As summer’s grip on the region started to wane, Fran loaded up his people, telling them that they had one last mission, that whoever survived could take whatever they needed, start a new life wherever they wanted. That seemed to bolster their morale. He remembered that and kept talking about it all the way to the coast. He no longer had use of satellites, but they could take their time. The coast was the coast, and they had twenty-eight well-trained mercenaries, plenty of weaponry, and enough firepower to take on an army regiment.
Though it was easy for Fran to pretend that he cared, he asked his men what their plans would be, whether they might look for wives, have kids, plant a garden, maybe raise horses, or herd cattle. He listened to their stories and they cozied up to him, often telling him their worries. Many would tell him their dreams. He concocted a story about going down to the Florida Keys, finding a boat, fixing it up. But he would never tell the truth. He never wanted one of these damn fools to follow him. He’d have his Montana rivers and he’d have them to himself.
They hit the Chesapeake Bay and feasted on crab, then they wandered down to Norfolk, looting the warehouse stores in Dam Neck. They spent a couple of days in Sandbridge, Virginia soaking in some rays. Fran even threw a couple of picnics, congratulating himself on what a fine, feared leader he was. He could give them nourishment, or he could give them death.
His thoughts turned back to Dottie, as if they were capable of turning away in the first place. They were on Dottie always. She lurked in his brain, skulking.
He could smell her now. He could feel his hands wrapping around her skinny throat. Oh, how he would enjoy that.
Chapter Forty-Two
Dottie Roth
She picked a moonless night, one masked by the buzzing of insects and the chatter of small animals. It had rained earlier in the day, so everyone was hunkered down and tired from the blowing wind, but full-bellied from another bountiful feast. Fishermen were getting better at their task. Chuck was getting good at finding flounder, and she enjoyed seeing his face when he returned from a successful trip with enough fish to feed five families.
She had a small pack and a weapon she thought she might need. Dottie was sure she could find more on the way. She’d become an even better scavenger than she had been in her past life. There were days that she marveled at her own skill, though she hardly put herself in the superhero category like some of the others did. Her body was enhanced. Sure, her mind probably was, too, but she was no immortal. She knew deep down that she could die, though she’d fight tooth and nail before that happened. She said a silent goodbye to the snores and crept back through the weeds, past the sentries. And she slipped into the water separating the outer banks from the mainland.
“Were you even going to say goodbye?”
She knew that voice all too well. It was Chuck.
“You’re getting better,” she said, referring to his stealth approach.
“I’ve had a good teacher,” he said.
She saw the pack on his back, the weapon in hand. No. Absolutely not.
“You can’t come with me, Chuck. I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’m not letting you leave.”
It was an impossible situation. Sure they’d become friends, and lately she’d begun to feel a little bit more, something that she thought she’d never feel again. Chuck was a kind man, a great friend, and an honest soul, someone that she could spend the rest of her life with. She wasn’t sure if that meant romantically or not, but they’d spent hours sitting and watching the waves crash in, playing cards, doing puzzles they found along the way. He was a patient man and she appreciated that.
But now he was looking down on her in the water, getting in her way.
“This is something I have to do,” she said, “I don’t want you to come with me because I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Chuck nodded like he understood. Then he raised his hands to the sky. “This. All this. I’ve come to realize the truths of this world, Dottie. I’ve come to realize that my past life meant nothing. I’ve cheated death on a handful of occasions, but really it was preparing me for this, maybe even this very moment. Me standing here, begging you not to go. But I know that wouldn’t work. I know you too well. I won’t say that I know you better than you know yourself. I hate it when people say that, but I will say that I will not let you leave alone. I’m coming with you. Not for you. It’s for me. I’m being selfish here. I won’t get in the way, but these past few months have taught me something. They’ve shown me that I can still find happiness in this world. And, Dottie, there’s no place where I’m happier than beside you. Now I’m not asking you to marry me or any silly thing like that, but I want to be with you. Can you understand that?”
“Of course, I can understand that. But, Chuck, I don’t—”
He shook his head. “I know. You already said you don’t want me to get hurt. But you must understand. If something happens to you and I’m not there, that’s way worse than me dying. Do you understand that?”
She didn’t. She truly didn’t. No one had ever said anything like this to her before. So she said what she would normally say to any anyone else, though she knew this would probably make Chuck smile: “You better not slow me down.”
Chuck did smile. She could see his white teeth even in the gloom of the dark night.
“I’ll keep up. I promise,” Chuck said. He stripped down to his skivvies and they swam across the water, slow, relishing the warmth that would soon turn cold. The winter months were coming, though they wouldn’t be as harsh as some of the Northeast winters she’d experienced.
When they got to the other side, they stood for a time air-drying and then put their clothes back on.
“So where to now?” Chuck asked.
“I’m not sure,” Dottie answered honestly.
“The ever-amazing Dottie Roth isn’t sure which way we need to go? Please, Lord, tell me that I misheard.”
Now Dottie grinned. This was the right choice. While tactically she knew she should probably be alone, it was good to have Chuck with her. “Let’s go west, the way we came.”
“You’re thinking if they followed us, they took the same trail.”
“Yes.”
