by Stone, Kyla
She’d never seen Gran cry before. Not once. Not until last night.
After Quinn had returned late last night on Christmas Eve, half-frozen and numb with grief, they’d sat in the kitchen beside the crackling woodstove, Gran weeping and Quinn heartbroken, Gran holding her like she hadn’t done since Quinn was little.
This morning, the old woman went about her business mechanically, barely speaking, slow and precise like if she made an error, her heart would crack open, and all her sorrow would pour out in an endless flood.
Quinn felt the exact same way. The women in her family were aces at anger and irritation, peevishness and snark. Not so much with the hard emotions. The real ones.
Not like Gramps. He was the one who kissed skinned knees and mended hurt feelings. Those rough and calloused but gentle hands, always ready for a hug or tender shoulder-squeeze.
The ATV grew louder. Quinn’s stomach knotted in apprehension. She couldn’t see it roaring up the road, but she didn’t need to. She could already picture it in her mind’s eye: an apple-red 1988 Honda Fourtrax 300 4x4, grimy with dirt and snow.
It was Ray Shultz’s four-wheeler. Her mother’s boyfriend. But Octavia drove it as often as he did.
The engine switched off. Her mother’s familiar voice shrieked, “Quinn! I know you’re here! Get the hell out here!”
Quinn grabbed the squirrel by its tail with one hand and swiped chunks of snow, shards of bark, and broken twigs from her insulated snow pants and the front of her coat with the other as she entered Gran’s house through the rear door.
The kitchen was empty but for the cats. Thor and Odin were curled up on the rug in front of the woodstove, sleeping. Loki, the naughty tabby cat, was perched in the middle of the table, licking his paws. He tilted his furry head and gave Quinn a smug look, like he wasn’t even sorry he’d gotten caught.
Quinn motioned at him. “Git! Before I make you regret it!”
Loki gave a disgruntled meow, flicked his tail dismissively, and took his sweet time strolling to the table’s edge and hopping down. Quinn rolled her eyes.
Gran was out behind the shed, working on the winter garden where she grew hardy vegetables like turnips, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower, onions, garlic, and Swiss chard. She grew everything in cold frames—portable wooden frames with clear, rigid polycarbonate covers.
They were unheated but captured solar energy and sheltered the crops from the elements. The insides were lined with aluminum foil to boost light and heat retention. That morning, Quinn had helped Gran brush the snow from the frames to prevent ice buildup.
Hopefully, Gran stayed out there. On top of everything else, she didn’t need to deal with Octavia, too.
Quinn set the squirrel on the newspaper-covered counter. The fire crackled and popped in Gran’s woodstove. The kitchen was warm. Too warm. Heat prickled her chilled skin.
She unzipped her coat, took off her hat and gloves, and stuffed them in her pockets. Gran had both a fireplace in the living room and the old woodstove in the kitchen. The woodstove gave off more heat, so they’d been staying in the kitchen as much as possible.
Quinn’s mother strode into the kitchen from the living room, the front door still slightly ajar. Her clomping boots trailed clots of snow behind her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Trepidation filled her, but she kept her chin high, her eyes hard. “Nothing.”
Octavia Riley was all raw agitated energy and wild eyes. She was painfully skinny, with long knobby limbs, gaunt cheeks, and ratty hair. Quinn had hardly any memories of her mother other than as a strung-out junkie.
Octavia leaned against the fridge, smoking a cigarette with a shaky hand. “You didn’t come home last night. I didn’t even know where you were. We were worried sick!”
Octavia hadn’t even bothered to remember that yesterday was Quinn’s birthday. Anger and hurt blazed in her chest. “No, you weren’t. You just wanted someone to clean up after you.”
Octavia’s dark eyes flashed. She took an aggressive step toward Quinn. Her hands were shaking. Her entire body was humming with tension and need like a struck wire.
Quinn didn’t flinch. She’d learned not to flinch long ago.
