by Lopez, Rob
“I promised Walt I’d check in on his kid. Doesn’t feel right to leave them here.”
“Yeah, I know, but what can you do?”
Nothing, and that was what irked Rick. Autumn leaves drifted down off the trees, carpeting the road now that there was no traffic to disperse it. Three miles up the road they passed the tractor and trailer they’d seen earlier on the way to the camp. The tractor was a little old Ferguson, low tech enough to still be running after the EMP, but it had broken down and the farmer, black oil stains on his hands, was still leaning over the engine, a ratchet wrench dismantling another engine component. Attached to the tow hook was a huge trailer loaded with grain, two soldiers riding shotgun on the top. They looked bored.
If this was the best that could be done, the future did indeed look grim for the half million people waiting in this part of North Carolina alone. In the rest of the state, the population ranked at ten million, a twentyfold increase since the pre-industrial era when people lived in small homesteads.
Never an optimist, even Rick was overwhelmed by the thought that most of them weren’t going to make it through this first winter. It was entirely possible that his own family would be among them.
2
As a mother, Lauren Nolan had long struggled to get her son Josh to enter the hallowed domain of a public library. She had no such trouble with her daughter Lizzy, who took great delight in perusing the books in the children’s section, and who pestered Lauren to take her far more often than Lauren was able. Josh, on the other hand … Unless it involved a chance to play Grand Theft Auto, Josh was seriously uninterested.
When offered the chance to break into the main public library in Charlotte, however, Josh was far more amenable. And even enthusiastic. Perhaps it really was a chance to play Grand Theft Auto now.
Lauren doubted any of the in-game gangsters would bother themselves with such a pointless endeavor. Certainly nobody in Charlotte, for all its wealth and arty pretensions, appeared to disagree with the pixel thugs. After traversing the streets of uptown and seeing all the broken windows and looted stores, Lauren and Josh arrived at the central library to find it untouched. It was with a pang of guilt, and a silent apology to Lizzy for her sacrilegious act, that Lauren smashed a pane to gain entry.
Slinging the scoped hunting rifle across her back and drawing her Beretta 9mm pistol, she stepped across the broken glass.
A customary hush permeated the reading rooms, except without the occasional cough or the slapping of a book on a table. Reading lamps and neatly arranged chairs waited patiently for devotees of the written word to return. After witnessing the visible chaos in the rest of the city, Lauren found the orderliness surreal. Holding her breath for a moment in the silence, it was possible to believe that the events of the past month had not happened. She fully expected to turn a corner and find someone studying, hunched over a pile of books, or a librarian tidying the shelves and asking if she needed any help. Between the book cases, ghosts of a former existence lurked.
“So what are we looking for?” said Josh loudly.
Lauren cast him an annoyed glance, putting a finger to her lips in order to shush him. She thought she’d made it clear to him how important stealth would be in this new era, but the empty streets and the fact they hadn’t seen anyone else in a while had made him complacent. She’d been reluctant to bring him on her scavenging expeditions, but reasoned that, at twelve years old – going on thirteen – he needed to start learning. Certainly, nothing in his previous life had prepared him for the harsh reality they faced now. Knowing how to surf the net and do the minimum of copying and pasting from Wikipedia for his school assignments was irrelevant. Doing the minimum of anything was irrelevant, and no longer good enough. The average life of a teen, coddled by a system that allowed them to drift along with no real need to commit to anything, was poor training for an environment that wasn’t inclined to forgive mistakes. Hunger didn’t care how lazy you felt. Survival wasn’t interested in how cool you were. Things that seemed important before were now obsolete. Josh needed to grow up fast, and she worried that he was already a little too cocksure. In his hand he carried his late grandpa’s .38 revolver, now down to two bullets in the chamber. He’d been forced to use it once already, and while she thought the trauma of that moment would haunt him for a while, he appeared to have recovered quickly. A little too quickly. Now he was waving that gun around like he was ready to take on the world. She hadn’t wanted to take the gun off him, but she wondered if doing so would make him more cautious.
It was too easy to think that simply having a gun solved all problems.
She pushed the barrel of his revolver down until it was pointing at the floor. “We’re here to look for books on how to grow and store food,” she whispered.
He stared at her. “We’ve got food,” he said.
“Yeah, for about a week,” she murmured. “And put the gun away. Use your ears.”
“You’ve got your gun out.”
He had a point, but she didn’t have time to explain. “Do as you’re told, Josh. And stick close behind me.”
With a sulky look, he complied, and she searched out the gardening section, perusing the shelves. She found plenty of books on lawn care, landscaping and growing vegetables in gardens that had been prepared with time, but what she really wanted was something like How to Get Food in the Event of an EMP When You Haven’t Prepared a Damn Thing.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t listed.
Picking the most useful books she could find, she stuffed them into her backpack.
“Check out the shelves and find a book you’d like to read,” she told Josh.
Josh gave her a look like he’d just been asked to eat his own foot. “You serious?”
“Very. Just because there’s no school doesn’t mean you shouldn’t carry on learning. I’m not having you growing up illiterate.”
“What does illiterate mean?”
