The sinking feeling was back, and stronger than ever. But she forced herself to stay calm—or at least to sound calm. “Okay, Pete. You take care of yourself, okay? And tell Alex to make sure to radio me.”
He chuckled. “Oh, don’t worry. From how he sounded, there’s nothing he wants to do more right now. I’m gonna sign off.”
“Roger. And thank you. And please—tell him to call me as soon as he can, and that we’re all fine here in the cabin community. Brent arrived. Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t have the radio on before.”
“My pleasure. KK4SWV out.”
The radio clicked off, and the room filled with static. As she straightened and turned, Cameron realized Bettie, Brent and Wade were all standing behind her. She forced a smile.
“They’re on the way,” she said, feeling none of the confidence in her words.
CHAPTER 12
Alex knew something was wrong the second he pulled into Ames.
The streets were empty of people. Of course, they’d passed plenty of towns with empty streets on their way west. But most streets were empty of all signs of life. And, he supposed, that was true here, too. But here there were wrecked cars—some crashed, some flipped—and other signs of civil unrest. Alex saw more than one home where the front door had been smashed in and the windows shattered. He’d never visited Ames before, but from everything he knew, it wasn’t a “loot and riot” sort of place.
This was something new. And it was definitely something dangerous.
Piper was staring out the window at everything as they passed. Suddenly she sat forward, pointing. “Look, Dad. There’s some people.”
Alex glanced over. He saw three tall, burly men sitting on the front porch of a house. The windows were broken in. One of them held an axe, and the other two crowbars.
“Don’t look at them, honey.” Alex stepped a little harder on the gas.
Fortunately they found no streets blocked by the wrecked cars or other signs of fighting, though once or twice they did have to drive slowly through thick clouds of black smoke. He had the route to Pete’s address memorized, and crept slowly toward it, feeling every moment like he was going to have to stomp on the gas pedal and escape.
They finally reached Pete’s house to find it broken into like all the rest.
Alex pulled the car into the driveway—but then he just sat there for a minute, thinking. He sure as hell wasn’t going to leave Piper here in the car by herself. But neither did he want to bring her into that house. The black hole of the open door was like a gaping mouth waiting to suck them down into some evil unknown.
On the other hand, who knew if Pete was inside, bruised but alive, and waiting for them? Or maybe he was hurt, and needed help. In any case, there might still be food inside, or other supplies. And even if those had been stolen, thieves wouldn’t have taken the HAM radio. Maybe a call to Cameron was just inside that black hole.
“We’re going to go inside,” he said. “But I need you to stay right next to me, and if I tell you to do something, you do it right away. No questions. Understand?”
“Okay,” said Piper, her voice small and terrified.
He stepped out, then moved to her side of the car and opened her door for her. He led her up the stairs and toward the door, and there he stopped. For a moment he looked out, making sure there was no one else in sight. The last thing he wanted was someone following them in. He’d have enough to worry about keeping eyes front.
The door creaked slightly as he pushed it a little farther open. That’s when the smell hit him—the smell of death. He knew it well—no ranger went more than a month without meeting some dead animal in the forest, and Alex had seen more than his fair share of human bodies, too. But it was worse in the house. Here the smell had collected, and gathered in the corners, and intensified.
Almost he turned around, got them back in the car, and took off. But there was still the HAM radio.
He gripped Piper’s shoulder and took another step in. At least he didn’t hear any sounds inside. If there were thieves—or worse—inside, they’d be moving, trying to take whatever they’d come for and get out as fast as they could. They wouldn’t be lurking, waiting for him. Hell, they wouldn’t have known Alex and Piper were coming.
They found Pete in the living room. Alex saw his foot first, poking out from behind the couch. But Piper was only half a second behind him. She cried out, covering her mouth with her hands. Too late, Alex took her shoulders and turned her away. He guided her around the corner, to where a wall blocked sight of the room.
