Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
DANIEL
March the previous year
Near Albany, New York
They’ve been staring at the same peeling wallpaper for over a month. Daniel and Sam have cracked more than a few jokes about it—how ugly it is, maroon and brown stripes in alternating widths, how it must have been picked by someone either blind or a hundred years old, but the jokes wore thin a few weeks ago and now there’s only waiting.
They have no car, no food, no water, and Jenny has been too weak to walk or even stand. They came to this run-down ranch house to recover, but it’s hard to do that when you have nothing to recover with.
At night, Daniel goes out to forage among the abandoned and ruined buildings of these dismal outskirts of Albany; occasionally he finds food or supplies that might be helpful—a flashlight, a box of Band-Aids, a bag of gummy bears. There’s not much left anywhere, but he takes what he can get and is grateful .
“It’s the little things in life,” he told Sam one time as he popped a gummy bear in his mouth, and his son forced a smile.
It’s been two months since that night in Bernardston, when Daniel had thought he’d lost both Sam and Jenny for good. When Dorcas had broken the news to him that the car had been abandoned, he’d stumbled out of bed, reaching for his coat, his shoes, without knowing where he was or how he was going to get back to the car.
Fortunately, Dorcas was willing to help. She drove him with Cal in his car—a giant of a man with a shiny bald head, a shambling gait, and a wide smile. The car was a clunker—a twenty-year-old Ford Fiesta that rattled and coughed the mile back to the exit ramp and the abandoned jeep. Sam still wasn’t there, and it was clear the car had been completely looted—the windows broken, the tires slashed, their supplies taken. Again .
Daniel had forced his mind away from the grim prospect of starting over with absolutely nothing and shouted hoarsely for Sam, willing his son to hear and respond.
“He would have left the car,” he told Dorcas and Cal, knowing he sounded truculent. “He would have left if he’d thought there was going to be trouble, and taken his grandmother somewhere safe.”
Left, though, Daniel asked himself, or been kidnapped? But why would they kidnap a young man and an old woman? For what possible purpose?
“Sam!” he called again, desperation turning his voice ragged. “ Sam .”
And then, finally, a hoarse whisper. “Dad?” Sam crawled out of the woods—his clothes torn, his face muddied, his eyes wide. “Granny’s safe,” he said, and Daniel sobbed with relief.
It had happened just as he’d told Dorcas—Sam had seen a truck blazing down the exit ramp and decided to abandon the car, taking Jenny into the woods, where they hid while the car was looted, its windows broken, the tires slashed for good measure—and no good reason.
Cal drove them all back to Dorcas’ house, where they recuperated with more coffee and soup. Jenny fell asleep in the bed Daniel had vacated earlier, while the rest of them discussed what to do.
“There’s a car lot on the outskirts of town,” Cal had suggested. “A Subaru place. ’Bout a hundred cars there, I’d say. I haven’t checked it out, but surely they haven’t all been taken. And I think I could figure out how to hotwire a car, may the good Lord forgive me.” His weathered face creased in a wry smile.
A car lot . Daniel couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of such a thing before. There were car lots over the state, the whole country. All those brand new, shiny cars—hundreds and hundreds—just parked there, empty and waiting, and meanwhile people were stealing their rust buckets right out from under them. It was both absurd and pointless, but not as pointless as what they’d discovered when Cal had driven him and Sam to the car lot: five hundred cars, just as the old man had said, all parked there, pristine and gleaming in their neat rows—with their windows all shattered and their tires slashed to ribbons, just like the jeep.
Cal had surveyed the depressing scene, scratching his cheek reflectively. “I guess they did it just because they could,” he remarked, sounding sorrowful but not surprised.
Because they could . Was that why anyone did anything, these days? The sheer futility of it all, the utter, absurd pointlessness, filled Daniel with total despair and made him want to laugh and sob in exactly equal measure. But worst of all, he realized, succumbing neither to laughter nor sobs, was the fact that he still didn’t have a car.
“Well, you’re not going to be able to get a car from this place, that’s for sure,” Cal said, stating the unfortunately obvious. Then he shocked Daniel to a humbled silence when he added as if it were a foregone conclusion, “I guess you’ll have to take mine.”
“Yyy…yours?” In his shock, Daniel stammered. “I…I couldn’t.”
Cal smiled, a weary yet knowing curve of his lips. “I think you’ll find you could, son.”
“But… I mean… you’ll need it.”
“I don’t, as it happens. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s been convenient on occasion. But I don’t need a car.” He glanced at Dorcas with an almost tender smile. “Me and Dorcas, we’ve already decided, we’re staying put. When the good Lord takes us, well then, He takes us, and that’s that.”
“Amen,” Dorcas murmured, smiling.
Daniel could not believe, or really understand, these two people’s peaceful equanimity. But already he knew Cal was right; he found he could take the car, and quite easily.
