” Gav knelt down beside me, but he had no more success.
“Someone else probably had the same idea,” Leo said.
The second car proved to be as empty as the first. We walked a little farther, trying a pickup truck that appeared to have stalled in the middle of the road and a van half a block down one of the side streets, but neither gave us so much as a drop.
“Someone’s drained them all already,” I said. The man who’d tried to warn us off? “Let’s get back to the truck. We can drive to the other side of town. Maybe whoever got the gas here only bothered with the main road.”
“No argument from me,” Tobias said, and Gav nodded.
“Meredith,” Leo said as we trudged toward the gas station, “from now on, you shouldn’t talk about the vaccine with strangers. I know you were trying to help, but people are afraid of getting sick, and some of them might not care that we need the samples to make more. They’d just want to get some for themselves.”
Meredith lowered her head. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I told her. “Just remember.” Hopefully there wouldn’t be a next time.
There was no sign of anyone nearby when we reached the station. If they had come and gone, their footprints were lost amid the ones we’d made when we arrived. The truck’s windows were undamaged and the doors secure. I started to relax as Tobias unlocked them. He hopped into the driver’s seat while we chucked the bucket and jugs in the back.
A shrill squealing split the air, so piercing my hands leapt to my ears. Just as abruptly, it cut off. Tobias twisted the key in the ignition again, but the engine was silent.
“What in hell?” he muttered, pushing open the door. He marched over to the hood and yanked it up, just as I reached him. For a second, we both stared down, motionless.
Every lid that could have been twisted off was gone. Every tube was snapped, every wire cut.
Gav hurried around and stopped with a hiss of breath.
“Can we fix it?” I said, even though I was already pretty sure of the answer.
Tobias’s shoulders slumped.
“Not unless you’ve got a magic wand,” he said. “The truck’s dead.”
eight
We’d only been worrying about keeping our supplies safe—it hadn’t occurred to us that someone might wreck the truck itself.
    “The guys in town,” Gav said. “You think they did this to get back at us?”
I hugged myself. “Or to take what we have. They couldn’t overpower us all at once. And they couldn’t get into the truck. So they stopped us from