Her mother was mostly piss and vinegar, all bark with little bite. Just an occasional slap or yank of Quinn’s hair. She was strong and frenzied when she was high, but Quinn was usually faster.
The boyfriend, on the other hand, was another matter entirely.
Quinn crossed her arms in front of her chest. She was tired of this. Sick of the same twisted, toxic dance. Her grandfather was dead. The grid was down. Everything had turned inside out and upside down.
Everything else had changed, but Octavia was still the same pathetic, hurtful, loser addict she’d always been. Not even the end of the world could change that.
19
Quinn
Day Two
“In case you haven’t noticed, everything’s going to hell,” Quinn said with more sass than she felt. “I’m taking that as my notice to quit.”
“Don’t you talk to me that way!” Octavia jabbed her cigarette at Quinn’s face. Her features contorted in seething contempt. “Don’t you dare. You ungrateful little brat!”
It had hurt, once upon a time. All the screaming and name-calling. Quinn told herself it didn’t hurt anymore. She wouldn’t let it hurt anymore. She’d built her walls to be thick and impenetrable—and they should be. They were constructed of scar tissue.
She stared her mother down, meeting those hard, red-rimmed eyes head-on. Octavia looked like she hadn’t bathed in weeks. The smell of smoke didn’t cover the unwashed stink emanating from her ratty clothes.
Octavia blinked first. She shoved her lank, greasy hair behind her ears with a trembling hand and took a drag of her cigarette.
“What do you want?” Quinn asked sharply. “What are you even doing here?”
“We’re starving! What do you think? We need food. And we need stuff to trade.” To exchange for more drugs, but Octavia didn’t need to say that. It was a given.
She strode over to the pantry and flung open the doors. Home-canned applesauce, peaches, freeze-dried fruits, and sealed containers of flour, beans, and grains lined Gran’s well-stocked shelves.
Octavia moved to the sink and crouched to open the cabinet underneath. She yanked out a couple of large trash bags. “Help me, baby girl.”
Quinn didn’t move. Of course, Octavia wouldn’t have any food after just a day. She never bothered to go to the grocery store. It was Quinn who always had to scrounge for a meal.
“What are you doing? Get over here.”
“Hell, no. No freaking way. I’m not helping you steal from Gran.”
Octavia rolled her eyes and started stuffing jars into the trash bag herself. She was careless. The jars clanked against each other, nearly breaking. “What’s all this flour and bags of beans nonsense? I can’t eat that. Where’s the rest?”
“The rest of what?”
“Don’t sass me, girl! Where’s all the food? I know how much Mom and Dad have hidden away. Don’t try to hide it from me.” Octavia’s face twisted with loathing. “Mom always did like to keep everything to herself and leave the scraps for me.”
“That’s not true.”
“They still have you wrapped around their little fingers, do they?” Octavia gave a malicious grin, revealing her rotting teeth, and waved the cigarette around, spreading the smoke she knew Gran hated. It always made Gramps cough and irritated his lungs.
Quinn’s chest constricted. Gramps wasn’t here anymore. He was still stuck at that stupid ski resort he’d insisted on, a frozen popsicle.
He was no one’s priority now, not with the world going to hell in a handbasket. It was one of his favorite phrases. And now it might actually be true.
“Octavia.”
Her mother ignored her.
“Octavia!”
Finally, she looked up in exasperation. “What!”
“Gram
ps is . . .” The words tore at Quinn’s tongue like barbed wire. Just saying it out loud hurt. “Gramps is dead.”
That finally reached Octavia.
She went rigid, her twitchy hands lowering to her sides. Smoke from her cigarette swirled lazily toward the ceiling. “What?”
“His pacemaker stopped working when everything else stopped. He was stuck outside in the cold. It put his body under a lot of stress. His heart just . . . failed.”
That was only part of it, but it was the only part that mattered.
Octavia’s gaze skipped frantically around the small kitchen as if searching for something to anchor herself, something to hold on to. Her reddened eyes grew shiny. She scrubbed at her face, nearly burning her cheek with the cigarette. “I—I didn’t know that.”
