ANYONE ELSE?: (ANYONE Series Book 2) A post-apocalypic survival novel

by Angela Scott

  I decided to search out the kitchen and pantry. Food and water were the diamonds and precious jewels of our day. A can of SpaghettiOs or a tin of tuna were worth more than all the strings of pearls, Valentino clothes, and designer handbags combined. I did have a fleeting moment where I wondered if I might be able to transfer all my backpack belongings into the Hermés satchel I saw in one of the open closets, but I walked away, proud I didn’t succumb.

  I took a few wrong turns and opened a few wrong doors. After this happened a couple of times, I wondered if maybe they didn’t have a kitchen after all. Maybe their food was prepared by a celebrity chef and brought in three times a day. Rich people did crazy stuff like buying gold-plated toilets and Swarovski-encrusted fridges, so it wasn’t unthinkable.

  When I swung opened the set of doors that led to the large formal dining room, I figured I had to be close.

  Except, I didn’t get a chance to find out.

  I could hardly contain myself as I watched Cole sleep. Even Bob waking up to be fed didn’t affect him at all. He slept right through it. I debated on jiggling him, forcing him to get up, but decided against it since what was in the dining hall wasn’t going anywhere and Cole deserved to sleep.

  Instead, I balanced Bob on my hip and led Callie on her leash out back to use the bathroom. The deer followed us. She wandered around the gated property, nibbling on anything and everything. Feeding a deer inside Walmart had been so hard to do. The silver lining to the fire forcing us to leave, it had to be that I no longer seemed to have to worry about it. She took care of herself.

  I couldn’t help but upright one of the many overturned patio chairs. Most of the furniture had blown across the yard or tossed into the nearly empty pool. A foot of brown sludge, leaves, and trash lined the bottom. It gave off a garbage dump feel.

  I sat in the chair with Bob on my lap and held onto Callie’s retractable leash, giving her enough line to explore, sniff, and rub herself on whatever she wanted. We all needed a moment to be normal.

  The faint smell of smoke still hung in the air, but it was breathable. It seemed strange to sit by a pool, even an unusable one, when the day before we’d been running for our lives.

  Bob reached up and patted my face, bringing me out of my thoughts. I took his hand in mine, kissing his pudgy fists while I bounced him on my knees. “I’m not sure what we’re going to do, little man, but for right now, I’m going to kiss you all over.”

  I smeared him with kisses, fitting my face in the space between his chin and neck. He giggled. I lifted him up and blew raspberries on his tummy, and that’s when I noticed the movement on the other side of the fence.

  I pulled Bob to my chest, hit the button to reel Callie in, and jumped out of the chair, ready to run into the house.

  Movement equaled bad. Many of my experiences had proved exactly that. Go figure it would happen the first time I made the conscience decision to step outside after being in Walmart. Running from the fire didn’t count.

  Seeing something move in the distance was exactly why I had trust issues when it came to the outdoors.

  But the deer didn’t bolt.

  She sauntered toward the strange shadow as if there were nothing to worry about.

  What is she doing? Is she nuts?

  I was about to call for her, because it was a whole lot easier to deal with unknown movement from inside a safe place but stopped short from doing it. I stopped short from doing anything — not yelling for her, not going inside, not shouting for Cole.

  On the other side of the tall iron-wrought fence, a pair of antlers appeared. A grand set, majestic in size, rose from the brush. A twelve-point buck stared first at my deer — yes, my deer — and then looked at me. He didn’t find me nearly as impressive as I found him and turned back to stare at my little doe. She seemed so tiny in comparison.

  He snorted.

  She snorted in response and moved closer to the fence.

  Several other deer appeared a couple at a time, some to the left of him and a few others to the right. None of the other deer had antlers. Each seemed timid but curious. They were of various sizes, but none were as big and brutish as the male.

  I held Bob, staring at the small herd.

  Besides Callie, the deer, and the insane swarm of insects that had attacked Walmart, I hadn’t seen any other living creatures. Not even a bird.

  How had this group of deer survived? Where had they been?

  Were they magical, too?

  A herd of enchanted deer would be ultimate! I wasn’t even sure how I’d take care of a herd of supernatural deer, but I would sure as heck find a way.

  My deer gave a sound that could only be described as a pitiful cry. She paced our side of the fence, looking for an opening. When she couldn’t find one, she cried again.

  She glanced from me to the other deer on the opposite side. Several of the female deer pressed their noses between the rails. My deer touched them with the tip of her own. She wailed several times, and the male buck bellowed a response.

  “I think it’s time to let her go.” Cole glanced down at me from the balcony above.

  I knew that was true, but I didn’t want it to be.

  She’d saved my life. To let her walk away didn’t seem like the right thing to do, even if morally it was. Was I selfish? Yeah. What if we needed her again? What if something terrible happened and she wasn’t there to guide us?

  Who needed her more? The herd of deer or me?

  Obviously, it was me. Those deer had done amazingly on their own all this time. But keeping her would be wrong. So wrong.

  “You’ve still got me.” Cole smirked. “I’m still here.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. I was grateful for him but as far as magic went, a person couldn’t have enough. Especially, during an apocalypse.

