27. Almost
Almost
Previous morning
The rumble of the two SUVs faded, swallowed by the trees until only the whisper of wind remained.
Josie stood on the porch long after they had disappeared, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.
She watched the snow drift over their tracks, slowly erasing the last proof they'd been there, a empty silence settling in its place.
She hadn't cried hugging Jay goodbye. She'd found a smile for Cara's last embrace and even managed a wave as Beast vanished. She had held it all together.
A small hand slipped into hers.
"Mommy?" Layla looked up with impossibly bright blue eyes. "They'll come visit, right?"
Josie's smile felt stiff, but she forced it for her daughter. "I hope so, sweetheart."
Layla nodded, accepting the answer with a simple faith Josie couldn't remember ever having, one still untouched by loss.
The screen door creaked. Liz stepped onto the porch with two empty coffee mugs, her gaze following Josie's down the empty road. "He's a survivor, Jo. If anyone can make it, he can."
Josie's gaze remained on the empty road. “Still doesn’t change the fact he’s gone, But I know, I really do.”
"You don't sound convinced."
Josie's gaze lingered on the empty road until the silence felt too heavy. Then she quietly knelt in front of her daughter. "Hey, Bug? Can Aunt Liz keep you busy for a little while?"
Layla tilted her head, studying her mother's face with unsettling perception. "Are you sad?"
The innocent question struck a crack through her composure; for a second, she couldn't draw a breath to answer.
"A little."
Without another word, the little girl threw her arms around her mother's neck. Josie held on tightly, breathing in the familiar scent of shampoo and woodsmoke, letting it steady her.
"I love you," Layla whispered into her mother's coat.
"I love you too."
She held her for another long moment, then kissed the top of her head. "I need a minute by myself, Bug. Can you go help Aunt Liz feed the goats out in the pasture for me?"
Layla looked between the two sisters, clearly sensing something she couldn't name. She gave a reluctant nod. "Okay."
She skipped toward Liz, who reached down and took her hand with a conspiratorial glance toward the barnyard. "I think those goats are plotting something."
Layla gasped. "They're escaping again?"
"I have a feeling."
The little girl hurried off, her laughter a fragile sound in the vast quiet.
Josie waited until it faded completely before turning from the house.
She didn't decide where to go; the barn pulled her forward.
Each step was a memory: the old tractor where she'd skinned her knee, the fence post worn smooth by her father's hands as he watched horses come in from pasture.
The barn door groaned softly as she pushed it open. Warm air, scented with hay, leather, and horses, wrapped around her, and the familiar smell coiled in her chest, a sudden, sharp ache.
Home. After everything, it still smelled exactly the same.
She closed the door behind her. Horses lifted their heads from their hay, nickering low in recognition.
One stretched its nose toward her, searching her pockets for treats.
She scratched its forehead absently before wandering deeper into the barn, past every board, every beam, every rusted nail she'd memorized over a lifetime.
She'd learned to walk on this worn wooden floor, learned to ride in the pasture beyond these walls. She'd spent countless evenings helping her father muck stalls while her mother laughed from the doorway because the two of them had somehow gotten dirt absolutely everywhere.
She leaned against a stall, the rough wood pressing into her back as she fought to catch her breath.
She reached the old tack room before finally stopping. Her father's hat still hung on the peg by the door, and one of his old work gloves rested on the shelf beneath it, exactly where he'd left it. Liz hadn't moved a thing.
Her fingers hesitated for a moment before she picked up the glove. The leather had stiffened with age, permanently molded to the shape of the hand that had worn it for so many years, and she pressed it against her chest.
"So much gone..."
The whisper echoed through the empty barn.
First her parents. Then Mark. And now, another goodbye.
She sank onto an old bale of hay, the thought catching her off guard.
It wasn't just about Seth—she'd known him for what, a week?
It was the finality of it, the last in a long line of farewells that had chipped away at her.
His leaving hadn't just created a new hurt; it had torn the lid off all the old ones.
A harsh laugh escaped her, catching on a sob. "This is ridiculous." She swiped at her eyes. "You were supposed to leave. You were always supposed to leave."
That had been the deal from the beginning—get her home, keep Layla safe, then continue east. She'd known it. He'd known it. They'd both understood the arrangement from the very first mile.
So why did his leaving leave her somehow smaller, as if she'd handed him something through the window of that truck without meaning to?
Fresh tears slipped free, and she buried her face in her hands.
"I can't keep doing this," she rasped, the words splintering under the weight of her accumulated burdens. "I can't keep saying goodbye."