“Stay here,” he said. “Do not move.” Then he went back into the living room.
It had been an axe, or so Alex guessed. Whatever had caused the wound, it was sizable, and had left a deep rent in Pete’s chest. Pete himself looked a lot different than Alex had thought he would: bald, with a thick beard and a scrub of hair in a half ring from one ear to the other. His eyes were closed, so at least that was a mercy.
There was a throw blanket on one end of the couch. Alex threw it over the corpse, then returned to Piper.
“Come on,” he said. “Don’t go into the living room.”
The HAM radio was in the back room. Alex looked it over. It was off now, but there was a notepad next to it. He glanced at it—then did a double take at the name Cameron.
Cameron to Alex: call as soon as you can. Brent arrived. Sorry she didn’t have the radio on. Cabin community doing fine.
He gripped the paper tightly, feeling waves of relief wash through him. With scrabbling fingers he turned the HAM on and sent out his callsign. But he heard only static in response. After trying a little while, he turned away—but he left the radio on, static still blaring.
“Come on,” he said to Piper. “Let’s make sure the rest of the house is okay.”
* * *
In the end, Alex decided to spend the night. Piper objected at first, and Alex didn’t exactly relish the thought of sleeping in a house with a dead body. But he couldn’t drive endlessly without stopping, and they had to take opportunities to rest while they could get them. Pete had a garage where the car might be safe, and the front door wasn’t damaged, so Alex was able to lock it and block it easily.
That was a little curious—the door hadn’t been broken open. The lock wasn’t thrown, and the doorjamb didn’t have so much as a scratch. Pete must have opened the door to a knock, and then had it kicked in on him. A hell of a way to go.
Opening the garage to secure the car revealed a new surprise: a dog. The dog’s tag told them his name was Max, and he was clearly a mix—mostly German Shepherd, but with floppy ears and spots on the tongue that spoke to Alex of some Chow, plus who knew what else. The garage door had been shut, whether by accident or on purpose, and Max, though overjoyed when they let him out, also moved in a careful, slow way that spoke of hunger. Piper was happy to have something to do, so she kept feeding Max and giving him water until he ran in the back yard and threw up, and then came back in to keep eating. Alex wanted to tell her not to over-feed the poor guy, but it kept her busy, and he had his own work to do fortifying the house.
He padlocked the garage and placed what furniture he could in front of the door. The back door was a double sliding-glass deal, and impossible to totally block off, but he hoped that, with Max running free in the house, they’d have warning if anyone tried to come in that way.
“And he can watch out for us on the road, too,” said Piper.
“Piper, we can’t take his dog.”
She glared at him. “Why not? Who’s going to take care of him if we don’t? And if we have to sleep somewhere else, Max can watch out for us.”
Alex wanted to argue, but that was a decent point. And besides, Piper still had a haunted look in her eye that he knew came from Pete’s corpse. In the end, he couldn’t say no.
Max had gone running over to the body the moment they let him in the house. He whined as he nudged Pete’s shoes, and then lay down at the man’s feet for a while. It broke Alex�
�s heart, and Piper cried openly, though she still refused to go anywhere near the living room. After Max left, he avoided it just as hard, so that it became a place only Alex would go, and even then as little as possible.
He shuttered the windows that had shutters and locked the ones that didn’t. The house only had one floor, and Pete’s smell had permeated most of it, but the back bedroom was far away and mostly free of the smell. Alex cracked the window—it opened into the fenced-off back yard, not the street or anything—and made ready to sleep there for the night, sharing the bed with Piper. Just as they lay themselves down to rest, Max came barreling in and jumped up, burrowing into the blanket between them. Piper laughed, and Alex couldn’t help but smile.
* * *
In the morning, Cameron answered the HAM on the third try.
“Cameron?” Alex sat straighter in his seat, gripping the handset tight.
“Mom?” Piper came running into the room, Max skipping at her heels.
