Daniel Webster Jackson & The Wrongway Railroad: a pre-Civil War Mystery
Author: Robert W. Walker
Date: 2000-06-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Post-Apocalyptic | EMP | Survival
Description: In this rousing 1852 romp through the eerie woods surrounding Hannibal, Missouri, and up and down the Mississippi River, fourteen-year-old Daniel Webster Jackson runs into a counterfeit Underground Railroad when he decides to run away from his foster home. At every turn he musters courage to survive in a land where the law is at odds with the heart and soul of a people, where The Missouri Compromise forces everyone into a disguise or a secret identity. Daniel, a white teenager, assumes a Black identity and becomes a hero. George appears to be a Black slaver, but he is really a freed Black man

The Darkest Day

Robert Walker

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Epilogue

About the Author

1

Mary stepped back from the Firebird and wiped the sweat off her brow with the upper section of her right sleeve. She stared at the big V8, smiling with quiet satisfaction; the rebuild was almost complete, and soon the muscle car would be running as smoothly as the day it had rolled off the factory floor back in ’74, ten years before she’d been born.

She took a moment to look around the large workshop, converted from an old warehouse in a formerly industrial area of this city. These days much of this neighborhood had been gentrified with art galleries, restaurants, and cafés, but Mary was proud to work in this haven of gasoline and steel, which still held part of the area’s formerly proud and stoic soul.

Gleaming muscle cars, vintage trucks and jeeps, and even a few truly ancient pre-WWII cars filled the workshop, and except for one or two that Mary had yet to work on, they were all running, like-new vehicles. A smile broke across her face; she was immensely grateful that she was able to do something she was good at and passionate about for a living. She took in the sight of the rows of beautiful old vehicles with pride, drinking in their proud lines, seductive curves, and gleaming, perfectly restored paintwork until an unexpected voice interrupted her and jolted her from this trance.

“Excuse me, miss, but can you point me to someone who can help me with my car?”

With a jumpy start of fright, Mary turned around, her fingers curling tightly around the large wrench in her hand. She’d been in a stable job and a safe environment for over fifteen years now, but dark memories from her past still made her jump every time someone snuck up on her.

The man she saw behind her was the furthest thing from a threat she could have imagined, though, a small, mousey fellow in his sixties with coke-bottle glasses and a pink golf shirt tucked into denim shorts, pulled halfway up his bulging belly.

“Of course, sir,” she said, putting on the usual sweet smile she wore for customers. “What car is it?”

“No offense,” the man said, somewhat snootily, “but I’d like to speak to someone who’s a specialist.”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes; she was accustomed to comments like these and had long since learned the value of having a thick skin in this business. At five and a half feet with a petite build, long, auburn hair, and a soft-featured face, she didn’t exactly look like a master mechanic, even if she dressed like one and her hands and wrists were black with oil and grease

“I’m the head mechanic here, sir,” she said, her smile unwavering. “I’m pretty sure I can help you with your car if you’ll just tell me what model it is and what the problem is.”

The man looked her up and down, and his face crumpled into an expression of blatant skepticism. He folded his thin arms over his pot belly, still scowling, but answered her questions, albeit reluctantly. “It’s an AMC Javelin AMX,” he said, almost sneering. “It’s a rare model, you probably—”

“1974, with a 335 horsepower 6.6-liter V8,” Mary answered confidently, still smiling. “They’re pretty light as far as classic muscle cars go, but that motor packs a powerful punch. Has yours been modified with a Borg-Warner T-10 stick-shift gearbox?”

The little man raised both eyebrows, and his scowl turned to a look of surprise. “Oh yeah, that’s right. It um, it stalled out at that gas station about a mile down the road, and it won’t start again.”

“I can get one of the boys to pick it up with our tow-truck right now, sir,” Mary said, “and we’ll get it running for you right away. Let me guess you hadn’t used it for two or three weeks before taking it to the gas station?”

“Actually, yeah, you’re right. And uh—”

The man stopped mid-sentence, for the workshop was suddenly plunged into gloomy shadow as all the lights went out.

“Ugh, sorry about that, sir,” Mary said. “Looks like a power outage. Anyway, I think I know what the problem is with your AMC. Hold on, let me just text Alex. He’s out with the tow-truck right now. He isn’t far, so he should be able to pick up your car right away. Hmm, I wonder why the backup lighting hasn’t come on yet?”

She pulled off her oil-stained gloves, squirted some cleaning foam onto her hands, and after drying them off, took out her phone. Alarm bells immediately began to peal in her mind when she saw that the device was off; when she’d last looked at it around half an hour ago, the battery had been on ninety percent. She held down the power button, trying to restart it, but the phone seemed to be completely dead.

She looked up at the man, peering through the gloom. “Uh, sir, could you check if your phone is on?”

“What? Why are you asking me that?” he asked, annoyed. “Are you going to call your truck or not?”

“My phone’s dead, sir, and I’d just like you to see if yours is too,” she said. Her voice was calm, but as the man reached into his pocket, her pulse started to race, boosting surges of icy, anxiety-laced blood through her veins. She suspected that this was something far more sinister than a mere power outage, but she was praying that she was wrong and hoping that she’d see the man’s phone screen light up in a second or two.

“I don’t see why your phone being dead would have anything to do with me,” the man grumbled, but nonetheless, he pulled out his cell. When he looked at it, though, his grimace of annoyance turned into a look of surprise. “What the– how the hell is that possible? This stupid thing was fully charged an hour ago, and I just bought it last week! It’s not even turning on or showing the low-battery symbol! What in the hell is going on here?”

Mary’s mind was now racing, and her grip on the big wrench in her hand inadvertently slackened. The heavy tool hit the floor of the workshop with a loud clatter, making the man jump with fright.

“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded.

“You need to get home,” she said bluntly, her tone and attitude completely reversed. “Forget about your car; I don’t think it’s ever going to run again.”

“What?” the man gasped. “Are you insane? Well, screw you, missy, I’m taking my business elsewhere!”

Mary didn’t bother to respond and didn’t wait to watch him storm out in a huff. A million thoughts were crashing through her brain. Her extremities were tingling, and she felt as if she were about to start hyperventilating. Her father had told her this day would come; twenty years ago, on the day she’d last seen him, those had been his exact words: “It’s coming, Mary. Mark my words. The day I’ve been preparing all of this for. You think I’m crazy, everyone thinks I’m crazy, but I promise you, the day is coming, and when it arrives, everyone who isn’t prepared is gonna be in for one nasty surprise.”

A spear of guilt and emotional pain stabbed through her guts when she thought about her father. His relentless obsession with this doomsday scenario and his complete rejection of new technology and modern society—something that she had been desperate to be a part of—had been what had ultimately driven her away from home as a teenage runaway all those years ago. She’d rejected all of his ideas and theories, and convinced herself that he was delusional and crazy, but even so, a small part of her had continued to believe that perhaps there was a chance that he could be right. Therefore, as unlikely and ridiculous as such a scenario as the one he’d envisioned seemed to her, she’d kept a bug-out bag in her apartment and had always had a contingency plan in the event of something like this happening.

There was one more test Mary wanted to run before she could be one hundred percent certain that this was, against all the odds, the exact scenario her supposedly crazy father had predicted. She strode briskly over to one of the newer vehicles in the workshop—an 80s-era BMW saloon that she’d just finished fixing up—and she climbed into the driver’s seat. The motor had been purring like a kitten just two hours ago, and she knew there would be no reason for it to fail to start.

She held her breath as she turned the BMW’s ignition key.

Nothing happened at all. Not a single dash light came on. The vehicle, which had just been running like new, was completely dead. “I can’t believe it,” Mary murmured to herself, floored by the realization that had hit her like a speeding truck. “An EMP attack. It’s gotta be an EMP attack.”

Her shock and disbelief quickly crumbled away, though, replaced by a surge of fierce determination. Her daughter was out there, stuck in school, and Mary knew that it wouldn’t be long before the city descended into complete and utter chaos. That rusty, dust-coated plan shelved away at the back of her mind would have to be pulled out, dusted off, and put into action. And she would have to do everything in her power to get herself and her daughter—her only family—out of this city before nightfall.

With her heart drumming madly in her chest and her mind racing at a million miles an hour, Mary jogged up the steel stairs to the office. Everyone else was out to lunch; Mary usually held down the fort during the lunch hour and then took her lunch break after the others came back. She grabbed her jacket and put it on, snatched as many water bottles and sports drinks from the fridge as she could carry, and shoved a bunch of chocolate bars and packs of peanuts into the bag too. Then she took the .45 ACP pistol she always kept in her bag and slipped it into one of the large thigh pockets of her mechanic’s coveralls. She didn’t know how soon things would start to get chaotic and violent, but she knew it would likely happen before she was able to get herself and her daughter, Ann, out of the city.

Mary was thankful that transport was not going to be a problem for her, despite the fact that almost ninety-nine percent of the vehicles on the road were now dead and could never be revived. Outside in the workshop were over a dozen vehicles manufactured before the early 70s that would still work despite the effects of the EMP.

“Okay, okay, think about this, Mary, just think for a sec,” she said to herself, now that she was ready to leave. “We take one of the cars, head straight to Ann’s school, pick her up, head to the apartment, grab the bug-out bag and as much other stuff as we can in five minutes, and then, we head out of the city to…”

Her face fell, and she trailed off; even talking to herself, she couldn’t utter the name of the place she now intended to go to—a place she’d sworn to herself she’d never again set foot. “To that place,” she eventually muttered.

Mary hurriedly browsed the car keys, which were hanging on a rack. Considering that she’d need to be doing some off-road driving once she got out of the city, she figured the early ‘50s Army Jeep would be the most sensible choice. She grabbed the Jeep’s keys, jogged down to the workshop floor, and hopped into the vehicle.

“I hope you were right about this, Dad,” she whispered as she slipped the key into the ignition. “These old vehicles will still work, won’t they?”

There was only one way to find out. She turned the key and smiled with grim triumph as the motor roared to life. She whispered a silent prayer of thanks, then put the Jeep into gear and drove to the back of the workshop, where the vehicle entrance was. Leaving the Jeep idling, she jumped out and started hauling on the chain to open the roll-up door.

As soon as she got the door up, though, a punch of bitter disappointment slugged her in the stomach. Completely blocking the exit was a huge eighteen-wheeler that had died right in front of the gate. Mary laughed bitterly and shook her head; here she was in a warehouse full of vehicles that would still work just fine while all the others on the road were dead, and there was no way to get any of them out.

Still, she wasn’t about to let this setback stop her from rescuing Ann and getting out of this city. She killed the Jeep’s motor and set off on foot, praying that she would be able to get to her daughter before all hell broke loose.

2

The eighteen-wheeler had pulled up very close to the walls and gate—as they usually did to get into position to reverse into the warehouse across the street—and Mary had to crawl under the massive vehicle to get out onto the street.

When she emerged from under it, she saw the trucker fiddling around with the motor with an expression of complete confusion. Because this was a quiet side street, there were no other dead vehicles nearby—aside from those parked on the side of the road, which would never start again—and the man thought that this was just a regular breakdown. He noticed Mary’s coveralls, with the vintage car workshop logo on them, and shot her a guiltily apologetic look.

“I’m really sorry about this, ma’am,” he said. “I hope y’all don’t need to get any cars outta this place any time soon. Damndest thing, she was running just fine when I pulled up here to back into the place across from y’all. Then she up and died, just like that. And what do ya know, my damn phone and CB radio are dead too! Like I said, I’m really sorry, but I can’t move a damn inch until I figure out what happened.”

Mary considered for a moment whether she should explain to him that this was no ordinary breakdown and that his truck would never run again. She didn’t want to waste time by stopping and talking to people, but she figured he had a right to know. “That truck isn’t gonna be going anywhere,” she said to him. “Because it didn’t break down. It was killed, like everything else around us that relies on electronics.”

The trucker’s frown of consternation intensified, and he put his hands on his hips. “Killed? By what? What are you talking about?”

“I’m pretty sure that what’s just happened was an EMP attack. Electromagnetic pulse: a sophisticated weapon that can knock out entire cities, states, or even countries, depending on how large and strong it is. Everything electronic gets fried and will never work again.”

The trucker’s frown deepened, and he started to say something, but then stopped himself. Suddenly, his frown morphed into a broad grin, and he belted out a bout of laughter. “You– you almost had me there!” he laughed. “EMP attack killing all technology and sending us back to, what, the pioneer days? Hahaha! What’s your next theory about my truck, an alien invasion from outer space? Or maybe you think that a terminator from the future is about to appear next to my rig? Hahaha!”

Mary sighed, shook her head, and walked away without bothering to say anything else. She should have known that he would think she was crazy. Part of her own mind was still having trouble accepting that this was, in fact, an EMP attack; how could she expect people who had never heard of anything like that to believe her? She resolved not to waste any more time by talking to people. She had to get on with her mission with laser-like focus.

Her plan had changed now that she had been forced to go on foot. Her first stop would have to be her apartment, which was only a mile from the workshop. She’d have to get her bug-out bag and supplies for herself and Ann, and then head over to Ann’s school, which was a few miles from the apartment. After that, she’d have to figure out a way to get herself and Ann out of the city. She prayed that things wouldn’t have become too chaotic at that point.

Any doubts she might have had about this being an EMP attack, however, were immediately erased from her mind when she got off the side street and onto one of the main roads. Indeed, when she rounded the corner, she tripped and stumbled, almost falling over with shock at the sight that greeted her eyes.

Stretched as far as her eyes could see in both directions, lining the long, straight road, was a seemingly endless stream of dead cars. It looked like any other traffic jam, except that aside from the clamor of human voices, it was completely silent. Not a single engine was running, and no horns were blaring. There was nothing but utter, dead silence from the thousands of vehicles.

Masses of people were milling around in confusion. A few were still sitting in their vehicles, desperately trying to start them, and more than a few had popped the hoods and were futilely messing around with their motors, but most had gotten out and were standing next to their cars or sitting on the sidewalk.

People were already figuring out that not only their phones, but everyone else’s phones were dead, and Mary could sense the first hints of fear and panic beginning to buzz in the air. A few people were striding briskly away, and one or two were running along the sidewalks with looks of fear and terrified confusion on their faces. Mary knew that this was the calm before the storm and realized that she had to move fast.

She cut across the street, weaving through the dead vehicles, and swerved around a small crowd that was gathering around two men who were arguing loudly and yelling into each other’s faces. She knew that fights and scuffles were likely to start breaking out and didn’t want to be around when fistfights inevitably escalated into something a lot deadlier. She also had no idea whether the police, national guard, or even the army had some sort of plan for an event like this, but she suspected that they’d be getting involved sooner rather than later, and also guessed that a large part of their response would be restricting people’s movement. She had to get out of this place before the authorities shut it down and locked everyone in, which she was sure would happen.

As she walked along the sidewalk, she glanced into the cafés and stores she passed. They were filled with similar scenes of the unfolding chaos. The lights were out in every store, which wasn’t a problem, seeing as it was midday and clear and sunny, but the staff was getting frantic and trying to placate increasingly agitated customers, and it looked as if fights were about to break out in more than just one or two stores.

