Neil considered the suggestion, nodding his agreement.

  “Let’s set camp in that gulley.”

  Neil pointed to a low spot beyond the leading edge of the once green woods. It would be cold in the depression, but the terrain would shield us from view and allow a fire.

  “Okay.”

  He went to tell Grace and Krista, then led them to the spot we’d chosen. I held my position, in sight of the road, its surface blanketed with snow. From the vantage point I had I could see the pristine dusting covering the two lanes of asphalt. There was not a footprint to be seen. Not a tire track. Not a mark at all. Nothing, no one, had traveled the road in weeks. That should mean that we were alone.

  But we weren’t.

  Nine

  Neil glanced toward Grace. She sat away from us, Krista pulled close next to her, a shared, thick blanket around their shoulders. She held a book between them, her daughter’s attention fixed on it, reading by headlamp, some effort at learning that was both hopeful and heartbreaking. It implied that some future where knowledge still mattered might exist, the uncertainty of that adding bitter to the sweet.

  “She’s tough,” Neil said.

  I laid a final two pieces of wood on the pile I’d arranged for a fire. The night would be cold, but manageable.

  “You wouldn’t think it to look at that,” he said.

  “She shot down a helicopter,” I responded. “I believe it.”

  He looked away from mother and child, to me, smiling lightly.

  “Damn smart, too,” Neil told me, a true admiration in his words. “Do you know you don’t have to boil water to make it safe? I mean, if you’re not sure of the source.”

  I shook my head. I’d always thought a rolling boil was what killed the nasty pathogens that might lurk in water taken from places such as back country streams.

  “You just need to get it to one hundred and fifty degrees for a few minutes,” Neil explained. “Like pasteurizing milk. That’s how Grace explained it.”

  “I’ll stick to a full boil,” I said.

  “Suit yourself. But we had to purify water on our way to your place plenty of times. She had this thermometer she carried and she’d stick it in the water over the fire, like taking its temperature. It was...”

  He stopped, beaming. The smile full and true. Somehow, the memory, that simple recollection of their time together, seemed on the verge of overwhelming him. Of taking him to an emotional place he could not visit. Or would not.

  He looked off, to the dimming sky above the trees, and drew a long breath. Then another. Before he could stop himself he was smiling again.

  “I thought we’d die before we ever got to you,” Neil said, chuckling softly at himself. “I mean, I thought—no plants, no oxygen to breathe. We’d all just suffocate from the carbon dioxide without photosynthesis happening, right?”

  I took a breath. The fear he was expressing had never crossed my mind. I wondered if it should have.

  “Grace went into this long description of the carbon cycle, and how there was less carbon dioxide being produced because everything that did was dying from lack of food, and how the ocean interacts with the atmosphere, and, well, it was all above my pay grade.”

  “Mine, too,” I agreed.

  He looked to her again, openly, if quietly, marveling at the woman who sat on a felled tree twenty yards away. I wanted to say something to him again. About her. About the possibility of them. But I didn’t. I’d gone down that conversational road with my friend already and was assured then that it was a dead end. I did not believe that for a minute, but I had to respect him. He had his reasons.

  “You want the last bit?” I asked, holding the package of MRE crackers out to Neil.

  He shook his head without looking away from Grace and Krista. I’d made us a passable dinner from a mix of Meals Ready To Eat. Krista hadn’t loved the Stroganoff, but devoured the brownie that came after. And the one that came after that, courtesy of Neil surrendering his.

  “It’s not right,” Neil said, still smiling at mother and child. “What is life going to be like for Krista? What is she going to face?”

  I noted that he didn’t say ‘fair’. ‘Right’ was another term altogether. Life was never fair, but the possibility of having a decent life, through work and perseverance, was always there. Or it had been. Now, for Krista, for any other children who might have survived, that hill to climb was steep beyond imagination. And the concept of a decent life to be had was now so degraded that mere subsistence was a matter for celebration. Goals and dreams were diluted down to the most basic hope—to live.

  There’s always hope...

  Neil’s words from before the world fell apart bubbled up in my thoughts again. But there had to be more than just surviving. There had to be the ability to really live, to thrive. If there wasn’t...

  Neil stood from where we sat by the fire and looked to me, a sullen determination about him. Like he was about to cross a river that was too deep, with no chance of ever reaching the far shore.

  “I’m going to go sit with them for a while.”

  I nodded and watched my friend join those he’d crossed the country with. Krista snuggled up to him as he sat next to her. He took one side of the book in hand, Grace still holding the other as the girl read to the both of them.

  I didn’t know what kind of life Krista would face in the time ahead. But I did know, I was certain, it would be better if Neil was a part of it.

  * * *

  I woke, the cold night heavy above, its darkness flecked through parted clouds with the light of distant stars, countless of their number certainly dead. The twinkles they offered were just ghostly echoes of what they’d once been, nothing more now than a celestial tease that spun across the heavens above.

  Something had pulled me from sleep. Not some sound. Not the soft crackle of the low fire. No gust of wind. No crack of a withered tree limb snapping from its wasting host. Instead it was a feeling. That sensation of presence.

  My gaze tracked over the space around me and immediately found the origin of the silent, subtle disturbance.

