Marcus did as he was told. He didn’t want to believe it either. Thoughts of Harper crept into his head again and he tried to block them out, unable to see his girlfriend’s face without knowing that it could one day be a reality again. He couldn’t do it to himself. It was too painful. Tightening his grip on the steering wheel, Marcus focused only on the road ahead of him and nothing else. He blocked out their surroundings and narrowed his gaze, speeding forward with the hope that something—anything—would appear.
Fifteen minutes later he was finally forced to stop the car and instantly, he broke down in tears. Ahead of the three boys was the Delaware River. They had crossed Philadelphia and reached the end of the city. The end of the state. On the other side lay New Jersey, a place that meant nothing and had nothing for them. Philadelphia was gone.
“I don’t understand,” Jesse murmured, his voice wavering as he spoke through the sound of Marcus’s tears. “Where is everything?”
“It’s gone,” Jadon whispered from behind him, his heart hammering in his chest as he saw everything for reality at last. “It’s all gone.”
“It can’t be gone,” Jesse replied, his voice quiet and absent, like it wasn’t really coming from him. He felt like he was in a dream or a trance, like what he was witnessing wasn’t real and that everything would change if he just gave it some time. “This can’t just be it.”
“It is,” Marcus announced, the tears still sliding silently down his cheeks. “The city is gone, and the people are dead. And soon,” he paused, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly. “Soon we will be too.”
Chapter 21
Just over a week had passed since Jadon, Marcus, and Jesse left the farmhouse, leaving the Clarke family behind to fend for themselves entirely. Aside from that, nothing had changed. The dirty, gray snow still fell outside, and the darkness surrounded them every waking hour. There was no respite from the effects of Yellowstone. The eruption had changed the world forever and it wasn’t going to let up any time soon.
Mia sat in the kitchen by herself with her head in her hands. She had just finished yet another count of the remaining food they had in the pantry and things didn’t look good. If they didn’t go out and find some food somewhere, then her family wasn’t going to survive for much more than another couple of weeks. Everyone had known this day would come eventually, but she hadn’t imagined it being so soon. Mia felt like she had only just gotten her family back and now at least one of them was going to have to leave the farmhouse in search of food. Without a vehicle it was an almost impossible task, but if they wanted to stand any chance of surviving, she knew it needed to be done. The only question was when and who would be the one to do it, though she already knew she couldn’t bring herself to ask anyone else to go.
“Hey Mia, you all right?”
Looking up, Mia smiled as her nephew Chase strolled into the kitchen with his grandmother’s favorite coffee mug in his hands. “Yeah,” she replied with a nod, “just going over our supplies.”
Chase gave Mia a concerned look, well aware what would be going through her mind. “You know,” he half grinned, “counting the cans over and over again isn’t going to make any more of them appear.”
Mia rolled her eyes at the attempt at humor, though she knew there was some truth behind what Chase was saying. Maybe she was losing her mind; after all, her go-to definition of crazy was someone who did the same thing over and over again expecting different results. She couldn’t lose herself in the what ifs and maybes; she had to stay strong and keep searching for a solution. Because there had to be one. No matter how bleak the situation looked, Mia refused to give up hope. She’d faced worse worries than an empty pantry over the past few weeks. This was nothing she and her family couldn’t handle.
“Very funny,” she indulged the teenage boy. “I take it you’ll be the first to volunteer to eat plain rice every day?”
Chase screwed up his face and stuck his tongue out, showing Mia how unappealing he found her suggestion. “Things aren’t really that bad, are they?” he then asked seriously, setting down Linda’s coffee mug on the side and leaning over to look at the page where Mia had been scribbling down her calculations. Everything was there: each type of food and the number they had left, alongside how many days total Mia thought it would last split between the four of them. “Hmm,” Chase mused sadly. No matter which way he looked at it, the figures weren’t good. They were going to run out of food, and it didn’t take him long to reach the same conclusion his aunt had come to.
“We’re going to have to go out and try to find more food, aren’t we?”
Mia nodded. “I don’t think there’s any way around it,” she sighed. “I just didn’t think this would happen so quickly.”
Looking at his aunt, Chase could tell how much this troubled her. The last thing that any of them wanted was to have to split up and go outside again. The weather wasn’t exactly worsening anymore, but it was still horrific. The frost found its way into almost everything, the farmhouse never quite warm despite the fire burning almost constantly. That was yet another thing that they had been forced to start rationing though, the supply of firewood wearing thin and all of them reluctant to start destroying the furniture just to have something to burn.
“It’ll be okay,” Chase tried to comfort Mia, putting an arm around her and squeezing tight. “We’ll figure this out. Do you want me to go and get some maps so we can try and decide where to look?”
Mia let the warmth from Chase’s body comfort her for a moment before replying, nodding her head against his shoulder. “Sure,” she confirmed. “Thanks, Chase.”
“No problem,” he smiled at her. “I better take Grandma her coffee first, she’ll be wondering where I’ve gone to.”
“Okay,” Mia returned the smile, then frowned as yet another concern crossed her mind. “Maybe don’t mention any of this to your grandma just yet, eh? I don’t really want her stressing about anything else.”
