Tommy put his hand on Nathan’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet, and then cut the zip-tie holding Nathan’s wrists together and left him to go to Cyndi.
The bullet meant for Nathan from Stryker’s pistol hadn’t missed him because Cyndi had pushed his hand out of the way. The bullet had missed Nathan because it had drilled through her back, blowing out a considerable chunk of her sternum; it had been diverted by her bone and then her flesh.
Nathan knelt down by the side of his wife, blood running from her mouth, dots of it smattered on her flickering eyes, their pupils alive and moving, wet and vital.
“Cyndi… I…”
Cyndi’s chest was open. Nathan instinctively tried to close the gaping wound over his wife’s exposed heart. There was too much damage. So Nathan held his wife’s heart beneath the palms of his hands as she died.
The organ was warm, pumping fitfully, the surface slippery and pitted with fragments of bone. Cyndi’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.
Nathan, the crust of his own world slithering off its axis to freeze and die, just like the Earth’s had, felt like it ended in that moment. He bent his head to Cyndi’s lips, his eyes hoping to lock onto hers, but they were too febrile, shivering and shaking in their sockets.
All he was able to do as he held her heart was to whisper into her ear, “I love you.”
The simplest words for the most complicated feeling he had ever had. Crushed beneath the weight of sadness, hollowed by the sight of the woman he loved, open to the air, the last beats of her punctured heart ticking down like the seconds on an unwound clock.
When it was over, Nathan waited with his hands in the wound as the first snow he’d felt in many weeks started to fall.
He stayed still because he didn’t want the snow to fall onto her heart.
When the flakes had stopped falling, he’d gotten up and led the others back to where he’d left Tony and Brandon.
They buried Cyndi with a view over the Esterbrook, towards Laramie Peak.
The mountains were purple and dark blue, with fast-moving shadows of winter clouds moving over the rock faces. The river running along the valley floor had broken free of ice, and there was melt water tumbling down, frothy and white. There were buds on the cherry trees, and even if this were a faux spring, at the very wrong time of the year, at least nature was trying.
Nathan had tried to be strong for Tony and insisted on digging his wife’s grave alone, but he’d collapsed as he dug, half because of tears and half from the physical impossibility of the action. Tommy and Freeson had finished the hole for him, and Cyndi’s body, wrapped in one of Tommy’s Diné-patterned blankets, had been laid in the ground and slowly covered.
Lucy had tried to speak a few words, but her voice had been so choked with emotion that she couldn’t get past saying Cyndi’s name. They’d left Nathan on his knees at the graveside, holding Brandon, with Tony at his side and hugging his daddy for a full hour before the cold whipped up a fine rain, and then Lucy had taken the baby from Nathan, and Tony’s hand, while Freeson had led Nathan back to the surviving wagon to get out of the drizzle.
In saving them all, Cyndi had given her own life. She’d laid the groundwork, made the plan, and executed it when the time was right, just as Stryker had pulled the trigger, meaning to send Nathan to his own oblivion.
After the funeral, Nathan told the others he wanted to go the five miles back to where Cyndi had died.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Freeson asked gently.
“Leave him be,” Lucy said, rocking Brandon gently in her arms. Tony was sitting on a rock with Rapier, looking down into the valley. When Nathan made his intentions clear, he looked up and spoke simply, in a voice that was clear, assertive, and would accept no argument. “I’ll come with you, Daddy.”
And so he did.
Nathan and Tony walked together into the milky fog of the Wyoming morning. The group had made camp as best they could in an abandoned roadhouse at the head of the valley, about a mile from where the wagons had been attacked.
Truth be told, Nathan would rather have made the trip on his own, but he didn’t have the strength to argue with the boy, and he also had no reason to argue. They fell into step together, the mist and the cold making them walk a little faster than was comfortable in order to build up some warmth in their bones and bodies.
For Nathan, the night before had been one of twisted anguish and zero sleep. They had decided that they would bury Cyndi, rather than cremate her, and where—knowing the view over Esterbrook towards the mountains was spectacular, Nathan had agreed with Lucy that it was the perfect spot. But even now, Nathan felt he could probably never close his eyes again without seeing a repeat image of his hands, holding what they had held.
If he ever slept again, he thought it would be a miracle.
It wasn’t just a feeling of sadness or grief that he felt right now, this numbing emotion washing up and down his body at every step—it was a feeling of being cast adrift.
Cyndi had been his anchor. Not his rock.
A rock was a dumb thing to be to someone, Nathan had always thought. A rock was solid and solitary, and it didn’t move; it was steadfast, a heavy weight to slow someone down.
An anchor was wholly different. An anchor allowed you to move around, and it could be wound up and carried with you, and when you needed to stay somewhere, you could drop anchor; you’d be safe in the currents of life, you wouldn’t drift away, and when you were ready to go somewhere else, it would always come with you. You never wanted to be separated from an anchor, especially when the storms were coming, and since the arrival of the Big Winter, Nathan’s life had been nothing but storms.
But now he was truly adrift. The chain to the anchor had been cut by the man he had once called his friend, and he couldn’t see himself ever being attached to someone like Cyndi again.