As a doctor, she had pronounced death, understood its clinical finality. Yet, she could still feel the rough cotton sheet against Mark's stillborn skin. Her training screamed protocols, but all she heard was silence as she closed their bedroom door for the last time.
She'd been wrong.
Grief, in its cruelest lesson, taught her that losing someone didn't always require death. Sometimes, it only required standing on a porch, watching taillights vanish down a snow-covered road.
Outside, Layla's faint laughter drifted across the yard.
Josie closed her eyes, letting the sound anchor her, clinging to that small, bright noise with everything she had left. It reminded her why she needed to stand, square her shoulders, and keep going.
Even though her heart yearned to remain on the barn floor.
The mountains gradually gave way to open highway, winding through snow-covered valleys and abandoned towns, frozen in time.
Occasionally, he passed a wrecked vehicle or the skeletal remains of someone who never made it home, but mostly, the world had settled into an eerie stillness stretching from horizon to horizon.
The radio was silent, offering no distraction from the miles ahead.
His thoughts drifted back to the ranch—to Layla's tiny arms wrapped around his waist, to Liz's helpless laughter as a goat escaped its pen for the third time that afternoon.
To Josie.
He could still summon the warmth of her hand intertwined with his beneath the quilts that final night, the way she'd rested her forehead against his while neither spoke, because there simply hadn't been anything left worth saying. They'd both believed it to be goodbye.
He hoped she hadn't cried after he'd left. He hoped she'd been angry instead. Anger sat lighter on the shoulders, easier to carry through the long days ahead.
The afternoon faded into evening as heavy clouds rolled across the sky.
The temperature dropped quickly, and the road turned slick beneath a thin layer of fresh snow.
Seth eased off the accelerator. He had no intention of pushing unfamiliar roads in the dark—not alone, not when exhaustion could get a man killed faster out here than any of the dead.
A weathered gas station appeared around the next bend, its faded sign leaning at an angle, several letters missing from the old logo.
The pumps had long since been stripped clean, and the convenience store windows stood boarded over from the inside.
More useful to him, though, was the sea of abandoned vehicles surrounding it—cars packed bumper to bumper across the parking lot and spilling onto the highway shoulder, left exactly where panicked drivers had run out of gas and options months earlier.
He eased Beast between two rusting pickups until the SUV all but vanished among them. Perfect. Anyone passing by would see one more abandoned vehicle in a graveyard of hundreds, not a survivor bedded down for the night.
He killed the engine and let the silence settle around him. For several minutes he simply listened—the wind, the soft ticking of Beast's cooling engine, and nothing else. Satisfied, he climbed out with his rifle slung across his chest and wove a careful path through the maze of vehicles.
Most had already been picked clean. Doors hung open, and suitcases lay scattered across the pavement, their contents long since ruined by snow and rain. One family sedan still had a pair of children's snow boots on the back seat, Velcro straps undone, sized for maybe a four-year-old.
Seth looked away and kept moving.
The store offered little more than a few dented cans of soup and a half-box of matches. He built a small, contained fire in a steel barrel behind the station. Dinner was lukewarm soup that he barely tasted. His mind wasn't on survival; it was hours down the road, back at the ranch.
He missed her already.
As full darkness settled over the highway, Seth pulled his sleeping bag into the back of Beast, leaving one rear door cracked just enough to catch the sound of anything approaching. His rifle rested beside him, one hand draped over it even as exhaustion began dragging him under.
Before closing his eyes, he unfolded the map one last time and traced the route back to the ranch by the dim glow of his flashlight.
He could make it by midday.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow he'd see Josie again.
The thought alone finally let sleep claim him.
Gray light filtered through the windshield, and Seth's eyes opened instantly, years of training snapping him fully alert before he'd even moved. For several long seconds he lay still and listened.
Only the wind. No shuffling footsteps in the snow, no distant moan of the dead.
The fire had burned out, and a thin layer of fresh snow dusted Beast's hood, proof the storm had drifted through sometime during the night without waking him.
He climbed out, stretching stiff muscles before brushing snow from the glass with a gloved hand as the cold immediately bit at his exposed face.
Coffee wasn't an option this morning. He settled for cold water and a granola bar as he walked one last slow perimeter around the station. No tracks. No sign anyone or anything had passed during the night. Just the endless quiet of a world that had long forgotten the sound of morning traffic.
He climbed back behind the wheel, and Beast rumbled to life on the first turn of the key. Seth looked toward the distant mountains, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth;"Almost there," he murmured, his breath a cloud in the cold.
He shifted into drive and eased back onto the empty highway.