Evergreen (Book 5): The Nuclear Frontier

by Cox, Matthew S.

Logan handed out backpacks.

  “Sorry. Place is rubbing off on me.” Cliff chuckled, taking his pack and putting it on.

  “She okay?” asked Harper when Logan held out her backpack.

  “Yeah.”

  “Time to go.” Cliff backed his bike away from the railing. “Besides. We can’t get a room here, anyway. All I’ve got is Discover.”

  Harper almost laughed, still eyeing about twenty people who looked ready to shoot her if someone farted too loud. No one had pulled a gun out yet, and they did seem to have calmed a bit once she’d shouldered the Mossberg. She threw a leg over her bike, stood on the higher pedal, and let gravity start her off.

  Yeah… not coming back here if I can help it.

  28

  Haunted

  A good while after leaving Fairplay, Cliff veered left off the side of Route 285.

  He stopped on a small patch of dirt beside the road, an elevated spot overlooking a creek crossing via culvert below the highway up ahead. Though Harper would’ve liked to put more distance between them and the weird town, a ready supply of—hopefully safe—water made for an enticing camping spot. Also, it had to be past midnight by now and they’d been riding all damn day. If anyone, especially the bike thief, from Fairplay had any intention of seeking revenge or acting on their bizarre bloodlust, it didn’t seem likely they’d walk this far.

  A horse they’d hear coming on the road. But, someone taking a horse and chasing them out of town implied a level of commitment she dismissed as excessive for simple bloodlust or a bike thief nursing a bruised ego.

  “This should be far enough to sleep in peace.” Cliff stopped at the edge of the dirt, dismounted, and walked his bike down the hill to the grass below. “C’mon down here off the road. Harder to be seen.”

  Some moonlight made it past the hazy sky, but not enough for Harper to notice a baseball sized rock in the grass while walking her bike down the hill. She tripped over it, pitching her forward off her feet. Clinging desperately to the handlebars, she slide-surfed the rest of the way down the hill to flat ground. As soon as she stopped, the bike fell onto her.

  Terrified she’d sprained or even broken her ankle, Harper didn’t even try to breathe for a moment. The irrational fear she’d end up stranded out in the middle of nowhere, forty or fifty miles from home unable to walk faded in a few seconds once the adrenaline spike from the fall wore off and her brain switched back on.

  I can ride a bike with a sprain… and I’m not alone.

  “Harp?” asked Logan from somewhere above and behind her. “You okay?”

  “Uhh…” She tentatively moved her right foot. It hurt a little, mostly on the sole. “Yeah. Whew. Lucky. Thought I sprained it.”

  “Gah!” yelled Ken. He tumbled to the ground behind her, his bike landing on top of him. “Frickin’ rock.”

  Harper rested her chin on her hand, elbow in the ground. “Guess I’ll sleep right here.”

  “Heh.” Cliff grasped her by the backpack and pulled her to her feet. “Mind where you step in the dark. If it ain’t a rock, it’s dog shit. If it ain’t a rock or dog shit, could be an IED.”

  A distant moo came from farther off the road.

  “More likely it’s cow shit than dog,” said Ken. “Ouch.”

  Harper dusted herself off. “You really think people are setting bombs randomly around here?”

  “Let’s just say I’m not confident they aren’t.” He patted her on the shoulder.

  She turned to keep facing him as he walked back to his ‘spot.’ “Where would they even get bombs?”

  “Grenades. Flash bangs, that sort of thing. National Guard armories, former soldiers, police stations. Who knows?” Cliff shrugged off his backpack and dropped it on the bike. “Take nothing for granted unless you’ve triple checked it.”

  “Right…”

  She exhaled… and decided she may as well sleep where she ate grass. Harper slipped out of her backpack, then lay down, using it for a pillow. Logan, to her surprise, stretched out right next to her with Luisa on his other side. She smiled, not that he could see, and snuggled up against him. Cliff and Ken wandered off to the north.

  “Crap,” said Harper a moment later.

  “What?” asked Logan.

  “We didn’t talk about watch rotation.”