  Grace stood over Neil and Krista. Gazing down upon them. Her daughter was curled up against my friend, his body shielding her from the bitter chill. He’d shifted the sleeping bag meant for him over her, doubling her protection from the elements.

  I eased up to a sit, the motion drawing Grace’s attention. She turned to me. Her expression, verging on melancholy, hurt to look upon. It was as though she’d just witnessed some loss, not the tender moment that I saw it as.

  Saying nothing, she turned and walked away from the fire. Away from our campsite. Into the darkness filling the dead woods.

  I slipped out of the blanket I’d wrapped around my upper half and stood, making my way quietly past Neil and Krista. Past the fire. Into the dark cluster of barren trees surrounding us. A few dozen yards into the once lush forest, where the trees thinned and the land opened to a rolling grey plain, I found her. She stood at the edge of the vast clearing, arms pulled tight across her chest, collar of her coat rolled against her neck, the knit cap above stretched over her ears. In the thin drizzle of moonlight I could see her breath, slow puffs of misty white rolling out, dissipating in the night. All about her seemed both lost and content, an impossible mix, the weight of it evident as she stared out, contemplating the landscape before her.

  “Are you all right?”

  She glanced back to me, offering no answer one way or the other, then looked again to the fields stretching south.

  “He doesn’t want you to know,” Grace said.

  I could have prompted her to explain, but I sensed that was coming, regardless of any desire on my part to know. Perhaps the uneasiness between them, his stumbling and fumbling when physically close to her, followed by interludes of calm togetherness, had reached a tipping point, its reasons no longer containable, the first bits of revelation about to spill.

  “We were in a town outside of Memphis,” she began, seeming to pause for a moment as that time, and whatever events had charged it, came flooding back. “It was just me and Krista then. Two months and two days after it all started. We lived in Birmingham, Alabama, but we had to get out. The city was falling apart. The police just gave up, there was shooting everywhere. I had to get Krista someplace safe. So we headed west.”

  “Eagle One?”

  She shook her head.

  “We didn’t learn about that until later. I just figured that getting to somewhere in the middle of the country would be safer. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did, and I made the decision to leave.”

  “It had to be difficult with just the two of you,” I said.

  “What’s that saying? You don’t know how strong you are until you have to be?” She quieted then for a moment. “Until you have to be.”

  She seemed unable to go on. I took a step closer and stood next to her.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I told her.

  For a moment she considered that. Then she nodded and did go on.

  “We’d avoided cities,” Grace said. “But Krista was sick. She had a fever, her head was hurting. I thought it was an ear infection, and I thought it would go away. I prayed it would go away. But it didn’t. The fever wouldn’t break. She kept getting worse. I had to do something.”

  I understood. From my own experience.

  “You went into the city for medicine.”

  She nodded at my informed guess.

  “Antibiotics,” Grace specified. “It wasn’t safe, or it might not be safe. By that time, there were a lot of dead, but the ones who’d hung on they...they weren’t all like you.”

  She hesitated there, and I couldn’t tell if she was searching for some detail that eluded her, or for the will to even dredge rest from memory.

  “We moved through back yards, alleys,” Grace described. “I was carrying Krista. She was weak, sleeping and waking. The fever was...I was afraid it was killing her. But finally we reached a neighborhood just off some boulevard. I could see a pharmacy mixed in among the dry cleaners and bars. That was where I had to go. But it was out in the open, and in the distance every few minutes there would be a burst of gunfire. I couldn’t expose Krista to that. I couldn’t put her at risk.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The hardest thing I’d ever done,” Grace told me, then realized that wasn’t quite accurate. “The hardest thing I’d done to that point.”

  She looked out to the darkened clearing again. Stared off at a place, a time, that wasn’t here. Wasn’t now.

  “I left her,” Grace said. “In a house close to the boulevard. It was empty, trashed, but I fixed a bed for her and covered her. She started to wake a little, and I told her I’d be right back. That’s when she got scared, and begged me not to leave her. She begged me.”

  Grace turned to face me again. The pain of that moment, long ago when measured by time, but not by memory, flared in her gaze.

  “But I had to,” Grace said, hurting. “I made her promise to stay right where she was, and then I left. I had this old revolver that my father had insisted I keep when I went away to college. It was this stubby little thing. That was all the protection I had, just some pea shooter shoved in my back pocket. I didn’t even take it out when I started across the boulevard. I didn’t want to even imagine that I’d need it.”

  I tensed where I stood, beginning to fear where this was leading.

  “I wasn’t five steps inside the pharmacy when they grabbed me.”

  ‘No,’ was all I could think, and I said nothing aloud. I need only listen to her. That was what she wanted.

  “There were three of them...”

  In that instant a memory flashed. Some deeper part of my consciousness making connections between places and people and events. It was an image of Neil. Images, really. Shuttering in my mind like some staccato montage as he walked from the old mining shed and executed the cannibals we’d come across near my refuge. Then, that moment was gone, and I was listening to Grace once more.

  “...and they pulled me to the back of the pharmacy. Dragged me over toppled shelves and broken bottles. I tried to get to my gun, but one of them found it before I could. Then they...they pinned me to the floor and one of them took out a knife.”

