by K. M. Fawkes
He wasn’t sure how much longer he could walk, but he didn’t think that either of them had much energy left. The thought of setting up the tent wasn’t pleasant, but he supposed that he would have no choice. Brad squared his shoulders and headed out of the woods.
Based on his last look at the map, before the sun had finally disappeared, Brad knew he was near a lake, but there was no sound of water lapping on the shore—the lake was probably at least eight inches of ice by now. It might have made better sense to camp in the woods, but he really didn’t want to stumble around in the shadows trying to find a clear place for the tent. The shore would be much easier and tonight, aching from his head to his toes, that was exactly what he needed.
Remington followed him closely and soon, they were out in the open. The wind that had whined around them while they were in the trees seemed to slice into Brad now. The sweat that had gathered at the small of his back and under his arms felt like it had flash frozen and he gritted his teeth to keep back a swear of mingled pain and annoyance.
Maybe he would have to set up camp in the woods after all. He couldn’t imagine trying to grapple with the tent poles and thin fabric out here alone. Remington was helpful, but without thumbs there just wasn’t much that the dog could do.
The wind blew away the clouds that had covered the nearly full moon and Brad caught his breath. There was a house sitting on the shore of the lake. It wasn’t as big as some of the other lakefront homes he had seen. In fact, the place looked almost squat and cramped under the harsh light of the cold moon. Then again, he wasn’t there to feature it in a magazine.
Brad was moving toward it before he’d even fully processed what he had decided to do. All he really knew was that he didn’t want to sleep outside if he could help it. The weeks in the retirement community had softened him up. The broken promise of the warm bed in the truck had made him bitter on top of that. Unless it was occupied, he was going to spend the night in that house.
Remington’s paws skidded as they walked up the steps and Brad made sure to get a good grip on the handrail. The last thing he needed to do was sprain an ankle. Or, knowing his luck, break his damn leg.
As he moved closer to the building, he could see that every window was dark. That didn’t mean anything by itself; it wasn’t like he had expected to stumble upon a family having a movie night or anything. He moved down the short porch, glancing pointlessly into the few windows there were along the front. He guessed that they’d saved their glass budget for the back of the house. That part would face the lake.
No smoke rose from the chimney, nor could he smell any in the air. Surely anyone living here would have made a fire tonight—the inside wouldn’t be much warmer than the outside without it.
Brad stood on the porch, shifting his weight from one numb leg to the other. He was exhausted but irresolute. Escaping multiple death cults probably did that to a person. Still, it wasn’t like freezing to death was better than taking his chances with anyone who might be hiding in here.
He hadn’t seen any signs of habitation in the woods or on the stony beach, he rationalized. The cabin wasn’t near any others so he doubted that it was claimed by any type of community that might have taken root here. It was probably perfectly fine.
That didn’t motivate him forward. Instead, he stood there, frozen not by the cold air and clumped-up snow, but by his own fear. He couldn’t tell anymore what was panic and what was instinct. If he opened that door, what would greet him?
Remington pawed at the door, giving a low whine as he looked at Brad. The dog seemed fine and Brad knew for a fact that animals could sense things on a level he couldn’t. Then again, Remington was a friendly dog. He might not react to people being in the house because, put simply, he liked people. Brad had been iffy before all of the attempted murders. Now he was firmly suspicious of his fellow man. Still…
Suddenly the fear broke and Brad acted before it could grow to paralyze him again. A quick wriggle of the door knob and the plain oak-and-glass door opened easily. There was no ominous screech of disused hinges. No thump of a heartbeat from under the floorboards, either. Brad rolled his eyes at his own imagination.
Still, once the door had swung open, he remained where he was on the porch. Nothing moved toward him or dropped down onto his head. He tried to listen for footsteps or voices over the howling of the wind off of the icy lake, but he couldn’t hear a thing. Something brushed his leg and Brad watched as Remington trotted confidently into the house.
He watched, swallowing back the urge to call the dog as Remy began to explore. The door had opened straight into the living room and the dog was currently sniffing at the couch. He sneezed suddenly and violently and then shook his head, making his golden ears flap.
More dust rose in the light of the moonbeams that spilled in around Brad, who still stood in the doorway watching carefully for movement other than the dog’s. There was none. He could see now that Remington’s paws had left prints in the thick layer of dust on the hardwood.
That was as good a sign as any. Brad stepped into the house and closed the door behind him. With the wind now muffled, the silence of the house immediately pressed in on his ears.
Brad rubbed his ears with his cold fingers, trying to create some type of noise to ease him back into the quiet. It had the added benefit of providing some friction which warmed him up just a little.
He walked slowly through the house, now much more worried about tripping over something in the dark than he was about coming across some unseen occupant. As his eyes adjusted to the deeper interior darkness, though, he could see that he didn’t really have to.
The outside of the little lake house hadn’t been inspiring but now he could tell that the previous owners had saved their budget for the inside. The house was as neat as a pin.
