A Single Light

by Tosca Lee

  My nape prickles, and this time I move toward him, glancing over my shoulder as he covers our retreat, pistol drawn.

  Upstairs, we turn off the flashlights, the darkness instantly stifling, the house I once found so welcoming ominous for its emptiness and unknown corridors. Chase holsters the pistol and unslings the rifle. Moving to a back window, he lifts the rifle and nudges aside the shade with the muzzle. Peers through the scope at the shed less than fifty yards away.

  “What is it?” I whisper.

  “Door’s cracked open. Can’t tell if there’s anything moving inside it through this fog.”

  “Which door?” Ezra.

  “Shed. We’re coming out the front.”

  I look around the kitchen in the darkness with a sense of desperate frustration. Where’s Noah? What’s happened here? Where did everyone go?

  Just then a sound issues up the stairs beyond the pantry. An echo from the basement, like wind howling through a loose-fitting window.

  Or a croon.

  The hair stands up on my arms.

  “What the—” I pull my pistol and move backward into the living room.

  “Time to go,” Chase says, positioning himself on the other side of the door.

  Pistol trained on the opening to the kitchen with one hand, I reach for the knob with the other. Unlock it.

  “One. Two . . .”

  I yank it toward me, hidden behind it. Chase moves out onto the porch, rifle raised.

  “All clear,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  We hurry down the steps into the milky haze suspended in mid-air. Blunting sound.

  We’ve made it fewer than twenty yards when Chase stops and turns, rifle pointed toward the corner of the house.

  “Chase.”

  “Go!” He pivots toward the front porch.

  And then I understand: anyone following us from the direction of the shed will come around that corner. Unless they come up through the house and out the front door.

  I run for the locust tree. Am almost there when I hear something beyond it, shuffling along the ground. At first I think it’s that bird.

  Until it growls.

  I freeze. Pistol trained in front of me. Looking for eyes, but in the absence of light there is no glint. Belatedly realizing I left my penlight in the basement.

  The sound again, a coughing snarl.

  “Chase,” I say, as loudly as I dare so the VOX picks it up, not wanting to take a hand from my gun. “There’s something—”

  Flurry of movement, coming right at me. “Chase—”

  “Wynter, drop!”

  I don’t question. My knees buckle, finger off the trigger as I fall flat to the ground.

  A shot rings out, whizzes overhead. Punches into something.

  A terrible flurry of scratching and clicking teeth. A clod of damp earth smacks me on the cheek.

  And then silence.

  “Get up,” Chase says. He’s running. “Go! I’m right behind you. Ezra, we’re coming in!”

  I claw to my feet and launch myself forward. Sprint for the concrete ramp rising from the earth to frame the silo door.

  “Ezra,” I pant.

  “I see you.”

  And now I see him, too, moving away from the entrance enough to let me pass.

  I stumble over a broken board and land heavily on the metal grate, the sound reverberating down the concrete well as Karam grabs me in the inky blackness before I can tumble down the stairs.

  Ten seconds later, Chase and Ezra pull the door shut and I wish we could lock it behind us.

  “Noah’s gone,” I say, breathing hard. “Everyone’s gone.”

  “How far does the sound of a rifle shot travel?” Ezra asks.

  “Not sure,” Chase says. “But if anyone nearby didn’t know we were here before, they do now.”

  5 A.M.

  * * *

  By the time we reemerge, fog has settled like a fine shroud around the ranch known as the old Peterson place, granting it an eerie, in-between feel. In but not quite of this world. Caught in a twilight before dawn that feels like the one before night.

  Far too quiet. As though the air itself is listening.

  For a minute it actually feels and looks like the New Earth Magnus preached about. Primordial and charged with newborn electricity.

  Until I take in the splintered boards beneath my next step. The great heap of rubble that used to be the barn.

  Ezra, Karam, Micah, and I move out in careful silence, determined to learn what happened to the others. To take stock of our surroundings, assess threats and options.