Mary hurried along faster, doing her best to maintain a façade of calm on the outside, but feeling increasingly anxious with her pulse racing and breathing quickening. She veered off down an alley, taking her usual shortcut, and then broke into a run.

She exited the alley, slowing down to a brisk walk to keep up the illusion of calmness, and then made a beeline for her apartment building. The tall, ten-story building was located on a smaller road, but even here, there was a jumble of dead cars clogging up the street, and crowds of worried and confused people standing around, with some talking and some arguing.

When she got to her building, a sad and familiar sight greeted her. Sitting on the stairs leading up to the main doors was a scrawny, nerdy teenage boy, looking sullen and morose. His nose was bleeding, and one of his eyes was purple and swollen. Mary’s heart broke at the sorry sight of him; this was her neighbor, James, who lived across the hallway from her. What was more, she knew full well who had done this to him.

James didn’t notice her until she was right next to him, but when he looked up, his narrow, angular face didn’t register any sort of surprise. He was too deep into this bout of depressing sadness to feel any sort of shock, and he had collapsed so deeply into himself that he hardly even seemed to have noticed the mess of dead cars on the street and the crowds on the sidewalks.

“He said it was my fault, Aunt Mary,” he whimpered, his eyes puffy and red with tears. “He said I broke the TV with my Xbox, but I didn’t even touch it today. I don’t know why it won’t turn on, but it’s not my fault. But he wouldn’t listen, and he blamed me like he always does.”

“Your dad’s been drinking again, huh?” she said, sitting down next to him and putting a sympathetic arm around his shoulder.

“He passed out on the sofa last night with half a bottle of whiskey in his hands,” James said, sniffing and wiping the tears from his cheeks, “and finished it off before breakfast. He started on another one right after he ate. I tried to stay away from him, but then the TV broke around half an hour ago, and so did my phone, for some reason, and then he came after me.”

“Why didn’t you go to school today?” Mary asked.

James shrugged. “I woke up late. I didn’t sleep much because he was yelling at the TV all night and throwing shit around and breaking stuff. I think I only fell asleep at five or six in the morning.”

Mary sighed and squeezed James’s shoulder. His father was a violent, deadbeat drunk who lived off inheritance money, and his mother had run off with another man years ago. Seeing as her own husband had walked out on her many years ago and she’d had to raise Ann on her own, Mary had always felt a lot of sympathy for James, who was also being raised in a single-parent household. Ann and James had been friends since a very early age, and more often than not, James would sleep on their sofa, especially when his father would hit the bottle harder than usual. Sometimes these benders would last for days.

“You should have knocked on the door,” Mary said. “You know the sofa is there for you any time.”

“I didn’t want to wake you guys up,” James said forlornly.

Mary felt immensely guilty, not just because she felt as if she hadn’t been there for James the previous night—even though she hadn’t known about his father’s bender—but because she knew what sort of fate she would be abandoning him to. Once she got the bug-out bag and another bag of supplies out of this apartment, she doubted she would come back for a very long time, perhaps ever.

Raw emotion stabbed through her, twisting in her guts like a rusty knife; she thought of James almost as an adopted son. She’d watched him grow up, had helped him with his schoolwork, and comforted him whenever his drunken father abused him like this, and he was like a sibling to Ann.

Her heart wanted to take him with, but her brain said no. James was unathletic, unfit and uncoordinated, and could barely see a few feet in front of him without his glasses. Aside from one camping trip that she’d taken him on—which he hadn’t enjoyed at all, being a kid whose favorite activity was sitting on a sofa, playing video games—he knew nothing about the outdoors. He would absolutely be a liability when it came to escaping the city, and Mary’s rational side knew that she had to put the survival of herself and her daughter first. Bringing James along could jeopardize their entire mission to escape.

She steeled her will and forced herself to suppress the billowing emotion within her. She slid her arm off James’s shoulder and made herself stand up, fighting back the tears and choking on a knotty sob that was rising in her throat.

“I have to go, James,” she said, choking on the words. “Put some ice on that black eye. You’ll be okay.”

With a heavy heart, she jogged up the stairs to her third-floor apartment. She headed in, grabbed her bug-out bag from the back of her wardrobe, and then pulled two large hiking backpacks out as well. She stuffed a few clothes from her wardrobe into one of the bags, then went to Ann’s room and hastily picked out her daughter’s most practical clothes and shoes.

She got changed out of her mechanic’s coveralls and put on some hiking gear. She put her toolbelt back on, though; there were plenty of useful things in there that could come in handy.

After that, she went to the kitchen, put all the bottled water she had into the backpacks, and threw in the mini gas cooker and aluminum pots she used for camping, and tossed whatever dehydrated foods she had into the bags. She threw a few cans of beans in, too, but the backpacks were already getting heavy, and she didn’t want to overload them.

She slung one backpack over her shoulders and wore it on her back, and then wore the smaller bug-out bag backward, wearing it on her chest. She had to carry Ann’s backpack in her hands.

Before she stepped out of her apartment, she stopped and took one last, heartbroken look at the place. She’d just finished paying off the mortgage the previous year and had put so much effort into decorating and remodeling this place, turning it into the cozy urban nook she’d dreamed of ever since she’d been a little girl. It was where she’d raised her little girl, where she’d made so many memories. It was her refuge from everything, the place she felt safest in all the world, and now she was being forced to leave it behind. A tear rolled down her cheek, and her lip quivered with sadness.

She drew in a deep breath and forced herself to steel her will against the avalanche of grief that was about to erupt inside her, and then she stepped out into the hallway, shut the door and locked it, perhaps for the final time ever.

“Going hiking, Mary?”

Mary looked up and saw one of her neighbors, Taylor Smith, coming out of his apartment. He was a lawyer in his forties and was a good-looking man who always dressed well. He was, however, arrogant and snarky, and while Mary feigned politeness whenever she had to interact within, she had no love for the man. He, on the other hand, usually made no attempt to disguise his disdain for blue-collar workers like Mary, even though she made a good salary as a specialized mechanic.

“Not exactly,” she said, walking away and trying to avoid being drawn into a conversation with him.

Taylor, however, seemed to be in quite a talkative mood. “You know,” he said, following her and completely ignoring the hints she was dropping, “the strangest thing just happened. I was working on a case in my home office—big client, a multinational firm, millions of dollars at stake,” he said, smiling smugly, “when my computer just went dead. Now, this isn’t your usual Chinese crap. It’s a top-of-the-line MacBook, you see. Only three months old. And then—”

“Look, Taylor, I’m in a hurry,” Mary said, speeding up her walking pace, “and I’m sorry about your computer, but I don’t have time to talk.”

“Well, it’s just so very strange,” he continued, ignoring her, “that my iPhone and iPad are also dead! Have you checked your TV, and whatever piece of shi—um, your computer you have in there?”

Mary rolled her eyes and stopped. She figured she might as well tell him, just to get him off her back. “Okay, Taylor, do you really want to know what’s just happened, and why your fancy electronics aren’t working?”

“If you have a theory, go ahead and enlighten me, please!” he said, grinning smarmily.

“There’s been an EMP attack. I don’t know who’s behind it, where it happened, or why, but I’m absolutely certain that this is what’s happened. Everything electronic, from your toaster to your freakin’ iPad, has been fried and will never work again. You can kiss your law career goodbye because there are far, far bigger things to worry about now than lawsuits and multinational corporations. I’d start by trying to figure out how you’re going to keep yourself alive once the faucets run dry. If you’re gonna stick around here, I’d suggest you go fill up your bathtub with water before the supply gets shut off, if it even works now anyway. After that, I’m sorry, I don’t know what other advice I can give you.”

Taylor stared at her with an incredulous look etched across his face. “Good God,” he eventually murmured. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? One of these goddamn tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist maniacs! Sheesh, I should have known. Ha! Man, this day is just getting crazier and crazier.”

“Goodbye, Taylor,” Mary muttered, and then she turned around and jogged down the stairs.

He yelled out something else behind her, but she ignored him; she had no time to waste on morons like Taylor.

She headed out of the building, fighting back the tears when she saw that James was still sitting on the steps, looking crushed. She knew that she had to do what was best for herself and her daughter, though, and forced herself to walk past him without making eye contact.

With every step she took, though, guilt gnawed at her with increasing persistence, until, a few yards from the building, she was forced to stop. She knew that as much of a liability as he might end up being, she could not in good conscience abandon James to his fate here. She turned around and walked up to him.

“James, sweetie,” she said. “What I’m about to say might sound a little crazy, but you need to listen to me very carefully, and do exactly what I say…”

3

Ann stared, fascinated, at the beautiful diorama before her. She had always loved visiting museums, ever since she could remember, and history was her favorite subject at school. She’d been looking forward to this field trip for weeks, especially since a new exhibit on the lives of the first East Coast colonists in this area had just been opened.

“It’s amazing that they survived here with so little, surrounded by this vast wilderness, and hostile tribes,” Ann murmured, staring at an incredibly lifelike mannequin, dressed in authentic 16th-century clothes.

“Yeah, uh, I guess,” said her friend Sandy, whose eyes were glued not to the impressive diorama display but instead to the screen of her phone in her hand. “Oh my God, did you see what Kanye tweeted last night?”

Ann was paying about as much attention to Sandy’s celebrity gossip as Sandy was paying to the museum exhibits, though. “Uh no, I didn’t,” she murmured, her eyes moving on to a mannequin of a colonial soldier, wearing a steel breastplate and a steel helmet, holding an arquebus, with a sword and scabbard on his hip. In the background, a huge taxidermized grizzly bear reared up on its hind legs in the trees and shrubs.

“Well like, he and Kim have like, been having this argument—”

Sandy stopped mid-sentence as the entire museum was plunged abruptly into darkness. The whole group of teenagers—the ninth-grade history class—started buzzing with excited chatter, and some of the boys began making mock ghost noises and laughing boisterously. At the head of the group, the teacher, Mr. McCallum, tried to quieten them down. “Hey, hey, it’s just a power outage people; let’s not act like hooligans, please! Just stay put, I’m sure the power or backup lighting will come on any second now.”

“Why the hell is my phone dead?” Sandy whined. “Jeez, just when I was like, about to see what Kim tweeted back! Gimme your phone, Ann, I like, have to see what Kim said.”

Ann took her phone out of her bag, but in the thick darkness, Sandy couldn’t see the frown forming on her friend’s face.

“What are you waiting for?” Sandy muttered, annoyed. “C’mon, gimme your phone.”

“It’s dead, too,” Ann murmured.

“Yo, why the hell is my phone dead?” one of the boys near them said.

“Mine’s dead too!”

“Yeah, something’s wrong with my phone too!”

“And mine, it’s freakin’ dead. It’s bricked!”

“Everyone, calm down!” Mr. McCallum yelled over the chorus of increasingly agitated voices. “Calm down, please!”

The initial atmosphere of mischievous delight at the power outage was quickly changing, and Ann could feel an aura of panic and fear buzzing in the air around her. Suddenly, as if a row of dominos was falling in mind, a conversation she’d had with her mother a few months ago popped into her head. The realization of what this apparent power outage really was had hit her like a speeding truck. “Oh my God…” she whispered into the blackness.

Sandy, however, seemed completely oblivious to the rising tension in the air. “I can’t believe this stupid phone died! It’s only, like, two months old!”

“Sandy, we need to get out of here,” Ann whispered in a low, urgent voice.

“Yeah, I know, right? This stupid field trip has been so boring, and there’s that café across the street from the museum with real fast Wi-Fi and a totally hot barista, and—”

“I’m not talking about skipping school to go hang out at some café,” Ann said. “This is serious, Sandy, I think something terrible has happened.”

“Uh, it’s just, like, a power outage or something, Ann.”

“Everyone, I want you to take the hand of the person closest to you, okay?” Mr. McCallum said. “It looks like there’s an uh, a problem with the backup power, so we’re going to slowly move in the direction of the exit, all together now.”

Ann’s mind was racing. Her mother had, one night, sat her down and told her about a range of distinctly scary possibilities and had mentioned that she had a plan in place if anything like any of them happened. Regardless of what the disaster was, Mary’s instructions to Ann had been the same: don’t get roped into a large group of people, stay away from crowds, stay out of large buildings, don’t trust anybody you don’t know very well, stay away from public places, be as stealthy as possible, and get to the meeting spot without delay.

The meeting spot in question was an old oak tree on the school grounds; if there were any sort of disaster or school shooting or terrorist attack, and Mary and Ann were not together, Mary had said she’d head straight there and had told Ann to do the same. Ann knew she had to get there immediately, for all the signs pointed to this being an EMP attack—one of the most disastrous and chaotic of the scenarios Mary had discussed.

“It’s not a power outage. It’s…” Ann paused; she was pretty sure that it would be a complete waste of time to try to explain to Sandy what an EMP was. “It’s a terrorist attack or an act of war,” she said. “And we’re not safe in here.”

“A terrorist attack? I didn’t hear any, like bombs or anything.”

“Just trust me on this, Sandy. I promise you; this is something bad—really bad. We shouldn’t stick with the class. We should get out of here and get back to school. My mom has a plan for situations like this.”

“I can’t even, like, see my hand in front of my face,” Sandy said. “How the hell are we like, ever gonna get out of here?”

“I’ve been coming here since I was in kindergarten,” Ann said. “I could navigate this place perfectly in a blindfold, which is pretty much what I’m gonna have to do. Come on, let’s go.”

“Everyone, have you joined hands yet?” Mr. McCallum asked.

“It’s now or never,” Ann whispered, the urgency in her voice plain to hear.

“Okay, okay,” Sandy whispered back. “Let’s do this.”

They fumbled in the dark for a second or two before finding each other’s hands, and then, once they had interlocked their fingers, the pair of them quietly slipped away from the rest of the class. Ann visualized the layout of the museum in her mind, taking slow, careful steps. She came here every few weeks—every time a new exhibition opened—and had been doing so far many years, so she knew where she was going.

“Okay, if we keep going straight,” she whispered to Sandy, “we’ll be passing the Native American exhibits.” She visualized the exhibits and did her best to project a lifelike image of them into the impenetrable darkness to her left. She had to imagine she was walking past the exhibit, and picture it as vividly in her mind as possible to get the distance right.

“I’m getting like, freaked out,” Sandy murmured. “This is scary as shit, Ann. I can’t see a damn thing. Are you sure we’re going the right way?”

“I’m sure. Just trust me, okay?”

“Oh my God, what we if run into that creepy guard who was following us around?” Sandy whispered, horrified.

A jolt of fear rippled through Ann’s core when Sandy said this. She had pushed the memory of the man out of her mind, but now that Sandy mentioned him, she found herself thinking about him again. When they’d first entered the museum an hour earlier, one of the museum guards, a heavyset middle-aged man, had practically undressed Sandy and Ann with his eyes when they’d walked in. They had noticed him following the high school group around, pretending to be going about his work duties but staring hungrily and almost drooling over the two of them.

“Just, um, don’t think about him, okay?” Ann said. “He’s probably gone back to the entrance.”

“But what if he’s still, like, lurking around here, waiting for us?”

“I’m trying to concentrate on getting us out of here,” Ann said. “Please, just stop talking about that creep.”

“Okay, okay,” Sandy murmured, her voice raised in pitch from fear.

