by K. M. Fawkes
Thin Ice
K. M. Fawkes
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Copyright 2019 by K. M. Fawkes
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part by any means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the explicit written permission of the author.
All characters depicted in this fictional work are consenting adults, of at least eighteen years of age. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased, particular businesses, events, or exact locations are entirely coincidental.
Chapter 1
December 1, 2026
Brad let his fingers trace over the letters on the floorboards once more. He had to make sure that they were real and not just some mirage conjured by wishful thinking.
The letters read S+A+M. The first initial of everyone that had lived at the cabin with him, in addition to be being a nickname that Sammy would probably adopt once he was a bit older. Brad saw now that he was examining them a bit more closely that the characters had been cut into the dark wooden floor very deeply. It wasn’t as smooth as the boy’s usual carving either.
Suddenly he winced and jerked his hand back, only barely managing to hold back a swear of mingled pain and annoyance. Just as the thought had gone through his head, a splinter had buried deep under the skin of his first finger.
He tilted his finger, squinting at it against the light that struggled in from the grimy window. Then he took a deep breath and caught the edge of the splinter between his finger and thumb. He had always hated splinters. It might be a minor pain in the grand scheme of things, but something about the way they scraped along as you pulled them out made his skin crawl.
Brad yanked quickly, trying to get it over with as soon as possible. He still felt every millisecond, like nails on a chalkboard. The splinter was thin, but it was also pretty long. A drop of blood welled up and then trickled down over his dirty skin, leaving a wobbly line of red that quickly darkened from vermillion to garnet. Remington moved to lick it and Brad shooed him away.
It was hard to resist the urge to wipe his finger on his pants, but they were even filthier than his hands, covered in the ashes of the retirement home fire and splattered at the cuffs by Walker’s blood. It had stiffened the fabric there, making parts of it stand rigidly away from his equally filthy boots.
Quickly, he pulled the bottle of water from his pocket and poured a bit over the small wound, flushing it out. He still didn’t want to get up and infection could a kill a person just as quickly as a religious nutjob could take them down.
More quickly, in his case, he realized in surprise. None of the fanatics he had encountered had managed to kill him and they’d all tried pretty hard. How many crazy people had he escaped from since the whole thing had begun?
The short answer was: a hell of a lot more than he had ever known existed. He hadn’t been completely naive before all of this, no matter what his father had thought. He had known that there were bad people, people who believed insane things and who wanted to force those beliefs onto others. Hell, he had been raised by one. But he hadn’t thought they were this prolific. Or maybe he simply hadn’t thought that they’d be this likely to survive.
He rubbed his thumb over the small hole in his finger, washing away the last traces of dirt. It was a little sore, but that would go away soon. It was a very minor injury.
Brad forced his mind back to the letters and the date on the floor. That was the more important consideration right now. And if he was honest with himself, he had to admit that it was the easier thing to think about. He didn’t want to think about the Family. He didn’t want to remember the retirement community or the things he’d seen and done there. He especially didn’t want the memories of his father crowding in.
The carving. He needed to focus on the letters and not the screams that still played through his mind when it got too quiet. Most of them were Jamie’s desperate pleas to be saved. Brad knew that the guilt over Jamie’s death would never go away. It clung to him just like the smell of smoke that he had been unable to get out of his mind.
Both fires seemed to linger not just in his mind but on his skin. He wondered about the possibility of heating some water and being able to wash off before he set out again. It wouldn’t be a bad idea. Maybe he could even take the time to rinse his clothes.
The scent of the smoke on him brought up memories that he didn’t want. Sometimes he could see the cabin collapsing in front of him again, taking his last sense of security and protection with it as it went. Other times it was the retirement community that he saw going up in smoke, cloaking the guilty and the innocent as he ran.
It also made him remember his father. He couldn’t stand to think of how Lee would feel if he knew what had happened to the cabin. He could picture the disappointed fury in his father’s eyes as he surveyed the rubble that was left of his pride and joy.
A bath might also soothe the aches and pains he had become more aware of as he drove. When he had been moving they’d been easier to forget, but long hours in the vehicle had solidified the overexerted muscles into knots of pain. His legs and back were killing him and he was developing a headache that had the potential to turn into a full-blown migraine.
He pressed his fingers to his temples and rubbed firmly. The tightness loosened fractionally and he sighed in relief. He couldn’t let the tension get to him. Thinking about pain never made it any easier to handle.
Brad looked down at the letters carved into the floor once more. This time he kept his hands to himself, but he ran his gaze thoroughly over the initials and the date that had been left there. Had Sammy gone over the carving again and again out of boredom? Had he done it because of nervous energy?
The kid typically had plenty of that, but unless Anna had found a vehicle to travel back home in, they would have had to walk a very long way to get from the cabin to Island Falls. Or had Sammy simply been hoping that somehow Brad hadn’t given up on finding them again?
