After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  The math of survival was colder than the landscape around them.

  “Nathan! Wake up. Nathan!”

  A hand shook his shoulder. Nathan didn’t remember falling asleep with his head resting on his knees, but now Cyndi’s voice rang urgent in his ear, drilling shrilly through his sleep.

  The wind was still howling outside, rattling the side panels, and he could hear Saber yelping and barking. With a supreme effort he didn’t want to make, Nathan lifted his head and opened his eyes. A dull light came through the windows, illuminating the scene in the Airstream. The air was thick with the odor of communal living and it seemed to move in eddies of condensation around him, as if the whole world was resting behind a steamed-up lens. Breath was coming in clouds from everyone beneath their blankets except for Cyndi, who knelt by Nathan, shaking him.

  “It’s Syd, for Pete’s sake, Nathan, wake up!”

  Nathan rubbed at his eyes. “What is it?”

  “Saber’s back, but Syd isn’t.”

  For the first time, Nathan could see that the Airstream door was being held open a crack against the wind by Dave. Through the gap, he could see Saber. She was leaping up at the Airstream, barking and yelping, flurries of flakes circling around her. She got down, spread her front paws wide, and barked again.

  “Suddenly, I’m in a Lassie movie.” Lucy rolled over, covering her ears. “Where’s Timmy, Lassie? Has he fallen down a well?” she snipped.

  Nathan didn’t want to do this. He didn’t care. Channeling Lucy, and feeling okay about it, he turned his face away from the door and tried to shut out the yelping of the damn dog.

  And that’s when Cyndi attacked him.

  Her fists rained down on his head, spittle streaking from her mouth, her incoherent words taking ten or fifteen seconds to make some sense.

  “Damn you, Nathan, damn you! We are not going to leave that girl to die in the snow. We are not going to leave her! Get up! Get up!”

  The blows lessened, Cyndi’s sobbing increased, and her body slumped to the floor of the trailer where she lay holding her ever-swelling stomach and crying like she was dredging up her tears from the very wells of hell.

  Nathan stared without seeing, and then, suddenly, it registered what he was looking at.

  Like a switch being flicked, the light came back on in Nathan’s head.

  Damn the hunger. Damn the cold.

  As his heart pumped a new fire into his chest, Nathan knew that this wasn’t him—this broken, depressed, hungry wretch was not Nathan Tolley. This wasn’t the man his daddy had raised, this wasn’t the husband that Cyndi had married, this wasn’t the father Tony needed, and, most of all, this wasn’t the man who would leave a child to die in the cold.

  Nathan hauled himself to his feet, climbed back into his damp pants, picked out a shotgun from the rack, and leapt out into the wind.

  The storm had almost blown itself out.

  It had only lasted a couple of hours, but in that time it had dumped a fresh load of snow across the road and piled it up against the Airstream’s side. Someone, probably Freeson, had unhitched the mules and tied them up in the trees, covered in blankets and out of the worst of the wind and snow.

  Saber barked excitedly, turning around Nathan’s legs and then trying to jump up to lick his face. He rubbed her ears and patted her back, and said, “Okay, Lassie, do your thing. Where is she?”

  Saber double-barked and then turned, haring off into the trees. Nathan followed as fast as he could, but when Saber got too far ahead, he would call her to stand fast until he caught up.

  How could he have gotten so close to giving up? The level of self-loathing was a rising tide within him as he stalked after the dog. He couldn’t let the cold, the hunger, and the depression it brought with it get the better of him again. He had never been this low before, ready to let his family and his friends slip through his fingers. It wouldn’t happen again.

  “Syd! Syd!”

  The wind whipped his words away and flung them into the trees, and Saber barked, too, kicking up sprays of powder with her back paws as she stood and howled.

  Within minutes, when Nathan looked back, he couldn’t see the mules, the Airstream, or the road. But he should be able to follow his footprints back in the snow if the wind, which was still dropping as the storm rolled away, didn’t wipe them clean in the meantime.

  “N…t...n!”

