by RJ Crayton
“That’s my daughter, Natalie,” Lee said, from behind her. “You favor her. That’s why I stopped when I saw you today. I wanted to make sure you were alright.”
Elaan turned back to Lee and smiled. He seemed sincere. She could tell he didn’t mean them harm, but after seeing the picture of his daughter, she started to wonder if Josh was right about Lee’s interest in her being too much.
“I’m fine,” Elaan said reassuringly. She turned to Josh. “Ethan was just upset about the bike. He wouldn’t hurt me. Ever.”
Lee shrugged, but he gave Josh a hard stare, as if he still thought ill of him.
“You were going to help us fix our tire?” Josh prompted. “So we could get on our way.”
Lee nodded. “Yeah. I’ll help you fix it,” he said, his tone clipped, and then he sat down in the armchair. “But I wanted to offer you both a place to stay for tonight. Under the Martial Law, you’re not supposed to be out after dark, and I can’t imagine you’ll get where you’re going in the next twenty minutes.”
Elaan turned to Josh. A place to stay. After waking up covered in bites, a real place to stay, a place with electricity and a fireplace and indoor plumbing, would be like heaven. Josh, who had been watching her, turned toward Lee when she tried to catch his eye. “You’ve already done so much for us,” Josh said. “I don’t think we should impose on you further.”
Elaan couldn’t help but frown. Josh didn’t want to stay. He had gotten a completely different vibe from Lee than she had, and now he wanted to sleep in the weeds rather than in a house with this man. She wasn’t sure she agreed with that.
Lee gave Josh a stern gaze. “Don’t let pride stop you from doing what’s best for your girl,” he said. “A real man would accept the help of a kind stranger, make sure his gal is taken care of.”
Lee turned to Elaan. “How long you two been dating?”
Elaan was surprised that Lee asked. And she didn’t have a ready answer. Josh chimed in with an answer that almost made her jaw drop.
“We’re married,” Josh said.
Elaan forced her mouth to stay shut and tried to keep a neutral expression. She wasn’t sure why Josh said that, but she didn’t want to contradict him either.
Lee sat back in the chair, his eyes narrowing. “You two seem awfully young to be married.”
“We are,” Josh said. “She’s eighteen and I’m nineteen, but we knew we wanted to be together, and with so many people being sick, it didn’t seem like there was any reason to wait.”
Lee still seemed suspicious, but he just said, “Suppose not.” The older man stood, with effort. Lee seemed old fashioned but his face didn’t look that old. However, he moved wearily, like he was tired or injured. She wondered if that was a leftover effect from surviving the Helnoan virus. Did anyone ever fully recover? “The tools we need to fix your bike are in the garage. I’m going to go set up so we can patch the tire — find everything we need. Why don’t you two decide if you want to stay while I do that? The guest room’s upstairs. Second door on the right.”
Lee walked past them and out the front door. This time he didn’t lock it.
Josh watched the door for a moment or two after Lee left, then turned to Elaan and whispered. “There’s something weird about this guy.” He set his backpack down on the sofa, checked for signs of Lee returning, and took out the pistol. He flipped a small lever on it, pulled back the top part, making a loud metal click, then flipped the lever again and put the gun back in the pocket.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I chambered a round,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
He peeked to make sure Lee hadn’t returned. “To fire a gun, a semiautomatic gun, you have to have a bullet in the chamber. Revolvers have six chambers, six bullets. Once you shoot, you spin to a new chamber to fire. This gun,” he said, pointing to the backpack, “feeds automatically after you chamber the first bullet. I had the safety on, and no round chambered. That prevents a misfire. But since we may need it, I chambered a round. Now all you have to do is take the safety off and you can fire it.”
Elaan sighed. She hadn’t planned on a gun lesson. “We have to decide whether to stay,” she said. She pointed at the backpack pocket where he’d put the gun. “So, I’m guessing your vote is no.”
Josh sighed, peeking at the doorway again. “Listen,” he whispered. “I know how rough last night was, and I don’t want a repeat. This house is tons better than anything else we’ve seen, but I don't know. He seems fixated on you and dislikes me a lot.”
