Chapter 20
TWENTY
DANIEL
Six months earlier
Somewhere outside Brattleboro, Vermont
“Dad, I think she’s dead.”
Sam’s voice is low and strained as Daniel hunches his shoulders and peers through the darkness, his fingers clenched around the steering wheel. He’s driving without headlights because it’s safer, but it takes a lot of concentration, and he wishes he’d thought to bring his glasses, something that hadn’t even crossed his mind—over a month ago now—when he’d set out from Ontario for this.
“Who’s dead?” he demands in a voice that is just as low and strained as his son’s.
“Pauline,” Sam tells him. “Granny’s asleep.”
Daniel breathes out a quiet sigh of relief. Pauline is one less person to worry about, and she was on her last legs anyway. She was the only other surviving resident of the care home where she and Jenny had been eking out an existence for the last four weeks. Amazingly, when he and Sam had arrived at the home four days after they’d left Tom’s farmhouse, his mother-in-law had still been, against all his expectations, alive.
Daniel had been bracing himself for the worst, and, in truth, it had been bad enough—there had been twelve residents in the memory unit of the care home, and ten of them were dead, in various stages of decay. He’d left Sam in the car, his son chafing against being treated like a six-year-old but still going along with it. For the four days of their journey, Daniel had hardly allowed him out, save to go to the bathroom, and then only quickly. He was conscious of how close they were to Hartford, how dangerous and damaged everything seemed, in a different way from Utica—no violent gangs here, but instead a steady stream of desperate, frightened people on the highway heading north or west, fleeing the radiation, or at least the fear of the radiation.
As they drove steadily toward Springfield, these poor souls had clawed at the car, or banged on the windows, but Daniel had simply stared straight ahead and kept driving.
Once, Sam had protested, “Dad, you might drive over someone. Kill them.”
“They’ll move out of the way.” He was not about to slow down, to get dragged out of the car, have yet another vehicle stolen from them, not for anyone or anything. His resolve was tested when a young woman, no more than Sam’s age, bravely stepped in front of the car, her chin tilted, her eyes flashing, her face covered with the reddened, dry, and peeling skin of radiation burns. Daniel kept driving, and, thankfully, at the very last minute, she moved.
If she hadn’t…
It was something Daniel had refused to dwell on. Sam hadn’t said a word.
And so they’d traveled to the nursing home—driving at night for safety, sleeping during the day, crawling down Route90, ignoring the exodus. Four days of tension and fear and purpose, and then, amazingly, they’d pulled into the parking lot of Tall Oaks like they had a hundred times before to visit Granny, steeling themselves for her inevitable decline, noticeable in increments, and always painful.
This, Daniel knew, would be entirely different.
The nursing home had looked as abandoned as everything else; Daniel had been sure he would find nothing but rotting corpses, and there had been plenty of those, but when he’d made it through the secure doors—left unlocked when the power had failed—holding his breath against the stench, Jenny had stirred from a recliner by the blank-faced TV where she’d been wasting away, nothing more than skin and brittle bone, and Daniel had gaped at her, utterly amazed.
She and Pauline had been drinking the bottled water in the memory unit’s little kitchen and subsisting on packets of cookies and crackers as well as the apples and oranges in the fruit bowl that were kept out for residents. They’d both been impossibly frail and yet they’d been alive. Jenny had seemed almost regal as she’d risen from the chair, talking to Daniel like she’d been waiting for a taxi that had finally arrived. Despite everything, it had almost made him smile; she was true to form, if nothing else.
But it had quickly become clear that Pauline wasn’t as strong as Jenny, and now, just a few hours later, she was dead.
Good , Daniel thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. He pulled over to the side of the road and opened the back door, trying not to breathe, just in case. They were about fifty miles from Springfield, heading north on Route91, somewhere between Bernardston and Brattleboro, Vermont. The crowds had started to thin out maybe twenty miles back; people either hadn’t made it this far or hadn’t wanted to. Daniel was glad; abandoned roads were easier in all sorts of ways, but they only had a quarter tank of gas left, and he didn’t know where they were going to find any more.
Now, as gently and respectfully as he can, he pulls Pauline out of the car while Sam watches, apprehensive. “Should we bury her?” he asks.
