by K. M. Fawkes
First Light
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
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
K. M. Fawkes Mailing List
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 7, 2026
At least the snow had stopped falling, for now. Apart from that, it was hard to imagine how things could have been worse.
Anna lay in a pile of snow at the foot of a slender aspen tree, slowly bleeding out; a vivid crimson pool had formed an ever-widening circle near the wound in her thigh.
Just before Brad’s father had left, taking the two kids with him, he had bragged that he could have easily killed Anna if he had wanted. Brad didn’t doubt this. Lee was a survivalist who had spent much of his adult life living in a cabin in the Maine wilderness. He could fell an elk from a distance of 600 yards with a rifle he had built himself out of spare parts. Anna was only alive, for now, because he hadn’t intended to kill her.
Brad knew his father better than to think he was being generous in sparing Anna’s life. More likely this was one of his cruel tests, one that Brad would only pass if he used the skills Lee had taught him as a boy to save Anna’s life.
Lee loved playing games like this: once, when Brad was thirteen, he had abandoned him in the woods and Brad had been forced to walk twenty miles home through the howling winter armed only with a half-empty jar of peanut butter and a navigational compass.
Before driving off in their only vehicle, Lee had hurled one last verbal volley. “You can’t trust her, Bradley!” he had yelled, gun in hand. “She’s been playing you from the start.”
It had been crazy, the deluded ravings of a paranoiac who had hastily cobbled together his own religion in the aftermath of the pandemic that had decimated the world’s population. And yet, Brad couldn’t stop thinking about it.
His father was good at a lot of things, but he was especially good at this—at reframing the world so that white was black and black was white. If there hadn’t been an element of truth in Lee’s accusation, maybe it wouldn’t have bothered him so much. But in the months Brad had known her, Anna had proven fickle and, often, unworthy of trust.
As he knelt at the foot of the tree, heedless of the low growl of an emaciated pine marten nestled in an overhead branch, he reflected once again on the fact that she had left him—had left him twice, actually, for reasons that must have made sense in her addled mind but which struck Brad as bizarre and irrational.
“I’m sure you’re a great guy,” she had written in the note he found pinned to the table the first time she fled, “but you’re also a guy who can break a lock with an axe in one blow and I’ve got a kid to take care of.”
Brad had never forgotten this; he resented her for it, even now. If only she had been brave enough to argue the point with him instead of running, he might have persuaded her to change her mind. Surely a man who could break a lock in one blow was exactly the sort of man you wanted by your side when the world ended? If your first priority was protecting your son, surely he would be the best person to help you?
But of course this hadn’t occurred to Anna. She never thought, she just acted, and left other people to deal with the consequences of actions done in haste. If she had been less afraid, if she hadn’t given in to her panicked impulses, if she had been willing to talk to him instead of just running, things might have turned out differently. As it was, he had a horrible feeling he was just setting himself up for future heartbreak by saving her life. Lee had been wrong about most things, but he was right about that.
In spite of this, there was a sensitivity at his core that would never let him abandon Anna while there was still a chance of saving her life. That was what distinguished him from his father, who had no qualms about shooting a young woman—a mother of one child and a guardian of one other. Lee must have anticipated how Brad would react, must have known when he fired the bullet that Anna would be horribly injured but still had a chance at survival, provided that Brad acted in a timely fashion. In spite of their mutual hatred, they retained this warped bond of trust. Brad knew that his father still respected him, and the knowledge made his hatred burn brighter.
He couldn’t think about that, not now. Right now the most pressing question was how to save Anna.
He would need to apply a bandage if he wanted to staunch the flow of blood, but his first-aid kit currently lay in the glove compartment of his father’s car that was now traveling some miles down the road toward the imaginary line that had once been the Canadian border.
Brad would have to make his own bandage out of clean cloth, but the only material available was a plain white shirt he was wearing under his coat and over a now musty-smelling pair of long underwear. (Already cleanliness was becoming one of those strange artifacts of the pre-nanobot world, about which future generations would whisper in disbelief).
Carefully, cautiously, Brad opened his coat and ripped off a strip of shirt at the torso. The cold was like a pair of pincers lacerating his exposed skin. Anna was wearing only a thin coat, but she didn’t seem to notice the cold; the pain of the wound in her thigh had rendered her insensible to the wind’s buffets.
“Stay with me,” said Brad, as if it made a difference whether he spoke or not. “I don’t need you to die on me just yet.”
But Anna gave no indication of having heard him.
The next few minutes would be crucial. He needed to find a way to sterilize the strip of cloth before applying it to the wound so that it didn’t become infected. It would be the darkest of ironies if Anna survived being shot in the leg only to die because he didn’t provide basic medical assistance—as if he and his father had conspired in killing her.