  “Haven’t gotten there yet. Dealing with biological needs first,” said Cliff from a fair distance off. He walked back over to the ‘campsite’ soon after. “Now, we can work out the watch rotation. Figure there’s four of us. Hour and fifteen each. Won’t get a great deal of sleep, but we ain’t all that far from home and no one likes sleeping on bare ground.”

  “Dammit.” Harper emitted a playful growl while sitting up. “You had to talk about peeing, didn’t you? Now I have to go.”

  Logan groaned, as did Luisa.

  My luck, I’m going to trip and fall face first into that creek if I go too far. Fortunately, the water reflected the moonlight enough to differentiate it from meadow. She walked a bit off from the ‘campsite,’ and assumed the position. Luisa and Logan also made their way out into the field in search of privacy. Harper couldn’t see much of her surroundings in the weak moonlight beyond the wavering hint of grass blowing in a faint breeze. Everything appeared in shades of blue or black. Numerous dark masses appeared to be moving pretty much everywhere in the distance. Given the intermittent mooing, she figured cows from one or more farms had broken out of their enclosures and become wild.

  I don’t remember it ever being so dark at night. There used to at least some moonlight. But… I’d always been in the city. We had streetlights, houses, shops, car headlights… and the sky didn’t have a permanent haze of dust.

  “All right. Unless anyone else wants it real bad, I’ll take first watch,” said Cliff. “Ken, second?”

  “Sure.”

  Harper yanked her pants back up. “Third?”

  “Works for me. Okay, Logan. You got last watch.”

  “Not me?” asked Luisa, sounding timid.

  “Nah.” Cliff chuckled. “Math ain’t my strong suit and I’m not going to recalculate the sleep time dividing by five now. Go on and get some rest.”

  Harper crept back to where she thought her bike was. Her shin confirmed its actual location, a little closer than she expected. “Grr. Son of a…” Scowling, she hopped around the bike and lay down again in the same spot, rubbing her shin.

  “I’m going to be waking up a few times anyway,” muttered Luisa. “Sorry if I scream and bother people. It’s not something I want to do.”

  “It’s okay.” Harper looked toward the general area of void where the girl’s voice came from. “I have nightmares sometimes, too. Kinda getting over them for the most part now, but they used to be bad.”

  “What are yours about?” asked Luisa in a hushed voice.

  “My parents being killed… and a while back, I saw this guy who’d suffered serious radiation poisoning. He’d turned purple, all swollen up. Didn’t really even look human anymore. Couldn’t talk. Just moaned like a straight up zombie. Gave me nightmares about like radiation zombies chasing me around the ruins of a city.”

  Cliff groaned as if stretching. “You know, anyone who got a serious dose of rads is long dead by now.”

  “Yeah,” said Logan, “but if someone spends too much time at a ground zero location, they could still get radiation poisoning over time.”

  “You aren’t helping,” deadpanned Cliff. “Trying to make your sister feel better here.”

  “What are your nightmares about?” asked Logan while leading his sister back over to the spot where they’d laid down earlier.

  Luisa grabbed at Harper, feeling her way around to sit. Logan lowered himself to the ground between them.

  “It’s okay if you can’t talk about it.” Harper went to pat her on the shoulder but mistakenly smacked Logan in the face.

  “Oof.” He laughed. “Can’t see a darn thing.”

  “Usually, I dream of Ma and Papa’s
rotting bodies sitting up and talking to me,” said Luisa in a toneless voice. “They’re not like trying to hurt me. Just saying I need to eat, and find water, and be careful. But their skin’s falling off.”

  Harper shuddered.

  Luisa sniffled. “Guess I shouldn’t have stayed there with them for so long.”

  Holy crap, this poor girl. At least she’s crying, not emotionless. Hopefully, it means she’s not gone psychotic.

  Logan broke down in tears as well.

  Unable to think of anything to say worthy of the moment, Harper wrapped her arms around him and offered comfort as best she could.

  Luisa hugged him from the other side. “Sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” rasped Logan.

  “I’m making you cry.”

