by Dana Fraser
A grim laugh bounced off the new wall he had installed over the month leading up to his trip. Reaching out, he tapped on the light and checked the time on his phone. Early morning, a little past dawn. He moved into a sitting position and considered his options. He knew he would spend most of the day in a fruitless effort to unlock Hannah’s message. To sooth his ego with an easier puzzle, he would probably run through a page or two of Gavin’s journal, as well. But, even with his later command duties, Thomas had never been a desk jockey. He needed to do something physical, something tangible.
If he didn’t, he would go crazy in his dark little cell—a cockroach at the end of the world.
He crawled over to his daily pack, the one he took with him when he left the house to scavenge through what was left at the homes of his neighbors. It had been clear the moment his subdivision came into view that every building, every shed, had been ransacked and picked over. But there were hot water tanks that still had water he could purify. When he ran through those, there were toilet tanks.
Aside from the water, Thomas mostly found dead bodies that he covered with sheets and said a few words over whether he had liked the person or not. So far, he had officiated thirteen such funerals.
“Not useful thinking, old man,” he mumbled before picking up the thermal scanner.
His fingers caressed its edges. The infrared device had been a Godsend in exploring the neighborhood. He wasn’t the only one who wanted to search through the surrounding homes. And some of the scavengers had ventured into his home while he was tucked safely behind the new wall. The last group that had been through had been brazen, openly moving about. They had brought drills and battery packs for the wall safe and discovered the floor safe, too. When they left and Thomas went up to survey the damage, he discovered that they had spent a lot of time sorting through the more personal items—his office, the photo albums, Becca’s journals. As best as he could tell from his trip around the neighborhood that night, his was the only house they had hit.
Turning on the scanner, he pointed it at the ceiling first. Above him, he knew, was his son’s bedroom. If none of this had happened, if he hadn’t shipped the boy off, Ellis would be up already, on the computer running chemistry simulations before school even though he wasn’t taking any chemistry classes his senior year. If it had been a weekend, Ellis would have been gone already, out on one of his early morning hikes.
He was a good kid, Thomas thought. One who was frequently too smart for his own benefit. If he liked a subject at school, he aced it. If he didn’t, it was like having bamboo shoots pounded under Thomas’s fingernails to get Ellis to pull at least a C out of the class.
Those C grades had put West Point out of reach for the boy.
Alone in his hidden room, Thomas laughed again and pointed the scanner at the wall in front of him. Grades were the least of what had taken West Point off the table. Ellis would have preferred digging ditches to going to a military college. And he probably had enough bitcoins stashed on his computer from selling gaming mods that he wouldn’t need to dig ditches anyway.
Seeing that the other half of the basement was clear of human heat signatures, Thomas fastened the scanner’s strap around his neck and put on his shoes. Next he shrugged on the holster he had fashioned to hold the Maxim 9 and then he grabbed the M16 with a growl.
It was a fucked up day in America when a man couldn’t take a stroll through his own home without needing a rifle, a sidearm, and infrared equipment.
He only wished he hadn’t used all twelve of the grenades he had taken from the building in Louisville to get home.
Thomas gave the other side of the basement a second scan then pulled on the door handle. On his side of the wall, the seam for the door was visible. On the other side, he had painted the drywall black and nailed in a board and batten with the same finish that perfectly hid the door, especially since the bottom horizontal board was two feet off the ground with nothing but smooth painted drywall beneath it.
Thomas had to lift a leg to get in and out of the room, but even after the house getting ransacked God knew how many times, the room and its contents had been untouched when he arrived—even with his own kids presumably having come down to the basement. They hadn’t known what he had been building unless Becca had mentioned it to one of them. But they both were intimately familiar with what the basement looked like from growing up in the house. They should have realized the dimensions were off.
Leaving the hidden room, he grabbed the vertical board on the right side of the opening and pulled the door shut.
Moving around the rest of the basement, he used the thermal device to scan the level above through the floors. The master bedroom was tricky because of the floor safe. It was heavy metal, its weight resting atop two load bearing walls that Thomas had put in to enclose the basement bathroom. Patiently, he scanned that portion of the ceiling, his attention evenly divided between what he was seeing—or not seeing—and what he could hear, which was nothing.
He continued his inspection as he moved slowly toward the stairs. As his foot touched the bottom step, his eyes and ears alerted him to the presence of intruders.
Someone was in his house. From the heat signature, it looked like two bodies standing close together in his living room. He pictured their placement. They were standing close to the wall on which Hannah had written her coded message in black Sharpie. He couldn’t tell if they were facing it, but they weren’t moving.
Thomas carefully picked his way up the stairs, the rifle rotated to hang down his back as he kept one hand on the scanner and the other on the Maxim 9 he had pulled out of its holster. There was no carpet on the stairs, but he knew exactly which steps had gotten creaky and avoided them. As he neared the top, he was all but slithering upwards on his belly, just the top half of his head poking above the line of the ground floor.
