After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  There was silence for a while, and then Cyndi did that thing she did so brilliantly when it was needed.

  She changed the subject, flawlessly.

  It was like a balloon popped in the room and the tension dissipated immediately. She announced that, right now, no one was going anywhere. Not for a few days, at least.

  “Freeson, you’re staying here until I’m sure your foot is better. You’re not working. Hell, you’re not even walking.”

  Freeson held up his hand to protest, but Cyndi dismissed it with a wave of hers.

  “But I need him, Cyn!” Nathan protested, immediately regretting the uncontrolled raise in pitch in his voice that made him sound like Mickey Mouse on helium. And, yes, he did need Freeson—but he also didn’t want the grumpy asshat around Cyndi all day while he was out working, suggesting even more reasons to make them leave Glens Falls.

  Cyndi dismissed Nathan with another wave, getting up to fetch Freeson fresh warm water for his bowl.

  “Nate, you’ll have to make do without Free. You don’t want him losing his toes now, do you?”

  Nathan had to admit that he didn’t. But he also wished uncharitably that the frost had bitten Free’s tongue off instead.

  The next day was bright and bone cold.

  The sky over Glens Falls would never be deep winter blue again, as the gray ash in the upper atmosphere had put an end to that, but at least it was clear enough to see the ghost of the full moon as Nathan drove to his auto shop on West Main Street.

  He was in a foul mood, too.

  Normally, the loss of Freeson would have been a PITA, but Main Street was pretty much deserted as he rolled into the parking lot in front of his building. The Dodge was the only truck he’d seen out in the snowbound city.

  Today was going to be another glacially slow day, which was against everything Nathan would normally have expected for April. Townspeople’s cars should have been emerging from a normal winter and needing all manner of attention. But without an appreciable move into spring this year, Nathan’s business was taking as much of a hit as his sensibilities.

  After an hour in the repair shop, mostly spent with him sat down and warming himself next to a burner running on recovered motor oil, Nathan realized that maybe he was wasting his time. No one was driving. If no one was driving, then no one was bending fenders, or breaking down or needing service. So many people had left the city in the last couple of months, in fact, he wondered if his mechanical skills would ever be called upon again, except to get someone out of a snowdrift…

  It wasn’t just the slow day and lack of business that was keeping Nathan in a foul mood, though. Before he’d left the house that morning, Freeson had talked openly again at the breakfast table about leaving Glens Falls, right in front of Cyndi and Tony.

  Whereas last night Tony had been excited and thrilled by the tales of danger, that morning, after a night in the less than warm house, his breathing had been more vulnerable. Free’s talk had started a mild asthma attack, which he’d treated with his Salbutamol inhaler.

  Freeson had apologized for letting his mouth run away with him but the damage had been done. Cyndi had taken Tony off to begin lessons in the family room, leaving Nathan and Freeson to move about the house as if the other was invisible.

  Nathan knew they’d iron out this wrinkle in their relationship soon enough, but it had left Nathan feeling even more adrift and unsure of the future than he’d been feeling last night. Without Cyndi there to mediate between them, there’d been no chance of a fix that morning.

  So Nathan had left the house and headed into town.

  And it had been a complete waste of time.

  At midday, Nathan got in the Dodge and drove out to the outskirts of town to see if anyone needed pulling out of snowdrifts—more to relieve the boredom and frustration than in nakedly public spirit.

  Nathan didn’t really enjoy touting for business like this, and made sure he told people he wasn’t raising his prices any when he saw them—but it still made him a little uncomfortably opportunistic. After another hour of not coming across anyone to rescue, he found himself out near the airport and Dot Henderson’s house.

  When Nate rolled along Ranger’s Boulevard, he saw Dot’s garage was open, and she and Art were loading up her silver Ford F-350 with the supplies Nathan had helped bring over the night before.

  Nathan pulled up onto Dot’s drive, got out, exchanged a hug with the librarian, and shook Art’s hand. His face must have telegraphed his disappointment because Art thumped the last box into the back of the F-350, pulled a tarp across the supplies, and said, “Sorry, Nate. We were going to wait another week… but after last night…”

  “Where? Where is there to go?”