  “No. You aren’t.” Logan fought back tears, coughed, then groaned. “I expected they died… but you know, like instantly vaporized when the bombs went off. I had no idea what happened. It’s—I dunno. Thinking about them dying slowly like that, I can’t…”

  Harper squeezed him.

  “They never said anything about being in pain,” whispered Luisa. “Hours before he died, Papa made a joke about how difficult it would be to get the insurance company to fix the house.”

  Joke? Or delirium? Harper kept her mouth shut. He couldn’t have been serious.

  “You know damn well Ma and Papa wouldn’t have complained about any pain,” said Logan. “Not when they had you to look after. They didn’t want you to be scared.”

  “Ma would have complained when she thought I was sleeping. I don’t think they suffered any more than knowing they were definitely going to die for a couple days before it happened.”

  Logan sobbed once, caught himself, and rubbed his face… at least it felt as if he rubbed his face.

  It’s so damn dark I can’t see him and I’m close enough to hold him.

  “Maybe you won’t have a bad dream tonight,” said Logan, his voice cracked. “You’re not alone anymore.”

  Luisa grabbed Harper’s arm while trying to cling to Logan. “Sorry…”

  “No worries. I’ll get this side, you hold the other.”

  “Okay.”

  Logan gave a sad chuckle.

  “Make a wish before you pull him apart,” said Cliff from a few feet away.

  “What?” asked Harper.

  “Never heard of a wishbone?” replied Cliff.

  “Nope.”

  He whistled. “Wow.”

  Harper rummaged the small blanket she’d brought out of her backpack, grateful Cliff insisted they bring them in case of unexpected circumstances. Not being able to sleep in Fairplay due to needing money hadn’t been on the list of potential problems, but… at least they had blankets. She thought about the brief lecture he’d given about the loss of body heat in the night months ago for help going to sleep.

  Ken nudged Harper awake and pressed a small metal object into her hand.

  She opened her eyes to void. Waking up early had never been cool. She had no idea what time it was, other than ‘really freakin’ dark.’

  “Your, uhh ‘watch,’ Harp,” whispered Ken. “Going to crash again if I don’t kill myself on a rock trying to find my pack.”

  She almost chuckled. If I don’t get up now, I’m going to pass back out. She sat up and glanced at the object he’d given her. Three glow-in-the-dark spots moved at different speeds in a small circle. It didn’t take her sleep-addled brain too long to figure out he’d given her a wind-up wristwatch.

  Cliff is taking ‘night watch’ a bit too literally.

  The glow elements had mostly lost their charge, but considering the heavy darkness, it didn’t take much energy for them to be visible. It couldn’t possibly be quarter after nine as the watch indicated. Cliff had wound it up purely to measure the passage of minutes for shift rotation, not tell the time. She drank some water, found a spot to pee again so she could try to go back to sleep as fast as possible as soon as her hour-and-fifteen ended, then returned to her ‘bed’. Feeling relatively safe due to being below the level of the highway, she sat in place holding the Mossberg, relying completely on her ears to warn of approaching threats.

  No one is going to be coming down the road at this hour without a light. They’ll be obvious for miles.

  Ken occasionally emitted a faint snore. Logan only breathed, but it seemed loud. His sister alternated between total silence, rapid breathing, and whimpering. Occasional odd noises coming from Logan suggested his sister squeezed him in response to whatever she dreamed about.

  I’ve never had a nightmare about my parents as zombies coming after me. And shit. Now that I thought about it, I’m definitely going to dream it. Luisa’s story about staying in the basement next to her dead parents for weeks made her skin crawl. Honestly, the girl looked too scrawny to be able to lift and carry a dead adult on flat ground, much less drag a body out of a basement through the rubble of a collapsed house.

  What choice did she have? Go out into radiation or stay there.

  Harper’s brain went off on an infuriatingly depressing tangent, trying to figure out what would have happened if she hadn’t hesitated. If she shot the Lawless coming for her so Dad didn’t need to turn away… could they have repelled the attack? Mom would’ve died anyway. Nothing Harper did or failed to do could have changed the guy stabbing her through the window. Mom shouldn’t have been so close to the sink. She had a handgun.

