by K. M. Fawkes
Chapter 6
The sun was rising. Brad could feel the warmth on his face and the light that filtered through his closed eyelids had the yellowish cast that only sunlight gave. He was still too groggy to understand the significance of the fact that he was waking up, but he knew a couple of things.
He had been moved back onto the couch. Vanessa hadn’t left him to lie where he had fallen in the floor. Again, she had been nicer than he’d expected for someone who’d drugged him into oblivion.
Hours had passed since he’d hit the floor. The sun was up; he had already figured that part out. And his body felt well-rested. He’d clearly slept long enough to ease many of the more minor aches and pains. He wondered if Vanessa had ground up some muscle relaxers and added those to the wine. That would explain both the added bitterness and the fact that his back felt a lot better.
He didn’t have much time to think that over though because he slowly came to realize that what had really woken him was the fact that he could hear voices. One of them, a deep, raspy male voice, was familiar, but he couldn’t quite figure out why.
Was it Uncle? Jesus, if it was then he was about to die. He didn’t plan to go out without a fight.
The panic at the thought of facing the cultist again enabled Brad to finally pry his eyes open. There was a quick flashing movement; something caught the light of the sun and seemed to press it right into his sensitive eyes.
He had been wrong. The sun wasn’t rising. It was setting. How long had he been unconscious? He flinched away from the light automatically, pressing himself back against the couch.
His first thought was that the metallic glint had been made by a knife and he tried to gather himself to move, but his body wouldn’t allow it. As he stared, he realized what it really was. It wasn’t the cold flash of steel. It was the heat of gold, flashing red in the dying sunlight.
Brad finally raised his eyes to the person in the chair across from him. The man twirled the lighter with laconic talent in his long fingers as he spoke to the group that had gathered in the small living room. It wasn’t the cult leader. It was his father.
Brad blinked, trying to clear his vision. Maybe he hadn’t just been drugged. Maybe he really had been poisoned. Maybe this was the afterlife.
If so, heaven was short on budget. There was a couch spring digging into his back. It wasn’t painful, just annoying. It also wasn’t the point. He needed to focus. Remington nudged his hand and he realized that this was real.
Lee met his eyes as Brad struggled to sit up. His head swam with the sudden movement, but he pressed his hand firmly against the arm of the couch to remain upright. He needed to regain some sense of control before the lack of it tipped him over the edge into a panic attack. His body might be pretty relaxed, but his mind was like a caged animal, scrambling this way and that for ways out and new enemies.
His father looked older now. Obviously. It had been decades since the two of them had seen each other. Much longer than the duration of the apocalypse.
For a moment, Brad had a flash of the family photo albums that his mother had kept on the short bookshelf in the living room. There had been several pictures in it of the man who had been his paternal grandfather. He had always looked very stiff and formal in the photographs.
Lee looked a lot like that now. His hair was cut so short that it looked like he had shaved his head at one point and was only just now letting his hair grow back. There were deep lines next to his mouth and around his eyes. A line formed between his brows as he watched Brad finally gain his balance. He was looking at Brad as if he was a specimen of some kind, or a curiosity in a zoo.
Worry, brief and surprising, flashed through Brad’s body. Why was his father staring at him that way? Had Lee forgotten him? It was like he didn’t know him at all.
His father’s dark eyes roamed over his face as Brad sat there. The room had fallen very quiet. Oppressively quiet, like that in the small cabin they’d found on their way here. It pressed in on him, confusing an already confused mind. Even the wind outside had died away so all that was left was the crackling of the fire.
Just as Brad moved to stand up, Lee dropped down to his knees in front of the couch and threw his arms around him.
Brad stiffened at the tight grip, one hand still at his side, the other resting awkwardly on the arm of the couch. What the hell was this? Of all of the ways that he had expected his reunion with his father to go, this hadn’t even been on his radar.
“You made it,” Lee rasped in his rough smoker’s voice. “My boy made it back to me.”
Rather than loosening, the hug grew tighter. Years of missing his complicated father suddenly burst like a dam. Brad gripped the back of his father’s jacket and buried his face against his shoulder, returning the hug as fiercely as it was being given. His heart was pounding and his throat was so tight that he could barely catch his breath. How long had it been? He honestly couldn’t remember the last time that his father had hugged him. That only made it better that it was happening now, when all hope had been lost.
It was a long time before they broke apart. Brad gave his father a shaky smile, but Lee was businesslike once more. He held up the lighter and Brad realized that his father must have searched his pockets to find it.
In fact, everything that he’d had in his pockets and pack was spread out on the coffee table. Brad frowned. Why had his father felt the need to search Brad’s belongings? Or had Vanessa been the one to do it? Either way, it was clear that the people who surrounded him now had not yet made up their minds as to whether or not to trust him.
“Does this mean what I think it does?” Lee asked seriously, the hand holding the lighter trembling just as bit.
Brad could see the sorrow in his eyes at the question and he felt a deep pang of sadness. He recalled the way that Jamie had talked about Lee. The hero worship he had seen in the boy had been touching even if it had been confusing as hell from Brad’s point of view.