They started walking.
“Tell me to shut up if this is an obvious question,” said Chuck, “but what do you plan to do when we do find them?”
There was no need to lie, so Dottie told the truth. “We’re going to find them, and we’re going to kill them. Do you have a problem with that?”
Chuck did not immediately answer. It was his way. He was not an impulsive man. “If you think that’s the right thing to do, then I support you.”
They kept walking. Overhead a flight of Canadian geese honked. Dottie reached out and grabbed Chuck’s hand and squeezed it.
“Thank you for coming with me. I...” She couldn’t find the words.
“I feel the same way, lady. Now what do you say we go find the bad guys and play a little bang-bang shoot ’em up?”
They walked hand in hand into the night, happy to be together, focused on their task, and for the two of them, for the first time in a long time, neither was alone. They’d found their completion.
Chapter Forty-Three
Sandy Kaplan
The baby wouldn’t stop crying no matter what he did—rocked it, bounced it. He tried to feed it. One time, he even found a goat, milked it, put the milk in a cup and then soaked it into a rag and dripped it into the baby’s mouth. That didn’t work either. Every new place they entered, he looked for a cow. Maybe the baby would drink cow’s milk. But whether they’d all been taken or had died off, no cows. He tried blackberry juice. Then he found a field positively choked with strawberries—strawberry juice, whole strawberries—nothing. With each hour, his desperation grew. He’d been entrusted with this baby, this poor nameless baby, this poor motherless baby. He was failing, like so many things he had failed at in his life. Every past failure seemed to follow him now, slapping him in the face, te
lling him that he was worth nothing, that the baby would die, that he himself would die, that he was cursed.
It’s all your fault, Sandy. It’s all your fault.
Only it wasn’t. But Sandy couldn’t know that he was a good man who’d cared for others, who’d cared for his wife, and cared for his children as well as he could. Sure, he’d made some mistakes, but for the most part, it had been dumb luck—dumb, bad luck that set him back. What he couldn’t understand during this latest debacle was that it was his persistence that had always kept him going. One foot in front of another, no matter what pain he felt. He could have lain down and taken it. That would have been the easy way. Or maybe take some drugs, maybe go to the hard stuff, but he never did. He’d never been a drinker and he shunned most medicine, other than the time he’d broken his leg falling from a ladder trying to clean the gutters, an activity he’d taken up after his wife had died.
He walked on. His persistence and renewed vitality made him jog most of the way. Running seemed to help the baby, lulling it to sleep with the jarring bump, bump, bump, bump, bump.
It had been a week since Molly left.
He thought of her often, promising in his own way that he’d take care of the child, and he would. Despair tried to bring him down, but he kept running. Sometimes the hilarity of the situation would be too much, and he’d run and laugh at the same time, imagining himself as some post-apocalyptic Forrest Gump. “I was running,” he would yell at the top of his lungs as the baby screamed in his arms. “I was running!” One day, he came across fresh tracks and thought he might follow them. Baby was asleep, so he figured he could take the chance.
Ten minutes later, he was overlooking a new campsite. There was a woman. No, two women. Oh. And a man with the women. He moved closer. They were tied up, arms behind their backs. The man stomped across the campsite and slapped one of the women repeatedly, yelling, “You’re a bad girl. A real bad girl.” The beating stopped and the man pulled down his pants. Sandy ran from the scene. He ran harder when he heard the screaming.
Coward. You’re a coward, Sandy Kaplan.
But he knew he had to save the baby. He had to. He’d promised. He didn’t know how far he’d run, but the baby was crying again. Sandy’s lungs burned. He dropped to his knees, sobbing, joining in the child’s misery.
He had survived X-99 and was apparently immune. Now he would die from something so simple as hunger, a thing that he had only days before taken for granted. All he had to do was go down to a river, fish out some food, and there it was for himself. But the baby wouldn’t take it. The baby wouldn’t eat, he was too young. What do you do, Sandy? What will you do? It was impossible. It was too much. Molly shouldn’t have given him the baby. They should have died together. It’s what was right. How could a child live in this world without a mother? “Snap out of it, Sandy,” he told himself. Like the times he’d lay in bed, pining for his lost life. Snap out of it. He got to his feet, kissed the beautiful child on its forehead and said, “I won’t let you die. I promise.”
Something was different now. Whether it was the scene at the campsite, the final domino of grief that had kicked over in his head—whatever it was, he was in survival mode now. He noticed every scurrying rabbit, every billowing cloud, every rooftop peeking over the horizon as he ran. It was a good thing too, because he heard a truck coming from a long way off. He had plenty of time to find a safe hiding spot for the baby and himself. He watched the military-style truck rumble into town, headed east, pulling two trailers. The last one held either fresh water or gasoline. Sandy couldn’t tell. The lone man in the cab hunched over the steering wheel, oblivious to the fact that Sandy was watching him. He watched closely, hoping that the man was indeed alone. A truck with a trailer meant there might be some supplies, maybe even some milk, though that was a long shot.
