by Thunboe, Bo
Dan headed north on the court, taking the curve west where it met up with Raymond Road. A faint flickering glow showed in the Snick’s front window from their fireplace in the back. Snick had a full house with his wife, twin boys, and a visiting niece who was now stranded here, just like four court families were stranded wherever they’d gone for the Christmas holidays.
Dan turned north on Raymond Road and walked faster. Moonlight filtered down, cutting in and out as clouds whisked across the sky. The wind came from the west, a steady blow that chapped his face.
Then the cloud cover thickened and the moonlight winked out like a switch was thrown. Dan stopped, letting his eyes readjust. Ahead of him the snow-covered road glowed faintly, the tress to the right nothing but a dark wall. In the woods this darkness would be absolute. Did Sean have a flashlight with him?
Chapter Three
Robert Carson stood at his front window, breath frosting the glass, wondering where Fallon was going. He rarely saw the Fallons or the Flecks since they moved into the Brady’s walk-out basement because it faced the river. And when Fallon went to his own house, he used the garage service door on the back of the house. To see what Fallon was up to, Robert had to sneak into the Fleck’s house and watch from the bay window in their kitchen, which had a great view of all the backyards along the river. Today Fallon and the Fleck boy had been cutting up metal fencing they’d brought back from somewhere and taking the pieces inside. He bet it was to lock up their food. He knew they had a giant stash in that house. A stash that should be part of the co-op’s inventory in Robert’s garage and feeding everyone left on the court.
From the day he and Barbara moved onto the court, it had felt like home. Not just their house, which was the first house they ever owned, but the court itself. Barbara knew that and leveraged his love for the house and the court to cut him completely out of her retirement account in their divorce settlement. She’d actually laughed at his “pitiful sentimentality” for wanting to stay here. But the laugh was on her. Her retirement account was now worthless and according to the picture of her condo he’d seen online, it didn’t have a fireplace.
He pressed his forehead to the glass and looked down the court toward the end. He could see almost the entire court from this spot. He and Barbara had never had children of their own but when he watched the children on the court, he felt connected to them. So when one of them did something dangerous—like when the Fleck boy set up a ridiculously high ramp to jump on his bike, or when the Fallon girl climbed the light pole—he told the parents so the child could be disciplined. The kids hated him for it and egged his house in retaliation, but he only did it to keep them safe. He never told on them when they played ding-dong ditch or TP’d someone’s house. That was harmless.
It took a village to raise kids and he was part of this village on Riverview Court. He’d always taken his responsibility as a member of this village seriously.
Now he had official responsibility as the court’s representative on Weston’s Community Emergency Response Team. He joined CERT two years before just for something to do after Barbara left him. It got him out of the house to attend the monthly meetings and help out at city festivals, which he’d enjoyed. He’d been completely in charge of keeping the beer tent clean at the Labor Day picnic, managing a team of seven people. His so-called helpers kept running off to watch a band or chat with friends, but despite having to do ninety percent of the work alone, he’d survived the weekend without humiliating himself—Barbara’s prediction delivered by text.
When the EMP hit, he’d known what it was almost immediately because of his training. He put on his CERT vest and helmet and set out for the Emergency Operations Center like he was supposed to. But the EOC was locked and the few neighborhood representatives who showed up huddled together against the side of the building out of the wind until the Assistant Director arrived. Thank God she did, because the people had been freaking out about Russia and China and even aliens.
The AD gave them a pep talk and ordered each of them to organize your jurisdiction and assess its strengths and weaknesses and prepare to lead for the long haul. He’d left the meeting empowered and energized, but his enthusiasm wore off before he got home because the orders were too vague. What did he need to organize? What was he supposed to assess? How was he supposed to prepare, and for what? How did one lead other people? He’d never been a leader, or even wanted to be one. If he tried to lead, would the people on his court follow him?
In the absence of more specific instruction he focused on the obvious: everyone needed food to eat, water to drink, and wood for their fireplaces. Those issues were concrete and immediate. Water and wood were easy in his jurisdiction—the court—because the court was on the river with woods to the south and north and Radar Grove Forest Preserve just across the river, so he’d focused on food. The AD had promised each jurisdiction would receive a proportionate share of the grocery store inventory commandeered by the city. To hold and distribute that food, Carson created a court-wide co-op where all his people would share their food and he would ration it out. The promise of the grocery distribution got everyone except Fallon’s group to join the co-op, but the stores were looted before the city got organized.
Robert looked up toward the mouth of the court where a dim light showed in Snick’s front window. Snick had joined the co-op and delivered his food for rationing, but had he brought it all over here? Thanks to the scene Fallon’s wife had made right in the beginning, Snick knew Robert didn’t have the power to come into his house and look for hoarded food.
Even though she was gone, the damage Fallon’s wife had done to Robert’s leadership lived on. And the city’s failure to deliver on his promise of food from the grocery stores hadn’t helped.
