by Harley Tate
There were a million innocent reasons for them to be late; she wouldn’t think about the bad ones. She handed Peyton the bat. “Trade you.”
He handed her the shotgun. “Brianna loaded it yesterday. All the ammunition we have is already in the gun. When you run out, that’s all there is.”
Madison nodded. Five shells. She would have to make them count. She inhaled and exhaled, counting with every cycle. One. Two. Three. Four. Whoever was out there didn’t seem in a hurry. Five. Six. Seven.
“Maybe you’re right. We could both go outside. One in the front, one in the back, case the place.”
“It’s too risky.”
Madison and Peyton went back and forth, debating what to do, until a scream shocked them both still. Madison reached for Peyton. “Was that…?”
“Wanda.”
“Let’s go.” Madison leapt up from her crouch, ignoring the risk, and ran toward the guest room.
“Wanda! Wanda!” Her voice carried down the hall, bouncing off the closed door and echoing back to her.
Another scream. This time more fear than surprise, the tone higher, the terror too real, too close.
Madison sucked in a breath, her own heart beating like a butterfly against glass, bruising and insistent. She reached the bedroom door two steps ahead of Peyton fueled by adrenaline and panic. Lunging for the door handle, she twisted and pulled.
Locked.
Damn it. What was she hiding from? Them? No one who wanted to break in would stop at a locked bedroom door. Madison hammered on the wood, ignoring the pain radiating up her arm as she slammed the side of her hand against the grain.
“WANDA!”
Peyton added his own deep voice to her shouts. “Wanda! Unlock the door! It’s us! Wanda!”
He hammered a foot above Madison’s fist, his beats as frantic as Madison’s own.
“Why would she lock us out?” Madison tried the door handle again, yanking and twisting as she added her foot to bang on the door.
Another scream from inside and Madison turned to Peyton. “Can you knock it down?”
He blinked in slow motion, staring at the door as he thought it over. “I can try.”
Madison backed up until she brushed the hallway as Peyton readied himself. Charging at the locked door like a linebacker, shoulder down, arm braced, he rushed past her. He slammed into the door and wood splintered, but it held. Peyton staggered back.
“Are you all right?”
He rubbed at his shoulder. “Yeah. Let me try again.”
“Maybe we—”
Before she could finish, Peyton launched himself again, running faster and jumping into the door with all his strength. The upper hinges split from the frame, canting the door at an awkward angle, but the stubborn thing still stayed locked.
Peyton stood up, cradling his arm. “I think I dislocated my shoulder.”
Madison couldn’t believe this was happening. What was going on inside that bedroom? Why hadn’t Wanda let them in?
She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted through the gap in the door and the frame. “Wanda! It’s Madison. You’ve got to let us in. Please!”
As her voice edged into begging, Madison leaned against the door, resting her head on the wood. She turned her head to the side and stilled. Is that…?
With a start, she pulled back. “I hear crying.”
“What?” Peyton stepped closer, still clutching at his arm and shoulder. “Is it Wanda?”
“I think so.” Madison leaned back in, straining to listen. “Wanda? Are you all right? Whatever has happened, it’s okay. We can get through it together. All you have to do is open the door.”
Madison didn’t know what more she could do. At some point, Wanda would either have to open the door, or they would have to go outside and try to break in through the single window. As she opened her mouth to voice her plan, the door knob rattled.
“Wanda?” She stepped back as the door creaked open. “Are you—”
One look at Wanda and Madison’s tongue turned to a cinder block inside her mouth. Her shirt hung loose and torn, exposing a giant swath of skin across her middle. A bruise already purpled around her left eye, swelling the skin and forcing the eyelid shut.
One free hand trembled in the air as Wanda pointed inside the bedroom. “I…I didn’t…I tried…he…”
She trailed off, the stops and starts of an explanation dying before anything coherent came out. Peyton eased past Madison. He wasn’t waiting for any explanation. As he came around Wanda’s side he stopped and whipped his head in Madison’s direction.
His eyes confirmed Madison’s fear. “What did you do? Is he dead?”
Oh, no. Madison slipped around Wanda and came to stand next to Peyton. A man half-sat, half-reclined on the floor, eyes closed, arms limp and floppy. Blood oozed from a gash on the top of his head, turning his blond hair into a matted, sticky mess. She swallowed.
“Wanda, what happened?”
Wanda’s mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water.
“Did he attack you?”
She nodded.
“Did you hit him?”
Her head bobbed. “W-With the gun. I didn’t m-m-mean to kill him.”
Madison exhaled and clasped her hands together to steady them as she knelt at the man’s side. He looked about her mother’s age, mid-forties, maybe a few years younger. Pale skin, no wrinkles in his relaxed state. With his khaki pants and polo he didn’t look like a criminal. He looked… like a neighbor.
She reached for his neck, pressing her fingers against the squishy side. Thank God. “He’s not dead. Just unconscious.”
Peyton mumbled a thanks beneath his breath. “What do we do with him?”
Madison stared down at the man. As much as she hated to admit it, they couldn't let him go. Not after Wanda almost killed him.