Elaan shook her head. “He just got the wrong impression,” she said. “For some reason, he thought you were going to hit me. We can convince him of what a nice guy Ethan is.”
Josh rolled his eyes. “And next stranger we meet, let’s be Jake and Emma. We don’t know what happened with Willie, and we certainly don’t want him to tell people we were using the names Priya and Ethan.”
Josh made a good point. Elaan nodded. She’d gone with Priya because it was easy to remember. But what if Willie had told people at the next checkpoint about them? And what if he’d hurt Lijah? She shuddered as she thought of her brother. She’d been decently successful at putting Lijah’s predicament out of her mind. At pretending she was confident of his safety. But at moments like this, her fear that something awful had happened to him returned.
She had to focus on the moment, not Lijah. She peeked at the door again. “He’s weird but harmless. I think we should stay.”
Josh sighed. “Fine, we’ll tell him we’ll stay,” he said. “But all bets are off if he tries anything weird in the next hour. Also, we make sure we patch the bike tonight, and we sleep with a chair pressed against the door, and our friend,” he pointed to the outer pocket of his bag, “is on the nightstand and ready for action, OK?”
Elaan nodded. She turned toward the door, so they could catch up with Lee in the garage, but she stopped, as one last thing popped into her mind. “Why did you tell him we were married?”
Josh flushed. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask first,” he said. “But you looked like Christmas had come early when he offered us a room. He seems so old fashioned and hostile toward me, I knew he’d tell us to stay in separate rooms if I said you were my girlfriend. We promised we’d stay together. I just wanted to make sure that happened.”
“Good thinking,” she admitted, admiring his read of the situation. For good measure, she added, “Hubby.”
He gave her a good-natured scowl. “OK, wifey.”
The two of them headed outside and found Lee where he said he’d be: inside the garage. Lee helped Josh lift the bike out of the truck and they took it inside. The repair seemed fairly easy with the tools Lee had. With a flat-edged tool, he removed the tire from the bike, then pulled the screw out, added some type of goo to the hole, and placed a little plastic patch over the spot.
“Should be set in a half an hour,” Lee said. “You’ll just have to pump it. You can leave and deal with the patrols, or you can stay. Have you decided?”
Josh nodded. “Just because the world’s gone bad doesn’t mean all people have. You’ve offered us hospitality, and we’d be glad to accept.”
Lee nodded, and they all walked to the house and settled in the living room. Josh and Elaan perched themselves on the sofa this time, trying to be gracious recipients of Lee’s hospitality. Lee offered to get them some water, but Josh declined for the both of them.
Despite Josh’s misgivings, he smiled affably at Lee and tried to be friendly as Ethan. Josh adapted well to the lie he’d told. He sat uncommonly close to Elaan on the sofa and had threaded his fingers through hers.
“Lee,” Josh said, respectfully. “We’ve been riding from Ohio, and we haven’t seen a lot of people. We’re trying to get a sense of what’s been going on. It just wasn’t like this in Ohio. Are there usually so few people, so few things open?”
Lee watched Josh, doubt in his countenance. “Ohio is drastically different from here?” he
said.
“It’s hard to say,” Elaan said. “We tried not to go out much. We didn’t want to get sick.”
Lee nodded, his expression easing, as if her answer had made perfect sense. “Yeah, people around here don’t go out much either.”
“Don’t they?” Elaan said, hoping he’d keep talking.
“No,” he said. “I’m probably more of a renegade. Always had been. May — my wife — always said I didn’t know when to stop, that I just kept going ’til I got what I wanted.” He chuckled at the memory. “She was a good woman. We were married for thirty years.”
Elaan tried to guess his age. He was older, but she hadn’t expected him to say he’d been married for thirty years.
“You married young, like us?” Josh suggested.
Lee nodded. “Got married at twenty,” he said. “She died this spring. We both got Helnoan, but May didn’t make it. And then Natalie, my daughter, I don’t know where she is. I always hold out hope she’s OK, but with the way things are, there’s no way to know.”
