by Jordan Rivet
She paddled around, keeping an eye out in case any larger fish hid in the shimmering depths. She was careful not to swallow any water until she tested it, even though its soothing touch tempted her to open her mouth and let it flow over her tongue. But just because the water looked pure and fresh didn’t mean it wouldn’t leave her puking for days.
She floated onto her back and looked up at the sky, remembering when they’d seen the comet blazing in the heavens like a second sun. She hadn’t witnessed the impact, but she’d never forget the sight of Brandon’s malevolent eye in the sky as they filed into the bunker for the last time. He’d dealt his blow. He’d done his damage. But Joanna was still here. She could still feel the sun on her face, hear the gurgle of water in her ears, shiver at the gentle lick of the water on her skin. It was enough.
After a while, she splashed back to the riverbank. The current had pushed her about fifty feet downriver from her belongings. A break in the trees on the bank revealed a clearing full of purple wildflowers. Joanna grinned. That would be the perfect place for a picnic lunch. Those blackberries were calling her name.
She emerged from the river and scrambled over a boulder at its edge. She looked down to make sure she wouldn’t cut her bare feet on any sharp rocks behind it—and froze.
There was a patch of mud on the other side of the boulder, clear of any other rocks. Deep in the mud was a massive pair of footprints. Or more accurately, boot prints.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Joanna bolted for her clothes. Those boot prints looked fresh, and she had no intention of greeting her mysterious visitor in nothing but her skin.
She sprinted to where she’d left her clothing, heart pounding, heedless of the rocks cutting into her feet. She pulled on her shirt and pants, barely paying attention to whether they ended up on the correct body parts, then she shoved her bleeding feet into Ruby’s running shoes, slung on her backpack, and grabbed her pickaxe.
She spun in a circle, weapon at the ready. No one emerged to challenge her. Had they been watching while she swam naked, thinking she was the only person in the world?
“Two hundred years after humanity’s extinction, and I still have to worry about pervs,” she muttered. Then she raised her voice. “Is anyone out there? I want to talk.”
Nothing stirred in the forest.
“I’ve had enough of you creeping around,” Joanna called. “Show yourself!”
There was no answer but the rustle of the wind.
Alert for the slightest movement, Joanna picked her way back to the boulder where she’d seen the boot prints. On closer inspection, they didn’t look quite as fresh as she originally thought. It had rained several times since the rifles disappeared, so they had to be more recent than that. Perhaps someone had walked their size twelves by here early this morning, or even last night. Maybe they hadn’t been watching her at all.
She approached the wildflower clearing, on the lookout for peering eyes. The tough grass was crushed in places. Whoever left their footprints on the riverbank had almost certainly tramped through this clearing. She wasn’t confident she could keep track of the trail once it entered the woods, where the undergrowth would be sparse. She didn’t know what she’d do if she found a strange man at the end of the trail, anyway, or what he’d do to her.
She wrestled with indecision, surveying the clearing. Then something caught her eye, not in the forest, but above it.
A plume of smoke rose into the blue noon sky. It was coming from the direction of her camp.
It can’t be.
Joanna took off running, the smoke guiding her like a beacon. Her bloodied feet hurt with every step, but she felt stronger than she had since she clambered out of her cryo tank.
She ran full tilt the whole way, vaulting over little ravines and crashing through the brush. She didn’t care about preserving her muscles now. She wasn’t giving up her home without a fight.
She arrived at the mine gasping for breath, a stitch in her side. She forgot the pain at the sight of the flames creeping across her vine-covered house. The leaves were curling up, turning black, drifting away on the wind. The fire was coming from inside the house. Joanna wanted to scream. Why would someone set fire to her home? Couldn’t they just steal her stuff and be on their way?
Worry about that later. First evaluate the situation. The inferno hadn’t consumed the whole structure yet. There could still be time to save a few things. She pulled the collar of her T-shirt over her nose and ducked inside.
Heavy smoke stung her eyes, making them water. The four concrete walls were still intact, but the keepsakes she’d tacked to them were burning up, and the desk piled with supplies was ablaze, including her jumble of radio parts and batteries.
No, no, no. All her work from the past few weeks, destroyed. All her priceless memories, gone.
She darted to the other desk and grabbed the first aid kit and whatever food items hadn’t caught fire yet. Acrid smoke surrounded her as she gathered as much as she could carry and hurried back outside. She sucked in a breath as soon as she cleared the doorway, the air outside only a little cleaner than within.
The fire was beginning to spread from the house, racing through the long grass. Joanna dumped the rescued provisions aside and kicked at the flames, stamping out the tendrils that had spread the farthest and trying to establish a fire line. For the millionth time since awakening from cryosleep, she wished other people were there to help her. She couldn’t fight this fire alone.
The smoke hung so thick over the complex now that she couldn’t tell whether the flames had reached the headframe—and the supplies stored inside the shaft house. What if she couldn’t get back into the bunker when the fire subsided? She couldn’t let that happen. She would never survive without those supplies.
She struggled to beat back the spreading flames. Even as she tried to protect the mineshaft, she couldn’t help casting about for a way to save her house. Wilson. The Burrow. It was the only home she had now, and she had tried so hard to make it her own.