They continued to move slowly through the darkness, with Ann doing her best to pretend she was actually looking at the exhibits as she walked along. “All right,” she whispered, half to Sandy and half to herself, “now we should be passing the prehistoric exhibit. Keep going, a few more paces. Now we’re walking past the flint arrowheads and stone axes, and then the corner will be just here to the left, a couple more steps this way…”

Ann came to a stop. She was sure she’d reached the corner, but there was only one way to find out. “We have to turn left here,” she said to Sandy. “Just walk really slowly; it’s no fun walking into a wall, trust me.” She held out a hand in front of her, with her palm facing forward, and took a few tentative steps, feeling ahead of her with her foot before putting it down, doing her best to make sure she didn’t walk into a wall or trip over anything.

After a few steps, they didn’t crash into anything, so Ann was sure she was in the right place. She breathed out a sigh of relief and then started walking again, leading Sandy along. “Okay, and now we’re getting into the natural history section,” she said. “Just a couple yards along this hallway, and we’ll be by the large mammals of North America exhibit. There’s a long hallway to get through, and—”

“Who’s there?” a gruff male voice demanded from the darkness just a few steps away from them, causing both girls to shriek with fright.

Both of them froze in the darkness, their hearts thumping in their chests and their pulses drumming in their temples, with surges of cold, fear-laced blood rushing through their veins. The voice in the nearby darkness clearly belonged to a middle-aged man; was it the creepy guard?

“I said, who’s there!” the man growled, more aggressively this time. “Are you those high school kids?”

Ann swallowed a gulp of dry, empty fear. Her mind was a riot of confusion and fear, and she was rooted to the spot with panic. She didn’t know whether to say anything in response, keep quiet and hope that he went away, or break into a run into the blind darkness.

“You are those kids, ain’t you?” the man said, his voice taking on a different tone—a darker and more sinister one, drizzled with menacing glee.

The fact that they couldn’t see where or who he was, but that he was clearly just a few yards away from them in the impenetrable darkness, made the whole thing a lot more terrifying. “You’re those two pretty girls, ain’t you, the blond and the redhead…”

Sandy was blond, and Ann had red hair, like Mary’s. Icy surges of terror gushed through both girls’ veins. For now, they were sure that this was the creepy guard who had been trailing their group.

“Don’t worry,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to disguise the predatory hunger in his voice. “Just come with me, I’ll make sure you’re both safe…” They heard him shuffling toward them in the dark, and their fear grew even more intense.

“What are we gonna do?” Sandy whispered hoarsely into Ann’s ear, on the verge of tears.

“Uh, um, I, I don’t—” Ann screamed as a large, strong hand clamped down on her forearm.

“There you are, ha-ha,” the guard chuckled darkly, “I’ve got you now, little girl. You’re safe with me, don’t worry, you’re safe now…”

“L–let go of me!” Ann yelled, trying to jerk her arm out of his grip.

“Oh my God, help!” Sandy screamed.

“Shut up, you little shit!” the man roared, fumbling through the dark to try to grab hold of Sandy as well. His grip around Ann’s arm tightened to the point of pain, and she knew she had to take drastic action. She couldn’t see a thing but judging from the sound of his voice and the position of his arm, she had a rough idea of where he was. She aimed a desperate kick in the direction of his groin. Her foot connected with something solid but somewhat squishy and the man grunted heavily with pain.

His grip on her arm slackened just enough that she was able to jerk it out of his grasp, and the instant she did, she yanked on Sandy’s hand. “Run!” she screamed, bolting down the hallway, barreling blindly through the inky blackness.

“Little whore, fuckin’ jailbait!” the man growled behind her, stumbling around in the dark and coughing and groaning with pain.

Ann and Sandy ran for a few seconds but slowed down to a jog and then a brisk walk; the chance of running smack-bang into a wall or something else solid—or crashing into another person—was too high a risk. Because of the blind dash away from the guard, Ann now only had a vague idea of where they were in the museum, and she was feeling disoriented and panicked. Somewhere behind them, the guard was stumbling and groaning and growling in the dark.

“He’s gonna get us, Ann,” Sandy whimpered, feeling around in the darkness for Ann’s hand, which she gripped tightly when she found it. “He probably knows his way around this place way better than you.”

“Just stay calm. I’m pretty sure I know where we are,” Ann said. “And he might know his way around well, but he’s as blind as we are, and that kick in nuts I gave him probably got him at least a little disoriented.”

“You little fuckin’ whores,” the guard growled in darkness, perhaps twenty or thirty yards behind them. “I was just trying to help you, fuckin’ shitty little bitches!” He started shuffling in their direction, groaning and gasping in the dark like some eyeless monster.

“We have to get out of here!” Sandy whispered.

“I’m thinking. I’m thinking!” Ann said. Her mind was racing as she did her best to visualize the main hall of the North American Mammals exhibit.

One of her favorite exhibits in the hall had always been a family of polar bears, and as she thought about the bears, a flare of inspiration blazed in her mind. In the image of her memory of the bears, there was something that had always stood out to her: above the huge male polar bear, there was a glowing green EMERGENCY EXIT sign. She was sure of it; she’d spent so much time staring in awe at the huge white bears that the sign just behind them had been permanently imprinted on her brain.

“Come on, this way!” she said, tugging at Sandy’s hand. “Feel around for the border ropes!”

The guard was coming closer, cursing aggressively and muttering under his breath. Possessed with a sense of urgency, both girls hurried forward through the blackness, tentatively feeling for any sign of ropes.

“You can’t hide for long, girls,” the guard growled. “I know this place like the back of my hand!” He sounded as if he were only a few yards away now.

“Got it, here, here’s a rope!” Sandy whispered, pulling Ann to the left.

A burst of triumph surged through Ann as she leaned forward and gripped the rope. “Step over it,” she whispered to Sandy. The two of them stepped carefully over the rope, and Ann started feeling around in the dark until her hands brushed fur.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the guard sneered from somewhere close by. The pain from his injury was wearing off, and there was a tone of sinister glee in his voice.

Ann felt frantically around, trying to paint an image in her mind of the animal she was touching. It was definitely huge, and the fur was long, thick, and shaggy. She was quite sure it was the big male polar bear. “Come on, this way,” she whispered to Sandy, leading her around the side of the bear.

“I can hear you!” the guard growled. “I’m gonna teach you a lesson, you ungrateful little bitches. I’m gonna teach you a lesson you ain’t gonna forget anytime soon…”

Ann led Sandy straight onward; if her memory were correct, the emergency exit door would be just a few yards behind the bear. She walked quickly but kept her hand held out in front of her. Soon enough, her palm collided with something solid. She felt all around it, praying that it was the door and not just a wall, and then felt a rush of relief as her hand brushed against the cool metal of the handle; it was indeed the emergency door. She turned the handle, opened the door and slipped through it, pulling Sandy behind her, and then closed it as quietly as she could behind her.

She felt around and found a guide rail on the wall, and the two of them gripped it and followed the passage, moving through the inky dark for around five minutes before they came to another door. Ann found the handle and turned it, and blinding daylight came flooding in, searing their dark-accustomed eyes.

“Hurry, get out, get out!” Ann said, pulling Sandy onto the street.

Both of them came stumbling out of the museum blindly, keeping their eyes closed against the intense daylight until their eyes became sufficiently adjusted to open.

And when they were finally able to open their eyes, the sight that greeted them made them both gasp and stumble back with terror and shock.

4

James wore Ann’s big hiking backpack on his back, and on the front of his torso, he wore a smaller backpack, into which he’d stuffed a few of his own clothes and snacks. He and Mary walked along the streets in silence for a few minutes. She was observing the scenes of unfolding chaos and keeping a close eye out for danger, but James was just staring at his feet as he walked.

“I didn’t say goodbye to him,” James suddenly said.

“You didn’t have to, sweetie,” Mary said. “Not after what he did to you.”

“And I’m glad I didn’t,” James said, his jaw clenching and his pale hands curling into fists. “I don’t ever want to see him again.”

Another surge of pain and guilt from old wounds tore through Mary’s insides. She remembered when she’d said those exact words herself, back when she was James’s age. But unlike the teenager next to her, her father had not been guilty of any sort of violence or abuse. She now regretted those words more than anything, but pride and shame had both prevented her from ever going back and apologizing.

“I know that you’re dealing with a lot of pain and emotional baggage right now,” Mary said to James, “and that’s perfectly understandable. But I need you to pay attention to what’s happening here and now, okay? We’re going to have to get through some really sketchy stuff in the next few hours, and we might find ourselves in dangerous situations. I need you to be present, in the here and now, listening to me and paying attention to what’s going on around you. So don’t get stuck in here,” she continued, tapping the top of her head with her forefinger. “Please, James, I know it’s hard, but you have to put these feelings to the back of your mind for the moment, at least until we’re safely out of the city, okay?”

James’s face crumpled up into an expression that was half embarrassment and half guilt, and he bit his lower lip and nodded. “Okay,” he murmured. “I’ll do that, Aunt Mary … and uh, thank you for doing this for me. If I’d been stuck back there with him, in this crazy situation, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Mary gave him a quick hug. “You’re like family to me. I couldn’t have left you behind.” Another stab of guilt cut through her core, for she remembered how close she had come to doing exactly that.

They walked along without speaking for a while, but it didn’t take long for James to break the silence again. “So, uh, there’s no chance my Xbox will ever work again?” he asked. “Not even if I got like, brand new parts for it from Japan or something?”

“Sweetie, I know how much you loved your video games,” Mary said, “but you’re going to have to accept that—”

A deep, booming explosion cut her off mid-sentence, and she instinctively dropped to the ground, pulling James down with her. The moment she hit the pavement, she covered her head with her arms, like her father had shown her all those years ago.

“Holy shit!” James gasped, his eyes looking as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. “What was that?”

Mary slowly removed her arms from her head and looked up, and saw a tower of thick, black smoke billowing up from one of the main streets, just two blocks away. Rows of skyscrapers and other massive buildings formed a visual barrier between them and the center of the explosion, but even here, the sounds of hundreds of people screaming in panic and confusion could be heard with chilling clarity. Then, cutting through the clamor of screaming and hysteria came the sharp cracks of gunshots.

“We need to move,” Mary said, her voice low with urgency. “Come on, get up, move! Go!”

She scrambled to her feet and hauled James up from the ground. The two of them took off at a run, with the sounds of anarchy and violence growing louder and more intense behind them. Mary had been planning on cutting across the exact street where the explosion had happened, but now she knew that she’d have to make a detour, especially since gunfire had now broken out.

“This way,” she said, veering into an alley.

James came staggering into the alley behind her, breathing hard from the short sprint. Despite the fact that Mary was over twenty years older than him, she was far fitter and healthier, and even this short burst of exertion had left him out of breath. “Just … wait … one second … please,” he gasped, leaning against a graffiti-covered wall, his face red and his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath.

“Dammit James, this is why you should have spent more time outside, playing sports instead of sprawled out on a sofa, playing video games!” Mary snapped. She immediately felt guilty, though; it wasn’t James’s fault that he had a deadbeat dad who had never supported him or encouraged him to do anything outdoors.

Before either of them could say anything else, though, shots rang out from the street they’d just come from and screams and shouts echoed down the alley. Mary could also hear the thumping of determined boots marching up the street; it almost sounded like a group of soldiers. Her sixth sense started pealing urgent warning bells in her mind, and she ran over to James, grabbed him by his arm, and hauled him forcefully down the alley. “We have to hide, hurry!”

“Get inside your homes!” a deep, aggressive voice roared from the street, from the direction of the sound of stomping boots. “Every civilian is hereby ordered to get off the streets and into their homes immediately! Get off the streets now! Non-compliance will be met with lethal force. I repeat, non-compliance will be met with lethal force!”

There was a large dumpster in the alley, and Mary made a beeline for it. She heaved it open and saw that there was room inside to hide. “Get in!” she said to James. “Quickly!”

“In there?”

“Just do it, dammit!”

The sound of marching boots was growing closer, and soon the soldiers—or whoever these men were—would be close enough to see down the alley. The men kept shouting out that all civilians were to get off the streets or face lethal force, and as they grew closer, Mary’s heart pounded with increasingly frantic anxiety.

James clambered into the dumpster, and then Mary scrambled in behind him and pulled the lid shut just as the gunmen reached the entrance of the alley.

“Steve, check down this alley,” someone growled in a deep, throaty voice.

Inside the dumpster, Mary held her breath and quietly pressed her forefinger to her lips, signaling to James to keep quiet. He nodded, and Mary noticed his hands were trembling. She reached out with her left hand to hold his, but she slipped her right hand into her pocket and curled her fingers around the grip of her .45.

They waited in the darkness of the dumpster, not daring to move or even breathe as the sound of the man’s boots came closer. He walked past the dumpster, but then stopped a few yards from it and started to walk back toward it. Mary’s heart started frantically pounding as she heard the man stop next to the dumpster; he was so close she could hear him breathing. Her sixth sense was screaming shrilly in her mind; her gut instinct was telling her that these were no army troops, nor were they national guard, or anyone from the government. She had a feeling they were part of something a lot more sinister.

Moving as silently as possible, she slowly drew her pistol and aimed it at the dumpster lid, her finger resting on the trigger, ready to fire in a heartbeat if necessary. Suddenly, the lid opened a crack, and Mary’s heart almost stopped, but the man wasn’t looking in; he was facing away from them. He casually dropped a burning cigarette butt into the dumpster and then dropped the lid shut again.

In the brief glimpse she’d caught of him, she’d seen a man dressed all in black combat gear, with a black balaclava covering his head and face. She’d also caught a partial glimpse of the firearm he was holding, which seemed to be an assault rifle of some sort, perhaps an AK-47.

She and James sat in frightened silence, listening to the man’s heavy boots moving farther away, and doing their best not to cough from the smoke that was trailing from the still-burning cigarette butt.

“All clear!” the man yelled from the other end of the alley.

“Sweep the street there!” the other man growled. “Keep moving, meet up at the end of the block!”

“Got it!” the man shouted back. Then he moved out of the alley and started roaring out the same message as they had earlier about civilians having to get off the streets or risk being shot.

Mary and James waited for a few minutes until it seemed clear that the man had moved on, and then she gingerly opened the dumpster lid and peered up and down the alley. When she was absolutely sure it was safe, she climbed out and then helped James out too. They dusted themselves off, and then Mary checked again that there was nobody nearby before she resumed her journey.

“Who the hell were those guys?” James asked, looking worried.

“I don’t know,” Mary answered, “but I definitely don’t want to run into them again. I have a feeling that they’ve got something to do with that big explosion and possibly the whole EMP attack itself.”

“What are we gonna do? Do you really think they’ll shoot anyone they find on the streets?”

“We have to assume they will, so we need to be very, very careful,” Mary said. “What I said to you before about paying attention is even more important now. Do exactly what I say, don’t ask questions, and when I tell you to do something, don’t hesitate, not even for a second. Just do it right away, okay?”

James nodded, gulping down an empty mouthful of fear. “Okay, I’ll do that,” he said.

“Good. Let’s go.”