He saw right away that one of the intruders was armed, a hunting rifle held at the ready. By the height and width, it was a male, the impression confirmed less than a second later as the man turned and whispered to his companion, revealing a thick, dark beard.
“You can look at it later,” the man said, each word loaded with quiet urgency. “First you need to get behind that chair with the 45 and hide while I clear the rest of the house.”
Clear the house…
A man with military training, Thomas thought. But why would either of them, in the condition they were in, care about scribbled nonsense on the wall? Only the date and signature of “H/E” on the bottom would be remotely comprehensible to outsiders. And even that small bit of clarity required context to know that the message was authored by Hannah and she had her brother with her.
The other figure was misshapen, sagging beneath the weight of what looked like two layers of blankets and either wearing a backpack underneath or Quasimodo was alive and traveling through Indiana. The feet were big, too, the shoes something Thomas would expect to find in the men’s department and out of proportion to the short stature.
Male or female, the second intruder ignored the pleas of the first and moved closer to the wall.
They were scavengers or vagabonds, Thomas decided. He didn’t need to kill them unless they decided to squat more than a day. He could wait out the time in his secret room, working on Hannah’s message using the photos he had taken with his phone.
A hand, the left one, emerged from the covering of blankets. Morning light from the busted out window caught the pale flesh, halting Thomas in his retreat down the basement stairs.
The hand didn’t go with the body. The fingers were long, slim and delicately articulated. They moved in the air as if the message was written in Braille. They danced with an understanding denied lesser minds.
He knew the hand, had been mesmerized by it on a flight from DC to New York City before ever seeing the woman who wielded it.
“They were here,” the figure exclaimed in a weak, dusty voice. “Hannah and Ellis were here.”
The dancing fingers had
jerked Thomas up from the stairwell like a puppet master playing with a marionette. He stood, limp, awaiting the next pull on his strings. Forgotten, the Maxim 9 pointed at the floor.
When he opened his mouth to speak, his voice was as dusty and choking as the woman’s.
“Becca…” he croaked. “Becca, is that you?”
Before she could answer, the man swung around, the hunting rifle expertly dipping to slide between him and Becca then lifting to point center mass at Thomas.
“Move and you’re dead,” the stranger warned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BECCA TURNED, her head whipping side to side. With a gun pointed at his chest, Thomas waited for her to say something, to acknowledge him. If her companion hadn’t reacted to him, he would have thought maybe there was nothing to acknowledge. Maybe, instead of standing in his home staring at his wife, he was in a ditch alongside the road dreaming one last dream—or maybe it was his ghost that had been wandering the house and neighborhood.
But the man was glaring at him like he was real, and a threat.
And still, Becca couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak.
He took one step forward, hands moving to reach out. The tip of the rifle’s barrel jabbed him in the chest. Thomas glared at him, studied the scraggly beard, the scar that cut across his gaunt cheek, the weary, hostile gaze. He was maybe in his thirties but the last five weeks had him looking almost twice that age.
“This is my house, junior,” Thomas said, his teeth grinding at each word. “Rebecca is my wife. So unless you want to eat that rifle—”
Becca’s hand came up to touch lightly against the weapon’s barrel. The man lowered the weapon, his gaze telling Thomas it was only because Becca wanted him to.
Thomas reached out but Becca shrank from him. She turned, her gaze fixing on the Hannah’s messages, the fingers on her left hand once again dancing in the air.
“Antibiotics,” the man said.
Thomas looked at him in confusion. The man looked undernourished, but there was still muscle on him and he didn’t seem sick.
“Are there any in the house?”
Thomas shook his head. “None on the block.”
Why did he want them?
The man asked another question, but Thomas ignored it. He placed one hand against the blanket covering her and the pack hiding beneath it. The other hand wrapped around the fingers as they tapped out some calculation. She froze but didn’t protest.
“It’s not safe to stay up here too long,” he coaxed.
“Is the house clear?” the man asked, his arm brushing against Thomas.
Shit—he didn’t know!
The basement was clear. The first floor had been clear except for the two of them, but he hadn’t checked the second floor since the night before. Releasing his hold on his wife, he used the scanner to check the upstairs rooms, first from the underside then going halfway up the stairs. Satisfied, he returned to Becca, captured her hand again and spoke softly into her ear.
“I have a picture of the message on my phone and written on paper downstairs. It’s in the room, the one you…”
He trailed off. His wife needed many things, clearly. Food and water, clean clothes. The flesh on her hand was hot to the touch, so maybe she was why the man had asked for antibiotics. What she didn’t need was Thomas reminding her how she had teased him for building the room, telling him he was displacing anxiety about the meeting with anxiety over securing the house.
“Baby, come downstairs where it’s safe.”
She seemed deaf to Thomas’s voice—her husband’s voice. The man stepped in, wrapped a hand around one of her frail shoulders and turned her toward the basement stairs. Then he wrapped a hand around her other shoulder and gently propelled her forward. Again, Thomas felt like a ghost in his home, a spirit that had passed on but hadn’t moved on.
Only once they were down in the dark basement with the man’s flashlight playing around the room in random confusion did Thomas exist again. He walked past them, pushed the door open and stepped inside so he could turn on the LED camping light.
