But of course this hadn’t occurred to Anna. She never thought, she just acted, and left other people to deal with the consequences of actions done in haste. If she had been less afraid, if she hadn’t given in to her panicked impulses, if she had been willing to talk to him instead of just running, things might have turned out differently. As it was, he had a horrible feeling he was just setting himself up for future heartbreak by saving her life. Lee had been wrong about most things, but he was right about that.
In spite of this, there was a sensitivity at his core that would never let him abandon Anna while there was still a chance of saving her life. That was what distinguished him from his father, who had no qualms about shooting a young woman—a mother of one child and a guardian of one other. Lee must have anticipated how Brad would react, must have known when he fired the bullet that Anna would be horribly injured but still had a chance at survival, provided that Brad acted in a timely fashion. In spite of their mutual hatred, they retained this warped bond of trust. Brad knew that his father still respected him, and the knowledge made his hatred burn brighter.
He couldn’t think about that, not now. Right now the most pressing question was how to save Anna.
He would need to apply a bandage if he wanted to staunch the flow of blood, but his first-aid kit currently lay in the glove compartment of his father’s car that was now traveling some miles down the road toward the imaginary line that had once been the Canadian border.
Brad would have to make his own bandage out of clean cloth, but the only material available was a plain white shirt he was wearing under his coat and over a now musty-smelling pair of long underwear. (Already cleanliness was becoming one of those strange artifacts of the pre-nanobot world, about which future generations would whisper in disbelief).
Carefully, cautiously, Brad opened his coat and ripped off a strip of shirt at the torso. The cold was like a pair of pincers lacerating his exposed skin. Anna was wearing only a thin coat, but she didn’t seem to notice the cold; the pain of the wound in her thigh had rendered her insensible to the wind’s buffets.
“Stay with me,” said Brad, as if it made a difference whether he spoke or not. “I don’t need you to die on me just yet.”
But Anna gave no indication of having heard him.
The next few minutes would be crucial. He needed to find a way to sterilize the strip of cloth before applying it to the wound so that it didn’t become infected. It would be the darkest of ironies if Anna survived being shot in the leg only to die because he didn’t provide basic medical assistance—as if he and his father had conspired in killing her.
When he was a boy, Brad had found a robin with an injured leg in the hedges that bordered their property and had spent a couple weeks nursing it back to health. But then one morning he awoke to find a mess of feathers scattered near the cot he had made for it. The dog had eaten it. His father told him it was his fault for not placing the bird in the top of a closet or on a shelf where she couldn’t reach it, and Brad had cried, knowing the bird’s death was his fault.
Brad was deathly tired: the sight of the ridged landscape of snow in front of him, speckled by trees and bordered by a frozen lake to the northeast, made his eyes heavy. He rose to let the circulation return to his legs, thinking quickly.
The axe that Brad had taken from the back of the truck was still buried in the frozen surface of the lake. He could break through the ice once again and retrieve enough water to sterilize the loose strip of cloth. What would prove more challenging was finding a vessel in which to boil the water, because he wasn’t in the habit of lugging around pots or saucepans. If he could find a large enough leaf, one capacious enough to hold liquid without accidentally draining, he could start a fire and get the water boiling in a couple minutes. And he didn’t have much longer than that before the situation became critical.
Considering that he stood at the edge of a wood, finding a sizable leaf proved surprisingly difficult. It was mid-winter in northern Maine and the aspens had shed their autumn leaves three, four months ago. One snowstorm and then another had blown through since then, layering the hilly woods in three to four inches of powdery snow.
The earth beneath him seemed to sway dangerously for a few seconds, the vein in his neck throbbing: here he was in the middle of a wood and not a leaf in sight. He told himself to calm down: Anna needed him, and her survival depended on his ability to act quickly.
Reluctantly leaving Anna leaned against the trunk of the aspen, Brad walked for a distance of about forty meters, first hugging the edge of the lake and then breaking off toward a clump of trees that retained some late-season color. Near the foot of one he found some new-fallen leaves the color of mango or papaya. They would have to do; now he needed water.
Brad trudged down to the edge of the lake and, with more strength than he felt capable of in that moment, reclaimed the axe from the ice.
Seven or eight strokes at the marble-topped surface later, the ice began to break like a cracked mirror, the pattern reminding him of an intricate spider’s web or a veined marble countertop. In another five strokes the rift in the ice widened to the size of his fist, exposing the unfrozen water that churned just below the lake’s surface. Moving quickly, before the lake froze back over, he let the leaf down with gloved fingers into the icy waters.
After the rigors of retrieving the lake water, the act of starting a fire proved relatively easy. Not having any matches, Brad gathered up a bundle of loose branches of varying sizes and set them down in a small clearing where the ground was level. Then, taking a twiggy aspen rod in his left hand and a smaller one in his right, he rubbed one against another with tireless pressure until they began to kindle.
