by Kyla Stone
Using the nav lights, she kept her eyes peeled for water moccasins—not that she’d see them in the dark—and gators. There were always gators.
Everything was deadly here.
A dozen small pairs of red orbs peered at her just above the surface of the brackish water—alligator eyes. With the tapetum lucidum at the back of each eye reflecting light back into their photoreceptor cells, gator eyes reflected a red, devilish glow.
It felt like Satan’s minions were watching them, just waiting for their chance to pounce.
Eden hunched in her seat, shivering, though it was far from cold. She needed a doctor, but Dakota couldn’t give that to her.
“Only a little while more,” she said, but Eden didn’t respond.
They passed a strip of dry land covered with a few low bushes and several hammocks—islands made of trees, walls of cattails, and dense stands of saw grass. She aimed toward a narrow channel, passing through a thick stand of cattails on either side.
The engine sputtered. The airboat rocked and slowed. Dakota checked the gas, a sickening sensation churning in her belly.
In her frantic bid to escape, she hadn’t checked. She’d picked an airboat with less than a quarter tank of gas.
They weren’t anywhere near the levee yet.
Damn. Damn. Damn. What now?
She scanned the endless water, the grass, the trees, panic clawing up her throat.
There. About thirty yards ahead to the right. An old, rotting dock leading to a peninsula of dry land thick with cypress and mangrove trees.
Jutting from the water along the muddy bank, a weathered wooden sign splattered the words in red, dripping paint: TRESSPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.
On one of their trips, Maddox had taken her past this same dock, pointing it out, shouting gleefully, “That’s crazy old Ezra’s place. Don’t get too close, or the ole codger’ll shoot your head off. For real.”
Did she have a choice now? The airboat was nearly out of gas. Without the boat’s GPS, she couldn’t tell which way to go.
They were too far from the levee, from a road, from any speck of civilization.
Without the boat, they’d need to walk and swim through miles of swamp, through gator-infested waters, through a directionless wasteland of saw grass and cattails that went on and on and on.
They could travel days—weeks—without seeing another human being…if they could even survive that long.
They’d fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They had no food. No safe, filtered water, not even a water bottle. No way to find shelter to protect them from the elements and the deadly predators that called the Glades home—gators, snakes, boars, panthers.
She wished she’d been able to plan, to prepare, be ready—but they were running for their lives. She couldn’t go back and change things now.
“I didn’t bring us out here to die,” Dakota whispered between clenched teeth. “I didn’t.”
23
Dakota
Dakota’s eyes remained closed, deep within her memories.
Trespassing on that man’s property had been a dangerous proposition, but it beat dying of starvation, heat stroke, a venomous snake bite, or a gator’s jaws.
She’d had no choice.
A dozen yards ahead, the channel was blocked by felled tree limbs. She cut the motor.
Dense cypress trees tangled overhead. The water looked black. Something heavy moved on the muddy bank and slipped into the water with a splash.
Against her legs, she felt Eden shudder, the knobs of her spine digging into Dakota’s shins.
She used the pole to push the airboat up against the rotting dock that could have been there for fifty years. Maybe a hundred. Several boards were missing; those still intact were warped and moldy.
She helped Eden clamber over the aluminum side, the boat rocking with their every movement.
Eden moaned, making a strange, rasping sound. Dakota hitched her shoulder beneath Eden’s arm, hissing as pain scorched her back, but she had to keep Eden on her feet.
They hurried along the dock until it ended abruptly, and their feet sank into mud so deep it sucked at their ankles.
An old shack on concrete blocks sagged ahead of them. It was nothing but old plywood covered in black tar paper. The door to the derelict cabin hung open like a gaping maw.
Inside, it was pitch black. She scanned the room with the flashlight—roaches and rats scurried from the light. More warped wood, mold, animal scat, and a raccoon carcass in the corner.
A table made out of two sawhorses and a split and peeling chunk of plywood. Three rusty metal chairs, one fallen on its side. And a cracked, blackened porcelain sink set into an unfinished wooden counter.
Half the ceiling had caved in over a filthy mattress shoved against the far wall. There was nothing for them here.
No food. No water. No shelter.
Eden’s whole body quivered in terror. She held both hands to the shirt tied around her throat. Dakota was terrified to look, to see how bad it truly was.
“This isn’t it,” she said. “We’re gonna find something better, I promise you.”
She remembered what Maddox had said about the old man hiding his place in plain sight.
This was a decoy cabin, meant to make people think no one lived here anymore. His real place was further in.
She wrestled Eden’s sagging body beneath her arm, her lower back aching, her muscles straining, the searing pain from the burn radiating from her shoulder up to her neck and down to her spine.
Wincing, she backed out of the cabin.
Her flashlight beam swept the darkness. Behind them, the water splashed—a fish, a turtle, or a gator. An owl hooted, a few birds calling in the night.
Something rustled to her left.
Her lungs constricted. She whipped the light around, staggering beneath her sister’s weight.
Grunting, snuffling sounds filtered from the underbrush only ten feet away. A pair of eyes glowed back at her about two feet off the ground. She caught a glimpse of silvered tusks.
