by K. M. Fawkes
A warbler sang in a branch overhead, perversely happy in spite of the misery that surrounded her. Brad felt utterly defeated. In a book or a movie this would have been the moment when help appeared by some fortuitous chance to lead them out of the woods, when the flight of the bird directed their path to a nearby cabin where they could rest for the night or a man appeared at the end of the trail with lantern in hand who proved to be their savior. But the bird was no magical assistant and no one appeared to save them. They were totally on their own, and the snow fell, silent and swift, all around them. All gods had died, all miracles ceased, all stories ended when the world ended, and now they, the survivors, shambled without purpose through a landscape stripped of hope.
“You ready to go on?” he asked, stretching and standing to his feet. “I want to put some distance between us and the lake before nightfall. That gives us about three, four hours of walking until we have to find a place to bed down for the night.”
“I heard a song once,” said Anna. She had risen and was dusting the flakes off of her coat and jeans. “This was years ago, before I had Sammy. I was the only person left in the bar and it was 2:00am and I was slightly drunk. It was one of those husband-and-wife bands—he sang and played guitar while she played the drums. And they were singing this song about a poor farmer who was making his way home to a cabin in the woods during a deadly snowstorm. His wife stood waiting in the doorway, baby on her knee. The farmer was just a mile from home when he fell. That was where they found his body at the first of spring, when the snow melted.”
Brad felt a sense of indignation at the story’s ending, at the injustice of it. “Why didn’t he press on the rest of the way, if he was so close?”
“His horse needed to stop for a rest,” Anna said quietly, “and he couldn’t bring himself to leave her. If it hadn’t been for her, he might have made it home.”
Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, Brad began to pull Anna along. This time, to his surprise, she offered no resistance.
“Let’s hope our story has a different ending,” he told her. “Because if we die out in the snow tonight, I don’t think they’re going to be writing any songs about us.”
Chapter 4
Leaving the ridge, they continued along the highway, pausing every few minutes so that Anna could catch her breath. By now it was late afternoon and they had seen no sign of the other hunter since those first, distant shots in the clearing by the lake.
More and more Brad wondered if maybe he had imagined them. In the stillness, it was hard to believe that any human had ever set foot in these woods. He remembered reading stories about men trapped in the remote wilderness who had hallucinated companions to keep themselves sane. Maybe this was a milder version of that. Maybe he had mistaken the wind, battering at the mountainous ridges that rose fifty to a hundred yards overhead, for the sound of a fellow hunter. It wasn’t the prospect of facing an armed rival that frightened him so much as this appalling loneliness that pressed in on all sides, relentless.
At the end of an hour’s walk they came upon a beige station wagon half-buried in the snowdrift. Brad used the axe to break open the passenger-side window, but found nothing in the floorboards or glove compartment worth keeping.
Probably, when the world ended, whoever owned this vehicle had driven it as far as he could and then, when it ran out of gasoline, abandoned it here and continued north on foot. Brad would have counseled him against such a foolhardy, potentially deadly venture if he hadn’t been headed in the same direction, by the same means. Undoubtedly further up the road they would begin seeing corpses, poor souls like themselves who had hoped to find a better life across the border, skeletal hands reaching helplessly out of the snow like the farmer in the song Anna had heard at the bar.
“Did you ever think there would be a time when our cars would be useless?” Brad asked. “Growing up I guess I assumed some things would always be with us. Airplanes. Wireless. Progress would just keep moving steadily forward.”
“When you picture the year 2400,” said Anna, “you don’t picture a new dark age.”
“For the first couple months after the power went out, I kept hoping that maybe we’d find a way to bring it back,” Brad said. “I realize now how ridiculous that was. It’s going to be hundreds, maybe thousands of years before we recover from this. It’s funny, too,” he added, though there was nothing funny about it: “I always thought nuclear war would be the thing that finished us off, not a faddish health craze for celebrities.”
“‘For in such an hour as you think not, the Son of Man cometh.’” Anna clung tight to his arm, looking half-starved and oddly small. “That’s one of the verses they made us memorize, at the compound. I wasn’t sure what it meant at first, but I think I get it, now. Death could come at any moment.”
Brad wasn’t entirely sure he agreed with that interpretation, but he wasn’t about to pick a fight with Anna in her current state. He gazed up the road ahead of them, where another abandoned car waited. It was the third they had passed in the last half hour.
“This must have been what it felt like to live through the Black Death,” he said, deciding to change the subject rather than dwell on Scripture.
“If there are history books in the future, they won’t look too kindly on the last hundred years, will they?”
Brad didn’t answer. He had paused at the front of the red Civic and was now rubbing away the frost on the driver’s side window with his gloved fist.
“What is it?” asked Anna. “Is something in there?”
“No, I was just thinking.” Brad took a step back. “Night’s going to be falling in the next hour or so. It’ll get colder, and we’ll need a place to rest for the night. In the absence of a house, I think a car might be our best bet.”
“Do you think it’s…big enough?” she replied dubiously.