They got to the end of the alley, and Mary held up a hand to signal to James to stop. She craned her neck out and checked up and down the street. Aside from the abandoned vehicles clogging up the road, it seemed deserted; the armed men’s threats appeared to have scared people indoors, at least for now.

The city had now taken on an entirely different, almost surreal atmosphere. Mary felt like she was walking through a dream—or a nightmare—as she stepped out onto the street. For a few moments, there was nothing but dead silence, like the kind you’d find in remote mountains or deserts at night, and it was beyond eerie to experience this kind of silence in a city.

“Where are those guys?” James asked.

“I don’t know, but I hope we don’t run into them again. If—”

Her sentence was cut short by a burst of automatic gunfire up ahead, around the corner of the street. The thunderous gunshots were followed by terrified screaming and aggressive shouts, followed by more gunfire, and then an ominous silence.

“Shit,” Mary murmured. Her mouth was dry with fear. Whoever the armed men were, they were moving in the rough direction of her daughter’s school. There was no way she could get to the school without running into them or crossing paths with them, not unless she made a very wide detour that would add miles and hours to her journey.

She racked her brains, trying to figure out a way to get to the school that wouldn’t put her in direct conflict with the armed men. Suddenly, she knew exactly how she could get there, and not only would it shave a mile or two off her journey, it would be about the safest way to get across town she could imagine.

“Come on, James,” she said, turning and taking off at a jog down the street.

“Hey, but Aunt Mary, that’s the wrong way. The school’s this way!” he called out after her.

“We’re not going the usual way!”

He ran after her, panting. “But– but, there’s no other way to get there!”

“Yes, there is! And trust me, nobody will be going this way!”

She ducked down another alley, seemingly leading James even farther away from their goal, and ran down it. He scampered along behind her, stumbling and gasping as the exertion of the run started to get the better of him.

When they exited that alley, Mary came to a stop, for in front of her was the entrance to the shortcut she was planning to take.

“Th–the subway?!” James murmured, staring at the entrance to the subway station with his face scrunched into an expression of worry and uncertainty.

“Yes, the subway,” Mary said. “Follow me, quick!”

She hopped over the railing and then scurried down the stairs, and within seconds she was swallowed up, melting into a well of inky, impenetrable darkness.

5

The museum, built on top of a small hill, was situated across from the city hall. Both were impressive 19th-century buildings, large and ostentatious, with huge rows of concrete stairs leading to their respective entrances. Ann and Sandy were around the side of the museum, where they had emerged from the emergency exit, and they had a clear view of the street and the city hall from where they were.

Both girls were staring in horror and disbelief at the sight that greeted their eyes after the intense darkness of the museum. It wasn’t the jumble of dead, eerily silent cars clogging the main street they were looking at, though, nor was it the hushed crowd of people who were all laying down on the street and sidewalks. It wasn’t even the armed men, dressed all in black, with black balaclavas covering their faces and heads and AK-47 rifles in their hands. It was the mayor and his staff whose eyes were locked on and the group of armed men in black around them.

There were at least thirty men in black spread out around the city hall and in front of the museum and other nearby buildings. They were watching over the pedestrians and the people who had gotten out of their dead cars and had forced everyone to lay on their stomachs with their hands behind their heads. Everyone was also being forced to watch what was happening in front of the city hall: the mayor and his staff had been forced to kneel on the stairs in front of the main doors.

Ann got a feeling that something terrible was about to happen, and she knew that if the men in black saw her and Sandy, they’d never get out of this place. There were a bunch of garbage cans nearby, and Ann ducked her head low, grabbed Sandy’s hand, and pulled her over to the bins. The two of them hid behind the metal, watching the horrifying scene play out before them with bated breath.

“Who the hell are those guys?” Sandy whispered. “What’s going on out here?”

“Shh!” Ann whispered back, peering through a thin gap between the garbage cans. From there, she had a perfect vantage point to observe what was happening on the steps of the city hall.

“You’ve all heard what we said!” one man in black roared to the crowd. In one hand, he was holding a long roll of paper, from which he’d been reading, and in the other, he had an antique bullhorn, which amplified his voice without the use of any electricity. It seemed that prior to Ann and Sandy coming out of the emergency exit, he had read some sort of speech or list of demands to the people. “These are the new laws, and this city is ours now!”

The other men in black raised their AK-47s and cheered raucously. Ann could feel the collective fear radiating from the people lying on the street.

“Take care of the counter-revolutionaries, boys,” the man with the bullhorn said to the armed men who were standing behind the kneeling mayor and his staff.

The men pressed the muzzles of their rifles against the backs of the heads of the mayor and his staff, and a volley of shots rang out. Ann’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets, and she clamped her hand over her mouth, stifling a scream as she watched the brutal executions. The people on the street started screaming and wailing as the limp corpses of the mayor and his staff slithered and tumbled grotesquely down the stairs.

“What was that?” Sandy asked frantically. “Who’s getting shot. What’s going on? Oh my God, oh my God, I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die!”

Ann could hardly believe what she’d just seen; it was like something out of a terrible nightmare, but it was real; it was happening. All she knew now was that if the men in black saw her and Sandy, they’d be in serious trouble. They had to get out of here while the window to do so—which was closing rapidly—was still open.

“We have to get out of here now,” Ann whispered. “Follow me and stay down!” She turned around and got onto her hands and knees; she knew if she stayed low, the men down on the street, at the bottom of the hill, wouldn’t see her.

It was a long crawl to get to the rear of the museum, and it was concrete all the way, and within a few yards, Ann’s bare knees were already hurting and scratched up, but fear and adrenalin kept her going. She knew that as painful as crawling was, she couldn’t risk standing up.

“Ow, Ann, my knees freakin’ hurt!” Sandy whined.

“Suck it up!” Ann hissed back. “If you stand up, you’re dead!”

As if to emphasize this point, from behind them came another volley of gunshots, followed by another chorus of terrified screams. Sandy didn’t dare to utter another word after that.

They crawled along on their hands and knees, breathing hard, their palms and knees burning with stabs of pain, and their hearts hammering, for almost a hundred yards, until finally, they got to the rear of the museum, where there was a large park-like expanse of grass and trees. Ann scanned the area for any signs of people, but the place seemed to be deserted. She crawled across the lawn to the nearest tree, where she finally stood up, taking cover behind the thick trunk. Sandy came along behind her.

“Oh my God, my knees,” Sandy whimpered. Her knees were torn up and bloody, as were Ann’s.

Another volley of shots and a chorus of screams rang out from the other side of the hill, and these terrible sounds spurred a fresh boost of determination into Ann’s veins. “Be thankful that we got away from that with skinned knees instead of gunshot wounds,” she whispered to Sandy.

In her mind, she kept seeing the nightmarish vision of the mayor and his staff being executed over and over again. She tried to force these disturbing visuals from her brain, but they kept creeping back. She wished she hadn’t seen it, but on the other hand, she was grateful to have escaped the scene without being seen by the sinister black-clad gunmen. She also knew, however, that they were by no means out of danger yet.

“Come on,” she said to Sandy. “It’s not safe here. We need to get moving.”

“Do you know how to like, get back to school from here?” Sandy asked. She was used to being chauffeured around everywhere by her parents and had no sense of direction or distance. The only place Sandy knew how to get was the school from her house, but that was only because she lived a mere two blocks from the school.

Ann, on the other hand, was used to walking reasonably long distances and getting around the city on her own on public transport. Hence, she had an excellent sense of direction and a clear knowledge of where everything was in the city. “Yeah, it’s about two miles from here. Maybe a bit less if we take a few shortcuts along the way.”

“You’re sure we’ll be safe there?” Sandy asked, looking worried.

“My mom will be there; I know she will. And she’s got plans for if something like this happens. She’ll keep us safe.”

“Okay,” Sandy said, looking worried and frightened.

“C’mon, let’s go.”

Ann gave the area another quick visual scan, and when she was sure it was safe, she ran to the next tree. With Sandy following her, she darted from tree to tree until they reached the iron fence at the bottom of the area. Beyond it was a quiet side street and a much larger park. Aside from a few cars parked on the side of the road and a few others abandoned in the middle of the street, the area seemed deserted.

“We’re gonna cut through the park,” Ann said. “It’ll take around half a mile off the journey.”

“Are you sure it’s safe?” Sandy asked.

“Safer than being on the streets.”

The iron fence was eight feet tall and impossible to climb, but a tree nearby had a bough extending over the fence and the street beyond it. Ann climbed the tree, edged her way along the branch, and then hung off it and dropped onto the sidewalk. Sandy followed her, and soon they were both out of the museum grounds.

They walked through the park, staying off the paths and using trees and shrubs for cover. It was eerily silent, except for the sound of birds and insects, who were carrying on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Occasional gunshots could be heard from all around the city, as well as distant shouts and screams, which chilled the blood in the teenagers’ veins and added to the surreal, nightmarish atmosphere of the deserted park.

They had to walk past the pond in the center of the park, in which ducks were happily paddling. The usual crowds who would picnic on the gentle, grassy slopes here, however, were gone.

“Feels like a freakin’ zombie movie or something,” Sandy murmured.

“I know,” Ann answered. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t like being out in the open like this.”

Before Sandy could respond, however, a harsh shout rang out from behind them, icing their blood with abrupt terror. “You two, fuckin’ freeze! Get on your knees and put your hands behind your fuckin’ backs! Do it now, or I’ll put a few bullet holes in your backs!”

6

Mary waited until she was a couple of dozen yards into the subway station before stopping and digging through her backpack.

“Uh, Aunt Mary, where are you? I can’t see a thing, not even my finger when I hold it like an inch from my eye,” James said from a few yards behind her, the clopping of his feet on the tiled floor creating eerie echoes in the underground chamber.

“I’m here, James,” she answered calmly. “Just stay right where you are for a sec.” Her fingers detected the contours of the object she was looking for in her bag, and she pulled it out and squatted down, setting it on the ground. Then she got her Zippo out of one of the pouches on her toolbelt. With a flick of her thumb, a flame appeared, instantly throwing a circle of dim, orange light around Mary. She saw James standing on the edge of the circle of light, looking very nervous. In front of her was the object she’d pulled out of her bag: a small gas camping lamp.

She turned on the gas and lit up the lamp, then put away her Zippo. “Come on, we gotta move,” she said, picking up the lamp.

James didn’t need to be told twice; the sea of utterly impenetrable darkness beyond the small dome of dirty-white light thrown out by the gas lamp was terrifying. He scurried over to Mary, staying a few steps behind her and well within the circle of light as she moved through the station.

“Uh, aren’t the subway trains gonna be broken, like all the cars and stuff?” he asked.

“That’s exactly why we’re heading down here,” she said. “We’ll walk along the subway tracks. There’s zero danger of being hit by a train now, and I don’t think anybody but us will be down here. When all the power died, people’s first instincts would be to get the hell out of the subway stations. Would you feel safe down here in these conditions?”

James shook his head. “No way. I’d have bolted for the exits at the first sign of anything like this.”

“That’s why I think we’ll be safe down here, and I don’t think we’ll run into anyone,” Mary said. Despite saying this, however, she kept her free hand in her pocket, curled around the grip of her pistol, ready to whip it out at a moment’s notice if necessary.

They walked through the station for ten minutes and didn’t hear any signs of anyone else around; it had been well over an hour since the EMP had hit, and Mary suspected that the stations would have been evacuated shortly after the power went out. They walked down a long escalator, going deeper underground. They would have to go down one more level, and then they would reach the train platforms.

“What about the people who got stuck on the trains?” James suddenly said as they continued walking through the creepily silent station. “There had to be a whole bunch of people on the trains when the power died. They’re probably still down here somewhere.”

Mary stopped walking to think about this. It was a good point; the trains were usually quite full around lunch hour—nowhere near as packed as rush hour—there would be a good few hundred, perhaps even over a thousand people trapped on dead trains on the tracks.

“I don’t think we’ll need to worry about them,” she said. “They’ll just be ordinary people, scared and confused. Not like those guys in black. I think they’ll eventually kick out the emergency windows in the trains and find their way back to the surface. I doubt anyone will be looking for trouble down here; if they’re coming from the trains, they’ll just want to get up to the surface as quickly as possible. We should still be cautious, though, of course…”

“Don’t worry about reminding me to keep my eyes open down here, Aunt Mary,” James said, his eyes darting nervously from left to right. “This place gives me the creeps, and I feel so alert I think I’d notice the sound of a pin dropping across the other side of the station. I can’t wait to get out of this place…”

“Let’s keep moving then.”

They continued their journey through the station, walking down the final long escalator to the platforms. When they got to the platforms, Mary’s sixth sense began to tingle, buzzing a faint warning inside her skull and deep in her gut. It was unwise to ignore the feeling, but they had come too far to turn back now. They only had to walk the length of two subways stops, and then they could leave this dark, unsettling place.

Mary walked across the platform with James following close behind her, and it didn’t take them too long to get to the edge. There was a drop of around five feet to the tracks, and still not a soul in sight.

“Are you uh, are you sure this will be safe?” James asked, peering nervously down at the subway tracks. “You’re sure these trains are dead and we’re not gonna get mowed down by a train coming outta nowhere?”

“I promise there won’t be any speeding trains. We’ll be safe,” Mary said. “You need a hand getting down onto the tracks?”

James shook his head. “I can manage. Here, I’ll hold the light while you get down.”

Mary handed him the light and climbed down onto the tracks and then took it from him while he followed her. James drew in a deep breath, which he held in his lungs for a while, and then he let it all out slowly.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m ready. I’m ready for—ah!” James yelped in fright and jumped back, almost falling flat on his face as a rat scuttled across the tracks.

Despite the somber air and the seriousness of the situation, Mary had to laugh. “It was a just a rat!” she said, chuckling. “There’ll probably be a lot more of ‘em too, so you’d better get used to ‘em.”

“Rat? That thing looked more like a small dog! Jeez, that rat looked like it probably eats cats for breakfast!”

Mary chuckled and shook her head. “We should count ourselves lucky if rats are the only living things we run into down here. Anyway, let’s keep moving. I’m sure you wanna get out here as quickly as possible, right?”

Still looking quite fearful, James nodded. Mary turned and began making her way through the tunnel, walking on the gravel between the two sets of tracks. James kept looking around him, edgy and anxious; it felt as if the darkness were somehow growing denser, becoming a thick and almost fog-like presence. He was starting to feel practically suffocated in here and felt the beginnings of a panic attack stirring deep in his chest. “Uh, how much longer, Aunt Mary?” he asked, trying unsuccessfully to disguise the nerves in his voice.

“Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes of walking,” she said. “I know it’s scary but as frightening as this darkness is, just remember that we’re likely a lot safer down here than we would be up there on the surface. And also remember that we’re not just wandering blindly through a maze; these tracks only go in one direction, and there are another five or six stops before they intersect with another line. We’ll be out of here long before then; there’s no danger of getting lost.”

“Um, okay, okay, I’ll try to remember that,” James said.

They walked in silence for a few minutes, with James doing his best to remain calm and keep his impending panic attack at bay. In one sense, it felt almost as if they weren’t making any progress at all and were just walking on a weird treadmill; the tracks ran dead straight, and the ground beneath their feet didn’t change at all. Finally, though, they got to another stop. As they walked past the subway stop, the light of the gas lamp, which illuminated a radius of around twenty or thirty yards around Mary, slowly began to reveal the sleek, aerodynamic contours of one of the trains.