Chase nodded in agreement. “Sure. Don’t worry, Mia; we’ve all been through worse things than this. We’ll figure it out, we always do.”
Appreciative of the kind words, Mia went back to making calculations on her scrap paper while Chase poured a mug of coffee for his grandma—leaving plenty in the pot for him and Mia to enjoy as well—and went back upstairs. Linda and Riley were snuggled together in the den reading. There wasn’t a great deal else to do in the farmhouse now. They couldn’t go outside, and they couldn’t do anything that required power. That sort of limited them to reading or obsessing over their supplies and survival, as Mia was.
“Okay, hit me,” Chase announced as he returned to the kitchen a couple of minutes later. “Let’s find a solution to all of this chaos.”
Mia couldn’t help but smile at her nephew, thankful for his positive attitude and disposition. It certainly stopped her from feeling like they were dealing with a life-or-death situation. She had been incredibly lucky from the moment Yellowstone erupted to have a support system working alongside her. Sure, parts of that had broken down along the journey as a result of people either going their own way or—in Jorge’s case—changing as a person, yet throughout it all she had never been alone.
Looking back on the experience, Mia knew just how different it would’ve been by herself and she was grateful she had never had to find it out firsthand. She wished she could’ve been with her family since day one, but all things considered, she knew she had been lucky with the group she’d ended up with. Her only real regret was not making it home in time to see her father one last time. While she’d caught up with her mom and the kids on everything else in detail, Jerry’s death was the one thing Mia hadn’t wanted to know much more about. It was bad enough that she had arrived so shortly after—any other details that might make her feel worse had just been ignored.
All things considered, it was one of the reasons why Mia was so worried about the next step of going out to find more supplies. She was terrified she would have to leave and come back to
another family member dead. No matter how much she rationalized with herself that it wasn’t going to happen, it still haunted her and made her value every last second she was able to spend in the farmhouse with her loved ones.
“So, this is the nearest store,” Chase announced, focusing Mia’s attention back on him and the maps that he was poring over. “I reckon it’ll have been ransacked already though, don’t you?”
“Almost definitely,” Mia agreed immediately. She remembered the store that she had found with Jadon, Jesse, and Marcus and the trap they had walked into there. They’d been lucky to get away with their lives that day; it wasn’t a process she wanted to repeat any time soon. Following that, they had broken into abandoned homes in search of food, which had worked much better for them. Telling Chase that, he nodded along, listening carefully to what his aunt was saying and scanning the maps on the table as she spoke.
“Okay,” he replied after a pause. “So what about these houses here?” He pointed to an area on the local map, a place where a friend of his used to live. “Or here?” He identified another possible area, this time in the opposite direction.
Mia consulted Chase’s suggestions and hummed under her breath, weighing up the pros and cons for each of them. Both would take the best part of a day to walk to, the remote location of the farmhouse not doing them any favors in that sense, but there was absolutely nothing they could do about that. It was a shame they were so far apart—the farmhouse pretty much smack in the middle of them—as it meant both locations couldn’t be checked out at the same time. Mia could only imagine what a disaster it would be if they picked the wrong one and went all that way for nothing.
“Mikey used to live here,” Chase commented, pointing again to the first place he’d identified. “His parents kept horses and had loads of ATVs too—you remember it was where I did a dirt rally once?”
“Ahh, yes.” Mia recalled the weekend. It was before Brogan and Lauren had died, but she had gone along to watch anyway, always a part of the family events. Chase and several of his friends had all made a track through the fields, forming a little racetrack that they then invited everyone down to so they could speed around on ATVs and basically have an absolute riot. There were maybe six or seven large houses in that area that would have all had large pantries and full cupboards. The fact they had that snippet of information gave it the advantage and that was enough for Mia to decide to try there first. Now all she had to do was get there.
“I remember,” she replied to Chase. “That sounds like a good place to start, then. I’ll try and get out in a couple of days. There should be enough food to last here for another week or so. That said, I’d like to get out there before it’s too late.”
Chase snapped his head up in Mia’s direction, catching on to what she was suggesting. “Hang on a minute,” he exclaimed. “When did we agree that you’d be going?”
“Come on, Chase,” Mia replied straightening up slightly in her seat and looking at her nephew. “You don’t really think I’m going to let you go out there again, do you?”
“You can’t do it alone,” Chase immediately argued back, making sure to keep his voice level and rational, while conveying how serious he was. It wasn’t safe out there for anyone and he didn’t want Mia going alone. She might be the adult in the house, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t susceptible to the effects of the volcano. Everyone needed to be careful and that included her. “Let me come with you.”
“You can’t, Chase,” Mia shook her head. “One of us needs to be here to look after Riley and your grandma. As much as I’d love to have you with me, we both know that can’t happen. I need to go out and do this, and you have to stay behind and look after the family.”
Chase looked at Mia, shaking his head slowly and trying to come up with an alternative. “Let me and Riley go,” he suggested. “We did it before.”
“Absolutely not. That is out of the question, Chase.”