Robert shivered, looked up the street for Fallon one more time, then went back into his family room and sat on the couch in front of the fire with a blanket wrapped around him. The first few days after the Pulse he’d kept the fire big and hot, but when he realized how much work it took to collect wood, he’d cut back to a smaller fire and draped quilts over the doorways to stop the heat from bleeding out into the rest of the house. But he would never run out of wood. Food was what worried him.
The food in the co-op would not see them through the winter. He and his assistant—Rachel Miller—kept a detailed inventory broken down by calories and by fat/carb/protein content. If they each ate only a thousand calories a day, they would run out on February eleventh. Then they’d starve. Or at least he would. He suspected that both the Millers and the Snicks had kept food back to supplement their daily ration, which explained why they didn’t seem to be losing weight as fast as he was. He’d already pulled his belt two notches tighter.
He pulled the blanket around his shoulders and went out into the garage. Over half the food laid out on the tables came from the four families away for the holidays when the EMP hit. They were never coming back so he’d used his CERT authority to enter their houses and commandeer their food. Very little of the rest came from Robert’s own pantry because it had been almost empty. Barbara had done the grocery shopping and most of the cooking. When she left, Robert took to buying frozen meals or getting takeout.
The food he and Rachel had already broken down into ration packs for each household grouping—Snick’s five, the Miller two, and Robert by himself—sat in ziplock baggies on the left-hand table. The bulk food not yet broken into ration packs stood on the table to the right. They prepared the packs a week at a time, but doled them out daily to avoid anyone eating up their week’s ration early and begging for more. It had been Rachel’s idea and he thought it was sound.
He picked up one of his ration packs and bounced it on his hand. The skimpy package of beans and pasta didn’t look like enough for one meal, let alone a whole day. But thanks to a deer the Fallon boy had killed, they had some meat to supplement their rations. For now.
He eyed the bulk food table. If the other co-op members were cheating him, he deserved to
eat more than his ration. He picked up the clipboard with its meticulous inventories. He and Rachel had done such a good job setting up this system, that if he took a little extra to compensate for their deceit it would be obvious. But what if he scratched a hole in a box of pasta or a bag of beans like a mouse had gotten to it and only took whatever spilled out?
He squeezed his eyes shut. A leader doesn’t cheat, Roberto Torres. He called himself by his real name when he was mad at himself. He’d started going by Robert when he was in college because he was embarrassed that he’d never learned Spanish as a kid, despite his grandparents not speaking English. He’d just always hated being different from the other kids at school. When he got married, he took Barbara’s last name and officially changed his first name to Robert.
His parents had not been happy about the name change, or about the marriage. But he’d rarely seen them after the wedding, which turned out to be a good thing because he didn’t have to explain when Barbara left him. He wondered how they were doing. They’d moved back to Mexico a couple years ago and he’d only talked to them once since then. Or was it twice?
He eyed a bag of beans, gritted his teeth and went back into the family room. According to his latest CERT meeting, food might not be the worse problem confronting them. Desperate people from Chicago were coming out into the suburbs looking for food and warmth and sometimes just taking it from those who had it. So far, home invasions had only happened on the northeast corner of the city but the AD warned that could change and advised each CERT leader to “prepare to defend your jurisdiction.”
That news had scared the bejesus out of him and he immediately started thinking about what they could possibly do to defend themselves. He started rereading some old war novels he had up in the attic but nothing that happened in them seemed to apply to this situation. The best he could come up with was to warn his people and set up a watch. Both seemed inadequate and too passive, and he worried that revealing the problem without a solution would weaken his authority and with it, the co-op. The co-op was keeping them alive. It was keeping Robert alive.
He fretted for days, but calmed down when he looked at the map. The northeast part of town where the invaders were causing problems was five miles away. That was two hours on foot in all this snow. And all those people, the invaders, were heading south. Not west.
For now, the best thing he could do for his people was to keep this news to himself so they wouldn’t be scared and fretful. He would hold the fear until he came up with a plan. That was the right thing for a leader to do, wasn’t it?
Chapter Four
Sean startled, heart racing. He’d heard…something. He looked out from under the overhanging branches but it was almost completely dark. I must have fallen asleep. He crawled out from under the fir tree and stretched, looking around him, but saw nothing but the faint shape of trees. He walked toward his trap, arms in front of him to ward off branches, then changed his mind. If he couldn’t see the loops, he ran the risk of tripping the damn snare and getting caught by the wire. He turned away and walked south, for home.
Blam!
Sean flinched and dropped to a crouch. How far away had that shot been? Was someone hunting in the Grove or was it just more random gunfire from the idiots in Cress Creek? How did they not understand the ammunition they had was all they would have until this was over?
When he didn’t hear another blast, he resumed his trek home. The wind kicked up and he shivered, hugging himself. A branch slapped his face with a stinging lash, just missing his eye. It was so damn dark. He looked up, but the cloud cover was so dense he saw nothing. Since the Pulse had extinguished artificial light, on clear nights they saw an amazing spread of stars lighting the sky. He now loved to be out at night, walking the woods and watching the star spectacle spin across the sky. Back in the Before he’d never even noticed that the moon crossed the sky just like the sun and that the stars spun around each other.
He continued on, left arm up to ward off invisible branches.