If the police still existed in some fashion, or the other neighbors found out… It could mean the end of their safety. The end of the little fiefdom they had worked so hard to cobble together. Without her mom there to defend them, Madison couldn’t begin to imagine how badly it could go.
At last, Madison lifted her head and met Peyton’s troubled stare. “Find some tape and bind his arms and legs. We need to keep this contained.”
Chapter Ten
WALTER
Cabin in Northern California
8:00 p.m.
Walter turned around, a dust-covered tin in each hand. “Tell me you like sardines.”
Drew sat up just enough on the couch to scope out the stash. “Aw man, seriously? A whole cabinet full of sardines? Gross.”
“Don’t knock ’em ’til you try them.” Walter tossed a tin at Drew and the man managed to catch it, only half-falling off the couch in the process.
“You’re serious?”
“Indeed, I am. There have to be fifty tins up here, all a few years old. We can eat a couple and if the owner of the cabin shows up, he or she won’t even miss them.”
“You seriously still care about the owner of this place? Look around. Every surface is covered in an inch of dust. Whoever owns it hasn’t been here in years. We don’t need to worry about eating an expired stash of sardines.”
Walter exhaled. “Humor me, okay?”
“Fine.” Drew stood up and made a show of hobbling over.
As he sat down at the table, Walter motioned to his feet. “How are the blisters?”
“Terrible. I don’t know how I’m going to hike out of here tomorrow.”
“Duct tape.” Walter popped the top on the can and the pungent odor of the fish hit his nostrils. He scooped an oil-coated fillet out with his finger and popped it in his mouth. “There’s got to be some around this place.”
Drew watched him eat like he’d just chomped down on someone’s eyeball, the horror of it contorting his mouth with every chew. “How is tape going to help? I don’t have a hole in my shoes or socks.”
Walter swallowed down the tasty morsel before scooping out ano
ther. “Simple. We duct tape your feet. The blisters will stop hurting then.”
“But what happens to them? If my feet are all covered in tape, how will they get better?”
“They won’t. But you want to get home, right? Sometimes life is crap. You have to suck it up.” Walter slurped down the rest of the tin, dripping every last bit of oil into his mouth, before leaning back. “I love a good sardine.”
Drew shook his head. “I knew you were crazy, but I had no idea how deep the psychosis went.”
Walter laughed—a true, belly-shaking, wrinkle-generating, laugh. Something he hadn’t done since the power went out. “So tell me about you, Drew. We’ve been co-pilots off and on for years, but I don’t know much more than you wear prissy shoes and don’t like the best fish to come out of a can.”
Drew laughed and shook his head. “Not much to tell. I wanted to be a pilot since forever, so as soon as I graduated, I started saving up. Worked everything from bus boy to lawn mower and put myself through flight school.”
“No debt?”
“Some that I’m still paying off. Or, was, anyway.” Drew glanced down at his hands. “I met this amazing girl last year. Anne.” Drew smiled, but Walter could see the fear in his eyes. “We were supposed to get married next month. At a golf course up in Granite Bay.”
Walter nodded. The more he could open Drew up about his past and the woman he loved, the more Drew would see the importance of their current mission.
Getting home could be the only objective. Not rest or recovery. Not camping out in the forests of Northern California like a pair of overgrown Boy Scouts while the world fell down around them. Home mattered. Family mattered.
He motioned at Drew’s unopened can. “You should eat.”
Drew glanced down at it, hesitating. “I’m not a big seafood fan.”
“You need the calories. Believe me, there’s a whole hell of a lot worse stuff you could be eating.”
“I take it you know from experience.”
Memories of SERE school filled his mind, but Walter just smiled. “Yep. So open that damn can and eat some fish.”
Drew frowned, but did as Walter asked, peeling back the lid of the tin before digging out a fillet. “You really just pop the whole thing in your mouth?
Walter nodded.
Drew scowled as he opened his mouth, the tendons in his neck popping out as he braved a bite. You’d think the man was about to swallow a live scorpion.
As Drew chewed, Walter brought the conversation back around. “So how did you and Anne meet?”
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
“Try me.”
Drew managed to swallow down another fish before leaning back in his chair. “She ran into me.”
Walter raised an eyebrow. “What’s so special about that? It happens everyday.”
“While carrying a three-layer chocolate cake. She was the catering assistant for my best friend’s wedding.” Drew grinned. “His bride still won’t forgive me for smashing a thousand-dollar wedding cake.”
“But it was an accident.”
“Try explaining that to a woman wearing forty pounds of hand-beaded silk while you’re wiping frosting off your eyelashes and picking bits of cake out of a hot chick’s hair.”
“Anne?”
“The one and only.” Drew sat up. “Even covered in white frosting and chocolate cream filling she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I asked her out right then, and the rest is history.”
As soon as the words slipped out, Drew frowned. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, as he worked his jaw back and forth. At last, he glanced up. “Do you think she’s all right?”
