Chapter 6
It’s been a week, and they haven’t found Emma.
Addison grows more despondent every day. She cries all night in her room, muffling the sound, but Wyatt still hears the quiet sobs. It feels like her soul is wasting away in front of him, and he is powerless to help.
Every failed search lowers the odds of success, but he isn’t about to give up.
He still has plenty of hope. Addison does, too, even if she’s afraid to entertain it.
She’s waiting for him to suggest they pack it in and let fate run its course.
He can tell because she’s hesitant when asking if they can search, as if she’s prepared for a no.
She’d go without him if he refused and get herself killed. He’d feel differently if they had time for weapons training, but every second is devoted to scouring the woods. He isn’t about to lose both of them on his watch.
Today, they’ve packed enough supplies to venture at least five miles past the freeway. They’ve exhausted most of the land surrounding the house. The few muddy tracks they found pointing toward the forest are enough of a nudge in that direction.
Mostly.
“You ever do much hiking back east?” he says absently. “More than all this?”
She hasn’t come to sit with him at night in the kitchen anymore. Hasn’t said much of anything the longer this goes on. Wyatt hates to admit it, but he misses the sound of her voice. So, he asks a pointless question, hoping she’ll grace him with a few more words than usual.
“Actually, yes,” she says, surprising him. “The group was highly focused on physical fitness. We had trails along the back of the compound with decent elevation. Five miles three times a week before breakfast, those were the rules.”
“Sounds like boot camp.”
“We’ll never survive the end if our legs give out while running. That’s what my husband would say. No breaks, no excuses. If you could breathe, you could hike.”
“Did Emma go too?”
“Sometimes.”
He lets out a neutral grunt, his boots crunching leaves on the thick forest floor. “Seen any bears?”
“Only one, and it ran away the moment it saw us.”
“Sounds about right. Black bears are shy. It’s the Grizzlies out west you gotta watch for.”
“She asked me if there were bears here. It was right before you showed up. We were looking out the window, watching for Vincent.”
Her silence forces him to pick up the slack.
“I spent a lotta time around Seattle. Lots of good trails up there. I preferred the hot tubs at those mountain cabins even more, though.”
“What’s a hot tub?”
There’s no hint of a joke in her words, and he supposes it’s a valid question from someone who never left the cult farm. “A big bucket of hot water you sit in.”
“So, a bath? We called those baths.”
“No, I mean yeah, but it’s not for getting clean. It sorta bubbles, like water on a stove. Hot enough that you can use it outside in winter.”
She slides him a sideways glance as if he’s fucking with her. “You boiled yourself on purpose?”
“Sure did. It was amazing.”
“I might like to see these mountain cabins one day. Aside from the third-degree burns, they sound relaxing.”
“It wasn’t that hot. I still got all my skin, don’t I?
” He pauses, kicking leaves off the path, hoping for tracks.
“The elevation makes it ten to twenty degrees colder up in the mountains. It’s not a place we’d wanna be when winter really hits.
All this flat land down here in Bumfuck Kansas, is the best shot we’ve got now. ”
We.
His stomach does a little flip at that word, and he doesn’t know why.
“I know what you’re doing,” she says.
“What am I doing?”
“Getting me to talk so I don’t drown in the silence of my own thoughts.”
“Oh, that. Little bit. Is it working?”
“Little bit.” She grabs a leaf off a branch, ripping it up into tiny pieces. “Let’s say we’ll go there in the summer? Me and you and…and Emma. I know we won’t. I know it’s not practical. I won’t hold you to it, but I need something to look forward to, even if it’s fake. Humor me.”
He pauses, watching her try to keep it together as her eyes water all over again. “We’ll go there. All of us. Even the apple. She’s gonna be out by then, right?”
“Even the apple,” Addison huffs, resting her hand over her belly. “Emma always had so much curiosity for what lay beyond the fences. If I had gone before the virus hit…if I left like I used to think of doing, maybe she wouldn’t be—”
“You can’t do that to yourself. All these what-ifs.”
“It’s all I have now.”
“That ain’t true. We’ll find her. Understand?”
He’s sharper than he wants to be, but if she keeps going down this path, it won’t help anything. What-ifs will ruin a person’s spirit given the chance.
A child-sized footprint in front of a vintage-style gas station brings them both to a sudden halt.