Seeing a fireplace on the opposite wall, Brad hesitated for a moment. He thought he could see the outline of kindling in the pretty ironwork basket by the stones, but he wasn’t sure he should risk lighting the fire. If there were people in the woods or surrounding areas that he didn’t know about, they thought this place was empty. They’d clearly decided to leave it alone, and he didn’t want to send up a signal that they’d been wrong. He had locked the door behind him, but he had no illusions that the measure would save him from a terrified or aggressively territorial fellow survivor.
He walked into the kitchen, checking the doors and windows there to be sure everything was locked. Then he slid one of the two chairs that were tucked under the small bar out over the dusty floor and dropped down onto it. He rested his elbows on the countertop and dropped his face into his hands, letting out his breath in a long sigh.
That had been a hell of a walk and he had one just as long waiting for him tomorrow. Then again, he was a runner. He had been longer distances than this with fewer problems. Why the hell was this walk proving to be so damn difficult?
He knew that part of it was the lack of consistent training and nutrition, so he could cut himself a bit of slack there. That wasn’t enough to account for his exhaustion, though, and he knew it. Brad forced himself to look deeper as he pulled out a can of pasta and opened it up.
Maybe it was the sheer amount of death that he had seen and been responsible for lately. Maybe it was the fact that a woman he had cared deeply for had ditched him for the second time. He supposed that he could thank her for not knocking him out cold the last time she’d left.
He dipped his fork into the sludge of ravioli and pushed one into his mouth. It was all he could manage to do to swallow it, but he forced himself to do so. He needed calories if he was going to keep going in the morning.
If.
The intrusive thought surprised him, but he forced himself to examine it. He didn’t have to go back to the burned-out shell of his former life. In fact, if he wanted to, he could probably stay right here in this little house until spring came again. Obviously he would have to have a look around in the daylight to be sure that he didn’t have any neig
hbors, but that would be easy enough to figure out once the sun was up.
Even if he never dared to light the fire at night, it would be warmer inside than it would be on the trek he was going to be stuck with. Not only would he have to comb the woods and surrounding land for Anna, Sammy, and Martha, once he found them, they’d have to make their way out of the danger zone right away. Days of winter walking faced him if he did this.
Days of walking that would probably end with his death, no less. He dropped a few ravioli down onto the floor for Remington as he mulled that over. It didn’t have to be the Family that killed him. One wrong step in the snowy woods that snapped his ankle would do the trick just as well.
There was also always the strong possibility of getting sick. He remembered the way that his sweat had nearly flash-frozen on the small of his back when he stepped out into the wind. He could get injured, or catch any number of diseases. He wasn’t getting enough calories anymore. Over time, he would just get weaker and weaker.
Sammy and Martha had been walking for just as long. Brad pictured their faces, red with cold. He pictured Sammy holding his hand out to help Martha up some of the steep embankments that they would encounter on their way back to the cabin. He pictured Anna wrapping her arms around her thin frame and dropping her head against the wind, letting her breath out as evenly as she could so that the kids couldn’t see how desperately tired she was.
Anna knew by now that she had made a mistake. Was Brad content to let her die for it? He tipped the rest of the can of ravioli onto the floor and watched Remington slurp it down in two gulps.
Did Brad have a reason to survive that didn’t include them? He turned the question over and discovered that the answer was no. There was the animal instinct that forced him to fight for survival, of course. He wasn’t going to put a gun in his mouth or walk out onto the first thin ice he could find or anything like that, but he didn’t have a purpose beyond finding them and caring for them.
All of his life, he had wanted to help, to heal, to save. It was why he’d become a veterinarian. If he’d liked people, he would have become a doctor.
Brad rubbed his chin. He did like these people. He liked Sammy’s sense of humor and his willingness to learn. He admired Martha’s strength and resilience. And Anna…even when she frustrated the hell out of him, he liked having her around.
The chair scraped as he pushed it back. He’d put on some dry clothes and snatch a few hours of sleep. And if he chose to go after them, he would hope that the luck that had carried him this far would continue to hold.
Chapter 5
Brad woke up the next morning and stretched, patting Remington’s head. Mercifully, the biggest problem he had run across in the small upstairs bedroom was the dust, which had left a thick coating at the back of his throat.
That was probably because he had piled all the blankets he could find on the bed. Even though there was a little stone fireplace in the corner and a small stack of wood beside it, he hadn’t dared light a fire in it. It was too much of a gamble. After he’d added all of the blankets, put on dry clothes, and dived under the covers, he had called Remington up onto the bed with him. What the blankets couldn’t do, seventy-five pounds of golden retriever fixed quite nicely.
Even though he had been warm, Brad couldn’t say that he had slept well. He’d kept waking up with his heart pounding. At first he hadn’t been sure why. He was exhausted—by his calculations, he’d trekked some twenty-five miles northwest since the truck broke down. It had been a punishing pace, but he hadn’t wanted to stop. For one thing, the walking was the only thing that kept him warm.
