“Yeah.” Anna shrugged in resignation, as if to say there was no use pining after things they could never have again. “So where are we headed?”
“I was thinking, I don’t want us walking on foot through the snow indefinitely. If we can make it to the cabin there’s a vehicle with a tank full of gasoline waiting for us, assuming no one has stolen it. We’re obviously not going to make it there in one trip, but if we keep following the highway we’re bound to find a place where we can rest for the night.”
“How?” That familiar note of panic was creeping into her voice, the one that usually preceded an outburst. “Brad, I don’t think there’s anything but woods for miles in every direction.”
Brad struggled to stay patient, reminding himself that she was presently in a lot more pain than he was.
“We’ll follow the highway toward the border. I know the wilderness is vast, but we have a decent chance of reaching human habitation, or what’s left of it, if we stick to the main road. No matter how small, most towns had a corner drug store or a doctor’s office or something. You’ll need proper medicine—”
“You don’t really know what you’re doing, do you?” Anna replied. “You’re as out of your depth as I am.”
“Listen: this is our best chance of survival,” he said. “If we don’t keep moving, we’ll die out here, and then the kids will have no one left but Lee. Right now I don’t care where we land, as long as we manage to get you cleaned up.”
They kept walking. In an earlier era, bulky machines would have piled the snow in drifts along the side of the highway, seeding the asphalt with salt for the safety of travelers. But there were no machines now; there were few drivers, because what little gasoline remained was hoarded in barrels by men with guns.
Even in a car, Brad’s father might not have gotten far with the roads in this condition. It would be the darkest of ironies if they rounded the next bend and came upon his lifeless body pressed against the steering wheel of the stolen car, having careened off the road and collided with a rocky embankment. Brad might even have dared to pray for such a thing to happen if he wasn’t so concerned for the kids’ safety. As much as he hated to say it, they were safer in the car with him than they would have been trying to make the journey through this impassable winter wilderness alone on foot.
“I really don’t know if I can do this all night,” Anna said miserably.
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” said Brad, “but the sooner we can get your leg mended, the better.”
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that they need never have found themselves in this situation if other people hadn’t been so careless and cruel—if his father hadn’t finally lost all touch with reality, if the world’s scientists hadn’t created a miracle drug for aging rich folk who thought they were above illness, and aging. Talk about flying too close to the sun.
“If we continue along the highway at a steady pace, we ought to reach shelter within seven or eight hours or so. Maybe sooner.” He had no idea whether this was true but it felt good to say in the moment.
“Maybe I could wait here,” Anna suggested.
“Not a chance.”
They were walking against the wind now; Brad lowered his beanie to keep flecks of snow from hitting him in the eyes.
“I don’t even know if I could find my way back here,” he told Anna. “I might spend days tromping through the woods looking for you, wondering the whole time whether you had been kidnapped, or just laid down and died. And we need to be in a warm, dry place when I take a look at your leg—preferably with a bottle of alcohol.”
“In lieu of anesthesia?”
Brad shook his head. “Not for you, honey… for me.”
Looking back on it later, he supposed he should have guessed that Anna wouldn’t be able to make the full trek.
“I sometimes think we’re dreaming all this,” she said. “Maybe we’re—”
Brad waited for her to finish the sentence. She had come to an abrupt halt and stood staring foggily ahead as if struggling to remember something important. He had only a second or two to be struck by how graceful she looked with the snow swirling around her, angelic strands of blond hair snaking around her face. Then she fell to her knees and landed face-first in the snow. Her body jerked, just once, and was still.
Chapter 3
Barely suppressing the panic that rose up inside of him, Brad knelt down at Anna’s side and felt for her pulse, cursing under his breath. She was still breathing, at least. Despite the cold, beads of sweat had formed beneath her hairline and along her jaw, and her face had turned an unnatural shade of red the precise color of raw meat.
“Anna?” he asked, scooping her up in his arms. “Anna, wake up.”
Earlier, when he had realized that Anna had a chance of recovering from the injury inflicted on her by his father, a sense of relief had come over him. A person who could survive being shot at close range could survive anything. Maybe that wasn’t really true—Lee could have killed her if he had really wanted—but it was reassuring to think that the worst was now past. They were safe. They could survive this. And although he still resented her for leaving him, in the back of his mind he had retained a faint hope that she would live, and prove capable of learning from her mistakes.
There seemed little chance of that now. He had rescued her from near-certain death an hour ago and now she had collapsed again after a walk of about three hundred yards.
Brad wasn’t sure he believed in God, but sometimes he felt that there must be some remorseless and whimsical being in charge of the universe who delighted in giving him hope only to snatch it away again. Anna had been fine. She had shed a copious amount of blood, but she was recovering. And now she had fainted, and she wasn’t stirring.
Roughly, with shaking hands, Brad rolled her over onto her belly, bending the knee away from himself at a right angle as he had learned to do when he was young. In another context the act of placing his hands around her waist would have called to mind the weeks they had spent in a now burned-out cabin and the night when they had come dangerously close to indulging their suppressed passions.