“Are you sure?” he asked, and to his shame he realized he was already holding his hand out for the keys.
“I’m sure,” Cal replied, and gave them to him.
The Ford Fiesta lasted for forty miles before it gave out, gasping to its end on Route2 outside of North Adams as they crawled along the Massachusetts/Vermont border, heading for Lake George, and then up around Champlain to New York’s border with Quebec. Daniel had pored over the crumpled ten-year-old road atlas he’d found in the glove compartment of Cal’s car, trying to figure out a workable route. Of course, that didn’t take into account the far more pressing concerns—food, water, and shelter, none of which would be easy or perhaps even possible to find.
By that point, Daniel was starting to get a better, and grimmer, measure of the situation, at least regionally—refugees flooding the roads, heading either north or west, away from the radiation and the devastated cities, a general lack of food and water, no humanitarian aid or military presence, an atmosphere of toxic fear. Violent gangs were less of a problem than people like him who were so desperate they’d do anything. That felt even more dangerous.
He’d been planning on traveling only at night and holing up somewhere during the days, but it took just one afternoon to drive the forty miles, and then they were carless. They’d already drunk the water and eaten the granola bars Dorcas had kindly given them, and they had nothing. Literally nothing but the clothes on their backs, in the middle of winter, over four hundred miles from home, and with an elderly and frail woman in their care. Daniel didn’t think it could get much worse.
The next month had them moving snail-like across a wintry landscape of northern Massachusetts and then upstate New York, sleeping in abandoned houses or barns, with Daniel making sure Sam and Jenny stayed inside as much as they could while he went out and looked for food. Once, he found a looted 7-Eleven with three cans of baked beans forgotten on a bottom shelf. He’d been ecstatic, until he’d realized they had no can opener or anything that could act like one. He’d ended up making a hole in the can with the Fiesta’s car key, and they’d had to siphon the mixture out with their mouths, one measly bean at a time. It was better, he told Sam, than starving.
When they found a place Daniel deemed safe and warm enough, they stayed, mainly for Jenny to regain some strength, although it was hard for her to do that when there was so little food. Still, Daniel knew he and Sam needed to regain their strength as well; they were all weakened from the journey.
Jenny struggled to walk for more than a few yards at a time, and he and Sam took turns carrying her, but it was far from easy, especially when they were feeling so weak themselves. They needed a car, Daniel thought, more than once, and each time with increasing hopelessness. They needed a car or eventually, somewhere between here and Flintville, Ontario, they were going to die, whether they found food or not.
Somehow they managed to eke out an existence as they inched steadily—or, really, not so steadily—northwest. Occasionally, Daniel would find something that kept them going for a few days or longer. Once, he snuck into a woman’s house to discover her long dead on the sofa, and a cupboard of dwindling food supplies—a sack of rice, a can of corn, another of peas—all of which he took, and without a backward glance at the poor woman’s corpse. She was dead, he thought, determined to be ruthless. She didn’t need it. She didn’t need to be buried, either. He doubted there was anyone left to mourn her.
They’d continued on in this way through January, but in February Jenny developed a fever and Sam a cough. They were too spent to go any further, and Daniel knew they needed to rest for longer—and he needed to find more food.
And so they sat here in this run-down ranch house, staring at the ugly wallpaper while Jenny slept in one of the two small, shabby bedrooms, both of them waiting and wondering what to do, because that was all that was left.
“I could go out,” Sam ventures late one afternoon, far from the first time. Outside the sky is already growing dark, and a few mean-looking flakes of snow drift down indifferently.
“No.” Daniel’s reply is automatic; he has always insisted Sam and Jenny stay inside when they’ve rested. He hopes—God, how he hopes, praying earnestly every day—that the intermittent exposure will not be too dangerous for either of them.
As for him…well, he’ll take whatever happens to him at this point as long as he gets Sam back. Jenny, too, but considering her health and age he isn’t holding out as much hope for her.
“Dad, I’ve been in this place for a month,” Sam fires back, sounding irritated and even angry, more than he has in all their travels. “Come on. Give me a chance.”
Daniel shakes his head, an inexorable back and forth. “No.” He won’t go into the reasons, the dangers, or the justifications, and so Sam just glowers at him. Daniel decides it was time he went foraging.
“You stay here with your grandmother,” he tells Sam sternly, knowing his son will never leave her alone. Thank goodness, because he needs him to stay inside. He will never, ever forgive himself if Sam is affected by the radiation, if he gets burned or poisoned or cancer or however it comes for him, which it won’t, because he won’t let it.
It is fully dark when Daniel ventures out onto the streets of this southern suburb of Albany, run-down and weedy and mostly abandoned. Albany, it seems, isn’t far enough to escape; people are heading further north or west, wherever they can go that feels safe…if such a place even exists.
