Chapter 52
Charlotte knew they couldn’t stay. The boathouse had offered cover, not safety, and Mason needed safety more than anything it could give him in a concrete shed beside a contaminated shoreline occupied by the force responsible for the contamination.
Charlotte moved through the space with focused efficiency.
Beneath the workbench, she found a first aid kit with bandages, antiseptic wipes, and medical tape, and added it to a stack by the door.
A storage locker held life jackets, dock line, and a fleece blanket still sealed in plastic.
Charlotte took the blanket and the longest section of rope.
The life jackets would only slow them down.
The dog watched from beside Mason, and each time Charlotte moved more than a few feet away, Mason’s body tensed.
“Hey,” Charlotte said. “I need to check the marina office. It’s right next door. I’ll be gone for two minutes. The dog will stay with you.”
Mason shook his head. “No.”
“It’s okay. I’ll be?—”
“No.”
His hand found the leg of her hazmat suit and gripped the fabric. Charlotte looked at his hand on her leg. She had seen it before in Sophia after Jacob’s death, the grip of a child who understood loss as an empty chair and a silence where a voice should have been.
“Okay,” she said. “You come with me, but you stay close and quiet. Can you do that?”
Mason nodded. He stood, releasing her leg, and his hand found hers instead.
The dog rose with him, falling into position on his opposite side.
They left through the partially open door.
The marina office stood twenty yards north, dark and locked.
Charlotte tried the handle, checked beneath the mat out of old postal habit, and found nothing.
She circled to the rear, where a warped service door opened with pressure.
Inside, the office was abandoned. A water cooler stood empty in the corner, but beneath the desk she found a sealed case of bottled water.
She took four. The desk drawer held a laminated marina map.
Charlotte folded it into the clear pouch on her chest with the firefighter’s map.
At the dockmaster’s shack, already looted, Charlotte found six cans of tuna, beans, and soup in a storage bin beneath a collapsed shelf.
She took them all. Mason stayed at her side through each stop, his hand in hers, while the dog ranged slightly ahead and back. As they returned to the boathouse to consolidate their findings, Mason spoke.
“Aunt Claudia lives on a farm,” Mason said. “In West Virginia. By the mountains. She has horses and chickens and a big garden and a creek behind the barn.”
“Do you know the address?” Charlotte asked.
“Route 33. Mill Gap Road. The farm with the red mailbox and the apple tree by the driveway. Number 447.”
He recited it flawlessly. Charlotte committed it to memory.
West Virginia was inland, beyond the coastal contamination and, she hoped, beyond whatever the SNA had planned.
She looked at the map in her pouch, estimating the distance.
Two hundred miles, maybe more. On foot, with a child, through a dismantled landscape. The math wasn’t encouraging.
They would go to West Virginia. To Aunt Claudia’s farm.
To the red mailbox and the apple tree and whatever safety might still exist. She was about to speak when the dog went rigid.
Its body locked into the particular stillness that preceded action, ears forward, muzzle pointed toward the shoreline beyond the marina.
Charlotte followed its gaze and saw them.
Three figures moved along the water’s edge south of the pier.
They wore dark uniforms, rifles slung across their chests, and the same sealed military-grade masks Charlotte had taken from the fire truck.
SNA personnel. They were sweeping the shoreline with the deliberate pace of a force that believed it owned the territory it was crossing.
Charlotte pulled Mason behind the dockmaster’s shack.
The dog followed, pressing against their legs.
Through the gap between the shack and a storage shed, she watched the soldiers advance.
They were two hundred yards out. Close enough to make out the insignia on their sleeves: the stylized compass rose enclosed in a circle.
One soldier paused, raised binoculars, and scanned the marina.
The lenses swept across the dockmaster’s shack, paused for a fraction of a second on the gap where Charlotte stood, and continued north.
They hadn’t seen her, but they would reach the marina in minutes, and when they did, a concrete boathouse with a partially open door would merit exactly the kind of attention she couldn’t afford.
Charlotte looked down at Mason. His hand was in hers, his body pressed against her leg through the open portion of the suit, and on his face was an expression she recognized from her own reflection in the days after Jacob’s death.
It held the stillness of someone who had seen enough to understand what came next.
“We need to go,” she said. “Right now.”
Mason nodded.