After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  “I lie. Get used to it.” She’d told him that in the cab of the Dodge. And yes, he really would have to.

  Cyndi left them then with a giggle and a jovial, “Men!”

  Freeson passed Nathan a glass. He enjoyed the liquor burning his lips and warming his throat.

  “You think this Stryker dude will help us out?” Free asked.

  “I’ve not said I’m going yet!”

  “Way Cyndi was talking, I reckon you’re going to be the only one left here in a couple of days if you don’t. Good luck with that.” Although there was a smile on Freeson’s lips, Nathan could tell a serious point lay behind the jest. Nathan sat back with his glass, struck again by Freeson’s situation and regrets over the death of his wife. The man would spend the rest of his life thinking that, if he hadn’t been a pig-headed asshole, perhaps his Marie would still have been with him, still curling up on the sofa with him, leaning her weight and warmth into his chest like Cyndi had been sitting against Nate.

  Am I making the same mistake?

  Family First.

  “Do it for Tony and Cyndi if you won’t do it for yourself,” Freeson offered, pouring himself another generously three-fingered measure.

  “And another.”

  The bottle lip clinked and slid across the glass as Freeson looked up with sharp interest, whiskey dripping onto his pants. “You mean...?”

  Nathan nodded. “Yeah. She is.”

  Freeson blinked, then passed the bottle to Nathan and drained his glass in one gulp. “Well, that settles it, I guess,” he said as he came up for air.

  Nathan poured himself another drink. “Yeah. I guess you’re right,” he said, surrendering, his mind full of a wrecked Charger mangled in trees on the side of Lake Shore Drive.

  6

  The scavengers didn’t come back in the morning, and once Syd was told that Nathan and his family were leaving, too, she didn’t head off first thing as she’d planned, even though she was clearly still angry with Nathan.

  When she’d fed Saber from a can of corned beef Cyndi had given her, Nathan, just downstairs from his shower, made a point of taking her aside in the family room.

  “Look, I’m sorry, okay?”

  Syd didn’t seem to be in the mood to be gracious or show gratitude. “Sorry for what exactly?”

  Nathan held onto his irritation and packed it down with a couple of compliments. “I wouldn’t have been able to run the scavengers off the land if it wasn’t for you. I couldn’t have done it without you. So I’m sorry for shouting at you…”

  “And?”

  Nathan chewed his lip hard, but didn’t rise to the bait. “And I’m sorry for blaming the dog for my son’s asthma attack, okay?”

  Syd considered this for just enough time for it to be annoying, but for a short enough time for it not to boil Nathan over like an abandoned pot of milk on the stove. She actually seemed to be an expert at keeping him simmering without getting burned herself. Realizing it, Nathan filed the conclusion away for further use when the time came right.

  Now, though, wasn’t that time. “So, we don’t have to be bosom buddies or anything, but how about a truce?”

  Syd didn’t argue, or work in a dig to wind Nathan up anymore, but neither did she agree to a truce. She just shrugged and took Saber outside for some exercise.

  Once you crack the nut on the outside, Nathan thought, there’s a whole other nut inside. Sighing, he went to see how Cyndi and Tony were getting on with breakfast.

  Later that morning, Nathan called everyone into the family room for a meeting. Syd was still sullen and avoiding eye contact with Nate, Freeson had screwed on his let’s-get-this-done head, and Cyndi was serene, switched on and determined. No change there.

  Nathan felt happier about his son, too. Tony’s color was so much better and he said that he was feeling fine just now. He was more excited to be getting off lessons with his Mom. Nathan loved the basic nothing-phases-me attitude of the boy. He definitely had his mother’s brains.

  Nathan outlined the plan he’d drawn up with Cyndi that morning. When he’d explained to her that he’d come around on the idea of leaving Glens Falls, her sense of relief had driven her practical and pragmatic skills into overdrive. Within the hour, they’d had a strategy and some ideas about how they’d implement it, and now it was time to talk to Free and the others.

  “I tried calling Stryker in Detroit, but the telephone is fritzed. We’re still able to get onto the internet, so we’ve tried emailing him to check that it’s okay to head there.”