“No.”
“Dad…” His son’s protest fades away into silence.
“We don’t have time,” Daniel tells him brusquely, an explanation rather than an apology, although in truth he feels a flicker of guilt. If he were a better man, he’d want to bury an innocent woman, or at least show her some respect. “We have to find somewhere to hole up while I look for gas.” By his reckoning, they’re a hundred miles or so from Boston, eighty from Hartford—not far enough. Vermont, he hopes, is far north enough to be safer, at least from the radiation. Whether they’ll encounter gangs in that green and pleasant land remains to be seen.
Daniel’s plan is to find an abandoned house and rest for a few days while Jenny regains some of her strength. He’ll find enough gas to get back to Canada, and they’ll try to cross in Vermont, up into Quebec.
He leaves Pauline by the side of the road, after crossing her arms over her chest. It’s all he can think to do to create a sense of occasion, of seriousness.
“Should you say something?” Sam asks uncertainly.
Daniel tries to summon a prayer, but his mind feels both blank and full of static. “Rest in peace,” he finally says, wearily. He gets back in the car and keeps driving. Jenny hasn’t even stirred from her sleep. He wonders if she’ll remember Pauline, or even notice that she is gone. His head throbs and his mouth is dry; he’s trying to conserve water but he knows he should probably drink something. Is a dry mouth a side effect of radiation poisoning? He remembers, when his aunt had radiotherapy for cancer, it dried up her salivary glands so she couldn’t even spit. Is that happening to him? Is his body already being destroyed from the inside out? Is Sam’s ?
“He stayed in the car,” Daniel reminds himself. “He stayed in the car.”
It is only when Sam asks him if he’s talking to himself that Daniel realizes he said it out loud.
They’re about twenty miles from Brattleboro when the warning light appears on the gas tank. They’re nearly at empty—and at the end of the road.
Daniel slows as he glimpses a barricade that has been set up across the whole road—an impenetrable barrier of oil drums and concrete blocks. An effort has been made here, and Daniel sees why when he spies the bullet-proof vests of the Vermont state police. For some reason, this shocks him; it’s the first police presence he’s seen since the Canadian Border Services on the St.Lawrence over a month ago.
“What…” Sam breathes.
Daniel brakes. He can’t drive through that kind of blockade, and he’s queasily apprehensive as a police officer strides toward him. He rolls down the window.
“You’ll have to go back,” the officer informs him flatly. “No crossing here.”
“No crossing…?”
“Vermont is a no-contamination zone.”
A what ? Daniel almost wants to laugh. Does this guy think he can stop the radioactive cloud from rolling onward?
“What does that mean, exactly?” he asks, tensely conscious that the police officer is holding a SIGSauer semiautomatic rifle, a no-kidding-around kind of weapon.
“It means no one is coming in,” the man explains irritably. “We’ve closed the state borders.”
“But why…”
“Because we don’t want a bunch of radioactive zombies flooding in,” the man snaps. “Now reverse your vehicle or suffer the consequences.”
He raises his rifle meaningfully and Daniel nods, rolls up the window, and starts reversing.
“Can they even do that?” Sam demands, outraged, as Daniel does a three-point turn with a dozen armed police officers looking on, and then bumps across the median in the middle of the road to the other side. His mouth is drier than ever.
“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “They have, anyway.” He has no plan now, he realizes. They’re almost out of gas. There’s nothing but tiny towns, barely more than handfuls of houses, for at least fifty miles in just about any direction. The nearest city of any size is Springfield, from where they came, and it’s closer to the radiation. He knows they can try to make their way on smaller roads through Vermont, up to the border, but he’s wary of having to drive through so many small towns. It feels like an easy way to get carjacked, and that’s without considering the problem of gas.
He drives back down Route91 to the nearest exit, for Route10 to Northfield, Massachusetts, and turns off, then stops when he sees the barricade that has been erected at the narrowest part of the road—more oil drums and concrete blocks, even an old truck. He knows he won’t be able to shift any of it, and the dense trees on either side make it impossible to drive around. Ostensibly, he could leave the car here and they could walk, but Jenny’s not strong enough and without a car they might as well be dead. Besides, what would they be walking to? He doesn’t even know if there’s a gas station in Northfield, not that he’d find any gas there anyway.