A boar.
Dakota went absolutely still.
Boars could be aggressive. Their tusks could do serious damage.
She had no weapons, no way to defend them. There was nowhere to run.
Maybe the airboat? Maybe, but the boar would reach them before they took more than a few steps. The boat was useless to them now.
She waited, not breathing, her pulse a roar in her skull.
Finally, the creature turned and shuffled off into the night.
She released a relieved breath. Ice water drained from her veins. She squeezed Eden’s trembling shoulder. “We’re okay, now. We’re okay.”
They were far from okay. Dakota was faint with hunger, thirst, pain, and terror. She couldn’t stop her own shaking hands, blood still embedded beneath her fingernails, the cracks in her palms.
She closed her eyes against the fresh memory, sharp as coppery blood in her mouth: the wide, staring eyes, the spreading puddle beneath the body, not red like she’d expected, but an eerie, oily black.
And the rising desperate scream clawing up her own throat…
She blinked the terrible vision away. She couldn’t lose it now.
Eden was hurt; she still didn’t know how badly. They needed to find this guy’s place. They needed food and water and rest.
Then she saw it. The overgrown trail wasn’t even a trail—barely a divot in the stand of cypress trees.
She stared into the darkness, the dark tangle of trunks and vines, her heart thumping, the burn pulsing like a second heartbeat.
“This way,” she whispered to Eden.
She barely remembered the frantic journey through the darkness, their skirts constantly caught on twigs, branches, and thorns, the spooky night sounds of raccoons screeching at each other, an owl hooting and another answering, creatures rustling through the brush on either side of them.
Mosquitoes whined around her face, biting through her c
lothes, any inch of exposed skin, even her eyelids. Eden stumbled beside her, silent but suffering, Dakota yanking her back to her feet again and again.
Something tangled around her leg.
She went down, taking Eden with her. Pain bit deep into her right calf. Barbed wire snarled around her leg, the barbs piercing her bare skin.
The flashlight flailed wildly as she took in the electrified fence topped by coils of barbed wire, a three-foot length of it downed by a felled tree, probably taken out by the huge storm the night before.
“Look, Eden. It’s a sign.” A sign from who, she didn’t care, as long as it helped Eden.
She took several steadying breaths and pulled herself free of the barbed wire, hissing through clenched teeth at the stabs of pain.
Slick blood leaked over her fingers. She wiped them on her filthy skirt. The raw, boiled welt on her back burned. Every muscle in her back, arms, and legs ached.
Pain was a thing to endure. At least she had plenty of practice.
Carrying Eden’s full weight, she scaled the fallen trunk and fell to the ground on the other side of the fence, nearly collapsing beneath the girl.
Dakota turned off the flashlight. They slipped through the darkness as silently as they could. Ahead of them, the moonlight revealed a one-story cabin in the center of a wide clearing flanked by several smaller buildings and a well.
Nothing special at first glance.
But Dakota remembered Maddox’s warning. She hadn’t forgotten the electrified fence. Anyone who chose to live out in the middle of the Glades all alone wasn’t someone to be trifled with.
And yet, they had to risk it.
“Careful now,” she warned both Eden and herself, well aware of the danger they were in.
Her throat was raw and burning with thirst. She was dizzy with hunger and pain.
“We get in, grab what we can take, and get out. There’s a driveway on the other end of this property, a driveway that leads to a road that will get us away to someplace safe, okay?”
Eden hadn’t nodded or shown she’d even heard Dakota. She had stared at the ground, rocking on her heels in exhaustion, her shoulders quaking.
Going into shock, maybe.
Fear constricted her throat, cutting off her breath. She’d seized Eden’s shoulders and peered into her slack face. “I’m taking care of you, you hear me? You’re my responsibility. I won’t let you die, I swear to you. I won’t leave you. Never, ever.”
She’d kept her word back then.
She could do it again. She would do it again.
Now as she folded the drawing and slipped it carefully back into her pocket, Dakota repeated the words like a chant, an incantation, a promise. “I won’t leave you. Never, ever.”
24
Logan
“Hungry?” Logan held out an orange bag of Sun Chips and a bottle of water.
Dakota was dozing, her legs tucked up in the upholstered theater seat, her arms folded against her stomach, hidden. She looked small and vulnerable, a word he hadn’t associated with the girl before now.
But the second he spoke, her eyes snapped open and she jumped to her feet, the knife already in her hand aimed at his chest.
A wary girl. And smart.
It was never a good idea to disarm an assailant with a knife unless you wanted to get stuck like a pincushion.
He took a step back, arms raised, the bag of chips, bottle of water, and a flashlight in his hands, an easy smile on his face. “Just thought you might be ready for some fuel.”
He expected her to apologize or show a bit of embarrassment at pulling a knife on someone, but she merely shrugged. She didn’t sheath the knife, either. “Sure.”
He dropped the bag of chips and the water into her free hand. She stretched and then settled back in the chair, placing the knife on the armrest beside her within easy reach. She scanned the auditorium with her flashlight.