Walter wanted more than anything to tell the man sitting across from him, yes, your fiancée is fine. But he couldn’t lie. “There’s not a minute that goes by that I’m not thinking about my wife and daughter and whether they are okay. Madison is in college at UC Davis and Tracy works close to downtown at a small library.”
He swallowed hard. “For all I know my daughter never made it out of school and is stuck on campus with no power, no running water, nothing but her wits and a ten by ten doom room to survive in.”
“And your wife?”
“I have to believe she’s still alive. I think she knew about the potential for this sort of thing. The only text she sent me that went through told me to come home. That things could be worse than I thought.”
Walter balled his hand into a fist. He was so full of regret over his choices the day the grid failed. He should have gone with his gut and feigned an illness, refused to fly, walked out of the airport, and gone straight home.
Instead he sat in the captain’s chair and flew a plane into the great unknown and watched as the lights blinked out for as far as he could see. “If I don’t have faith and hope, then what do I have?”
Drew nodded slowly. “Anne works all over the city. She drives a delivery van from Rocklin to Elk Grove. If the power went out when she was on a job…” His voice cracked and Drew paused to run a hand through his hair. “She could be anywhere. She could be hurt, hungry, afraid, and I’m not there to protect her. I’m not there to—”
Walter reached out and put a hand on Drew’s arm. “All we can do is work to get home as quickly as possible. If Anne isn’t home when you get there, you can start a search. Go to her work, break in if you have to. Find her schedule, track her down. Cars still work. You can do what we talked about earlier and siphon gas if you have to.”
With every word of encouragement Walter uttered a little life came back into Drew’s eyes. “You’re right. I can’t give up.”
“That’s the spirit.” Walter didn’t tell Drew all the other thoughts inside his head. The bad ones. The horror of the future without electricity that he saw every time he closed his eyes.
Over the past twenty years family farms vanished like smoke up and down the Central Valley. Giant, corporate behemoths bought the land and converted self-sustaining operations into one-crop mega-farms built on the back of irrigation and fertilizer and chemicals.
He didn’t begrudge them. Profitable businesses meant jobs and food and security when times were good. But without power, those farms couldn’t survive. Without factories making the fertilizer and power running the massive irrigation systems, the crops would wither in a matter of days.
Every time Madison came home from college on break she talked about the advances in farming and how it had become as tech-savvy an enterprise as mobile phones and computers and cars.
People didn’t get their fresh vegetables and meat from their backyard or even the farmer’s market anymore. They got it from a shelf in the nearest grocery store. When those shelves didn’t refill themselves, what would all the people do?
Rural communities might band together, he supposed. But a place as large as Sacramento with half a million people in the city itself and another two million clustered around the outside?
No one stood a chance. He pushed back his chair and sighed. “We need to get home. The faster we get there, the sooner we can pack up and leave.”
Drew looked like he’d just swallowed a lemon. “Leave? Why?”
“Safety. Lack of resources. A million other reasons. It won’t be safe there. We’ll have to move out, find somewhere secluded, and start over.”
Drew shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t know who the hell you are.”
Walter shrugged. “I’m the same man I’ve always been. Only now, the stakes have changed.”
Drew opened his mouth to say something when a noise startled them both. Walter rushed to the lantern and turned it off.
“Did you hear that?”
Walter hushed Drew and ran to his bag. “Grab your things. If that’s what I think it is, we’ll need to make a run for it.”
Chapter Eleven
WALTER
Cabin in Northern California
9:00 p.m.
“What’s going on? Is someone out there?”
For once,
Walter wished Drew would just take his advice. “Shut up. Do you want them to hear us?” He slung his bag over his shoulder and crept toward the front door. “We’ll try and go out the front first. If they’re far enough away, they won’t see us.”
“And if they do?” Drew’s voice came out muffled as he worked on securing his things.
“Run like hell.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
Walter moved toward the front door, hoping Drew could see him in the dark. He held up his fist to halt. “If they start shooting, just run. Try to head south, but if you get confused, it’s okay. What’s important is that you don’t get shot.”
The ragged exhale of the air in Drew’s lungs was the only reply. Better than nothing. Walter paused beneath the front window, rising up until his eyes cleared the sill. Somewhere out there at least two, if not more, men were approaching. It didn’t take years of training and experience to hear the sounds of laughter and raucous carrying on, but Walter was thankful for his background all the same.
If only he had the appropriate gear.
From his vantage point, he could barely make out the hood of a car—late model, four-door sedan of some sort—with the trunk up. A light beam bounced around behind it, intermittently darting in the cabin’s direction and then back to the trunk. If he slowed his breathing, he could hear voices, but couldn’t make out the words.
As Walter tried to count the number of intruders, the trunk slammed and the flashlight beam lit up the car. Oh, shit.
“We need to go out the back. We can crawl through the window.”
“What’s wrong? How many are there?”
“Too many. Let’s go.”
Walter counted five men. All solid, with beer guts and thick necks and at least two shotguns slung over shoulders. One retired lieutenant colonel and a civilian pilot were no match for a car full of hunters in the forest.
He eased the lock shut on the front door and motioned for Drew to head toward the back. They needed to get the hell out of there before those guys got inside.