Quinn didn’t pity her. She had no pity left. Grief and resentment and anger took up all the space in her chest, expanding until it was hard to breathe. “You didn’t even ask how Gramps or Gran was. You don’t care. You’ve never cared!”
Octavia flinched. She stubbed the cigarette out on the newspapers covering the counter and left the butt next to the dead squirrel. She stood there, trembling, just staring down at the squirrel.
In that moment, the ravages of her drug habit fell away. She looked years younger. Lost and vulnerable.
From old pictures, Quinn knew Octavia used to be beautiful, her ratty hair once long and black and glossy, her patchy skin a healthy olive tone, her yellowed and decaying teeth once straight and white when she smiled, her dark eyes that matched Quinn’s own shining and healthy.
Octavia and Quinn had both taken after Gramps’ Vietnamese heritage, though their skin was lighter. Quinn’s father was a Chinese-American adopted by English parents as a baby, so she looked more Asian than her mother did.
Quinn had very few pictures of her father, and zero memories. He’d stuck around long enough for the one-year marriage to end in fiery disaster, decided parenthood wasn’t his thing, and took off to work oil rigs in Alaska.
Quinn had his last name and not much else. No one in Fall Creek had heard from him since. And his parents—her biological grandparents—had moved away soon after.
The only family Quinn had left was her mother and Gran. And Octavia barely counted.
Tears leaked down Octavia’s face. “I—I should have been here. I didn’t even get to say goodbye . . . I—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry . . .”
Quinn let the anger flare through her, let it drive out the grief and sadness. Octavia was sorry now? Of course she was. It was far too little, far too late.
Her expression hardened. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You never think. And you’re never here.”
Not that Quinn wanted her around. Octavia’s presence made her edgy and tense. She always counted down the seconds until she could escape her mother and the ridiculous pretense that they loved each other or were any semblance of a family.
And yet, an inexplicable mix of resentment and longing tangled in her gut. What she wanted was the mother Octavia was supposed to be, not the piss-poor version she’d been stuck with.
Octavia snapped out of it. Whatever she’d been feeling—sorrow, remorse—it was gone in an instant. Her eyes dimmed. “That’s your problem, isn’t it? Always blaming people. Always so ugly. Ray was right about you.”
“Ray’s a hairy-arsed moron.”
“Always the smartass, aren’t you?” Octavia snatched up the heavy-duty trash bag filled with Gran’s stuff and slung it over her shoulder. “I’ll be back for more.”
“You better not.”
Without another word, Octavia turned and stomped through the kitchen and living room, threw open the front door, and slammed it behind her.
Quinn stood in the middle of the warm kitchen, alone but for the cats wrapping themselves around her ankles. She blinked back the sudden wetness in her eyes. “Merry freaking Christmas to you, too.”
20
Noah
Day Two
The board room was plain and unadorned with beige walls, beige carpet, and a long rectangular table in the center. About ten people sat around the table.
Having lived in this town most of his life, Noah recognized everyone, including the police chief, several police officers, the rotary club president, and several local business owners.
Township superintendent Rosamond Sinclair sat at the head of the table. She was a short, slender woman with blonde hair styled into a sharp bob at her chin, accentuating her strong cheekbones and attractive features.
A good-looking woman in her early fifties, Rosamond was a careful, precise woman. Nothing was ever said carelessly. Every item of clothing, every gesture and mood calibrated, deliberately chosen.
Rosamond gestured to Noah with manicured fingers. “Come in, come in. Julian tells me you were at Bittersweet yesterday when the power went out. I’m sure it was quite the adventure getting back.”
An image of Quinn’s frozen grandfather flashed through Noah’s mind, followed immediately by Brock in agony and shock, dying right before their eyes.
Julian chose a chair near his mother and flopped into it. Stiffly, Noah took a seat beside him. “Something like that.”
Rosamond flashed him a smile. “Glad you and Milo made it back safe.”
Noah had spent much of his teens in and out of her house, spending the night on the floor of Julian’s room, raiding the fridge at midnight, sneaking pot in her basement.
