Chapter 12
TWELVE
DANIEL
Six months earlier
Outside Utica, New York
As soon as they reach the farmhouse of weathered white clapboard, Daniel knows something is wrong. He was here just two days ago— two days! —and yet everything has changed. No light glows cozily from within; the whole place looks empty and abandoned, as just about every house they’ve seen since Utica has been.
Slowly he mounts the steps. It’s just past dawn, the light still gray and misty, and they’ve been making their way, slowly and painfully, through the back streets of Utica, to the relative safety of Route12. They’ve kept to shadows and hedges, sidling along, sometimes stopping for as much as an hour, to wait until someone or other—usually in a souped-up jeep or a monster truck—passes. At night, Daniel has come to realize, the vampires come out, looking for blood, dressed in camo and jacked up with weapons. He is hopeful that once they leave the city behind everything will become calmer. The smaller towns won’t have these monstrous armies, a crazed infantry waving AR-10s around, high on coke and power. They might have to walk most of the way, and they’ll need to find food, but these dangers, at least, will have passed.
Now, as the front door of Tom’s farmhouse, once a haven of warmth and welcome, creaks open, Daniel is not sure.
“Is anybody here?” Sam asks in a whisper.
“I don’t think so.” Daniel steps into the hallway. The first thing he sees is a picture on the wall, a needlepoint sampler, hanging askew because someone must have knocked it. His heart sinks that little bit further. He imagines Hannah and Noah, the little baby Isaac, and he closes his eyes. They were here two days ago, shy and smiling. What happened?
“What happened?” Sam asks, echoing Daniel’s thoughts, and asking as if he knows, but he’s afraid he does know, because all the signs are here—a chair on its side, the rag rug in a crumpled heap, cupboard doors flung open. The silence .
“They must have left,” Daniel tells him. “In a hurry.”
Left…or were taken? He hopes, desperately, that it’s the former, but he has no idea. Slowly he walks down the hallway, the wooden floorboards creaking under his footsteps, to the kitchen. For a second, he can picture how it was just a few days ago—Tom’s wife, Abby, at the stove, the baby in his highchair, their German Shepherd Rocky’s tail beating a staccato rhythm on the floor, everyone’s heads bowed for grace. An ache starts inside him, deep and wide and painful.
Not this family , he thinks. He can just about handle the strangers—even the pale faces he saw strapped into stretchers, as God-awful as that was—but these good people, who helped him, who only wanted to live a good, simple life? No. Not them. Not them , his mind cries out, a prayer, a rant. Not them, God .
“Dad?” Sam asks uncertainly, and Daniel’s gaze moves slowly around the kitchen. A broken jar of applesauce on the floor, oozing out. A cupboard door nearly wrenched off its hinges. A pot in the sink, maybe the same from which he’ d been served stew. A baby’s spoon, left on the highchair. He picks it up, wrapping his roughened fingers around it, and then drops it again, with a clatter.
“Dad,” Sam says again.
“I’m going to look upstairs,” Daniel says. He hesitates and then adds, a command, “Stay here.”
Sam, looking troubled and more than a little scared, nods. “Okay.”
Slowly, his footsteps now heavy, Daniel mounts the stairs. He’s afraid of what he might find, but he knows he needs to look. He steels himself for the worst, but the bedrooms—small and spare—are empty. In the master bedroom, the covers are half-pulled off the bed, the drawers left open, although still with some clothes in them, neatly folded and smelling of soap. Noah and Hannah’s rooms are the same—a mess, drawers yanked out, covers off the bed.
Were they pulled from bed? Daniel wonders. He can almost picture it—their rumpled hair, the look of sleepy confusion on the children’s faces. Were they made to dress, marched out to a truck? Why? In God’s name, why ? And when—yesterday? The day before? One or the other, because before that Daniel was here and it had been safe.
In the baby’s room, the mobile that would have once hung over the crib is on the floor, broken in brightly colored pieces. He sees a rocking chair by the window, an old-fashioned one with a hand-crocheted blanket draped over the back. Daniel can almost imagine Abby there, a sleepy Isaac draped over one shoulder. He didn’t even know these people, not really, but they’d felt like family. They’d reminded him, briefly, that he was human, that he was good. Or at least, trying to be good. Wanting to.
He feels so far from that man now.