Becca, forgetting about the two foot lip at the bottom of the door, tripped forward. He caught her and she immediately recoiled, squirming to escape his touch. Thomas made sure she had her balance then moved to close the door after the man stepped into the room.
“Christ,” the stranger said. “All this and no antibiotics?”
Thomas didn’t answer. He knew what he had, knew what he didn’t have.
“Hand her the notebook,” he said, pointing at a stack of papers next to the bedding. “I’ll find a second light.”
He brought over a matching lantern a second later then opened up one of the boxes stuffed with ready to eat meals. He had cans of Sterno, but he hadn’t been able to test with a carbon monoxide reader whether the small vents hidden by the bottom slats on the other side of the wall would keep the room ventilated enough to burn the fuel with the door shut. And keeping the door open was dangerous for other reasons.
Thomas scooped the cold beef stew into plastic cups and handed the food to Becca and her guest before sitting down a few feet away from them and quietly eating his portion. She didn’t touch her food at first. The man ravenously dug into his until he realized Becca wasn’t eating. He pried the pad from her fingers then and filled her hand with the cup.
“Eat,” he ordered. “You can work on whatever this is when I search the other houses for some pills.”
Thomas had already told him there were no antibiotics on the entire block. But maybe he had missed something, no matter how much crawling around he had done on his hands and knees, looking under beds, moving couches, and digging in the pockets of the dead who still wore them.
“You got a name?” Thomas asked, pouring water he had purified after draining it from the Medley’s hot water heater.
From the light provided by the two lanterns, he saw the man’s gaze flick in his direction before he returned to making sure Becca remembered to take a bite of the cold stew. Thomas set the cups of water next to them and retreated. Like a small child, Becca had to be coached to drink.
Thomas wasn’t sure it was merely the puzzle her daughter had left behind. She seemed diminished in some way, like something had been torn out of her. It killed him to know he hadn’t been there to stop whatever had happened to her.
“I asked if you had a name,” Thomas repeated, his voice roughening as a nauseating rage began to churn in his stomach.
“Sean,” Becca said as the man glared in reply. “His name is Sean.”
Another day would pass before she spoke again—and only then to tell him that Hannah and Ellis were headed to a town in Tennessee named Dover.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AS WRITTEN on the wall in the living room, the untranslated message took up a space some four feet wide by five feet tall. The resulting text was very little. For some reason Thomas couldn’t understand, Hannah had jumped through mathematical hoops to give them the name of the town and the name of a family to look for. No street address, no house number, just a couple of names and a town that was a hundred twenty miles distant before dealing with the fact that all the bridges over the Ohio River were under the control of Project Erebus.
So was the land south of the river.
Swaying as she gained her feet, Becca was ready to walk out the front door in the middle of the day once she finished decoding the message and confirmed in the road atlas that there was such a place as Dover, Tennessee. Sean managed to talk her into sitting back down and waiting for nightfall.
Thomas didn’t want her to go at all. Becca seemed to get sicker by the hour. Exposing her to November weather with the promise of snow hanging over their heads would accelerate her physical deterioration.
Within earshot of Sean, he had pleaded with Becca to let him expand his search into the city for the medicine she needed.
Too dangerous, she had responded with a di
smissive wave of her hand. The road before them was dangerous enough. Days would be lost in Thomas’ hunt with no guaranteed result. She and Sean had already wasted hours leaving the safety of cover to undertake perilous searches of homes and other buildings already picked clean.
Not once as she told him she would leave after sunset did Becca meet his gaze.
The three of them departed a few hours after the purple of twilight faded to black, delaying only long enough for Thomas to make a trip down the street to retrieve an inflatable raft he had seen in the Medley’s garage. The raft was another twelve pounds for him to hump around, but it got them across the river the following night. Once they made it to the opposite shore, Thomas sent Becca and Sean into the tree line with the best of the equipment while he stood exposed and collapsed the boat into something he could carry without dragging.
Three days and no more than fifteen miles later, Thomas and Sean tugged the inflated raft across a burned field of oats, Becca inside and unconscious. Their destination was a barn that had lost half its roof to fire, but the sky to the north was threatening hail and heavy rain, the wind carrying the thunderous clouds in their direction.
This time Sean left Thomas and Becca at the tree line and made sure the barn was empty. He came back with a grim look on his face, checked to make sure Becca was still out cold then grabbed the handle on his side of the raft. Thomas grabbed the other handle and they entered the barn carrying her between them.
It only took a few steps into the crumbling structure for Thomas to fully understand the look on Sean’s face when he had rejoined them.
There had been horses in the barn when the fire hit. There was no lingering scent of death, just the visual spectacle of charred flesh and exposed bones. When they had Becca secured in the only stall that had avoided structural damage, Thomas grabbed a rake and used what remained of the hay to cover the corpses.
His wife was going to survive. She was going to walk out under her own power. And she damn well was not going to be subjected to witnessing the obscenities that had been visited upon those poor creatures.