5. Desperate Dawn
Desperate Dawn
Spring had arrived, but only dread and urgency thrummed in Josie's chest as she tied her boots tight, her hands shaking—not from the cold, but from what she intended to do.
"Today is the day," she repeated in her head like a chant. "Today I go into McKale's house."
She'd planned this for weeks, waiting for the thaw, for more daylight and if she was being honest for courage she'd begun to doubt would ever come.
Every ration scraped from the bottom of a can was a reminder of Denver.
Slim as the odds were that her parents still lived, Layla deserved the chance to find out. She deserved more than just her mother.
Layla slept on downstairs, curled in her nest of blankets near the fireplace, the embers burning low and casting a soft glow across her tiny form.
Josie paused on the basement steps, watching her little girl breathe steadily, one small fist tucked beneath her cheek.
She whispered a promise she desperately wanted to keep.
"I'll be back before you wake up."
She slipped the makeshift wooden bar from the basement door and eased it open, careful not to let the hinges creak. The air that met her from upstairs was frigid compared to the basement's warmth. Frost traced the edges of the windows.
Josie crossed to the garage door. She hit the manual release and lifted the heavy door, light spilling across the concrete.
Mark's old SUV sat exactly where she'd left it—four-wheel drive, full tank, ready and waiting. She ran a hand along its hood, steadying herself against the metal.
"This is it," she whispered.
She stepped outside, pulled the garage door shut behind her, and scanned the street. An eerie silence held the neighborhood. Wind stirred old leaves; nothing else moved. Good.
Mr. McKale's house loomed across the road. He'd never done anything halfway in his life, and if anyone on this street kept a stocked emergency supply, it would be him. Josie needed that stockpile more desperately with every passing day.
She hurried across the street, boots crunching against the thawing ground, breath puffing in pale clouds ahead of her. She tried the front door.
Locked.
Her heart sank. She backed away and checked the windows, one after another. All of them were locked.
"You're a doctor. You survived years of sleep deprivation and combat trauma. You can handle a window," she told herself, though her pulse thundered in her ears.
She chose a small side window near the porch—one she could climb back through fast if she needed to. Wrapping her elbow in her coat, she turned her head away and struck the glass.
CRASH.
The sound exploded across the quiet street, impossibly loud. Josie froze, ears straining into the silence that followed.
Silence. No footsteps, no infected groans, no voices. Only the wind.
She let out a trembling breath, swept the remaining shards away with her sleeve, and climbed through, landing inside with a soft thud.
The moment she stepped into the darkened entryway, the smell stopped her cold: rot, decay.
A heavy sweetness clung to the back of her throat, and she gagged, eyes watering.
Bracing a hand against the wall, she forced a shallow breath through her mouth.
Just tissue, she told herself. A problem to be managed, contained. You can do this.
But it was harder when the body belonged to someone she'd waved to every morning. Someone who used to shovel her sidewalk without being asked. Someone whose wife had died years ago, leaving him quietly lonely but unfailingly kind.
Mr. McKale.
She swallowed and pushed forward.
His body lay in the bathroom just off the hallway, the door cracked open.
She nudged it shut with her foot, refusing to look too long at the collapsed shape on the tile—skin blackened and sunken with decay, hands curled as though he'd tried to brace himself against the sink before he fell.
She closed the door gently, almost respectfully.
"I'm sorry," she whispered to the closed door. Her fingers turned the lock with a soft, final click—a barrier for the living, not the dead.
The hallway was dim behind drawn curtains. She flicked on her small flashlight, angling the beam toward the floor as she moved. Each footstep on the hardwood creaked, unnervingly loud in the silence.
Supplies. In and out. Don't waste time.
The house was cold, but the layout was just as she remembered. She pictured Layla, small and bundled in a snowsuit, handing Mr. McKale a plate of Christmas cookies right here in this kitchen. Her throat tightened. Life had been so painfully normal.
She opened the garage door.
Two red gas cans sat on a shelf beside old camping gear: tarps, a water jug, rope, bungee cords, even a folding shovel.
Josie's eyes moved from item to item, each one crossing off something she hadn't dared hope for.
A full toolbox rested on the workbench, organized with the meticulous precision only a career military man would maintain.
"Thank you, Mr. McKale," she murmured into the dark.
