Chapter 8
EIGHT
DANIEL
December, six months earlier
Outside Utica, New York
Daniel stumbles to the side of the road, his hands flung into the air, as a man he can’t see presses the muzzle of a rifle to his temple. From the corner of his eye he sees another man, grizzly and bearded, pointing a semiautomatic rifle, a serious kind of weapon, at his son, and something in him both breaks and hardens at the same time. He can’t believe this is happening already. He and Sam have been together for maybe ten minutes.
“Please,” he says, trying not to sound like he is begging even though he knows he is. “Take the car and go.”
The man chuckles, a throaty, smoke-filled sound. “Oh, we’ll take what we like,” he assures Daniel, and presses the muzzle of the rifle a little harder into his temple, chuckling again as he does so. He’s clearly enjoying this—not just the stealing, but the inducing of fear, the relishing of control. What a pathetic power trip, Daniel thinks with a sudden, savage bitterness. What a total loser, this guy, to be getting his kicks this way. He doesn’t say any of this out loud, but he feels a spurt of futile rage and he closes his eyes briefly before snapping them open, knowing he doesn’t have the luxury of either regret or despair. Not now, not when his son’s life is at stake.
“The keys are in the ignition,” he tells the man. He forces himself to look him full in the face, yet even as he takes in his features they blur before him, so he is nothing more than a faceless body, an automaton with a gun and a grimy baseball cap. Does this man have a soul? Daniel supposes he must, but it is tattered and threadbare, judging from the relish he is showing as he moves the rifle from Daniel’s temple to his midsection, prodding his belly like he’s an animal at an abattoir. Again Daniel feels that blaze of rage, and forces himself to tamp it down. He’s so close to snapping, and he can’t, not here, not now, when he’s powerless and this wannabe badass would shoot both him and Sam simply for the pleasure of it, because he can.
While the man keeps his gun trained between Daniel and Sam, the other opens the back of the car to inspect their booty. Sam makes some small sound of protest, quickly silenced. They will take it all, Daniel thinks numbly. His backpack and Sam’s, along with Sam’s duffel bag. Admittedly, it’s not much—a couple of Slim Jims and packets of Ritz crackers are all the food he has, plus a change of clothes, a water bottle. But without those things, how will they possibly survive? And, Daniel realizes, they will take his gun. And of course the car.
The only thing they’re escaping with in this situation, he knows, is their lives. And that’s if they’re lucky.
“Empty your pockets,” the man commands, and Daniel complies. He’s not so stupid as to have put anything important in his front pockets—the car keys to the SUV left back in Canada are in the inside zipped pocket of his coat, his cash, worthless as it probably now is, tucked into his pants. The man takes a handkerchief, a stick of gum, and a crumpled Slim Jim wrapper, and with a snarl hurls it all to the ground .
“Give me one good reason not to shoot you right here,” he snaps, and Daniel stays silent.
The man glares at him for a moment as Daniel holds his gaze, even wonders if he sees a spark of something almost like admiration in the man’s wild, red-rimmed eyes. He’s on something, coke or meth or whatever it is people shoot up these days. It’s a world Daniel doesn’t know, even as he comes up hard against it, again .
The moment stretches on like an elastic about to snap, and then a canny look comes over the man’s face and he grabs Daniel by the front of his coat, wrenches it open, and pats down his inside pockets, instantly feeling the bulge of the car keys. “Ah ha, so what are these to, buddy?” he asks, his breath sour in his face.
“A car two hundred miles away,” Daniel replies flatly. The man is already unzipping his pocket, taking out the keys. “In a barn near Rockport, Ontario.”
“Oh, yeah?” The man sneers at him, indifferent, but he takes the keys, which is so stupid and pointless Daniel could almost laugh—except he feels, suddenly and savagely, like putting his hands around this man’s throat and squeezing. He wants to see his eyes pop and his tongue stick out as the breath leaves his body. He closes his eyes, willing the image away, the deep sense of satisfaction it brings.
Shouting to his partner in crime, the man clambers into the car, followed by the other, and then with a roar of the engine and a squeal of tires they are gone, down the road toward Utica. In the ensuing, wintry silence, Sam collapses to the ground, retching.
“I thought…” he gasps, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “I thought they were going to kill us.”
“They might have,” Daniel agrees. He picks up the handkerchief the man threw to the ground and hands it to Sam, who looks at him with a kind of fearful awe .
