by K. M. Fawkes
He lay back down slowly, pulling the small blanket over his head to keep out the cold and trying to finish regulating his breathing. It was still a little too choppy for him to be able to get back to sleep. In hopes of distracting himself, he went back to the original question. How many times had he had the dream? He began calculating, keeping his thought process slow and deliberate.
When the sun rose in a few hours, it would be his seventh morning in the woods. It had been a week since his cabin had burned. Which meant that this was his sixth time having some variation of the dream. He had it every time he managed to sleep deeply enough for his REM cycles to kick into high gear, which was more often than he’d thought that it would be.
The first night Brad had spent in the small tent had been dreamless, but that was only because it had also been sleepless. He thought back to the morning that had preceded it, inviting the pain once again. It was almost like continuing to poke at a sore tooth. It hurt, but it hurt in a familiar way that told you that you hadn’t gone numb.
The cold, pale winter sun rose over the ashes of his cabin and he got up slowly, cold to his very bones. He was so stiff from the hours by the frozen lake that he could barely move, but he didn’t really care. There wasn’t really any rush, after all.
He walked stiffly over to the tree where he’d stashed the extra pack, moving almost on autopilot. He knew what he needed to do, but there was no real drive to save himself this time.
The Family would probably come back, just to make sure that he hadn’t managed to salvage anything. They would probably rake through the ashes of the cabin and look for his bones. They seemed like a thorough group. The fact that they wouldn’t find anything sent a quick burst of warmth through his chest. They hadn’t managed to kill him. In the end, they’d failed.
He glanced around the orchard. Parts of it were badly singed from how hot the fire had burned; some trees probably wouldn’t bear fruit for several years, at least. Some might need to be cut down completely.
Brad knew that the garden up front would be totally destroyed. If the fire hadn’t gotten it, then the people and trucks that had trampled through it would have finished the job. There would be seeds and bulbs in the cellar but… Brad shook his head firmly. “No,” he whispered, speaking almost desperately into the frigid air. “No, I don’t care what survived.”
Nothing that mattered had made it through the Family’s attacks. What was left was no longer his concern. He slung the pack over his shoulder and headed into the woods.
Brad closed his eyes and they popped right back open again. With a sigh, he had to acknowledge that he wasn’t going to get back to sleep tonight. He sat up, bringing the extra blanket with him. He draped it over his head to try to cover the parts of him that the sleeping bag didn’t. Even with the extra effort, he still wasn’t exactly warm.
In fact, he hadn’t been warm since the night he’d lost the cabin. He wondered how long he could keep it up. The winter was turning out to be just as brutal as he’d been afraid it would be.
Anna, Sammy, and Martha had gear just like his, so he wasn’t too worried about their ability to survive. Which didn’t mean that he wasn’t worried. So many things could go wrong, even to a well-supplied group of people. The hundreds of climbers who perished on Everest were a perfect, morbid example.
His brain took up that line of thought and ran with it eagerly. What if they tried to light a fire and ended up burning their supplies, or themselves? What if they happened upon a bear’s den in their search for shelter? What if they grew so desperate for food that they took chances and ate something that would kill them? There were plenty of options there.
Scenario after scenario played in his head and they grew worse and worse. He had to find them, even if Anna didn’t want to see him. He needed to know that they were somewhere safe.
It was time to make some plans, but as always, when he pushed himself on the point, his mind scrambled in circles. He knew that he couldn’t go too far west. He’d run into the Family out there. He didn’t know how far their territory spread, and he definitely didn’t want to find out, either.
On the other hand, if he went too far north, he might end up dead at the Army’s hands. If that faction was still alive, they probably wouldn’t be thrilled to find that he was alive—and their truck was definitely out of commission, thanks to him.
East wouldn’t do him much good. It would just take him right back to his own place. Or into the lake. Well, onto it, since it was still frozen. The idea wasn’t appealing.
“Well, there you go. Process of elimination,” he said aloud. “South it is.”
Of course, south took him back in the direction he’d come from originally. And who knew what was happening back in Bangor at this point? The thought made him pause for a moment, but then he shrugged. It didn’t really matter. He had to do something; he couldn’t stay where he was.
He wasn’t running out of rations just yet, but that was only because he barely ate. Losing everything was pretty hard on a person’s appetite.
Reminded that he needed calories, Brad fumbled for the pack in the dark. After a bit of rummaging around, he found and broke open one of the military ration bars. He sighed and then began chewing the dry, tasteless thing as fast as he could without choking on it. Being taken down by an MRE in the dead silence of a winter night was the last way he wanted to go, after coming this far.
“South it is,” he told himself after he’d taken a long drink of half-melted snow from his water bottle. “Even if I don’t know what the hell is going on out there.”
He much preferred the devil he didn’t know, at this point. The unknown had to be better than a crazy militia or an insane doomsday cult, and at least he knew enough now to avoid the interstate. That knowledge had to give him a slight upper-hand.
He could find plenty of supplies to stock up with in the city. There had to be at least some food left, as well as medical supplies and maybe even some clothes. Hopefully, he could even find some time of shelter out there. There would be more room to hide if he ran into another group of nutjobs, too.
He tried hard to talk the experience up for himself, listing as many pros as he could, but he wasn’t exactly successful. He really didn’t want to go back to Bangor or any other big city if he had to pass through his old home. And he wasn’t so stupid that he didn’t recognize that heading into a city in the winter of an apocalypse could be a suicide mission.
A soft patter on the tent above his head made him jump. The sound became more regular after a moment. Was it starting to snow? If it was, he wasn’t going anywhere—he’d end up looking like Jack Nicholson as the end of The Shining.
Unzipping the tent just slightly, Brad took a look outside. The moon was out and in the light that speared through the trees, he could see that just as he’d feared, it was snowing. Again.
He sighed and pulled his head back into the tent. Then, he dropped his head into his hands. He’d liked snow once. And not even just in the way that all kids liked snow. He’d genuinely enjoyed it up until this damn winter.
Of course, before this winter, he’d had a house. It was one thing to watch the snow from the front window and enjoy the slower pace of life that came with a big snowfall. It was something else entirely to camp on top of the stuff.
The snow had finally stopped after the Family had showed up to ruin his life, and he’d thought that his luck might have turned. Why did it have to start again now? And who knew how much more there would be by dawn? It could drop a foot and half for all he knew; then, he really would be trapped.
Brad sighed and pulled the blanket off of his head, folding it up and stuffing it into his pack. His course was clear: if he wanted to have a chance to get anywhere quickly, he had to start now. Luckily, there wasn’t a great deal to pack.
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lyptic EMP Novel (Enter Darkness Book 2)
