Chapter 6
The light didn’t vanish all at once. It seeped out of the sky in stages, as it did in early October: first the brightness, then the color, until only a gray-blue strip hung above the western tree line and faded into night.
Along the highway, people had split into two groups.
Some had moved to the grassy margin and kept going.
They were heading toward the nearest visible town, which Rachel guessed was four or five miles east. Some walked with purpose.
Others moved because standing still felt worse. The rest stayed with their cars.
They sat behind the wheel or stood beside their vehicles, waiting for the situation to undo itself.
A few had their hoods up, though that didn’t help and only showed how badly they still wanted a mechanical answer.
One man sat on the hood of his sedan with his arms folded, watching both directions as if help might still come rolling down the road.
Rachel watched both groups for a moment, then went back to the county SUV.
The SUV was useless for travel, but it still mattered as locked storage.
Rachel opened the back and inventoried everything in the fading light.
She worked quickly, setting each item on the tailgate and counting what they had.
There were three sealed one-liter bottles of water and a fourth that was three-quarters full.
From the center console, she found two granola bars, a bag of crackers, and a handful of wrapped mints.
A wool blanket was folded beneath the seat, and an emergency foil blanket was still sealed in its packet.
The first-aid kit had been repacked and closed.
Rachel checked it and found bandages, gauze, antiseptic wipes, pain relievers, nitrile gloves, and a small roll of medical tape.
Three flares were in a canvas pouch, which she set aside.
A zippered bag of tools included a tire iron, jumper cables, a flathead screwdriver, a Phillips screwdriver, and a folding utility knife.
Her overnight bag held a change of clothes, a toothbrush, a basic toiletry kit, and a phone charger that no longer worked.
Sophie’s backpack and the grocery bag, which she did not open.
They were Sophie’s. A folded paper road atlas sat in the door pocket.
It covered Ohio and the neighboring states and had been printed the year before last. She set it on the tailgate with the rest. Sophie sat on the ditch slope nearby, close enough to watch the tailgate and far enough to stay out of the way. Her backpack rested between her feet.
“Are we still going to my aunt’s?”
Rachel stopped and straightened. The aunt was roughly fifty-five miles east. On foot, with Sophie and the supplies they could carry, that was probably four days of walking, possibly more.
They might shorten it if they found bicycles or caught a ride with someone in a horse-drawn cart.
Her children were more than two hundred miles west. By the same measure, that meant two weeks of walking, maybe longer, depending on the road between there and Brenton.
Sophie was Rachel’s responsibility. That had been true that morning, and it was still true.
Rachel couldn’t leave a girl alone on a highway because she needed to get home.
She also knew what staying with the SUV would cost her.
It wasn’t only supplies or time. Hannah’s face had been lodged in her chest since before the lights went out, fixed in the moment Rachel’s car pulled away.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “We’re not walking anywhere tonight. Three flares won’t get us fifty-five miles. We don’t know the road, and half the people on this highway are still trying to understand what happened. If we move in the dark now, we’ll turn one problem into several.”
“Okay,” Sophie replied.
They stayed near the SUV because it was the most defensible space they had.
Locked storage lay behind them. The road was visible in both directions, and the ditch gave them a lower edge to hold.
Rachel moved the supplies back inside and locked the rear hatch, leaving the blankets out.
She and Sophie sat on the sloped grass with their backs against the rear quarter panel, the foil emergency blanket pulled over both of them for warmth.
The highway wasn’t loud, but it wasn’t quiet, either.
People spoke in low voices around their cars.
A baby cried somewhere in the median and then stopped.
Twice in the first hour, Rachel heard an argument to the east. The voices carried in the dark, then fell away.
No engines turned over. No headlights swept the road.
She waited for those things the way the people by their cars waited for the tow trucks.
Then she stopped waiting. Sophie fell asleep with her head tipped against the backpack she had wedged between herself and the SUV, but Rachel didn’t sleep.
She sat with the foil blanket over her lap, watching the empty road in both directions and listening to the absence of everything that should have been there.
When the sky behind the eastern tree line grew less dark than the sky above it, Rachel unlocked the rear hatch and pulled out the road atlas.
She unfolded the atlas and tilted it toward the weak early light.
She found their position in eastern Ohio without trouble, traced the route across the Pennsylvania line, located the county where Sophie’s aunt lived, and measured the distance.
Then she moved her finger west toward Brenton, counting miles against the scale. She stopped where Hannah and Caleb would be waking up to a powerless house and an absent mother. The map lay open across her knees in the thin morning light. Soon she would have to choose a direction.