“Dad, you were so…” He trails off, shaking his head. Daniel does not ask him to finish that sentence. He was so what? Cold? Indifferent? Weary? Hopeless?
All of the above, and not the kind of man he ever wanted to be, but he can’t dwell on that now. They need to obtain some kind of vehicle, as well as find shelter. It’s late afternoon, the sun sinking lower in a slate-gray sky, and the temperature is dropping. It will be hovering near zero by dark. They can’t afford to be exposed to the cold, as well as whoever else is roaming these ravaged wastelands.
“Dad,” Sam asks, his voice full of little-boy trust, “what are we going to do?”
Daniel has no idea. How far are they from Utica? Four, five miles? At the very least. “I think we’ll check out that army base that has food and fresh water,” he tells his son. “Elihu Root Army Reserve Center, right?”
Sam blinks at him. “Um, yeah, something like that, I think. Do you know where it is?”
No, he does not, and Utica is not exactly a small town. A small city, perhaps, with a population of maybe fifty thousand? Or, at least, that’s what it used to be. What it is now, he shudders to think, based on what he’s already seen while going to get Sam—guys like the ones he just encountered holed up in Walmart, barricading roads, shooting rounds off just for the hell of it, not caring who might get hurt, and no presence of police or military or anyone remotely trustworthy. How has it come to this, so swiftly? There’s no point, he knows, in lamenting the state of affairs; it simply is, and they must move forward.
“We’ll ask someone where it is,” Daniel decides. “Someone we can trust.” He thinks, then, of Tom, the quiet, steady man he met who helped and fed him, back on Route12, just two days ago. It feels like a lifetime already, but it isn’t. He can picture the gummy smile of Tom’s youngest, Isaac, only a baby, as he banged his spoon on his highchair. The quiet, dark-eyed older children, Hannah and Noah, the calm capability of his wife, Abby. If he and Sam can get there, maybe they can regroup. Figure out a way forward. But that man’s farmhouse must be at least fifteen miles away…
That’s about six hours of walking, he tells himself. It will be dark by the time they arrive, close to midnight, but it’s still doable…and it might be their only option.
“I think I might know someone,” Daniel tells Sam. “But we’ll have to walk.”
Sam nods jerkily. He’s clearly scared, but he trusts his dad to think of a plan, to make it happen. His son might be eighteen, but right then Daniel feels as if he might as well be six years old, gazing at his daddy with big, trusting eyes. Doesn’t Sam realize how powerless he is? They were just carjacked by two hillbillies high on drugs and he couldn’t do anything to protect himself or his son.
He glances down the empty road, a cold stretch of concrete under a winter sky. “Let’s go,” he says, and together they fall into step and start walking.
As the sun sets, the temperature drops, and Daniel’s mind slips into a numb haze. He knows he needs to think about what they’re going to do, how they can possibly get all the way back to the cottage in Canada without a car or any supplies, but it feels like everything is happening in slow motion, the gears in his mind barely turning over. He’s exhausted, near starving as well as freezing, and it’s all he can do to put one foot in front of the other as the road stretches on in front of them, seemingly endless.
“Tell me about Clarkson,” he finally says to Sam, rousing himself out of a near-stupor. “Before, I mean. I know we Skyped about it, but what was your favorite class? Did you get along with your roommate?”
“My favorite class…” Sam sounds as if Daniel is speaking a foreign language, and in a way, he is. What does any of that ma tter anymore? It’s a world that has been destroyed, perhaps forever. And yet Daniel wants, even needs , to hear about it. He wants to be a normal dad for just a few minutes, smiling and nodding as his son tells him how his economics professor is super strict.
“Yeah, your favorite class. Was it Econ? Or the history one? What period of history, again?”
“Modern European.”
“Right.” Daniel nods, the memories filtering through him like shards of broken glass, glinting with a barely held recollection of what once was, hurting him with their painful poignancy. “What is that, like 1850 to present?”
Sam shoots him a look like he thinks he’s crazy for caring, but then he continues, his voice growing a little stronger. “Yeah, around then. We started with the revolutions in 1848.”
“Right,” Daniel says again, nodding, trying to remember what he knows about that dim and distant past. “Were they in Italy and Germany?”
“And France and the Austrian Empire.”
“So back then it probably felt like the whole world was on fire,” Daniel remarks.
“Yeah,” Sam agrees, smiling crookedly. “Maybe kinda like this.”
