The Midnight Hour (Lost Lake #2)

Chapter 1

ONE

ALEX

We drive for six miles before our luck runs out. I can smell the smoke in my hair, taste its acrid tang on my tongue. My mind is reeling, reeling —we have left everything behind. Everything.

Everyone.

Kerry…

“Mom.” My daughter Mattie, just fifteen years old and utterly focused, calls out sharply. “ Mom! There’s someone up ahead.”

I blink the winding gray ribbon of road into focus. Straight, green pine trees line it like bristling arrows on either side. We are in the backwoods of Ontario, Canada, driving away from oblivion and toward the utterly unknown, nearly seven months after a nuclear holocaust that devastated the world and our lives. A dried trickle of blood runs down my arm from where I was nicked by a bullet, and my heart is still pounding in my chest, hard enough to hurt. Less than an hour ago, my whole world imploded, for a second time. I picture black smoke swirling into the sky, and I push the image away. I need to focus, because now there’s another danger.

Up ahead a beat-up truck on monster wheels is parked sideways, blocking the road. A man in a plaid shirt and weathered baseball cap is lounging against its bumper, working over a chaw of tobacco. He is holding a semiautomatic rifle like it’s a toy, slack against his hip, but I have no doubt whatsoever that he knows how to use it, and, moreover, that he’ll enjoy doing so. I think of the men who have burned down our cottage on Lost Lake, the relish on their grimy faces as they came to steal and plunder what was ours. It doesn’t take long for the animal to emerge from the man.

“Mommy.” Phoebe’s voice is quiet, more a question than a wail. She is four years old, and her mother died an hour ago, sniped by a broken-toothed man in a baseball cap. Does she even realize her mother is gone forever? Can she possibly understand? I don’t know if any of us can; the reverberations will continue thudding through us for a long time to come, but right now we have a new crisis to deal with.

“Mom…I’m not sure those guys are friendly,” Mattie says quietly. She has Phoebe on her lap, her arms laced around her middle, and Ruby, my twelve-year-old daughter, is sitting next to her, as silent and watchful as always. My husband, Daniel, is driving the car ahead of us, with our nineteen-year-old son Sam and Kyle, the kid we picked up along the way, a couple of months ago.

I can’t think about the people we’ve already lost, the sacrifices they made. The cost was high, too high, and it might be about to get higher. It’s all too much to take in, especially when there’s a guy who is blocking the road and he’s holding a gun.

The guy raises the gun a little, like a greeting. Hello there . Up ahead I see Daniel veer hard to the left, pulling onto the side of the road with a screech of tires and a spray of gravel. I follow suit, hunched over the steering wheel, keeping low in case he decides to shoot. I hear a pop, and then an exhale like a slow breath, and finally a sinking sensation. I realize the guy must have shot out my front right tire, and for what? Fun? Stupid , I think, my hands clenched on the wheel. He could have used the tires .

Remarkably, I do not feel remotely afraid. Too much has happened today for me to feel any more terror. My house has been burned down by backwoods terrorists; my best friend has died along with my mother; I’m on the run in a world that is on fire. I don’t have time to feel afraid of one measly guy with a gun.

Except, I realize when I dare to lift my head a little to peer out the windshield, there’s not one guy. There are two. The other one sits in the cab, looking relaxed, his head tilted back against the seat, his expression almost sleepy. These guys are toying with us, I think. They’re so sure of themselves, and, more importantly, they’re sure of us.

Just like before when I’ve run into this type of backwoods hooligan, they think we don’t know our way around a gun. They assume we’re city slickers, simply by the cars we drive or maybe the way we look. Daniel is sporting a Patagonia fleece and I’m wearing a striped boat-neck top from Land’s End, relics of a former life when we were smug suburbanites and our idea of roughing it outdoors was mowing the lawn ourselves.

Well, things have changed since we came to Canada back in November, when my biggest worry was whether our turkey would defrost in time for Thanksgiving. Things have changed since Daniel made me practice shooting, the first time I’d ever held a gun in my hands, and it took me fifty tries to so much as nick the tin can on top of a stump. Seven months later, I’m hardened to the core; I feel as if I have no more softness inside of me, and I’m glad.

Observing these two cocky guys, I feel only a flicker of nerves, like a ripple in water. It’s strange, how calm I feel. Otherworldly, almost like I’m not entirely here. I’m floating somewhere up in space, watching this scene unfold with only a mild curiosity about how it might all go down .

“Mom,” Mattie whispers, and she sounds as angry as she does afraid. “What are we going to do?”