  “I’m coming down.” Cole moved away from the balcony railing, but I could still hear him. “We need to open the gate for her.”

  A few yards down the way, a gate broke the monotony of the fence. Shoot, I hadn’t noticed it before. She had jumped a fence twice the size of this one, so if she wanted to leave, I couldn’t do anything about it.

  She kept looking at me, and I realized why she hadn’t already left.

  She needed me to let her go.

  And it was time to let her go. A herd of deer, appearing out of nowhere, made a pretty good argument for the case.

  I loved her, and that made for a pretty good case, too.

  Since she’d jumped into the hiking lean-to over a month before, I’d become used to her. Even her wild smell no longer bothered me. It was part of her. I guess I thought she’d always be with me. Where else would she go? I didn’t know what the future held, but I assumed she’d be a part of it.

  “Should I open the gate, or do you want to?” Cole placed a hand on my shoulder.

  I knew it had to be me. I handed Bob over to him and held out Callie’s leash as well.

  “You can do it,” he said, mimicking Rob Schneider.

  I ignored him and walked slowly to the gate. None of the deer seemed agitated by my presence. They watched me as I worked the clasp and swung the gate open.

  If the deer came inside, even the intimidating big one, I would keep them. That would be my sign. I would be a deer whisperer, but none of them came in. None of them even tried.

  My deer approached me, head down. She stopped at my side and tilted her head until she touched my arm.

  I gave her a few scratches under her chin and behind her wiggling ears, and then threw my arms around her neck and hugged her. “Thank you for everything.”

  When I felt ready, I unwrapped myself from her.

  She hesitated on our side of the gate only briefly and turned, looking at me once more with her large dark eyes.

  I nodded to her, and with my okay, she darted through the gate.

  The others approached her, accepting her into their fold. Without wasting time on deer introductions, they all sprinted off together, leaping over the n
eighbor’s dead bushes and flower gardens.

  I stood at the gate and watched until I couldn’t see a trace of them.

  I never imagined saying goodbye to a deer would be so hard.

  But it was.

  I left the gate wide open just in case.

  Chapter 39

  “Okay.” Cole bobbed his head several times, attempting to understand the magnitude of what I was showing him. “Not sure if I’m looking at someone’s act of genius or their sad descent into madness.”

  I completely understood. When I first opened the doors to the dining hall, I wasn’t sure what I’d been looking at either.

  Maps, short-wave radios, scanners, batteries of all shapes and sizes, scattered papers, markers, tacks, post it notes, pictures, webs of string linking various papers were taped to the walls. The entire room, which at one time probably hosted elaborate banquets, appeared much like an investigation scene from an espionage-CIA-FBI-who-done-it movie.

  Or a movie about a lunatic planning to take over the world.

  One or the other.

  “I think whoever did this was trying to figure out where to go.” I laid Bob on the floor and wrapped Callie’s leash to a chair before touching a small, wrinkled map of Texas pinned to one of the walls closest to us. “See the circles and x’s?” I waited for him to nod before running to a different wall and pointing to a giant list of cities and towns handwritten directly on the fancy wallpaper. Some were highlighted. Others were crossed out with dates and times written next to them. “Austin?” I pointed at him and motioned for him to look at the map.

  He glanced at it and then back to me. “Circled in black but then crossed out in red.”

  “Same here. It matches. Looks like it was crossed out back on the sixteenth of April at 11:42 a.m.” I felt as though I was on to something.

  “I wonder what happened at 11:42 a.m. for it to deserve an x through it,” he said as he watched me run to the opposite wall.

  “Beijing?”

  He wrinkled his brows. “That’s not in Texas.”

  “No kidding.” I waited for him to find the right map.

  He walked slowly around the room, eyeing the various papers and notes scattered on every flat surface. After leafing through several maps on the table, he found it. “Still circled.”

  I nodded and smiled. “See?”

  He held his hand, palm out, stopping me. “Slow down there, slugger. First of all, we can’t get to Beijing.” He paused for a moment and sighed. “I guess we could sail a boat or something, but you get my point. Possible, yes. Probable, not really. Way too many risks, and we don’t even speak the language. Second, until we go through all of this, we have no idea how old any of it is. Days, weeks, months? Beijing might need to be crossed out for all we know.”

  “I totally understand that, but it’s somewhere to start, don’t you think?” For the first time, I felt hope in an otherwise hopeless situation. I refused to let him crush it.

  “No, you’re right. There’s something here, I just don’t know what it is yet.” He leafed through the papers on the table. “All these hand-written notes will need to be sorted. A lot of them make no sense.” He looked up at me. “If there’s an answer here in the gibberish, it’s not going to be as easy as you think.”

  “That’s okay. We don’t have any kind of plan. Since we really didn’t have time to figure one out, why not start here, with all of this? I don’t think it would do any harm to at least try.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  I smiled. “And of all the houses to choose from, we picked this one. The one with the maps and radios and notes full of gibberish. Are you going to tell me that it’s just another coincidence like all the other coincidences up to this point?”

  He nodded. “Yep. Exactly that.”