And suddenly they’re both laughing, deep, from their bellies, hard enough to make tears come to Daniel’s eyes, although maybe they are real tears, because God knows he is so very close to weeping. But he doesn’t; he holds it together for his son as they keep walking and Sam, getting into the spirit of the thing, tells him about the climbing club he joined, how they’d hike out into the Adirondacks. Some kids even free-climbed, which was crazy hard, but pretty cool. Sam wants to try it, maybe, one day.
Daniel listens and nods, grateful for the soothing cadence of his son’s voice, the rise and pitch of syllables without him taking in all the words, just savoring the seeming normality of the moment, for however long it lasts.
Eventually Sam’s monologue trails away, and they both walk in silence. They haven’t seen a car or person in over an hour, which is hopefully a good thing, although the silence and stillness, along with the freezing temperatures and oncoming darkness, make Daniel feel uneasy. They need to find shelter, and soon. His face is numb, as are his fingers, even in the gloves he fortunately had in the pocket of his coat, and his toes.
Then Sam suddenly grabs his arm. “Dad!” he says, sounding excited. “Dad, look!”
Daniel blinks through the twilit gloom, a ripple of shock going through him when he sees a sign for the Elihu Root Army Reserve Center.
“We can get food,” Sam says, sounding even more enthused. “And water and maybe other stuff. Maybe someone here can help us.”
Daniel looks down the empty road now shrouded in darkness; the only sound is the sweep of the wind against the hardened, snow-encrusted ground. There’s no one around—no person, no vehicle, not even a light. He does not have a good feeling about this, but he wants to catch Sam’s enthusiasm, to feel his hope. “Let’s have a look,” he says.
Together they head off Route12, down a smaller road. One side is an empty field, another a stretch of chain-link fence, with a few flat-roofed, concrete buildings of the Army Reserve Center visible behind, cloaked in shadow.
After about ten minutes, they come to the gates of the center; they’re wide open, and one looks dented, as if someone drove into it, hard. Daniel’s sense of unease deepens, his gut churning as his gaze darts around, looking for any sign of life. He had, like Sam, been half-hoping, almost expecting , even, a place of bustling activity—security guards, trucks, warehouses full of food, a smiling doctor in scrubs standing by a medical tent. He’d felt that palpable sense of relief hovering at his fingertips, that someone could take charge, even if just for a few minutes, so they wouldn’t be all alone in this.
Instead, the whole place looks empty and abandoned. The concrete is cracked, the buildings dark and ominously silent.
“Is no one here?” Sam asks uncertainly.
“It doesn’t appear so,” Daniel replies. He’s conscious of their intense vulnerability—no weapon, no vehicle, no food. They have nothing. And no one is here. At least, he now hopes no one is here, because if they are he doesn’t think they’re going to be friendly. That radio announcement must have been an old recording, from after the first strikes, because what is abundantly clear is that this is no longer a place to get food or fresh water or medical aid. This is no longer a place to get anything.
Still, Daniel walks forward, just in case…in case of what? He knows no one is here…and yet he keeps going.
In the parking lot in front of the main building, a few tents have been set up. They list now, like sinking ships, their awnings ragged and torn. A dozen or so plastic crates, empty, some broken, are scattered across the asphalt.
Daniel moves forward again to one of the tents, and that’s when he sees the sprawled body of someone, their legs visible from behind a table. From where he stands, he can’t see their face, but they are clearly dead. They have been shot in the stomach, and, judging from the state of what he can see, it happened a while ago. As his gaze moves around, he sees other bodies sprawled across the parking lot, some of them in military uniform. There must be a dozen people or more; all are dead, and most likely have been for some time.
Sam starts to walk ahead, and Daniel checks him with an arm flung out, hitting him hard in the chest. His son lets out a startled oof .
“Dad…”
“Let’s go. ”
“What? Why?—”
“Let’s go .”
Sam sucks in a quick, startled breath as Daniel wheels around and starts walking back the way they came. After a few seconds, his son follows. They’re both silent as they go back through the gates, out onto the street, and back to the main road.
“Someone shot that guy,” Sam finally says, his voice quiet.
His son must not have seen all the bodies, for which Daniel is glad. “Yes,” he agrees.
“Do you think it was the same guys who took our car?”