  Nathan spun, unsure of the direction that the voice had come from. Saber was off as it came again, and this time there was no calling her back. Saber left a fresh trail for him to follow and he made good progress through the silent trees.

  “Syd! Syd! Can you hear me?”

  “Nathan!”

  It was faint, but the voice drew Nathan on, Saber’s bark pulling him like a chain-fall. He saw the bloody snow and the F-150 Raptor SVT in the Green Livery of the Michigan Great Lakes Park Ranger service long before he saw the dead body of a 16-pointer elk that pinned Syd to the ground.

  “Syd?”

  “Thank God. Nathan. Help me. Please!”

  Syd was beneath the elk, and so large was the dead bull that all that was protruding from beneath it was Syd’s head. It took Nathan ten minutes of hauling to get the dead weight off the girl.

  She was lying in a depression from which all the snow had melted from the combined heat of their bodies. Like the snow around them, Syd was smeared in blood, but thankfully none of it was her own.

  When she was out from under the dead animal and had checked herself for injuries, finding nothing but a few small cuts and bruises, she told Nathan what had happened.

  “I found the Ranger truck half-buried in snow. And I was checking it out when I saw the elk. Biggest thing I ever saw. I tried to shoot it with the AR, but I slipped and missed. The bullet musta ricocheted and spooked it. It ran straight at me! I fired and got its shoulder, but it carried on. I guess it was just running blindly. I shot it in the head, but it was still moving and slammed into me. Then, bang, I was underneath it, couldn’t move, and it was bleeding all over me.”

  Her words came in an excited rush as she continued, “I’ve been here three hours, I reckon, and I am cold and I am wet and I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life!”

  She stepped tighter into Nathan and hugged him like she had at Jacob’s house. Nathan just looked down at the elk in shock and commented, “This is going to feed us for a month.”

  “It doesn’t need to. Not now.”

  Nathan looked at the girl, feeling the confusion leaking out of his face.

  “Easier if I show you,” she said.

  And so Syd took Nathan’s hand, and led him away from the truck and up through the treeline to come out with a view straight over paradise.

  23

  “Nate! You made it! You actually made it!”

  Stryker, the collar of his hideous Hawaiian shirt sticking up from the neck of his parka, ran down the steps outside the grand limestone edifice of the huge Masonic Temple. The enormous gothic façade was the perfect vision to complement the billion icicles that hung murderously from its ledges and finials. If Bela Lugosi had followed Stryker out of the building, Nathan wouldn’t have been at all surprised. The sixteen-story slab of history, turreted and formal, thrust its bulk up into the sky, daring the weather to attack first. The top of the building, where once had been the clean, straight lines of civic architecture, was now festooned with over a dozen wind turbines on jury-rigged steel gantries.

  Detroit’s grand Masonic Temple looked like it was half city structure and half a monstrous Howard Hawks’ prop engine sea-plane, about to take off and power up into the ashen sky.

  “It’s okay, you don’t have to bare your breast or roll up your pant leg to get in. Everyone is welcome here. Everyone!” Stryker threw out his hands and pirouetted on his heels. “Let’s get you guys inside, into the warmth!”

  Downtown Detroit had been a mess of half-cleared snow, wrecked cars, and a million broken windows. The streets were mainly empty excep
t for a few city cops who’d checked on them periodically as they’d rolled through. Nathan had driven the Raptor with Cyndi up front, and Tony, Syd, and Saber in the vehicle’s crew cab. The four others had ridden in the Airstream. The journey over the last ten miles by the shore of Lake Erie, and along the banks of the Detroit River into the city, had taken the best part of a day. But in contrast to the last six weeks, it felt faster than ice skimming across an oil slick. The mules had been reliably steadfast, but also totally more stead than fast.

  The weather had held off for the last few miles and the run along the expressway across the compacted snow had been the smoothest they’d experienced in months.

  After Syd had taken Nathan away from the Raptor and dead elk, up through the treeline, and pointed across the frozen expanse of Lake Erie, Nathan had been able to see the skyscrapers and bulk of their final destination.

