“Should,” Gina repeated, but what choice did she have?
Now that the survival formalities were out of the way, Gina wanted to talk about last night. She wanted to clear the air, to let Dean know that she would respect the boundaries of their relationship, but he seemed distant. She could tell he wasn’t in the mood for discussing their relationship, or whatever it was, so she let it be.
She grabbed her duffel bag, Dean grabbed his, and the three of them moved off. The going was slower than the day before. The path was harder to follow and they weren’t in a rush to get away from men that could harm them, so they took it easy.
For that, Gina was relieved. It was just what both of them needed. She knew there was a reason to go fast, especially with their small amount of remaining food, but she couldn’t help but enjoy the leisurely walking. The duffel bag was an annoyance; she found herself switching arms every mile or so. Still, she would rather have its contents than not, so she gritted her teeth and kept walking.
She thought it was about noon when they came to a highway. Dean made her and Petey stay back in the foliage as he crept up to the road and watched. After nearly ten minutes of waiting, he made his way back to them.
“It’s clear, for now. Stick close and follow me. Once we get to the road, wait for my signal to cross. Okay?”
She nodded, then looked down at Petey. They were ready.
Dean got up and made his way to the road. Gina was next, followed by Petey. When they reached the road, they paused. Then Dean gave the go ahead and climbed onto the road. He moved fast. Petey ran ahead of Gina, crossing the road to safety before even Dean.
Gina was halfway across before she stopped. Standing on the center line, she looked to her right, then to her left.
“Dean, wait,” she said.
“Move, Gina!”
“Dean…”
Without thinking, Gina was running to the left as fast as her legs could carry her, the duffel bag dropped in the middle of the road. Dean dropped his and sprinted after her, trying to stop her, but it was too late.
She reached the crest in the road and looked down. Haysberry, or what was left of it, was below. A few puffs of dark smoke billowed up, but the fires were mostly out. Many of the buildings were nothing more than black husks. Some still stood: the old school, half of the massive city building, a few others. Most in the old factory district had escaped the worst of the fire.
“I have to go down,” she said. She didn’t know why, but she felt she had to. She was being drawn there.
“Gina, it’s too dangerous.”
“Dean, that’s my home. There could be survivors down there.”
“That’s the perfect reason to avoid it.”
“There are supplies down there. Stuff we can use.”
***
“No,” Dean said. He turned and made his way back down the road. When Gina didn’t follow, he turned back, pausing long enough to say, “I’m not risking my life to go down there. Not when we have a good chance of avoiding towns all together.”
Gina knew that Dean was right. Going down was dangerous. She could die down there. But she wanted to go home so badly, even though she knew that her home was gone. She took one last look down at Haysberry, knowing in her heart that she would never see it again.
She turned back and followed Dean. She could see him up ahead, moving off towards an overturned van half-buried in the ditch. She hadn’t noticed it when she was going towards Haysberry, but that wasn’t surprising: she’d been so focused on getting a look at the town that she wouldn’t have noticed a man with a gun approaching her. She chastised herself. That was dangerous.
“Stay back,” he cautioned her, as he made his way around the van. As she got closer, she could tell that it was one of the news vans from Haysberry. From the looks of it, they had flipped coming into town, but it wasn’t clear why. The front of the van was crumpled up where they had finally come to a rest in the ditch. She could see a man hunched over the steering wheel, his face an echo of the pain he must have felt. “It’s safe.”
Gina inspected as closely as she could. The man wasn’t anyone she recognized. In the passenger seat, a woman was slumped against the window. Gina gasped as she came closer. She recognized this woman: she was the main newscaster on the local news channel.
She heard a grinding noise and went around the back of the van to investigate. Dean was wrenching on one of the back doors. With a grunt, he pulled it free and stepped back as it swung open. Then he ducked inside. Gina couldn’t see what he was doing, but she heard him rooting around.
After a few minutes, Dean made his way back out, holding a small, black box in his hand.
“A radio?” Gina asked, her eyebrow raised. “What good is that going to do?”
Dean shrugged. “It can’t hurt to listen in.”
Gina nodded. It couldn’t hurt, but she didn’t think it would help. “Well, let’s hear it.”
“Let’s get off the road, first,” he said. Together, they moved back down the highway. Gina grabbed her bag from the middle of the road and followed Dean into the woods on the other side of the road.
They walked for nearly 15 minutes until Dean was satisfied they were far enough away from the road. Gina thought that he was being a little too paranoid, but she kept her mouth shut. Dean was the survivalist, not her.
