by K. M. Fawkes
After a brief hesitation, she shook his hand. “Anna Carson. This is my son, Sammy.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said. Okay, the endorphins had apparently dissipated quickly. He’d just pulled a gun on her child and she’d tried to gut him. And he’d said “nice to meet you.”
“Are you going to ask us to leave?” Sammy asked when his mother didn’t say anything in response to Brad. “Because I don’t want to go out right now. It’s scary out there without lights.”
“No,” Brad said. “I was actually going to ask if you’d had anything to eat.”
“Cold ravioli,” Sammy answered. “It’s gross.”
“Yeah, it is,” Brad agreed wholeheartedly. “But don’t worry, I’ve got way better stuff than that. I’m guessing you guys didn’t find the cellar?”
“No,” Anna said as she followed Brad down the stairs. “Are you going to show us?”
“Not tonight,” he answered, shaking his head. “We’ll have to wait until the sun is up to find it. But I have some other stuff in my backpack, and I can get the stove going so we can heat something up.”
“I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea,” Anna said. “Won’t someone see the smoke?”
“That’s a smart thing to worry about,” Brad agreed. “But I don’t think so. I came here today from Patten and didn’t see another soul.”
“Is that where you’re from?” Anna asked. “Patten?”
Brad shook his head. “No, I’m from Bangor, but I left there two days ago.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, pretending not to notice the small bit of resentment that crept into her tone. He couldn’t blame her, really. He’d pretty much crashed her party.
“Why not?” he asked rhetorically. “I knew that this was here.” He gestured around at the immaculate cabin. “Who wouldn’t prefer this to rats walking over them in their sleep?”
“You had rats?” Sammy asked, looking up at Brad in interest.
“Well, they weren’t mine,” Brad said. “They came with the apocalypse.”
Anna laughed and shook her head. Brad smiled in relief.
“I had a hamster once,” the boy continued. “I got him when I started kindergarten. But he died last year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Brad replied genuinely.
“It’s okay,” Sammy said. “We gave him a Viking funeral.”
Brad raised his eyebrows at Anna. Her cheeks flushed slightly and she looked down.
“You made him a boat?” Brad asked.
“Mom made it out of toothpicks and we set it out on the river,” Sammy said. “We had to set it on fire first though, because neither of us has a bow and arrow. And even if we had, it would have had to be really, really small.”
Brad nodded seriously. “Makes sense to me. What was your hamster’s name?”
“Foggy. He was gray.”
“You’re a logical fellow,” Brad responded.
Sammy continued to talk about his hamster as Brad got the fire going, but he didn't mind. He’d always been better with kids than he had been with adults. Anna stayed quiet, simply watching him as he worked.
Once the blaze was going strong, he walked them around the house, making sure that things were locked up tight. There were a few windows on the ground level that had been opened, so he closed and locked them.
“I got hot,” Sammy said. “That’s why Mom raised those.”
“I know it can get a little stuffy sometimes in the afternoons,” Brad said. “But it’s safer to just leave the upstairs windows up. That way, no one will get in. Unless they have a ladder, that is. And I don’t think those are the first thing on anyone’s list with all of this going on.”
Brad glanced at Anna after the sentence had left his mouth. He tended to shoot pretty straight with kids, but she might not appreciate him saying something like that to her son.
When she only nodded in agreement, he let out his breath in relief. She seemed to get what he was saying without getting all tangled up in the way that he’d said it, which he appreciated.
“We’ll remember that,” she said.
On their way back around the lower level, he made sure to lock the front door as well. When he bolted the three locks and slid the chain into place, Anna’s mouth pressed into a tight line and she looked down at her son.
“See why I asked you to lock it?” she said. “If you don’t keep the doors locked, anyone can just walk right in, can’t they?”
“Yes,” Sammy said, looking down at his shoes for a moment. “But it was his house!” he added defiantly.
“But it might not have been,” Anna said firmly. “I’ve told you before that you can’t be too careful!”
“And it doesn’t belong to anyone else,” Brad added. “So let’s just be sure to keep it locked from now on, okay?”
“Okay,” Sammy said, looking up again. “Can we eat now?”
The stove wouldn’t be heated up enough to cook on; that would take most of the night. The door was big enough for Brad to hold a pot over the flames, though, and in about ten minutes’ time, they had spaghetti—and it wasn’t the kind from a can. Anna pulled some bowls down and Brad filled them up, pouring sauce over the noodles.
Then, he gestured to the table and Anna and Sammy took their seats while he filled their water glasses with some of the bottled water Lee kept in the pantry. Midnight was probably an odd time to sit down to a big bowl of pasta, but they didn’t seem to mind any more than he did.
Sammy grinned at his mother after he took the first bite of dinner. “This is way better, Mom.”
She smiled back, already twirling a second bite around her fork. “Yes, it is, honey. What do you say?”
The boy turned back to Brad. “Thank you, Mr. Fox.”
“You’re welcome. You can call me Brad, though. If it’s okay with your mom, that is.”
Anna hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “Sure.”
“I’ve seen a lot of foxes since we got here,” Sammy went on, plowing his fork into the noodles and slurping them up with more enthusiasm than skill. “But we didn’t see a lot when we were on our way. I think the horse scared them.”