Up ahead, I see Daniel get out of the car. I glimpse the flash of Sam and Kyle’s scared faces in the back, like pale moons, before they bob beneath the seat. My husband’s movements are slow, purposeful, as if he’s got all the time in the world. As if there aren’t at least a couple of rifles trained on him.

I open my door.

The man leaning against the bumper is still looking relaxed, his gun slack but its muzzle still aimed toward me. The guy in the truck also has a gun, I see; it’s propped against the open window, tilted toward Daniel. The air is filled with birdsong, the rustle of wind in the trees. The road stretches in both directions, shimmering in the summer sunlight. It’s a beautiful June day, and I have no idea what is going to happen. Whether someone is going to die here.

“Hey there,” the man says in a drawl. His finger plays with the trigger of the rifle. Daniel and I have rifles, too; we’re holding them in a way that is just as trigger-happy as this guy, but we haven’t aimed them at anyone yet. But we will, I know we will, if we have to.

I’m carrying a Colt semiautomatic M-16 that belonged to Phoebe’s uncle, before he killed himself because he couldn’t take the Armageddon scenario he thought he’d been waiting his whole life for. It shoots thirty rounds and, while I can’t claim to be any kind of expert on guns, I think this one will get the job done if it needs to, because more potent than the weapon in my hands is the fury in my heart, the steel in my spine. I’m so ready to shoot someone who is threatening me or my family.

“You want to put your gun down?” the man asks Daniel, and his voice is mild, almost amused. He really believes we’re noobs and compared to him we are , but it still makes me angry. Guys like this have taken everything from me. Everyone. And I’m not letting another one take a single thing more .

“No, I don’t think I do,” Daniel replies, his tone an unsettling mixture of affability and deadly seriousness. “You’re blocking the road.”

The man frowns, his brows drawing together as he glances between us, and I know he is re-evaluating the threat we present, and I’m glad. That’s right , I think. This isn’t going to be as easy as you thought it was . I raise my rifle just a little bit, like a warning, or maybe a greeting back. Yes, hello there . I see you.

“Look…” the man begins, and now he sounds both weary and wary, his finger still on the trigger. “Let’s not get carried away here, okay? It would make it a whole lot easier for everyone if you just put the guns away.”

And walk right into whatever he has planned? The last time I faced these types of guys, they killed two women. The time before that, they shot at me. And the time before that, they tried to rape me and shoot me. I am not putting anything down.

“Like I said,” Daniel replies, and now he just sounds serious, “I don’t think so.”

A second passes, taut, sparking with tension. No one moves; no one even breathes. From its perch on a tall birch by the road, a mourning dove lets out its soft, sorrowful coo, and an oriole chatters in reply. A single trickle of sweat rolls down between my shoulder blades, and my arm throbs where the bullet nicked me. My hands don’t waver. My rifle is still lowered, but only halfway.

What happens next is a blur of instinct and reaction; I move before I think, and so does Daniel. The guy in the truck moves first, the muzzle of his rifle swinging around to Daniel. The guy by the bumper raises his own gun. And then someone fires.

I don’t know who pulls the trigger first, but as my ears ring from the sound of the shots, and my shoulder pulses with pain from the recoil, I see that the guy by the bumper now has blood blooming across the blue plaid of his shirt. He looks dazed, his eyes wide, his jaw slack as the rifle slides from his hands, and then he falls back against the truck before slipping all the way to the ground.

The guy in the truck is slumped forward, and the windshield is speckled with blood like something out of a horror movie. In the second of electric silence, the man in the truck suddenly lifts his head, blinking blearily at us, before he stumbles out of the truck, clutching his arm. His shirt is covered in blood.

“You…you killed him,” he exclaims in hoarse disbelief, blood trickling between his fingers, while Daniel and I simply stare. Then he starts half running, half stumbling into the woods, and a few seconds later he is gone.

I breathe out slowly and lower my rifle.

“You okay?” Daniel snaps out, and I nod before I find my voice. I’m numb, yet also shaken.

“Yeah,” I croak, “they didn’t get me. You?”

“Yeah, me neither.”

We are silent, absorbing what just happened, although I don’t think I actually can. We just killed a man and seriously injured another, and we are safe. I have to hold those things together, make them work in unity.

Another second passes, and then the back door of Daniel’s car opens, and Sam comes out, his mouth slack, his eyes wide.

“Mom…you shot that guy.”

I can’t quite judge his tone; he sounds wondering, but also, I think, accusing.

“They were going to kill us,” I state, matter-of-fact. I put my rifle down on the ground; my hands are trembling. I’m not as hardened as I thought I was, I realize, and I don’t know if that fills me with relief or disappointment.

“Is he… dead ?” Sam’s voice is hushed as he creeps a little closer.