Daniel reverses back onto the highway and keeps driving. He thinks they have just about enough gas to make it to the next exit, for Route10 south to Bernardston, even though he doesn’t want to go any further south. Near the exit, he sees a sign advertising a gas station, a campsite, even a Starbucks and a Dunkin’ Donuts. He turns off and comes to another barricade, this one just as impassable as the last. The good people of Bernardston have been efficient, he thinks, as well as determined. He wonders how many other barricades they’ll come across, against refugees from radiation that nobody wants to let in.
This time when he starts to reverse, the car sputters and then stops. They’re out of gas.
From the back, Jenny stirs. “Where am I?” she asks, her tone more curious than fretful. “Where are we going?”
They are, Daniel thinks, good questions, and he can’t answer them. He turns off the ignition and pockets the key as he tries to think. They’ll have to get out of the car; at least, he will have to get out of the car. It’s probably safer for Sam and Jenny to stay here and wait for him to return.
He swallows dryly at the thought. He really needs to drink some water.
“Okay,” he says at last. “Sam, you and Granny stay here. I’ll go find some gas, come back and fill up. Eventually we’ll find a way off the highway. They can’t have blockaded everywhere.”
“Why are they doing this?” Sam asks unhappily.
“Because they’re scared. And when people are scared, they circle the wagons, proverbially speaking.” He turns to his son, dredges up a reassuring smile. “It’s going to be okay. I got us a car before. I can get us gas. All you need to do is stay inside, windows rolled up, doors locked, okay? I’ll be back before daylight. I doubt anyone will even notice you’re here.”
Sam frowns, still unhappy. “And if they do?”
“It’s been twenty miles since we saw anyone,” Daniel reminds him. “No one’s coming, Sam. It’s going to be okay.” He reaches back and grasps his son’s hand, squeezes it. “It’s going to be okay,” he says again. Jenny, he sees, has fallen back asleep.
A few minutes later he is out of the car, his coat zipped up and his hat pulled down over his ears. It is breathtakingly cold, so his chest hurts every time he draws a breath. All around him the forest looms, dark and bare. There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts less than a mile from here, but it’s hard to believe.
He starts walking—head down, hands dug into the pockets of his coat, his boots crunching on the dried leaves, around the barricade and then back onto the road, which leads to an intersection. In the moonless darkness, he can’t see a thing in either direction, but a sign on the other side of the road tells him that Church Street is to the right. He turns right, toward the town, and keeps walking—past the white wooden Congregational church, its steeple piercing the night sky, and then another; and then, there it is, a gas station with a Dunkin’ Donuts.
The pumps, as expected, have been destroyed, no doubt in an effort to get at the gas, and the windows of the Dunkin’ Donuts are shattered, the store looted. He glances around the empty street, wondering where he should go. His first thought is to find an abandoned house with a car and siphon the gas out, but based on the barricade he has a feeling that there won’t be as many abandoned houses, and that more will be locked up tight and bristling with hostile residents.
He stands there for a few minutes deliberating what to do, his mind as slow as molasses, so every thought feels like something sliding inexorably away from him, gone before he can even begin to try to grasp it.
Then, in the distance, he sees a light flickering. A flashlight? A lantern? The glow is comforting, beckoning him forward, or maybe that’s just his weariness, his hopelessness, because he doesn’t know where to go on his own. He puts one foot in front of the other, walking down Church Street, toward the light.
As he comes closer, he sees that it is a lantern, hanging on the concrete porch of a small, weathered building that has a sign in its gravel parking lot—Faith Christian Church. It’s a tiny building that looks a little like a dry-cleaners, but as he comes forward someone comes out to stand on the porch—a middle- aged woman with woolly white hair and a surprisingly wide smile.
“Hello,” she says gently. “May I help you?” He stares at her dumbly. Her smile softens. “You’ve come a long way?”
“Yes.” His voice is a croak. “Canada, originally, and then from near Utica.”
She nods in understanding. “Would you like to come in?”