“I was hoping for a fancy hotel,” he said in a chilly tone, “but they’re all booked for the night.”
This silenced Anna for the moment, though she continued to peer through the window with a dubious stare as if wondering how they were both going to fit inside.
Brad had been thinking hard about this ever since he spotted the first car.
“We could fold out the two front seats,” he said, “or you could take the front and I could take the back. It won’t be the snuggest sleep of your life, but it’s better than sleeping in the snow.”
“I’m not opposed to sleeping in a car,” said Anna. “But how are we going to stay warm?”
Brad had been wondering this, too. He had slept in cars before, in the middle of winter, and unless the engine was running and the heat was turned on, they were only marginally warmer than the air outside. But the car couldn’t be working, or it wouldn’t have been abandoned.
“Look, it’s the best idea I’ve got,” he said finally. “We’ll sleep with our coats on, and maybe that will be enough.”
“If only we had a dog or something,” Anna said. “I read somewhere that travelers in the polar regions used to sleep with two or three dogs on their beds at night to keep warm without the benefit of a heater.”
Brad thought briefly of Remington, the retriever who’d kept him warm and his spirits up during his search for Anna and the kids. As good as it would have been to have him here, he was glad to have left the dog in the safety of Vanessa’s place. He’d been through enough.
“No dogs here, sorry,” he said to Anna. “The only bodies we’ve got are each other’s.”
He would have been thrilled, Brad reflected as he lit a fire in the snow, if Anna had come to him a few months ago while they were living together and suggested sleeping together to keep warm. Probably he would have taken it as her way of expressing romantic interest.
They hadn’t talked about their feelings since shortly after that first aborted encounter, the night Brad had brought out the bottle of Scotch, but it was a sure sign of how much things had shifted between them in the ensuing months that they were now talking about
spooning not from any mutual attraction but because they might die otherwise.
Brad wasn’t sure the concept of romantic attraction retained much meaning in an age when the choice of one’s partner was so limited. Before the collapse, during the internet era, a person was able to choose a romantic partner out of all the world’s available singles. Now, with the population thoroughly gutted, with few means of travel and no means of meeting people online, his prospects were limited to women he met in person. It made the notion of “soul mates” seem like a sentimental relic of a past that was already rapidly being forgotten.
He had always hoped that eventually he would find someone with whom he shared a spooky connection, some thrilling intellectual and emotional chemistry that was uniquely theirs and that would be the envy of other couples. He had spent much of his twenties fruitlessly seeking this woman. He had dated an aspiring actress, the lead singer of a power-punk girl band, and even entertained a brief fling with the wife of one his college professors, though he was embarrassed to think of it now.
Anna wasn’t like any of those women. He had thought, once, that perhaps the two of them would end up together, but it appeared increasingly unlikely that that would ever be the case. If they were destined to be nothing more than friends, he decided, he could live with that. But first they had to live.
Once he had finished building the fire, Brad walked over to where Anna was seated in the back of the Civic, droplets of ice forming on the fringes of her coat sleeves.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said, “and I think we ought to get that wound cleaned now rather than later. I don’t want to wait another day and risk something happening to you.” He didn’t have to specify what he meant.
Anna winced, as if sensing he was right but not relishing the prospect. “You said it wasn’t safe to perform a medical procedure out here in the snow—that the wound might get infected.”
“I know,” Brad said, “but the back of this car might be the best we can hope for right now. The roof will keep the snow out, and the seats are sufficiently dry that you won’t have to worry about water leaking into the cut and infecting it.”
Anna reached instinctively for her leg, somehow looking even paler than she had done before. “Do you have anything that might act as a painkiller? Alcohol or anything?”
“Anna, I’m going to need you to trust me on this.” The old tone of impatience was returning to Brad’s voice. “Tell me, what was the most painful experience you ever had?”
“Uh, when I was twelve, I had to get a root canal,” said Anna. “But they gave me—”
“And you survived that, and you’ll survive this,” Brad cut in. “When it was happening I bet it seemed like the pain was never going to end. But then it was over and you never had to think about it again.”
“I had nightmares about it for the next year,” Anna replied.
Brad was beginning to think he maybe hadn’t chosen the best example. “Look, you’ll be thanking me in another ten years when you’re not dead. Either we clean the wound out now or we risk an infection that could kill you. Either you choose to suffer now or you suffer later.”
Anna went quiet at that, and Brad was sure that she was holding back tears. Something inside him softened.
“Look. I wish Lee hadn’t shot you in the leg,” he said, “and if I could go back twelve hours and stop him from doing it, I would. But there’s no point in wanting to change the past unless you can figure out a way to do it. I can guarantee you that as painful as this is going to be, it will be over in fifteen to twenty minutes, at most. And then—”
“Then what?” asked Anna, sensing his hesitation.
“Then we’ll try and survive till morning, and go from there.”
Judging from Anna’s hesitation, Brad had assumed that cleaning the wound was going to be an arduous task in which she screamed and moaned and dug her nails into the soft flesh of his arms while he struggled to hold down the injured leg long enough to clean it. But, having learned that she would be given no pain relief, Anna seemed to have lost the will to resist.
