Peter thought about asking where her mom was, but the way her eyes grew unfocused and she bit her lip decided him against it.
“He wasn’t always quiet, though,” Nat continued. “He went back to his house to get my cousins and aunt and came back quiet. That’s what my dad says: He came back quiet. He won’t tell us anything, except that it was too late.”
“Oh.”
Peter imagined the mess Rich might have found and tried to put it out of his mind. That could certainly make a person quiet. He measured and cut the fabric to cover the extra bed pillows they’d cut into squares and read the instructions for the machine. He’d never sewn before, but it seemed easy enough.
Nat wiped a splotch of paint off her cheek. “You think Uncle Rich is weird, but you’re like him, you know. You killed all those zombies like a superhero, but here you are, decorating the house with me. And I know your clothes were super expensive before.”
“You know, you’re right,” Peter said with a laugh. He hadn’t realized that he might be considered a walking contradiction these days.
An hour later he sighed and laid the first uneven pillowcase on the floor. He was going to have to thank Cassie for the gloves again. How she’d fit together the strips of leather with such perfect seams, figured out the elastic and connected them to the gloves they’d found was amazing. He could barely sew a square, he’d just learned. The bobbin was still a complex mystery, although he’d gotten it to work. Natalie sat next to him, and together they made the second pillowcase a little more square than the first. The third was decent, and the fourth was almost perfect. They placed them on the couch and chairs and admired their handiwork.
“It never would’ve looked this nice without your help,” Natalie said. “We just have to spray paint the tables and we’re done.”
“Tomorrow. Let’s get some sleep.”
Natalie stood on her tiptoes and hugged him goodnight, like he was family. He stole her nose and pretended to put it in his back pocket. She humored him with a smile, the same way Bits did when he stole her nose. Even at half of Nat’s age, Bits was too old for Got Your Nose.
Nat raised her eyebrows. “Am I supposed to ask for it back or something?”
“Nope.” Peter tapped his pocket. “I have quite the collection. I’m not giving it up.”
“Wow, and here I thought you were cool. You’re just as dorky as my dad.”
Peter smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Goodnight, weirdo.” Nat giggled and headed for her room but turned at the door. “My dad told me if they don’t come back that I would go with you to Kingdom Come. He wanted me to know, just in case.”
“That’s right,” Peter said. “But, don’t worry, they’ll be back.”
“I know. I just didn’t want you to worry about telling me.” She put her hands on her hips. “Now, would you finish Breaking Dawn, already? I’m dying over here! We need to discuss!”
Nat skipped into her room and shut the door behind her. She’d gone from something as terrible as admitting her dad may never come back to demanding a Twilight symposium. Teenage girls were so strange, and he was extremely glad he was no longer a teenage boy. How any of them could compete with a sparkly vampire was beyond him. One day Bits would be a teenage girl, he realized, and picked up the book with a grimace. He should know what he was getting into.
***
Peter had circled the island over and over for days, until his ankle wasn’t sore. He’d run around in the brush as much as was possible. It was time, and when he announced his intention to leave the next day everyone looked disappointed. He would have stayed if he’d had nowhere to go, since he’d grown fond of them these past weeks. But September was almost half over, and he wanted to reach Kingdom Come before the snow started.
“I knew it was coming,” Chuck said, out on the deck after supper. “And thanks for staying longer than you needed to, so Nat wouldn’t be alone. We’ll miss you, Pete.”
“You could all come. I know you’ve put a lot of work into this place, but apparently this Safe Zone really is safe.”
Chuck sighed. “Next year, maybe, if we still need Safe Zones. We can’t go just yet.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Natalie’s mom. I’m waiting for her.” Chuck’s face softened, and he smiled when Peter failed at hiding the thought that she wasn’t coming from showing on his face. “I know, it sounds crazy. But I want to give her more time.”
“Where was she?”
“I’m not sure. We were separated, and it was Nat’s weekend with me. By the time I got to her house there was no sign of her. She’s a smart lady. She could still be okay. Not like Rich’s…”
Peter nodded. “Nat told me.”