“Exactly. Find yourself a dictionary, too. Playtime’s over.”
Josh sloped off and Lauren rooted through the children’s section, selecting a few things for Lizzy. By the time she finished, her bag felt like it was full of bricks. Josh returned with a well-thumbed copy of The Zombie Survival Guide. It wasn’t quite what she had in mind, but maybe it would put him in the right frame of mind. At least it contained words.
“Okay,” she said. “Open that window. We’ll climb out.”
“Why don’t we go out the same way we came in?”
Lauren looked at her son. “Lesson One: Never leave the same way you entered. If we’ve been followed, somebody could be waiting. And never take the same route home, either.”
Josh wasn’t impressed. “You sound like Dad.”
“And you’d do well to listen to him.”
“He’s a control freak, Mom.”
Lauren pursed her lips. The distance between Josh and his father troubled her. The tension between them remained, in spite of everything, but she wasn’t willing to wait for Josh to grow out of it. Nobody had time for that anymore. “We’re all control freaks now, Josh. If you want to survive, that is. This isn’t a game, okay? You’re not going to respawn if you make a mistake, and there’s no health packs to pick up when you’re low on hit points.”
“I know that,” scowled Josh, “I’m not stupid.”
“Then don’t act it. Your father’s a combat veteran and he knows how this stuff works. If he tells you to do something, do it. Don’t argue.”
Josh clearly wanted to, but he held his tongue. Opening a window, he climbed out. Lauren heaved the bag out and clambered after.
The street was clear in both directions, the fallen leaves and abandoned cars giving it a forlorn appearance. The elaborate architecture of the Hearst Tower that loomed opposite the library was blackened from fire, the sidewalk littered with broken glass and scorched pieces of paper. Most of the office blocks uptown had suffered the same fate after the solar storm overloaded the banks of computers and servers and blew t
hem out. The smell of charred plastic remained pervasive. What was less noticeable, but more worrying, was the radiation.
When the McGuire nuclear plant lost its power in the storm, it went into meltdown and eventually blew. Fear of fallout evacuated the city, leaving the streets eerily quiet and potentially deadly. Lauren pulled up the hood of her jacket and bade Josh do the same. It was slim protection against the invisible killer that lurked in each wafting dust mote, but it was the best she could do. Once Rick and Scott returned from their recon outside the city, they would make their preparations to leave. Pocketing her pistol, Lauren unslung the rifle and nodded for Josh to follow her as she crept among the shadows.
3
April wondered what she was doing in Charlotte. She’d been telling herself for years that she had to get her black ass out of Baltimore, but now that she had, she felt lost. She didn’t know her way around Charlotte, and wasn’t familiar with the surrounding area. She was completely dependent on Lauren and the others, and while she didn’t want to be ungrateful, she felt subdued when it came to the decision-making. She was the odd one out and she’d lost her sass. In a perverse way, she felt a little homesick.
She’d been so determined to head out west, but she never knew why. It wasn’t like she was pining for West Virginia or Ohio, and while she’d dreamed of living in the mountains, she’d never so much as crossed the Appalachians, other than in TV shows. It wasn’t so much that she hated Baltimore, though she did. No, she realized that her desire to fly stemmed from wanting to get far away from her mother.
Mama hadn’t approved of her marriage and had prophesied it would come to a bad end. The fact that her mother turned out to be right only made April want to rebel more. She’d been rebelling against her mother for as long as she could remember, and the fact that her mother had been so disdainful and amused by her daughter’s defiance only further fueled April’s determination. She told herself that no matter what happened, no matter how bad things got, she would never go crawling back to her mother’s haughty sense of superiority over her. It didn’t matter how well April did in school, how many prizes she won, how many good grades she acquired, in her mother’s eyes she would always be the mewling little brat born of a boyfriend she never loved. She often told April she’d nearly given her up for adoption, and April shouted back that she wished she had. They never spoke again after April left Philadelphia, and April didn’t want to now, even though her mother was probably suffering in that city now. Watching Lauren break down when she found the graves of her own parents in the backyard of the family home twisted something inside of April. She was vaguely aware she should feel just as bad at the thought of her own mother’s loss, but inside of her was a smoldering little girl with balled fists who was damned if she was going to mourn that vindictive old witch.
She didn’t feel so defiant now. Just sad that she was as alone today as she’d always felt she’d been.
She dragged the saw one last time through the chair leg and stopped, flexing her aching hand. The leg was only halfway cut, and the pile of sawed wood on the garage floor looked paltry after all her efforts. The house they’d chosen to shelter in had a fancy wood-stove – one of those artisan designer pieces that probably had never been used other than to decorate the kitchen with – and the attempts to cook on it the night before showed just how much wood it took to boil water and heat a few canned meals. The wood she’d sawed so far wouldn’t last an hour in that thing. April had harbored fantasies of creating a sizable wood store that would last the winter, but the truth was that, in order to survive, they were going to have to saw wood every day. They burned through it faster than she could saw it. Back in Baltimore she’d fancied herself as a prepper as she watched videos on self-sufficiency, but none of the videos truly emphasized the amount of work it took just to get through one day. And there was only so much furniture in the house to saw through. They needed to go outside to start cutting down some trees, but that was a job for more than one person. Alone in the house, it was advised that she didn’t go outside, even into the garden. With potential scavengers about, it was safer to maintain a low profile and stay hidden.