Back in the Before, and here in the After. That’s how he thought about the Pulse and how it changed things. Even before the Pulse he’d divided his life into befores and afters. He and Erin had lived with Dad before he died. After Dad died, they moved in with Dan and Mom. They became a family with Dan before the Pulse, but in the After, it was just Sean and Dan.
Sean’s feet broke through icy crust and into the soft snow beneath. He stopped. He didn’t remember the snow having a crust on his way north. He looked around again but still saw nothing. Maybe I’m not walking south as I thought.
He closed his eyes and felt for north. He’d always had a good sense of direction, maybe because Dan made him navigator on road trips. He leaned back and held his breath, reaching out with his senses. There! A gentle pull at the base of his skull. North was directly behind him and he was heading straight south toward the dam, the river was to his left, and Raymond Road was way off to his right. He’d had the direction correct after all.
But he should have brought a flashlight. He was so used to traveling by moonlight that he hadn’t brought one along. The possibility of cloud cover should have been obvious enough for him to bring one. Dan would have carried a flashlight.
He continued on, boots punching through the crust, one hand up to ward off branches, wind blowing in his face.
Bang!
Gunfire again, off to his left. A rifle this time, and closer. Someone coming in from Cress Creek to hunt at night. They might hear him or see his blurry outline and think he was a deer. He walked faster, feet punching through the icy crust and sinking into the slushy snow underneath, the crust catching on his boots when he lifted his foot. I should wear an orange vest.
Crunch, slush, snag.
Over and over. Then a crunch and nothing as the ground gave out beneath him. His momentum flung him forward. He twisted as he fell, landed on his side, and rolled down a slope to sprawl onto smooth ice.
Ice?
Crrr-ack!
The ice collapsed and dropped him into frigid water.
He gasped, sucking in an icy slug of water that plunged down his windpipe. He panicked, thrashed, and his right hand found the bottom. He flipped over to his knees and got his head above water. He coughed the water from his windpipe and kept on coughing until his lungs were clear.
He shivered, stood up, slipped on a rock and splashed down again, banging his chin on the ice but landing on his hands and keeping his head above water. He crawled, breaking through ice, changing direction until he sensed the water getting shallower. He fought his way to solid land and flopped out of the water and onto his back, panting. He shivered, one long tremble that ran through his whole body. Then couldn’t stop. The book said shivering was good because it would help his body warm up against the hypothermia trying to take him down. That sounded like nonsense when he read it and now he knew it was. There was no way a little shivering would make him warm, or keep him alive. He needed to get home fast or he’d die out here. He laughed, a harsh bark that left him breathless. He’d always thought of Radar Grove as tame. Now it was going to kill him!
He got to his feet and felt for north again. But if he’d gotten it right the first time he wouldn’t have fallen into that water. What water was this? He knew the river and it always smelled earthier than that and tasted like rot when some mist got on his lips by the dam. And the river had been east of him and…the wind had been in his face. Winter wind almost always came from the west. He should have remembered that. The water was the stream that wound from Mud Lake down through the northwest quadrant of the Grove. He’d forgotten all about it.
He put the wind on his right side and walked, now confidant in his direction. Arms wrapped around himself, hands crammed under his arm pits, shivering and hunched over, trying to conserve heat. Within a few minutes his jeans were stiff with ice and crackled with each step. He realized no branches were hitting him as he plodded on, feet catching on thick grasses under the snow cover. He was in one of the open prai
ries south of Mud Lake.
He shivered so hard his teeth clacked together. He was less than two miles from home but he wouldn’t make it like this. He needed to find shelter and start a fire. Now or he was dead. The night sky had lightened enough that he saw a copse of fir trees ahead. He trudged on, flinging each foot ahead of him in a stuttering zombie-ish walk. He shouldered his way through their branches to a small clearing among the trees. He gathered up fallen twigs and dry needles, then pulled off his sodden gloves. His fingers were so cold he couldn’t feel the lighter in his pocket but finally got it out. He had to watch himself light it because he couldn’t feel it in his hands. He spun the wheel, sparks stuttering and the flame catching. Then his thumb slipped off the lever and the flame went out and he dropped the lighter.
Damn it!
He scrabbled around until he saw he had the lighter in his hand and tried again, finally getting a short tongue of flame. He held it down to the kindling and the pine needles ignited, then the twigs. He fed in more twigs until the flames looked steady, then put the gloves back on and searched the area and assembled a heavy armload of branches and piled them on. Within minutes the dry wood was roaring and he sat in front of it with his hands out, the heat baking into him. He was so tired and so, so cold! He lay down next to the fire, blinking against the heat drying his eyes.
Chapter Five
Dan left the road at the entrance to Radar Grove and got on the Paget River Bike Trail, a wide path of crushed gravel now covered with ice and snow. The trail meandered northeast, dropping down a long shallow slope then kicking west into woods after it crossed a creek. Dan pulled out the flashlight and turned it on, twisting the lens to widen the beam. He checked the ground and found many footprints scuffed through the snow. He saw no marks of a travois, but if Sean didn’t score a deer there wouldn’t be any.