Once the fire had been lit, it was just a matter of holding the water-filled leaf at a certain remove from the fire so that the water warmed but the leaf itself didn’t catch fire. Within about ninety seconds the leaf-water began to bubble. Taking the torn strip, Brad placed it into the water for another five minutes until he felt sure it had been thoroughly sterilized.
The entire process had taken about ten minutes, and Brad hadn’t wasted a second. But Anna lay still and pale in the snow, blood blossoming around her thighs in a sickly pool. Now it was time to apply the bandage, and even though he had been quick, and even though he hadn’t made a single mistake, he still wasn’t sure it was going to be enough.
Softly, Brad knelt down beside her, tearing a hole in her jeans and long johns large enough for his hands to operate unfettered.
“Anna?” he asked calmly. “Anna, are you still with me?”
Anna’s eyes were closed. She didn’t stir at first. But when Brad felt for her pulse with trembling hands, she smiled weakly.
“Brad, you don’t have to go through the trouble. Really.”
It was just like Anna to deny that she needed medical care even as she lay bleeding out.
“Maybe don’t talk for a few minutes,” Brad said as he reached for the bandage. “You’ll be fine once I get the wound cleaned—I just have to patch you up for a few hours until—”
“Don’t bother,” she said again with a dazed look. She looked oddly euphoric, as if she had already resigned herself to dying and didn’t plan on being talked out of it. “Lee was right, Brad. I don’t deserve to survive. I’ve made so many mistakes. This is all my fault…”
“Cut it out!” said Brad sharply. “You’ve survived being shot in the leg. You should consider yourself lucky.”
But Anna was delirious; logic wasn’t going to reach her at this point.
“The people who died in the first wave—they were the lucky ones, weren’t they?” she said faintly. “Lee quoted a verse this morning—something about how the righteous man dies before his time so that he doesn’t have to face the horrors of the future. What if God took the people he wanted, and left the rest of us?”
“Anna, stay with me, okay?”
Brad knew it was useless to argue with her: he was going to bandage her leg up wheth
er she wanted it or not, because she was in no position to stop him. He pressed the newly sterilized strip of cloth to the site of the wound and Anna winced in pain.
“It’s going to hurt but you can’t pull at it, whatever you do! The bandage needs to stay on, otherwise you’re just going to lose more and more blood, and you really don’t want that to happen!”
Anna let out a swear word, one he had never heard her use before. “Why are you even keeping me alive, Brad? Are you doing this out of spite? Do you secretly want me to suffer?”
Brad didn’t have an answer to that question; he had been wondering the same thing for much of the past quarter hour.
“Once we get you taken care of,” he said, “we’re going to find the kids. And if Lee tries to stop us, so help me—”
But he never completed the thought. At that moment they were both startled by the sound of a gun going off no more than a mile away.
Leaving Anna where she rested, now fully bandaged, Brad sprang to his feet. At first he thought maybe he had been mistaken, that it was only the sound of a branch falling or ice cracking on some snow-sodden cliff. But no, there it was again, even louder this time: the echo of a gun being fired.
On an ordinary night, with the world humming around them, he might never have heard it. But here in the silence at the end of the world he could hear for miles around, and what he heard troubled him.
He and Anna weren’t alone in the woods.
Chapter 2
Brad waited in the frigid silence, every muscle in his body tense.
“Brad?” asked Anna. Her voice sounded oddly far away. “Brad, what’s happening?”
Brad spoke lowly. “I don’t know. I thought I heard something.”
He knew Anna must have heard it too, because she had nearly jerked up when the first shots were fired. But in her present insensible state the noise must not have registered.
“Was it Lee?” she asked. “Is he coming back?”
“No,” he said quickly. “And even if he was, I wouldn’t let him hurt you.” He would happily kill his father before he would let him harm Anna again.
“Do you think—” Anna began, but Brad motioned for silence. He didn’t want their voices to carry through the woods, drawing attention to their location. Just as importantly, he wanted to gauge where the shots were coming from and their approximate distance from him and Anna. To his frustration, however, the gun didn’t go off again. It was as if the shooter had sensed his presence and gone silent.
“I’m sorry to do this,” he said after a few minutes’ silence, during which the wind rustled the evergreen junipers that surrounded the lake on its northern end, “but we need to get moving. We need to leave, Anna.”
“Why?” she asked, struggling and failing to sit upright. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But we can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
Brad lowered himself to his knees, afraid that his voice might carry.
“Listen,” he said. “There’s someone else in these woods, somebody with a gun, and we need to get out of here before they find us. I don’t know what they’re hunting, and I would rather not wait around to find out.”
Despite Anna’s insistence that she would rather die, Brad could sense that there was still some fighting instinct left in her. Wrapping an arm around the trunk of the aspen, she offered the other to Brad, who pulled her to her feet. She winced in pain and nearly fell over before Brad extended a hand to catch her.
“I don’t know,” she said, panting. “I don’t know if I can walk on this leg.”
“You’re going to have to,” Brad said firmly. “You won’t just die; you’ll take me with you. And then who will go after the kids?”
Anna went quiet at that, watching as the wind blew a flurry of snow from the crook of a black branch. “You really shouldn’t have saved me, Brad.”