“The people on this train were lucky,” Mary remarked as they passed the dead train. “It died right at the subway stop, with the doors open.”

“I bet there are plenty more trains that weren’t so fortunate,” James said, staring at the long, empty train as they walked past it. “I bet there are people trapped down here…”

“Well, like I said, they’ll probably just be scared and confused, and they’ll just want to escape this place as quickly as possible,” Mary said. “Don’t worry about stuff like that.” Her sixth sense, however, continued to tingle. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was feeling just as creeped out and uneasy in this place as James was.

After this subway stop, the tracks swung around in a long, protracted curve. “See,” Mary said, “we’re past halfway now. We’ll be able to get out of here when we get to the next stop.”

“Yeah, I can’t wait,” James murmured.

They left the subway stop behind and moved through the darkness, following the long curve in the tracks. The only signs of life they saw or heard were the occasional scurrying of rats, but then, after a few minutes of walking, they came across another train. This one had been going in the opposite direction and had stopped halfway through the curve. Beads and shards of shattered glass glistened and gleamed all over the tracks around the back of the train, and Mary’s sixth sense began to buzz even more frenetically when she saw that there was blood on the glass. She tried to steer James away before he noticed the blood, but it was too late.

“Why’s there all this blood on the glass?” he asked warily.

“Whoever kicked it out probably cut themselves while doing it,” Mary said.

James walked tentatively closer, bending down and leaning in to scrutinize the glass and blood. “Uh, I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s a lot of blood here—like, a ton of it. It’s inside the train, too, all over the floor.”

“David, sweetie, let’s not fixate on stuff like that, okay?” Mary said, doing her best to disguise the mounting nervousness in her own voice. “Let’s just keep going and forget about—oh, God.”

Mary froze in her tracks, and her heart started racing when her eyes fell upon the sight that the gas lamp revealed: lying flat on his back, with his white T-shirt dark crimson and sopping wet, soaked with blood, was a dead man. His face was frozen in an expression of agony, and there was blood all over his arms and hands.

“Oh, shit…” James gasped when he saw the corpse. “I– I knew that wasn’t blood from an accident! He– he’s dead, isn’t he? That guy’s freakin’ dead!”

Mary didn’t know what to say; there was no way she could reassure James about the safety of this place now; indeed, she could hardly even allay her own fears, and suddenly the thoughts about evil beings prowling the inky shadows just beyond the circle of light from the gas lamp didn’t seem so childish anymore.

“There’s nothing we can do for him now,” she eventually said, her eyes locked on the young man’s blood-soaked torso. Looking closer, she could see several three-inch tears in his shirt, and the cuts with them on his chest were almost certainly stab wounds. There were well over a dozen such wounds on his chest and abdomen. It seemed that he’d been stabbed on the train or while trying to get off it.

“I’ve– I’ve never seen a dead body before,” James half-whispered, half-croaked, staring with horror-bulging eyes at the corpse. “His face, it’s like…”

“James, stop talking,” Mary said.

“It’s just so…it’s like—”

“James, shut up!” she said, much more forcefully this time, and then she reached over and tilted his chin up, forcing him to take his eyes off the corpse and look up, for a few seconds earlier she had caught sight of something just as scary as the corpse in front of them.

James’s eyes protruded even more from their sockets when he followed the line of Mary’s pointing finger. Up ahead, in the sooty blackness of the tunnel was light, and it was coming toward them.

7

Ann’s blood felt as if it had frozen solid in her veins. Terror gripped every part of her body, locking her joints and immobilizing her muscles. The horrifying images of the executions played in her mind over and over again.

“What do we, Ann; what do we do?” Sandy whispered next to her, her voice tremulous; she was clearly on the verge of tears and snared in the grasp of the same type of panic that had seized Ann.

“Didn’t you hear me? Are you fuckin’ deaf?” the voice behind them roared. “Hands on the backs of your heads, get down on your knees, now!”

From the sound of the man’s voice, he wasn’t close, perhaps forty or fifty yards off. He had to have just emerged from the trees. They also hadn’t heard any other voices, so Ann assumed he was alone. Without turning around and looking at him, there was no way of knowing if he were one of the black-clad terrorists, or just some opportunistic criminal, or even a cop or soldier.

Ann’s mind raced; her mother’s advice about kidnappings rang loud and clear in her mind. The primary goal, Mary had always told her, was to fight tooth and nail against the kidnappers and never allow them to take you to a second location. If you got badly injured but managed to get away, it was a way better outcome than being tied up and taken to wherever they wanted to hold you and do whatever terrible things they had planned for you. This was no kidnapper, but Ann had seen what had happened to the mayor and his staff, who’d been bound and gagged by these people—if this were indeed one of the terrorists behind her. If they allowed this man to capture them, something awful would surely be in store for them.

“I’m gonna say this one more time, and then I’m gonna put some goddamn holes in you!” the man yelled. “Put your fuckin’ hands behind your heads and get the fuck down on your knees!”

Ann knew she had to act immediately. “Make like you’re doing what he says,” she whispered hoarsely to Sandy. “But when you’re almost on your knees, take off at a sprint, as fast as you can. Run in a zigzag pattern, straight for those trees ahead.”

“But—”

“Do it, or we’re both literally dead, Sandy!”

“Okay, okay…”

The girls put their hands behind their heads and made as if they were slowly sinking to their knees. “Okay, sir, we’re doing what you said!” Ann yelled. “Just don’t hurt us, please!”

“That’s it; that’s better,” the man growled.

Ann heard his footsteps crunching across some leaves; he was obviously starting to walk toward them, and she prayed that he’d lowered his gun and could be caught momentarily off guard. It was now or never; they had to make a break for it.

Ann’s knees had almost touched the ground, and she tensed her muscles, ready to dash. “Go!” she whispered and took off at full tilt. She didn’t bother to see if Sandy had listened to her; all she could think of was moving as fast as possible.

“Hey!” the man roared behind them. “Stop, you fuckin’ bitches! Stop running!”

Ann veered left, adrenalin coursing through her veins and pumping fresh strength and energy into her muscles. Via her peripheral vision, she caught sight of Sandy sprinting along beside her; her friend had at least plucked up enough courage to take off.

From behind them came a sound that boosted a further rush of adrenalin through their bodies; the man started firing his gun, and bullets kicked up spurts of dust around their feet, whizzing menacingly through the air past Ann’s head. She ducked and swung right, then jerked left when a bullet spat up a burst of dust a mere inch from her right foot. A strip of hot pain seared her left arm as a bullet grazed it, and she swore she felt another zip through her ponytail as it swung and bounced behind her head.

The dash to the trees was only fifty yards, but it felt like the longest distance in the world, and the handful of seconds it took the girls to sprint there felt like terror-soaked hours. Once they got into the trees, they didn’t stop running, though, for the bullets kept flying from behind them, ripping through clumps of leaves and thudding into tree trunks. Ann carried on sprinting, her chest heaving and her muscles burning. She maintained her zigzag pattern of running, swinging around trees and hurdling over bushes, benches, and other obstacles.

Both girls continued sprinting until they were well out of breath, and only when they slowed down to a jog, panting and gasping and shaking with fright, did they noticed that they were no longer being shot at.

Ann’s first thoughts, once she realized they were safe at least for a few seconds, were for her friend’s wellbeing. “Shit, Sandy, are you okay?!” she asked.

“I didn’t get hit, but I like, twisted my ankle really bad when we were running,” Sandy murmured, her face contorted into a grimace of pain. “But what about you? Oh my God, there’s blood all over your arm. Did you get shot?!”

Ann examined her arm and saw that the bullet that had nicked her had opened up a cut, from which a few trickles of blood were running. It stung, but that was the extent of it. “It’s just a graze,” she said. “I’ll be fine. I’m a lot more worried about your ankle. We can’t stop here, that maniac might be coming after us, and we have to keep moving. Are you able to run?”

“I don’t think so,” Sandy said. “The pain’s getting worse. I think I’ve sprained it bad.”

Ann knew they didn’t have much time and staying here any longer would be suicidal. “Lean on me,” she said, stepping up to Sandy and wrapping an arm around her waist. “We have to go. Hop along as fast as you can.”

She took one last look in the direction they had just come from, and then moved off, supporting Sandy as best she could. They were able to get into a somewhat awkward but decently effective rhythm, with Sandy doing her best to take large hops with her good foot while Ann jogged. Both girls were flushed with fear and kept shooting anxious glances over their shoulders.

After five minutes, they still hadn’t seen any evidence that the man with the gun was pursuing them, so they slowed their pace a little and took a moment to breathe. The end of the park, bordered by one of the main streets of the city, was in sight. After what had happened and what they’d seen, they were very nervous about stepping out of the shelter of the trees and into the open street. They leaned against a large tree, hidden from view of anyone on the street, and had a quick chat.

“How’s your ankle?” Ann asked.

“It really hurts,” Sandy gasped, her face scrunched up with pain.

Ann looked down and saw that her friend’s ankle had ballooned in size and was already discolored. “You’re lucky your dad’s a doctor,” Ann said. “He’ll be able to help you.”

“If we can get to him without getting shot,” Sandy said, looking as if she were about to burst into tears. “Who the hell was that guy? I still can’t believe we like, literally got shot at—someone was seriously trying to kill us. It doesn’t seem real. It feels like we’re, I don’t know, walking through some kind of nightmare…”

“I don’t know,” Ann said. She was as shaken up as Sandy was by everything that had happened, but she was trying to retain some sense of composure. She’d always been able to keep a cool head under pressure, but now that ability was being tested to its limit. “Like I said back in the museum, all I can think of is that this is some sort of very well-planned, large-scale terrorist operation.”

Sandy pulled her phone out of her bag and fumbled with the buttons, trying to turn it on. “Argh!” she growled, thumping her fist into the tree with frustration. “What’s wrong with this stupid thing? How come it won’t turn back on? God, if ever there was a time when I like, desperately needed to call my dad, it’s now!”

“It’s never gonna turn on again if my mom is right,” Ann murmured, staring at the ground and feeling almost as if she were drifting into some sort of trance. Everything was becoming increasingly surreal, and shock and disbelief didn’t even come close to describing the tsunami of emotions rushing through her mind at this moment.

“Never? Come on, Ann, be realistic here. Whatever these crazy terrorists have done, the government will like, fix it in a day or two. I mean, what we’re going through now must be like how people felt while the 9/11 attacks were happening, right? And as crazy as that was, things were back to normal in New York after, like, a few weeks.”

Ann shook her head, a dark expression on her face. “This isn’t like 9/11, Sandy,” she said softly. “It’s worse. Way, way worse. There isn’t going to be any going ‘back to normal’ after this, not for months. Maybe not for years. Maybe … never.”

“That’s crazy talk, Ann. I mean, come on, we’re both real shaken up, and things seem out of control now, but like, it’ll be fine in a few days. The government will take care of things.”

“We don’t have time to sit and argue about this right now,” Ann said, snapping herself out of her trance of dark thoughts. “We have to get moving. The longer we hang around, the more danger we put ourselves in.”

Sandy leaned out from behind the tree and stared at the street and the concrete jungle, with its menacing skyscrapers and endless sea of massive, silent buildings beyond the park, and a fresh tide of fear swelled within her. Timed perfectly to amplify this fear, a deep, thunderous boom of an explosion a few blocks away echoed through the park, followed by the rattling chatter of gunfire and the sounds of screams and shouts.

“Maybe we should, like, just hide here until things quieten down,” Sandy murmured. Her hands were trembling, and her face was pale. She had all but forgotten about the hot, throbbing pain in her ankle.

“Things aren’t going to get any quieter,” Ann said softly. “They’re only going to get worse. A lot worse. We have to move while we still have the chance to do that, and the window is closing, Sandy. It’s closing really fast. I know it’s scary, but we have to be brave, and we have to do this. Come on, lean on me again. We have to go. We’ve already lingered here too long.”

Sandy swallowed a dry gulp of fear, then gave Ann a teary nod and put her arm around her shoulder. Then the two of them set off for the silent, gray terror of the deserted city streets.

8

“Get under the train, hurry!” Mary hissed, stepping over the dead body to get behind the train.

“B–but b–” James stammered, frozen and rooted to the spot with fear.

Mary couldn’t afford to try to reason with the teenager’s panic and fear-paralysis. She lunged at him, grabbed his collar and pulled him behind the train, and then forced him down onto his hands and knees and shoved his butt with her boot, making him crawl under the train. She hastily killed the gas lamp and then, in the pitch black, crawled blindly under the train behind him.

“Who, who are, uh, uh, what are they—” James whispered, his panic rising.

Mary fumbled frantically around in the dark, trying to find his face, and when she did, she clamped her hand over his mouth.

“Quiet!” she hissed. “Don’t say another word, James. Don’t even breathe, dammit, you hear me? Just play dead, seriously, or you might end up like that guy on the tracks! Now shut it!”

She was doing her best to play it cool, but fear was shooting in icy gushes through her veins as surely as it was through James’s, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t steady her hands against the shaking that had possessed them like some sort of vengeful poltergeist.

The light was coming closer now, enough so that they could see the slickness of the steel subway tracks nearby glowing like two long snakes of luminescence. Moving almost painfully slowly, so as not to make a single noise louder than a mouse’s heartbeat, Mary drew her pistol and painstakingly flipped the safety off, trying to do it without making the sound of a click. A sickening feeling, like a meal of spoiled food, was swirling around her guts—the sense that she would soon have to use this weapon in anger.

Now the light was getting even closer, illuminating the walls of the tunnel with a faint, almost ghostly grow, which grew steadily brighter. With the swelling light came the sounds of footsteps crunching on the gravel and voices. Mary listened intently, trying to determine how many people were approaching, and who they were.

From the sound of it, there seemed to be maybe three or four people, and at least two or three of them were men, judging by the sounds of their voices. The pulsing of fear deep within Mary’s core grew more intense when she heard the distant voices more clearly; they sounded brash and aggressive and were laughing in harsh tones. These were undoubtedly not anxious, confused commuters who had been stuck on a train, and the fact that they were all men rang further alarm bells in Mary’s mind.

Soon the light thrown off from their party was enough to illuminate the tunnel around the train and the station quite clearly, and from its orange, dancing nature and the whiff of burning gasoline Mary smelled, it seemed that the men had improvised some sort of crude torches for light. Her heart started to beat faster as she heard what they were saying.

“I saw it, man, I fuckin’ saw it. There was light this way,” one of them growled. “It was comin’ this way toward us.”

“You be fuckin’ trippin’, there ain’t no fuckin’ light around here,” another muttered, his voice deep and resonant.

“Shut the fuck up, Haze,” the third man snarled. “Fuckin’ bitch. I saw the fuckin’ light too. There’s some motherfucker down here.”

“It’s probably some subway contractor or some shit tryin’ a’ fix the power outage,” the second man said. “An’ they gon’ find that motherfucker we shanked on the train.”

“So?” the first man scoffed. “We’ll just fuckin’ shank ‘em too an’ take their shit. Subway repairmen ain’t packin’ no guns.”