  Nelise and Delaney guard the silo entrance. I gesture Micah to wait where they can cover him. He’s the only one of us not armed, having claimed he’d be more of a liability than an asset with a gun in his hands.

  Chase, crouched on the top of the concrete ramp above the doorframe, squints through the scope toward the house and then lowers the rifle with a curse. I know he’s anxious to learn who—if anyone—was out here earlier. But night vision doesn’t help in fog.

  Static. “You see this?” Ezra murmurs in my ear and I wonder who he’s talking to.

  I move around the heap, impatient to get going. Because I need to know what’s in the bunkhouse beneath the shed. Have promised myself that I will figure something out today. That I will get Julie what she needs by this afternoon—nightfall, latest.

  I find Ezra and Karam staring at the pile, a piece of twisted shrapnel in Karam’s hands.

  When I follow their gazes, I stare, too.

  At the mass of mangled white-and-red metal protruding from the debris. It’s burned black in some spots. Crumpled like a cheaply made toy crushed by an angry child. A buckled roof collapsed over a rounded nose.

  No, not a roof. Wings.

  The wreckage of a plane.

  “Looks like an old Cessna Agwagon,” Ezra says. “Used for crop dusting.”

  “Wonder what this is about,” Karam says, kicking the corpse of a turkey vulture. The instant he does, it flutters, sending him skittering back.

  “What the—”

  It goes still. The next time he nudges it, it doesn’t move.

  “Look,” he says, pointing around us.

  There are three more like it littering this side of the heap.

  Ezra climbs up onto the wreckage.

  “At least we know what happened to the barn,” Karam says.

  “I’m guessing the pilot was sick,” Ezra says. “Judging by the fire, he wasn’t out of fuel.”

  Static, and then: “There a body?” Chase.

  Ezra shines his flashlight into the cockpit, the door of which is hanging open. “Well, there was at some point. Can still see blood in some places. Whatever happened, the body’s gone now.”

  I touch the button on the walkie-talkie, though Ezra’s only ten feet away. “Remember what I said about surgical instruments. If that pilot was sick and you cut yourself through your gloves . . .”

  “Roger,” Ezra says, moving to jump back down. But as he does, he slips. Grabbing the edge of the cockpit door, he skids out onto the stub of an amputated wing and regains his balance. For a nervous moment, he studies his latex-gloved hands. No one bothered to color them black in anticipation of sunrise. With a grin, he holds them up to show the gloves intact.

  “Clear back there?” Chase.

  “Clear,” I say. “We’re coming back.”

  I’ve barely got the last word out when Ezra drops down to the ground. A beat later, he screams.

  Ezra pitches forward, hands over his mouth. Karam and I run toward him at once.

  “Who’s that?” Chase demands. “What just happened?”

  Ezra rolls onto his back, grabbing his foot and wincing in agony. The toe of his sneaker flops to the side, shorn almost completely off.

  Along with his toes.

  I turn away, arm across my face.

  “Ezra stepped on a metal shard,” Karam says. “Oh, yup. It’s bad. I’m bringing him back. Irwin, send
for Rima.”

  I help haul Ezra to his good foot. Slide a shoulder beneath his arm and look fixedly away as Karam pans the debris at our feet and then swiftly collects several objects and drops them in Ezra’s pocket.

  Chase curses. “When the sun comes up and this fog clears, we have no cover between us and whatever’s out here.”

  “I’ll go,” Delaney says.

  We get to the entrance. Ezra grabs the concrete frame. The instant he’s hopping past Nelise onto the landing, Delaney emerges, gun pointed toward the ground. And then Micah, Karam, Chase, and I are moving toward the house, Delaney covering our backs.

  Just past the locust tree, Chase stops. Rifle over his shoulder, he circles back, scanning the ground, pistol naked in his hand.

  And I know he’s looking for the animal he shot.

  “It should be right here,” I murmur. The grass is bent every which direction and I remember the clatter of the animal’s teeth, the convulsive spasm as it died.

  But there’s no sign of it.

  Chase shakes his head. “Must have crawled off and died somewhere else.”

