The Freeze (Barren Trilogy, Book 3)

by Holly Hook

  I sat up a little. Someone was moving downstairs. Their footsteps were creaky. The whole house was old and full of history. I heard the crackle of the emergency radio. We'd need that for the road, to tell us about how horrible the conditions were going to be on the way to New York.

  “Jerome,” I said.

  He blinked.

  “We need to get up. Someone will be knocking on the door soo--”

  “Hey,” Alana said, opening our door just a crack and sticking her head into the room. “Gina got out the—Laney!”

  She backed out and closed the door when she spotted me and Jerome under the blanket together, but not before her mouth dropped open in shock and redness rushed into her cheeks. Even in the darkness it was obvious. My eyes were adjusting and it wasn't as late as I thought.

  “Did Alana just see us?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  We both sat up. I raised my voice. “Alana, we both have our clothes on. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  She opened the door again. She was giggling. “Come on,” she said, composing herself. She shot me a look and I knew what it meant. I'd be telling all as soon as I got the chance. If we survived the night, that was.

  Jerome and I didn't speak much and neither did Alana as she pulled us both downstairs, walking backwards down the old steps and managing to not die on the way. She grinned with amusement that I hadn't seen in what felt like weeks. My old friend was coming back piece by piece and I was happy to see it. She was letting her hope grow back. I might be improving, too. Mine was struggling to poke through the dirt, but it was there...a little.

  Waiting for the boot of death to stomp on it, I reminded myself. I'd been tricked before.

  Downstairs, everyone was gathered around the emergency radio. Mr. Doomsayer was still on air, or maybe it was a different guy because the original had to sleep. This guy sounded way too comfortable while he droned on about dropping temperatures. He said something about the dust storms out west beginning to calm down and blow off into the ocean as the weather got worse in the north. I thought I heard something about acid rain, but the sizzling of more fried eggs from the kitchen cut over it and chased that away for a bit. Alana pulled us past the living room, to where Christina was frying eggs over the gas burners. The blue flames cast a bit of light on the surrounding area and on a spice rack that might never get used again. “Night,” Christina said. “I know I should say good morning, but that doesn't make sense anymore.”

  Alana let go of our arms. “Did the radio say something about acid rain?” I asked.

  “The guy's been talking about it for the last twenty minutes,” Christina said. She wasn't looking at any of us as if we were already dead. That was a great sign. “Pretty much all the crops are supposed to fail this year. Well, the ones that aren't in a little strip of land in the South where it's not supposed to get too cold and where the hurricanes can't reach too well. They're saying farmers might be able to grow some stuff in Texas in the next few years.”

  Panic seized my insides. We weren't going to run out of food right now, but we would...soon. Months went by quickly when you were waiting for death. “Did they say there are going to be any other safe areas?” I asked.

  Christina flipped an egg. “Of course not,” she said. “They're not leaving us any instructions. They're happy to tell us that we're all going to die of cold and starvation, though, and that we should just wait for it.”

  I looked at Jerome. Even Alana frowned. It was because the people in charge wanted the resources for themselves. The rest of us were left to nature and nature wasn't nice. Only the government and the military would know where the safest places were to ride this out. I still hadn't decided where we should go once we found our people. If we found them, that was. We'd talked about islands, forests, the whole thing. Other people would be heading there, too. Maybe this family had already done so. We were the late ones, the ones who had missed the lifeboats.

  “I believe it,” I said. “Well, we have our truck with our food.”

  “Looters, though,” Jerome said.

  I agreed. “We can't take the truck all the way into New York City.”

  I thought and thought. Maybe there would be a bus we could steal on the way there. It was almost time to hit the road and we'd have to start our journey in the truck. I parted the curtains and looked outside. The ground just looked wet now and the cows were coming out from under the trees to munch on it. I spotted a couple of chickens over on the edge of the field. The grass looked...sad, almost brownish, even though that might have been the eerie light. But the rain had stopped. I couldn't believe the relief. If the roads were thawed out, the drive might not be as terrifying tonight.

  I might even find Dad in the next twenty-four hours.

  It was hard to eat my food. Anything could happen. The moment of truth might be coming, but I choked down the eggs and tried not to throw them up. I'd gotten sick plenty of times in the last couple of weeks, but this was a different kind. This was nerves. I was a wreck and I had to lead us.

  “Let me drive,” Jerome offered.

  “Okay,” I said. There was no way I could transport everyone like this. Their safety had to come first. But it felt wrong not taking the wheel and the responsibility. I felt like the worst heel in the world.

  I really was trying to punish myself. Or redeem myself in an impossible situation.

  We all moved out into the living room as the light got darker and darker. Tony and Mina had gone through the closets and pulled out a bunch of coats. I was so relieved to see them, even though I had never worn a full winter coat outside of a vacation in my life. The new doomsayer kept going on about crop failure and coming global food shortages. Even halving the population wouldn't solve the problem. In ten years, only five to ten percent of the original population would survive to see the ozone layer make a comeback and the weather correct itself.

