The End of All Things

by Lissa Bryan

  He put Dagny’s crib behind their seat, fastened in place with cables. He was worried that rough ground might jiggle the baby too much, but Carly shrugged and said if it was too rough, she’d get out and carry her.

  Justin put a halter on Storm for the first time and got her used to it so he could tie her to the wagon. He didn’t completely trust Shadowfax’s placid nature when it came to Dagny and was worried she might bolt with the wagon if something frightened her, but with her baby tied to it, perhaps she’d be more careful. And it would prevent the curious Storm from wandering off and getting into trouble.

  Justin taped a gun under the seat. He showed it to Carly, and she made no comment. She hoped she never had to touch a gun again. Every so often, she still had bad dreams of that horrible couple who had shot Justin with the arrow and of the man in the train depot. She knew she had done the right thing, but it still bothered her that she had killed people, taken human lives. She supposed it was like Justin said: It shouldn’t be an easy thing to do.

  Carly walked slowly through the house on the day they left, saying good-bye to each room as she remembered what had taken place in each. She was glad Justin was out making last-minute additions to the wagon and wasn’t there to see her tears.

  In their bedroom, she lingered by the large, soft bed where she and Justin had come together the first time as husband and wife and where their baby had been born. On impulse, she took a pencil from the office and wrote on the back wall of the closet, “Justin and Carly lived here, and we were happy. 2013.” With one last glance from the doorway, she went downstairs and out onto the porch.

  “Did we forget anything?” Justin asked.

  Carly shook her head, too choked up to speak.

  Justin understood. He dropped the tarp he was spreading over their supplies and went up onto the porch with her. He took her into his arms and rested his chin on her head. “We’ll have another home where we’re just as happy. It’s waiting for us. We just have to find it.”

  Chapter Nine

  They fell into the familiar rhythm of travel quickly, as though they had never stopped. Each night, they pitched their tent by the wagon. Sam slept beneath it, and the two horses remained nearby, as though recognizing his protection. In the morning, Justin would cook them breakfast over the campfire, and they stopped for lunch whenever Sam brought them a rabbit or a squirrel. Carly disliked squirrel meat and always gave the whole thing to Justin, who seemed to relish it.

  They paused to forage as they passed houses. More often than not, Justin found little, either because the families hadn’t stocked up before the Crisis, or because looters had been there before them. Once, Justin became enraged to find looters had smashed the glass jars of everything they hadn’t taken. He was infuriated. As scornful as he was of human society, he seemed to feel the senseless destruction violated some code of survival, some unwritten rule of wasteland courtesy everyone should obey.

  As a group, they gave the towns a wide berth. Justin would hide the wagon, Carly, and the baby as best he could and head off alone into the towns to see what he could find. It was seldom worth his effort. Even most of the houses in the towns had been looted.

  Were there that many survivors? Or had they somehow managed to find the only area in the country that had been picked clean in such a fashion? They met a few people on the road during their first month of travel, and there was always a mutual wariness. Most didn’t want to trade away their food.

  Carly knew Justin was worried when he found a house with a small barn behind it and told her he was heading out alone for a day or so, headed east to see if maybe their route was too well-traveled and another one might have more supplies available.

  As with many of the houses they’d stayed in during their travels, it appeared as though the residents had just stepped out. It was a comfortable little home, decorated in warm earth tones, and Carly would have ordinarily liked it, but being without Justin made everything seem drab and dour.

  Carly hated being left behind, but they had Dagny to think of. She tried to hold back the tears to avoid making Justin feel bad. She knew he had to do it. They couldn’t live solely off the small game Sam brought them, not with Carly nursing a baby.