When he was a boy, Brad had found a robin with an injured leg in the hedges that bordered their property and had spent a couple weeks nursing it back to health. But then one morning he awoke to find a mess of feathers scattered near the cot he had made for it. The dog had eaten it. His father told him it was his fault for not placing the bird in the top of a closet or on a shelf where she couldn’t reach it, and Brad had cried, knowing the bird’s death was his fault.
Brad was deathly tired: the sight of the ridged landscape of snow in front of him, speckled by trees and bordered by a frozen lake to the northeast, made his eyes heavy. He rose to let the circulation return to his legs, thinking quickly.
The axe that Brad had taken from the back of the truck was still buried in the frozen surface of the lake. He could break through the ice once again and retrieve enough water to sterilize the loose strip of cloth. What would prove more c
hallenging was finding a vessel in which to boil the water, because he wasn’t in the habit of lugging around pots or saucepans. If he could find a large enough leaf, one capacious enough to hold liquid without accidentally draining, he could start a fire and get the water boiling in a couple minutes. And he didn’t have much longer than that before the situation became critical.
Considering that he stood at the edge of a wood, finding a sizable leaf proved surprisingly difficult. It was mid-winter in northern Maine and the aspens had shed their autumn leaves three, four months ago. One snowstorm and then another had blown through since then, layering the hilly woods in three to four inches of powdery snow.
The earth beneath him seemed to sway dangerously for a few seconds, the vein in his neck throbbing: here he was in the middle of a wood and not a leaf in sight. He told himself to calm down: Anna needed him, and her survival depended on his ability to act quickly.
Reluctantly leaving Anna leaned against the trunk of the aspen, Brad walked for a distance of about forty meters, first hugging the edge of the lake and then breaking off toward a clump of trees that retained some late-season color. Near the foot of one he found some new-fallen leaves the color of mango or papaya. They would have to do; now he needed water.
Brad trudged down to the edge of the lake and, with more strength than he felt capable of in that moment, reclaimed the axe from the ice.
Seven or eight strokes at the marble-topped surface later, the ice began to break like a cracked mirror, the pattern reminding him of an intricate spider’s web or a veined marble countertop. In another five strokes the rift in the ice widened to the size of his fist, exposing the unfrozen water that churned just below the lake’s surface. Moving quickly, before the lake froze back over, he let the leaf down with gloved fingers into the icy waters.
After the rigors of retrieving the lake water, the act of starting a fire proved relatively easy. Not having any matches, Brad gathered up a bundle of loose branches of varying sizes and set them down in a small clearing where the ground was level. Then, taking a twiggy aspen rod in his left hand and a smaller one in his right, he rubbed one against another with tireless pressure until they began to kindle.
Once the fire had been lit, it was just a matter of holding the water-filled leaf at a certain remove from the fire so that the water warmed but the leaf itself didn’t catch fire. Within about ninety seconds the leaf-water began to bubble. Taking the torn strip, Brad placed it into the water for another five minutes until he felt sure it had been thoroughly sterilized.
The entire process had taken about ten minutes, and Brad hadn’t wasted a second. But Anna lay still and pale in the snow, blood blossoming around her thighs in a sickly pool. Now it was time to apply the bandage, and even though he had been quick, and even though he hadn’t made a single mistake, he still wasn’t sure it was going to be enough.
Softly, Brad knelt down beside her, tearing a hole in her jeans and long johns large enough for his hands to operate unfettered.
“Anna?” he asked calmly. “Anna, are you still with me?”
Anna’s eyes were closed. She didn’t stir at first. But when Brad felt for her pulse with trembling hands, she smiled weakly.
“Brad, you don’t have to go through the trouble. Really.”
It was just like Anna to deny that she needed medical care even as she lay bleeding out.
“Maybe don’t talk for a few minutes,” Brad said as he reached for the bandage. “You’ll be fine once I get the wound cleaned—I just have to patch you up for a few hours until—”
“Don’t bother,” she said again with a dazed look. She looked oddly euphoric, as if she had already resigned herself to dying and didn’t plan on being talked out of it. “Lee was right, Brad. I don’t deserve to survive. I’ve made so many mistakes. This is all my fault…”
“Cut it out!” said Brad sharply. “You’ve survived being shot in the leg. You should consider yourself lucky.”
But Anna was delirious; logic wasn’t going to reach her at this point.
“The people who died in the first wave—they were the lucky ones, weren’t they?” she said faintly. “Lee quoted a verse this morning—something about how the righteous man dies before his time so that he doesn’t have to face the horrors of the future. What if God took the people he wanted, and left the rest of us?”
“Anna, stay with me, okay?”