  Syd seemed less than convinced that Detroit was a viable option and commented, “It’ll still be cold there. Just as cold as here.”

  Cyndi nodded. “Yes, but there’s floods and tornadoes in the Midwest, and there’s earthquakes in California. Detroit may be cold, but looking at the rest of the states, it’s at least stable. For now. So, considering that we’ve got a connection established there, it offers our best opportunity. It’s also near enough to get to on the gas we have. Or, almost.”

  Tony was looking with wide-eyed wonder from Cyndi to Nathan, his face full of the promise of adventure. Nathan knew in his heart that the trip to Detroit would be anything but a fun escapade, but he wasn’t going to say that out loud to his son. All he knew was that he would keep his son as close as humanly possible over the next few weeks.

  While Freeson took the wrecker back to town to fetch clothes and essentials from his apartment, Cyndi and Nathan took Syd out back of the house. The snow out there hadn’t been disturbed since the storm and offered wild drifts that came up past the women’s thighs and Nathan’s knees.

  The backyard, if it hadn’t been glutted with snow, would have been a concrete apron where Nathan stored auto spares that were too valuable or bulky to leave in his shop in town. There were also tubs of earth that now lay frozen and barren, into which, before the winter had come, Cyndi had planted fruit trees meant to augment her stores and make seeds for future cultivation. Beyond the tubs and the cases of spare parts, there was also the silver fuselage of a vintage 70’s Airstream Trailer.

  The Airstream looked like a Dakota with its wings sawed off. A rounded aluminum trailer, with door and windows, sat on six wheels, equipped with berths to sleep as many as six people with a small dining area, galley kitchen, and bathroom facilities all included. One side had been almost entirely obscured by snow, and the windows were frosted over, but it was still a weirdly impressive sight.

  “Wow!” Syd said, revealing—as Cyndi had predicted—the young girl within the woman. Nathan got snow shovels from the outhouse and handing one to Syd, and with that they began to dig the trailer out of its snowy tomb.

  After some time spent shoveling, Cyndi went inside the vehicle with Tony to check the propane levels for the stoves and reconnect the batteries, which Nathan had stored in the garage. As the seasons had stopped dead in their tracks and the Big Winter had covered New York State with its blanket of ice, the Airstream had hibernated, ready to be awoken only when the need arose.

  Saber had jumped up into the trailer to follow Tony, and Nathan thought he detected a slight look of irritation from Syd as her dog continued bonding with the boy, but she didn’t call the dog back. The truce, at least for the moment, was holding.

  By the time Freeson drove back to the valley, it was early afternoon and the Airstream trailer had been excavated from beneath the now. Nathan and Syd fitted snow chains to its tires, so Freeson set about connecting the snow plow to the front of the Dodge. Before the Big Winter, the plow had been used to clear the concrete outside Nathan’s auto shop, or in normal winters to get to town in the first place. Now it took Freeson just a few minutes to reach the road outside Nathan’s house so the Airstream could be brought out and hooked up.

  Steam rose from the vents in the Airstream’s roof. Cyndi had fired up the stove and boiler to get the inside of the trailer warm and dry. It would take a few hours yet, but it would certainly be ready for when they decided to leave the next morning.
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  Syd, who’d jumped up inside to have a look around, pulled over a sliding window and stuck her head out to speak to Nathan. “Jeez. This place is half the size of my apartment. It’s like a house on wheels!”

  Nathan smiled as Cyndi handed him a cup of coffee she’d made in the trailer. Although there was no wind to speak of outside, the day being still and in recovery from the storm, it was still uncomfortably cold. Even after the exertions of digging the trailer out of the snow, the chill would soon bite back. The coffee was as warming as the whiskey had been.

  “Where did you get it?” Syd asked, jumping down with Tony and Saber in tow.

  “I didn’t. It was my daddy’s trailer. He spent fifteen years renovating it, and I spent the next five finishing. It was a shell when he got it, beat up to hell on the outside, and it looked like a tornado had been through the inside.”

  “You fixed it yourselves?”

