“How about we find a spot on the other side of the building?” Dakota suggested. “Give you a chance to rest your old-man legs.”
Nate wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be offended. “These old-man legs just helped you out of a cage.”
“I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” she said, and he could tell she was being honest. To most teenagers, anyone beyond their mid-twenties was practically a senior citizen.
“No harm done,” Nate said. “What do you say we head out?”
She agreed.
Nate led them past Ugly’s corpse―splayed by the double doors―and then along a darkened corridor brimming with shadow. Lockers ran along both sides of the wall, punctuated by the occasional classroom. They soon found themselves at the front of the school where Nate had encountered the locked doors. He pointed to a room with the words ‘Principal’s Office’ stenciled on the door.
“Oh, great!” Dakota moaned. “The world’s coming to an end and I’m still being sent to the principal’s office.”
Nate smiled. “You’re not the studious type, I take it.”
“Not for boring things, no.”
He let that one go, too. Nate kept the AR in the low ready position as he swept the reception area followed by both offices. The one on the left was the principal’s. The other belonged to the vice. One had to pass the reception area to reach the offices. That gave them two layers of defense, much like a castle with concentric walls, two or more curtains of fortification an attacker would need to defeat in order to get inside.
With Dakota’s help, they barricaded the main door by stacking furniture against it. When they were done, he waved a hand to the office on the right. “Madam Vice Principal,” he said, ushering her inside.
She entered laughing, but didn’t close the door.
Nate took the principal’s office. There wasn’t a couch. That was his first observation. As a consolation prize, he found a plush leather chair behind a large oak desk. He dropped his bag, set the AR against a bookshelf and fell into the seat. A tiny blast of air hissed out from under his weight. He pulled at the metal release and reclined, propping his feet on the desk. Nate basked in the warm glow born of simple pleasures. Within ten seconds, he was fast asleep.
Chapter 26
Day 4
Nate came awake to the sound of giggling. Early morning light streamed in through the windows. Slowly the room came into focus. A young girl was standing at the doorway, bent over, covering her mouth.
“What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
She shook her head, her thin body twitching. “I’m not sick, I’m laughing.”
“Oh, well, what’s so funny then?”
Dakota straightened and leaned against the wall, the traces of a smirk still on her face. “You snore. Did you know that?”
“That right?” Nate said, shrugging. He remembered Amy mentioning something about snoring one or two million times.
The young girl folded her arms. “Well, as snoring goes, you’re the GOAT.”
“The what?” He sat upright.
“Greatest of All Time. GOAT. I’m not making fun of you. It’s a compliment.”
“Doesn’t sound like one. Did I wake you up?”
Her left eyebrow rose. “Me? Hell no. I sleep like a corpse. Can sleep anywhere at anytime. It’s one of my gifts.”
He recalled finding her in that cage, curled up in a ball sleeping. “I’ve never heard someone call sleeping a talent,” Nate said. “But I give you points for creativity.”
“Fake it till you make it, right?”
That one made him laugh.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“Famished.”
“Good,” she replied, smiling. “I made breakfast.”
“Really?” Nate was impressed.
She handed him a can of beans, a fork sticking out the top. “I would have made eggs and bacon, if we had either of those things and a stove to cook it on. I make a mean Egg McMuffin, I’ll have you know.”
Nate scooped some beans into his mouth. “Stop teasing me. Right now, I’d run naked through the snow for an Egg McMuffin.”
Dakota beamed with a devilish smile. “And I’ll film it and put it on YouTube. ‘Naked Old Guy Versus Winter.’ A million hits guaranteed.” She clamped a hand over her mouth. “Oops, sorry. I said the O word.”
Nate fought a smile. “I just love how you think people my age have one foot in the grave. But I guess I shouldn’t complain. There was a time I was the same way.” He waved his fork at her. “How old are you anyway?”
“Fifteen,” she said.
“Huh, hope you don’t mind me saying, but I took you for younger than that.”
She nodded. “I get that a lot. I’m skinny, that’s probably why. I have a fast metabolism, what can I do?”
“When I was your age, I was desperate to hit eighteen, then twenty-one, then twenty-five. Growing up seemed to take forever. Far as I was concerned, the days couldn’t fly off the calendar fast enough. But the older you get, the faster time seemed to speed by. Call it nature’s cruel joke. Not much you can do about it, except focus on making sure tomorrow is better than today.”
Her expression darkened. “Yeah, well, none of that matters anymore.”
Nate returned to his beans. “How’d you get these cans open, by the way?”
“With this,” she said, producing a multi-tool from her pocket.
“You find that on one of the dead guys?”
She shook her head, her black straight hair dancing about her shoulders. “This one’s mine. I got something different off them.”
“What’s that?”
She nudged her tiny chin in his direction. “That fork you’re using.”
Nate looked down at it and couldn’t help but laugh. Normally the thought might have turned his stomach, but hunger had a funny way of making the things that used to feel important suddenly insignificant and maybe even petty. That grounding thought drew his attention back to matters more serious.
“Where were you going when they grabbed you?” he asked.