  I ran the math in my head.

  Five to ten percent of the original population was expected to survive. Half around the world were already dead, mostly from the radiation and some from being burned. That meant, what? About ten to twenty percent of us would make it in the next ten years. We each had a fifteen percent chance of staying alive.

  One or two of us might make it long enough to see our late twenties.

  It was terrifying. I hadn't thought about my own death very much. Not yet. I'd mostly been thinking about it for the others. But now I couldn't avoid it, now that I knew what the odds were. These were probably the final months and years of my life.

  Gina turned off the radio. I could tell from everyone's faces and the way they were shifting in their coats that nobody wanted to hear any more. Christina stood in the doorway of the living room, holding back tears. I had never really liked her, but right then, I felt sorry for her, sorry for everyone else, and sorry for myself.

  “Well,” I said, “We had better get going.”

  * * * * *

  I stopped feeling guilty about letting Jerome drive the truck once we had backed out of the barn, confirmed that the helicopter wasn't waiting there to bomb us, and got back on the road. The conditions weren't nearly as bad tonight, but more cars were on the road, headed west to better areas. Maybe people were flocking to Texas where food was still supposed to grow. The scientists must have figured out where the rain would be the most acidic. Or they were lying.

  I relaxed a bit while Jerome weaved around a crash on the expressway. Someone must have crashed there last night and abandoned their vehicles. Maybe they had even hitchhiked to get out of the coming sun. The truck was wedged up against the guardrail with a minivan squeezed up against it like they had both been trying to move away from something monstrous coming down the road.

  Jerome kept his eyes on the sky around us. It was dark tonight. There were no airplanes. No lights up there and no stars. It might be years before those came out again.

  And almost no one was headed the direction we were. It made sense. Almost everyone on the west side of th
e country had died. There was no reason for anyone to be coming from that direction.

  We crossed the New York border about an hour later. My heart fluttered as we passed the sign, which emerged from the darkness and vanished again. We'd taken another step towards our goal. The towns were getting closer together, too, like we were arleady on the outskirts of the city. That would come before morning. Jerome had placed the ticking wristwatch up on the dashboard, the one he'd taken from the dead hotel manager back in Arizona. I grabbed it and checked the time. It was twelve-thirty at night. We still had at least five hours before we had to think of shelter.

  A single car passed us on the left. The traffic was getting a bit thicker now, but there were still occasional cars in the ditch, abandoned from last night. The expressway was dry. Merciful. I'd never been so grateful for that and would always be grateful for dry roads.

  Another truck merged on, a truck with a picture of fresh produce on the side. Jerome got over to let it on, leaving me facing the driver of the truck. There were two men inside, dressed in army fatigues. They both stared straight ahead. They were on duty.

  “Get down!” I shouted.

  Jerome ducked as much as he could as I squashed down as much as I could in my seat. Jerome slowed—I could feel the engine doing the same—and the other truck blazed past us, its produce vanishing into the dark. I didn't let my breath out until the back of the truck grew small in front of us and kept going.

  “That was close,” he said. “They're really raiding food out here. More stores, I suppose. Maybe we blend in.”

  “We might have to get some fatigues of our own,” I joked.

  “They won't believe we're old enough to be in the military,” Jerome said. “I can't even grow any facial hair yet. Embarrassing.”

  I pulled out the map I had raided from a gas station several days ago. The state of New York spread out in front of me in green and red lines, splotchy forests and square city limits. The city itself had its own little box in the corner of the map. I turned on the flashlight and searched around for Dad's avenue. I found it after about twenty minutes of looking. His hotel was on the edges of Manhattan, close to the Hudson River and packed in among lot of other square city blocks. How did people ever find their way around these cities? I'd never been in a large one before. Mom and Dad always took me out for vacations in nature. They hated urban life.

  “I think I found where Dad might be,” I said, pointing to Chuck Avenue.

  Jerome smiled at me. “That's awesome. Hopefully he's there.”

  “A lot could have happened,” I said. It had been about two weeks since the pulse, maybe more. The chances of Dad being in that hotel room were probably very slim by now. If transportation had crapped out in New York by some chance, he might be hanging out there, but what if he had gone back to Colton?

  No. Dad had been spending the past year running from death and reality, going on every business trip his company posted. He wasn't going to run back to it anytime soon. There wasn't supposed to be a chance of me surviving, anyway. Dad must have assumed I was gone the moment the news hit about the radiation.

  We passed an exit that had a hospital H on the sign. There were tons of abandoned cars on the ramp along with the hospital itself, which rose into the darkness. Its lights were on, but not all of them, like the place was running on emergency power. Even from down here on the highway I could see that cars had parked anywhere they could around the building to get to medical help. I had to remember that the radiation had struck here, too—just not as badly. Only some people had died. Others had made it. It must have depended on where you were when it hit.

  And there were a couple of bodies lying off to the side of the ramp. One was an older woman lying with her arm strewn over her head. Another was a young, very skinny man who might not have been healthy to begin with. A couple of crows took off into flight when we passed.