Jamie and Lee had been close, closer than Brad had been with his father. It probably wasn’t the best idea to tell his father how the kid had died at the hands of the Major and his brainwashed soldiers after being tied up in the cold for hours beforehand.
He blinked the image of a desperate Jamie away from his mind’s eye and nodded slowly, trying to think of what to say. In the end, he didn’t try to explain. There was simply no way to do it without giving his father mental images that he didn’t want him to have to deal with.
“Yeah, he’s gone,” he said simply. “I’m sorry. I know that the two of you were close.”
Lee held him in his gaze, and Brad blinked at the intensity of the stare. What did Lee want from him? He didn’t want to rehash the grizzly details of the poor boy’s death, for God’s sake. He shifted under the weight of his father’s stare, completely confused.
“What is it?” he finally asked, glancing around for some kind of explanation on his father’s face.
When he didn’t find one, he glanced over at Vanessa who he’d only just realized was still there. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her waist and her face looked tired and strained. Remington trotted over and pressed his nose against her hip. She put her hand distractedly on his head, watching Lee and Brad warily.
“How did you get this lighter?” Lee asked, getting to his feet. “Tell me that, Brad.”
It was only when his father towered over him that Brad understood what Lee had been trying to get out of him. He stood up, too. Lee didn’t step back. They were nearly nose to nose and for a split-second, Brad could tell his father was surprised by how tall his son had grown. He was an inch taller than Lee now.
“I didn’t kill Jamie,” he said, keeping his voice level. “I haven’t killed anyone except in self-defense since this whole thing got started.”
“How do I know that?” Lee demanded.
Brad bit back the urge to snap at his father. The last thing he needed was his father descending into one of his moods. Not with a group that was much mor
e familiar with Lee surrounding them. He could hear footsteps from the kitchen. Two men appeared behind Vanessa.
“Because that’s not the kind of man I am,” Brad said. “I tried to keep him safe.”
Lee still didn’t speak. The mood in the room became restless. Vanessa shifted her weight, looking at the two men who’d joined her. Brad cleared his throat.
Maybe distraction was the best way to go. His father had never been tolerant of Brad’s failures and he probably wasn’t going to start now. Not when one of those failures had cost a boy his life.
“I’m glad to see you again, Lee,” he said, keeping his tone level and easy. “I knew that you’d make it.”
Lee scoffed. “Of course I would,” he said. “I hoped you would, too.”
“I used everything you taught me,” Brad said. Flattery was always a good tactic in situations like this, and this particular kind had the benefit of being true. Every skill that had kept Brad alive had been taught to him by his father.
“Damn right you did,” Lee said, stepping back and dropping back down into the chair Vanessa had occupied last night.
Vanessa and the men in the doorway relaxed. Brad sat back down on the couch, though he watched his father closely. Remington trotted back over and curled up at Brad’s feet. One of the men added a few logs to the fire and then the rest of the group sat down as well.
No one introduced themselves. Lee was staring moodily at the lighter. Vanessa looked guilty. The two men Brad hadn’t seen before merely looked intrigued.
“Were you all part of the group in Bangor?” Brad asked after a moment.
Lee shook his head. “No,” he said. “Vanessa was always here; this is her place and she didn’t leave it when things got bad. I picked these two up on the road after I left Bangor,” he added, with a nod at the two men. “Joe and Julian,” he said.
Brad gave them a wave. Joe, who was a big man in a red flannel shirt, gave him a nod in return. Julian, who was much smaller and thinner and wearing twice as many layers, gave a twitch of his fingers. He looked like he had been sick recently and Brad wondered just how long it had been since his father picked them up.
“Why’d you drug me?” he asked bluntly, since no one seemed ready to explain.
Vanessa sighed. “That was my decision.”
Brad blinked; somehow he had assumed that his father had been behind the choice.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “But why? Did I do something or say something to frighten you?”
His memories were still a little fuzzy, but he really couldn’t think of anything he’d done to justify her knocking him out cold. Hell, he would have said that they were actually getting along really well.
Vanessa looked uncomfortable. “I was the only one home when you came in,” she said. “I knew there was no way that I could take you down if you decided to take what was mine. I figured it was best to knock you out till they came back.”
“Did you drug them when they showed up too?” Brad asked, gesturing at the other men sitting around her fire.
“She didn’t need to,” Lee said with a shrug. “We were smart enough to show her how useful we were right away.”
“Lee saw signs of life in her cabin about a week before we approached her,” Joe chimed in before Brad could say anything. “We showed up with a string of fish and a deer. That’s what was in the stew you ate last night.”
“What about you?” Lee asked, turning back to his son. “How the hell did you end up out here?”
Brad rubbed his chin. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“It’s not like we have appointments to keep,” Lee said with a sardonic smile.
Where could he even start? Brad thought over the things that had happened to him since the whole thing began. The summer seemed so far away now.
“The day that martial law was declared, the military moved us to a safe house in Bangor—”
“Who is ‘us’?” Lee cut in.