  “Not everything is as disposable as a razor,” said Nathan, noting to himself that he sounded fifty-eight rather than twenty-eight.

  Some days, he felt like a man out of time who had been born too late. Truthfully, he longed for the times of his daddy, and his daddy before him. Before the silicon chip and the internet and the microwaved meal. Nathan liked the honesty of the wrench, the authenticity of the lathe, and the trust of a well-made hand drill. He could deal with technology, but he wished he didn’t have to.

  “Okay, Grandpa!” Syd said, nudging his ribs with a bony elbow. Cyndi and Freeson thought the retort hilarious, and Nathan had to admit it had at least turned up the corner of his mouth momentarily.

  And that was the last time that would happen for a while.

  “I said, what’s up, honey?”

  Nathan blinked, and it suddenly hit him that Cyndi had been talking to him and he hadn’t heard a word she’d said. In fact, he hadn’t even heard her come into the bedroom.

  Nathan had been sitting on the side of the bed going through an old photograph album. It was full of pictures of fishing trips he and his daddy had gone on when he’d been Tony’s age. They’d been the best of friends, hiking up around Lake George, catching walleye and cooking them on makeshift hearths, picking scales off their greasy fingers and listening to the huge silence of the woods.

  It seemed a dozen lifetimes ago, and it had been back in those distant days when Nathan’s daddy had passed on his love of engines and automobiles to his son. Explaining the intricacies of the internal combustion engine, the powerful engineering of the pushrod OHV 90° V-configured gasoline engine, and the precision craftsmanship of a rack-and-pinion steering system. Nathan had of course lapped it all up, and each piece of knowledge had stuck with him so that he’d eventually been ready to take on his father’s business. All that was left of those times now were these photographs and the compressed silence of the outdoors hollowing out Nathan’s heart.

  He was supposed to be packing essentials into his backpacks and taking them down to the Airstream, but he’d gotten stuck in a reverie so deep that Cyndi had almost had to shake his shoulder to lift him out of it.

  “Sorry,” he said, slamming the album shut and then standing up abruptly. “I was just…”

  “I can see what you were just doing, honey. It’s okay, I feel the same.”

  After a second, he met her eyes. “I haven’t known another home, baby. I’ve lived here all my life. I was made in the room next door and born there.”

  “It’s going to be a wrench for all of us. But we’re doing the right thing,” she added, hugging Nathan so that her breasts pressed pleasingly into his chest. She’d just come in from outside, and the cold had made her nipples hard enough he could feel them through the material of her shirt.

  Damn.

  Eyes on the prize, Nathan. Keep your mind on the matter at hand.

  Nathan loved the way Cyndi made him feel, even after nine years of marriage. The passion he felt for her burned just as bright as it ever had. Whatever his mood or distemper, she could turn him around with a look, a stroke, or a hug. She was all woman, and Nathan knew he’d fallen on his feet the day he’d met her.

  Cyndi’s father had brought her into the family auto shop in town to have something adjusted on his own 4x4. Nathan couldn’t remember what the problem with the truck had been because, as had happened with the album just then, he’d been lost in the moment. Only having eyes for the young woman who’d eagerly followed her father in to speak to Nathan’s daddy.

  Nathan had made sure to be in the shop a few hours later when the two of them came back to pick up their vehicle, and he’d settled the bill with them while his daddy had had his head stuck in another engine, up to his elbows in oil.

  Nathan had noted their address, memorizing it, and in as non-stalkery a way as possible, he’d then hung out after school in a coffee shop nearby, wasting dollar after dollar on overpriced coffee until the afternoon that Cyndi showed up—and he’d then, with maximum faltering and imperial-level shyness, asked her if she’d like to come to a movie with him on a Friday night.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” she’d said.

  In response, Nathan’s face had transmitted pure confusion, and Cyndi had laughed. She’d told him, “This is my aunt’s coffee shop. I come here every day after school to do my homework. I’ve been sitting in a booth over there, and you’ve failed to notice me for the last four days because you’ve been looking out of the window like your life depended on it. Not for once noticing that I’d gotten here before you. Every. Single. Day.”

