After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  The rush of debris and hot flame burst past the wrecker on all sides. It was like being in a space shuttle reentering the atmosphere, but it was just a fast rush of flame and it was gone as soon as it appeared.

  The wrecker drove on across the back of the compound, turning and swinging around behind the gas station.

  Nathan saw figures running across the concrete towards the parked Ski-Doos, and he turned the wheel and pointed the truck right at them.

  Before Mustache and Redhead could get the engines started on either machine, Nathan crushed them both beneath the wheels of the wrecker.

  “Good for you, Nathan!” Lucy shouted. “Good for you!”

  The scavengers had moved the majority of the stores from the Airstream into the diner for inventory, and to check over what they’d liberated in the relative comfort of the building. It meant that the attack with the Molotov cocktails hadn’t just been an attempt to hurt and injure the party, but a deliberate act to destroy the stores. A message that said: If we can’t have it, neither can you.

  That Mustache and Redhead had paid with their lives to torch the diner had only one logical conclusion for Nathan. This group of scavengers saw the survival of his group as a direct threat to them. There were only so many resources to go around, so eliminating the opposition became an imperative strategy. Ensuring Nathan’s group was robbed of those essential supplies piled pressure upon pressure on their situation, and it would make them desperate, possibly more careless, and in turn vulnerable to attack.

  Cyndi streamed silent tears as they searched through the exploded wreck of the diner to find whatever was left that they could salvage, but apart from a few scorched ready meals, a number of tins of ham, and a catering bag of rice, there was nothing. The diner had become a blackened stain next to the highway, and without it as cover or shelter, Nathan felt even more exposed.

  Tony sat in the crew cab for most of the morning that followed the violence, hugging Saber with Syd as the sun came up over the frozen landscape, orange beams fingering the snow and illuminating the smoke that was still rising into the sky.

  Nathan shielded his eyes and looked to the sky. The column of smoke billowing up from the wreckage would be a convenient locator signal for anyone on the lookout for a place to bring or make mischief.

  “We don’t know that there aren’t more of them on their way here now,” he said to Freeson and Lucy as Cyndi insisted on checking the burned shell of the diner again for anything she could save.

  Freeson, who was just able to stand up, appeared hollowed and desperately ill from his beating and night of exposure to the elements. Lucy had her arm around his waist as if she were offering more than just the support of a warm body. She also looked as though she was clinging onto him as much as he was holding onto her. Freeson’s voice sounded croaky and his lips split to new blood if he talked too much, but he agreed, “Yeah. We need to get as far away from here as we can.”

  “They left the fuel in the Airstream, but we’re so low on food that we’re going to have to ration if we don’t find anything soon.” Cyndi’s face remained covered in soot from the fire, her hair a mess of sweat and blood. Not her blood, at least. She’d also caught a spray of material from Owen’s head as the second bullet had hit home.

  They all needed a shower and to rest for a month, but there was no chance of that. Not right now.

  Donie and Dave were happy that their flight cases had been left intact in the Airstream, as Owen and his scavengers had prioritized food over anything else. From what Nathan had seen of them before he’d driven the truck into the diner, most of them had had the hungry, rangy look of people who regularly went a long time between meals.

  The two Mack trucks were cosmetically intact but had already been cannibalized for parts sometime in the last few months. The scavengers’ black Ford F-350 was still in good shape, though, showing few signs of damage from the fire, except for a few bubbles of paint lifted by the heat and spreading like a rash down one side.

  As they got ready to head out, Lucy offered to drive it while Freeson rested with her. Nathan hooked up the Airstream to the Dodge, and he, Cyndi, Dave, and Donie joined the kids in the crew cab with the dog.

  And then, without an ounce of restful sleep between them, they drove up the snowy ramp and back onto the highway.

  The wind howled around the Airstream and the blizzard rattled its hide. A storm had closed in six hours from the diner. They were traveling back roads again now and had gotten off the highway as soon as they could, but there’d been no way they could avoid the storm.