She gasps, eyes wide and hope renewed in a flash. “It’s fresh. Emma? Emma!”
“Whoa, whoa. Careful.” He hisses as they rush toward the gas station.
They sneak up to the door and give a few hearty knocks in case it’s filled with rotters. It isn’t.
A search inside, through overturned shelves and broken glass, offers no sign of the kid.
“It’s okay,” she says. “It means she was here. We came the right way. With all the rain this week, that footprint would be gone by now if it wasn’t recent, right?”
“Right. Gotta be within the last day or so.”
“That’s progress. It’s something.”
“More than we had this morning,” he agrees.
They found a clue, and he hasn’t seen her smile like this since…well, since ever. Decides right then and there that he needs to figure out how to make that happen more often. If he thought she was pretty before, that brilliant grin takes things up a hundred notches.
He isn’t allowed much time to enjoy the sight, though. All their yelling for Emma alerted passersby to their location. Instead of carrying on in search of her, they’re about to waste precious time hiding.
“Look,” he whispers, pointing toward the window as they duck behind the counter.
Four men head right for them. Wyatt doesn’t like the looks of ‘em one bit. He wants to hope he’s only being judgmental.
Addison thought he was trouble, too, and he didn’t do a thing to earn that, but he knows these fuckers are about to earn it.
The blood splatters on their clothes are suspicious, and crimson dripping from a machete sends chills up his spine.
There’s nowhere to hide until he spots the attic.
He pulls the steps down and cuts the outside string off with his knife before they hurry up and into the darkness.
It’s cramped among boxes of holiday decorations.
His first worry is that they’ll both erupt into a sneezing fit from all the dust. They’ve crunched in so close that he can feel her pressed to him, shoulder to thigh.
Then the little bell jingles on the door, and he can feel her anxiety manifest in a ripple that jumps from her body straight into his bones.
“Heard a little bird out this way. I know I did.”
“Me too, she had a pretty voice. Might like to hear it saying other things…
“Like my name?”
“No, asshole, like my name, all breathy and high-pitched while I’m—”
“Shut the fuck up, can’t hear a damn thing with you two going on. If she’s in here, we’ll find her.”
Yeah, this is why Addison wanted to off him the first day without a second thought. Half the people left are like this. No rules anymore. That means all the demons are free to roam.
He wants to tell her that he won’t let anything happen to her, but who is he kidding? He couldn’t take on four of them alone, even if he tried.
She’s breathing as hard as she had been in the shed, only now he’s close enough to feel her shaking.
If he knew her better, he might take her hand or rub her back, anything to calm her down.
At this rate, they’ll fall through the fucking floor if she trembles any harder.
The boards under them creak the slightest bit, and her hand shoots out to cover his where it rests on his knee.
Settles there like an anchor while she shuts her eyes and leans her head back against the wall.
Usually, he’d curse out anyone touching him, but he doesn’t mind it this time. If she needs to hold on to something, then it only makes sense. He isn’t one to judge anyone else’s coping mechanisms.
What doesn’t make sense is how his thumb flutters ever so slightly against the edge of her pinky finger. Once it’s over, it’s too late to take it back.
His face flames like he did something awful, but her gaze only softens.
She smells nice. Then he scolds himself for daring to let his mind wander.
Embarrassment for not showering this morning creeps up the back of his neck.
He took one yesterday, grateful for even cold water when it flows freely from the well, but he may have sweated in his sleep.
Now here he is shoved so close that she could sniff his armpits if she leaned forward a fraction.
She doesn’t seem especially put off. There’s no wrinkle in her nose, so he considers that a win.
Wyatt can’t look directly at her, though, or she might notice that he’s not completely averse to this sort of closeness. So, he averts his eyes every few seconds, careful to look at the rafters or the floor instead of the woman whose breath ghosts his collarbone.
It takes longer than it should for the men below to leave. When they finally do, he gives it an extra ten minutes to be sure.
“Are you good?” he asks as they emerge from the darkness.
“I’m fine. We don’t know which way they went.”
“Gonna have to take our chances and hope that—”
The moment he puts one foot outside, the cocking of a gun at his temple stops him cold.
There must be a blind spot out the window.
“You’re not a little bird,” one of them sneers before looking past him to Addison. “There she is.”