  Cyndi had had the drop on Nathan ever since, and he loved her all the more for it.

  “I want to take everything,” he told her quietly, thinking back to that moment and looking around their room.

  “If you take everything, we won’t be leaving, will we?”

  Nathan couldn’t compete with her logic, and so he put the album he’d been holding so tightly back onto the bed. Cyndi looked up at him with huge, beautiful eyes. Then she picked up the album and put it back into Nathan’s hands. “I think we can find room for that, don’t you?”

  He swallowed. “Thank you.”

  “But you really need to make some serious decisions about the other stuff. We need to prioritize food, fuel, and survival supplies for the Airstream. We’ve got to travel light.”

  Cyndi had already caught Nathan trying to stuff extra socket sets and tool bags into the storage bins of the Airstream that she’d earmarked for food. “No, Nathan, come on. You’re not being practical,” she’d told him earlier.

  “But they’re Daddy’s tools!”

  “And you can keep them, of course…”

  “I can feel a ‘but’ coming on…”

  “But you’ll have to store them in the toolbox on the back of the wrecker.”

  “You know that’s already full!” Nathan had protested.

  “Tony can’t eat socket sets, Nathan. And I can’t treat his asthma with hacksaws. Prioritize.”

  “I agree, so I see no need for you to bring any underwear,” he’d responded with a salacious grin, tapping her backside with the flat of his hand and giving her buttock a squeeze.

  Cyndi had batted his hand away, but with a smile in her voice had told him to behave himself.

  Now in the bedroom, holding onto each other like drowning sailors, Nathan could feel the memories already lifting from his head to float away into the distance of experience. Cyndi was right. They had to prioritize or they wouldn’t make it out of Glens Falls, let alone across the state.

  Yet he felt more doubt than he had the night before. Stryker hadn’t replied to the email Nathan had sent, and that was a worry. Not a terminal concern that would derail their choice of destination before they started… but one that added an extra layer of uncertainty to the trip before they’d even turned a wheel.

  “We should stay another two nights at least before we set off,” Nathan said to the others that evening as they rested by their fire, their bellies full from dinner. Out of earshot, Tony was playing with Saber
in the kitchen.

  Cyndi agreed easily enough, but Freeson commented, “We’ve been lucky so far. The weather’s still calm enough to give us a good head start. The snow on the roads will be powder and good for travel. Another lowering in the temperature and it’ll turn to hard ice, and that’ll slow us down. We should go tomorrow.”

  Almost all of the supplies Cyndi had stockpiled in the garage—the food, both dried and canned, and the propane and water purifiers, the candles, the tents, and the survival gear—had been transferred to the Airstream during the day with herculean effort on the part of everyone. Even Tony had done the best he could, sorting through his toys, deciding on leaving the majority of them in favor of taking as many books from the family library as Cyndi would allow.

  Pretty soon, the interior of the Airstream had been cramped and dark with gear. Everywhere that could be was now stuffed with stores in boxes and tied down with straps. Progress down its length was nearly impossible without a map. Freeson had compared it to trying to negotiate a Pac-Man maze. Syd had looked at him like he’d been speaking Swahili.

  Another pointer to her real age, Nathan realized as he glanced her way now.

  He hedged, “I dunno, Free. Setting out without a definite invitation might not be the smartest idea.”

  “What kind of friend is he, Nate? The kind that would turn away a fella in need? One with a sick boy and a baby on the way?”

  Put like that, Nathan had to admit that Stryker was absolutely not that kind of a man. Well, he hadn’t been anyway, and the contact they’d had since he’d made it to Detroit seemed to suggest a man who was still honorable and trustworthy.

  “I think we should go tomorrow, too,” Syd said, her knees drawn up in the armchair, chin resting on them, hugging herself like she was feeling anxiety but wasn’t comfortable about showing it. Nathan wondered if she felt worried about the scavengers coming back or something else was bothering her. It had been a couple of days now, and conversely, the good, bright weather meant those men wouldn’t have been able to approach in the daytime without being seen; even the nights were too exposed for them to attack without the cover of a storm.