He takes a step into the room, and that’s when he sees it. The grubby blue blanket baby Isaac had held just two days ago, with a bunny’s head fashioned out of one corner. It’s under the crib, and, when Daniel stoops to pick it up, running the worn fleece between his fingers, he sees it is spattered with blood.
A sound escapes him, more of a sigh than a sob—an understanding, an acceptance. They didn’t leave willingly. He sinks into the rocking chair, still holding that little piece of beloved blue fabric in his hands. He stares down at it, bowing his head as if in prayer, but his mind is blank. He can’t think anymore. He can’t let himself think. He rubs the fabric between his fingers like it’s a talisman, the last thing anchoring him to who he was, who he wanted to be.
It isn’t until he feels the wetness dripping onto his shirt that he realizes he has been weeping, tears sliding slowly down the seams in his weathered face. He’s weeping for Tom and his family, wherever they are, dead or alive—and part of him hopes they’re dead rather than suffering—but he knows he is also weeping for himself. He’s lost some precious part of himself somewhere between Watertown and Clarkson, and he doesn’t think he will ever get it back. And maybe that loss was necessary, so he could make this journey. So he could bring back Sam. He had to close his eyes and his mind to the suffering of others, to the suffering he would inflict, so he could keep his son safe. And the worst part is, he’s almost certain that that trade-off has barely begun. They still have over two hundred miles to go, and Daniel has no idea how they’re going to manage it, not without making more than a few Faustian bargains along the way.
“Dad?”
He looks up to see Sam standing in the doorway of the nursery. “Nobody’s here…are you crying ?” He sounds horrified.
“I’m just tired.” Daniel wipes his face as he feels a familiar hardness settle inside of himself. “It’s been a long couple of weeks, and I haven’t slept in a while.”
“Yeah.” Sam hesitates. “There’s some food in the pantry. Not much, but some. And there’s a truck outside. I found the keys. It looks pretty beat-up, but we could take it maybe? That is, if no one’s here…if they’re not coming back…” He trails off uncertainly, clearly unsure how to gauge Daniel’s mood.
He can still feel the dampness of tears on his cheeks. Take Tom’s truck, eat his food. It feels painfully wrong, and yet also weirdly right. This can be Tom’s gift to them. His saving grace. Daniel nods slowly. “That could be good.”
“Do you think it’s safe to stay here?”
Is it safe anywhere? “I think we need to stay here for a little while,” Daniel says in a tone of finality. He needs to rest, eat, make a plan. He’s too tired now, too weary in both body and spirit, to keep forging ahead. If he does, he’ll make mistakes, and those could be costly. Costlier than he even wants to imagine. “We’ll rest for a day or two,” he continues. “Figure out what to do.”
Sam stands in the doorway and eyes him uncertainly; Daniel feels as if he can’t move from this chair. Slowly, everything in him aching, he rises. “Let’s have a look at that food in the pantry.”
Downstairs, he moves around the kitchen, opening cupboards, finding various cans and jars. He pauses, a jar of raspberry jam in his hand, a woman’s neat writing on the front, telling him it was bottled last summer. He imagines the moment—Abby and the children picking fat, red raspberries in the garden, their laughter carrying on the breeze. He can see her standing by the stove, just as she had been when he’d come here two days ago, stirring a pot, the heat flushing her face. He grieves for this family in a way that is unnatural yet still a deep-seated instinct; he is afraid he has already lost his own.
To his amazement, there’s enough food in the pantry for at least a few days’ meals, as well as propane for the stove. With the truck out back and the clothes upstairs, they should, Daniel realizes, be okay, at least in terms of supplies. He wants to be grateful to Tom, but he feels too sad; it’s like a dragging weight, turning every action, every little movement, laborious.
And yet, they eat, and that is a small miracle. After nearly twenty-four hours without food, they’re both starving, and he and Sam both wolf down plates of rice and canned beans as if it’s a gourmet meal. After doing the dishes—somehow, even in the midst of the empty devastation of the house, this feels important—Daniel decides to do a deeper explore, even though it feels invasive somehow, as if he’s violating the family’s privacy. He doesn’t want to be, and yet he knows he needs to…for Sam’s sake.
And so he goes through the house methodically; he opens drawers and riffles through cupboards, finds a flashlight beneath the sink and braves the cobwebby depths of the basement. Sam follows him around at first, but then he gets bored when all Daniel finds is the detritus of a once-normal life—bills to be filed, folded laundry, Scotch tape and a stapler, sixty empty Mason jars in a cardboard box.