Outside, the sky was darkening. “Sometimes it’s hard to get them to come for the dead,” he said in a low voice. “May had gotten sick first, and I’d nursed her through it, or tried to. When she died, I called and asked them to come, but I never heard back. I took the backhoe and dug a hole. Buried her over yonder, near the tree line. Then I got sick, could barely do anything for myself. But somehow I made it.”
Elaan turned toward the window, thinking of the man struggling with his wife’s corpse. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That must have been hard for you.”
“Life is hard,” he said, unflinching. “You just have to go with it.”
“When was the last time you saw your daughter?” Elaan asked. “Do you think she’ll come back?”
Lee smiled wistfully at that. “Natalie,” he said. “I saw her in October of last year, before the virus had hit the US, really. But I talked to her in February. She was such a good girl, such a sweet girl. Always calling to check on us, always kind to us. She’d have been a nurse, too. She was studying that at the U of I, when she married that Ray fellow. He convinced her to drop out. Said she could transfer to a new school, somewhere cheaper, but then he came up with some reason why it made more sense for her to take a semester off. Convinced her to move to Chicago with him. Convinced her that being his wife was the most important thing.”
He shook his head and grimaced. “She had a bruise on her cheek and she said she fell. Always some damned fall. I told her it was OK, that she didn’t have to stay, and she kept lying to me that Ray hadn’t done anything, that Ray was a good man. But I knew. Her mother knew, too. But May said if we kept pushing, she wouldn’t talk to us at all. I wanted her to leave him. I wanted her to see what he was.” Lee’s eyes were focused on some point in the distance, anger simmering beneath the surface. “But she didn’t want to see. She didn’t want to believe, and I sometimes wonder if I did something wrong, so she didn’t realize what he was doing was bad. ‘Not everyone is like you, Daddy,’ she used to tell me. ‘No boy will ever be good enough to you, Daddy.’ That’s what she’d say. But someone who loved her, truly loved her, would’ve been good enough. Still, last I saw her was almost a year ago. She called in February and said she and Ray were going out west, to stay with his uncle in Arizona. But I ain’t heard from her since.”
Elaan took in a small breath. His hostility toward Josh made more sense now. Poor Natalie.
“It was about a month after the virus really took hold hard,” Lee said. “And since then, I just been hoping to hear from her. May got sick just after Natalie called. She don’t even know her mother died. May and I had gone into town to get some supplies to tide us over. She wanted mason jars for canning. She had some, but she got more. And I had gotten some ammunition for my guns. That was hard to get. A lot of gun stores were running low, but I been a customer for thirty years and Johnny had stashed me some ammo, when I called and told him I’d pay double. We came home, thinking we were good, thinking May and I were set to ride this thing out for a while. But a few days after that trip, May got the fever.”
He shuddered at the memory. “Eventually, I got a fever, too,” he said, his voice low again. “I took the best precautions I could, wearing a mask, wearing gloves. It seemed to have worked. Even though May had passed, I was in pretty good shape, I thought. Then it hit. The fever, the bleeding, the vomiting. Every part of you hurts when you get that disease.” He closed his eyes, breathed out, and then opened them. “But enough about me and my misery. Why are you two riding through Illinois? Where you headed?”
Josh leaned forward and said, “The Quad cities. Both our folks died, and we have relatives up that way. At least we had ’em. No telling if they’re there now, but there was nothing left for us back where we were. We thought maybe it was safer out here where there are fewer people.”
Lee shrugged. “Well, there are fewer people, but I can’t say it’s tons safer. Some people try to come out here and steal. I lock all the doors and sleep with my Derringer just in case.”
Josh nodded solemnly, and Elaan sat still and silent. She hadn’t expected this. She’d thought that they were on a quiet, sleepy farm, not a place rife with crime.
“Do people try to break in often,” Elaan asked.
Lee shook his head. “Not often, but enough that it’s something I’m prepared for.” Lee smiled at Elaan. “Don’t worry, Priya. If I hear anything overnight, I’ll come out shooting. I do recommend the two of you stay in your room, though, as I’ll be shooting first and asking questions later.” He chuckled at his little joke, and Elaan forced a smile.