They found a fallen log and sat down on it. Gina reached down and petted Petey as Dean turned the radio on. There was a loud burst of static for just a moment. Dean turned the volume down, then began turning the dial slowly. Station after station full of static crackled.
“This is pointless,” she told him. “Dean, there’s nothing—”
Between the waves of static, a voice came through. Dean twisted the dial back, even slower than before. The static faded...and a voice came on.
“—ING THIS, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. THIS IS GENERAL HARRIS, LOCATED NORTH OF MARSHALL MOUNTAIN. WE’RE ATTEMPTING TO REBUILD. NORTH WILLIAMSTOWN IS LOST. REPEAT, NORTH WILLIAMSTOWN IS LOST. THE BOMBS HAVE ENDED. OUR GOVERNMENT HAS FALLEN, BUT WE HAVE NOT. REPORTS STATE THAT ALL OTHER COUNTRIES ARE FALLEN. IF YOU’RE HEARING THIS, YOU ARE NOT ALONE.”
The message repeated. Gina and Dean sat in silence for a few minutes, processing what they had heard. So, Dean had been right, after all. The government had bombed their own cities, for whatever reason. Now, it was defunct. And the news of the other countries falling was a shocker. Somehow, she had expected the rest of the world to be fine. Still, there were survivors, looking to rebuild.
“Dean, we have to go there!”
“No!” he growled, getting up. He looked angry, angrier than she had seen him before.
“What?” she asked, confused. “Why not? Isn’t that where we were going, anyway?”
“Not anymore.”
“Dean.”
“It could be a trap! I’m not walking into a camp led by a General of the United States army! What if he shoots me? Takes you for himself?”
“I don’t believe that for a second,” Gina said, though internally she admitted that Dean had a good point. If the government had bombed their own cities, then his idea wasn’t so far-fetched. She shivered, thinking about the man that had shot her and then the man that had attacked them outside of the bunker. If society had really crumbled that fast, what made this place any different?
Still, she had to believe that there was something left. Some hope of humanity and society. There had to be others like her and Dean. There just had to be.
“So, then. What do we do?” she asked.
Dean shrugged his shoulders. “The plan doesn’t change, much. We still head north. To Canada. Maybe Maine. We just won’t stop at the cabins.”
“Okay,” Gina said, but it wasn’t okay. She’d been with Dean since almost the beginning, and he’d been right nearly every moment of being out here. He’d known that man outside of the bunker had ill intentions. He knew what berries were safe to eat. He knew which water sources were safe to drink, and he was exce
llent at moving through the forests and mountains. He’d excelled in the bunker on his own.
But was he right here? She wasn’t sure. She thought of going to Canada with Dean and Petey, but what then? A cabin in the woods, living alone until the end of their days, undisturbed? She almost laughed to herself. It didn’t seem likely.
But an actual society… that was something she could see. Something she could help build. She was a doctor. She didn’t have any supplies, but she could help so much more in a new society than she could out in the woods, away from everyone else.
Dean grabbed his duffel bag and gave her a look. She got up and picked hers up, as well. Together, they set off, trying to find the trail Dean had talked about the day before. Right now, they were together. But when they passed Marshall Mountain, she wasn’t sure if it would stay that way.
And would she want it to?
*
They were making decent time; as well as could be expected, anyway. Dean wanted to move fast, and he knew that Gina wanted to move fast, too, but she wasn’t prepared for the trail that wound up and down the Appalachians.
It wasn’t easy going, but she did her best, especially when weighed down by her duffel bag full of supplies. A duffel bag that was getting lighter by the meal.
The day after they’d found the radio, they’d done just over 10 miles. It wasn’t as much as Dean had wanted to do, but he could tell that Gina was sore. The last thing he wanted to do was to push her, or have her push herself, so far that she got injured. An injury out here could spell worse than disaster. It could mean death.
The second day, they’d done just over eight. It had been an easier day than the one before and he could tell that both Gina and Petey appreciated it. He admitted to himself that taking it a bit slower was nice, too.
At every break, Dean turned the radio on, hoping to hear more from General Harris. The message that repeated was always the same, and they couldn’t pick up any other radio stations. Dean didn’t know whether that was good or bad.
He recognized what that radio message meant. For Gina, it was salvation. For him, it was death. He knew that they would recognize him in that camp. He was a wanted man.
What he’d told Gina could be true, though. It could be a trap. He didn’t think it was, though. Maybe it was his Shifter intuition telling him that. Maybe it was him rebelling against what his grandfather would have done.
So the plan had changed. He would continue on, past that little spot in the woods that was to be his salvation. He’d continue on to somewhere more secluded and start his new life there. On his way, they would swing close enough to that camp for Dean to check it out. Make sure it was safe. And then, if she wanted to, Gina would stay.