The third man chuckled darkly. “Who knew a power outage could be so good for business, huh? How many grand we up after robbing these scared-ass motherfuckers? Haha!”

“Man, you right, we made some quick and easy money,” the second man said, “but everyone’s gone from the tracks now. They all bailed outta here. We ain’t gon’ find nobody else to take shit from. Let’s just get the hell outta here now. They gon’ eventually send some cops in here, an’ I don’t wanna do no more time. I already done enough years behind bars. An’ when the power comes back on? You wan’ be stuck underground on the fuckin’ subway tracks an’ get creamed by a fuckin’ train? Fuck that, man, I say we go now.”

Mary prayed that the other two would listen to this man, but her heart sank when the third man replied.

“Not until I find where that light was coming from,” he growled.

“Yo!” the first man yelled as the men got within a few yards of the abandoned train. “Who the fuck is here?”

His voice boomed in a series of ominous echoes through the tunnel. Mary and James were hidden in the intense black shadows under the train, but they could see the three men’s legs and shoes clearly enough. The men looked big—all of them—and were dressed like inner-city thugs. They’d already killed one person just to rob them, and she had no doubt that they would do something just as heinous if they discovered her and James hiding under the train. She reached over and took his trembling hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Her pulse was booming so loudly in her ears that she thought the men had to be able to hear it.

“Come out, motherfucker, we just wan’ talk, okay?” the man yelled. “We know you here. We saw your light!”

Mary watched as one of them walked up to the train, and her pulse started to race even faster. Fortunately, he didn’t look under it. Instead, he climbed into the train, and she and James listened with bated breath to his footsteps thumping around right above them.

“See?” the man on the train said. “Nobody here. It’s as empty as when we left it. Let’s just get the hell outta here.”

A brief flame of hope flickered to life inside Mary. Maybe, just maybe, the men would give up and leave. As quickly as it had flared up, though, the fire was extinguished.

“He ain’t in there,” the first man growled. “But I’m pretty sure I know where the motherfucker is.”

Mary held her breath and slid her forefinger onto the trigger of her .45 as the man got down on his hands and knees. She saw where the orange light was coming from—it was a section of ripped up carpet rolled into a tube and doused with gasoline, a crude but efficient torch. The writhing torch flames instantly banished the shadows from under the train, and Mary’s heart almost stopped when the man’s eyes met hers. He was a big, brutish-looking man with a shaved, scarred head and a skew nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times. He smiled evilly at her, revealing a mouth full of crooked teeth.

“What you lookin’ at, man?” the third man asked.

“It ain’t no subway repairman down here,” he replied his sadistic grin widening. “It’s a Lil’ milf an’ her kid.”

The other man chuckled darkly. “Come on out, honey. We ain’t gon’ hurt you,” he said, dropping down to his haunches and leering at Mary and James. He, too, was a large, powerfully built man with a bald head. He flashed them a mocking smile with a broad mouth full of gold teeth.

“Don’t fuck with me, assholes,” Mary hissed, doing her best to sound as confident and intimidating as possible, despite the almost debilitating fear that was surging through her. “Get back! Get back, or I’ll shoot all of you. I swear to God I’ll do it!”

“Ooh, we got a feisty one down here, huh?” the first man said, chortling. “Tell you what, baby. How ‘bout you come outta there and hand over that piece, an’ the three of us give you a real good time in the back a’ the train. Your boy can watch. Maybe he’ll learn a thing or two.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Mary snarled. “You three clowns start running now, and maybe you’ll get away with your lives before I start shooting.”

“You ever shot a man before, baby?” the third man asked. The mocking smile on his face vanished, replaced by a vicious snarl and a devilish gleam of menace in his eyes. “Coz, I have. You think you got what it takes to pull that trigger an’ put a bullet into a man? You got the balls to do that?” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a large hunting knife. “I shot plenty a’ motherfuckers before, but I prefer using this. An’ if you don’t give us that fuckin’ piece, I’m gonna use this on you an’ your boy … nice an’ slow. I’ll do that, lil’ punk first. Take his fuckin’ face off while you watch. You wanna see that? Coz, you gonna see that if you don’t give us that gun in the next five seconds.”

“Come on, honey. Come outta there. Let me get a good look at that tight lil’ body a’ yours,” the first man sneered. He crawled closer and ducked his head under the train, and Mary and James scrambled back.

“Get back, dammit!” Mary yelled. “I said, get back!”

“Gimme the fuckin’ gun, bitch!” the man growled, his smile vanishing. He lunged for the pistol, but Mary yanked it out of his way and scrambled back farther under the train.

“This is your last warning!” she screamed. “Leave us alone, or you’ll die in this tunnel, all of you!”

The man laughed humorlessly, but then abruptly snarled, and threw the burning torch at them. Mary yelped and rolled out of the way of the flaming projectile, but the man used this distraction to lunge and grab her. Suddenly his big, powerful hand clamped tight around her wrist, and in a flash, he half-forced the pistol out of her hand. Mary screamed, tugging with all her might to try to get her arm out of his grasp and to get her hand back on the trigger so she could shoot, but the man was far too strong.

“I got the bitch. I got her. Fuckin’ shank her, man, shank her!” the man roared as he and Mary fought in a furious struggle in the cramped confines of the space under the train.

Over the grunting and growling of the man she was fighting, she heard the thumping of boots above her inside the train and the crunch of gravel as the other man—the one with the knife—ran around the back of the train to try to get to her and attack her from behind. She knew that she had mere seconds to act to save both her life and James’s, and she launched into a frenzied counterattack on her assailant, lunging forward and clawing at his face with her free hand.

To her surprise, James ripped himself out of his panic-induced paralysis and howled with animalistic fury as he scuttled toward the man on his back, kicking the thug’s head and shoulders and arms repeatedly with both feet, wailing on him with desperate fury.

Mary wasn’t sure how, but somehow her hand was free of the criminal’s death-grip, and the pistol was still in it. James continued screaming like a rabid animal and raining furious blows down on the man’s head and face, and he was fighting back, swinging vicious punches at James's legs and roaring like a cornered bear. Now, in the heat of the moment, Mary knew she could not hesitate. There was no time to aim; she simply pointed the pistol in the general direction of her attacker and squeezed the trigger.

A bright flash briefly lit up the underside of the train, and the bang of the gunshot resounded down the tunnel, leaving both Mary’s and James’s ears ringing with a shrill whine.

Her assailant flopped forward limply, and she felt the warm wetness of his blood sprayed across her face. She didn’t even think about whether he was dead, or perhaps just wounded; she spun around on her back just as the third man, with his knife ready to gut her like a pig, scrambled under the train behind her. He lunged with the blade, and she squeezed off two shots in quick succession, and the knife stabbed into the gravel to her right, and his huge form flopped onto her legs—dead.

This third man was standing frozen in place on the tracks, after hearing the gunshots, but James was still screaming and kicking the first man’s head, too caught up in the fury of the fight to stop.

“James, James, stop, stop, he’s dead, he’s dead,” Mary gasped, reaching over to James. “He’s dead, honey. He’s dead—stop.”

Outside, on the tracks, the other man was utterly silent. Mary knew she had to deal with him immediately. She scrambled out from under the train with her .45 gripped in both hands. Now that the man’s torch was burning under the train, everything in the tunnel was dark and gloomy, and she could only see the remaining shadowy outline against the blackness.

“Your friends are dead,” she said coldly. “And you will be too if you don’t leave right now. There’s the platform—climb up onto it, walk up the escalator stairs, and keep going until you get to the surface. I’ll be watching you, asshole, and if you even try to look over your shoulder, you’ll end up like your friends under the train. Go! Move it! Get the hell out of here, now!”

The man said nothing. He quietly turned and headed over to the platform, climbed up onto it, and walked away without turning to look back. Mary kept the pistol trained on his back until he melted into the darkness beyond the light, and even then, she waited until she could no longer hear his footsteps before she lowered the gun. After that, she hurried over to check on James.

He had already crawled out from under the train and was dusting off his knees and elbows. He was breathing hard, his chest was heaving, and his face looked both frightened and haggard. There was a faraway look in his eyes, and his mouth was hanging half-open.

Mary didn’t know what to do or say. She still couldn’t believe that she’d just killed two men, and she was reeling with shock. She holstered her pistol, walked up to James, slowly wrapped her arms around him, and hugged him. For a few moments, his limbs hung limp at his sides, but then he wrapped them around her and returned the embrace. When they disengaged from the hug, both Mary’s and James’s eyes were wet with tears.

“Let’s go,” she said softly.

James simply nodded in response. Without another word, and without another glance at the dead men, Mary lit up her gas lamp and set off, and James followed quietly behind her.

9

“How far are we from school?” Sandy asked. Her usually pretty face was a twisted mess of pain, fear, and anxiety.

Ann peeked around the corner of the dry-cleaning store, scoping out the street beyond. Thus far, they had managed to navigate two city blocks without being seen or running into any more of the sinister men in black. The deserted streets, littered with abandoned cars, were eerily quiet, although sporadic explosions and scattered bursts of gunfire, as well as shouts and screams, would frequently shatter the fragile silence. Also, while Ann and Sandy had not seen or encountered any other people in the streets, they had felt eyes quietly watching them and had seen frightening faces peeping out from behind the drapes of apartment windows. All in all, it was a very frightening situation, and Ann couldn’t wait to be reunited with her mother, who she was sure would have a plan to get her out of this mess.

“Um, three blocks,” she said to Sandy. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s three blocks from here.”

“Could you take me home first instead?” Sandy asked. “My dad’s not at the hospital today. It’s his day off. I just—I need to get home, Ann. I really need to get home.”

“You don’t wanna come with my mom and me? She’ll know exactly what to do, I promise.”

Sandy, on the verge of tears, shook her head. “I just … I just wanna go home, please Ann, I just wanna go home.”

Ann nodded; she could understand this. If her mom hadn’t had a backup plan in place, she too would have wanted nothing more than to just run straight home and lock herself in. Also, while Mary would certainly have some sort of plan in place, Ann wasn’t sure how much first aid knowledge her mother possessed and wasn’t entirely sure that she would be able to help Sandy, with her severely injured ankle that looked even worse now. At least Sandy’s father would know what to do.

“All right,” Ann said to Sandy. “We’ll go to your place first. Then I’ll head over to the tree at school to wait for my mom.”

“You don’t wanna, like, stay with us?” Sandy asked. “We’ve got the two guest rooms, and my parents won’t mind. You could, like, even bring your mom too. We could all stay in the apartment.”

Sandy’s parents stayed in a swanky downtown apartment, and as tempting, as her offer was, Ann knew that Mary would want to get out of the city as soon as possible. It wouldn’t be wise to stay here, no matter how luxurious and comfortable the accommodation was.

“I don’t know about that,” Ann said. “I guess I’ll have to ask my mom and see what she says. But for now, let’s just focus on getting you home. Come on. The coast’s clear; let’s go.”

She slipped her arm around Sandy, and they ran-hopped down the deserted road. As they moved down the street, Ann found herself wishing she had a gun. Unlike most of the other girls in her class, Ann knew how to handle firearms and was a good shot with both a pistol and rifle. Learning how to shoot and going for regular sessions on the range had been one thing Mary had always insisted Ann do.

She’d also made Ann train in regular martial arts classes ever since she was five years old; Ann was thus now a black belt in both Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and karate. Mary had never explained exactly why she’d been so forcefully insistent about the firearms and martial arts training, and Ann had always thought it had had something to do with her mother’s stressful and traumatic years as a teenage runaway on the streets. Her mother had never spoken much about those days, but from the look that came across her face whenever that period of her life came up, she had been able to tell that it had been rough. However, now Ann had come to an altogether different realization. Her mother hadn’t been prepping her for possible dangerous encounters with men—although this had certainly been part of the motivation, surely—but rather, she had been making sure that Ann would be able to handle herself in a disaster scenario just like this one.

Thankfully, Ann thought, she hadn’t actually had to fight or shoot anyone thus far; it was one thing shooting at targets on a range and fighting opponents in the controlled confines of a martial arts dojo, but, as she’d discovered when being shot at earlier, real-life fighting was a lot more chaotic and vicious, and nobody played by the rules when there were lives at stake. She wondered if she had it in her to actually point a gun at another human being and pull the trigger, even if that person were threatening her life. And she wondered if Mary, for all her training and preparation, was capable of this too. Her mother had always been tough and independent, but she was a kind, soft-hearted, and gentle person too. Would she really be able to kill, even in a life or death situation?

While getting lost in these thoughts, about halfway down the street, Ann’s sixth sense began tingling. She wasn’t sure why, but she sensed that danger was nearby. She stopped and listened intently to the gentle breeze and was sure she heard the sound of a great many footsteps, approaching rapidly. She couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from, or if she even heard it or if her weary and stressed-out mind was simply conjuring it up, but a mounting sense of fear was growing within her.

She frantically scanned the area for both cover and an escape route—the first priorities her mother had taught her to seek out in a dangerous area—and decided that a large abandoned SUV straddling the sidewalk nearby would have to do in terms of a hiding place. There were no alleys or side streets close by, and no unlocked buildings they could slip into.

“Get under that Subaru!” Ann whispered urgently, yanking Sandy to the side.

“What? Why?” Sandy asked.

“Just do it! People are coming, a lot of ‘em!”

Ann didn’t give Sandy time to argue or ask any more questions; she simply dragged Sandy along behind her as she made a beeline for the SUV, with the injured girl hopping and stumbling along behind her, yelping in pain. Ann pulled her friend to the ground so hard that it was almost as if she had tackled her or given her a judo throw onto the sidewalk.

“Ow, dammit!” Sandy yelped, but Ann was already dragging her under the Subaru, and before she could say another word, Ann’s hand clamped down over her mouth.

Ann’s urgency was warranted; a mere second or two after they had crawled under the SUV, a group of black-clad men, all armed with AK-47 rifles, came striding around the corner that Ann and Sandy had just come from five minutes prior.

They were not the only people in the area, though. Ann looked out from under the front of the Subaru, and she saw what looked like a group of US Army troops running out from around the corner at the other end of the street. The sense of danger and peril in the air was buzzing like static electricity all across the surface of her skin, and a nauseating feeling bubbled in the pit of her stomach like it had when she’d watched the men in black pressing their rifle muzzles against the heads of the mayor and his staff.

“Drop your weapons!” came a throaty roar from the direction of the army troops. “Surrender now, or we will use lethal force!”

“Cover your head!” Ann hissed to Sandy. Both girls lay on their stomachs under the SUV, and Ann covered her head with her arms and hands.

There was no response from the men in black. Instead, they opened fire. The battle that erupted was as violent and chaotic as it was brief. For a minute, maybe less, the entire street was a frenzied storm of automatic gunfire from both sides. Ann and Sandy screamed in terror under the SUV as a hail of bullets peppered the Subaru and all the other abandoned cars around them, and the thunder of gunfire seemed to hammer its terrible aural chaos into the core of their brains, no matter how tightly the girls pressed their arms into their heads.

The minute of fighting that passed felt like it would never end, but finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the firefight was over. The silence that came after it was eerie and dense, and almost as scary as the thunderous roar of gunfire, but it was soon shattered by the gruff voices of the army troops.