“Everyone on the street,” Brad clarified. “And in the neighborhoods around, I guess. I was one of the only ones left downtown—I had an efficiency apartment over my vet office.”
“You lived by yourself?”
Brad nodded again. “Anyway, the military was rounding people up.”
Lee snorted. “And you just went with them?”
“They had guns, Lee.”
“If you were smart, you would have too.”
Brad cleared his throat, determined not to rise to the bait. “Either way,” he said. “I felt like it would be for the best to go with them, so I did.”
He hadn’t thought about the soldier who’d come to his door in a long time. Was the man still alive or was he under some snowdrift, only to be discovered by the wildlife when the thaw came? Had Corporal Metzger stayed kind and practical or had he twisted, become something even he didn’t recognize anymore?
Surely not everyone Brad had encountered had been insane from the start. He wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse. Did he want to believe that madness created some type of an advantage in situations like this, or did he want to believe that goodness was so weak that it could be wiped away in less than a year?
“So why aren’t you still holed up in some government-sanctioned safe house?” Lee asked with a curl of his lip.
“I left before we could starve to death,” Brad said bluntly. “One man left to look for food and he never came back. People got restless and eventually they decided that I could go next since I didn’t have a family or anything to sit around and worry about me.”
He hadn’t thought of that in a long time. Meeting Anna and the kids and the daily struggles of surviving had pushed it to the back of his mind. He remembered the gentle prodding of the group and the way that he had felt absolutely disposable as he set off to get supplies for people who never considered lifting a finger to provide for themselves. It could have been a death ride.
In a way, it had been. It was the death of the last remainder of a certain innocence that he had done his best to hang on to. Part of it had been the gentle creak of the ropes that the family had hung their children and then themselves from. Part of it was the callous way that the soldiers had thrown the bodies of the dead. And part of it was the fact that those same soldiers, men he would have trusted implicitly only a year ago, had knocked him down and stolen everything that he had worked so hard to bring back.
He had known then that the world wasn’t the place he had expected it to be. That it had changed faster than he had ever thought possible. The cabin, a place that he’d tried his hardest to forget, had slid into his mind then and had proven unshakable. All he’d wanted to do was get there and hide.
“You didn’t find any supplies to take back to the safe house?” Vanessa asked and Brad could feel the slight judgement in her voice.
“I found supplies just fine,” he said testily, again pushing aside the memory of those small sneakers hanging so far from the dining-room floor. If he thought about it too hard, he found that he could smell the decay again. “Then a group of soldiers beat me up and stole everything I’d gathered that day. They left me on the street in the middle of downtown after they took everything they wanted.”
Vanessa looked down, her cheeks flushing. Lee looked unimpressed, but Brad was used to that. His father probably thought that he should have been able to fight off an entire regiment to keep what was his.
Joe nodded though, his eyes sympathetic. “Same thing happened to us,” he said. “We’d set up a pretty nice camp, figured we’d ride out the winter there at least. Julian had been sick. We needed shelter and a lot of supplies.” His face hardened. “Some assholes in fatigues took every damn thing we had.”
“They left some blankets,” Julian said, his voice slightly rough with deep exhaustion that came from much more than a night’s missed rest. “And that tent with the hole in it.”
Joe shook his head. “How could I forget?” he asked. “The point is, we’ve been where you were. Do you think they were real m
ilitary or do you think they were impersonating them?”
Brad shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I feel like I’ve run into a little of both.”
The soldiers who’d basically mugged him in downtown Bangor had seemed like the real deal. The ones in Island Falls had sounded pretty real, too, from Anna’s description; their equipment had certainly been military-issue. The ones that had taken Anna and Sammy though…he wasn’t at all sure that they were who they claimed to be. With fewer people in the world though, maybe soon the impersonations would stop. It sent a chill through him to admit it, even to himself, but the military held absolutely no power now.
“So what happened once you decided to hit the road?” Lee asked, getting them back on track with an impatient question.
“I went to the cabin,” Brad said, cutting out the journey and the escape on the interstate.
“First smart thing I’ve heard you say,” Lee grunted.
Brad saw the other people in the room cast his father surprised glances. So that hadn’t changed; Lee was still much nicer to people who weren’t his son.
“There were people in it,” Brad continued.
Lee sat up straight. “What?” Then, before Brad could respond, he said, “Did you take care of that?”
“It was a woman and her eight-year-old son,” Brad said coldly. “We worked out an arrangement. I taught them a lot of survival skills, and they helped me plant and harvest and get ready for the winter.”
“Sounds nice,” Vanessa said. “A bit like what we have here.”
“Where are they now?” Julian asked.
Brad cleared his throat, but it didn’t help. His voice was still ragged as he said, “I’m not sure. I’m trying to find them.” He glanced at Vanessa. “I wasn’t lying about any of the things I told you about them. We got separated—”
“How did you get separated if you were both at the cabin?” Lee demanded, cutting in quickly.
“That section of Maine belongs to a cult now,” Brad said simply.
Vanessa pressed her hand to her mouth. “What?” she whispered.
“Are you talking about the Family?” Julian rasped.