I don’t reply as Daniel dispassionately inspects the guy on the road. His face is expressionless as he turns back to us. “Yes,” he tells Sam. “He’s dead. As for the other guy…” He glances back at the woods. I know he’s thinking about how injured he was, how far he might make it. “I don’t know,” he tells Sam.

I exhale slowly.

“We need to keep going,” Daniel states. “That guy might be getting some backup. We can take the truck. It fits all of us, and I think we should stick to one vehicle. It’s safer, and we’ll conserve gas.”

I nod, still not trusting myself to speak. What are we meant to do with the body? I have yet to look at him properly, and I realize I don’t want to. Both men were threats we had to eliminate; that’s all I can let them be. I can’t look the dead man in the face, check if he has a wedding ring, family photos crumpled in his front pocket. I can’t let either of them be ordinary men. They were, I remind myself, ready to shoot us.

From behind me, I hear Mattie get out of the car. I turn and see she’s got Phoebe on her hip. Her dark hair is blowing in the breeze, and her eyes are narrowed, her face hard, as hardened as I thought I was. “What do we need to do?” she asks Daniel.

“I’ll deal with the body,” he tells her. “You all unload our cars. Let’s load up again as quickly as we can.”

He glances up and down the road, and I’m reminded of how vulnerable we are. The cottage we left burning under a blue sky is less than ten miles behind us. The gang that took it from us might still be roving the countryside, out for revenge. I might have just shot a man in cold blood, but I do not want to meet those sadistic savages again.

“All right,” I say, and now I sound stronger. “Let’s get going.”

We start unloading our gear—crates of food, bottled water, guns and ammunition, sleeping bags, tarps, backpacks of clothes, a first aid kit, flint and steel. We packed it weeks ago, in case we needed to run. It will last us a little while, but not much longer. But hopefully a little while is all we’ll need .

Our destination is a military base near Buffalo that Daniel believes might be some kind of safe community. He heard rumors of it, when he’d gone to upstate New York to get Sam, but that’s all we’ve got to go on—a whisper of hope. We have no idea if the base is even there, or if the people will be welcoming. We don’t even know how far the radiation might have spread across the country, or if there’s any remnant of government still in place, or how many people are left in this world. There are a lot of unknowns, too many dangers, but the only chance is to keep going, because we can’t go back.

Phoebe clings to Mattie, silently sucking her thumb as we stack everything as quickly as we can. Mattie moves with brisk efficiency, Ruby more slowly, with care. Sam unloads the other car; Kyle was shot in the shoulder by one of the renegades back at the cottage and is lying in the backseat, his face gray with pain and beaded with sweat. Daniel got the bullet out and bandaged him when we first stopped a couple of miles out, but he still looks in bad shape. He’ll need some more medical care, not that anyone is actually qualified to give it, but we’ll do what we can.

No one looks at Daniel, who is dragging the man’s lifeless body to the side of the road. From the corner of my eye, I see a smear of rusty red on the road and I quickly avert my gaze, focus on the box of canned goods—the last we have—that I’m lifting from the trunk.

We’ve nearly finished unpacking the cars when Daniel comes up to me. “I’m going to bury him,” he says quietly. “I know it might take a while, but…I think I should.” He glances at Sam before turning back to me. “There’s a shovel in their truck.”

I’m startled, because somehow it puts a different spin on what happened. Do you bury your fallen opponents in battle? Isn’t that their side’s job? Unless those guys really were innocent. Does Daniel think that, even if he won’t say? But even so, we’re vulnerable out here, and we need to put more distance between us and the cottage…and the guys who attacked us there.

I don’t say any of this, however, because I recognize the calm but obdurate look on my husband’s face. He’s going to do this, no matter what. “Keep an eye out,” he tells me, and I nod.

We finish unpacking the cars and load everything up into the truck. I check on Kyle, who is only semi-conscious, his gaze bleary and pain-filled as he looks up at me. Blood has soaked through the bandage on his shoulder.

“Let me fix that,” I say, and I find the first aid kit and change the bandage; the wound looks clean but deep. I’ve come a long way, I reflect as I carefully wrap gauze around the area, from when I was so squeamish I nearly passed out when I had to stitch up Ruby after she’d nearly severed an artery. A sigh escapes me at the thought; it’s a distance I wish I hadn’t had to travel. I glance down at Kyle and see that he’s passed out.

Twenty minutes later, Daniel is just coming out of the woods when, in the distance, I hear the rattle and hum of some kind of motor. We exchange knowing glances and then we start to move.

“Let’s go,” he says.