Sandy pulled the old pistol from his pocket and checked to make sure a round was in the chamber. He was no crack shot, but sometimes the sight of a weapon scared people off. It had happened no fewer than three times on this road. Sandy took his chance. Moving slowly and deliberately so that the driver would see him, Sandy walked nonchalantly out into the middle of the road. He had to time it perfectly. If the driver got spooked, he could either run down a field or maybe even press on the gas. Sandy was sure he could scooch out of the way, but he was hoping beyond hope that there was a chance. For a moment, it seemed that his gamble paid off. The truck slowed. He saw the driver lean closer, saw him reach down and pull out his own firearm.
Sandy held up the baby.
That got the driver’s attention. The window came down and Sandy took that as his cue.
“I promise I don’t want anything, not for myself, anyway, but for the baby. He’s only a week old and needs milk, formula, anything. Have you any supplies? Anything you can sell me?”
Sandy was sure that any second the driver would press on the gas and leave the baby and him far behind. The truck didn’t move, the driver’s eyes locked on the baby. Then the driver spoke.
“I’ve got some formula in the back o’ the trailer.”
Sandy shook his head as if suffering auditory hallucinations. “I’m sorry. It sounded like you said you have formula in the trailer?”
The driver smiled now. “That’s right. That’s what I said.”
Sandy couldn’t believe it. Tears came to his eyes as they did to the baby’s, as if they were both thinking the same thing. It was too much to believe, too much to hope for... and it didn’t look like the man was lying.
“My God,” Sandy said. “It’s a miracle.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Fabian Moon
Fabian watched Sandy feed the baby. The guy said that the poor thing hadn’t eaten in a week. That was a long damn time for anyone, let alone a baby. He’d rambled on for a few minutes while Fabian dug through the trailer and found his precious stash of baby formula. When he’d packed it, he figured it would fetch a fair price. In those last weeks, he’d made a pretty penny off fathers begging for any sustenance for their newborn children, ones left without a mother to feed them. So he’d brought cases along thinking that they might be perfect for bartering. Only now, he was giving it away and he didn’t know why, other than the fact that the man had looked so pathetic when he’d asked and so surprised when Fabian had said yes.
Fabian could have laughed if the thing hadn’t been so extraordinary. Formula, something that anyone in America could have bought at the convenience store or in bulk at Costco back before X-99 had ravaged the world. Now he, Fabian Moon, was probably one of a handful of purveyors of baby formula in all of North America. And he’d found what might be the first baby born in this new world. Even as jaded and depressed as Fabian had become, he had to acknowledge that this was an extraordinary thing. Something incredible, something that would have to fill you with hope, unless you were a monster. And despite the many awful things that he had done, he was no monster. He was still a man, or at least that’s what he told himself.
That’s what he’d said when he’d passed the four wanderers, ones that had run after him until they were well out of sight, choking on his dust. He told himself the same thing when he’d had to kill the teenager who snuck in at night and tried to get into his trailer. “I am no monster,” he told himself over and over as he drove farther and farther east. Some days he made good time, some days it seemed to take forever wandering through roads littered with the debris, crumbling cars, and decaying bodies.
“What’s his name?” Fabian asked.
“He doesn’t have one yet,” Sandy said.
“Where’s his mother?”
Sandy shook his head. Fabian knew what that meant. He imagined it was the same shake of the head that surgeons gave families when they came out to give the bad news that the patient had died, that the father was gone, that the brother was no longer with them. That simple shake of the head meant death.
“You should give him a name,” Fabian said. “It’s not right, not to have a name.”
>
Sandy shrugged and motioned for Fabian to hand them another bottle. “I figure he’ll tell me in time.”
Fabian didn’t understand. “Tell you? Tell you what?”
Sandy replaced the old bottle with the new and then looked up at Fabian. “Don’t you understand what just happened? Hadn’t you seen them all around since X-99 took everything from us?”
Fabian had no idea what the old man was talking about and told him so. Sandy chuckled and refocused his gaze on the eating baby, its eyes closed in contentment, sucking down mouthfuls of the precious milk.
“You’ll understand in time, Fabian,” Sandy said. “It might not look like it now, but we’ve been given a gift. And the fact that you drove down that overgrown road proves it.”
Fabian didn’t want to burst the old man’s bubble. His hands were full, quite literally, Fabian’s own calloused heart didn’t believe in miracles, just coincidence. And that’s exactly what this had been. He’d been driving down one road that Sandy and this baby happened to be on. Coincidence? Odds, one in a million? Maybe. But still just luck. Same as a woman hitting the jackpot in the casino. Same as the five workers in the meat plant hitting the Lotto big. Luck. Just dumb, stupid luck. Something that Fabian had never had. He thought his millions had been the big win, but now it was worth jack and squat.
“So, where are you headed? Looks like you’ve got enough food in there to feed a battalion.”
Sandy’s question immediately put Fabian on the defensive, so he concocted a lie. “I’m meeting some friends not far from here. There’s about forty of us.”
Sandy whistled. “Forty? Wow, that’s a lot. Can’t remember the last time I was in the middle of forty people.”
Fabian chuckled nervously. How to get around this? He couldn’t invite the old man to come with him, so the lie slipped out instead. “I’m in the army. Or at least I was. These are old army pals still doing work for the government.”
The Next Dawn Page 14