“The house is lost,” she said aloud, as if she could force herself to accept it. “Focus on what you can still save.”
But Joanna had already lost so much. She thought of the mementoes she’d collected in the house, the last remnants of her old life. Chloe’s posters. Ruby’s novels. The pictures of her parents. Those photos were all she had left of them. As if drawn by a magnet, Joanna approached the burning structure, raising a hand against the heat. Did she dare try to save anything else?
Bad idea. Don’t do it, Jo.
She’d just about convinced herself it would be foolish to go back inside when she remembered she’d left a survival manual on her couch, and she’d used one of her family photos as a bookmark. The manual was a priceless tool—and she might have a chance to save one photo.
“Just a quick trip inside,” Joanna said, “then move forward.”
She held her breath and entered the house again. The heat had intensified to nightmarish levels. Tongues of fire licked all four walls now. The linoleum floor was melting. The posters and photos on the walls were blackened beyond recognition, but the survival manual was still on the couch where she had left it. Joanna dashed across the room to grab it, scooping up a pile of blankets from the smoldering sofa at the same time. She thumbed the pages to make sure the family photo was still there as she hurried back to the door. Her lungs strained, but she didn’t dare breathe until she escaped the smoke.
But as Joanna crossed the threshold, there was a crack like a gunshot, and the roof collapsed in a rush of sparks and ash. The lintel crashed into her back, and she struck the ground, her breath bursting from her in a huff.
Pure-white shock stunned her. She couldn’t move! She couldn’t see! She couldn’t—
Joanna! Snap out of it.
Clinging to some semblance of calm, Joanna twisted her head, trying to see how bad it was. The blankets in her arms had cushioned her fall, but a huge beam lay across her legs, trapping them beneath th
e burning wreckage. She couldn’t feel anything. Did that mean her back was broken? Was she in shock? She tried to wriggle forward, scrabbling at the dirt with her hands. Her eyes stung, tears filling them as smoke and ash billowed around her.
She was going to die. She felt oddly removed from herself, as if she could see her fate clearly. Of course she was going to die. She should never have expected to escape the apocalypse.
Then her brain caught up with the pain, and she nearly blacked out. She had feeling in her legs all right: agony.
Joanna struggled, frantic, panicked. She had to move. She was burning, breaking, dying. She felt the pressure of the beam and the fire licking her legs. It was excruciating. There was no escape.
“Please,” she gasped.
The smoke thickened around her. She couldn’t see. She needed help.
“Please.”
Movement and light flickered before her eyes. She couldn’t tell if she was actually watching the smoke and the flame or if her pain had taken on form. It danced a death ritual around her, white-hot, icy, burning red and black.
She remembered her mantra. Freaking don’t . . . don’t . . . panic . . . don’t . . .freaking . . . something. It came back to her, distorted, mangled. What wasn’t she supposed to do? She couldn’t remember the words, couldn’t remember the training that had kept her going, kept her believing she would survive.
“Don’t freaking die, Joanna,” she said aloud. “Not now.”
She summoned the last of her strength and shoved the beam as hard as she could. She strained against its weight, trying to move it an inch, a foot. A sharp rod of pain shot through her, and she gasped.
Smoke and ash filled her lungs, too much, too fast. Pain moved around her, as corporeal as flesh and bone. Then the world narrowed to a pinprick, and she knew no more.
Chapter Twenty-Three
BEFORE
Garrett held her hand as they walked across the cryo chamber, the freshly painted red arrow crisp beneath their feet. A disembodied voice issued instructions over the nervous babble of the BRP cohort. Garrett and Joanna didn’t speak. She didn’t know what to say that would encompass what they had been through over the past few months—and everything still to come.
“We’re going to have a good future, Joanna Murphy,” Garrett had whispered in her ear more than once over the last few days. “I promise.”
An elderly technician waited by tank 188, wearing Dr. Huntington’s white lab coat. She had iron-gray hair and a blunt chin, and Joanna had never seen her before.
“Who are you?”
“I volunteered to see this job done,” the woman said brusquely. “Someone had to. Do you remember the abort signal?”
Joanna demonstrated the thumbs-down gesture she was supposed to make if the system didn’t put her to sleep. She figured all the thrashing around would be sign enough if she started drowning in her own cryo goo. She wasn’t worried. Garrett would make sure the process went smoothly. There was no one on earth she trusted more.
“Very good, 188. Hurry up now.”
Joanna hopped into the tank and lay back, adjusting her tightfitting leotard. The technician tapped a few buttons, and warm cryo liquid began pumping into the tank. Joanna felt as if she were slowly being immersed in frog spawn. It was just as she remembered from her cryosleep trial, except that Dr. Huntington had overseen that process. Why had he left when they were so close to the end? He was supposed to be the last of the true believers. Instead, this anonymous woman had stepped up to usher them into the new era.
The technician moved away to pick up a bundle of tubes, and Garrett took Joanna’s hand. His touch had become as essential as air, but in these final moments, she couldn’t find the words to tell him that.
“I’ll save you a spot on the couch,” she said with a wink. “I’ll be the one in the skintight leotard.”