“She doesn’t know the details. From what Rich said, it looked like his wife attacked his kids. My nephew was dead, but my niece and sister-in-law were still there. He had to—”
Peter filled in the silence. “Shit.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I’ve left notes everywhere my wife might go, telling her we’re here. This is where we used to make out in high school.” Chuck laughed. “So I could leave notes without being specific.”
“I hope she comes.”
Chuck kicked a rock off the steps. “Me too. I know she will, if she can. Maybe not for me, but for Natalie she’d do anything.”
“Well, you know where I’ll be if you change your mind.”
“I bet you can’t wait,” Chuck said. The straight line of his mouth curved a tiny bit. “Your little girl is there, and I’ve heard a bit about the others from Nat.”
“I can only imagine what she told you.”
Chuck clapped his back and howled. “She said she doesn’t know how any girl wouldn’t love you back. I think you may have beat out Edward.”
Peter laughed but said quietly, “Well, I was a jerk. That’s why any girl wouldn’t have loved me back.”
“Yeah,” Chuck said with a sigh. “I could’ve done a lot of things differently. I still love my wife, and I’m hoping I get a chance to make it right. You’ve got that chance, to make things different. Take it.”
Peter looked at Chuck’s broad, kind face. He was the kind of person Peter might have disregarded as simple a few months ago, if he’d even deigned to notice him. He hadn’t been overtly rude, but he’d treated people like they were invisible much of the time.
Maybe because he’d felt invisible. That’s what he’d said to Cassie one night. She’d told him it wasn’t true, but he’d pretended to fall asleep so as not to cry. The next morning Cassie tried to bring it up again, and he’d seen the impatience and hurt in her eyes when he shot her down. He’d known then that it was his last chance, and he hadn’t taken it.
That’s what he’d done the whole time they dated. Whenever he felt her pull away, he’d open up just enough for her to see the guy from the night they met. Then he’d get scared and distance himself again. It must have driven her crazy.
Well, he wasn’t scared anymore. There was a hell of a lot of other stuff to be scared of these days. Machetes and guns were useful, but the only thing that could really allay the fear was people. And for the first time in eighteen years, he had people. He had a daughter, a best friend, a possible girlfriend and the rest of his new family. He was lucky to have gotten one more chance to make things different and not fucked it up for the thousandth time.
Peter clapped Chuck’s shoulder in return. “I already have.”
***
The next morning, Rich, Chuck and Nat stood beside the truck and watched Peter throw his bag into the passenger seat well. “You sure you don’t want the Mercedes?” Chuck asked. “You can have it.”
“I’m sure,” Peter answered. He grinned and kicked a tire. “Maybe I’m more of a pickup guy now.”
Natalie threw herself at him. “I’ll miss you!”
“Don’t wait around for any sparkly vampires,” he whispered in her ear.
“I’d be on Team Peter, if you weren’t so
ancient,” Nat said and pulled away, eyes sparkling.
“Thanks,” he said. “I think.”
He wished they were coming. On their way up to Cassie’s cabin, they’d left the Washingtons at the campground with promises to meet up, but they never showed. The chances of seeing Chuck, Rich and Nat again were slim to none. He understood Chuck’s reasoning, his desperate hope, but people needed to band together. It might be the only way to win back the world from the Lexers.
He held out his hand. “Thanks for all the nursing, Rich.”
“Thanks for helping around the cabin,” Rich said with one of his rare smiles. “It looks real nice. My brother would’ve dragged me over the coals if I’d suggested any of it.”
Chuck punched Rich’s shoulder and gave Peter a back-thumping hug. “You be safe out there.”
Peter nodded and got into the pickup. He spread the map, marked with roads Rich knew to be clear, out on the seat beside him. It would get him a third of the way there. After that, he was on his own. He put the truck in drive.
“So long, lollipop!” Nat called.
She’d remembered. He laughed and waved one last time. “So long, lollipops.”
And then he started down the road.
