There.
She sat at the base of the tree and felt the same knot in her back she’d felt last night. This was definitely it.
Up the driveway, the gravel made a familiar crunch under her shoes. She could see the skid marks left behind by the wheelbarrow, too. That gave her pretty much the exact position where she’d been standing.
She stood there again, counted down from three, and then spun around.
“Bang,” she said.
There was a bullet hole in the garage door now. It wasn’t a stretch to assume it hadn’t been there before.
But where’d the gun go? she thought.
She’d been woefully unprepared for the degree of kickback when firing a gun for the first time. Her wrist—which she thought at first was broken—still hurt, and probably would for a while. She also fell backwards, into the wheelbarrow, causing the skids in the driveway. And, of course, she lost her grip on the gun.
The next thing she did after that was get up, right the wheelbarrow, and get the hell out of there as fast as she could.
So where did the gun land?
Looking for it the night before would have been a waste of time had she even hesitated to consider the notion. But clearly it landed somewhere that was not out in the open.
Unless someone else had come by overnight and picked it up.
She walked around the front lawn, which was skirted by overgrown shrubs, until her eye caught something silvery beneath a bush. She got down on her stomach for a better look.
“There you are,” she said.
The gun had flown a remarkable fifteen feet from where she’d fallen over. This was surely a record of some kind.
She reached under the shrub and grabbed the revolver, then walked back over to the middle of the driveway and pantomimed her prior actions once again, this time with the gun in her hand.
Stop, spin, fire, fall down, she thought, while neither firing nor falling down.
Next, she walked the bullet’s trajectory to the garage door. Theoretically someone had been standing somewhere along the path when she fired, assuming she hadn’t imagined it all.
She had to admit, she probably had. Just like Carol had in the dorm. In fact, that was by far the most likely explanation for all of this: (1) Bethany got the idea of Carol’s bogeyman rattling around in her brain; (2) alone in the dark, she let her fear get the better of her; and (3) she shot the gun at a figment of her imagination.
There was something that felt wrong about the driveway, though, now that she was looking at it in the light. The surface was still damp from the rain the night before, but it was a soft pebble driveway rather than tarmac, and from a certain angle, it looked like one spot had been rubbed in the wrong direction, like a thick pile carpet brushed against the grain.
A patch of the driveway was a different color from the rest of it, and it was right in line with the flight of the bullet. If the discoloration had been red, Bethany would have been all over the idea that this was blood, and therefore proof that she wasn’t losing her mind, that she really hadn’t been alone, and that she’d even clipped the guy.
But it was yellow.
Robbie
It took Robbie most of the morning to get one load of blankets together and into the cart.
Not because blankets were a particularly difficult challenge, in terms of packing, but because first he had to make sure everything they wanted to bring was collected in the same place. It would give him a good idea of the volume he was dealing with, to assess how many trips he would need in order to move all of it to the new location.
They hadn’t been in the dorm for more than a few weeks, but somehow they’d managed to spread stuff out all over the place, between four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two rooms in the basement, and the common room. It made him wish they’d thought to pack before leaving. Although if they had, they probably never would have come across the heavily armed priest.
Having the pastor around was an incredible relief. Or it was going to be once the man was ready to get out of bed again. Assuming he survived the wounds they found him with.
The guy had walked through hell in order to make it to them, doing what none of them had the skills or the tools to do. He could hunt, and he had guns. And thank God for both, because there wasn’t enough Noot to keep them all alive until spring. Not unless they found more, or figured out how to plant and grow their own Noot trees.
“Or we could just grow actual food,” he said to himself. “Crazy, I know.”
The bike was loaded and waiting at the front of the dorm for the first of many trips. Robbie was at the back of the dorm, meanwhile, on the other side of the gate, looking at the river.
It was a beautiful day. Despite the now-leafless trees, it was easy to see how they’d been confused about precisely which season they were in the middle of. The weather was manic; it couldn’t decide what it wanted to do from minute to minute.
He would have liked to be able to spend more time close to the river if only to have this view now and then. At the same time, it wasn’t that far from the house, and Bethany had been right; the new place was definitely safer, and easier to defend and heat.
“All right,” he said. “Enough sightseeing. Let’s do this.”
He was about to head back inside when he heard . . . Well, it sounded like a horse. It probably wasn’t a horse; it was probably something terrible, not unlike when he thought he heard a locomotive and it turned out to be a tornado.
But in this case a horse was exactly what it was. Far more important, someone was riding the horse.
“Touré?” Robbie shouted.
“Robbieeee!”
Touré and the horse came to a stop in front of the gate, and Touré climbed down as fast as he could. Which wasn’t fast at all, as he appeared to have a bum leg.
“I can’t believe it!” Robbie said. He was crying and this time didn’t care who saw.
“Dude!”
Touré hopped over, Robbie met him partway, and they hugged for a while.
“I thought you were dead,” Robbie said. “I can’t—”
“I know, I’m sorry. I got attacked. Oh, man, I have so much to tell you.”