  We cross slowly toward the northeast corner of the house, the fog tinged incrementally lighter than before, grass dampening the hems of our jeans. From here, I can see the pallid metal of the shed. There’s a dark truck parked at an odd angle just to the right of it, missing its front wheels.

  We circle wide to the long side of the shed, having rehearsed this—on paper at least—an hour earlier. For a minute I have the strange sensation that I’m swimming rather than skulking through the fog. It’s fatigue, I know. But I can’t shake the thought that Chase, Micah, and Karam look like specters. And that it feels like premonition.

  I don’t want to be here. Don’t want to go into that shed or see the state of those bunkers. And I don’t want Truly, Lauren, or Julie near them, either.

  I touch the button on the walkie-talkie. “Chase, did you see any vehicles earlier?” I whisper.

  “A UTV near the gate. I assume it doesn’t work or they’d have taken it.”

  “Let’s go look. Maybe it just needs fuel.” Which we have. “Or one of you can fix it. Maybe we can get it working, take Julie into town.”

  Karam glances at me.

  “And what? Leave the rest of us like sitting ducks?” he demands.

  “I’m talking about saving a life!”

  Chase gestures us angrily toward a windbreak.

  “Look,” he says, as soon as we’ve retreated behind a line of spruces. “We have to secure the bunkhouse and basement. Then we figure out how to get Julie the help she needs.”

  “You don’t need me for this!” I hiss as Micah glances nervously around.

  “The whole point of you being here is that you’re immune,” Karam says, eyes narrowed. “You volunteered to go in!”

  “ ’Scuse me,” someone cuts in. Nelise. I’d forgotten she was on the frequency. “Ezra passed out. And I’m guarding the entrance and everyone below by myself right now. Wynter, I’m sorry to say that if Julie can’t wait another few hours, she ain’t gonna make it anyway.”

  I lower my head, calculating the direction of the fence. Where the

  UTV might be. But finding it won’t be enough if it needs gas from the silo’s storeroom. And I’ll need help getting Julie topside and into

  the vehicle, as well as someone to hold on to her while I drive.

  “The minute the ranch is secure, we find the UTV and do whatever it takes to get it working,” I say, looking from Chase to Karam, and then Micah. “If Julie dies and you didn’t do everything you possibly could, it’s on your heads.”

  “Agreed,” Micah says. Karam doesn’t respond. Whatever he’s thinking, he doesn’t say.

  By the time we cross to the front of the shed, the sky is the color of new denim. Fog to the east tinged an uncanny shade of red. The color of blood in water, which does nothing to settle my unease.

  So eerily quiet.

  Chase pulls a flashlight from his belt and nods to Karam. The next instant they’re pushing their way inside the shed in a rush of motion.

  “Anything?” Chase.

  A moment later: “Nope.”

  “Clear here.”

  “Clear.”

  I gesture Micah in ahead of me, pistol drawn. Step in after him and grab the edge of the door. The instant Delaney’s through I lean my weight into sliding it shut, wheels screeching along the track. It closes and Delaney turns the latch handle, driving the bolt into the concrete floor. Unlike most sheds, which are meant to keep things inside, this one is also meant to keep others out.

  Micah turns on the lantern, holds it up.

  The interior tells a story similar to that of the basement: the far shelves, once stocked with white plastic buckets, are empty. The tubs of hygiene supplies and towels that lined the adjacent wall sit askew or tumbled onto the ground.

  I find the bank of light switches, which should work; the fixtures in the shed are solar. I try them all. Nothing.

  Moving to the tubs, I peer in each one. Like the bins in the basement, they’re empty except for garbage: a few MRE containers, cans that once contained food. Tuna, by the smell of it. I cover my nose. Kick the last tub over.

  A hiss sounds from the corner, followed by a rhythmic growl.

  “What’s that?” Micah says, stumbling back.

  I grab the lantern and shine it toward the opossum.

  I saw plenty in the Enclave—along with the requisite mice and occasional raccoon. The last few weeks I was there, I spent hours wondering how they got in. Wondering if I could follow the same way out.