“We’ll stay put,” Josh said. He paused, then started another question. “We’ve been trying to carry supplies with us, but thought in a real emergency, maybe we’d be able to stop and buy things. Frankly, until we hit this town, most of the stores were closed. If everything is closed like that, how do people get things?”
Lee nestled back in his chair. “There are stores open. They just do business differently. They have a special booth set up. Some of them have people in them. Others have a computer. You can give the person your list or type it in. They see if they have everything, and once you pay, your items get delivered at another booth. It keeps contact down. The real problem is with so many people dying, there just aren’t enough supplies. And people try to avoid going out as much as possible. No need to expose yourself to the virus if you don’t have to.”
Elaan nodded.
“So Ohio was different?” Lee asked. “People going out all the time.”
Josh shrugged. “Not all the time, but I think more often than here.”
“Where’s about in Ohio?”
“Cleveland,” Josh said, and Elaan marveled at his ability to think on his feet, to lie quickly and adeptly without seeming like it was a lie. Or perhaps it wasn’t him thinking on his feet. Perhaps he had thought through their entire story while they were on the road. Perhaps he’d been prepared, whereas Elaan had just been moving through their situation, realizing too late she’d have to answer questions like these.
“Seems odd that they’re so cavalier,” Lee said. “So, why’d you leave?”
“We’d been holed up with a couple of immunes. They’d gone to get us supplies,” he said. “But they decided to leave, to go back out East, where they were from.”
Lee stared. “Out East seems like it would be worse off than Ohio. A lot of people, fewer resources.”
“It was central Virginia, so a little more rural than the bigger cities,” Josh said. He had an earnest expression on his face and seemed to be trying to look as nonthreatening as he could. She’d always thought Josh knew how to interact with people, and she got the impression Lee was softening toward him.
Josh spoke again. “Our friends only had cell phones, and the service died a few months ago. Do cell towers still work around here? Or is it just landlines?”
Lee shook his head. “Depends,” he said. “They don’t repair the cell tow
ers if they’re broken or have a problem. If you have service, you do. If you don’t, you don’t. The landlines are a bit better. The government telephone numbers at least seem to ring if you dial ’em. That doesn’t mean a live person will answer, but they ring. A lot of the numbers are disconnected. If something goes wrong with the line, they don’t send people out to fix it. There aren’t enough people.”
Spotty phone service, people scared. She’d missed so much living in the SPU. Her life there had been easy. Up here, people were dying or afraid of dying. “How many people do you think have died?” she asked. “Does anyone report numbers, maybe on the news?”
Lee narrowed his eyes at her. “Ain’t no news. Ain’t been no news in weeks. Them people who broadcast the TV don’t air nothing now. Most I can get is static. Y’all got more in Cleveland?”
“The house we were in lost power,” Josh said. He wrapped an arm around Elaan. “It was pretty harsh for us, and we just thought we’d do better leaving there, do better with family.”
Lee sighed, nodded. “Well, I hope y’all get what you’re looking for, that your folks ain’t dead, that you haven’t traded Cleveland’s harsh winter for Iowa’s. If I were you, I’d have headed for Virginia where it’s warmer. Winter is coming and it will be cold, snowy, and frozen.”
Elaan hadn’t thought of it like that. She knew winter was coming and they needed to get to Dahinda, sooner rather than later, but she hadn’t thought of the harsh winter’s effect on them once they arrived. If the house her mother was at had no electricity, then it would be tough. Though Lee had electricity and running water.
“How are you going to survive?” Elaan asked, before she could stop herself.
He smiled. “This is the country, Priya,” he said. “The garden had been planted before May got sick. After I got well, I used all the mason jars she had to can up the stuff that had grown. I was able to grow some more. It’s not the most, but it’s a decent start. I also plan to hunt. Wild turkeys run right through my front yard. And deer. I see deer all the time. I can survive on canned vegetables and well water, and the occasional animal I hunt.”