“It could have been anybody, Sam.” Daniel takes a deep breath. He is recalibrating his plans, his hopes, of how to get from here to the cottage. Right now, it feels like an unfathomable distance. “We need to find the guy I mentioned,” he finally says. “Tom.” He says his name as if he knows him as a friend, when all he really is is a stranger who invited Daniel in for a meal. But he was kind and honorable, and Daniel is sure he can trust him. If he can get to that farmhouse, he can make a plan. Somehow…somehow he will be able to get back to the cottage. To Alex and Mattie and Ruby.
Together they start walking back down Route12. Daniel estimates they have about six or seven more miles more to walk. It’s dark now, moonless, so he can barely see his hand in front of his face. This is a good thing because it means they can’t be targeted…or so he hopes.
After about half an hour, they come into the center of Utica, and he tenses, conscious that there are likely to be people about. They pass looted stores, houses either boarded up or broken into, abandoned cars with shot-out tires and shattered windows, everything possessing an air of emptiness and desolation and violence. They stick to the shadows, and twice Daniel guides Sam to lie flat on the ground, their cheeks pressed to the freezing concrete, as a truck or SUV careens by. When they reach the downtown, Daniel glimpses people outside a hospital on the other side of the street, racing stretchers down a steep hill so they clang hard into the concrete wall of a parking garage at the bottom. He sees a flash of a pale, terrified face on one of the stretchers and tells himself he must be imagining it; surely no one could be that depraved as to treat other human beings that way, for no good reason. This was a civilized country, he thinks, up until about two minutes ago.
He guides Sam away onto a side street before he sees any of it, and they trudge on, one foot in front of another. At times, the world around them feels like an alien, abandoned landscape—at other times, an apocalyptic hell. Daniel can’t feel either his fingers or his toes. They’re on a side street of shabby, wooden townhouses, most looking empty or others shuttered up tight, when he hears the staccato volley of gunshots up ahead, and then the squeal of tires, the flash of lights. He pulls Sam onto the front porch of a house with the windows blown out; they both lie flat on their bellies, hidden by the porch railing, breathing hard as the truck races down the street…and then stops right in front of them.
Neither of them so much as breathes as they hear doors open and then slam shut, voices that sound both belligerent and jovial. Footsteps, thankfully moving away. A door opening and closing, directly across from them, Daniel suspects. More voices, another car. Wild guffaws of laughter and then the sudden raucous blare of rap music, making Daniel jump a little.
He hasn’t heard music, he realizes, since before the first bombs dropped. Already it feels like a relic from another world, harsh on his ears and yet making something in him yearn for all the things he used to take for granted—music, art, fresh coffee, hot, gooey pizza. It rushes at him, a barrage of simple pleasures that now are impossibly out of reach.
Next to him Sam shifts on the hard wooden boards of the porch. “What should we do?” he whispers. A scent of cigarette smoke drifts toward them on the cold air, along with the murmur of voices. The guys, whoever they are, are standing outside, maybe on the porch of the opposite house, maybe on the sidewalk or the street. They could, Daniel realizes, be there for a very long time. It sounds like they’re having something of a party.
“We’ll have to go around the back,” he whispers back. They can’t stay on this porch for much longer; it’s too cold, and they’ll be far more exposed and vulnerable in daylight.
“But if they see us…”
Daniel hears a tremor in his son’s voice. “They won’t,” he says. There are some steps off the porch leading to a narrow alley that runs alongside the house. If they commando-crawl down it, Daniel thinks they won’t be seen. He hopes they won’t.
Because if they are…
But no. He’s not going to think like that.
“We’ll stay low,” he tells Sam. “Follow me.”
Fortunately, the blare of music covers any sound they might make as they crawl on their forearms off the porch and along the alleyway. Marines make it look easy , Daniel thinks, and almost laughs. After just a few feet, he’s exhausted and breathing hard. He keeps going.
It’s maybe fifty feet down the alleyway to the backyard, a barren stretch of frozen grass crusted with snow, a broken picnic table listing on its side. Safely hidden now, they both stand, wincing as they do. Even with the protection of his coat, Daniel thinks his forearms are probably scraped raw.
“Now what?” Sam asks.
Daniel gazes at the rowhouses stretching in every direction, a sea of chain-link or rickety wooden fencing, roof after drooping roof.
“We keep going,” he says, and heads to the back of the narrow yard, vaults the fence, and walks on.
Behind them, from the party house, they hear a gunshot. Daniel doesn’t look back.