CHAPTER 5
At first the roads took him past widely-spaced houses and fields choked with weeds. It all looked so desolate. Even the houses that didn’t have signs of struggle—broken windows or bodies out front—looked lonely. He felt like the last human on Earth. He wasn’t, of course, which was the only thing that kept him sane. He tried to imagine someone driving blindly along these roads, hoping to find something besides the small groups of Lexers he’d passed, and saw how it would be possible to give up. The old Peter probably would have, but not him.
He knew there was good out there in the world, hidden in places like campgrounds and tiny lake islands. And even if he arrived at Kingdom Come to find they hadn’t made it there, he wouldn’t give up. The thought made the inside of his cheek bloody, but he had to entertain it. It was reality.
Okay, that had been enough entertaining of reality. He concentrated on the road. It’d turned into one and a half lanes of rutted, dried mud. If Rich hadn’t assured him that it went through, he would have turned back by now. Finally, he came out onto a road that looked like it had been driven on by something other than logging trucks. He followed it north, branching onto smaller roads with the occasional tiny town center and groups of Lexers loitering around the general stores and empty intersections.
He’d just passed the point of charted territory when he hit his first road blockage. How a traffic jam came to be in the middle of this stretch of dirt road was beyond him, but there were four cars and no way around. He looked into the woods to make sure they were empty and kept the scuffing of his boots to a minimum while he meandered around the scene. There was a one-armed body in a car, head leaning against the window.
He pushed between it and the car alongside and almost lost his shit when the body moved. Its head slammed against the window, the leathery skin of its mummified face leaving flakes in its wake. It knelt on the seat, its red-veined eyes hungry. Peter breathed out and watched it struggle. Sometimes it felt as though this were a dream—a nightmare, really. That there was such a thing as zombies was unbelievable. Maybe Nat should hold out for that sparkly vampire.
He walked to the lead car, a silver Prius angled across the road. The cars behind had slammed into it when it’d stopped short after hitting something. That something was under its front wheel, still alive. Or undead, take your pick. It reached its arms up and clacked its teeth, so eager that it almost separated from its legs pinned under the tire. Peter stabbed his machete through its eye.
The Prius’s door was open, but the keys were gone. There was no other way to shift it into neutral that he knew of. He bet John could’ve done it. The most Peter knew about cars was how to change a tire, check the oil and things like that—he wasn’t a complete moron—but put him under a hood and he was lost. Feeling like an idiot for trying, he attempted to push the Prius out of the way. He might have been a superhero, according to Nat, but there was no way the car was moving.
He passed the car with the zombie inside and gave it the finger when it went crazy again. Juvenile, maybe, but it made him feel better. It was time to backtrack. Four hours into the drive and he was only a third of the way. He’d known it wasn’t going to be a piece of cake, but this was more than a little discouraging. If all the roads were in similar shape, he was going to have to find a bike. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. He’d backtrack, look for a bike and throw it in the truck, just in case.
There was a bike in the garage of a house somewhere south of Rutland. It was tall enough for his six feet, and the tires weren’t flat. It even had panniers and a small pump. He thought of going into the house, but after knocking and being answered by a series of thumps, he decided to play it safe. He had enough food for a few days. There was no sense in asking for trouble. Ana probably would’ve argued for going in, just for laughs. He shook his head and smiled. Banana—that was Penny and Cassie’s nickname for Ana, and it was an apt one.
Lexers had passed while he was in the garage, and he checked carefully before he loaded the bike and drove away. Judging by how many he’d seen in this fairly isolated area, heading to a town the size of Rutland would be a very bad idea.
He headed east and north along dirt roads and roads that might as well have been dirt, with all the patched asphalt, but at least they were passable. As long as the road twisted through farmland, there was a shoulder or grass on which to skirt the inevitable abandoned cars. It was when the road narrowed in the woods that it became an issue. Google Earth would’ve come in handy, since the map didn’t show the terrain a road traveled through. Good thing there weren’t a lot of trees in Vermont. He snorted at his own joke and realized he was improbably happy again. He’d been tapping the wheel and humming under his breath without being aware of it. Go figure.
