Free Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories by Megan Crewe Page A

Tyler, three of the other Wardens, and one of the doctors stopped with me outside the three-story row house I’d noticed the woman with the two kids disappearing into a few days ago. I’d kept an eye on it during my wanderings as I’d re-familiarized myself with the neighborhood in its flu-altered state. At least one other family with young kids was holed up in there—I’d seen a white-haired man who might have been a grandfather ushering a little girl inside while cradling a baby in his arms.
    This “job” didn’t technically require anyone except me, the doctor, and the case of filled syringes I’d told her to bring along, but I wanted an audience, and I wanted to observe how that audience responded.
    I knocked on the door, the others shuffling their feet on the sidewalk behind me. It was the older man who answered, opening it just a crack.
    “We’re making a house call,” I said. “Limited time special offer. Any kids here under thirteen can get a shot payment-free. Can we come in?”
    Someone behind me snorted, maybe thinking we didn’t need to bother asking. Not an attitude I planned to encourage. The man’s gaze slid from me to the doctor to the case in her hands. He backed up, opening the door wider.
    We ended up in the cluttered first floor living room—no one had been keeping the place neat, and crumpled food packaging bags and cartons lay strewn around the sagging couch and heaped along the walls. The old man, who still hadn’t said anything to us, brought the little girl and her baby brother in. The woman I’d seen begging outside the station peeked in with her two boys, and a girl who looked to be about ten crept in just as we were finishing with those four. Thankfully, that was it, because I’d only had the doctor bring five doses.
    Tyler and the others slouched by the doorway as the doctor did her work. I’d have gotten more satisfaction out of seeing the anxiety on the kids’ faces giving way to hope if I hadn’t sensed skepticism in my colleagues every time I glanced their way.
    “What about us?” the woman said after we were done.
    “ What about us? ” one of the Wardens mocked in a singsong voice, and she cringed.
    I shot him a pointed look, and he just grinned. “You should be able to scavenge up something,” I said. “This was just for the kids who can’t fend for themselves—be glad we offered that.”
    I wanted to add that I was going to try to cut down the payments, that none of this had been my idea in the first place, but that might encourage them to start arguing down at the station where they could draw Nathan’s attention—and irritation.
    “You give a little, they want everything,” one of my colleagues said as we headed back. “What a bunch of freeloaders.”
    “It’d get Nathan’s goat if he knew, though,” the guy who’d done the mocking earlier said, and high-fived Tyler. Then he turned to me. “What else do you have in mind?”
    So that’s what they assumed this was about—sticking it to Nathan?
    “There’s no reason anyone in this city needs to die from the friendly flu now that the vaccine’s being made,” I said. “And it doesn’t cost us anything to give it to people who couldn’t pay us anyway.”
    The woman arched an eyebrow, and Tyler laughed, as if he thought I was making a joke. “I guess it’s good to make sure we have a good pool of grunts to do the heavy lifting down the line,” the other guy remarked. “They’ll be able to pay their way later on, right?”
    “Yeah,” I said, playing to that attitude with a growing queasiness. “Worse for us if the kids get sick, too—parents can go kind of crazy trying to save them.”
    What kind of future did they envision here? A world where the Wardens lorded our power over everyone else for as long as we could, until there wasn’t anything left to scavenge or stockpile and our own stores ran out—and then what?
    I wasn’t sure they were bothering to think that far. Looking at them