Brad knew it was useless to argue with her: he was going to bandage her leg up whether she wanted it or not, because she was in no position to stop him. He pressed the newly sterilized strip of cloth to the site of the wound and Anna winced in pain.
“It’s going to hurt but you can’t pull at it, whatever you do! The bandage needs to stay on, otherwise you’re just going to lose more and more blood, and you really don’t want that to happen!”
Anna let out a swear word, one he had never heard her use before. “Why are you even keeping me alive, Brad? Are you doing this out of spite? Do you secretly want me to suffer?”
Brad didn’t have an answer to that question; he had been wondering the same thing for much of the past quarter hour.
“Once we get you taken care of,” he said, “we’re going to find the kids. And if Lee tries to stop us, so help me—”
But he never completed the thought. At that moment they were both startled by the sound of a gun going off no more than a mile away.
Leaving Anna where she rested, now fully bandaged, Brad sprang to his feet. At first he thought maybe he had been mistaken, that it was only the sound of a branch falling or ice cracking on some snow-sodden cliff. But no, there it was again, even louder this time: the echo of a gun being fired.
On an ordinary night, with the world humming around them, he might never have heard it. But here in the silence at the end of the world he could hear for miles around, and what he heard troubled him.
He and Anna weren’t alone in the woods.
Chapter 2
Brad waited in the frigid silence, every muscle in his body tense.
“Brad?” asked Anna. Her voice sounded oddly far away. “Brad, what’s happening?”
Brad spoke lowly. “I don’t know. I thought I heard something.”
He knew Anna must have heard it too, because she had nearly jerked up when the first shots were fired. But in her present insensible state the noise must not have registered.
“Was it Lee?” she asked. “Is he coming back?”
“No,” he said quickly. “And even if he was, I wouldn’t let him hurt you.” He would happily kill his father before he would let him harm Anna again.
“Do you think—” Anna began, but Brad motioned for silence. He didn’t want their voices to carry through the woods, drawing attention to their location. Just as importantly, he wanted to gauge where the shots were coming from and their approximate distance from him and Anna. To his frustration, however, the gun didn’t go off again. It was as if the shooter had sensed his presence and gone silent.
“I’m sorry to do this,” he said after a few minutes’ silence, during which the wind rustled the evergreen junipers that surrounded the lake on its northern end, “but we need to get moving. We need to leave, Anna.”
“Why?” she asked, struggling and failing to sit upright. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But we can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
Brad lowered himself to his knees, afraid that his voice might carry.
“Listen,” he said. “There’s someone else in these woods, somebody with a gun, and we need to get out of here before they find us. I don’t know what they’re hunting, and I would rather not wait around to find out.”
Despite Anna’s insistence that she would rather die, Brad could sense that there was still some fighting instinct left in her. Wrapping an arm around the trunk of the aspen, she offered the other to Brad, who pulled her to her feet. She winced in pain and nearly fell over before Brad extended a hand to catch her.
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br /> “I don’t know,” she said, panting. “I don’t know if I can walk on this leg.”
“You’re going to have to,” Brad said firmly. “You won’t just die; you’ll take me with you. And then who will go after the kids?”
Anna went quiet at that, watching as the wind blew a flurry of snow from the crook of a black branch. “You really shouldn’t have saved me, Brad.”
Brad shook his head. “You’d have done the same thing, if the tables had been turned.”
“I wouldn’t have known what to do. I would have panicked.”
“I would’ve coached you.”
Privately, though, Brad didn’t know how helpful this would have been. Anna had left him, twice. There was no guarantee she wouldn’t panic if their lives were endangered and disappear into the woods, into the waiting arms of whatever was hunting them, or whatever that person was hunting.
Now that the shots had faded, he couldn’t be sure he had really heard them. Anna couldn’t remember having heard anything; maybe he was still tense from the face-off with his father. Maybe the ungainly descent of a wolf or coyote down a snow-covered bluff had sounded to him, in his panicked state, like yet another hunter firing with intent to kill. God knew there had been enough of them lately.
Maybe Anna was right: the disaster seemed to have snatched away whatever was decent or gentle in the human race, leaving only hardened survivalists and deranged zealots toting machine guns and living behind walled compounds.
He wondered what had become of the florists and cake decorators and kindly, tea-swilling mothers who had made life tolerable in the years before, but who would have little to contribute in the world that had been birthed. If they hadn’t died of the virus, they would surely have perished in the chaos of those first months when society was reorganizing itself and those who had access to weapons, and knew how to wield them, were declaring their supremacy over those who did not. The children that would be born in the years ahead would be descended from those people, would carry the stamp of their DNA, their cruelty and win-at-all-costs mentality forever embedded in the tree of life.