He would have to become the anchor now for his two sons, though. He would have to learn to tether them but let them play out on the chain—holding them not too tight because, in heavy waters, a chain pulled too stiff could buckle or snap. The trick was to leave enough chain to allow movement, but to know the ship would never go so far as to be lost completely.
Tony looked up at Nathan as they approached the road from the track to the valley. “What are you thinking, Daddy?”
“About ships and anchors.”
“Why?”
Nathan thought for a moment, and then answered earnestly. “I think I’ve just stopped being a ship. And now I need to become an anchor.”
“Will that help you not feel sad about Mom?”
“I dunno, Tony. I really don’t. But you and Brandon are this family’s ships now, about to sail, and Daddy will be your anchor.”
The boy rubbed at his chin. “I… think I get what you mean. It was like Mom… Mom was the center of everything. She kept us all together. It’s like, when the center goes, something has gotta take its place, or everything will fall apart.”
Nathan looked down at his boy, who was nodding along to his own wisdom, as if he were testing the limits of his own grief. Looking at the map of it. Instead of being so close to it that he couldn’t see anything but a cartographer’s lines and dots, Tony was already learning to fly above the whole thing. Seeing what the lay of the land was, and what direction he should go in.
“Is that all your own idea, son?”
Tony stopped, and looked up at Nathan. “Not really. I didn’t understand it at first, but now I think I do.”
“Where did you hear it, Tony?”
“It’s what Mom said about you when you were trapped in the silo. She said you were the center that held us all together.”
The wagons were burned up beyond all recognition, and the carcasses of the oxen were starting to bloat and swell. The Black Hawk was silent and frosted with the latest snowfall. Out here in Wyoming, it was still recognizably winter, but the snows were light, the skies often free of clouds, and no huge ice storms had rolled across the
landscape for many weeks.
Nathan avoided dwelling on the spot where Cyndi had fallen. The bodies of Stryker and the others had been dragged to the side of the road and burned in a pyre. No attempt had been made to bury their remains. It felt fitting that they had been left to carrion feeders. They deserved no more.
Nathan pulled down the burned, black sideboards of the wagon he’d traveled in with Cyndi, Tommy, and the boys and let it fall to the tarmac. The wagon was a skeleton of burnt spars on the bones of spoked wheels. Everything was black, everything destroyed. Nathan had no idea if he’d find what he was looking for, but he had to try.
When they’d left Glans Falls, Cyndi had made him leave the majority of his tools behind; they just hadn’t had the space for them in the Airstream trailer they’d left their home in to head out on the trip to Detroit.
But she had allowed him a small metal tool kit with a lockable lid. Over the months since they’d begun traveling, this had become the place where they’d kept not just the tools Nathan’s daddy had bequeathed him, but also an impromptu jewelry box, and stored drawings that Tony had made when they’d had a chance to stop and rest and enjoy each other’s company—diamond-like moments in the slog of the survival imperative. It was that box which Nathan was searching for now. Not for the tools, or the jewelry, or even Tony’s drawings.
For something else entirely.
As he shifted wood, burnt canvas, charred blankets, and the burnt remains of food tins, Nathan saw the soot-colored metal box beneath the detritus, and the remains of his life. The life before he had been set adrift on the raging waters between the terrible icebergs of the Big Winter.
Nathan pulled the box across the ashes and the cinders. Hoping against hope that Cyndi had thought to use the box for another valuable object one last time.
Nathan flicked the latch, pulled over the metal gullwing lid… and there it was. A little singed by the heat transferred through the steel of the box, but it was there, dog-eared and bookmarked.
It was Elm’s ledger. Cyndi had put it in the toolbox with their other valuable items – and Nathan knew this was probably the most valuable item in America right now. Nathan picked up the leatherbound book and slipped it inside his coat. Then he closed the lid of the toolbox and picked it up, too.
“Come on, son,” he said to Tony. “We’ve got a long way to go still, but Casper will get closer with every step.”
THE END
End of Killing Frost
After The Shift Book Two
Freezing Point, September 13 2018
Killing Frost, November 8 2018
Black Ice, January 10 2019
PS: If you love prepper fiction then keep reading for exclusive extracts from Black Ice and Dead Lines.
About Grace Hamilton
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Grace Hamilton is the prepper pen-name for a bad-ass, survivalist momma-bear of four kids, and wife to a wonderful husband. After being stuck in a mountain cabin for six days following a flash flood, she decided she never wanted to feel so powerless or have to send her kids to bed hungry again. Now she lives the prepper lifestyle and knows that if SHTF or TEOTWAWKI happens, she’ll be ready to help protect and provide for her family.
Combine this survivalist mentality with a vivid imagination (as well as a slightly unhealthy day dreaming habit) and you get a prepper fiction author. Grace spends her days thinking about the worst possible survival situations that a person could be thrown into, then throwing her characters into these nightmares while trying to figure out "What SHOULD you do in this situation?"
It’s her wish that through her characters, you will get to experience what life will be like and essentially learn from their mistakes and experiences, so that you too can survive!
