Chapter 3
THREE
I linger by the stream for another fifteen minutes, mainly because I’m sad and scared and I don’t know what to say to my children when I see them. It’s getting dark, though, the sun a massive orange ball sinking behind the dark fringe of trees on the other side of the stream as the horizon darkens to violet, and so reluctantly I rise and head back up to everyone else.
In my absence, a makeshift campsite has been set up—the tarps fashioned into two tents, a fire pit dug, banked by stones and offering a comforting blaze. A metal pot hanging from a travel hook holds the stew Mattie mentioned. She, Ruby, and Sam are all huddled around the fire; Kyle is stretched out on the bench seat in the truck, already asleep, or maybe just feverish, with Phoebe curled up in the back. Daniel sits a few feet away from the others, studying the atlas with a small flashlight, and occasionally slapping his arm or neck when a black fly or mosquito comes too close.
It looks cozy, almost like something from our past life—a camping trip to the Berkshires, not that we did that more than once or twice. We were never great campers, until we had to be. Mattie and Sam both glance at me as I come up the hill, and then look away again without speaking.
I know I should say something, but right now I feel too cowardly, or maybe just too tired, to attempt it. I head over to Daniel and hunker down next to him.
“How are you?” I ask quietly. Such an innocuous question, and yet it holds so much import. How are you really , is what I want to ask. How are you holding up after what happened today, how are you coping with whatever happened while you went to get Sam that I still don’t know about, how are you feeling about whatever is ahead of us? And how can I help you , because I want to reach my husband, but it feels as if he is continually, determinedly edging away from me.
“Fine,” Daniel says briefly, the polite equivalent of back off .
I nod toward the map. “What are you thinking there?”
“I’m not sure.” Wearily he passes his hand over his face. “I wanted to go as far west as we can get because I’m pretty sure the bridge is closed at Thousand Islands, but there just aren’t that many points to cross, and we’d have to go miles out of our way around the Great Lakes. But if we go directly south…” He traces the route on the map with one finger, to the edge of a blue swathe that is Lake Ontario. “To Port Granby or thereabouts,” he continues, “which is about a hundred miles from Toronto, we could maybe find a boat in one of the marinas, sail across…it’s about thirty miles, I think. But we’d be landing on the other side between Buffalo and Rochester, both of which I think were hit.”
I swallow hard. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“No.” Daniel is silent for a moment, his forehead furrowed as we both gaze at the atlas with the gridlines of Toronto, Rochester, Buffalo all laid out, and now all most likely destroyed. He pauses, his gaze trained on the map. “The safer thing, perhaps, would be to keep making our way north and west.” With one finger, he traces up from Kawartha to Sudbury. “Along the eastern shore of Lake Huron, and then up over the top and down the other side,” he continues, his finger marking the proposed route. “There would be a bridge to cross here, at Mackinaw City, between the two lakes, and then down through Michigan and across.”
I stare at the roundabout route he’s mapped out, the meandering length of it. “Daniel, that has to be at least two thousand miles. We’re only a couple of hundred miles from Buffalo now.”
He scrubs at his face. “I know.”
“We can’t…it would take us all summer,” I continue, panic creeping into my voice although I’m trying to keep my tone level. “If not longer. We’d run out of food, out of gas, and then we’d still have to cross a bridge that might be closed or barricaded or whatever, go around cities…” The route he’s just traced skirts Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland. Detroit was definitely hit; I don’t know about the others. Such a journey feels enormous, insurmountable. Impossible .
We can’t do this , I think suddenly, the force of my feeling like a smack in the face. I haven’t actually thought about the future since those terrorists attacked the cottage, sent us running through the woods for our lives. I’ve been operating on numbed autopilot, but now the future looms in front of me, in front of us , and it is both utterly unknowable and completely terrifying. Where will we find food? How will we survive? The supplies we brought from the cottage will last a week or two if we’re careful, and that’s on practically starvation rations. If we can’t make it to Buffalo…what on earth are we going to do? “We can’t,” I say again, insistent this time.