Daniel nods. He feels as if he is in a dream, and he doesn’t want to wake up. He follows her into the church, which is tiny—an entrance hall, a sanctuary that seats maybe twenty, and a room in the back. There’s no electricity, but another lantern inside lights the way.
“I have soup,” the woman tells him. “And coffee.”
He sees she has a two-ring propane stove that she fires up with calm efficiency.
“What…” He can’t make sense of this; it really does feel like a dream. “What are you doing here?”
She turns to him, still smiling. “Helping people. There’s quite a few who have come through, from the highway. A meal is the least I can offer. I’m afraid I haven’t got much more than that.” She nods toward a wooden chair by the door to the sanctuary. “Why don’t you take a load off?”
“All right.” He eases into the chair, amazed at how relaxed he already feels, simply from this single human interaction. “Has there been much violence here?” he asks.
“Some, but this is a small town and people are trying to stay civilized. They had a soup kitchen going, but then a gang from another town came and shut it all down. The military were here a few weeks, trying to organize things, but I haven’t seen them in a while. I heard talk that they’ve all headed out west.”
“Yes, so have I.” The smell of soup—canned tomato—wafts toward him, and his stomach grumbles. He’s barely eaten today, and he’s still so thirsty. “What about the radiation?”
She shrugs, seeming peacefully pragmatic. “We won’t know until it happens, will we? But we’re only seventy miles from Hartford. There’s bound to be something, isn’t there?”
“Maybe.”
“Not much we can do about it but wait,” the woman replies. “I’m Dorcas, by the way.”
“Dorcas.” He nods a greeting. “I’m Daniel.”
“A good biblical name.” She speaks lightly, with a smile. “I’m named after the woman in Acts who made clothes for the poor. She died and then Peter raised her to life again. Do you know that story?”
He half shakes his head, half shrugs. “Sort of.”
“Well, this is my version of making clothes,” she says as she spoons soup into a mug. “Because truth is,” she explains with a rusty laugh, “I don’t know my way around a sewing machine at all.”
“Aren’t you worried about being attacked?”
“For a little soup and some coffee?” She raises her eyebrows as she hands him the mug. “When the good Lord decides my day has come, well then, my day has come. Until then, I’ll be here, doing what I can.”
Daniel is both moved and shamed by this simple statement of faith; his own actions have been so far from it—desperate, calculating, selfish. He doesn’t know how to be any different; faith, he reflects, is a nice idea until you have to put it into practice with something—or someone—you really care about. He’s not going to risk his son’s life for a step of faith of any size. It feels like a holier version of virtue signaling, although that is clearly so far from what Dorcas is doing.
“I’m afraid I haven’t got any milk or sugar,” she tells him as she hands him a cup of coffee, which Daniel takes with murmured thanks.
He balances both the soup and coffee in his lap. “I need gas,” he tells her, blurting it out. She is, unsurprisingly, unruffled .
“Gas is pretty hard to come by,” she muses. “The gas stations were the first to be looted, along with the grocery stores. Some people have left already, heading out west, hoping it’s better there. They needed the gas.”
Daniel nods. “Understandable.” He takes a sip of soup, savoring its warmth. He’s so tired, he feels as if he could drift off right there, lulled to sleep by the woman’s kindness, the warmth stealing through his body.
Dorcas frowns at him. “Are you all right, Daniel?” she asks. “You’re looking a little flushed.”
“I’m tired,” he admits reluctantly. And, he fears, maybe sick. How sick?
Dorcas presses the back of her hand to his forehead. Her hand is cool and soft and reminds him, bizarrely, of his mother’s. For a wonderful, blessed moment, he feels like a child. “I think you have a fever,” she says with concern. “I’ve got some Tylenol somewhere…” She reaches for her purse, a voluminous bag of fake black leather, and roots around it. Daniel takes another sip of soup, and some of it dribbles down his chin. Until Dorcas said it, he didn’t realize just how truly sick he felt, but now it crashes over him, pulls him under, and part of him wants to go. He craves that release.
He blinks fuzzily, the whole world seeming to come in and out of focus. “I’m sorry…” he begins, and she shakes her head.
“It’s all right. Take this.” She presses two tablets into his hand, and for a second he wonders if he should trust her. Maybe she has poisoned him with her soup—but he knows she hasn’t. He’s just sick, so sick…and he didn’t let himself realize it until he was sitting in a warm place, sipping soup.