  Nathan had parked the group in the parking lot next to a small lake where, in better, warmer times, people had come to sail, relax, and barbeque.

  As the wind brought the first burst of snow out of the darkening sky, Nathan couldn’t think of any scene more opposite of that summer picture in his head than the one that greeted them now.

  “Ahhhh! Come on!”

  Cyndi was doing the best she could with the frostbite in the soles of Freeson’s feet.

  The scavengers had left him barefoot on the frozen forecourt of the gas station for many hours, and the flesh had set solid. In the party’s rush to get away from the diner, they hadn’t had the time to do even the most cursory bit of first aid on the mechanic. The beating he’d taken wouldn’t damage him long-term, but his frozen feet were another matter.

  Cyndi had warmed some water on the Airstream’s stove and put Freeson’s feet into it. His toes were near black, though, where six hours of neglect as they’d hightailed it away from the diner had left only a paltry blood supply to reach them. Cyndi put salt and lavender oil into the water. “Not to thaw them, that’s already happened, but to clean them and try to stop any infection.”

  “It hurts! Damn, it hurts!”

  “It will. Now shut up and put your feet back in the bowl.”

  Cyndi had also attended as best she could to the wound on the side of Nathan’s head from the bullet graze. “It’s infected,” she told him, turning her attention to her husband and popping some antibiotics from a pack she’d found in the looted medicine chest. They had ten pills left. “You’ll need them all, Nate.”

  “Give them to Free. Or save them for you and Tony.”

  “Let’s see if I can stop his feet taking bad first. Your head has to be a priority.”

  Nathan nodded, but although his head wound was still leaking pus and felt hot to the touch, moving squelchily beneath his fingers, he still felt Freeson’s feet looked worse than his head felt.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” Freeson said before pulling the cork from a bottle of single malt with his teeth. “I got my own kind of painkillers.”

  Donie and Dave were still high on their light and sound show, more than pleased with themselves. Nathan didn’t tackle them on the fact that they’d left Freeson to pick himself up and come to the diner to end Owen. Still, it grated on him. Perhaps if they’d not been backslapping so much, maybe Betty would still be alive. It wasn’t that he resented their silly grins and their high-fiving every time one of them mentioned how well the sound system had worked out, but their moods didn’t match the rest of those who were holed up in the Airstream while the storm raged on outside.

  When Cyndi had finished with Nathan’s head and Freeson’s feet, she and Lucy prepared a meager meal of rice and ham.

  “No. Don’t do that!”

  Syd’s hand stopped halfway to Saber’s salivating mouth and sparkly-eyed gaze. In her fingers was a chunk of ham that had been rolled in rice and gravy. “She’s got to eat, Cyndi.”

  “Not our food. She can go hunt after the storm. Now, come on. You took quite a blow to the head, and we need to make sure you’re not concussed and that you’re getting some protein in you.”

  “I’m not hungry anyway,” Syd said with maximum defiance, and threw the meat to the dog. Saber swallowed it so fast it didn’t touch the sides of her mouth.

  “Syd!”

  The mood had suddenly become toxic. Cyndi
was ready to explode, and Syd was all belligerence and attitude, setting her chin and looking around for something else to feed to the dog.

  Syd’s changed mood made sense to Nathan, though. To have been kidnapped by the Seven-Ones, potentially taken back to be conscripted for a rape-harem after all she’d been through... Nathan felt sure she wouldn’t be able to articulate it yet, but the experience might just have proven to her that joining up with Nathan and the others made sense.

  “Okay, okay.” Nathan got to his feet and stomped over to Syd, caught between concern for the teen and a need to back up his wife. He softened his voice, but inside he was wound up tighter than an airlock door on a space shuttle. “Look, Syd, we’ve all got to get along here, okay? Cyndi is doing the best she can with the little we have left. We’re still three hundred miles from Detroit. We don’t know where the next food is coming from. The dog will hunt—I’ve seen her do it. Saber will be okay. When the storm breaks, you and me will go hunting, okay? See what we can find. But you’re not doing anyone any favors right now, resisting the needs of the party.”