  Detroit. Shining in a golden vision below the sun-pinked, ash-filled sky like a mirage.

  “I was coming back to tell you, but I got elked,” Syd said with the matter-of-fact simplicity of someone to whom that kind of thing happened every day.

  They’d been perhaps only a couple of days away from Stryker and his promised new life. They’d had a fresh vehicle, elk meat to butcher, and a renewed sense of urgency that Nathan had felt shivering through him like lightning in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory.

  Live, my beauty! Live!

  Even together, Syd and Nathan hadn’t had the strength to get the elk’s enormous body onto the back of the ranger’s Raptor. But once he’d lit a small fire under the block to thaw the engine and get the truck in a position to start—the tank had been nearly four-fifths full according to the gauge—the rugged vehicle had started on the fourth attempt. Nathan had used strong nylon ropes he’d found in the crew cab to tie the elk around the antlers and drag it behind the Raptor, down a track in the pines and back to the road where the bridge was out—and right to the waiting Airstream.

  It was the nearest feeling to Christmas Nathan had experienced since… well, Christmas.

  Freeson and Cyndi had butchered the elk, which had traveled well across the ice, losing only a few points from its antlers, and that evening they’d eaten like kings.

  “I once ate elk venison in Paris,” Lucy said as the meat roasted over an open flame and the party stood around the fire in the approaching night, their mouths salivating, their eyes glittering. “I didn’t like it that much. Can’t you go back and find a deer?”

  For a moment, Nathan had thought Lucy was being serious, and he’d been forming a rebuke when she’d flat-out winked at him and chucked the beard under his chin with her fingers. It had been the first really human moment he’d seen from her since she’d stood up to Owen in the diner. She had a sense of humor after all, so perhaps she and Freeson would work out.

  The next morning, Dave had managed to charge and get the base station working from the power point in the Raptor’s dash, and with that, they’d gotten an exact fix on their location and contacted Stryker by Skype.

  Stryker had said he’d arrange with the city authorities to give them access to the downtown area of Detroit. And he’d been good to his word.

  For perhaps the last time.

  The outskirts of the city were burning or burned-out in much the same way as the other cities they’d skirted on their journey to Detroit. Vast blocks of buildings were blackened, roofless stumps sticking out of deep, virgin snow.

  They’d nearly reached the downtown area before they’d met the city barricades. The wide, ice-covered expressway was completely blocked by lines of yellow school buses placed end to end. Snow drifted up almost to their roofs where city cops with shotguns, and one machine gun post, waited to challenge anyone who approached.

  Stryker’s assurances that they would be let into the city had been honored, but as they’d rolled on and continued to witness empty streets, dead windows in the faces of shattered buildings, and a general lack of evidence that the city was anything like the pictures Stryker had sent them over email, Nathan had begun to feel a nagging worry return to his gut—a background thing for the moment, but there, and unsettling.

  “Doesn’t look like paradise,” Syd had said from behind him, putting voice to the niggle of anxiety Nathan had been getting from the deserted streets.

  There were small pockets of evidence to show the city had been trying to prep for a future of cataclysmic weather events. But nothing like Nathan had imagined from Stryker’s overheated descriptions. Some public spaces that had once been parks and garden areas were covered in improvised plastic cloches, man-tall and misty with condensation. Nathan had also seen some shadows moving behind the transparent plastic, perhaps tending plants, but not the full evidence of an enclosed city they’d been expecting.

  Each small area of city farm had sported three or four spinning, domestic-use wind turbines up on telegraph poles. “I guess they’re using wind power to generate the extra heat they need inside the cloches… but the plastic will freeze and crack in the cold and under the weight of snow. They must be fixing them constantly. What happens when they run out of plastic sheeting? Why aren’t they using glass?” Cyndi’s practical prepper instincts had begun kicking in with her running commentary as they’d rolled through downtown. As they’d headed for Stryker’s home in the old Masonic Temple just beyond the Detroit business district, the near total lack of what they had been told to expect had done nothing to assuage Nathan’s unease.