“I was halfway from Leaf River,” she explained—a pinprick of a town a few miles west of Byron. “Heading to my uncle Roger’s place.”
Nate had mentioned her folks earlier and that hadn’t exactly elicited a positive response, but he felt it was important to find out where this girl belonged. “Why your uncle? Are your parents still around?” He really meant ‘alive,’ but wasn’t certain how to frame such a delicate question.
She shrugged. “I’m not sure where they are. My dad started a dog-walking business over the internet that blew up and made us rich. My mother was a real-estate agent, one of the best ones in the country.”
“So far that all sounds like good stuff to me.”
“Maybe on the surface it does. But both of them are about as self-absorbed as you can imagine. I used to live with them in a penthouse apartment in Chicago. We had drivers and servants. That is, until they sent me away to live with my uncle. And then when that didn’t work out they bought me an apartment in Leaf River.”
“Your own apartment at fifteen?” Nate asked, shocked. “Is that even legal?”
“It is when you have the right connections.”
“Must have been hard going from the big city to a place the size of Leaf River. It’s so tiny, it makes Byron feel like a thriving metropolis.”
Dakota sneered. “No kidding. They always liked to keep me at arm’s length. Far enough that I wouldn’t be seen, but close enough that they could whip me back if the Feds ever found out.”
“I’ve never heard anything like that,” Nate said, and he meant it. If that was truly the case then it made sense why she would be heading to find her uncle. “This uncle of yours, what’s his name?”
“Roger. But he usually calls himself something else. Ranger or something like that.”
“Ranger? Okay. Is he from Byron?”
Dakota shook her head. “Roger has two places. A house in Rockford and a c
abin in the country, outside of town.”
Nate’s eyes lit up. “I’m heading to Rockford myself.”
“The evacuation collection point?” she asked.
He nodded. “An indoor soccer field they’ve turned into a shelter.”
“If your family is there now, why didn’t you go with them?”
The sigh that escaped his lips came out far more forcefully than he had intended. “Leave no man behind. Isn’t that what the marines say?”
She stared back at him. “Sounds about right.”
“My brother works at the power plant. I couldn’t leave without at least trying to bring him with us.”
“Why couldn’t he get out on his own?” A look of confusion clouded Dakota’s fine features.
“Probably because he’s just as stubborn and loyal as I am. If there was a way to save the plant from melting down he wouldn’t go until he’d tried it.”
“And after?”
“Once it was too late, well, things quickly shifted from prevention to how to avoid the absolute worst-case scenario.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You were worried he would think you had abandoned him.”
Nate rattled the fork in his now empty can of beans. “Maybe. But when I got there the guards played target practice with my truck. Once they were done trying to kill me, they said Evan had been taken to the hospital.”
“Did they say which one?”
“No. Said they didn’t know. And I can’t entirely blame them. The whole situation was pure chaos. My guess is the ambulance would have headed for a hospital outside the exclusion zone. The Javon Bea Hospital is the biggest in Rockford. As good a place to start as any, I suppose.” All this talk of hospitals and nuclear plants made him reach into his pocket and withdraw the Geiger counter.
“What’s that?”
He switched it on and held out the wand. “It measures the amount of radiation in the air.” The device clicked weakly.
“That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“It ain’t good,” he told her. “But it could be worse. The louder, more frantic the sound, the more radiation you’re getting.” He handed her a potassium iodide pill, then took one for himself.
“So we’re safe in here?”
“Not safe. Less exposed.”
“And out there?” she asked, pointing at the window and the blowing snow behind it.
Nate didn’t reply to that one. The deep grooves of tension furrowing along his brow ridge were answer enough.
Chapter 27
No matter how you sliced it, there was no getting used to the sting on your cheeks when you first stepped out into the cold. Each time, it seemed to bite as painfully as it did the first.
Protected as best they could against the elements, Nate and Dakota made their way through the school’s inner courtyard, past the remains of Lauren’s pickup and out to the road.
Although she was at least a foot shorter than him, Dakota’s ability to keep up was impressive. For both of them, the procedure remained the same. Search the white space before you for a dip in the snow, lift one foot, swing it forward, drop it down and hope something stopped its descent before you were up to your crotch. No one on earth could look cool trudging along in this fashion, but appearing foolish was a trade Nate was more than willing to make if it kept them alive.
Dakota pointed ahead to a strip where the wind had piled the snow up into a high ledge, leaving the space below it relatively shallow.
They made their way over, Nate already sweating his bits and pieces off. Dressing to face both the numbing cold as well as a bout of intense physical activity was an art he definitely had not yet mastered. By comparison, the girl appeared far more comfortable, in spite of the fact that her jacket was much thinner and lighter than his own.
Not five minutes in, they arrived at a decisive point. Either continue following the side roads back to Blackhawk Drive or cut through an open field and save some time.
The first meant they could keep an eye out for any robust vehicles able to make the journey and willing to take on two extra passengers—slim chance as that was. Off-roading on foot produced its own hazards. Namely, they would be traveling over virgin accumulation. The wind could very well have pushed some parts to over six feet in depth. Not to mention unforeseen barriers. Nate knew of at least one chest-high fence that ran along sections of Highway 2 between Byron and Rockford.