And he knew she would.
She would be a fool not to. She could help others. She was a doctor, after all. She could be one of the major pillars of rebuilding society as they knew it. With Gina there, they might even stand a chance. But it wasn’t for Dean, no matter how much he wanted it to be.
So they continued on, 30 miles from the mountain where they would have to make their decision. Their food situation was dwindling, though not alarmingly so. With Dean’s foraging, and maybe a little bit of luck hunting or fishing around the lake, they would make it to that camp hungry, but alive. He was going to avoid going into the city now more than ever, considering the warning that North Williamstown was lost.
After they’d listened to the first broadcast after passing Haysberry, Gina had brought it up. She thought it was destroyed, probably by a bomb blast. Dean didn’t bother to correct her, but he knew better. When the General said that it was lost, he didn’t mean destroyed. North Williamstown was probably a cesspool; a major location of trouble and death.
One of the ideas his grandfather had instilled in his mind was that in an apocalyptic survival situation, humanity would quickly fall. That didn’t necessarily mean that society would crumble immediately. Rather, civilization would crumble. Men would give in to their baser instincts. Dean knew, in his gut, that that’s what had happened in North Williamstown.
Gina hadn’t said much to him for the past few days, beyond the usual. He didn’t know whether that was good or bad. He didn’t know what was going on between them anymore. He had wanted to talk to her, to articulate his feelings towards her, and why it wasn’t a good idea. He hadn’t done it, though. He didn’t know if he would ever get the chance.
By his estimation, they had maybe three days of walking before they would get around the mountain. After that, it should be an easy day or two to where he imagined the camp was set up. In five days, he would part ways with Gina. With that amount of time left, he didn’t think it would be important to let her know his feelings. They didn’t have much time left together, so why did it matter?
There was one small mountain before they reached Marshall Mountain, and that’s where Dean’s plan absolutely collapsed.
The ascent was gradual, but the descent on the northern side of the mountain was absolutely brutal. It was less hiking and more scrambling down thick, massive rocks. Nearly every few feet, Dean would have to make his way down a rock, then turn back towards Gina and help her down. After that, he would grab Petey and they would repeat the process.
On one of the smaller rocks, Gina went to climb down. Her foot caught between two boulders and she fell. Her ankle twisted between the rocks. Behind him, he heard a scream of pain and his plan shattered.
*
“It’s not broken,” Gina reassured Dean, though the reassurance was as much for herself as it was for him. But it wasn’t in good shape. She felt around, poking and prodding the joint lightly. Bolts of pain shot through her leg at the slightest touch. “It’s not broken. Just sprained. Bad.”
And she knew in some situations, like now, that could be even worse.
Petey was barking next to her, lapping at her face. She tried to tell him it was going to be okay, but she knew it wasn’t. This was bad. Even Dean’s calm exterior had shattered. He looked like a panicked mess.
It had all happened so quickly. He’d been helping her and Petey down the mountain and she’d went to climb down one of the rocks and slipped. As she had fallen, her foot had got caught between the rock and another. When she’d struggled, she had wrenched it and fallen forward, hard.
“How’s my face?” she asked, trying to make the best of a bad situation.
“Pretty as ever,” Dean told her. Whether or not that was true, she didn’t know, but she appreciated his response just the same.
“This is bad, huh?”
He nodded sagely. “Yeah, we’re in trouble.”
“Dean, what do we do? You’re the expert.”
“Give me a minute,” Dean told her and took a few steps back to think. Gina grabbed Petey and embraced him. He could tell when there was trouble, but she didn’t think he understood the gravity of this situation. It was possible that this accident could lead to her death.
After a few minutes of silent thought, Dean came back and opened up the duffel bags. He rummaged through their food. They had enough for a week’s worth of meals each, unless they wanted to eat Petey’s dog food. Then they would have a few more days, at best, and Petey wouldn’t have anything.
“Okay, we have a week left,” Dean said. She could tell he was doing some calculations in his head. “Normally, we would be past the mountain in three days. We’re only about 20 miles away from it. Now, we’re not going to be so lucky. You can’t walk. I’ll have to make you a litter. That’s going to eat up a few days, at the minimum. So we’ll have five days of food left when we get you down the mountain and get moving. Then we’ll still have two, maybe three days of walking until we’re past the mountain. So, when we come out the other side, we’ll have two days of food left. If we’re lucky.”
MUNDO (BBW Bear Shifter MC Romance) (MC Bear Mates Book 2) Page 66