And the radiation was outside, anyway. Minimizing exposure was the name of the game.
Unwinding the towel wrapped around her hand, she uncovered the blisters that had burst. By the time she got used to this kind of life, her hands would be as rough as the wood she sawed, but for now they were still soft. She needed to make sure the blisters didn’t get infected. Before the EMP it wasn’t something she would even have worried about, but now, without medical services, it was imperative. At least until her immune system toughened up.
Grabbing her pump-action shotgun, she walked through into the kitchen, searching through the white pine closets until she found some vinegar. Taking some of the precious boiled water from the pot on the stove, she mixed a little salt and some vinegar with the water in a glass. Dipping the towel into it, she applied it to the blisters, grimacing as it stung. Waiting for the feeling to pass, she leaned against the counter and gazed outside the window at the yard.
One advantage of the apocalypse, she thought, was that you could virtually take your pick of houses to live in. She had a pretty nice place during the two years she was married: a renovated row house near the Baltimore docks that combined history with modern features. It didn’t have a pool in the yard, though, like this house. Nor a wooden deck with a hot tub, a pergola with lights, seating and hanging baskets. The two-story house with loft studio was the kind of place April dreamed of having. Would have been better with a view of the sea, but there were plenty of trees in the yard to partially obscure the bungalow that lay beyond.
The disadvantage of the apocalypse was that she couldn’t really enjoy the luxury. The pool was already covered in algae, and the geraniums in the baskets were wilted and turning brown. The lawn was overgrown with weeds, and the hot tub had filled with leaves. At night, instead of the beautiful lights glowing blue amid the vines of the pergola, there was only inky blackness and a sense of foreboding when it was her turn to take the watch, staring at shadows and listening to every sound, imagining the stealthy footsteps of raiders approaching her position.
So far they’d seen no raiders, and there was no indication they would, but the night magnified all possibilities until she felt besieged by her fears. Without electricity and street lights, it became very easy to believe in ghosts, demons and chainsaw murderers with a taste for human flesh.
April blinked to clear the image from her imagination. In the next room she could hear her son Daniel playing with Lizzy.
The drapes were drawn to block observation from the street, and the children lay on their bellies with crayons and paper. They’d already been told to keep their voices low, and normally that wouldn’t have been a problem as Daniel hardly spoke a word after his father had left them.
Unable to afford the quaint row house by the docks, April had been forced to move into one of the projects of Baltimore, fearful of the gang violence that ebbed and flowed like a lazy tide. Most of the time it had been quiet, but every once in a while, a wave would erupt that would bring the police sirens, the crime scene tape and, eventually, the commemorative plastic flowers tied to the street light. Looking out of the window one day, her boy had witnessed the drive-by shooting that missed the intended target and killed a little girl instead, sitting out on her stoop. Daniel had been struck dumb ever since, like opening his mouth might invite the bad thing to happen again. April felt bad for not getting him out of there sooner, but she didn’t have the money. It broke her heart dropping him off at daycare every day so she could wipe tables downtown, and infuriating to pick him up and hear the daycare manager express her regrets that Daniel wasn’t interacting with the other children and that she really needed to take him to a speech therapist. It took a lot for April not to lose her temper at the constant reminders. She spoke to Daniel every day like she was talking to a friend, in the hope it would trigger some verbosity. But most
ly she talked to herself. Daniel would just look at her, understanding everything but choosing to express nothing – at least she hoped he understood everything. With his big eyes staring and taking everything in, he looked so smart, but when the other kids started calling him dummy, she harbored a secret fear that there might indeed be something medical involved, rather than just trauma. And she’d hate herself for thinking that, convinced that she just needed to hang in there and hope. So she got angry instead, both at herself and everybody else. There was only one person who could help him out, and that was her.
But not anymore.
“Now you want to draw a tree next to the house,” said Lizzy from the other room.
“Like this?” replied Daniel.
“Kind of. You want to make it bigger. Here, use a pencil for the branches.”
“Now it’s bigger than the house! I’ve got a big tree. Can I color it?”
“Sure, but use the green crayon for the leaves.”
Daniel peered out through the doorway, his eyes screwed up as if scrutinized the trees outside. “But they’re yellow,” he said.
“That’s because it’s fall. This is going to be a summer tree.”
“Okay.”
It astounded April to hear her son speak fully formed sentences. Under Lizzy’s charming tutelage, he’d come out of his shell, expressing things April had never heard, like he’d been waiting years to say them. Lizzy was like a mother to him and the two were inseparable now. April felt a twinge. Was it jealousy? She loved that Lizzy had taken to her son so rapidly, and he to her, but now that Daniel was showing his own preferences, and a modicum of independence, April felt the previous two-against-the-world bond weaken.
Her baby was growing up.
It was a good thing. But in a poignant way, also not. It was a confusing emotion and April didn’t like where it was taking her. Wrapping the towel back around her hand, she returned to the garage and picked up the saw.