  Once the hugging and the backslapping greetings were over, Stryker led the party through the doors and into the opulence of the marble entranceway of the Masonic Temple, and soon that unease Nathan had been feeling turned into an unscratchable itch.

  The once magnificent spaces of the temple were moving towards ruin. As their party climbed the stairs, the spaces above them showed up as being damp and gloomy. Their breath hung in the air like mist in autumn trees. The carpets were sodden and the place smelled of neglect and decay—like an old church that hadn’t had its roof fixed in decades.

  The walls on the stairwells were slick with water, too. Holes had been punctured in ceilings so that electrical wires could be fed through.

  “No point heating the stairs, guys!” Stryker said, picking up Nathan’s concerned looks to Cyndi.

  A ripple of ‘Is this it? Really?’ was moving through the party, though, from Nathan, through the kids, and back past Dave and Donie to Freeson and Lucy. Nathan saw Lucy feeling a wall as they moved up past the ninth floor, apparently checking the plaster that came away under her fingernail. Lucy shook her head. “Shocking,” she muttered.

  Even Saber was picking up the mood, loping behind them along the stairs, eyes unsure, her ears back and flat against her head.

  At the tenth-floor lobby, Stryker had to push his shoulder against a mahogany door that was warping in the damp in order to allow them all to get into the corridor beyond. At least here there was a feeling of warmth billowing from the space beyond the lobby.

  “See?” Stryker asked brightly. “Once you see the whole place, you’ll get a better idea of how well we’re doing. We have five rooms up here for you guys. Plenty to go around.”

  “Rooms?” Nathan stopped, a wave of suspicion rolling up his spine and bursting in his head. “You said we’d get a place of our own.”

  Stryker smiled widely and clapped Nathan on the shoulder. “Sure you will, buddy. Sure you will, but this is just for settling in. Worry not. Have I ever let you down before?”

  I never gave you the chance before, Nathan thought uncharitably, but he said nothing.

  “Sorry about the elevators,” Stryker said as he moved away down the corridor past a series of wooden doors that had names on them—The Michaels. Randy’s Place. Fullerton. Mrs. Kowalski… and half a dozen more. “You’ll love the neighbors. All good people. All of them. We’ll have a get-together tonight after you’ve settled in.”

  “How many people live here, Stry?”

  “I’m not a census guy, Nat
e.” Stryker laughed and made a joke of counting on his fingers until he shook off the joke and commented, “Coupl’a hundred, I guess. Haven’t met them all. We get a daily influx, as well, from downtown and some outlier communities. The main auditorium here in the temple is also the city government chamber. They got a proper parliament going, dude. All the plans. All the ideas. This is a city of ideas, man. It’s built on them!”

  Stryker stopped outside a set of mahogany double doors, and then turned like he was a three-ring circus ringmaster about to announce the main act.

  “Nathan, Cyndi, Tony, and everyone, welcome to the rest of your lives!”

  And then came the explosion, blasting the doors apart, filling the corridor with dense black smoke—it crashed through them in a rage of hot breath and red fire.

  24

  There was an age of black silence, where empires of fear and grief rose and fell in the unhappiness of inevitable history. The years spinning darkly around his head to the buzz of flies rising from a rotting carcass.

  Then history moved on, and Nathan was back in the room.

  Nathan felt like he’d been dropped into a pressurized diving bell and someone was pushing their thumbs hard into his eyes, while an elephant or similar beast pressed its full weight down on his guts. His nose and mouth were covered in a gritty film of warm soot and the stench of a broken latrine forced its way into his nostrils.

  When his ears began to work again, Nathan could hear coughing, spluttering, and groaning all around him. But his eyes were refusing to work, and that immediate frustration brought his hand up to try to clear his vision. The fingers came away smeared with wet earth as if his face had been pushed into a muddy puddle. As he cleared his eyes, gloomy light in the corridor came in a rush through his eyelids, and Tony’s sobs, harsh and hacking in the close proximity, began to turn into the wheeze of an asthma attack.