First Drop
Page 41
“Got your clothes together yet?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Go, Naomi, right now, and help Cole pack, too. I think your brother got distracted.”
“We aren’t really leaving, are we?”
“Get going.”
Naomi pushed back from the table, her chair shrieking against the hardwood floor, and stormed out of the kitchen down the hallway.
“Hey,” he shouted after her.
“Cut her a break,” Dee said. “She’s terrified.”
Jack stood beside his wife.
The night beyond the windowglass was moonless and unmarred by even the faintest pinpricks of light. The city’s second night without power.
“This is the last jug,” Dee said. “Makes eight gallons.”
“That isn’t going to last us very long.”
From the battery-powered radio on the windowsill above the sink, an old woman’s voice replaced the static that had dominated the airwaves for the last six hours. Jack reached over, turned up the volume.
They listened as she read another name, another address over the radio.
Jack said, “They’ve lost their fucking minds.”
Dee turned off the tap, screwed a cap onto the final jug. “You think anyone’s actually acting on that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“I’ll take these jugs out to the car. Go make sure the kids are getting packed.”
***
Jack hit the light switch out of habit, but when he opened the door, the garage remained dark. He shined the flashlight on the four steps that dropped out of the utility room. The smooth concrete was cold through his socks. He popped the hatch to the cargo area, illumination flooding out of the overhead dome lights into the two-car garage. He set the first jug of water in the back of the Land Rover Discovery. Their backpacks and camping equipment hung from hooks over the chest freezer, and he lifted them down off the wall. Pristine, unblemished by even a speck of trail dust. Four never-slept-in sleeping bags dangled from the ceiling in mesh sacks. He dragged a workbench over from the red Craftsman tool drawer and climbed up to take them down. Dee had been begging for a family camping trip ever since he’d purchased three thousand dollars’ worth of backpacking gear, and he’d fully intended for their family to spend every other weekend in the mountains or the desert. But two years had passed, and life had happened, priorities changed. The gas stove and water filter hadn’t even been liberated from their packaging, which still bore price tags.
Inside the house, Dee released a loud gasp. He grabbed the flashlight, negotiated the sprawl of backpacks and sleeping bags, and bolted up the steps and through the door into the utility room. Past the washer and dryer, back into the kitchen. Naomi and his seven-year-old son, Cole, stood at the opening to the hallway, their faces all warmth and shadow in the candlelight, watching their mother at the sink.
Jack shined the light on Dee – her face streaked with tears, body visibly shaking.
She pointed at the radio.
“They just read off Marty Anderson’s name. They’re going through the humanities department, Jack.”
“Turn it up.”
“Jim Barbour is a professor of religious studies at the University of New Mexico.” The old woman on the radio spoke slowly and with precision. “His address is Two Carpenter Court. Those of you near campus, go now, and while you’re in the neighborhood, stop by the home of Jack Colclough.”
“Dad—”
“Shhh.”
“—a professor of philosophy at UNM.”
“Oh my God.”
“Shhh.”
“—lives at Fourteen, fourteen Arroyo Way. Repeat. Fourteen, fourteen Arroyo Way. Go now.”
“Oh my God, Jack. Oh my God.”
“Get the food in the back of the car.”
“This is not—”
“Listen to me. Get the food in the back of the car. Naomi, bring yours and Cole’s clothes out to the garage. I’ll meet you all there in one minute . . .”
Copyright © Zoë Sharp 2004
First published in Great Britain 2001
Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd
This edition published 2011
Murderati Ink
excerpt from ROAD KILL copyright © Zoë Sharp 2005
excerpt from RUN copyright © Blake Crouch 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author, nor otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published.
All characters and events in this collection of stories, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.ZoeSharp.com
END