“Me too!” Robbie said. “And you have a horse? How do you have a horse?”
“Don’t call him that. His name is Elton.”
“Don’t call him a horse?”
“Yeah, he doesn’t know.”
“When did you even learn how to ride a horse?”
“That’s what you wanna ask me?” Touré asked.
“It’s the first thing I thought of. I have more.”
“Okay, well, I’m not really riding him, I’m kind of hanging on. I can’t believe he even got me this far; I thought he was gonna jump into the river instead. And he’s not mine.”
Elton snorted.
“Sorry, man,” he said, petting the horse’s neck. “Elton doesn’t belong to anyone, but I’m not the one who put that saddle on him. Her name is Win, and she saved my life a lot.”
Touré looked past Robbie, to the dorm.
“Hey,” he said, “um, you’re not . . . Are the others . . . ?”
“Oh, no, no,” Robbie said. “They’re fine. We moved. And we ran into that kid from before. Yeah, he’s dead now, and we set the library on fire, after a tornado. But we met this priest, who seems pretty cool, and all that was just yesterday.”
“You met a priest? I met an astrophysicist. Look, we have to get you guys over to MIT. Win’s there now. We have electricity, and heat. Ananda says she thinks we’re in for a crazy bad winter.”
“Ananda?”
“The astrophysicist.”
“Oh, cool,” Robbie said. “I think my guy is looking for her.”
“The priest or the dead kid in the library?”
“The priest.”
“Wait, wait, wait . . . Is his name Paul?”
“I left before I asked.”
Touré laughed, and then Robbie hugged him once more. He
really never did expect to see Touré again, and it had been killing him for so many reasons. Today in particular, because he had been gestating an idea and Touré was the only person in the world who would take it seriously.
“Look,” Robbie said, “we have to go over all of it, but I think I’ve worked out what happened to us.”
“Is it a crazy theory that makes no sense and is probably impossible?”
“It is.”
“I’ve got ten of those,” Touré said. “Hit me.”
“It’s about how we survived.”
“Uh-huh. Go on.”
“I think . . . This is going to sound crazy,” Robbie said. “You’ll think I’ve lost it.”
“That’s the best kind of idea. Are you kidding?”
“Here’s what I think. I think we survived because we weren’t here when it happened. The mass extinction, I mean. We didn’t die because we weren’t here.”
“Here, where? Like, in Cambridge?”
“Bigger than that,” Robbie said.
“Not on the planet?” Touré said.
“Bingo.”
Touré laughed. “I love it,” he said. “So how did we end up off-planet for the apocalypse?”
“That’s the crazy part,” Robbie said. “I think we were abducted by aliens.”
Touré hugged him hard.
“I am so glad I found you again, man,” he said. “You’re not going to believe this, but I was thinking the same exact thing.”
Part three
Dungeon Master
Twelve
Paul
1
“Do you have the shot?” Win asked.
The deer was standing in the middle of Lexington Common in front of a monument to honor those who died in a battle long ago, erected by a community of people who effectively no longer existed.
The animal looked largely indifferent to the historicity of the environment.
There was a small patch of grass near the monument, at the border between the cement walkway and the rest of the battle green. It was formed by the runoff from the snow that—while melting—was still very much a major presence in the area.
“I do,” Paul said.
He was lying on his belly on a porch across the street from the green, watching the deer along the barrel of his Remington. The porch he was on was probably also historic—there was a plaque on the side of the house, partly obscured by an overgrown tree—but Paul was largely disinterested in the details. He’d been camping out in Lexington for a week now, and only realized where he was five days into the stay. It explained why the wood floors in some of the houses were warped, and the doorways so low, and the doorknobs and whatnot so antiquated.
“Good, that’s out of my range,” she said.
Win was kneeling next to him, behind a support beam, with that compound bow of hers nocked and ready to loose.
“It’s fifty yards. That’s not out of your range,” he said. “You’re better with that than I am with this.”
The doe raised its head and looked around, perhaps sensing it was the subject of a conversation taking place nearby, or perhaps just naturally edgy.
Paul exhaled slowly and squeezed off a shot. The deer’s head rocked to the left, and then the animal collapsed into the snow. The shot echoed through the neighborhood, sending various other critters fleeing in a collective scurry.
“I can’t hit a deer in the eye like that from this range,” Win said. “Nice shot, by the way.”
“Thanks,” he said. “You would if you had to.”
He set the Remington aside. It was the only rifle he made it out of the wilderness with, of the three. He managed to hang onto the double-barreled Winchester, but the Mossberg made it about halfway; he lost it around the time the bear bit him. He lost the Ruger in the hailstorm, and the Glock in a fight with a cougar. The Smith & Wesson and the Heritage both made it all the way, but the former was currently in Bethany’s possession.
He rolled to his left and held out his hand, while Win got to her feet so she could help him to his.