“Alex? Piper?” Cameron laughed from the other end of the radio, her voice awash with relief. “Oh my god, it’s so good to hear your voices.”
“You too, honey,” said Alex. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. We’re all fine—everyone in the cabin community, I mean. Bettie says hi.”
Alex blinked at the handset. “Bettie?”
“She came up with me from Seattle. She’s staying at our place.”
“Okay,” said Alex, shrugging. “Tell her hi for us, I guess.”
“I will. Piper, sweetheart, are you all right?”
Piper’s face fell, and she looked over her shoulder. Alex knew she was thinking of Pete. With his finger off the handset, he whispered, “Remember she’s far away and can’t help us. Try not to make her worry more.”
She nodded, then took the handset. “I’m fine, Mom.”
“Are you eating enough? And how’s your meds?”
“They’re fine,” she said, smiling. “Do you think Dad would really drive me across the country without having enough insulin?”
“I know, sweetie. I’m just worried. You’re taking care of him, too, right?”
Piper rolled her eyes. “Of course, Mom.”
“Good. Can I have him back?”
She relinquished the handset. Alex spoke low to her again. “Can you give me a minute, sweetheart?” Piper nodded and left the room, taking Max with her.
“You there?” he said.
“I’m not going anywhere. Not until you make me.”
“I sent Piper out of the room. Is everything really all right at the cabins?”
“Yes, it’s fine. Bill—you know, the caretaker—is being a total asshole. But everyone else is keeping to themselves. A family came here from the road. They got stranded. But we’re taking care of them.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. We’re coming as fast as we can. But we have to take back roads, now more than ever. I thought Ames would be fine, but it’s just as bad as I hear the cities have gotten.”
“That’s only going to get worse,” she said, suddenly grave. “Brent didn’t paint a pretty picture.”
“There’s no pretty picture to paint. Pete—the guy you talked to, whose house we’re in—he’s dead.”
“What?” Cameron snapped. “What happened? Was Piper there?”
“No. We found him that way. She was a little shook up, but bounced back quickly. We, uh…we have a dog.”
Silence for a moment. “A dog.”
“Listen, it cheers her up.”
“You always wanted a damn dog. Don’t tell me this wasn’t intentional.”
Despite himself, and despite the seriousness of the situation, he smiled at the handset. “You think I set this up? What, did I cause the whole solar flares storms, too?”
“I wouldn’t put it past you.”
He laughed. But the laugh died away, and he spoke low, just in case Piper was trying to listen through the door. “We’re going to be fine, Cam. I promise you I’ll get Piper there. But things are getting really bad. I don’t know what we might have to do, what detours we might have to take. So you keep yourself safe, and do your best not to worry. Focus on yourself. Keep the house ready for us when we arrive.”
“I will,” she said. “Promise.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Christ, I love you. Take care of her.”
“Always.”
The radio clicked off, leaving only static.
CHAPTER 13
Before they left the house, Alex raided it for supplies. There wasn’t all that much to take—Pete had a good supply of canned food, but Alex already had more than enough to eat on the trip, and they were well stocked on everything he thought they might need. But since Piper was set on taking Max, he loaded up a bag of dry dog food from the pantry, plus half a dozen cans of wet food. He wasn’t going to give the dog any of their rations, which he’d already worked so hard to hoard. And Pete had two hand-chargers for electronics, so Alex grabbed them just in case.
“Dad? Why are you taking Pete’s stuff?”
Alex froze in the doorway. Piper sat there at the kitchen table, looking up at him.
“Well…” Alex winced inwardly, but he kept his face calm for her as he sat down across from her at the table. “You know what happened to him.”
Her eyes grew a little wider. “Yeah.”
“So he doesn’t need anything left here. But it might help us.”
“So…that makes it okay?”
His lips twisted. “Not…not all the time. It’s just that things are different right now. Dangerous, like I told you before. And we have to do some things that we wouldn’t do normally. Just until all of this gets sorted out, and the world gets back to normal. After that, we go back to the old rules.”