The sunshine that streamed into the truck was warm enough that he cracked a window. He didn’t dare take off his leather jacket in case he had to run. The weather had changed in the past few weeks. What had been hot and humid was now cool, and the trees were beginning to show their autumn colors. The drive should have been another 120 miles, but it was probably over 150 with the back roads. He was good on gas, even if he had to backtrack a few times.
He was riding along one of the larger roads toward Northfield, allowing himself the vision of being at Kingdom Come by nightfall, when he hit a wall. And it wasn’t a figurative wall. It was a cinderblock, brick and stone wall built just north of a two-road intersection. It met a large building on one side and a house on the other before resuming in the distance.
He pulled parallel to the wall and climbed to the roof of the pickup. The buildings of a small college sat on the left, residential houses to the right. The white buildings of the college were surrounded by trees just turning gold and orange. It was a pleasant, albeit deserted, scene. There wasn’t a living creature behind the wall, although an overturned thermos and a grouping of chairs made it look as though someone had defended it at some point. “Hello? Anyone here?”
There was movement across the parking lot. A Lexer appeared, followed by a dozen more. He knew they didn’t sleep when they weren’t actively chasing people, but once they caught wind of you it was like they woke up. Peter was in the truck and southbound before they got close. It was back to the small roads and possible logjams for him.
***
It all went wrong on Route 100. He’d had no choice but to take it; the twisting roads all deposited him on the main road for at least a few miles, and he had to pass under I-89. He was weaving his way through a maze of cars on the bridge that led to the overpass, when there was the pop of a gunshot and the front tire blew. His first thought was duck, and his second was fuck, and then the pickup veered left and came to rest on one of the cars that suddenly didn’t seem so randomly spaced. He’d been following
a maze, all right, one that had been designed to slow a car down and give the people who’d created it plenty of time to take a shot. His head smacked the steering wheel, but he’d been going slow enough that he was fine.
“Get out of the truck!” a man’s voice called from under the overpass. “Now!”
Peter moved the driver’s seat back so he’d have more room to crouch while he swung open the door. “What do you want?” he yelled. It was hard to get his voice to carry; his mouth was a desert.
“I want you out of the truck!”
He held his pistol and debated what to do. Whatever they wanted, it wasn’t going to end well. They could have everything he had, which wasn’t much, but anyone who had put this much thought into staking out travelers probably wasn’t letting them go.
He called again to pinpoint the direction of the voice. “Why?”
The windshield cracked with the force of another bullet, and the voice came again. “Get out of the truck or we’ll shoot until you can’t get out.”
The speaker was a hundred feet ahead, behind one of the concrete pillars. Peter reached to the passenger seat and grabbed his pack, then shoved the map in and slung it over one shoulder. He put his pistol in the crack of his open door and fired at the pillar. He waited as several shots were returned. They came in order—boom, boom, boom—like there was one shooter, not several. Maybe they didn’t want to waste ammo, but Peter thought there should have been more action than that one lone voice and gun. It seemed like someone desperate, which could go either way. Either they were desperate enough to let him go if he gave them his supplies, or so desperate they’d kill him on sight.
“I don’t have much,” Peter called. He had to work hard at it, but he managed to sound unafraid. “But it’s yours if you let me walk away. I just want to get north.”
There was a full minute of silence from the pillar. Then a bullet hit the door. He guessed that was his answer. It pissed him off. You could offer someone the shirt off your back and they would still kill you. So be it. He fired at the pillar again, waited for the answering shots, then again, more shots, and then there was a pause. Maybe they were reloading, or rethinking, but this was his chance. He pulled the keys out of the ignition—they’d have a tough time moving the truck without them—threw them off the bridge and ran around the back of the pickup. There was another road to the northwest that he could take under I-89. He lowered the tailgate and pulled the bike to the ground.
So Long, Lollipops (An Until the End of the World Novella) Page 5