Now, though, there was nothing erotic in the act of touching her frail body. Instead he was struck by how thin she had gotten. She had lost a massive amount of weight during her time spent living with the Family, and that was going to make her recovery doubly difficult.
Lifting her up on his knee, Brad tilted her head back and gently parted her lips—those lips he had once kissed, now colorless and thin—so that air might flow unobstructed. As long as she continued to breathe, he wasn’t giving up hope; but with each minute that passed with no change in her condition his worries mounted.
He had once rescued a drowning girl from a swimming pool at a Fourth of July barbecue and performed CPR until she regained consciousness—even now the scent of chlorine brought the urgency of that moment, the panicked sobs of her mother, flooding back. But this was different: Anna had fainted from loss of blood, because there wasn’t enough blood flowing to her heart, or her brain. And with the materials he had to hand, there was perilously little that Brad could do about it. He knew she needed food, of course; she had to be hungrier than even he was, and he was famished.
Brad had never understood the impulse to pray before the disaster, but now it was slowly beginning to make sense. He would like to think there was something more to the world than the workings of blind caprice. Right now Anna seemed suspended in some in-between state, midway between Heaven and Earth. Thin flakes of snow were gathering on the ends of her long lashes, and Brad brushed them absently away with the back of his hand.
On some level he knew he was wasting precious time waiting for her to awaken when he could be out hunting for food or making his way toward the cabin site. He could have gone faster alone, but he wasn’t going to leave her lying here to be half-buried in snow. In her present emaciated state she would need to be assisted or carried the rest of the way there, even after she awoke.
Slowly, Anna began to stir again. Blinking back her confusion, she asked quietly, “What happened? Was I asleep?”
Hearing her voice, whatever resentments Brad had been feeling toward her an hour ago melted away in a warm surge of relief.
“You passed out,” he told her. “You lost a lot of blood back there at the lake, and I can tell you haven’t been eating well.”
“Couldn’t really help it,” said Anna. “The needs of the body aren’t a huge priority when one’s eternal soul is at stake. At least that’s what the Family told me.”
“The Family can bite me,” Brad replied. “If there is a God, I think he wants us to be healthy and well-nourished. Speaking of which, I’ll need to go hunting soon. I don’t need you fainting on me every hundred yards to the cabin.” He was desperately hungry, himself, though he didn’t like to say so.
“I’m not worried about food at the moment.” Anna raised herself gingerly, her right hand reaching instinctively for the tear in her jeans. “I want to find Lee before we do anything else.”
Brad was possessed with a sudden, strange longing to take her hand, which he did his best to ignore.
“Anna, I want to save the kids as much as you do. But we won’t be rescuing anyone unless we get some food in us,” he said.
“I’m not talking about that.” A zealous light shone in her eyes, the same look he had seen in the faces of some of the Family’s members during the hours he had spent in the compound. “Lee needs to pay for what he did.”
Brad stared at her in surprise, wondering if she was delirious from loss of blood.
“We’ll worry about that when we find them,” he told her. “You’ll have noticed that right now he has a car and we don’t. And one of us is seriously injured.” He raised a hand to quell her objections. “I’m not saying it’s hopeless. Lee taught me how to track, after all. We can find them, Anna. We’ll ask around. A man in a car, with two kids, isn’t going to pass unnoticed.”
He was getting flustered again, doing that thing where he talked rapidly and incoherently to hide the fact that at present he still didn’t have any feasible plan for rescuing the two kids—God only knew when they would next come across someone in the woods who wouldn’t be inclined to kill them on sight. But Anna didn’t seem to be paying attention.
“Brad, I don’t think you’re listening to me,” she said lowly. “I’m not worried about Sammy and Martha. If you could rescue us from a walled compound, I know I can trust you to find them.”
It wasn’t like Anna to be unconcerned for the safety of her own child—further evidence that in the wake of her injury, she wasn’t thinking clearly.
“I’d prefer to get there sooner rather than later,” Brad hedged. “Lee might have claimed to have the kids’ best interests at heart, but as the kid he raised, that doesn’t mean much.”
“I know.” Anna bit her lip, thinking. “My mind’s all over the place, is all.”
“Frankly, I think you’re in shock.”
“And maybe that’s part of it, but I also don’t want Lee to get away with this. In a sane world he would be taken to court and convicted for attempted murder and kidnapping. That’s no longer the world we live in. He needs to pay for what he’s done to us.”
“What are you saying, Anna?” Brad asked. He didn’t need to ask though; her meaning was clear.
“I want to make it so that he never hurts another child,” she said lowly. “I couldn’t care less about what he did to me. If he’d been a decent person, he would have shot me in the heart and ended it instead of leaving me here to suffer. But the second he laid a hand on my baby, he committed an unforgivable sin. He has to pay for what he did.”
Despite not being a parent himself, Brad had always known that the bond that could form between a mother and child was like nothing else on earth. He’d never seen it play out quite as violently as it was now.
“I don’t want him to get away with this, either,” Brad assured her, “but retribution is going to be difficult when he’s armed and we’re not.”