  “Texas maybe. Mexico. Just away from here. See how far our savings get us. Start again.”

  The hard snow reflected in Art’s aviators, his eyes set as hard as the resolve in his chin.

  “Well, I’ll keep an eye on both your properties,” Nathan offered lamely.

  “It’s okay,” Art answered quietly. “There’s no need. We won’t be back.”

  “Damn it!” Cyndi slammed the lid of the laptop shut and pushed the machine across the bed. The power had come back on while Nathan had been out talking to Art and Dot, but as the evening had worn on, other deficiencies thrown up by the breakdown of systems across the U.S. were beginning to show.

  The internet was inaccessible tonight. Again.

  Nathan had come back to a house still filled with tension. Tony remained quiet and subdued as he took apart and cleaned the family’s Winchester Model 1876 lever-action rifle and their M1903 Springfield. Both weapons had been left to Nathan, like the Dodge, by his father. Tony was usually diligent and thorough with this chore, but tonight his mind hadn’t been on the task, and in the end Nathan had sent him to bed, finishing the job himself.

  Freeson, feet up, drinking Nathan’s beer, had kept his thoughts to himself for once, and for that Nathan had been grateful—he’d done enough damage already.

  The tension got expressed most acutely through Cyndi. Her conversation came out clipped and tight, whereas it would normally have been warm and loving. Nathan had felt her spikiness from the moment he’d gotten back, and it extended now to the bedroom, where Nathan was coming back from the shower drying himself, seeing Cyndi getting annoyed with the laptop.

  “No luck?”

  “Nothing. Tony’s medication isn’t going to last forever. Just trying to get online to see what I can still order. You might even have to make a trip into Albany to pick it up.”

  Nathan nodded. “Sure. Not a problem, honey, but that’s not what’s eating you, is it?”

  Cyndi’s lips became bloodless lines as she clammed up, and Nathan knew his wife well enough to see that a fouled-up internet wasn’t her only issue tonight.

  “Look, I can take Freeson back to his place if you want… I know he’s scared you and Tony with his crazy talk about leaving…”

  Cyndi looked at him. “I don’t think he’s crazy. As I said. It’s worth considering.”

  The comment took Nathan by surprise, and he sat down hard on the bed—he’d thought maybe Freeson scaring Tony into an asthma attack had put to bed any talk of the family leaving Glens Falls. But it clearly had not.

  Dammit.

  A chill equal to the cold outside the window ran through Nathan’s guts. He sat on the edge of the bed and took Cyndi’s hands in his. “Baby, we can’t just leave. We can’t give up the business for one thing, but you know better than I do how low our savings are. This winter has been a killer for the business. The government will…”

  Cyndi threw her head back and laughed with derision. “I love you, Nate. You’re a wonderful husband and father. More than I ever could have hoped or wished for. But you’ve got a hell of a lot to learn about rock and roll.”

  “I can’t just run away from the business. I can’t. It’s tough right now, but me, you, and Tony will get by. The three of us will make it.” />
  Cyndi’s face fell. She reached behind her under the pillow and brought out two white plastic tubes and put them in Nathan’s palm. “But what about the four of us?”

  Nathan looked down at the two thick blue lines on the pregnancy tests and his world lurched sideways at an angle of forty-five degrees.

  3

  Nathan finally slammed the phone down. He’d been trying for an hour to get through to Doc Simpkins on Bay Street, but there was no answer.

  At least with the power back on, the house was warm throughout and not just in front of the fireplace, and Tony’s chest had been a lot better that day. But the news that Tony was about to have a brother or a sister had dropped several boulders into the gently rippling surface of Nathan’s emotional lake.

  Cyndi had been taking the pill, but Nathan wouldn’t have blamed her for accidentally skipping a dose in error here or there, what with everything else going on. Hell, he’d fouled up enough things himself. But the fact was that there was a baby on the way, and like anything major that landed in their laps, it would just have to be dealt with. Both of them were of one mind on the subject of abortion, so the baby would be going full term, Big Winter or no Big Winter.