  “Well, I’m not leaving here until I’ve gone through it all and decided whether or not any of this means anything.”

  He nodded again. “Figured.”

  “We have nothing to lose by trying.”

  “True. If nothing else, we can at least know where we shouldn’t go, right?”

  I sighed. “Right.” Though I really did hope for more than that.

  “Okay, then.” He pulled out one of the expensive dining chairs, sat down, and scooted it toward the table with his arms folded on top. “I guess we should get started.”

  We placed non-USA maps and notes on one end of the table, with everything else on the other. We needed to simplify and be realistic. To get to any other country that didn’t at least touch borders with the one we currently lived in would be darn near impossible. We limited our search to America and limited it even further by focusing on the states that adjoined ours. There had to be a safe place nearby. If nothing nearby seemed likely, too many X’s, then we’d expand the search, starting with the West coast and go from there.

  While I went through various notes, papers, and time frames, circling cities and crossing out others, Cole fiddled with the scanners and short-wave radios. Most of the batteries were dead, and it took him some time to find replacements. He searched the house and then ended up raiding some neighboring properties. After hours of turning dials and tweaking things here and there, we heard nothing but static.

  “There’s still a lot of channels to go through.” He switched the knob of one radio before turning the knob on another. “I’m not giving up yet.”

  His fascination with electronics and gadgets kept him engaged, and it reminded me of the time he carried a George Foreman grill back to his “lair” in the middle of a desert. I had barely known him then, and thought he was somewhat crazy for wanting the grill when there were so many other things he could’ve picked. Turned out, he tore that grill apart for its various pieces to use in his other many projects. It was then that I realize he wasn’t as dumb as I feared he might be.

  “How are you doing over there?” he asked. “Any luck?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without having the box it came in. I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like in the end.” I set my highlighter down on a stack of papers. “There’s just so much to go through.”

  He pushed away from the table and came to stand behind me, looking over my progress. “Maybe we should take a break.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  He tapped the map I’d been working on with his index finger. “That’ a whole lot of X’s right there.”

  I sighed and nodded. “Tell me about it.”

  Idaho had over a dozen cities crossed out. Colorado wasn’t much better. At one point, the Dakotas looked promising. Several hand-scratched notes later, that hope dissipated.

  “Looks like the West was hit hard.”

  “Definitely.” I motioned to a three-inch pile of notes and papers directly across the table from where I sat. “Those deal with the Mid-West and eastern states. I tried to sort by region, so I haven’t even gone through those yet, but…” I didn’t need to continue.

  He clapped his hands together. “Okay, that’s it. We need to take a time-out, so we can come back and look at this a little more clearly.” He scooped up Bob, content to play on the floor with wooden spoons and various-sized bowls from the kitchen, and turned to me. “This guy could use a bottle, a nap—” Cole crinkled his face. “—and from the smell of it, a new diaper, and you and I could use some fun.”

  Fun?

  Cole grinned.

  I shook my head. “A bottle, a nap, and a new diaper? Okay, but we don’t have—”

  He placed a finger over my lips, shushing me. “There’s always time for fun, Tess. Always.”

  I’d read enough and seen enough to know that rides in shopping carts, playing video games, and shooting hoops — all of which he made me do at one time or another — had no place in an apocalypse. Not really.

  The survival book I’d shoved in his backpack said nothing about fun. Nothing.

  Besides, I still had so much to go through. A break would only
put us further behind.

  He took my hand. “Come on. Grab your crazy cat. Let’s put these two down for a nap and have ourselves a little party. I know you want to.” He smiled.

  Up to this point, he’d been pretty good at reading my thoughts. This time, not so much.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said. “We almost died yesterday, but we didn’t. Today, this room and everything in it is overwhelming. We need to do something different. You and me. We need it.”

  We needed food. We needed water. We needed to feel safe. We needed to find people. We needed to rebuild our lives. Nobody partied during an apocalypse.

  “I do.” He winked at me. “And you do. We need to feel normal for a minute. Before you even say there’s nothing normal about our situation, that’s exactly why we need this break. We need to remember how to live, not just survive minute to minute. In all this chaos, it’s easy to forget.”

  I glanced at the large windows. “What about the fire? Shouldn’t we—”

  “I’ve kept my eye on it. It’s moved past us, long gone, so no more excuses.” He started toward the door, rubbing Bob’s back and watching me. “The rest of this will wait, I promise.”

  Always with the promises.

  This was Cole. This was exactly who he was — promises and craziness.

  He wasn’t easily swayed when he had an idea, even awful ones. I took a deep breath and let it out. “Is this party of yours casual or formal?”

  His grin widened from one ear to the other. “Oh, it’s formal, all right. Formal all the way. In a place like this, it wouldn’t be a party if it weren’t.”

  Chapter 40

  The floor to ceiling mirror reflected an image I hadn’t seen in months. I stood inside a closet the size of a small bedroom, wearing a pale pink, strapless Zuhair Murad and matching Jimmy Choo heals. I almost forgot what I used to look like, before living in survival mode, where sturdy boots and worn out jeans were the norm.