  “I hope the city isn't this bad,” Jerome said. “We don't have that much farther to go.”

  I turned the map in my hands. “We need to merge onto this other highway in about five miles,” I told him. “South. Down this highway 87 or whatever.”

  “Got it,” Jerome said.

  “That will take us right to Manhattan,” I finished.

  We were close—very close. We'd be there by time the night was over.

  Then, it was the moment of truth.

  Chapter Five

  The area didn't get too population dense until we had turned south and driven for about an hour. The semi could do a decent speed, but it didn't go as fast as some of the cars around us.

  And then, traffic started to get heavy.

  “Great,” Jerome said, hitting the brakes.

  It was a river of brake lights up ahead. I hadn't imagined that so many people would be left alive in the world, especially when we crawled out of the Visitor Center in our radiation suits.

  Apparently, everyone was trying to get into New York City to find their missing relatives. I should have known.

  We stopped in traffic right behind another food truck—probably the same one with the soldiers—and sat there for what felt like minutes. Then we crept forward, stopped a little, and moved again. There was another exit in two miles but it felt like forever before we would get there.

  “Well, this is fun,” Jerome said. “I forgot that in other parts of the country there are things called traffic.”

  I looked at a car that was right below where I was sitting. There were two parents and three kids squeezed into the back. The kids looked like they were fighting over something. At least they seemed to be healthy. Maybe the kids had been inside a good brick building when the radiation came down, but the dad who was driving looked like Death had its hand on his shoulder and was sucking the life out of him. His eyes were sunken and he wore a dingy T-shirt like he spent most of his time working outside. Yes. The radiation had affected people outdoors more than indoors over here.

  I hoped the guy survived and those kids wouldn't have to hold his hand while he died.

  We sat in traffic so long that I memorized the license plate number on the truck in front of us. I had to go to the bathroom but the rest areas on this side of the country weren't entirely clean. They weren't as full of bodies over here, but the next one on the map was fifteen miles away and we weren't going to get there anytime soon. I checked the map to see where the next exit went, but Jerome held up his hand and stopped me before I could. “The next exit is not a good idea,” he said. “Look.”

  I had to lean to see past the truck ahead. There was a whole line of cars and semis trying to get up the ramp and there looked like there was a leftover accident on the top. Another semi had flipped over—probably from the night before on the ice—and blocked most of the way. Some people had pulled off to the side to wait for someone to come tow it away. But the tow trucks weren't out doing anything anymore. The drivers were probably trying to survive with their families. Civilization was closed until further notice.

  “We keep going, then,” I said. “Maybe the next exit will have something better. It's...oh, god. Ten miles up the road. You sure we can't drive across the median and turn around?”

  Jerome looked. We were in the right lane and I couldn't see him getting this huge truck over there. Cars were so packed there was barely space to walk in between them. The median had a metal guardrail that we were sure to get stuck on. The desginers of this road wanted to make sure that no one got out of the slaughter chute.

  I checked the time.

  Two AM.

  We had three hours before the sun came up. It wasn't close enough to panic yet, was it?

  The semi's windows were huge, enough to let in the deadly rays as they poked through the smog. We had no rain to protect us now.

  The license plate number in front of us got so familiar that I swore I would see it when I slept. If I slept again. We were all trapped and the family pulled over to the side of the expressway, got out, and walked into the darkness together as I watched.
They vanished into the dark without so much as a flashlight to guide them. Someone else honked their horn. People were starting to panic. The get out of the sun rule was well established around here, too. It wasn't just Arizona.

  Another car pulled off to the side and the couple in it abandoned it on the side of the road. They, too, walked off into the night.

  “Should we pack it in?” Jerome asked. “People are fleeing for shelter. Or parking until they know they can get to shelter.”

  “Not yet,” I said. I thought about the food in the back of the truck, possibly months' worth. We couldn't give it up unless there was no other way. Parking would mean someone would take it, guaranteed, even if they had to hot wire the truck somehow. A house was lit in the distance, far back from the expressway. Someone had a generator. It seemed like only the power companies had decided to stop working. Or the grid had been knocked out.

  Two thirty.

  Three AM.

  I was starting to get nervous. More people gave up, parked on the shoulder, and abandoned their cars to run for shelter. We passed a little town that had no ramp to it—and the most parked cars. There were no lights on here except for a few candles in windows.

  Three-thirty.

  We were still five miles from the ramp. The town ahead would be full by time we got there, but after that would be the start of the urban area, of the place where the traffic would get really terrible.

  Unless it was daytime. I got an idea.

  “I think we should keep going,” I told Jerome. “We have coats. We can cover ourselves. Tony and Mina found some gloves and I think they're in the back. If we stop for a bit, I'll go back and get them.”

  “We can't,” Jerome said. “There's nowhere to pull over. If we open the back of the truck, everyone's going to see our food.”

  He was right. I knew it was wrong to hog all the food, but this was an emergency situation. Natural selection meant thinking for yourself and no one else. Well, ourselves. Stopping wasn't an option right now.