Piper looked around the house like she was expecting to find someone else inside it. “So then what are the new rules? The ones right now?”
Alex shrugged. “The most important rule is to keep ourselves safe, and we try not to hurt anyone else in the process. This might help keep us safe, and it’s not going to hurt anybody.”
She relaxed and nodded, like that was something comforting and not a pretty significant logical leap. “Okay. Do you need my help?”
A lurch hit his stomach. He might be able to tell her this was all right, that it was justified, but the thought of asking her to help him raid some dead guy’s house… “No, sweetheart. I’ll be done in a minute.”
It wasn’t a minute, but it wasn’t much longer. The conversation had killed his interest in raiding for supplies, and soon they were in the car and heading away from Pete’s house, Max crammed in the back seat, where he lay on top of the supplies. Not a moment too soon, it seemed—as they pulled out of the driveway, Alex saw a few guys standing across the street in the shadow of a home. They didn’t look particularly threatening, but they were definitely watching Alex and Piper drive away. Behind the homes across the street, plumes of smoke were rising.
They’d almost reached the border of Ames when they heard several sharp, rapid pops. First there was a burst of them, and then a few more in scattered reply. Then silence. Piper frowned from the sound of the first one, leaning forward and looking out of her window.
“What was that?” she said.
“Not sure,” said Alex. “Probably a car backfiring.”
He’d stretched the truth with her a few times already on the trip. That was his first flat-out lie. He’d recognized the sounds at once. It was gun fire.
* * *
The car was quiet for so long that Alex began to wonder if Piper knew he’d lied to her. But he was distracted from such thoughts as he spotted the underbelly of a car off the side of the road. It had been flipped. He spotted it a long way off, and the freeway was empty, so it was easy to pull off to the shoulder. He got out of the car, then looked over to see Piper unbuckling her seatbelt.
“No,” said Alex. “Stay here. Watch Max.”
She looked up, and he was positive
she’d ask why. But she didn’t. She only nodded with wide eyes. Max gave a little whine.
Alex approached the car slowly. As soon as he was a dozen yards away, he spotted what he hadn’t been able to see from the freeway: it was a cop car. The rooftop lights were smashed, but the top of the car hadn’t crumpled when the car had flipped over.
That hadn’t saved the cop, though. Alex found him dead in the driver’s seat. Even upside down, one of his hands gripped the wheel, while the other hung down to the car’s roof. Right side up, it would have looked like he was waving at someone.
Alex knew what he’d find, but he checked the guy’s pulse anyway. Dead. He stood up and turned around, ready to leave.
He stopped.
Mind whirling, he turned and looked back at the dead cop.
Jesus, Alex, he thought to himself.
Keep her safe. That voice was Cameron’s. She’d said it the night before. And he’d promised he would.
He kneeled down again, trying to hold his breath as he squeezed in through the shattered window and past the corpse. Thankfully the glass had broken clean, so he didn’t have to worry about slicing himself open.
The cop’s pistol was missing from his belt holster, but the belt still held all its other supplies—pepper spray, cuffs, everything but spare clips of ammo. Alex grabbed it all and shoved it into his pockets.
Whoever had raided the cruiser had left the shotgun. It was stuck in its mount beside the driver’s seat. Alex gave it a tug. Wedged fast. Or at least, that’s what some random scavenger would have thought. But rangers had pretty much the same vehicles, and they were often armed, too. Alex looked up at the butt of the shotgun and saw it: a thumbprint scanner.
Lips dragging back in a grimace, he took the cop’s limp hand and extended the thumb, pressing it to the scanner. It gave a halfhearted chirp, and the shotgun came free. Alex tried to catch it, but the barrel came down hard on his finger. He jerked back, his head slamming into the steering wheel. Wincing, he sucked a deep breath in through his teeth. But after a moment, he loosed a soft chuckle.
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