The question kept turning over in his mind. What if he just stayed here? Started fresh? Just a man and his dog? He wouldn’t have anyone to worry after. Surely the guilt would abate in time. Hell, why should he feel guilty at all? How many times was Anna going to walk out on him and then run back? How many times was he going to let her back in to screw him over?
The questions that had run through his head had done so in his father’s voice every single time. That rough, sarcastic smoker’s rasp of Lee’s had jarred him back awake as he drifted off time and again. He knew exactly what his father would say. He’d say to let them stare at the ruins of the cabin and figure it out from there. That they weren’t his responsibility and Brad was an idiot for running back into a situation that almost certainly spelled death.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. He could have handled the half-dreamed questions. No. The worst part had come at a very dark hour of the night when he had agreed with his father’s voice. Why push through it? Why go back? He could die—no. He probably would die.
Now as he watched sun pour over the dusty bedroom floor, he thought the night over. At first he hadn’t been able to figure out why the questions had begun to plague him now, but he was pretty sure that he had figured it out. This was the first still and quiet moment he’d had in a long time.
When he was walking there wasn’t space to think of anything except putting one foot in front of the other and scanning constantly for danger. When he had been at the retirement community, he had needed every bit of brain power to try to turn the resources to his advantage. In Island Falls, he had been searching for clues.
Now, with nothing to do but ask questions, his own mind had tormented him.
He sat up slowly, wincing at the way that his back had stiffened in the night. Being tormented Scrooge-style was one thing, but why the hell had his brain picked his father’s voice to do it with?
Maybe because it was the one thing that would really force Brad to think. He had never been able to argue successfully with Lee. His father picked every single sentence and idea apart, sneering and jeering at Brad’s attempts to be logical.
Lee didn’t believe in logic. His father lived his life in obedience to the gut feeling, to the pursuit of instinct. He didn’t give a damn about statistics because he said that no one knew the real numbers for most things. If Brad brought up the good things the government had done, he was treated to a snort and the assurance that they’d done many, many, worse things. Things Brad didn’t even know about.
When he’d been a child, it had been frustrating. As an adult he’d seen it as a cop-out, a way for Lee to never have to be wrong. A person couldn’t argue against an unknown, after all.
Hearing his own objections and worries in his father’s voice had solidified some things for him, though. He was going to go on. He was going to go back to the cabin and try to trace the people that had become family.
After a breakfast of dry oatmeal, Brad packed up again and headed out into the winter day, Remington following unhesitatingly at his side. He lifted his face to the sun, grateful that it was out. The wind had died down a lot, too. It was more of an even breeze over the frozen lake now.
However, even with his mind made up and peace in his heart about his decision, he couldn’t seem to pick up his pace. He had twenty more miles to go, but they had the potential to take far longer than the twenty-five he had trekked after the truck broke down if he didn’t hurry up just a bit. But he couldn’t seem to.
Part of the problem was that his back ached nearly constantly. He had hoped that it would stop once he got moving, but that hope was apparently in vain. Sometimes the pain was dull and other times it was sharp enough to make him pause and catch his breath. Each time he did, Remington glanced up at him in concern. Brad breathed through the spasms of pain and then pushed on, over and over again.
He was keeping to the edge of the woods this time. He wanted to know how many cabins were near to the small lake house. If he found Anna and the kids, it might be a good place to return to if they could be sure that they weren’t being followed. He didn’t exactly relish the idea of having two cabins burned out from under him.
There was nothing else for miles around and he still couldn’t see any signs of habitation. More than likely, he could have lit the fire last night. He shook off the wave of bitterness that that knowledge produced and conti
nued onwards. There was no point in living in the past. He would just remember where the place was and they would hopefully have a warm place to rest for a while once they were reunited and headed back.
After a few hours his stomach growled but he ignored it and continued to trudge onward. His legs ached until they went numb and then he stumbled more and more often. The sharp movements that it took to correct his balance before he fell wrenched his back even more and he had to grit his teeth to keep from crying out in pain. If his legs could go numb, why couldn’t his back do the same?
The hours dragged past, but he rested as little as he could. There were no cabins around now and he didn’t want to stop until he found another one, despite the fact that it was nearly dark again. It surprised him even though it shouldn’t have. Night came on quickly in Maine, especially in winter.
Despite having covered barely half the distance he had needed to, Brad knew he would have to bed down soon. Not because he was sleepy, necessarily. He just didn’t see how he could go on for much longer. The pain in his back was constant now and he could barely lift his feet.
As he rounded a bend in the road, his heart jerked in chest. There was another house on the ridge. The only trouble was that this one had someone in it.
There was light in the window and when he looked more closely he could see that it came from an old-fashioned oil lamp that burned there. It gave the view a distinctly Christmas-like feel and a wave of nostalgia smacked into him.
Christmas had never been a big deal for Lee, but Brad’s mother had always done the best she could. The last Christmas before she and Lee divorced, she’d bought a cheap artificial tree at a thrift shop and decorated it with popcorn and cranberries.
“Why don’t we have any lights?” Brad asked. “The tree in Miss. Erickson’s classroom has lights and glass balls.”