Garrett’s cheeks reddened, and he squeezed her hand.
“Sweet dreams, Joanna.”
Then the tubes were forced into her orifices, the gel crept up her body, and she endured several moments of poking and prodding from the technician. She was composing her final words, the sentences that would encompass the chest-tightening magnitude of her feelings, when the tank’s lid tipped down without warning, sealing her in with a hiss.
Joanna locked eyes with Garrett through the Plexiglas tank. She clenched her fists, fighting her gag reflexes and the urge to make the signal. She had made it this far. She wasn’t going to miss out on her chance at a future now, especially a future with him.
The cryo liquid closed over her head. A few uncomfortable minutes later, she was asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Four
When Joanna awoke, she was genuinely surprised to find she was still alive. She knew she was alive because of the terrible pain, as if she’d been dipped in hot oil from the waist down. She tried to move and sucked in a breath at the sting, her throat as grainy as an exhaust pipe.
For one wild moment, she thought she was back in her cryo tank, but it was too dry for that. Something warm covered the top part of her body, and there was no mechanical music, no countdown bringing her back to life.
Her eyelids felt heavy with grit, but she managed to peel them open. The world came into focus around her.
She lay flat on her back in a strange room, and she was alone. She had a quilt over her torso, and her legs stretched in front of her, draped in loose bandages. They burned like hell.
Burned! Right. A flaming roof had fallen on her.
She wiggled her toes to see if she still could and bit back a cry. Her skin felt shrink-wrapped. Every movement pulled it tighter. The parts of her legs that weren’t shriveled pulsed with blisters. She fought the urge to throw up, or scream, or maybe faint, as she slowly rotated one ankle. She could control her legs. Maybe she hadn’t broken her spine after all.
Her back did hurt, though. It must be horribly bruised from where the lintel had struck. There could be a cracked rib in there too. She winced as she probed at her sides with her fingers, inching toward her back until it became too painful. Definitely bruised. Her lungs were sore from the smoke, but she could breathe well enough.
Her inventory of injuries completed, she looked around the strange room, trying to figure out where the heck she’d ended up. This place shouldn’t be possible.
She was lying on a hard bed in what appeared to be a log cabin. It felt lived in, almost cozy. Handmade quilts covered the bed, and an embroidered cushion occupied the wooden chair beside it. A cupboard on the far wall had assorted pottery dishes piled on top. Someone had even taken the time to glaze the clay in multiple colors. The cabin looked like the set of an Abraham Lincoln biopic, except for a very modern-looking plastic water bottle on the bedside table.
She reached for the bottle, flinching at the pain when the action made her legs twitch. The water tasted like ambrosia in her singed mouth, and she finished it all in one go. She was hungry too, but no food had been left within her reach, and she definitely couldn’t stand up yet.
She wondered whom she had to thank for the bandages and water—not to mention the rescue. Her mysterious footprint-leaving visitor must have been closer than she thought. If he’d taken her in and dressed her wounds, hopefully he didn’t intend to use one of those stolen rifles against her.
She looked around the quiet cabin, noting the care that had been taken in its construction, the handicrafts, the bits and pieces of clutter. She wondered how far she was from the bunker. Who had been living here long enough to build all this? She had previously dismissed the idea that some people survived the comet on the surface, but she was reconsidering now. Her little corner of the world had appeared untouched; that didn’t mean people hadn’t been going about their lives elsewhere for the past two centuries.
A knock sounded on the door.
“Uh, come in,” she called. At least her rescuer had manners.
A middle-aged man entered the cabin. As the door swung wide, Joanna caught a glimpse of other cabins a
nd a dozen people milling around outside. So this was a settlement, not just some lone stranger. Hope spun through her as the man closed the door softly behind him.
He crossed the room and sat in the chair at her side. He set a fresh bottle of water on the bedside table, and Joanna noticed scars and calluses on his hands and muscular forearms. He had brown hair, heavily peppered with gray, and deep lines in his tanned, weathered face.
“Hello, Joanna,” he said, barely above a whisper. “How are you feeling?”
It was Garrett.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Holy hell, it was Garrett. He had gray in his hair and lines in his face, but he had the same kind eyes, the same serious bearing. He sat at Joanna’s bedside, waiting for her to answer.
What was the question again? She couldn’t remember. She was struggling to form a coherent thought, much less voice a coherent answer.
It was Garrett, and he looked twenty years older than the last time she had seen him. How was that possible?
“Are you hungry?” he asked as Joanna gaped at him. “You’ll need to eat to regain your strength. We don’t think you have any broken bones, and we’ve done what we could for the burns with herbal remedies. Time will have to do the rest.”
“How?” Joanna spluttered. There. That was coherent enough.
“We’ve been keeping an eye on you for almost two weeks,” Garrett said. “One of our scouts stumbled on your camp. He didn’t recognize you and figured you were a drifter. He took your rifles so you wouldn’t shoot any of our people. When you didn’t move on from the old mine, we decided to observe you for a bit before making contact. We only just realized it was you, and we were discussing how to approach you when the fire started. Luckily our people got there in time to pull you out.”