Of course, that was before he and Julian reformed themselves and became cops.
Though the Sinclair family came from money and small-town influence—Rosamond’s father had served as a judge, and both of her uncles were township superintendents in the ’90s and early 2000s—she’d never looked down on him or treated him as anything other than family.
Noah’s mother had taken off to live with a boyfriend in Seattle when Noah was still in middle school. His accountant father had been convicted for money-laundering and tossed in prison when he was nineteen, but he’d been a crap father long before that. The Sinclair family had become his de facto family.
“Thank you all again for coming at such short notice. And Christmas Day at that.” Rosamond motioned around the room. “I asked our trusted law enforcement officials to be present along with Chief Briggs. I’m sure you all understand why.”
Heads nodded soberly around the table. People’s faces were tense and drawn.
“We may have an enormous crisis on our hands,” Rosamond said, “and I, for one, wish to be ready to meet it.”
“It’s just a power outage,” Chief Briggs insisted. In his early sixties, he boasted a cantankerous personality and a wrinkled bulldog face to match. “A little different than usual, but nothing we can’t handle.”
The department had four full-time officers, two part-time officers, and ten reserve officers, who were usually only called in for extra security at parades, county fairs, and other community events.
The other officer in the room besides Noah, Julian, and Chief Briggs was Jose Reynoso, a burly former Marine in his forties. He was built like a tank and knew how to fight like one, too. He was quiet and kept to himself, but he was loyal as hell.
“I didn’t say we couldn’t handle it,” Rosamond said evenly, “only that we need to be prepared. As you all are aware, a serious power outage has affected our town. And not only our town.”
“How far-reaching is this thing?” asked Dave Farris.
“I was in Kalamazoo County yesterday,” Noah said. “Sixty miles north. The same thing happened to us, and at the same time, too. A little after noon.”
Jose Reynoso scratched his jaw. “The only radio stations coming through are the canned emergency responses from the governor’s office. We’re in the dark here, literally and figuratively.”
“Which leads us to believe that this may be statewide,” Rosamond said. “At least.”
“What about the rest of Southwest Michigan?” Noah asked. “Grand Rapids? Detroit? Kalamazoo? Has anyone heard fr
om the governor personally?”
Rosamond shook her head. “No. Nothing. We haven’t been able to make contact via the regular channels with anyone. Two of our part-time officers, Samantha Perez and Oren Truitt, volunteered to take snowmobiles to Lansing to make physical contact with state government officials until we can get communications up and running.”
Briggs grunted dismissively.
“This isn’t normal, Briggs,” Dave Farris said. In his early sixties, Dave was a generous, loud, boisterous Caucasian man who loved fishing, his ham radio, and sports cars. “Our vehicles aren’t working. Our phones are dead. What kind of power outage ever effected any of that before?”
“Something’s going on,” said Annette King, principal of Fall Creek High school. She was in her late forties, an avid jogger with a compact, athletic physique and silver hair cut in a short pixie style. Annette was normally a confident, self-assured woman, but her face was drawn and tense. “My daughter is on vacation in Cancún. I can’t reach her.”
Chief Briggs crossed his arms over his burly chest. “They’ll figure it out and get things up and running in a few days. No reason to get everyone’s panties in a wad.”
“I’m sorry, Annette.” Rosamond intervened before Chief Briggs could respond. “Some of you know that my own son didn’t make it back to town last night.”
Noah looked around for Julian’s half-brother, Gavin Pike. While not an official councilmember, he seemed to always be around, whispering in his mother’s ear, skulking in the shadows, smiling that silky fake smile of his.
Noah had never liked the guy. Not since high school, when there were rumors that he’d sprained that girl’s arm on a date gone wrong. Noah had never been able to pin anything on him, much as he’d wanted to.
Noah didn’t want to worry about him right now. He was thinking about Quinn’s theory. He needed to hear it from someone else to make it real. He spread out his hands. “What exactly happened? Does anyone know?”