  Karam’s studying a door that, by all appearances, leads to a side room. It reminds me of the wooden one in the barn that obscured the silo entrance.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  Chase raises his pistol, braced against the hand holding the flashlight, rifle slung over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  Karam gives the silent count, hand on the door handle.

  Throws it open.

  And then he’s following Chase down a set of plywood stairs.

  A moment later Chase gives the all clear. I descend behind Micah and his lantern as Delaney closes the door behind us and locks it.

  The motion-sensor light in the stairwell sputters on and then fades with the last of its battery. Down the hallway a second one flicks off and back on as Chase disappears into and steps back out of one of the shipping container rooms. Looking at the sliding doors to my left, I can’t help but remember the night Chase and I spent here.

  I push the thought aside as I take the lantern from Micah, enter the room to my right, and begin searching the open drawers of the antique dresser. I look under the bed and inside the pocket door closet at the far end of the room. Find nothing but garbage, a discarded Rolling Stones T-shirt, a toothbrush, an issue of People magazine. Relics of lives abandoned and forgotten. Squalor compared to the luxury of our laundry, clean facilities, kitchen, and library.

  Each room tells a different tale: from sweat stains on the mattresses to the MRE wrappers in the back corner of the closet to the old traveling trunk I remember from before. It had been filled with toys. There’s a blanket in it now, giving it a manger-like appearance.

  “Anything?” Micah says from the hallway outside the fourth room, the others—including Chase—not daring to touch the objects down here.

  Someone—a little girl, I imagine—left a broken butterfly necklace beside the bed. I pick it up, consider giving it to Truly. But then notice the purple Sharpie on the floor, the array of butterflies drawn on the corrugated metal wall beside the headboard. I return the necklace to the nightstand, the tarnished chain pooling beneath the upturned charm.

  “No,” I say. No clues to where they went. Or why. Only who they once were.

  In the last room—a larger family suite made of two containers side by side—I find a tear-off calendar like the one Julie’s husband, Ken, used to have on his desk with a Far Side cartoon for every day of
the year.

  I carry it out to the hallway. “Look at this. The last day is March twenty-first.” Beneath the date it says, in bright, whimsical art, “Today Is Going to Be a Great Day!”

  I wonder why it was left behind—unless whoever owned it just got sick of being lied to.

  “Some of the food wrappers in the shed seem a lot more recent than that,” Chase says, stationed at the far end of the hall, gun and flashlight both trained around a corner I never knew existed.

  “I used to have one of those calendars.” Micah shrugs. “And I’d forget to tear the pages off for weeks at a time.”

  “People who live in community would never leave a place in this condition,” I say. “Not if they actually worked in it to survive the unthinkable and respected their leader.”

  I should know.

  “So the most recent inhabitants were squatters.” Karam.

  Noah’s been gone for months.

  5:30 A.M.

  * * *

  There’s a narrow turn just off the end of the hallway that I do not remember from before. Not that we did more than explore the rooms themselves, enthralled with their knickknacks and antique, mismatched furniture, the shipping containers cut open and laid side by side to form two double-wide suites at the end. As we get closer, I see what looks like a dark bookcase, labels fixed to the front of the shelves: TWIN SHEETS, PILLOWCASES, FULL SHEETS, EXTRA BLANKETS.

  Chase shines his flashlight at the floor. It’s scratched where the case has been moved.

  “Never realized Noah was this paranoid,” Delaney murmurs.

  “It’s not paranoid. It’s smart.” Karam.

  We move single file through the passage, which feels more like a concrete channel. West, toward the house, and emerge in the exact spot Chase pointed out earlier this morning.

  “Place looks ransacked,” Delaney says as we navigate the chaos of toppled rubber totes.

  Part of the mess is mine.

  Inside the office, Micah tries several switches. When nothing happens, he pulls a folding knife from his back pocket and snicks the zip tie around the bundled cords. After searching for several seconds, he pulls out one in particular. Follows it toward the wall.