  Sam was on high alert all night, and every time he jerked awake at a sound, Carly woke, too. She had a gun on the nightstand and a rifle stored under the bed. Sam went into the kitchen and pawed at the door to be let out. She finally opened it for him and he disappeared into the darkness. She sat at the kitchen table and waited for him, the rifle clutched between her trembling hands. But he was calm when he returned, and he checked on his cat, who was curled up in a soft basket Justin had found at a pet store. Dagny was sleeping in a dresser drawer that was serving as a makeshift cradle. Sam sniffed her and was apparently satisfied with the data he gleaned. He hopped back up on the foot of the bed and curled up in a ball. Carly got back into bed, but her sleep was light and unsatisfying.

  The next morning, she nursed Dagny before she got out of bed. Thankfully, they both seemed to have figured it out and Carly hadn’t had any trouble since they started on their journey. It was a big relief because she’d worried about sterilizing the bottles properly on the road.

  The house had an electric stove, so Carly had to build a little fire in the yard the next morning to make some coffee and breakfast. She saw the remnants of a fire ring in the side yard, likely built by other travelers who had stayed here before. She fried some Spam, but just picked at it, though she knew she should eat for Dagny’s sake. She looked down at her baby, sound asleep in the baby sling, but she couldn’t force down another bite. Sam and Tigger watched her with intent stares until she gave up on eating and put the Spam into the wolf’s bowl. Sam had a passionate love for Spam, but since Justin loved it too, Sam seldom got a nice, big meal of it. He shared with Tigger grudgingly.

  Carly went out to the barn and checked on the horses. They had already gone out into the yard, found the flower bed at the side of the house, and were in horse heaven. She sat outside for a while with them under the shade of a nearby tree. Dagny woke while she was lounging there, and Carly enjoyed a pleasant morning of playing and cuddling with her. Storm would stop eating every now and then and trot over to Carly for a pat on the nose. She grinned because Storm was becoming more like Sam every day.

  She waited. Justin should be back any time now. Any time now. After Dagny’s midday feeding, she put her in her makeshift cradle in the bedroom and sat down at the kitchen table. Every time she glanced at the stopped clock over the sink, it reminded her Justin was late.

  She pulled her gaze away from it to the sideboard. A pile of mail still sat atop it, bills that would never be paid. The corner of an envelope caught her eye and she pulled it out of the stack. Cederna Pharmaceuticals. Carly blinked and tore it open. It was a form to be sent to the insurance company of the residents. Both of them had gotten a flu shot at the local pharmacy. A flu shot made by Cederna.

  She heard the door open and looked up, relief and joy flooding through her. “Justin! Oh, thank—”

  It wasn’t Justin.

  A ginger-haired man stood there, looking just as surprised as Carly felt. Someone else was behind him, but Carly didn’t get a good look as she scrambled to her feet and bolted into the bedroom. Carly grabbed her gun off the top of the dresser and darted to the doorway, which looked out into the kitchen, across the small hallway. Where is Sam? she wondered and blinked hard to suppress tears of fear.

  “You stay right there!” Carly shouted at the man, who hadn’t moved since he stepped through the door. His eyes were wide.

  “Please, lady,” he said and held his hands up. “You can have whatever you want. Me and my wife are going to leave now, okay?”

  “Where’s my wolf? Did you hurt him? I swear to God, if you hurt him—”

  “A wolf?”

  “A wolf with a cat!” Carly shouted.

  The man lowered his eyes, and he cast a quick look back at the woman behind him. Carly reali
zed how crazy what she’d said must have sounded to him. “I didn’t see a wolf with a cat,” he said, and his voice was soft and soothing. “I’m sure they’re around here somewhere. I’ll help you look.”

  At that moment Sam came in through the open door and trotted past the couple in the doorway, Tigger dangling from his mouth as usual. The man’s jaw dropped as Sam went into the bedroom behind Carly and hopped up on the bed, depositing Tigger beside him.

  Carly was bewildered, to say the least. Sam didn’t like strangers, but there he was, treating the ginger-haired man and the person still hiding behind him with familiar indifference, as though they were members of the family.

  Dagny let out a little whimper and a halfhearted cry. She was spoiled rotten for affection and her mother’s presence. When she woke up alone, it was odd, and she didn’t like it.

  “My God, Stan, is that a baby?” the woman whispered, awed.