  “You’re not my dad!”

  And that unspun the wheel. Boom.

  “I wouldn’t want to be!” Nathan yelled.

  He hadn’t realized how frayed his own temper was right now, and that response had just bludgeoned his lips open and crawled out. Nathan had fallen into the bear pit, too, and after everything he’d been through in the last couple of days, Nathan was ready to tear the bear several new assholes.

  The argument raged like the storm outside until Syd got up, stormed the length of the Airstream, and locked herself into the toilet for an hour.

  When she came out, her face was streaked with tears and, yet again, the hard-nosed bitch had turned into the sensitive child. She didn’t say anything, but she went straight to Cyndi, wrapped her arms around her, and squeezed for all she was worth.

  “It’s okay,” said Cyndi. “It’s all okay.”

  Nathan looked around the Airstream. At Lucy huddled under a blanket with Freeson, sipping from her hipflask, at Dave and Donie, their faces serious and drained of their joy over the sound system working out, and at Tony sitting with his hand on Saber, stroking silently—then, finally, to Cyndi hugging the errant teen, whispering in her ear that everything would be okay.

  Right then, Nathan couldn’t in all honestly agree with her that it would be, so he said nothing.

  The storm lasted fourteen hours.

  When Nathan finally emerged, blinking into the gray mid-morning light, it was on a breath of fetid air and human body odor that Lucy had complained she could chew on, to the extent that she wished they hadn’t ended up in the “Black Hole of Calcutta.”

  Nathan didn’t know what the “Black Hole of Calcutta” was, but by the way Dave had side-eyed the rich woman, it didn’t look like her choice of words had made her anymore friends. They all needed space and air. Saber dived through the door behind him and headed off into the woods to forage.

  In the six hours of travel before the storm, they’d put a good distance between them and the diner, but Nathan still felt exposed by the lake. The fresh snow had added another two feet of powder to the already frozen lakeside, and as Nathan headed down the slope of land to where he figured the water began, his feet scooted from under him on a patch of ice. He slid onto his ass and plowed through the cold snow to bark his knee against the concrete side of a park trash can.

  It was only when he heard Syd laughing behind him that he realized she’d followed him out. She shooshed down through the snow and offered him a hand. Although the girl was slight, she was strong enough to help him up.

  “Did I look like I needed a girl to help me up?” he asked, feigning hurt.

  “Doesn’t every man?” she answered, digging through the snow with her gloved hands and locating the surface of the ice on the lake.

  Nathan and Syd broke the crust with their heels and then filled water cans to lug back up towards the Airstream.

  “Are you okay?” he asked as they hauled the water.

  Syd shrugged. “I thought… I can’t go back to them. To Danny. To the Seven-Ones. I don’t want to live like that…”

  Nathan didn’t want to overstep the moment by trying for a hug, so he just paused to put the water down for a moment, held out his hand, and waited till she stopped and took it. Something of that connective truce achieved, they completed the walk back to the Airstream.

  Cyndi was in full-on ration mode. The coffee she made was weak and gritty, and the breakfast was sweetened rice fried on the stove.

  “Until we find another source of food, it’s going to be meat every other day if we can’t catch it,” she announced.

  The glum faces receiving this pronouncement accepted Cyndi’s assessment, but their eyes told a whole other story. Things had been upended so thoroughly in such a short amount of time. In one engagement, they’d gone from having more than enough food to get them through, right on to a feeling of desperation and poverty.

  And after two hours of fruitless hunting around the lakeshore and the surrounding woodland, Nathan and Syd hadn’t managed to shoot anything. Not even a bird.

  Saber came back with a half-eaten rat, but nobody felt like sharing. It was as if all the animals in the area had followed the fleeing humans south.

  “Dave, can you get a signal on the base station?” Nathan asked.

  In response, Dave dipped into the flight case and pulled out the equipment he needed. Half an hour later, he came back shaking his head. “Nada. I can’t even geo-locate us.”