Instead, she retired to the back of the car and lay against the passenger-side door awaiting his arrival, reminding her of a young caribou Brad had once seen in an animal documentary who gave up in defeat and allowed itself to be eaten by a pursuing polar wolf.
This curious display of resignation and resolve softened Brad, and the frustrations that had been building between them ever since he announced that he was going to clean the wound again slowly ebbed.
To make the task easier, he did his best to distract her, first by telling stories from his days working as a vet in Bangor. Anna struggled to listen; she fought back tears of pain; but he could tell she wasn’t sufficiently interested and cast around for a new topic. Realizing with a shock of embarrassment that although they had lived together for some time he still knew almost nothing about her, he asked her questions about herself, her hobbies, and her life before the disaster as they occurred to him. What was her favorite color? (Velvety crimson.) What was the best meal she had ever eaten? (Baked salmon paired with sauvignon blanc.) When did she first kiss a boy? (Anna glared at him and hesitated for about half a second before saying, “Fifteen.”) Had she liked it? (“He kissed me, actually, and no.”)
He kept interviewing her as he applied the new bandage, torn from another strip of his thin T-shirt, and although Anna let out a few panicked gasps, and although at one point she nearly kneed him in the shin as he stooped over her, the whole procedure only took about fifteen minutes, at the end of which Brad rose with a paternal smile and said, “There, now. You’re all done. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
He was teasing, mostly: performing an impromptu surgery in the back of an abandoned car with no anesthetics was about as bad as it gets. But after Anna had registered the fact that he wasn’t going to be digging into her wound again for the rest of the night, and that a fresh bandage had been added, and that she wasn’t in any immediate danger of dying—which admittedly took a minute or two—she turned him a look of surprised gratitude. “You didn’t have to go through the trouble,” she said softly. “But thank you.”
“No need to thank me,” he said quietly, though his heart gave an unexpected leap at the sight of her face looking back at his in relief.
Before long, they were turning in for the night. Having talked it over, they had decided that if they folded out the rear seat there should be enough room for the two of them to sleep in relative comfort. Brad would sleep with his arms around Anna, so that they might stay warm during a night when the temperatures were threatening to descend into the upper twenties.
Brad had built the fire close to the back of the car, and the flames illuminated Anna’s dirt-smudged face as she lay back against the reclining seat using her coat as a makeshift blanket.
“The fire ought to last us the rest of the night,” Brad said as he sat down beside her.
“What about the noise you heard earlier?” asked Anna. “The hunter?”
“I guess if he sees us, he sees us.” Brad had been thinking about it and didn’t see that they had any other options. “Maybe we’ve put some distance between us over the past six hours or so. I don’t know. I just know that without the fire, we might go to sleep tonight and not wake up, and I don’t want to chance that.”
“At least we have the axe,” Anna said, “in case he does show up.”
Brad murmured his agreement, even as inwardly he questioned what she expected an axe to do against an experienced hunter wielding a high-powered weapon. He didn’t voice his disagreement, of course; he had no option at this point but to maintain the pretense of optimism.
Quietly, though, after Anna fell asleep that night, Brad slipped the pistol out of his ankle holster and placed it into the pocket of his coat.
Chapter 5
Anna had long since fallen asleep by the time Brad began to nod off. They lay there awkwardly for about half an hour, adjusting their bodies until they had found the
least uncomfortable positions for sleeping in. At one point she complained that his elbow was digging painfully into her ribs; Brad apologized, but she continued to wriggle anxiously.
With mounting impatience Brad pulled away, his face warmed by the glow of the fire that blazed on the snow-covered roadway. Anna turned sullenly over, hooking her arms into the sleeves of her coat, and Brad waited for a respectful minute before lying back down and gingerly placing his arms back around her waist.
It was the type of intimate gesture that in any other context would have presaged a night of passionate lovemaking. Months before, when the cabin still stood, that might have been the case, but Brad knew they were far past that now.
He wondered how differently things might have gone if they had made love that night at the cabin. Maybe the experience would have bonded them; maybe it would have eased her insecurities; maybe she wouldn’t have been tempted to flee into the snow a few days later. Perhaps she would have fled all the same.
When he finally fell asleep that night after listening for nearly an hour to the rise and fall of Anna’s breathing and the soft pounding of her heart, he dreamt that several days had passed and they were still walking along the same highway they had been following for much of the afternoon.
As they made their way down the main street of what had once been a thriving industrial town atop a high hill, Brad spotted what were unmistakably lights in the distance. Thinking he must have been hallucinating, he waved Anna over.
“Do you see that?” he asked, feeling perplexed and excited. “Tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”
She didn’t have to ask what she was supposed to be looking at. “That isn’t just one or two lights; that’s a whole town.”
“Within walking distance, no less.” The light of the setting sun shone on his face with a dull salmon color. “Less than a day or two ahead of us at the rate we’ve been going.”