He walks slowly, his feet dragging along the road, weary right down to his bones. He has no idea where he’s going to find any food. He supposes he’ll do what he’s been doing, with limited success, for the last month—sneak into abandoned houses or stores and hope someone forgot to take it all, gather up what scraps he might be lucky enough to find.
It doesn’t feel like nearly enough. He knows it isn’t. How long can they keep existing this way? He thinks of Sam’s cough still rattling in his chest, Jenny’s debilitating weakness, his own lethargy and gauntness. Something needs to change—but how?
He’s spent hours thinking about possible solutions. Could he find food in a school, a hospital, a warehouse, a farm? Every time he tries to look, all he comes across is broken glass and bullet holes. Nearly three months on from the first bombs, the world is still so very broken—and getting emptier. In the dead of winter, a nuclear war is a disaster. Lack of food and freezing temperatures have added to the horrific death toll. Yesterday, when he went foraging, he came across an entire family, huddled together for warmth—and frozen to death.
Up ahead he sees an apartment building of crumbling brick, its windows mostly intact although the front door has been left wide open, an invitation or maybe just surrender. Daniel hesitates, and then, slowly, cautious with every inching step, he goes inside, having no idea what he’ll find.
What he does find, as in so many other places like this, is emptiness and decay. There’s a musty, sweetish smell in the air whose source he knows too well. A cold wind blows through the hallway, rustling the trash that carpets the floor in drifts of paper and cardboard.
A few apartment doors are flung open, while others are tightly shut. Daniel steps through the first open door into a shabby three-room apartment that has been completely ransacked. Like so many other places he’s seen, it hasn’t been just looted but wantonly destroyed—windows and mirrors broken, sofas and mattresses slashed, what has to have been something like a sledgehammer sent through the TV. People high on coke or meth or fentanyl, taking their pointless pleasure or maybe just acting out their terror. Who knows? It doesn’t matter, anyway.
There’s nothing there, Daniel is sure of it, but he checks anyway, opening every single cupboard. He finds a handful of silverware in the kitchen, which he takes, and a dish towel. He pockets that, too, and then he moves on.
He works his way methodically through the building, going into the empty apartments first and then circling back to the ones with closed doors. Most of them are locked; whether there are people inside he doesn’t know and isn’t about to find out. He might be desperate, but it would be insanity to come face to face with someone wielding a weapon and defending their home.
He takes what little he finds—a women’s sweater, a pair of old sneakers, a blanket, and, best of all, a dented can of spaghetti and meatballs, already expired before the bombs. Never mind; food is food, after all.
On the top floor, he turns the knob of a closed door, and is surprised when it swings open. He steps inside, and stills when he hears the thin, fretful cry of a baby. For a second, his instinct, or maybe just his desire, is to turn around and leave. He can’t get involved with an infant, not when he’s already got two people to take care of.
But then he hears another sound—the croaky voice of a woman.
“Hello?” she calls out, her voice hoarse and papery. “Is anyone there? Can you help me, please? Hello?”
Still Daniel hesitates. Then, reluctantly, he moves forward, rounding the corner of the narrow front hallway to the small, dark living room, where a young woman lies supine on a sofa, a baby swaddled on the floor next to her.
She is clearly close to dying—utterly emaciated, the bones of her face as naked as a skull, her eyes sunken into her flesh. She reaches one scrawny hand out and then drops it in exhaustion. Her lank, dark hair lies in greasy strands next to her thin, pale face. “Hello?” she whispers. “Can you help me? Please?”
Daniel glances down at the baby, who is just as gaunt, its mewling cry pathetically weak, its tiny form nearly lifeless.
“How can I help?” he asks, and a smile breaks over her face, lighting her sunken eyes in a way that makes him feel wretched because already he knows he can’t help. It’s too late for her, and most likely for the baby as well.
“I’m trying to get to Buffalo,” she rasps. “There’s a…a military base there…” She trails off, catching her breath; just those few words have taken too much effort. “It’s a safe place. They’re letting people in. I need to get there.”
Daniel shakes his head slowly, regretful but firm. “Buffalo is three hundred miles from here.”
“I have a car,” she says.
He stares at her for a long moment. “You do?”
She leans forward, nodding eagerly, then collapses back against the sofa, gasping for breath. “A Honda Civic. It’s parked in a locked garage about a mile from here, on County Road. I put it there when the looting started…I figured it would be safe, when I was ready to drive out somewhere, get away from all this…but then I got sick, and Tiffany too…” She gazes down at the baby, her lips trembling as she looks helplessly at her daughter. The baby’s face is so wizened it looks more like an alien than a child. Daniel feels a stirring of pity.
“Do you want me to get your car for you?” he asks.
She nods, eager again. “Would you…” She pauses, gulps. “Can I trust you?” she asks, the question of a helpless child.
What other answer can he give? He keeps her gaze as he answers.
“You can trust me,” he promises her.