  With that in mind, he’d decided there was no point in working that day and had stayed home to organize Cyndi’s pregnancy for her. Well, that was how Cyndi had characterized it, anyway—making Freeson snort and lose the ability to make eye contact with Nathan, lest he giggle himself into a mirth-coma.

  “I’m fine. Stop overreacting. I don’t need to see Doc Simpkins. I’m not ill,” she said again as she passed by him.

  But Cyndi’s previous pregnancy had been plagued with the high blood pressure associated with pre-eclampsia, and she’d suffered from killer migraines and impaired vision to a debilitating level. Cyndi had always been strong, healthy, and indomitable in Nathan’s eyes, and that terrible confrontation with her mortality had shaken him in ways he hadn’t been expecting.

  Now he was clucking like a hen, and when Cyndi wasn’t amused by his over-concern, she was more than a little ticked off by it. When Nathan gave up on Doc Simpkins and called the local hospital direct, Cyndi all but pulled the phone cord from the wall—possibly so that she could strangle him with it.

  When he did make the call, he discovered she needn’t have bothered. There was just a recorded message on the line telling them that the hospital was now closed permanently, offering contact details for the main hospital in Albany.

  Albany was a fifty-mile journey from Glens Falls that would take an hour on a good day—but in the snow of the Big Winter? Even if the roads were passable, one harsh blizzard would make for plenty of places to be stranded.

  “Nathan! Stop. Go to work. Chop some wood. Play some checkers with Freeson. Anything! Just stop panicking. The only thing raising my blood pressure right now is you!”

  Nathan opened his mouth to argue, but Cyndi cut him off. “This is just displacement, Nate, and you know it. What you’re really churning about is the fact that me being pregnant means we’re one step closer to having to get the hell out of here. With the hospital gone, I for one am not interested in having a baby on the New North Pole. What happens when the power goes for good? Tony’s asthma isn’t getting any better, and if I get pre-eclampsia again, where does that leave us?”

  Nathan felt like he’d been hit in the gut.

  “Yes, while you were snoring away merrily last night, I was awake thinking.”

  “You’ve made up your mind then?”

  Cyndi nodded, and then softened and hugged him. “You know I’m right.”

  Nathan just hugged her back, as gently as he could make himself. She was pregnant, after all.

  At first, Nathan thought he was hallucinating.

  But as he approached in the wrecker, the red wavering dot he’d noticed ahead in the gloomy afternoon light became a puffy anorak riding above blue jeans. There was a huge ball of fur worrying at the form’s legs, which were walking purposefully along the side of the highway like the person was out on a Sunday afternoon power-walk.

  The furball was a dog, and the form was a woman who was out, without a vehicle, in this iron-cold afternoon… hitchhiking.

  She had her ungloved hand out beside her, and her thumb was raised as if there was a steady stream of traffic going past and she was just waiting for someone to bite.

  The clouds above the landscape were gathering for another bout of blizzarding. The wind was getting up and the tops of the pines were twisting and swaying as the weather moved in. Nathan had left the house to get his thoughts together, and perhaps hope to help anyone who’d gotten stuck in the snow, but he hadn’t figured on coming across a hitchhiker.

  In the time before the Big Winter, Nathan wouldn’t have thought twice about picking up a lone woman who traveled a lonely road with a storm threatening. But now, after the run-in with the Ski-Doo scavengers, Nathan felt himself hesitating as the Dodge trundled down the road towards her.

  After all, it’d be an easy deception. Pretend to be hitching, stop, pull a gun on him, and wait for the Ski-Doos to show up.

  Nathan hated that he was thinking like this, though. Damn this new world, and this hard cold and the even harder feelings towards fellow travelers.

  Nathan stopped the wrecker next to the girl, but checked that he knew exactly where his tire iron was. Just in case. Then he wound down the window.

  “Hi.”

  “Hey, mister, thanks!”

  “I didn’t say I was taking you anywhere yet. You know there’s a storm coming, yeah?”

  “Do I look like a weather girl?”