“If only we could find a snowplow,” Dakota shouted in despair.
Nate tucked his head down, pulling at the end of a scarf to cover parts of his exposed face. All joking aside, her suggestion wasn’t half bad, except it would mean heading back into town. Back toward the radiation they were trying so desperately to escape. Serious or not, her comment had jogged something loose in Nate’s brain, a sight he remembered seeing a hundred times over the years as he’d driven between both towns.
“There’s a farm just north of here,” he indicated. “I suggest we head in that direction.”
Dakota cinched her hood tight over the red beanie she was wearing. “What for? More food?”
“Transportation,” he replied. There were horses there. He remembered seeing them from the highway this summer, grazing lazily in the sun, a sight so common in that old life it had faded into the low static of daily background noise.
“North it is,” she agreed, aiming her gloved hand before them. “You do know how to ride a horse, don’t you?”
“They don’t call me Cowboy Nate for nothing.” Nobody called him Cowboy Nate. But it was true. He had ridden a horse once or twice, nearly twenty years ago. He also knew there was no sense fretting over details before they got there. One of his favorite quotes by Mark Twain summed it up rather nicely. Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.
They turned off Blackhawk onto what, in warmer times, would have been a gravel country road. This was the dividing line between two radically different worlds, the urban and the rural. On one side, the top end of a mesh livestock fence poked just above the snowline. Beyond that stood a former pasture, now only a desolate field of blowing white powder. On the other side was a tree line broken only occasionally by the vague opening of a driveway. Since they had veered off, they had yet to see a single tire track. Could it be that the folks with nearby farms had opted to stay home and protect their property come what might? Had they ridden to Rockford themselves? Or had they already succumbed?
As they passed one property, Nate peered through the loose screen of trees, recognizing a red barn far in the distance. “This is it,” he told her.
The lane was unbelievably long, and shaped like a giant question mark, winding around a clump of evergreens before finally arriving at the house. The structure itself was quaint. White, two-level with a wide wraparound porch and a stone chimney. He pointed. “No smoke.”
Dakota nodded.
Approaching, they saw no sign of any vehicles. He conceded they could be buried beneath several feet of freshly fallen snow. Regardless, Nate was on his way to the front door when Dakota called him. “What are you doing?” she asked.
He looked at her, puzzled. “What do you mean what am I doing?”
“You said you wanted horses,” she replied, her voice tinged with a hint of disbelief. She hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “Isn’t the barn back that way?”
“It is, but I’m not a thief. Remember those friends of yours, the ones who threw you into that cage? I refuse to become one of them.”
Dakota snickered. “I didn’t mean steal, I meant borrow.”
She was fighting him, at least on the outside. He could see that. She was part of a generation that had grown up downloading pirated copies of movies, books, music and software. What was stealing a few horses to someone not very well versed in the notion of property and ownership? Behind the snicker, however, Nate suspected Dakota knew he was right.
Nate climbed onto the porch and rapped at the door several times. Dakota stood back, staring out toward the road.
&nbs
p; He was about to knock again when he followed her gaze and saw what she had been looking at. Fifty yards out stood the wolf. It was standing inside the tracks they’d made, eyeing them intently. The sight made Nate’s pulse quicken.
“What do you think Shadow wants?” Dakota asked.
“Shadow? I thought you said he didn’t belong to you?”
“You can’t own a wild animal,” she replied, her eyes never leaving the beast. “Not the way people own a poodle or a turtle. We were also cell mates, don’t forget. Sure, it wasn’t for more than a few hours, but we developed a kind of bond, I guess. I named him the minute I saw the dark patches of fur around his eyes.”
Nate was looking into those feral eyes right now and not entirely sure what to think. Was the creature stalking them? Waiting for the weather to weaken them? Or was it hoping for something else?
Reluctantly, Nate turned his back for one final assault on the door. He decided to knock the way cops do when carrying out an arrest warrant.
Several minutes passed with still no result. Nate swung around to find Dakota, bobbing up and down, trying to stay warm. “All right, you win. Let’s go check out the barn.”
The more he thought of it, the simpler the argument in favor of liberating the horses became. Without a doubt, anything left behind in Byron was going to die—if not by starvation, then by the constant bombardment of radiation in the atmosphere. Regardless of what people might have told themselves, once you left town, there was no coming back.
Nate scanned the snowline for the wolf. He was nowhere to be seen. It seemed Shadow was living up to the name Dakota had given him.
Once they reached the barn, Nate was relieved to see the door was a large side slider rather than the kind you opened by pulling outward, a task that would have wasted precious time and energy given the depth of the snow piled up against it.
Both Nate and Dakota leaned against the side of the structure and pushed with all their might, grunting from the effort. Slowly, the door began to move. Soon enough, they had created enough space for a tractor to come and go.
America Offline | Books 1 & 2 | The Day After Darkness Page 12