He could picture the boy hard at work, his head bent low over his carving as he struggled to make it readable even if the floor got even dustier and dirtier through the passage of time. His face would have been set in perfect concentration as he carved. Sammy’s serious expression when he was working on something had given Brad a few hints of what the boy would be like when he was grown up.
Sammy had the potential to become a hard-working adult, one that Brad would be proud to have alongside him for a long time. The boy was good with his hands and mechanically inclined enough to be very useful when it came to fixing things. He was also cheerful and mostly optimistic, and Brad was certain that the last two attributes were just as important as the ones that preceded them.
No one wanted to spend the end of the world with a jerk, for one thing. For another, a good attitude kept a person from getting too paranoid. If Anna had been a little calmer, a little less inclined to sabotage a good thing, it might have gone differently for the two of them. Then again, if she hadn’t sent him out, he would never have found Martha.
Brad recalled the girl once more. Her blue eyes had seemed to fill up her small, frightened face when he had first found her. She had been so thin, so silent. Had she gone back to that now that she had been r
emoved from the safety of the cabin and the sense of anonymity she had managed to regain there?
She knew now that the Family hadn’t forgotten her. If anything could draw the girl back into her shell, it would be that knowledge. It sent chills through Brad to think about what they would do to him if he ran across them again.
Of course, he reminded himself quickly, he probably wouldn’t ever see that group of fanatics again. He wasn’t going to be dumb enough to stick his head back into the noose by returning to the scene of the ruined cabin. There was also no reason for the cultists to leave the safety and security of the compound they’d built up. There was nothing out in the world for them.
Except more converts.
Brad shook the thought away and went back to his contemplation of the floor. The boy had been smart to think of the carving. It was personal enough for Brad to recognize it and grasp the meaning, but it would give nothing away to an outsider. Anyone could have carved initials and a date into the floor as they passed through.
As much as he hated that Sammy had needed to become mistrustful of his fellow survivors, Brad was glad that it had happened. There were few people left that were worthy of that trust. Even the ones that still spoke cheerfully and offered you food and shelter might try damn near anything to get what they wanted out of you.
Loyalty. Service. Protection. A human shield for when shit hit the fan. Maybe they were the same things people had always wanted from each other, simply stripped bare of all pretense. Then again, maybe he was exhausted and morose and this train of thought wasn’t helping.
Another thought came to him as he sat there trying to distract himself from the impending descent of nihilism. It was intriguing enough to do the job. Maybe the carving hadn’t been Sammy’s at all.
Had the carving been Anna’s idea? She was a careful thinker herself, and something about this brought her to mind. Something more than the fact that her initial formed the center of the carving. Maybe Anna had wanted to let him know that they’d been there. Maybe she had wanted him to follow them, to find them again. They’d been a good team, after all.
No, it was more than that. They’d been family, at least from his point of view. He knew Anna well. Probably better than anyone else ever had. She had a lot of great qualities, but she was also impulsive, almost aggressively so. She was also driven by fear. Leaving had seemed like the right thing to do when she’d gotten cabin fever at the start of winter and she hadn’t been able to push the feeling away. It hadn’t been a hard stretch for that to turn into leaving him once the Family’s threats had begun.
Once she and the kids were out on the road her choice might have seemed right for a while. She would have had other things to think about, to occupy her mind. She would have had to provide food and shelter and heat for two children who depended on her. It was more than enough to keep a person busy and distracted from self-doubt or recrimination.
Maybe things had changed when they’d reached Island Falls. Once she had gotten back to her old home and had a few worries taken off of her mind, maybe she had missed him the way that he had missed her all this time. Maybe she had worried about him back at the cabin. Maybe she really had regretted letting Brad face the Family alone.
Brad made a small scoffing noise and drew his knees up, shaking out his legs as they started to go numb from his long stillness. No, there was no need to take his musings that far, and rewriting the past was a dangerous hobby. If Anna had a regret about how things had happened between them, it would have been not dragging him out of that cabin with her. There was nothing he could have done at the end to convince her to stay and fight it out with him and it probably wouldn’t have changed anything anyway.
Why was it so damn hard to stick to the point suddenly, Brad wondered with a shake of his still aching head. There was no point to all of these little trips down memory lane. Anna didn’t carve and she probably hadn’t had time to learn while she was running away from him.
There was an oddly frantic quality to the depth of the carving, though, and Brad kept trying to find an explanation for it, turning the question over and over in his mind. Maybe Sammy had needed to hide what he was doing from his mother. How would he have done that, though? Anna kept a close eye on the kids at all times. If anything she would have gotten stricter ever since they had discovered the Family.