  “You stay the fuck away from my baby,” Carly snarled and waved the gun at them.

  The woman poked her head around the man’s back. She was almost as short as Carly but stout, with a sweetly rounded face. “I just wanted to see her. I haven’t seen a baby since the Crisis. I didn’t know if the babies would be immune . . .”

  Carly lowered her gun to her side, but kept her finger curled around the trigger. “What are you doing here?”

  “Um, we . . . We actually live here,” the man said in an apologetic tone. “But that’s okay. You can have it. You can have whatever you want. Just, please, don’t hurt my wife.”

  “I’m not going to hurt her unless you try to hurt me. Or my baby. Or my animals. You didn’t scare my horses, did you?”

  “You have horses?”

  Carly felt relief wash through her. Shadowfax and Storm must be in the barn. Maybe they had been smart enough to hide from these strangers. Not Sam, though. He was napping, his feet twitching in his dreams. The only way such a thing was possible must have been that Sam didn’t see them as a threat. “Yes, I have two horses. One is just a baby.”

  “A baby. A wolf. A cat. And two horses. Am I missing anything?” A smile played around the corners of his lips.

  “A man. My husband. You didn’t see anyone coming this way, did you?”

  The man shook his head. “Listen, if you aren’t going to shoot us right now, could you put the gun away? I’m very nervous around guns.”

  Carly put on the safety and stuck it in her back pocket. “I can draw it really fast,” she said. “So don’t try anything.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. May I ask your name?”

  “Carly.”

  “Hello, Carly. I’m Stan. And this is my wife, Mindy.” Mindy poked her head around Stan’s body again. “Hello.” She gave a little wave and then ducked back to her hiding place.

  “This is Sam,” Carly said and pointed to her wolf. “He’s . . . uh . . . really protective of me and the baby.”

  Sam rolled over and used Tigger as a pillow. The long-suffering cat just let out a sound that seemed to be the equivalent of a feline sigh. “Tigger is the cat.”

  “And the baby?” Mindy sounded eager.

  “Dagny.” Carly backed up until she was standing by the open drawer.

  “Please, may I? I just want to look at her.” Mindy’s eyes were bright with excitement, and in her Carly could see something she recognized in herself: hope. Carly glanced down at the snoozing Sam and decided to trust his judgment. “I’m taking my gun back out. Don’t you dare touch her, or I’ll shoot you.”

  Mindy nodded. She walked slowly around Stan and then into the bedroom, her hands held up like a bank robbery victim. She peered down into the drawer and gasped.

  “Oh, Carly, she’s so beautiful!”

  Dagny was dressed in a light pink cotton smock with matching socks. She had fallen back to sleep and lay on her back with her head turned to the side, her only movement the gentle rise and fall of her chest.

  Mindy had tears in her eyes. “She gives me hope.”

  Carly put away her gun. She could not have explained it if asked, but she felt a strange kinship with Mindy. Maybe it was the same sort of instinct Sam had about the couple, and Carly almost laughed aloud, picturing the expression on Justin’s face if she tried to tell him that. She said, “That’s why I named her ‘Dagny.’ It means ‘a new day.’ ”

  “I didn’t have my pills,” Mindy murmured. “But I haven’t gotten pregnant. I thought, maybe exposure to the Infection made us sterile.”

  Carly considered telling her how Dagny had stubbornly persisted in being born—a broken condom and a dose of the morning-after pill—and decided against it. But Mindy’s remark about the Infection made her remember the envelope on the table.

  “You both had flu shots? Made by Cederna Pharmaceuticals?”

  Mindy blinked in confusion at what must have seemed like a non sequitur to her. “I’m not sure who made them, but yes, we both got a flu shot. On the same day. We went to the drug store to pick up a case of soda and thought ‘Why not?’ when we saw the nurse at the table.”

  “Justin and I both had flu shots from Cederna.” Carly’s heartbeat accelerated with excitement. Maybe there really was something to her idea after all.