  If Harper had shot the guy, would she have had a breakdown and become helpless upon witnessing him die? Or gone psycho and freaked out, shooting every Lawless in sight? Would Dad have buried Mom in the yard and continued living with her and Madison in the basement, or would the attack have been the final push to get him to check out the rumors of safety they’d been hearing about Evergreen? Other survivors had gone past the house several times in the days before the Lawless attacked. She hadn’t seen them, since only Dad went to the door when someone knocked.

  Did anyone who tried to talk Dad into leaving make it to Evergreen or did they die on the way?

  Of course, the way it happened, she and Madison had to run for their lives. Enough Lawless chased them, at least according to her foggy, traumatized memory, it didn’t seem likely she and Dad could’ve fought them all off. The gang would have stormed the house, killed Dad anyway, then kidnapped her and Madison. She’d only grabbed Maddie and run because Dad died. The idea it would have been worse for everyone involved—especially her little sister—if Harper had shot the man without hesitation almost got her crying.

  Almost.

  I promised Dad I was done crying over what happened.

  She let out a long, slow breath to calm her nerves.

  And I really need to stop thinking about it so much. Gotta move forward. Can’t change the past.

  Except for the occasional moo in the distance and Ken’s intermittent snores, Harper listened to silence for an hour and fifteen minutes according to the tiny bits of weak glow in her hand. Each hand had a little rectangle of phosphorescent material. She stared at the watch. Logan’s gotta pedal with his sister tomorrow. He needs the sleep more than I do. What if we get attacked? If I’m too out of it, I won’t be able to hit anything.

  She flipped her hair forward over her face, sitting with her arms balanced across her knees, intending to let him remain asleep since he’d definitely be carrying extra weight tomorrow. Harper only needed to stay sharp if someone attacked them, not a guarantee.

  A little while later, Luisa jolted awake but managed not to scream. Logan woke from the sudden, violent jump. Luisa’s freakout didn’t make much noise, which got Harper thinking the girl had spent some nights sleeping alone in ruined cities… and learned to stay quiet to avoid danger. Fortunately, she settled back down fairly quick.

  “Hey, what time is it?” whispered Logan. “Want me to take over?”

  “No idea. This watch isn’t set. Just using it to count minutes and hours.”

  “How long before I’m up?” Logan yawned.


  “Not long. Go back to sleep.”

  He reached around until he found her shoulder. “You’re past your time, aren’t you? I can tell by your voice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing?” Logan kissed her above the ear. “You need sleep, too.”

  “You’re carrying two people.”

  “She doesn’t weigh much. Get some rest.”

  Harper looked down. “I miss being able to sleep all night without worrying someone might attack us.”

  “It’s pretty much like that back home in Evergreen. You’re not keeping night watch at your house, right?” Logan squeezed her shoulder. “Maybe it’s not quite as safe as civilization, but home invasions still happened before the war.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” She stretched, yawned, and relented, handing him the watch. “Guess you don’t really need this thing since you’re up until sunrise. Are you sure you don’t want extra sleep?”

  “Totally. Haven’t been getting tons already and working on the farm is a lot more tiring than riding a bike with a skinny little passenger.”

  Luisa jabbed him in the side.

  He laughed.

  “’Kay.” She reclined, again using her backpack for a pillow.

  Water bottles and potatoes didn’t offer the most comfort in the world, but for the moment, they worked fine.

  Harper awoke to a cow’s nose inches from her face.

  Fortunately, the curious animal had approached from behind, so she didn’t find herself completely under it. She gazed up past the cow at a hazy blue sky marked here and there with long, strands of cloud. It looked like the most epic swimming pool imaginable. Sleeping under only a thin blanket left her more than a little cold. The morning’s chilly breeze didn’t help. At least the sky didn’t look dark enough to threaten rain—or maybe snow. She exhaled hard to test the temperature. Her breath didn’t fog, a good sign.

  After a minute or so of daydreaming about ‘diving into the sky,’ she shifted her gaze back to the big, black nose hovering over her. “Good morning.”