BLURB
Nathan fights the elements in an epic race south to save his family. But first he must survive the journey…
A civil war in the one place they thought safe sends Nathan and his friends and family back on the road to face desperate challenges as tornadoes, earthquakes, and bitter cold turn the trip into a perilous nightmare. Nathan is still reeling from the loss of his wife, Cyndi, but with people depending on him to bring them to safety, he has little time to dwell on his feelings. However, a sudden accident shows him how precarious their situation truly is—and even worse, Nathan learns that pneumonia is slowly overtaking him.
With main roads becoming havens for robbers, the band of travelers crosses into Colorado to find unlikely salvation. An old mining town has been transformed into a prosperous settlement run by the friendly, forward-thinking Larson. Several members of Nathan’s group want to stay and build a future with Larson, but Nathan has misgivings. The people of this settlement seem almost too friendly, and there are an awful lot of children for the town’s size. Nathan works out a deal to get back on the road, but when his own children go missing, he must confront the dark mystery at the heart of the community, and face down a past that is rapidly catching up with him—or die trying.
Get your copy of Black Ice
Available January 10 2019
www.GraceHamiltonBooks.com
EXCERPT
Chapter one
“You can move back or I can shoot your face off. It’s entirely up to you, my friend.”
The business end of the Remington Model 887 Nitro Mag pump action shotgun was indeed pointed at Nathan’s face, and was being held in the hands of a petite, blonde-haired woman wearing a denim coat, a black Stetson jammed onto the back of her head. Her face was set, her sighting eye squinted, and the hood of the silver 2004 Cadillac SRX V8 across which she was leaning glinted in the weak Wyoming sunlight. Behind her, men backed her up with their own weapons at the ready.
Nathan had approached from the horse drawn wagon when they’d hit across the roadblock across the I-25 on their approach to Casper—four cars across the highway, placed end to end on each side of the interstate, and so he’d approached from just beyond them.
The grass on the central reservations were almost free of snow, and the air smelt damp and rotten like fall, even though the first spring Nathan had experienced in the last four years had come in the middle of these summer months. The crust of the Earth had slid off its axis, the arctic was now in the middle of the Atlantic, and America was one-third winter wasteland, one-third Siberian tundra, and one-third earthquakes and volcanoes. With that amount of natural confusion, spring could turn up any time it liked as far as Nathan was concerned.
Nathan had raised his hands, and he spoke calmly. “I’m Nathan Tolley. We have two kids, six adults including me, and a dog. We were hoping to come into Casper.”
“For what reason?” The woman’s voice and the barrel of the Remington didn’t waver. Behind her, men in checks and denims, shotguns over their shoulders, were looking out past the woman at Nathan. One plopped a brown spatter of tobacco juice onto the blacktop.
Nathan kept his voice level. “To stay. If you’ll have us.”
The woman didn’t move, and Nathan dared not lower his hands. He was dog tired, feeling like he hadn’t slept in half a lifetime, and his heart was broken.
The only thing that had kept him going since the death of his wife Cyndi had been the thought of getting his family and friends to the safety of Casper. A town they had heard, from sources on what was left of the internet, was doing okay. It was on the edge of the new Arctic Circle. The prairies were cold and wet, but they would nurture hardy crops and sustain livestock in a way that the landscape east of Casper wouldn’t.
Nathan and the others were pretty much out of food, and it felt like they were almost out of luck.
The woman still didn’t lower her gun. “We’re not authorized to let anyone through. You’ll have to make an application.”
Tobacco Juice snorted as he walked up closer to the woman and ga
ve a wry smile. Nathan got the impression that making an application wasn’t going to get them past the roadblock, however good it was, but he plowed on anyway. “Look, we heard Casper is a good place. We just want to come in and help. We’re ready to work—I’m a mechanic, a good one, and we have another. We also have two tech wizards and a woman who makes the best Bloody Mary’s outside New York.”
Nathan’s attempt at humor didn’t have the desired effect. It didn’t take the tension out of the situation one bit.
Tobacco Juice spat again, then leant in and whispered in the ear of the woman with the shotgun. Nathan couldn’t hear what was being said, but the woman lifted her elbows from the Cadillac hood. She kept the gun trained on Nathan’s chest.
“You got a medic in that wagon?”
“No,” Nathan replied, playing his ace, “but I do have the next best thing.”
“And what’s that?”
“That will be my application.”
Tobacco Juice’s face hardened. “You play games with us, Mister, and we’ll just shoot you all now.”
“I’m not playing games. I have the next best thing, but I’m not going to tell you what it is until I get certain guarantees.”
“Which are?”
“That I’ll be given a fair hearing by whoever it is I need to talk to in order to get my family and my friends into Casper.”
Tobacco Juice whispered to the woman, who at last lowered her shotgun, allowing Nathan to relax a hair. Since the fall of the Big Winter, there had been a lot of guns pointed at him, but he wasn’t getting used to it. Even though he was wearing a Kevlar vest below his North Face jacket, he didn’t feel any safer.
Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2) Page 26