“Alex, I know .” His voice contains more despair than irritation, but I fall silent, feeling chastened. Of course he knows. He’s come much closer to all this than I ever have, when he went to get Sam. But is this route really our most viable option? He takes a deep breath before continuing. “It’s just…if we go south from here…I don’t know what it will be like, between Buffalo and Rochester. How bad.”
He sighs, knuckling his forehead as if he’s trying to push something out of his head. “It’s not just the radiation, Alex, it’s the other dangers. The people . That little redneck gang that took on the cottage?” He shakes his head. “That’s nothing compared to some of the stuff happening in the more metropolitan areas. People have got ahold of major weaponry, huge sites they’ve turned into fortresses—malls, hospitals, hotel complexes…Ex-military and police and some prepper types who have gone totally rogue. It’s…it’s not good.”
Which sounds like the biggest understatement ever. I open my mouth, but no words come out. Daniel’s gaze is distant and unfocused, and I wonder if he’s reliving whatever terrible things he saw on the way back to me. I want to assure him that he can tell me whatever it is that is so clearly haunting him since he came back with Sam. I want to promise him I will understand, and I want to believe that I would, but the truth is I just don’t know.
“But those…things…are going to be in other places, too, aren’t they?” I finally say quietly. “The gangs or fortresses or whatever. We’re likely to find that stuff anywhere.”
“They might be,” Daniel allows. “But in the cities…”
“But we won’t be in the cities,” I persist. “Not that close, anyway. And two hundred versus two thousand miles…? Do we really have any choice?”
Daniel is silent for a moment, his gaze shuttered. “Maybe not,” he says, and closes the atlas. It feels as if the conversation is over.
“Daniel…” I begin, wanting to have the courage to say something of what I was thinking before, but I feel him tense and so I let that trail away. “Do you think Kyle will be okay?” I ask instead, which feels like the safest subject at the moment.
“Hopefully, in time, as long as his wound doesn’t get infected.” He shrugs. “We’ll keep an eye on him, let him rest. There’s no real reason we can’t stay here for a couple of days, make sure we’re all fit and ready to go.” He tries to smile, but it’s like his mouth doesn’t quite work.
“And Sam?” I make myself ask. “He’s been so quiet.”
Daniel shrugs. “I think our shoot-out on Route114 freaked him out a little.” The words are wry, but his tone is grave.
“Daniel…” I don’t want to ask, but I know I have to. “Do you think those guys were actually all right? I mean…do you think that maybe they weren’t trying to hurt us?” Daniel is silent and so I continue stiltedly, “I mean, the bridge being out. Was that guy trying to warn us about it?” The notion, if I let myself dwell on it, torments me. Did I kill not just an innocent man, but a good one?
“That would have been awfully nice of them,” Daniel answers after a moment. I can’t gauge his tone, whether he’s being sarcastic or serious or sorrowful. “Just parked in the road, waiting for people to come by so they can give them a heads-up.”
“I guess…” I have a feeling he’s just trying to make me feel better. “But what if they were stopped for another reason—hunting or having a pee or whatever—and they heard our cars coming and decided to warn us about the bridge?”
Daniel shrugs, his face expressionless, revealing nothing. “That’s a lot of ifs, and the facts are, they were both armed, and they asked us to put our own weapons away without doing the same. He didn’t say anything about the bridge or that he was friendly, and in this world there’s no way we would have assumed it.”
“Maybe.” Heaven knows, I want to be convinced.
“Sam will get over it,” Daniel tells me. “I think it was just a shock, how it all played out. And he hasn’t really seen anything like that before.”