Now all he wants to do is sleep, forget…
“Daniel…” Dorcas says with concern.
His eyes flutter open, and he tries to focus. “I’m sorry…” he says again, but the words are slurred. The cup of coffee sl ips from his hand; he hears the thud on the carpeted floor, feels the splash of hot liquid against his leg.
That’s the last thing he remembers.
He wakes slowly, blinking in the dim light, conscious that he is in bed, and feeling instinctively that he shouldn’t be. Memories trickle slowly through him at first, and then with a sudden, alarming jolt.
Sam. Jenny.
He bolts upright, breathing hard. “Where—” he begins, only to stop in confusion. He’s in a bedroom, with a home-made quilt draped over him, and embroidered Bible verses on the walls. Seek ye first , he reads before he jerks his gaze away.
“Dorcas!” he calls, his voice hoarse and rasping. “ Dorcas …”
A few seconds later she comes into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. She is wearing jeans and a fleece, and she is smiling like a nurse who has seen her patient improve. “Oh good,” she says. You’re finally awake.”
Finally… ? He’s reminded of when he first started this hellish journey; he’d had a fever for a whole week. He’d been devastated to learn just how much time he had wasted, but now, he realizes, it is so much worse. He left his son and mother-in-law in a car, completely undefended, virtually helpless, in the freezing winter. What if they’re both dead?
A gasp escapes him, a ragged, desperate breath. Dorcas gazes at him with concern.
“You needed the rest,” she tells him, and Daniel shakes his head, frantic.
“My son…my mother-in-law…I left them waiting in a car.” He takes a gulping breath. “How long have I been asleep?”
Dorcas frowns, full of sympathy. “About twenty-four hours.”
Twenty-four hours! It feels like an obscene amount of time. Daniel throws off the covers; at least he is still dressed. “I have to get back to them,” he hurls at her, like a demand. He swings his head around wildly, although he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. His coat? His keys? He doesn’t even have keys, never mind a car; he left them with Sam.
“Where’s your son?” Dorcas asks, and her voice is steady despite his obvious agitation. “Your mother-in-law?”
“On the exit ramp off 91 South,” he replies, and now he sounds miserable. To his shame, his eyes fill with tears, and for a second he thinks he might break down and sob. If anything has happened to Sam…
“That’s over a mile away,” she tells him, frowning. “You’re not on Church Street anymore. My friend Cal helped me get you back here, to my house, when you’d fallen unconscious.” She eyes him critically. “And I’m sorry to say I don’t think you can walk that far.”
Daniel knows he can’t walk that far. He sinks onto the bed, letting his head fall into his hands. “How could I have let this happen…” He chokes on the words.
“Listen.” Dorcas puts a hand on his shoulder, and her touch, solid and sure, is comforting. “I can walk down there and check for you. You stay here and rest.”
He looks up, blinking at her in bleary surprise. “You’d…you’d do that for me?”
She smiles, looking almost amused. “I might be entertaining an angel, after all, as the Good Book says,” she teases him. At least, he thinks she’s teasing him. “Yes, I’ll do that for you.”
Daniel has forgotten about such sweet, simple kindness. It didn’t take very long, he realizes, for most people to descend to savagery and selfishness, but he is so grateful that Dorcas did not. “It’s a jeep,” he tells her, “about twenty years old, parked by the barricade on the south ramp?—”
“I think I’ll be able to find it. There aren’t many cars parked around here these days.”
“Thank you?—”
“You thank me by resting up,” she tells him sternly. “I don’t want you getting sicker, not after I gave you my coffee and soup.” She squeezes his shoulder and, as meekly as a child, Daniel climbs back into bed. Those few moments of exertion and anxiety cost him; he’s feeling weakened again. By the time he hears the front door close, he’s already sinking back into sleep.
He wakes he doesn’t know how long later, disorientated and dry-mouthed. Dorcas is standing at the foot of the bed, looking somber. Daniel’s stomach swoops.
“Did you…”
Already she is shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Daniel. When I got to the car, it was abandoned. I called out and looked around, but there wasn’t anyone there at all.”