We take the keys from our cars; the last thing we want is to provide transportation for anyone. I glance at the front tire of mine and see that it’s flat, but not blown out by a bullet, like I’d thought. I crouch down, and that’s when I see it—a rusty nail embedded in the rubber. An accident or intentional? It no longer matters. I straighten and head for the truck.

Daniel and Sam maneuver Kyle into the back, so he is slumped against the seat, his eyes fluttering open and then closed again. Mattie and Ruby slide in next to him, with Phoebe on Mattie’s lap. The little girl’s eyes are wide, but she doesn’t say a word. Daniel, Sam, and I take the bench seat in the front. All our stuff is in the truck bed, covered by a tarp, and Daniel thankfully wiped the windshield clean of blood, although there’s still the metallic taste of it in the air, along with a smell of tobacco and someone else’s sweat.

I don’t want to imagine that man’s body buried in a shallow grave, covered by leaves and just a little dirt, to be discovered by foxes and raccoons, and so I don’t.

“They had forty gallons of gas back there,” Daniel continues in a low voice. “So that’s good.”

Gas was one of our biggest issues with making this journey. In the last seven months, we’ve conserved and hoarded as much as we could, but we knew we wouldn’t have enough to get from rural Ontario all the way to Buffalo, a distance of some three hundred miles, and that’s without considering any necessary detours. Forty gallons will certainly help; it might even get us all the way there, although this thing looks like a gas guzzler.

Daniel starts the truck and I turn to Sam, who hasn’t spoken since he told me I shot that guy. His face is pale, and he is biting his lip as he stares out the window. I put my hand on his arm, and he twitches, as if to shrug it off. I return it to my lap.

“You okay?” I ask in a low voice, and this time it’s his shoulders that twitch. I have a feeling he is deliberately trying not to look at me, and unease creeps along my spine, settling in my gut. How did we get here? I wonder, even as I know how.

Seven months ago, we traveled from suburban Connecticut to rural Ontario in a naive and desperate attempt to recalibrate our family after so much had gone wrong. We’d come to my parents’ dilapidated cottage that no one had stepped foot in for seven years, thinking somehow this change would reset us. I’d envisioned a montage of Hallmark moments—bonfires and s’mores and candlelit card games, spontaneous hugs and important, healing chats. What I got was a nuclear holocaust five days after we arrived.

Really, I know it was a blessing that we’d been there at all, away from the disaster, the radiation, the fallout. Nine initial strikes across America turned into dozens more, leaving most of the United States and some of Canada unlivable, as far as I knew, although the truth is no one really knows anything. This is not a comfortably predictable disaster movie or even a smugly certain governmental strategy for a potential extinction-level event; it’s reality, and it doesn’t unfold the way anyone expects. It doesn’t unfold , at all; it both explodes and collapses, it trickles away, and it surges up. Endlessly.

Over the last seven months, I know that all the major infrastructure of North America has collapsed, the government has more or less disappeared, the military melted away. Civilized human beings emerged from terrified hiding and some formed into roving gangs while others did their best to protect themselves. And that was in just our little part of rural Ontario. Who knows what has happened elsewhere; Daniel experienced some of it, but so far he hasn’t given any details. He was gone for six months, getting Sam from college at my command, yet another jagged piece of our fractured relationship. When he returned, he was a different man, silent and tense-jawed, yet with a resignation about him that seemed to be soul-deep, and scared me…but at least he’d brought back Sam.

Sam, my son, my firstborn, who now is refusing to look at me. And I know the real question I’m asking is not how did we get here , but how did I get here. How did I come to shoot a man without a flicker of fear or concern, never mind remorse or real guilt? How did I become this person I don’t really like, and yet I already know I don’t want to change?

I can’t change, because this is the world we live in now, and this is how you survive.

We drive for maybe half a mile before Daniel slows, and then stops in front of an old iron bridge that once crossed Snake Creek, a swathe of murky green water fifty feet below us. The bridge has collapsed into the creek, a jumble of giant rusted parts. We are silent, realization trickling through us, or at least through me. And not just realization, but the guilt I thought I didn’t feel.

Was this why that man had blocked the road? To warn us about a blown-out bridge? Going sixty miles an hour on a back road, we would have sailed right into oblivion before we’d been able to hit the brakes.

It’s a thought I can’t cope with, not now. My mind rejects it the way a soda machine refuses a crumpled dollar. He shot first , I insist in my mind, but I know I’m not sure.

I turn to Daniel, who is staring at the bridge, his hands braced on the steering wheel, his jaw bunched and his gaze distant, almost as if he is thinking about something else.

“Turn around,” I say stonily, and, after a second, he gives a jerky nod. No one speaks while I stare straight ahead, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes as Daniel reverses and then we start back the way we came.