She grabbed a large plastic tote and began filling it fast—rope, tools, tarps, anything useful her hands could reach. She found a siphon hose coiled neatly beside a jug labeled WINTER FUEL STABILIZER and nearly laughed aloud with relief.
Then her eyes drifted to the corner, and her breath caught.
MREs. Not many—perhaps eight or nine packs, likely remnants from her Marine days—but each one represented another day her daughter wouldn't go hungry. She added them to the tote.
Once the tote was full, she dragged it to the garage door facing the driveway and peered outside. Quiet. No infected in sight, no wandering survivors, no visible danger of any kind. Yet, by now, she knew better than to trust stillness.
She exhaled. "Okay. Two more minutes."
She fumbled through the shelves, grabbing batteries, flashlights, a can of WD-40, and a tarp-wrapped bundle that revealed itself to be a tent.
She quickly went back in the house, as she climbed the stairs, each step a reminder that she didn't belong there. Her pulse thudded in her ears as she moved toward the master bedroom, the air inside stale and cold. She paused at the doorway and listened.
When she finally crossed the threshold, she went straight for the closet. The moment she opened the door, her hand tightened on the knob, and she froze.
There they were. Exactly where she'd hoped.
Two rifles leaned neatly in the back corner, in soft cases. A handgun sat on the top shelf beside two military-issued knives, one with an edge still sharp enough to slice paper. She gathered all of them with shaking hands, pressing their weight against her chest as if afraid they might disappear.
"Thank you," she whispered to the empty room, unsure who she meant it for—God or Mr. McKale himself.
She found an old duffle bag then opened the dresser drawers. Extra magazines. Cleaning kits. Loose rounds rattling in a small wooden box. She dumped everything into the bag, barely registering the metallic clack as it hit the bottom. No time to organize.
With the weapons secured, she crept back into the hallway, her heart refusing to slow even a fraction as she descended the stairs and pushed her way into the kitchen. The room sat untouched for months, the silence pressing in around her, heavy and suffocating.
She opened the pantry. Half-empty boxes, a few cans, old pasta. Rice. Anything that would keep went straight into the duffle.
Then her fingers brushed across a jar of peanut butter, and she stood there holding it. Layla loved peanut butter. She ate it straight from the jar with a spoon. She called it her "sleepover snack" in that small, bright voice that belonged to a different world.
Josie snatched the jar, shoved it into the bag, and fought to control her trembling breath.
Her hands, trained to heal, were now stealing from the dead. She should be teaching Layla the alphabet, not about staying quiet. Each stolen object felt less like a victory and more like a betrayal of the woman she used to be.
She closed the pantry, swung the duffle onto her shoulder—and froze.
A floorboard groaned somewhere above her.
Just old beams settling. Probably.
Her grip tightened around the handgun she'd slipped into her coat pocket.
Her jaw set hard. "Just get it done," she whispered. "Get it done, get home, get Layla."
She stepped out of the kitchen and headed for the garage, the duffle thumping heavily against her side with every stride.
The seconds bled away.
The SUV bumped and rattled along the frost-heaved road.
Cara sat in the passenger seat beside Jay, bracing a hand against the dash each time they hit a deep rut.
Seth rode in the back, a map unfolded across his knees, his eyes sharp and constantly calculating as he glanced between worn mile markers, the paper, and the trees lining the highway.
They were on the right path. He checked again anyway—because out here, a wrong turn could cost them hours of backtracking, wasted daylight, or something far worse.
Outside the windows, spring had arrived without fanfare.
Pale green shoots pushed stubbornly through mats of dead grass, and budding branches trembled beneath a wind that still carried winter's leftover bite.
Cars sat abandoned along the shoulder. Paper cups, plastic bags, torn clothing, children's toys—layers of what had once mattered to someone, now nothing but roadside trash.
Every few miles, a power line sagged across the road, its pole half-rotted or snapped clean through.
In the old world, crews would have arrived within hours—cleanup trucks, flashing amber lights, workers in neon vests restoring order before anyone had time to complain.
Now the fallen lines simply remained where they dropped, a permanent interruption.
Seth traced a finger along the red route line. "We should hit the turnoff in four miles," he said.
Cara nodded, though her eyes stayed fixed on the landscape sliding past her window. "It looks worse out here than last time."