Brad shook his head. “You’d have done the same thing, if the tables had been turned.”
“I wouldn’t have known what to do. I would have panicked.”
“I would’ve coached you.”
Privately, though, Brad didn’t know how helpful this would have been. Anna had left him, twice. There was no guarantee she wouldn’t panic if their lives were endangered and disappear into the woods, into the waiting arms of whatever was hunting them, or whatever that person was hunting.
Now that the shots had faded, he couldn’t be sure he had really heard them. Anna couldn’t remember having heard anything; maybe he was still tense from the face-off with his father. Maybe the ungainly descent of a wolf or coyote down a snow-covered bluff had sounded to him, in his panicked state, like yet another hunter firing with intent to kill. God knew there had been enough of them lately.
Maybe Anna was right: the disaster seemed to have snatched away whatever was decent or gentle in the human race, leaving only hardened survivalists and deranged zealots toting machine guns and living behind walled compounds.
He wondered what had become of the florists and cake decorators and kindly, tea-swilling mothers who had made life tolerable in the years before, but who would have little to contribute in the world that had been birthed. If they hadn’t died of the virus, they would surely have perished in the chaos of those first months when society was reorganizing itself and those who had access to weapons, and knew how to wield them, were declaring their supremacy over those who did not. The children that would be born in the years ahead would be descended from those people, would carry the stamp of their DNA, their cruelty and win-at-all-costs mentality forever embedded in the tree of life.
But of course he couldn’t think about that now, because he couldn’t control it. He was powerless to do anything except carry out the task ahead of him, however futile or insignificant it might prove in the end.
“We have to get your leg mended,” he told Anna. “I need to find a place where we can clean your wound properly.”
“Couldn’t you do it here?” asked Anna, evidently not relishing the thought of having to walk miles in the snow with a gaping hole in her thigh.
Brad shook his head. “No, because the wound needs to be cleaned in a safe, dry place. And we need access to proper medical equipment, which I might be able to salvage from a nearby town if we can find one.”
“Do you even know where we are?”
“I have a vague idea,” he said, ignoring the accusation in her voice. “We were ten, maybe fifteen miles at most from the Canadian border—what used to be the Canadian border—when Lee stopped the truck.” This seemed like a ridiculously benign way to describe the act of starting a fight that nearly resulted in one person’s death, as well as the kidnapping of two children. “There are bound to be towns along the way—if not here, then in Canada. They’re not going to be checking our passports.”
“I still wish we could do it here,” said Anna. “It hurts so much, Brad.”
“I wish I could,” said Brad, “but trying to operate on you in the snow, there’s a good chance the wound would have gotten infected. Better to wait until we have a roof over our heads, till I can tend to the wound without my hands shaking and worrying that I’m going to make a mistake that could—” He didn’t want to say “end your life.”
“We’ll need to eat something soon,” he said instead, his eyes on Anna’s shrunken stomach. She looked skeletal and frail even under her woolen coat. “I can’t even remember the last time I ate. I’m running on pure adrenaline right now.”
“I can’t even think about eating right now,” Anna snapped. “How could I eat when the kids are out God-knows where with a goddamn madman, and you’re not doing a damn thing about it?”
Brad winced; of course Anna cared more about getting Sammy and Martha back than she did about filling her belly, but she would do herself no favors by neglecting to fulfill her most basic needs. She seemed to be slipping away before his eyes, like the boy in the German fairy tale who refused to eat his soup and got thinner and thinner unti
l he disappeared.
Anna seemed to regret her outburst in the silence that followed.
“I’m sorry,” she said lowly. There was that same glimmer of fear he had seen in her eyes two or three times before, as if she was thinking about how easily he could kill her. “I won’t question you. I know you’re trying your best.”
“I don’t care if you question me.” Brad rubbed the back of his neck, which felt raw and bruised from the wind’s pelting. “Question me all you want; just try to have some faith.”
They were approaching a cluster of rowan bushes that in the summer months would have been heavy with bright red berries. Presently, however, they provided no sustenance.
“I don’t know about you,” Brad said, trying to lighten the mood, “but I would give anything right now for a skillet of pan-seared bacon. Lee used to butcher his own hogs and we’d have bacon as a special treat on Sunday mornings. But it wasn’t until I got older that I experienced the joy of real, store-bought bacon, which tasted so different it might as well have been a different food.”
“I wish we could just settle down somewhere, for a month even,” said Anna. “Amazing how you used to be able to live in a place without having to worry that it would be torched by crazed militants. You paid your mortgage and lived your life.”
“It seems like an impossible dream now, doesn’t it?” Brad said. He paused at the crest of a hill overlooking the highway, feeling suddenly exhausted. He wasn’t sure he could move another step; though he knew he would have to, if he was going to clean Anna’s wound in a timely fashion. “I’d kill for a place where I could just live in peace, without having to worry about being gunned down or kidnapped or herded into a camp and forced to memorize made-up scriptures.”
Enter Darkness Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 59