Somehow I have trouble believing that. “Even though it took you four months to get back to the cottage?” I counter skeptically. “Daniel, you were just telling me how bad it was out there.” Although I still don’t feel like I really know. “Both of you must have seen some pretty awful?—”
“No,” Daniel cuts me off, his tone absolute. “Sam didn’t. Not that much, anyway. Not the worst of it. At Clarkson he was protected because some billionaire alum had brought in the Marines. It was almost unreal to him, at the start, like it was a movie or a…a video game.” He breathes out heavily, resting his hands on his thighs like he has to brace himself. “But what he did see was bad enough, trust me. We were carjacked at the beginning, and then later…” He’s quiet for a moment. “And he saw things from the car—gangs, violence, crowds begging and pleading…” He swallows and then shakes his head as if to clear a memory—of what, exactly, I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure he’s not going to tell me. “But nothing that close, that personal. Not me or you or anyone he cared about, which is different.”
He’s hardly told me anything, and yet it’s enough to fill me with unease, even dread. Those four months he spent traveling from Massachusetts to Ontario are a swirling blank to me, a vague haze of unwelcome possibility. What did my son endure? What did my husband do ? I’m not sure I’ll ever know, but what I do know is that it has changed Daniel, maybe forever.
“Okay,” I say at last. “So we’re going to Port Granby, and then across Lake Ontario?” I make it sound like a vacation jaunt, when I know it is absolutely anything but.
Slowly Daniel nods. “Yes. But we’ll rest here for a few days first. I think we all need it.”
I glance back toward my children, gathered around the campfire, their heads close together although none of them is speaking. In any other normal-life scenario, it would be a scene to warm the battered cockles of my heart—my three children huddled together in stalwart camaraderie, having a moment.
But looking at them now, I feel only despair, that it has come to this for the children I’d give my life for, and gladly. They’re so young —only twelve, fifteen, and nineteen years of age. They’ve seen so little of life, and yet far too much. What kind of future can they possibly have? What kind of future can I forge for them?
Because that is what I hope from this unknown, semi-imagined military base near Buffalo. A future…not for me or even for Daniel; I’m forty-four but I feel like my life is over, and I don’t even mind. But for Ruby. For Mattie. For Sam. And, I realize with a sinking sensation, for Phoebe and Kyle. Five young people Daniel and I are responsible for. How can I ensure they have something to look forward to, to hope for and to believe in? How can I make sure they let me, considering they don’t seem to even want to talk to me now?
I turn back to my husband. “What exactly do you know about this military base?” I ask, a plaintive demand.
He doesn’t answer right away, taking a moment to consider, his hooded gaze fixed on some undefined point in the night that laps our little firelit camp like the dark water of a dangerous sea. What is out there, I wonder, in that endless night? Can anyone see the smoke from our fire? Are they creeping closer, waiting to jump on us, to attack ? I suppress a shiver.
“I know it’s somewhere southwest of Buffalo,” Daniel says slowly, and I turn back to him. “And that it’s protected. And that the people there are trying to eke out some kind of civilized existence.” He turns toward me, his expression resolute. “But all that is only what I’ve heard from other people. I have no idea if any of it is actually true. If the base even exists. But people were talking about it, on the road. Not just one group, but several. I got the sense there was someone in charge there—some ex-military guy.”
I let out a huff of hard laughter. “This sounds like a bad action movie.”
Daniel smiles faintly, his eyes creasing at the corners in a way that reminds me of how things used to be. How we used to be. “Yeah,” he says. “What do you think happens when we get there—they take away our weapons and turn us into slave labor?”
I give a considering frown. “That would be the best-case scenario.”
Daniel raises his eyebrows. “And the worst?”
“They shoot us on sight,” I answer promptly. “Or they don’t let us in because they don’t like the look of us.”
He cocks his head. “If they were going to make us slaves, that second option might be no bad thing.”
“True.”
We smile at each other, barely a flicker, before we both lapse into silence as the reality of what we’re facing, the utter unknowability of it, hits us all over again. We can joke about it, and sometimes that feels like the only thing to do, but it’s real and it’s serious. We don’t know what’s out there. We don’t know how bad it is going to be.