It was maybe the most bold-faced lie he had yet told her, for he was carrying a concealed pistol in an ankle holster hidden under the leg of his jeans. He had used it once already, to dispatch Auntie and Uncle, but was hoping Anna might have forgotten that he still had it, or assumed that he had lost it in the chaos of their escape. Besides, the gun would prove all but useless now in a fight against his father: there was only one bullet left and he wasn’t planning on using it unless their situation grew truly desperate.
“We’ll find him,” he said calmly, though he didn’t feel calm at all. He didn’t know how they were going to find Lee and the kids, but at present his immediate need was to get Anna moving again.
They were seated atop a narrow ridge overlooking the highway. Ahead of them lay a path bordered on either side by hornbeams and hedges with sharp, spiky leaves that grew darker and less even as it sank into a valley. The tracks left by Lee’s vehicle were still barely visible in the snow—the only vehicle that had taken this route in days, maybe weeks—though already they were disappearing under a sprinkle of new snowfall.
Brad felt a vague, foolish notion that he could have grabbed onto the back of the truck and held on until Lee reached wherever he was going, but he knew the attempt would have likely killed him. He was old enough now to know that stunts like that only worked in movies, and he was living in the real world, where fathers betrayed sons and sons hated fathers, and where a man might risk his life to save the life of a woman who had twice run away from him, and neither one really seemed to know where they were going or what they were doing, and by morning they would probably both be dead.
A warbler sang in a branch overhead, perversely happy in spite of the misery that surrounded her. Brad felt utterly defeated. In a book or a movie this would have been the moment when help appeared by some fortuitous chance to lead them out of the woods, when the flight of the bird directed their path to a nearby cabin where they could rest for the night or a man appeared at the end of the trail with lantern in hand who proved to be their savior. But the bird was no magical assistant and no one appeared to save them. They were totally on their own, and the snow fell, silent and swift, all around them. All gods had died, all miracles ceased, all stories ended when the world ended, and now they, the survivors, shambled without purpose through a landscape stripped of hope.
“You ready to go on?” he asked, stretching and standing to his feet. “I want to put some distance between us and the lake before nightfall. That gives us about three, four hours of walking until we have to find a place to bed down for the night.”
“I heard a song once,” said Anna. She had risen and was dusting the flakes off of her coat and jeans. “This was years ago, before I had Sammy. I was the only person left in the bar and it was 2:00am and I was slightly drunk. It was one of those husband-and-wife bands—he sang and played guitar while she played the drums. And they were singing this song about a poor farmer who was making his way home to a cabin in the woods during a deadly snowstorm. His wife stood waiting in the doorway, baby on her knee. The farmer was just a mile from home when he fell. That was where they found his body at the first of spring, when the snow melted.”
Brad felt a sense of indignation at the story’s ending, at the injustice of it. “Why didn’t he press on the rest of the way, if he was so close?”
“His horse needed to stop for a rest,” Anna said quietly, “and he couldn’t bring himself to leave her. If it hadn’t been for her, he might have made it home.”
Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, Brad began to pull Anna along. This time, to his surprise, she offered no resistance.
“Let’s hope our story has a different ending,” he told her. “Because if we die out in the snow tonight, I don’t think they’re going to be writing any songs about us.”
Chapter 4
Leaving the ridge, they continued along the highway, pausing every few minutes so that Anna could catch her bre
ath. By now it was late afternoon and they had seen no sign of the other hunter since those first, distant shots in the clearing by the lake.
More and more Brad wondered if maybe he had imagined them. In the stillness, it was hard to believe that any human had ever set foot in these woods. He remembered reading stories about men trapped in the remote wilderness who had hallucinated companions to keep themselves sane. Maybe this was a milder version of that. Maybe he had mistaken the wind, battering at the mountainous ridges that rose fifty to a hundred yards overhead, for the sound of a fellow hunter. It wasn’t the prospect of facing an armed rival that frightened him so much as this appalling loneliness that pressed in on all sides, relentless.
At the end of an hour’s walk they came upon a beige station wagon half-buried in the snowdrift. Brad used the axe to break open the passenger-side window, but found nothing in the floorboards or glove compartment worth keeping.
Probably, when the world ended, whoever owned this vehicle had driven it as far as he could and then, when it ran out of gasoline, abandoned it here and continued north on foot. Brad would have counseled him against such a foolhardy, potentially deadly venture if he hadn’t been headed in the same direction, by the same means. Undoubtedly further up the road they would begin seeing corpses, poor souls like themselves who had hoped to find a better life across the border, skeletal hands reaching helplessly out of the snow like the farmer in the song Anna had heard at the bar.
“Did you ever think there would be a time when our cars would be useless?” Brad asked. “Growing up I guess I assumed some things would always be with us. Airplanes. Wireless. Progress would just keep moving steadily forward.”
“When you picture the year 2400,” said Anna, “you don’t picture a new dark age.”
“For the first couple months after the power went out, I kept hoping that maybe we’d find a way to bring it back,” Brad said. “I realize now how ridiculous that was. It’s going to be hundreds, maybe thousands of years before we recover from this. It’s funny, too,” he added, though there was nothing funny about it: “I always thought nuclear war would be the thing that finished us off, not a faddish health craze for celebrities.”
Enter Darkness Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 60