Maybe he had worked on the letters while Anna slept? Or perhaps Martha had stood guard for him? The blue-eyed girl had been closer to Sammy than she had been to either adult in the cabin, although she had warmed to Brad and Anna over time. If Sammy thought that the carving was a good idea, she probably wouldn’t have challenged him on it and she was usually willing to help whenever she was asked.
In the end, whether they had all been in on it or not, this small carving was proof positive that the three of them were alive. Or at least they had been in November.
Brad glanced around the place. Had Anna, Sammy and Martha known that he would come here to look for them? Sammy must have thought so. No matter how Anna felt, Brad knew that her son believed in him. So did Martha. If he had managed to get through to her, anyway. He had thought that he had seen trust in her eyes before everything fell apart.
An almost physical pain of loneliness pierced through his stomach so suddenly that he nearly doubled over. It had been way too damn long since he’d had a conversation with someone who wasn’t insane. He remembered the chats he’d had with Charlie, Jack, Vance and Neal. He remembered wrapping his hands around the mugs of hot water that Charlie had always served while they stood on the porch of the retirement home, watching life pass with a semblance of normality.
Hell, with Remington chasing the kids and the scents and sounds coming from the livestock area it had felt like a neighborhood of a bygone age. Everyone had gotten along even if they were divided along the lines of civilian and soldier. And everyone there had been either lying or lied to.
Charlie, Jack and Vance hadn’t understood the depth of Walker’s control over the place. Brad still wasn’t sure whether Neal had been lied to or whether he was lying to them. Then there was Ben who only wanted to look after the animals in peace. Brad hoped that he had gotten away safely. He had been the most honest man in the whole community.
Then again, even if Ben had escaped, where was he supposed to go and what was he supposed to survive on? Brad’s mouth twisted bitterly when he thought back to the food stores Walker had stockpiled. He hoped to God that it hadn’t burned, but he didn’t hold out much hope that it had survived intact. Only the soldiers had known that it was there, so the civilians wouldn’t have known to try to save it even if they’d been able to fight the soldiers off once Brad had slit Walker’s throat.
No. Those weren’t the conversations that he missed the most. He wanted to talk to someone whose every move he didn’t have to watch. He didn’t want to keep track of innuendo and suspicious words and phrases. He just wanted some kind of connection again.
He remembered how easily he had talked with Anna before cabin fever had set in with such disastrous effects. They had chatted long into the night sometimes, about their lives before everything went dark—movies they’d seen, places they’d been, cases in his vet clinic and customers in the diner Anna had worked at. There had been plenty of stories to share on that front. It had become so easy with her.
He replayed Sammy’s laughter as they played in the lake; Martha’s quiet voice as she read out loud from the books he’d kept beside the fireplace. She’d read well once she had managed to escape her shyness and get into the book at hand. Even Sammy had listened to the stories when she was in charge of them, leaning back against the couch with the firelight shining over his face as he rested his chin on his knees. Homesickness flooded Brad.
Like a punch in the gut, he remembered once more that the cabin was really, truly, gone now. He couldn’t go back home even if he could find his family. The books that had helped Martha break loose from her shell had joined everything else he owned in a huge pile of char
and ash that had tainted the snowy landscape for miles around. He had been deep in the woods before he’d been away from the smell of it. The way that the smoke had wreathed the trees like fog still lingered in his mind.
The depth of the hurt of losing the place shocked him. Two years ago, if he had heard that the cabin had burned down he would simply have shrugged and moved on with his life. He had sworn never to go back there the last time he’d left it. And until he’d decided to leave the starving safe house, he had kept his word.
The place had always felt much too small to him when he’d been a kid. He remembered that it had always felt like the walls and ceilings were pressing down on him when he was there for the summer. It was how he imagined wild rabbits to feel when they’d been trapped or caged.
Part of it had been his mother’s resentment of the place, he knew. He had been able to feel it rising as they drove the winding roads closer and closer to the cabin every year.
He could still remember the last time they went up there as a family, Brenda going silent when they pulled into the driveway then plastering on a smile as she pushed open the door of the small, rusty car that Lee always insisted didn’t need to be replaced. The conversation he’d witnessed later that day would forever be burned into his memory.
“We’re hardly ever even here, Lee!”
“If something happens, you’ll be glad I did this,” Lee said, reciting the words by rote. “Hell of a lot more useful than a fancy haircut or some new clothes.”
“Or fixing the washing machine?” his mother challenged. “Or buying Brad a pair of shoes that aren’t secondhand? Or maybe having a nice meal out once in a while that’s just the two of us?”
“What good is any of that gonna do you when the world is falling apart?” Lee demanded.
“The world isn’t falling apart!” Brenda cried out, pushing her hands back through her long hair. It tangled around her thin fingers and she shook her hands free with a sigh. She hated wearing it long, but it was impossible to find a price low enough to appease her husband when it came to things like salon visits. “Lee…I miss you. This is all you do anymore. It’s where all of our money and all of your time goes.”