“I don’t know what else to do,” Daniel says after a moment. “Where to go to be safe.”
“We’ve got to try,” I reply, an agreement. “Maybe everything will be better than we think.” Daniel does not bother to reply to this, and I explain a little doggedly, “I mean, I wasn’t expecting the drive here to be so quiet. We saw hardly anyone. And this park…if we had amnesia, we could be on vacation.”
He lets out a huff that almost passes for laughter. “Except we’re in a monster truck. Even with amnesia, we wouldn’t own a vehicle like that.”
Which brings us right back to what I can’t bear to think about, the two men we killed. Daniel must see something of this on my face, for he lays a hand on my arm. “Alex,” he says quietly, and his voice is almost tender. “I was the one who shot first.”
I’m pretty sure he’s just trying to make me feel better, but I nod in acceptance like I’m buying it. He squeezes my arm. “We should all get some sleep. ”
I nod again, and then rise from where we were both hunkered down, casting my gaze over the flickering shadows of our campsite. Ruby, Mattie, and Sam are all still seated around the campfire, and I give them a smile that no one seems to acknowledge before I go to check on the others. Kyle is stretched out in the front of the truck, sleeping soundly; I rest the back of my hand against his forehead and, while it’s not cool, it’s not burning hot, either. With a few days’ rest, he’ll hopefully be well enough to travel. Phoebe is curled up in the back, her thumb tucked firmly into her mouth. I wonder how much she can understand; does she realize her mother is not coming back?
Justine. Kerry . My mother, too, dying in her sleep only last night. I can’t think of them yet, can’t open the floodgates to that tidal wave of grief, and so I turn back to the campfire, and my own children, knowing I can’t put off some sort of reckoning with them any longer.
“Hey,” I say softly as I sit down next to Ruby. “How is everyone doing?”
Ruby gives me a fleeting smile but doesn’t speak, Mattie shrugs, and Sam gets up and walks away. It feels as deliberate as a slap. I glance at Mattie, who raises her eyebrows.
“He’s processing ,” she explains in a tone that suggests I should understand this already, and for a second, fleeting and precious, I can picture her on the sofa back in our old house, legs stretched out as she glances up from the phone that was practically surgically attached to her hand and tells me some pithy, dismissive thing, a well-duh moment for a middle-aged mom. I would take that Mattie, with all her aggravating eye-rolls and hair-flicks, over this one any day, I realize, as much as I admire how strong and resilient my daughter has become. I want those petty problems back so much it hurts. Cannabis in her locker? A deadbeat boyfriend I don’t like? Fine. Fine . Bring them on. I’d welcome them compared to this .
“Right,” I say, because how else can I respond? We’re all processing, to one degree or another. “Well…we should get ready for bed,” I tell my girls. Daniel and Sam have set up two makeshift tents with the tarps; Ruby and I will sleep in one, Sam and Daniel in the other, while Mattie stays with Phoebe and Kyle in the truck. It’s not ideal, but it will work.
“Yeah, okay,” Mattie says, but she doesn’t move. The fire casts dancing shadows over her face, her dark eyes serious, her arms wrapped around her knees.
I turn to Ruby, who is so still, so silent. Ruby has gone through phases of selective mutism for most of her life, but she’d started to come out of herself, once we’d settled into this strange new life. She had her home-made greenhouse and her books, and I think she was happy, or as much as anyone could be, all things considered. Tentatively, I put my arm around her, and am relieved when she doesn’t shake it off.
“Okay, Rubes?” I ask softly, and she leans her head against my shoulder and closes her eyes. I squeeze her shoulder, grateful for this moment. At the edge of the camp, I can see Sam moving away, into the darkness, and I wonder what tomorrow will bring—for the world, but also for this ragtag group of survivors that we are going to have to form into a family. No matter what my children think of me now, I’m determined to keep us all together and safe, even if I already know it’s a promise I don’t have the power to make, never mind keep.