The teenager huffed and sat back in his seat. He hadn’t expected Mia to go for that idea, and he was still reluctant to agree to her heading out on her own. He had only just gotten his family back and even then, it was barely held together. He’d lost so many people; Chase couldn’t stand to let anyone else walk out of the door when he didn’t know for certain whether they would return.
“Well, I don’t want you going out on your own either,” he pouted, unable to keep the teenage angst from creeping into his tone. “And I bet Grandma will agree with me.”
“Chase, come on,” Mia pursed her lips, seeing exactly what her nephew was doing. Any other day she would be laughing. Despite how much they both wanted everyone to stay at home and be safe, it just wasn’t an option. “I know this is hard. We have to be rational about this. I know you’ve been through a lot with your sister in Houston, but I’m still your guardian and I have the final say. I don’t want to fight with you over this, but you need to accept that this is how it’s going to go. I have to go out alone.”
“What’s this?”
Chase and Mia both turned in unison, both so wrapped up in their conversation that they had failed to notice Linda and Riley coming down the stairs and into the kitchen. The new arrivals had both clearly heard the end of the discussion and stood with expecting expressions on their faces, waiting for the full truth to be told.
“What’s going on?” Linda continued, wrapping the folds of her oversized cardigan around her body for warmth. “What’s this about someone going outside? I thought we’d all agreed that was out of the question in this weather.”
Mia looked at her mother and sighed. This wasn’t a conversation she would’ve ever been able to avoid. Her chest felt heavy from the pressure of it and suddenly, she was overwhelmed with tiredness. Even though she had come back to her home and ended her journey in some respects, she still hadn’t been able to rest. Mia had been fully switched on and on-the-go from the second Yellowstone erupted and it was truly taking its toll on her body and mind. She was exhausted, and the end wasn’t even in sight yet. There was no time to slow down or to rest; she had to keep going—keep fighting—or she risked losing everything she was doing it for.
“We need more food,” she answered bluntly, aware that there was zero point in mincing her words now. “We’re going to run out soon and someone needs to leave the house to go and gather more supplies.”
The statement fell hard and heavy on both Linda and Riley, staring at Mia with shocked expressions. Neither of them was an idiot. They both knew in the back of their minds that this day would come eventually, but both had been trying to ignore the truth. Both had been so wrapped up in their emotions over the last few days that they had tried to live in blissful ignorance of what was really going on in the world. Now that time was over, and it was time to face reality.
“We can’t go outside,” Riley whispered, squeezing her grandmother’s hand tightly as she spoke and reverting back to her childlike mannerisms. “And we don’t have a car anymore. How are we going to get food?”
“I’m going to walk,” Mia stated, refusing to let her voice break on the statement. “Chase is going to stay here with you both and take care of you until I’m back—though I know you don’t really need it. I shouldn’t be more than a couple of days; there’s enough food for the three of you until then.”
Chase bit his lip as Mia spoke, understanding that she needed him to keep quiet and be on her side now. Even though he didn’t completely agree with her and wasn’t happy about her going back out on her own, he knew that he needed to act like he was in support of it in order to comfort Linda and Riley. The most important thing now was keeping the pair of them safe and Chase knew that in order for him to play his part, he needed to make a sacrifice and not fight Mia on this. She knew how he felt, but they needed to work together for the greater good of their family.
“Mia,” Linda pleaded softly, unsettled by what she was hearing. “You can’t go out there by yourself, surely not?”
“I need to, Mom,” Mia replied calml
y. “I’ll be fine, don’t you worry about me.”
“It’s my job to worry, sweetheart.” Linda half smiled at her daughter. “I’m your mother. That’s what I do, you know that.”
Mia looked at her mom and nodded, understanding what she was saying. It was exactly the same way that she felt about Chase and Riley and so because of that she knew that Linda had to understand what she was doing to some extent. This wasn’t an easy decision for anyone. It was just what needed to be done and so with a great amount of courage and determination, the Clarke family accepted it and prepared for what was about to come. It was only a day later that Mia found herself standing by the kitchen door preparing to leave. The moment had come around so quickly; she almost wasn’t ready for it now. But there was no turning back. This was what she needed to do. And she had faith she would be back before long.
“I’ll see you all soon,” she whispered tenderly to her family, unsure what to say to the three of them. She didn’t want to say goodbye or make it emotional, aware that that would just plant the seed of doubt regarding her return. Then again, she felt like she had to say something. She had missed out on saying a true farewell to her father. She didn’t want the same to happen with everyone else.
“Take care of yourselves. I love you.”
As Linda, Chase, and Riley all murmured back their love for Mia in return, she slid out of the doorway and closed it behind her. Once again, she was on the wrong side of the farmhouse and once again, she wanted nothing more than to go back inside. Regardless, Mia had a job to do and she wasn’t going to turn it away. She had to provide for her family, and she had to do it quickly. So, ensuring her Re-Breather was fastened tightly around her face, Mia squared her shoulders and set out into the unknown. No way of knowing if she would ever see her family again but filled with a determination to make it so.
Escaping Darkness (Book 6): The Shadows Page 15