Brad’s eyes widened in surprise. “You have a horse?”
“Yeah, he was Mr. Brayden’s horse, but we borrowed him.” Sammy picked up his glass and drank quickly before he resumed his eager consumption of spaghetti.
Anna raised her chin in that defiant gesture again when Brad glanced her way with a raised eyebrow.
“It was a smart move,” Brad said. “Traveling on foot isn’t a good option right now.”
She seemed to relax slightly as she nodded. “That’s what I figured. And it wasn’t like I could just hop in the car. I wanted a way to get away fast.”
“Horses are a great option for that,” he agreed. “If you want, I can look him over for you, make sure he’s doing okay. It was probably a long ride.”
She tilted her head before she took a sip from her own water glass. “Why would you—”
“Oh, I’m a vet,” he hurried to explain. “At least, I used to be. Before everything…” he trailed off. “Anyway, I had my own practice back in Bangor.”
“Cool!” Sammy said, polishing off the last bite of his pasta with a slurp and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, ignoring the napkin that his mother pushed toward him. “Did you work on a lot of horses?”
“A few,” Brad said. “But not a whole lot. I mostly helped out cats and dogs and smaller animals.”
“Like hamsters?”
“Every once in a while.” Brad smiled at the kid. “Even a few gray ones.”
“Maybe one of them was Foggy,” Sammy said. “I mean, cats get nine lives, right? Maybe hamsters do, too. They’re just as cool as cats.”
“Maybe,” Brad said with a laugh. “I don’t see why they wouldn’t.” As Sammy busied himself wiping his hands and mouth on the napkin that Anna had finally forced into his hands, Brad turned his attention to her. “So, how lo
ng were you two on the road?”
“Five weeks,” Anna said.
Brad stared at her. “Five weeks?” he repeated. “Are you serious? You didn’t go to one of the safe houses?”
“No,” she said flatly, her eyes darkening with a memory she clearly didn’t want to talk about. “Come on, Sammy. Let’s go get some of the apples we picked and we can have dessert. Then, it’s time for bed.”
“It’s way past bedtime,” Sammy corrected. “But this is more fun.”
She took her son’s hand and they disappeared up the stairs. A few minutes later, they came back down. Sammy was carrying two large apples, one of which he handed over to Brad.
“We don’t know what kind these are,” he said. “But I love them.”
“William’s Pride,” Brad said, taking a huge bite of the purplish-red apple. They always tasted like fall to him, no matter what time of year he first bit into one. Lee had grown them because it was so easy to dry the slices, but Brad had always eaten his fill before drying time began. He chewed the bite quickly and then said, “I’m glad you found the fruit trees.”
“They’re hard to miss,” Anna said after swallowing her own bite. “That’s a big orchard.”
In addition to the apple trees, which were apparently doing well, there were Flemish Beauty and Harrow pears out there somewhere. They stood up against the cold very well and Lee had made pear wine with the fruit he hadn’t eaten fresh or canned. There might be a few bottles of that stashed somewhere, actually. It was probably even better for stress and anxiety than carnation tea.
“Are the plums doing okay?”
Anna shrugged. “I guess. They taste pretty sour to me, though, so I thought maybe they weren’t ripe.”
“You probably got some of the Damson plums,” he said. “They’re more for making jam than for eating right off of the tree. There’s another variety out there that tastes a lot better fresh. I think it’s called Green Gage. We’ll look for that tomorrow, too, if you want.”
“Sure,” Sammy said without waiting for his mother to speak.
“Did you plant all of this?” Anna asked.
“I helped with some of it. But mostly it was my dad; all he has to do is look at something and it grows. He’s got a real green thumb.” Brad paused suddenly, not sure whether he should be using the present tense or not.
The fact that his father wasn’t here was finally starting to sink in, now that no one was waving a knife at him. The meal he’d just had helped, too. His brain always clicked a little better after he’d eaten something. The implications of what his dad’s absence could mean were also beginning to play through his mind, but he rejected most of them. He just couldn’t imagine Lee dying in any post-apocalyptic scenario.
There was no way that his father would have gotten the nanobot injection. He probably wouldn’t have intentionally associated himself with anyone who had, either. Of course, that didn’t mean that he hadn’t come in contact with someone anyway.
In the later days, it had been hard to tell who might have been infected. No one was immune. The news outlets had stressed that over and over.
“I’m gonna take Sammy up to bed,” Anna said. The boy had rested his head on his arms and he had the thousand-yard stare of a kid determined not to fall asleep, but was clearly already more than halfway there.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine,” Brad said. Obviously it’s fine, he chided himself. Sammy was her son; she could do whatever she wanted. “I’m gonna…be around.”
“We’re sharing the bigger room,” Anna said as she stood up and tugged Sammy to his feet. He shuffled to the stairs with her reluctantly, but since he was too tired to even argue, Brad didn’t foresee any protests. “So your room is still free.”
“Thanks.” Knowing that he’d have his own bedroom back was a relief, but he tried not to let it show.