“All clear!” one of them roared from the far end of the street.

“Check the bodies then move out!” another one of them yelled gruffly.

Sandy and Ann watched in silent fear, with their hearts in their mouths, as at least two dozen feet and legs clad in combat boots and urban-camouflage uniforms jogged past the SUV. Thankfully, none of the soldiers seemed interested in checking any of the vehicles, and nobody noticed that two teenage girls were hiding under the red Subaru.

When the soldiers got to the corpses of the men in black, Ann flinched as three more ominous shots rang out; the wounded had, she surmised, just been executed. She listened intently and heard the soldiers talking but couldn’t make out what they were saying. After a minute, they moved off, but Ann and Sandy waited for at least another two minutes under the SUV before they dared to stick their heads out and peek around to make sure the coast was clear.

“This is getting like, way too crazy,” Sandy murmured. Her whole body was trembling, and her eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. “I– I can’t take any more of this, Ann, I’m scared. I’m so freakin’ scared. I don’t think I can go on…”

Ann squeezed Sandy’s hand tightly. She, too, was terrified, but Ann knew she had to be strong for both of them. “It’s not too far to go now. We’re gonna make it, okay? We just have to be careful and use our heads.”

“I’m so scared,” Sandy murmured.

There was a faraway look in Sandy’s eyes, and Ann was worried that she wouldn’t be able to go on. There was nothing else they could do, however, but proceed; out here on the streets, there was only danger and death.

“Come on, we’re almost there. Let’s go. I got you,” Ann said gently, doing her best to come across as brave and confident, even though she was feeling just as bad as Sandy.

She crawled out from under the Subaru, then helped Sandy to get out too. Here in the open, she felt terribly vulnerable, especially after what had just happened, and it took every ounce of courage she possessed to simply put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Now that both girls were standing, they could see the full extent of what had happened a few minutes earlier.

Dead bodies dressed in black were strewn across the intersection to their rear. A few were slumped dead over the hoods of cars, which they’d been using as cover during the battle. It hadn’t been a one-sided massacre, though; the men in black had killed a few army troops, too, although the number of Army dead at the far end of the street was a lot lower than that of the men in black.

Ann’s first instinct was to move forward toward their goal as quickly as possible, but an injection of cold, rational thought popped into her mind. It was now as clear as the light of day that she needed a firearm, and she realized that this might be her only chance to find one.

“Wait here,” she whispered to Sandy, and before her friend could answer, she jogged over to the closest of the dead men in black.

A stab of disappointment cut through her when she saw that the army troops had taken the man’s rifle, as well as whatever handgun had been holstered at his side. Even his ammunition pouches were empty; the soldiers seemed to have searched the corpse thoroughly and taken all weapons and ammunition off it.

There was no indication of who the man was, or with whom he and his fellow terrorists were affiliated. His all-black combat uniform had no insignia or badges on it, and a black balaclava covered his entire face, with only two dead, glazed-over, brown eyes visible. Ann was too freaked out by being so close to a corpse to peel back the balaclava and get a better look at him.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sandy cried, her desperation and fear verging on hysteria.

“Just wait a sec!” Ann yelled back, acutely conscious of how loud her voice sounded in the deserted street.

She was feeling the beginnings of a state of panic set in and knew she couldn’t hold those feelings at bay for very long. She ran over to the next corpse—a man slumped over the bonnet of a bullet-riddled Mercedes sedan—and saw that the soldiers had taken his AK-47 as well. She knew that the longer she spent trying to search all the bodies, the more danger she was putting herself and Sandy in. Filled with despair, she was about to give up when she noticed a glint of metal under the Mercedes by the rear wheels. She dropped down onto her hands and knees and saw that the dead man had dropped a pistol there. It had bounced behind the far tire, where the soldiers hadn’t seen it.

She got down and half crawled under the sedan, stretched across the asphalt, and managed to grip the muzzle of the pistol. She dragged it out from under the car and felt a surge of triumph rush through her when she curled her fingers around the grips. It was a 9mm, she noted, and she popped the ammunition clip out and saw that it was full, thankfully.

The dead man’s ammo pouches had been cleaned out, so there was no spare ammunition for the gun, but at least she was now armed and had a means by which she could defend herself and Sandy against the dangers that lay ahead.

Suddenly, while Ann was inspecting the pistol, a piercing scream of terror split the air. Ann almost dropped the weapon with fright, and she spun around to look behind her, for the cry had come from Sandy’s direction. When her eyes fell upon the sight that greeted them, her heart began to boost frantic rushes of icy, fear-laced blood through her veins, for she knew now that she was about to find out whether she had it in her to use this weapon on a living human being.

10

The rest of the journey through the subway tracks was quiet and uneventful. Neither Mary nor James spoke; neither really had much to say, and both were lost in their own thoughts. Both were still trying to process what had happened, and Mary was still trying to come to terms with the fact that she’d just killed two men. It had been a life and death situation, of course, but that didn’t make it much easier to deal with.

James was similarly lost in introspection, but the thoughts that were going through his mind were quite different. For his whole life, he’d been beaten up, both by his alcoholic father and bullies at school. He’d always either run from them or curled up into a ball and simply taken the pain and humiliation they’d dealt out to him. Yet back there, under the train, when the man had attacked Mary—who was the closest thing to a mother that James had ever known—something within him had snapped. All the pent-up rage and frustration of a life of being abused and bullied had all come pouring out in a torrent of righteous violence. He didn’t feel a shred of remorse for the dead men; in fact, he felt his chest swelled with a very unfamiliar, yet very pleasing emotion: pride. And in the bleak darkness of the subway tunnel, the corners of his mouth curved up into a hidden smile.

When they got to the next platform, they found it as deserted as the previous one, but there was no train here. There were a few abandoned bags and other hastily discarded or dropped items, like hats and umbrellas laying around that indicated that people had fled in a hurry when the EMP had hit, but aside from these few scattered things, there was nothing to indicate any sign of a human presence here.

“This is our stop,” Mary announced, breaking the long period of silence. “Climb onto the platform, and we can get out of this place.”

“I know the way from here,” James said. His father was usually too drunk to drive him anywhere, so he was used to getting around on public transport and knew the layout of most neighborhoods around the main subway stops.

Mary paused, cocked her head, and narrowed her eyes, staring at James for a few seconds in the grimy-white glow of the softly hissing gas lamp. He had only said a few words, but he sounded quite different to the James she knew so well—a lot more confident and self-assured than she could ever remember him sounding.

James seemed oblivious to Mary’s scrutiny and forged on ahead through the darkness. Mary grinned to herself—the first smile she’d had on her face for quite some time—and then hurried after him before he could melt into the shadows beyond the small ring of light.

Despite James’s newfound confidence, he was still feeling shaken up by what had happened, as was Mary, and both of them jumped with fright every time they heard a rat scampering past, or when a gust of wind from the surface trickled down, rustling litter and plastic cups.

Eventually, though, they got to the escalators that led to the surface, and both breathed out sighs of relief when they saw the light of day shining down, feeling like a couple of miners who had been freed after being trapped underground by a rockfall.

“Go slowly up the escalator,” Mary warned. “Give your eyes time to adjust to daylight again. We don’t wanna be walking out of here blinded by the light.”

James didn’t need to be told to wait, though, for something else was making him hesitate at the bottom of the escalator. From the city beyond the subway station exits, they could hear the dull roar of what sounded like a huge crowd. They made their way cautiously up the escalator stairs, and as they got closer to the exit, the sound became more distinct, and Mary and James realized that it was, without a doubt, a crowd of people. What was more, it didn’t sound like any ordinary crowd; there were shouts of both anger and panic, and it sounded almost like a riot was taking place.

James paused halfway up the escalator and looked behind him at Mary, and there was an expression of worry and anxiety on his face. “What do we do?” he asked. “Things are sounding pretty crazy up there.”

Mary was torn. She knew that it was a really bad idea in a situation like this to go anywhere near crowds, but here they were a mere half a mile from Ann’s school. There was no way Mary was going to leave Ann behind; she would rather die trying to save her daughter than abandon her to the unfolding chaos so that she could selfishly escape and survive.

“It probably is crazy, but we have to keep going,” she said grimly. “Ann’s gonna be waiting for us at school, and we can’t let her down. We have to get to her.”

“We could go back down into the subway,” James suggested, “and go two more stops, then loop all the way around and get to the back of the school.”

“That would add three miles to our trip,” Mary said, shaking her head, “and we have no way of knowing if there are crowds and riots on that side too. No. I don’t like this any more than you do, but we’re so close now. We have to try to get through this.”

“All right,” James said, looking nervous; his newfound confidence was already starting to fade a little.

They headed cautiously up the escalator, their hearts in their mouths, and the closer they got to the surface, the more chaotic and unbridled the sound of the crowd became. Just before they got high enough up the stairs to see what was going on, a deep boom echoed through the subway station from above, and a chorus of thousands of people screaming in terror crashed in an aural wave from above; another explosion detonated, and from the sound of it, it was maybe only a block or two away.

“Shit,” Mary murmured, her heart thumping in her chest. The blast only made her feel more desperate to get to Ann, though, and not a single thought of retreating or running away crossed her mind. “Come on,” she said, pushing determinedly past James and hurrying up the final few escalator steps. “Let’s move!”

James hurried along behind her. When they got to the surface, a scene of sheer anarchy greeted them.

“Holy shit…” James murmured, his jaw hanging open with shock.

The subway station exited onto one of the main streets of the city, and this one—in utter contrast to the eerie, deserted streets they’d seen before heading down into the subway—was a rolling ocean of people. The police, dressed in riot gear, and the members of the US Army were there, and they were trying to stem the flow of people, who appeared to all be moving in one direction—away from where the explosions had come from. There were plenty of abandoned vehicles littering the broad, multi-laned street here. But these looked almost like they were being swallowed up and carried along by a tsunami—a living, seething tsunami of human bodies.

Mary and James were faced with an additional challenge now because to get to the school, they would have to fight their way through the crowd, moving in the opposite direction of everyone else. It would be like plunging into a river in full flood and then attempting to swim against the current.

Just as if they were wading into a raging river, Mary knew that she and James would need to be joined together to avoid one of them being swept away. “Grab the handle on my backpack!” she said to him in the entranceway of the subway station, before heading down the stairs and stepping into the flow of human bodies. “Hold on tight, and whatever you do, don’t let go!”

James reached forward and grabbed the backpack handle. “I’m holding on!” he yelled over the clamor of the surging crowd. “Go!”

Drawing in a deep breath and gritting her teeth, Mary strode purposefully down the stairs and stepped into the jostling crowd. The collective sense of fear and panic was so thick in the air she could almost taste it, and she knew that she would have to steal her will and keep her focus razor-sharp to avoid becoming infected by it.

From the moment she stepped into the crowd, it was a fierce battle. Half of the people who were in the group didn’t seem to know where they were going or why; their faces were masks of confusion and panic, like a flock of sheep running from unseen wolves in the night. Even though Mary was a relatively petite woman, the big, bulky backpacks she was wearing meant that she couldn’t use her small size to her advantage and slip through gaps the way she would have been able to if she’d been on her own and unencumbered by baggage.

She did her best to filter between people, but the press of bodies was tight, and she was met with anger and curses, with people shoving her and jostling.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Get outta my way, you stupid bitch!”

“Fuckin’ idiot, why are you going that way!”

“Move your goddamn ass outta my way!”

“You’re blocking me, shithead!”

Mary ignored the barrage of insults flung her way and pushed on determinedly against the flow of the crowd. Bodies thumped against her, and angry hands pushed and shoved her, and despite how determined she was to get through this mess and get to the school, she found herself quickly becoming overwhelmed with fear and confusion. As desperately as she fought against it, it was almost impossible to avoid becoming infected with the collective panic and fear of the crowd. She had no idea whether James was still holding on to her backpack either; the jostling and shoving were so fierce that it was impossible to tell.

Somewhere behind her, the police and soldiers were shouting something at the multitude, but Mary couldn’t hear what they were saying, nor did she particularly care. However, the angry yells from the authorities were quickly followed by other noises that ignited the entire crowd’s panic, turning it into an inferno, like burning matches tossed into a slick of gasoline: the sound of guns firing and tear gas canisters being launched.

Mary barely had time to react before all hell broke loose. Suddenly, the crowd was no longer surging forward, all pressing in one direction. People started screaming and trying to flee in all directions, and sheer pandemonium erupted.

11

One of the men in black was not only still alive, but he was also holding Sandy in a headlock, with a hunting knife pressed against her neck. Ann was shocked to see this sight and guessed that the man had played dead while the soldiers were checking the bodies, but right now, how he had survived was not important. The crucial fact at this moment was that he had a knife pressed against Sandy’s neck.

“Gimme that gun, or I’ll put twelve inches of steel through your friend’s throat,” he growled. “Put it on the ground, walk away, and I’ll let your friend go when I pick it up. Just gimme the gun, and I’ll let you both walk away from this.”

Ann was torn with indecision and drenched with icy fear. She knew that if this man got ahold of the gun, he wouldn’t let them go; one of these terrorists had already tried to kill her and Sandy for no reason, and there was no reason for her to believe that this man would be any different.

But what could she do? These black-clad men were cold-blooded killers, she understood this for certain now, and she knew that if she didn’t comply with what he said, he most likely would slit Sandy’s throat.

“Are you deaf or just fucking stupid, kid?” the man roared aggressively, pressing the blade of the knife more forcefully against Sandy’s throat, which caused her to scream out in fear again. “This is the last time I’m gonna say it! Put down the fucking gun and back away! I’m gonna count to three, and if you don’t fucking do what I say, this little bitch gets the knife! One … two…”

“Drop the knife, or I’ll blow your brains out.” Ann couldn’t believe she’d just said this, and on top of that, she couldn’t believe she’d said it so calmly. Furthermore, she was having a hard time believing that she was now actually pointing the pistol at the man. It felt almost as if someone else had taken control of her body and mind, and she was merely an observer.

A black balaclava covered the man’s face, but she could see the disbelief in his eyes—disbelief that quickly morphed into rage.

“I’m gonna get her, then I’m gonna gut you, you stupid little bitch,” he growled, “you probably don’t even know how to—”

Ann squeezed the trigger before he’d even finished his sentence. The crack of the shot echoed across the deserted street and the terrorist’s head snapped back in a spray of blood. His body slithered limply to the ground, and the hunting knife dropped from his limp fingers and clattered with a metallic clang onto the street. Sandy shrieked with horror and staggered away from the corpse. Half her face, her shoulder, and back were wet with the man’s blood.

Ann stared at the corpse with disbelief. Making the shot had been easy enough; she always got tight shot groupings at the range but pulling the trigger on a human being instead of a paper target brought with it a rush of intense emotions.

Sandy, weeping loudly, limped over to Ann and threw her arms around her. Ann hugged her back, but her eyes remained locked on the man she’d just killed. She felt as if she’d fallen into a trance and couldn’t pull her gaze away from the corpse. Somewhere inside her brain, though, a calm but firm voice was instructing her to move.

From a few blocks away came the sound of another gunfight erupting—presumably between soldiers and terrorists—and this enabled Ann to snap herself out of the trance. She gently pushed Sandy away from her.