The rest of the survivors were sleeping fitfully in various seats, most of them together near the front screen, which seemed to watch over them all like an enormous white eye.
Schmidt sat cross-legged in front of the food and water, his clipboard on his lap, pen in hand, still stubbornly awake. Of course he was.
“I’m Logan, by the way.”
“I know.”
He scanned the aisles and the rear of the theater for anything out of place, any potential threats, then sank down into the seat beside her. It was a habit now, ingrained in his DNA.
Dakota flashed him a guarded look, but didn’t say anything.
“You’ve got a watch. It’s analog, isn’t it? I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those.”
She popped a chip into her mouth. “It was a gift.”
“Good thing. It’s the only way we’ll know enough time has passed. What time is it, anyway?”
She glanced down, her face taut in the shadows. “Nine thirty-three a.m.”
It’d been twenty-one hours since the bomb went off. How quickly everything could change. It only took a second for the world to go to hell.
Of course, he already knew that.
“First day of the end of the world,” he quipped.
“Do you think so? The end of the world?”
He wanted to make a stupid joke, but the blast had shaken him, whether he wanted to admit it or not. “Not the world, maybe. But probably our country.”
She chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Everyone else expects things to go back to normal within a week or two. I mean, I think they instinctively understand this is a worse terrorist attack than nine-eleven, but they think people will just go back to their homes, their jobs, that the infrastructure, this country as they know it, will hold.
“It won’t. Not with multiple bombs killing hundreds of thousands of people. What if there are more bombs? Add in the fallout eradicating hundreds, maybe thousands of square miles of urban real estate for years?
“Millions of refugees without work, housing, or food and water. FEMA utterly overwhelmed. In huge swaths of the country, the infrastructure could simply collapse.”
It was a sobering thought. Not that he wasn’t used to a certain level of chaos, of lawlessness. But he’d put that life behind him, and he wasn’t planning on going back. But you kept the gun, a voice whispered in his head. You’ll never change who you really are…
“You thought it was coming, too,” he said to push the ugly thoughts from his head. “That there were more bombs. That Miami could be a target. You knew right away.”
“If you’re always prepared for the worst, nothing can take you by surprise.”
“Words to live by. That should be embroidered on a pillow or something.”
She took a swig of water without looking at him. “You seem plenty prepared yourself.”
He tensed. “How so?”
“Just a hunch. Those scars on your knuckles. The way you carry yourself.”
He glanced at her again. She was observant, more so than the general population. Maybe too observant.
“You a soldier? Ex-military?”
“Something like that,” he mumbled.
He hated that question. Hated everything it signified about what he wasn’t, hated that it dredged up the shameful, whispering voices in his head.
A soldier was honorable. He was something else.
“Nice tats.” She was looking at his arms, at the inked crosses, the snake winding through a skull across his left bicep, the large Virgin Mary gazing beatifically out at the world on his right.
Her gaze dropped to the Latin inscription tangled in the barbed wire on his forearm. Before she could ask what it meant, he shifted and moved his arm, blocking the inscription.
It was the last thing he wanted to discuss.
He was thirsty. But not for water.
The burning, wanting sensation had started last night. The desire building as a headache pounding at the base of his skull, as acid in the back of his throat.
He pulled his silver flask from the si
de pocket of his pants, grateful once again for his own foresight. He always kept it full—he never knew when he’d need a bit of calm, an oasis in the desert of his life.
Liquor wasn’t always a refrigerator or bartender away.
He’d been drinking a sip or two every hour, displaying impressive levels of self-control, considering a literal bomb had just exploded his life.
It’d been enough to stave off the thirst, but he felt it now, stronger than ever.
He tilted his head back and gulped the last few precious swallows. His heart steadied as the sweet burn slid down his throat.
She cocked her brows at him.
“You see anything better to do?”
She didn’t answer, just took another small sip of her water and capped it. It was still two-thirds full. She was conserving it.
“You got family to get back to?” he asked as a distraction. He wasn’t used to this quiet stillness with no TV, no phone or radio, no hum of traffic or work business, no buzz of liquor in his blood to fill him with the warm nothingness he desired above all else.
It made him restless and anxious. He hated it.
For a few moments, she didn’t answer. He started to think she was giving him the cold shoulder so he would leave.
He stared down at his empty flask, willing himself to get up and leave her to her peace, but some part of him simply didn’t want to.
There was a wariness in her eyes, something haunted that he recognized in himself. Something broken in her, but also a strength like steel.
She’d kept her head in a disaster that felled most people. She’d gotten them here, after all.
“A sister,” she said finally. “She’s only fifteen. We’re all we’ve got. She’s waiting for me. She needs me.”
“No parents? No other family?”
There was the slightest hesitation. “No.”
“Me either.” He flipped the flask and rubbed the grinning skull embossed on the side. He should probably feel depressed that he had no family to worry after, but he didn’t. The fewer burdens to weigh one down, the better.
He’d never known who his father was—just a sperm donor in a long line of one-night stands, his strung-out mother willing to trade anything for her next fix. She was somewhere in Richmond, Virginia.