There were things about Paul’s recovery from the many wounds he’d endured on his walk from the New Hampshire border to the city that everyone took to be true, absent the formal opinion of the medical professional they did not have and could not consult. Those included (1) that he would never regain full range of motion in his right shoulder, (2) that he had cartilage damage in his left knee, (3) that the scarring on his face had healed about as well as it was ever going to, and (4) that it was an actual miracle he hadn’t died from an infection. This last seemed especially pertinent given Touré nearly did die from only one such wound.
Paul thought the Lord refused to let him die for reasons known only to Him, and he was in no position to question His wisdom. But by Paul’s reckoning, miracles were supposed to be positive things, and this seemed to have been performed out of some kind of divine spite. He did not feel graced.
“I’ll get him,” Win said, once Paul was up. “You look like you need to work some kinks out there.”
He squeezed his right hand to try to get some blood back in his fingers, and flexed his knees. The left one tended to just give out altogether without warning. If it really was cartilage damage, it was bound to improve. Until then, he wouldn’t be using any of the bikes the others used to get around.
Luckily, they had a horse.
Win dropped the quiver and bow and headed across the street to fetch the deer carcass. A few months back, Paul probably would have argued that a woman like that was too slight to lift the deer. But she’d proven him wrong more than a few times already.
It wasn’t actually a few months. It was a few months and a hundred-odd years, but he wasn’t going to be getting his mind around that anytime soon, no matter how often Ananda offered to explain it. The problem was, her explanations were all centered on the proof of the fact but were short on the how part. Until someone provided him with that part of the story, he was holding on to some skepticism.
Win made it to the body of the deer—but suddenly froze because a wolf had emerged from the blind side of the Revolutionary War monument.
Paul bent to retrieve his rifle. Win raised her hand, which was a signal that said: Hold on, I have this.
She pulled out that knife of hers and crouched down over the deer.
“Go on,” Paul heard her say, faintly. “This one’s mine. You don’t want a fight.”
Win was a head shorter than Paul, and probably half his weight. She was supposed to be wearing pantsuits and working for a public relations firm in Providence, not facing down wolves in the snow. There were times when Paul saw that woman in the pantsuit, when Win relaxed. There were other times, like this one, when he saw the world-class archer who lived off the land, alone, for weeks, and would straight-up murder anyone that got in her way.
They seemed like entirely different people. Paul didn’t know which one he preferred.
The wolf growled. She was locking eyes with him, which was not something Paul would have recommended unless you were aiming to challenge. It worked for her, though.
“You’ll lose, doggie,” she said. “Shoo.”
A long standoff ensued, and then the wolf whined and loped away. It was thin, hungry, and alone for the moment. If it had been with its pack, that might have gone differently.
Winter hits us all hard, Paul thought.
With the weather surveys Ananda found as a guide, they were anticipating the worst kind of winter, from a constant onslaught of nor’easters carrying outrageous amounts of snow to days and weeks of subzero temperatures. But with that as context, it had been a pretty mild season so far. There had been one really bad storm, and a week where the mercury thermometers registered as below zero (absent a windchill calculation) but it wasn’t epically, end-of-the-world terrible.
That was good, since so far as they knew, the only building in the world with heat was at MIT, and some of the temperatures Ananda was talking about were legitimately life-
threatening. That it didn’t happen—and now winter appeared to be winding down—was a small kindness.
Out on the green, Win slung the deer over her shoulders and headed back.
“Are you set up in here?” she asked, nodding to the front door.
“Yep. Already have a fire going. You want some coffee?”
2
The idea of establishing remote outposts to hunt game and prep it for wider consumption came out of the need to find sustenance for Elton.
What they wanted was an area where people might have kept horses, so they could take advantage of whatever stored hay and grains might still exist. That meant leaving the local area, because outside of the Boston mounted police, nobody in the city kept a horse. (They didn’t know where in Boston those municipal horses might have been kept, anyway. And after what happened to Win and Touré, nobody was interested in exploring the downtown, except to go boar-hunting.)
Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Bedford, and Carlisle were all close enough to travel to in an hour—by bike or by horse—and had plenty of farmland to choose from. Some of it looked promising as potential sources of actual vegetables, too, come spring.
There weren’t any barns in downtown Lexington, but there were plenty less than a mile off the main road. Paul was only set up downtown because it was near the central drag—Massachusetts Ave.—and it was about time for Paul and Elton to head back and rejoin the living.
Win dropped the deer on the marble kitchen countertop the prior owners had undoubtedly been quite fond of, and the two of them got to work cutting up the carcass. This was done wordlessly and with the efficiency of lots of practice, helped along by the carving implements they’d collected from a butcher’s shop in Cambridge.
A couple of hours later, the meat was all carved up. Half would go back raw, packed in snow. The other half, they were cooking in the fireplace.
This was another nice thing about the houses out beyond the city: They all had fireplaces.
“How’s everybody doing?” Paul asked as he passed a rocks glass to Win. They were sharing an expensive bottle of bourbon from the homestead’s extensive liquor cabinet. Alcohol was just about the only good thing about discovering themselves inexplicably vaulted ahead a century: All the stuff that got better with age had done so.
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