While Daniel continues his methodical exploration, Sam retreats to a sofa in the living room, flipping through some Old Farmer’s Almanac s by the dim beam of a flashlight. Outside the night is still and silent under a cold, wintry moon.
Daniel is looking for guns, but he doesn’t find any, and that makes him nervous. It seems that whoever came and took Tom and his family away was more interested in weaponry than food. It’s a disquieting thought, and surely the only conclusion he can draw, because he’s pretty sure that a man like Tom—he doesn’t even know his last name—would own at least one rifle. He was— is —a farmer in upstate New York. He had to have had something .
Still, Daniel finds other things that are helpful—matches, a flashlight, dried beef jerky, warm sweaters, two decent pairs of boots. They will be vulnerable without a gun, but at least they won’t be entirely unprepared. He stacks all the provisions in the kitchen, and then goes to find Sam.
His son is sitting on the sofa in the living room, the flashlight turned off, the room dark, so Daniel can barely make out his face. He comes in and sits opposite him, in an armchair that lets out a creaky little sigh as he lowers himself into it.
“I was thinking,” Sam says after a moment, his voice far away. “How we went camping, once.”
Daniel blinks at him in the gloom; he can’t actually remember when they went camping.
“Do you remember?” Sam continues. “I think I was about eight. We put up a tent in the backyard. Well, you did.” He smiles, a little shamefacedly. “I just watched.”
“Oh…” A vague memory, sepia-tinted, filters through Daniel’s mind. The dutiful effort of putting up the tent. Mattie watching, five years old, her thumb stuck in her mouth. Ruby on Alex’s hip. All of it makes him ache. “Yes…”
“It was because I missed the Cub Scouts’ campout, because I had tonsilitis. You did it all—the tent, the campfire, ghost stories with a flashlight.” He smiles reminiscently, while Daniel struggles to find the memories, hold on to them. “About halfway through the night,” Sam continues, “I got tired of being outside and went in, to my own bed. You stayed out, though, in case I changed my mind. And in the morning you made pancakes. Blueberry.”
Daniel can’t believe Sam remembers all this. He can’t believe he did all this. “Yeah,” he says, smiling. “I remember.”
“Well…” Sam pauses, looking a little shamefaced again. “Isn’t that a little, I mean a very little, like this?”
The question seems to hover in the air. Daniel stares at his son and the realization filters through him that Sam needs to believe that their squatting in the house of someone who is most likely dead—has been murdered—after a nuclear holocaust is, somehow, a little bit like a Cub Scouts-style campout in the backyard.
And maybe it is. At least, maybe they both need to act like it is, to get through it all…or at least to get through this moment.
“Yeah,” he says again, and his smile, improbably, widens. “Yeah, it is.”
They go to bed a little while later, when it’s dark but still early, because they’re both exhausted and there’s nothing else to do. Daniel locks the doors. He knows how ineffectual such a precaution is, but it seems as if this house has been forgotten; at least he hopes it has.
Daniel sleeps in the master bedroom with its handmade patchwork quilt, the sheets smelling of other people—a faint hint of unfamiliar soap and sweat. Sam takes Noah’s room, its wallpaper with vintage airplanes starting to peel off the walls and another home-made quilt on the narrow bed.
Daniel doesn’t think he will sleep, with all the dangers and worries clamoring in his mind, but he is so exhausted he falls into a deep, dreamless slumber almost the moment his head hits the pillow, waking only to the wintry sunlight streaming through the windows and the smell of something cooking in the air.
He gets out of bed slowly, all his muscles aching, and moves to the window. Under a deep blue sky, a field of winter wheat sparkles, every single blade and sheaf rimed with a glittering frost. He realizes he doesn’t know what day it is, but it must be close to Christmas. It feels like Christmas, with the frost and the homely smell of cooking in the air. He dresses quickly and heads downstairs.
Sam is in the kitchen, making pancakes. Daniel stands in the doorway and stares at him, dumbfounded, as his son nonchalantly flips a perfectly round pancake onto the pan on top of the stove.
“I found flour and oil and stuff,” he explains, “and some dried egg powder, and UHT milk. No blueberries, though.” He grins. “These people were pretty well prepared, though, huh?”