  Her gaze ticked off of me, just a few inches, so that she wasn’t looking me in the eye.

  “They started to laugh, and the one with the knife, he put the blade to my neck and told me to go ahead and scream, because it was more fun that way.”

  She looked back to me again. It hurt to meet her gaze. To know, to imagine what she’d gone through in that place.

  “But I wouldn’t scream. I couldn’t. If I did, and Krista heard me, she’d come. She’d try to find me, and that would mean she’d find them.”

  She took a breath, and I could see that the visuals, the sensations of that moment, were flooding back to her. Her back straightened. The tip of her chin rose. A muted defiance swelled within.

  “Then the one with the knife grabbed my shirt and ripped it open.”

  I could only think again, ‘No’.

  “And he slipped the blade between my skin and my bra,” Grace said, as dispassionately as one could. “I knew what was coming. I felt that steel against my skin. That was when his head exploded.”

  I’m certain my reaction was a visible ‘What?’

  “Blood, everything sprayed all over me. All over everything. He fell over me and I screamed. Then there were two more shots. They were loud, and they were close. The other two, they both flopped backward. I got a quick look at one—his whole chest was opened up. Everything inside was pouring out. I shoved the one with the knife off of me and scooted away until my back was against the counter. That’s when I saw Neil.”

  The tension, the fear, the pain of the previous moments withered as she spoke his name. She smiled, soft and true.

  “He was standing there with his shotgun. The barrel was still smoking. He stepped over the bodies toward me and reached his hand out. I took it. I can still feel how wonderful and strong and reassuring his touch was.”

  “He saved you,” I said, stating the obvious.

  “He did. I told him I had to get back to my daughter, but he said I couldn’t see her the way I looked. He helped me clean up and gave me a shirt from his backpack. I tried to find the medicine I’d come for, but I was too shaky, so he dug through every box and bottle in the place to find the amoxicillin I needed. Then he walked me back to the house where I’d Krista, and he stayed. Just sat in the front room while I gave her the medicine and cooled her down. He said he’d make sure nothing bad would happen to us.”

  “He’s a good guy,” I said. “Best guy I know.”

  She nodded complete agreement with my appraisal.

  “For three days he stayed,” Grace said. “Just sat in that front room watching over us. He gave us food that he had. Anything we needed, he saw to it. When it was time to move again, he asked if we’d like him to come along. That was about two seconds before I was going to ask him the same thing.”

  How such a horrific tale could, at that moment, come to a point where the purest joy warmed Grace’s face was beyond my ability to comprehend. But it did. Her next words confirmed why that was.

  “I love him. I think he loves me, too.”

  “I more than think he does,” I said. “You and Krista.”

  She, too, knew there was a certainty to his feelings toward her. But voicing that, making it real through statement, might be too big a step for her to take. Admitting it, implying a hope that it might become real, would put her in a place of vulnerability. A place of expectation, with no assurance of satisfaction. In the purest, simplest sense, she wanted a happy ending. Such a thing could exist in this new world. I believed that. I believed that for them, and I wished it would come to be.

  “He won’t cross that line from platonic,” Grace said. “After seeing what those men tried to do to me, I think he just can’t find a way to let himself get close. I think he sees that as some boundary he shouldn’t cross. It’s like he feels stained by what they did.”

  “Guilt by gender?”

  She nodded at my suggestion. It was precisely what she’d been sensing from Neil.

  “I know he just needs time,” she said. “But I’m worried. The longer we’re together without being together, it’s tearing at him. Inside. I can see it.”

  “I can, too.”

  She smiled and looked to me and reached out her hand. I took it in mine and felt her squeeze it tightly, a gesture of thanks. For listening. For being there. For being a friend. All three, I suspected.

  “If—”

  Only that word slipped past her lips before a flash in the southern sky drew our attention. We looked up and watched a bright object carve a hot white streak across the heavens, a trail of fire briefly flourishing behind it before fading to nothing against the black tapestry of the universe.

  “A shooting star,” Grace said, choosing the colloquial over the correct.

  It was a meteor. Nothing more. Just a fist-size rock plummeting through the atmosphere and burning up.

  “Wow,” Grace exclaimed softly.

  I smiled. It was such an ordinary moment in a darkly extraordinary time. But it was also proof that there was a constant. Rocks still fell from above. And people could, if they wanted, still rise to meet what challenged them. To cross divides that existed between them.

  “He’ll see the light,” I said to Grace.

  She nodded, still looking to the sparkling night above. There was hope in the gesture. No more, no less. That was fine by me. The belief that good, that right, would triumph had sustained me this far. It had carried us all to this place and time. Neil would see that, in Grace, there was a future full of that goodness. He would. He had to.

  We stood for a few moments and waited for more stars to fall.

  Ten

  We woke early and moved south, keeping our distance when we reached Kalispell, staying on the fringes of the town¸ peering into it from places of cover. Behind old buildings collapsed by the previous winter’s snow. From an overturned bus on its side across the highway. Through binoculars we glassed the avenues reaching into the city. We scanned buildings. Homes. Abandoned cars.

 

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