  Stan scratched his head. His expression was slightly skeptical but interested. “Do you think that has some kind of connection?”

  “I can’t say for sure. But it’s a pretty big coincidence.”

  “CARLY!” It was Justin’s voice, and he sounded panicked.

  “Did you leave a vehicle outside?” Carly asked quickly.

  “Our bicycles, but we—”

  Carly snatched her sleeping baby out of her makeshift cradle and dashed past them to the door. It banged behind her as she flew through it into Justin’s arms. He checked her and the baby. Dagny gave a little disgruntled sound at being shaken around when she was having a really nice nap.

  “It’s okay,” Carly said. “They’re nice.”

  Justin was almost running as he hurried toward the house, Carly right at his heels. He drew his gun as he charged through the door, and Stan grabbed Mindy and stepped in front of her before he threw up his hands in instant surrender.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Justin demanded.

  “Stan and Mindy. We live here.” Stan gave Justin a small, rueful smile. “And might I add, I really don’t enjoy being on the business end of a gun. That makes twice today.”

  Mindy poked her head around him. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.” Justin didn’t lower the gun. His eyes were narrowed in suspicion. “Where were you, if this is your house?”

  “Out foraging for food. We were gone for three days. I didn’t want to leave Mindy alone, so she came with me.”

  Sam hopped down off the bed and trotted over to Justin, his tail swishing in the air, side to side. His tongue lolled out the side of his mouth. Justin stared at him for a moment and then put his gun away.

  “Is anyone hungry?” Mindy asked. “I’ll make brunch.” She went over to the bag that lay beside the kitchen door and withdrew cans. Carly was touched; Stan and Mindy obviously didn’t have much, but they were willing to share with the strangers who had invaded their home and held them at gunpoint.

  “I could eat,” Justin replied, though a hint of wariness lingered around his narrowed eyes. He pulled Carly against his side, and he glanced down at his baby once more, as if reassuring himself again that both were safe and sound.

  Mindy had a little camp stove she set up over the sink, heated by chafing dish burners, which she said she’d gotten from a friend’s catering business. She made a stir-fry of canned vegetables, and Carly contributed a pot of white rice to eat with it. While Mindy cooked, she excused herself to feed Dagny and change her diaper and returned to lay her down in the laundry basket-bed beside her chair. She gave Dagny a set of plastic keys, and Dagny gnawed on them happily.

  The vegetables Mindy was cooking reminded her, and Carly shuffled uncomfortably. “Um, my horses have probably wrecked your
garden. I know they ate your flowers. Sorry.”

  Mindy chuckled. “It’s worth it to see a horse again.”

  “We saw some wild ones up in Canada,” Carly said. “So, I guess the ones that were closest to humans got the Infection, and maybe the wild ones were safe because they kept their distance. Maybe they had some level of natural immunity humans didn’t have.”

  “Tell me about this flu-shot theory of yours,” Stan said. “The only survivors you’ve met were people who had Cederna flu shots?”

  Carly accepted a plate from Mindy and thanked her. “It’s not really a theory. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, Justin and I got the shot and we’re immune, and so did you guys. I haven’t been taking a poll or anything, but I’m really curious if the rest of the survivors got one, or if anyone who got a shot from Cederna got sick and died anyway.” Carly twirled her fork between her fingers and bit her lip. “I’m not, like, a scientist or anything. It just seems to me if we want to figure out why we survived, we need to look at things we have in common.”

  Justin picked up his fork. “Carly, if your theory was correct, every active-duty man and woman in the armed forces would have survived. They’re required to get flu shots.”

  She hadn’t thought of that. “You weren’t required?”

  “No, but I got one anyway. I get the flu every damned year if I don’t.”

  “No more vaccines,” Mindy said. She glanced down at the laundry basket where Dagny lay, sound asleep again.

  They were all silent for a moment, pondering the implications of that truth. At that moment, while humanity was still scattered to the winds, the danger was small, but once communities began to form again, the risk of disease would increase.