  “We can’t be too far from the nearest town. Do you think you can find out where we are on the map?”

  Dave shrugged. “We left in a hurry. I’ve sorta got an idea, but I don’t know how accurate I can be.”

  “We should avoid towns,” Donie cut in, jumping down from the Airstream with her face set.

  Nathan shook his head at her, resigned to the difficulty ahead. “We need food, supplies, and medicine. We need antibiotics.”

  “You think there’s anything left down there that the people leaving or the scavengers haven’t already taken? We go down into a town, we’re an easy target for an ambush. If I was a scavenger, that’s what I’d do. Wait for the good stuff to come to me. Why waste energy if people are just driving by ready to be picked off?”

  Things felt too desperate to avoid looking for supplies, but Nathan couldn’t, at the moment, refute her logic. Not that he was in a position to. A throbbing bitch of a headache had come on since he’d fallen over near the lake, and it had worsened during the failed hunt. He felt like he might be coming down with a cold or, worse, flu—the back of his throat felt raspy and dry.

  “Whatever. We’ll look out for isolated homesteads then as we go, but we’re going to have to check them all. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Donie and Dave said in tandem.

  “Do the best you can to find out where we are on your cop maps and plan a route that will take us by the most farms. We might get lucky again like we did with the tractor.”

  They set off an hour later, with Lucy, Freeson, Dave, and Donie leading in the F-350, and Cyndi announcing she would drive the Dodge, having taken pity on Nathan’s ashen face and shivery shoulders.

  Cyndi put a hand on Nathan’s forehead before she put the Dodge into gear.

  “You’re sweating. Hot, too.”

  “I’m freezing.”

  “Take more antibiotics. Two instead of one. And get in the crew cab. I’ll be fine driving.”

  Nathan didn’t have the strength to argue. He climbed over both seats into the rear of the cab, dropping into the cargo space at the back. Wedged in, he lay down and aimed for sleep, hoping that Cyndi didn’t notice he’d not taken any of the antibiotics at all.

  Tony and Cyndi were his priority, and if they needed the capsules before they found extra, Nathan wouldn’t be able to live with himself, knowing he’d used them up when they needed them. The pills would be saved for them.

  And
that was that.

  Nathan awoke with a start. His head felt thick with fever and he was shivering like he’d been left out in the snow. Voices were raised outside, though, and there was an argument going on somewhere not far out of earshot.

  His head still thrummed with a headache, though, and he didn’t know if he wanted to throw up, or whether his world was going to fall out of the other end of his body.

  The crew cab was empty of anyone but him. Not even Tony or Saber were there. He lifted his head off of Lucy’s fur coat and tried, fuzzily, to concentrate on the voices.

  “We haven’t been near anywhere! Show me the map!”

  That had been Cyndi’s voice, and she added, “Where are we?”

  “There. I think,” Dave said, sounding unsure.

  “The snow’s taken all the road signs down—it’s not his fault!” Donie, her voice risen several notches in pitch.

  “This road isn’t getting us anywhere except more lost. We need to find our way back to the highway.” Cyndi again. The tone of voice wasn’t one for taking any crap, either. Nathan knew it of old. Cyndi’s stubbornness was her superpower.

  “Can we just decide? I’m as cold as a snowman’s dick.” Lucy. Even in his haze of fever, Nathan couldn’t help smiling. That was one of Freeson’s choice phrases that had rubbed off on Lucy, and she seemed to be happily assimilating his broader turns of phrase.

  Nathan tried to sit up, but it felt like there was a weight on his shoulders, too massive to shift. Then a swirl of darkness rushed up towards him, and he could do nothing but sink towards it.

  When he woke again, the truck was moving. It seemed to be making a good speed, too, the comforting rumbles of the engine moving up through his spine. Somebody was mopping his forehead with a rag. He opened his eyes. Syd hovered above him, her face a mask of concern. He tried to smile, to put her mind at rest, but with some panic he realized that his mouth wasn’t working.

  Nathan tried to lift his hand.