“Yes,” Daniel agrees. “They were.” Were . Past tense. Where are Tom and his family now? Are they dead? He will never know. “Thanks for making breakfast.” He suppresses the spike of frustration he feels that his son is frittering away supplies on a pancake breakfast they don’t really need. He gets why Sam is doing it; they’re camping, after all.
“There’s even maple syrup,” Sam says, and brandishes a bottle he must have found in the pantry. “Home-made.”
“Wow.” Daniel decides to go with it. They can enjoy this moment, this morning; he can let it be what Sam wants, and even needs, it to be. “Smells really good, Sam,” he says, and his son shoots him a shyly pleased grin.
“So I was thinking,” Sam says, once they’re both seated at the table with plates of pancakes, crisp at their edges and soft in the center, drowning in sweet maple syrup. “I think we should go and get Granny.”
Daniel, a fluffy forkful halfway to his mouth, stops and stares. “Get Granny,” he repeats in a neutral tone, not wanting to reveal the scathing, knee-jerk incredulity. Does Sam not realize what it’s like out there? Hasn’t he seen enough?
“Yeah.” Sam leans forward, earnest now, his pancakes momentarily forgotten. “How far is her nursing home from here? A hundred miles, maybe?”
“Closer to two hundred, and in the wrong direction.” Alex’s mother’s nursing home is between Worcester and Springfield, a mere eighty miles or so from Boston, one of the blast sites, and nearly five hundred from the cottage. It will nearly quadruple their mileage, and bring them closer to any potential radiation or other danger.
“But we’ve got the gas,” Sam presses, insistent now, as well as eager. “The truck has a full tank, and there were a couple of gallons in the barn. I checked. We could do it, Dad. ”
They’ll need all that gas—and more—to get back to the cottage. “Sam…” Daniel doesn’t know how to say this any other way. “Granny might already be dead.”
Sam’s lower lip juts out, like a child’s. “But she might not be. It’s only been—what? Three weeks?”
“Yes, but…” Three weeks for a dementia-suffering woman in a locked memory care unit with little food or water? Daniel doubts whether Alex’s mother could last three days .
“I think we should, Dad,” Sam says, staunch now, a little sanctimonious. “I know there are a lot of people we can’t get to. Grandma and Grandpa are too far away…” His voice wavers and Daniel rubs a hand over his face. His own parents, he knows, down at their condo in Florida, are almost certainly dead, probably in the first blasts. He has tried not to think of them, except to hope that it was quick. “And Aunt Sarah…Uncle Chase…we can’t get them, but Granny…” He trails off before he lifts his chin. “We could try .”
Daniel starts to shake his head, then stops. Something about Sam’s willingness, naive as it might be, calls to the better part of himself that he thought he’d already lost. “It’s dangerous out there, Sam,” he says quietly. “You saw yourself.”
“But we’ve got a truck now,” his son persists, excited now. “And we can stay away from the cities. You can take Route90 the whole way, and the highways don’t seem too dangerous, right?”
“We don’t know that.” Route90 might be blocked off, barricaded by either the military or lawless thugs. He doesn’t say it out loud, but he imagines Sam’s instantaneous response. But it might not be.
Can they try to get Alex’s mother? For a second, Daniel pictures the indomitable Jenny, only five foot two with a carefully kept perm of snow-white hair, blue eyes snapping with fire even as her mind sank into the swirling mists of dementia. She hadn’t lost any of her spirit, even in a nursing home, kicking against everything, shooting back with asperity when someone dared to suggest she was in any way feeble or past it. Maybe she would survive.
Maybe they could get her.
It’s crazy. Daniel knows it’s crazy. And foolish, and maybe even a death wish for not just him—he doesn’t care about himself, not anymore—but for Sam.
And yet… it feels like redemption, both for his soul and in his son’s eyes. If he rescues his mother-in-law, if he somehow, against all odds and expectations, manages to bring her back to the cottage, to Alex…
Will that atone for shooting that boy, for leaving the others, and not even caring if they all died? Will it make up for the many people he’s ignored, looking the other way rather than risking his life, his son’s life, to save an innocent? Will it somehow soften the calluses that have grown around his soul, so he doesn’t even recognize himself anymore, this weary, mercenary, hard-faced stranger?
There is, he knows, only one way he can discover the answer to those questions.