  Nathan had to admit to himself that she didn’t. The girl, who could have been any age between twelve and twenty-five, was thin faced and olive skinned, and looked like she belonged in a band, not on cable news.

  “And anyway, I haven’t decided if I’m taking this ride yet. You’re on probation, too.”

  Without waiting to be given permission, she opened the door wide and looked down at her dog. “Saber, what do you think?”

  Nathan’s hand twitched towards the tire iron as, without notice, the dog—huge, white, and gray faced, it had to be some sort of Malamute cross—leapt onto the passage seat. Instead of tearing into him with wild eyes and yellow fangs, it companionably licked Nathan’s cheek before dipping its enormous head down and resting it in his lap.

  “Congratulations, mister. You passed.” The girl smiled, climbing up into the cab to squeeze in against her dog and slamming the door behind her before she held out her hand. “You can call me Syd.”

  Speechless, Nathan just shook her hand. Close up, she had bright nickel-gray eyes dancing beneath a short, spiky hairdo that was dyed blacker than a moonless night.

  Syd made Saber leap over the seat into the crew cab and settled herself down into the seat. Blowing on her hands to warm them, she commented, “If my dog says you’re okay, you’re okay.”

  Blinking, Nathan put the truck in gear and pulled away from the curb. “Where are you heading?”

  “What ya got?” Syd replied as if it was her standard answer to a question she’d been asked a lot already.

  “I’m just out looking for people to help.”

  “Then you must be one of the good guys. Not many of those since I left New York.”

  “Hell, that’s some journey in this.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  Nathan could feel the weight of something or another behind Syd’s answer, but it was clear she didn’t want to go any further with explanations. What was strange was how immediately comfortable he felt with her in the cab - not in an attracted way, but in the way she was giving off such a trustworthy vibe. Nathan smiled. Perhaps he was a Malamute cross, too, and had the same ability to tell who was honest, like Saber.

  None of Syd’s behavior so far had given off any sense of a threat, so Nathan was a little taken aback when she leaned forward to fiddle with the radio dial and he saw the stock of a pistol, probably a SIG Sauer M11 by the
look of it, sticking out of a pocket in her jeans.

  “Had to use that on your journey?” he asked.

  Syd’s face creased up, but after a second or so of following Nathan’s eye-line, she realized what he was talking about. “Not since I ran out of ammo. You don’t happen to have any nine-millimeter I can have? I can cook a mean curry in exchange.”

  Nathan smiled and relaxed a little. “No. No spare ammo, but my wife loves a good curry. Why don’t you come back with me and you can at least feed us in exchange for warming you up? My boy will love Saber.”

  And that seemed to settle it. In just a few minutes of traveling, Nathan had invited an armed stranger back to his family home.

  His dad’s voice echoed in his mind. Family first.

  It’s okay, Dad, he thought. I still know how far my hand is from the tire iron.

  “Shoot,” Syd said suddenly.

  She was looking into the side mirror through the condensation-stippled window.

  Nathan also saw the yellow flash of a Ski-Doo in the reflection. There were two of them. An orange-black Renegade and a yellow-black MXZ that looked like a hornet. They both carried parka-clad riders, each sporting black beanies over full black ski-masks. And they both had what looked like AR-15s slung across their backs—they were gaining on the wrecker fast over the snowy surface of the road.

  It was clear from her reaction that Syd knew who the Ski-Doo bandits were, or at least had had a run-in with them in the recent past. She pulled the SIG from her waistband.

  “I thought you said you had no bullets?”

  “Yeah, well, they don’t know that, do they?”

  Nathan dared not go much faster. The road was snow clogged, and the wrecker was the first vehicle that had rolled across its crisp top since the last blizzard. The Dodge was heavy enough to make good progress and the snow chains on the wheels were providing Nathan with the necessary confidence to push the Dodge up to forty-five, but that was it. The pines on either side of the road were close enough to repay any mistake he made with wreckage and injury. The Ski-Doos would have no trouble catching up in any case; they were designed for this terrain, and on a good day could zip along happily at eighty or more.