The sense of home that he still felt here was a large part of what had driven him along for so many hours today. He’d only been able to bike about half of it. After that, he’d had to push the bike and walk because the terrain was so rough. It hadn’t done his sore muscles any good.
Again, despite his exhaustion, he was too keyed-up to sleep. It seemed to be a new trend in his life. He wanted to give Anna some time to get Sammy settled in and to get ready for bed herself without feeling like he was intruding, so he went into the living room and dropped down onto the old leather couch.
As he stared into the unlit fireplace, wanting to make a fire and yet too tired to actually get up and do it, he went back to the question that wouldn’t leave him. Why wouldn’t Lee be here? His mind scrambled for a good reason, but there just wasn’t one.
His father would have seen this coming from a mile away. Brad knew that for a fact, because he’d determinedly ignored every sign of it himself. He’d seen it coming, too; he just hadn’t acted on it.
Everything he knew about Lee told him that his father would have headed for the cabin at the first sign of trouble. And yet, he wasn’t here. There was only one thing that he knew for sure would have prevented his father’s arrival here, and that was Lee’s death.
Brad thought back to the last thing he’d said to his father.
“I don’t care, okay? I don’t care! None of your bullshit scenarios are ever going to happen and I’ve been sitting here freaking out for a whole week for nothing! I called Mom and I’m leaving!”
He’d left the cabin that summer night and he’d never gone back. He hadn’t answered any of the calls his father had made after that. He hadn’t responded to any of the letters that came after the phone calls had stopped either. He hadn’t even read them. Eventually, after the next summer had come and gone with no contact between them, both of those attempts had tapered off and then stopped. And now, his father wasn’t here, and he didn’t know what to do about that.
Chapter 10
“Hi.”
Brad turned his head and saw Anna standing in the doorway, holding one of the oil lamps. It cast shadows and awoke flashes of gold in her dark blond hair.
“Hi,” he answered.
She bit her lip, looking more unsure of herself than he’d seen her before. Probably because her son wasn’t around to have to be strong for.
“Am I bothering you?”
“No, come on in.”
She put the oil lamp on the table between them and took a seat in the big armchair across from the couch. She tucked her feet underneath her and looked across at him.
“Is it okay with you if we talk a little?”
“Yeah.” He gave her a quick smile. “I mean, we’re sharing a house. It’s probably better if we know something about each other.”
She smiled back. “That’s kind of what I thought. I also thought that you looked really surprised when I said that we’d been on the road for five weeks. I guess you haven’t been.”
“No,” he said. “I was only on the road for the two days it took to get here from Bangor. And I was surprised because I thought that everyone got moved into safe houses before then.”
She shook her head. “We weren’t offered the chance.”
“How come?” Brad asked. “Where are you from?”
“Island Falls.” Her brows drew together as she spoke.
“I don’t think I know exactly where that is,” he said. “Is it in Maine?”
If she’d come from somewhere else, it might explain the long travel times.
“It’s about an hour and a half away from Bangor,” she said. When his eyebrows rose in surprise, she smiled—just a quick lift of the left side of her mouth. “I’m not really surprised that you don’t know, though. There aren’t a lot of us there. There weren’t a lot of us,” she corrected herself with a sigh. “We had around eight hundred people, but there were a lot of tourists in the summer. None of that really matters, now,” she said. “Sammy and I might be the only ones left, but I don’t know that for sure.”
“What happened?” he asked. When she frowned again, he hurried on to say, “Yo
u don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I know it’s really none of my business.”
“No,” she said. “I’m living in your house and you’ve been generous enough to share your food. I should repay that with some honesty.” She took a deep breath and began. “Somehow, we didn’t get hit very hard with the virus. I don’t know if it was the fact that most of us were just too poor to have it, or if it was the fact that most of us stick close to home most of the time. People don’t really come to Island Falls unless they’re looking for a vacation, so we didn’t have a lot of outsiders come pouring in when things got really bad.”
She shrugged helplessly. “Then again, maybe we were just lucky. I honestly don’t know.”
“Then…I don’t understand,” Brad said, confused. “If everything was so good there, why would you leave?”
Anna sighed and leaned back, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. Her voice was strained when she asked her next question, but she didn’t let any tears fall.
“Did the military come to Bangor?”
“Sure,” he said. “I assumed they went everywhere.”
“What did they do?” she asked tightly.
“They took us all to the hospital to be scanned and then moved us into a safe house,” Brad said. “They told us to stay put at an apartment complex they’d stocked and then they left. They said they’d come back, but once the EMP went off, we didn’t see them again.”
Her eyes widened and she leaned forward to see him better in the low light of the lamp. “Really? I mean…you’re serious? That’s it?”
“Yeah,” he said, wondering why she was starting to shake. “What do you mean? What did they do in Island Falls?”
Anna’s knuckles went white as she clenched her hands in her lap. “Nothing like that,” she said.
Chapter 11
Five Weeks Earlier
“Hey Mom! Come here! Look at all the trucks!”
Anna looked away from the television and out of the small living room window. Her blood seemed to turn to ice as she saw a row of olive-green jeeps roll to a stop, lining their street. She put her hands on Sammy’s shoulders, moving him slightly to the side, out of the center of the window.