“Pull yourself together, Sandy,” she said. “We can’t stand here in the middle of the street like this, especially since I just … look, we have to go. Now.”

Sandy, sniffling and whimpering, nodded. The two of them set off down the street, with Ann supporting Sandy with one arm and holding the pistol in her free hand. They passed the corpse of the terrorist, and Ann did not look down.

The next street they got to was quiet, but even so, they scoped it out for a good few minutes before setting off down it. In the background, Ann could hear what sounded like an enormous crowd roaring. As they moved down the street, the sound grew louder and louder, and it seemed to be coming from downtown, which was on the other side of the school, just under two miles in a straight line from where they were.

“What’s happening?” Sandy asked. “What’s that sound?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it much,” Ann answered. “It sounds like riots or something. Whatever it is, it’s probably about as bad as anything else we’ve seen today, and we don’t wanna be anywhere near it.”

“I’m glad to be back in my own neighborhood,” Sandy said. They were just a block away from her apartment building now. “I just hope those people don’t come here.”

They headed down a side street, and then ducked through an alley, and finally emerged onto Sandy’s street. There were a few people outside on the sidewalks, as it was mostly apartment blocks here, but they all looked scared and confused rather than hostile. Ann helped Sandy across the street to her building.

“I can’t believe we made it,” Sandy said, and tears started rolling down her cheeks again. She broke down, hugging Ann tight and weeping.

Ann was on the verge of bursting into tears, too, but she managed to maintain her composure. Her journey wasn’t over just yet, and she couldn’t afford to relax now. “Are you sure you don’t wanna come with me and my mom?” she asked. “After your dad’s checked out your ankle and stuff, I mean.”

“I just wanna take a bath, lie down, and sleep for a very long time,” Sandy said. “I don’t wanna leave my house again, not until after all this craziness is over.”

Ann frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know if it’s going to be over,” she said softly. “Not for a very long time and maybe not ever.”

Sandy shrugged; despite everything that had happened, she couldn’t conceive of a future that was utterly different from everything she’d grown up with. She couldn’t accept that the EMP attack had changed everything, perhaps permanently; it was simply too massive a change to wrap her mind around. “I just wanna stay at home with my family.”

“All right,” Ann said, feeling a sudden stab of sadness lancing its sharp steel through her; she realized that this might be the last time she ever saw her friend. “Take care, Sandy. I’ll come to visit you when this is all over,” she said, almost choking on the words.

The girls embraced one last time, and then Ann watched as Sandy limped over to the door. The doorman unlocked the security gate, helped Sandy into the building, and then, staring coldly at Ann, slammed the door shut and locked the building up again. Ann closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath, held it in her lungs for as long as she could, and then breathed out, doing her best to focus and stay calm. Then she turned and set off alone in the direction of her school, the pistol a cold and deadly weight in her hand.

12

A big man to Mary’s right careened into her, knocking both her and James to the ground. For a few terrifying moments, all Mary could see was a sea of running legs moving chaotically in all directions. Someone tripped over her and crashed headlong onto the ground, trampled under the panicking feet. Mary floundered on the ground, feeling like a turtle that flipped over onto its back, for the weight of the backpacks she was wearing made getting up difficult. Icy terror flooded through her; if she couldn’t get up in the next second or two, she could easily be crushed to death.

Suddenly, two hands hooked themselves under her armpits, and she felt herself lifted up. With this boost of assistance, she was able to get to her feet, and she turned and saw that it was James who had assisted her. He was panting from the effort, but he had done it—he had saved her life. There was no time to thank him, though, or even to really think about what came next; all they could do at this point was to try to get out of here without being knocked down again.

Foggy drifts of tear gas were already filling the broad street, and the cops and army troops were still firing. Whether it was live rounds they were shooting or rubber bullets, Mary did not want to get hit.

“Come on, this way!” she yelled to James, grabbing his hand and pulling him toward a side street, down which several people were fleeing.

There was no time to think or to try to figure out a route or a plan; the thick banks of tear gas were spreading fast, and panicking people were careening around like pinballs in a machine, overcome by an infectious and primal terror. From behind Mary and James came the sound of even more tear gas canisters being shot into the main street, and from the sound of marching boots, it seemed as if the police and army men were advancing in a formation.

“We have to get off the street!” Mary yelled at James. She was desperate to get to Ann and the school, but her immediate priority was now her survival. To her rear, gunfire broke out, and this only added to her sense of urgency.

A number of small businesses lined the side street, mostly cafés, boutiques, restaurants, bars, and other such places. Most of them were locked up, but through the chaos of running and careening bodies, Mary saw that the door to a convenience store was slightly ajar. Behind her, a division of riot police, who were all armored up in riot gear, turned onto the side street and started firing rubber bullets into the mass of fleeing people, using their batons to club anyone they got close to.

“Come into the store!” she said, yanking James toward the convenience store. She shoved open the door and stumbled into the store, pulling James in after her so forcefully that he fell sprawling onto the floor.

“No, no, the store is closed, the store is closed!” shouted the clerk behind the counter, a young Asian man who seemed to be an immigrant.

“I’m sorry, we just need to wait in here for a few minutes, then we’ll go,” Mary said to him.

The young man looked like he was in a state of complete panic, and Mary couldn’t blame him. He, like all the rest of these people out there, had no idea what was going on, and could only look on helplessly as scenes of complete chaos unfolded outside.

“No, no, please, you go, please,” he pleaded.

“Just a couple minutes, please, sir,” she said.

Before either of them could say anything else, though, two large men barged into the store, bowling over James, who had only just got back up to his feet.

“Store is closed!” the young man yelled weakly at the newcomers. “Please go, the store is closed!”

“Shut the fuck up!” one of them growled. The other closed the door and pressed his body against it, keeping it shut.

Mary didn’t like the look of either of them; dressed like inner-city thugs, their confident swagger suggested that they had firearms on them. Both of them were looking through the door and watching the riot police advance along the street, clubbing people and shooting them with rubber bullets as they went and firing more tear gas canisters to fill the streets with choking smoke.

While the two men’s eyes were glued to the scenes unfolding in the street, Mary quietly helped James onto his feet and crept away to the rear of the store. The men hadn’t given any overt indication that they were doing anything here except taking shelter from the tear gas and riot police, but she didn’t trust them. Behind the counter, the clerk had given up on trying to get them all out of the store and was also watching what was happening outside.

“Ooh, that fat motherfucker got his head smashed in!” one of the men exclaimed gleefully. They both burst out laughing as if they were watching a wrestling match.

“Damn, these pigs mean business, yo! They ain’t fuckin’ around,” the other said.

“Haha, look at that motherfucker! They beatin’ on his ass like he a fuckin’ pinata!”

They both laughed raucously, but at the rear of the store, Mary and James sat in somber silence. Her distrust of the two goons was growing, and she regretted coming in here, even though she hadn’t had much choice, since it was the only place that had been accessible. She peered around one of the shelves to get a look through the storefront window at what was happening outside. The street was thick with teargas, and it looked as if a dense sea fog had rolled in. From what she could make out through the milky drifts of gas, the riot police were now passing this store and were still firing rubber bullets and beating anyone unlucky enough to be caught in their path.

Soon enough, she hoped, they would be gone, and when the street was clear of both cops and tear gas, they could get out of here and be on their way. With very little wind around, though, she wondered how long it would take for the gas to clear. She didn’t want to have to hang around in here for the next hour or two, wasting precious time. Perhaps, she thought, there might be something in the store that could help her and James to make their way through the fog of tear gas without succumbing to its terrible effects. She had plenty of cash in her purse and felt that she should at least buy something to thank the clerk for the shelter his store had offered them. She decided to wait for the two thugs to be on their way before doing anything like that, though.

After a few tense minutes, the riot police had moved on, and the vast crowd outside had dispersed, and there was nobody on the road except a few injured people, laying on the street and sidewalk, groaning with pain and choking on tear gas.

“Everybody’s gone,” one of the thugs growled.

“Yeah, pigs, too,” the other said.

Mary was hoping that this would mean that they were leaving, but that was not the case. The two men walked over to the clerk, eyeing out the liquor bottles on the shelves behind the counter.

“Please go now,” the young man said nervously. “No sell anything now. The store is closed.”

“Gimme three bottles a’ Johnny Walker Black,” one of the goons muttered. “And some bottles a’ Gray Goose Vodka, yeah, give us that good shit.”

“No, no, the store is closed, no sell anything now,” the clerk protested.

“Your English ain’t too good, little man, is it?” the first thug growled. “I ain’t askin’ you for that shit. I’m tellin’ you to fuckin’ give it to me. And what’s in the cash register. Open that shit up and give us everything in it. And I do mean everything, motherfucker.” He casually pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the clerk’s chest.

“You two, lie face-down on the ground and shut the fuck up!” the other man snarled at Mary and James.

The other man didn’t have a gun in his hand, and if he did have one on him, he hadn’t yet drawn it. Mary, meanwhile, had quietly slipped her hand down into her pocket and curled her fingers around the grip of her pistol. If she acted fast, she would be able to draw it and get it onto the armed robber before he could turn around.

Her movement wasn’t quite subtle enough, though; either that or the second thug spotted the outline of the pistol in her pocket. “The bitch is packing!” the man suddenly yelled, before Mary could draw her weapon.

She tried to whip it out, but she only got the firearm halfway out of her pocket by the time the armed goon had spun around and aimed his pistol at her face. “Take the piece out, nice and slow, bitch,” he snarled, “if you wanna keep that pretty lil’ face looking like that, without no fuckin’ bullet holes in it. Take the piece out real slow, just usin’ your thumb and one finger, and put it on the ground and kick it over to me. And if you try anything, and I do mean fuckin’ anything, I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ brains all over that ice cream fridge behind y’all.”

There were only ten feet of space separating Mary from the robber. She knew that even if he were a lousy shot, he couldn’t miss at this distance, and the cold, hard look in his eyes told her that he’d killed before and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again. With her mouth dry with fear, and a crushing sense of dread and defeat squeezing its invisible force around her chest, she did as the man said, and quietly pulled out her .45, laid it down on the ground and kicked it over to him, leaving herself and James at the mercy of the armed robbers.

13

Everything had happened so fast that Mary hadn’t had time to process it all. She was silently cursing herself, frustrated that these men had managed to disarm her so easily. She should have known that they hadn’t just come in here for shelter and would try to pull something like this, she thought. With the bitter taste of defeat lingering in her mouth, she and James lay on the floor and put their hands behind their heads.

Mary couldn’t believe this was happening and wished she’d drawn her gun the moment these two goons had walked into the store. Regret and frustration, however, would be of little use to her and James. All she could do now was hope and pray that the robbers would just take the liquor and the money and move on, leaving them and the clerk unharmed.

The man bent down and picked up the .45, which he handed to his accomplice. Both men were grinning with smug triumph. The first one turned his attention back to the clerk, who was standing wide-eyed behind the counter with his hands above his head, virtually paralyzed with fear. The other walked over to Mary and James.

“What do y’all have in these bags, huh?” the man asked, looking at their backpacks. “Y’all are carrying a lot of shit, huh? Going on vacation or something? Gimme them bags, hand ‘em over.”

“There’s nothing valuable in them,” Mary said. “Please, just—”

The man stood over her and booted her viciously in the ribs, causing her to grunt with pain and curl up into a ball, gasping and groaning as waves of agony blasted through her side. “I said gimme the fuckin’ bags, bitch,” the man snarled. He bent down and started pulling the backpack off Mary’s shoulders. She didn’t resist, but because she was lying face-down on the ground, getting the bag off her proved to be a bit of a struggle. While this goon was busy trying to yank the pack off Mary’s shoulders, the other one was leaning over the counter and grabbing wads of money out of the cash register.

Suddenly, a tremendous bang clapped through the store, followed immediately by another, and the second robber pitched forward onto Mary, his dead weight crashing into her like a heavy cupboard falling onto her back.

“What the fuck?” the first robber at the counter yelled out, spinning around with his pistol at the ready, but four more shots rang out, and the man’s body jerked as the bullets slammed into his torso, and he slithered limply to the floor, dead before he even dropped his pistol to the ground.

Mary, yelling with confusion, managed to shove the dead robber’s heavy corpse off her and saw James laying on the ground, his eyes bulging with shock and his jaw hanging open, with a smoking .38 revolver gripped in both hands.

“James,” Mary gasped, “you … you shot them?”

James simply nodded, slowly closing his mouth.

“What? How? How did you even do that? Wh-where did you get that gun?”

“I, uh, it’s my dad’s,” he mumbled. “I um, I took it before I uh, before I left.”

“Oh my God,” she gasped, “and you had it in your bag the whole time? Why on earth didn’t you tell me?!”

“I just uh, I didn’t think, um…” he trailed off, staring in shock at the men he’d just killed.

Mary realized that it wasn’t the right time to bombard him with questions. She helped him up off the ground, gently pried the revolver out of his trembling hands, and then gave him a long, tight hug. “Thank you, James,” she said softly. “You saved our lives. His, too,” she continued, pointing at the clerk, who was looking even more terrified and shocked. “Are you okay, sir?”

The man swallowed slowly and nodded, unable to speak.

“I can’t believe you had this on you the whole time and you didn’t say anything,” Mary said to James. “But never mind about that. You used it when you had to, and you saved our lives.”

“I’ve never … shot a gun before,” James murmured, still looking complete shell-shocked. “I mean, I’ve probably killed a million people in video games, but in real life…”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “And I guess you’re really lucky this is a revolver, with no safety. All you really have to do is the point and squeeze the trigger.” She smiled. “My God, James, I still can’t believe you did that! Make no mistake, you saved our lives. You’re a hero. I just wish you’d have told me that you had the gun in there! Do you have any more ammo for it?”

He nodded. “Yeah, but I uh, I don’t know how to load it or anything, though,” he said.

“Here, like this,” she said, popping out the cylinder. James reached into the same pocket of his backpack that he’d slipped the revolver out of and dropped a handful of bullets into Mary’s hand. She showed him how to load the revolver, then handed it back to him.

“Th-thank you,” the young man behind the counter said, finally speaking. “You s-save my life.”

“And thank you for allowing us to take shelter here,” she said. “Is this your store?”

He shook his head. “My cousin’s. We live nearby, my whole family.”

“Then you need to take as much food from the store as you can, and all the bottled water and sports drinks, and lock this place up,” she said. “And don’t come back. Stay in your home and stay locked up. Things aren’t going to be safe in this city for a long time.”

“If you want anything from the store, please take,” he said.

“Just these,” she said, taking some sports drinks out of a nearby fridge. “And don’t worry, we’ll pay for them. Also, do you have any dust masks for painting and stuff?”

“Maybe look there, hardware section,” he said, pointing toward some shelves at the rear of the store.

Mary headed to the rear of the store and browsed the shelves and found some basic masks for painting and fumigation work that would do, and in the small toy section, there were some kids’ swimming goggles, which would serve to keep the teargas out of their eyes. The clouds of the offensive substance were thinner, but they had no means dissipated, and since there wasn’t much of a breeze outside, Mary figured they might be hanging around the streets for hours. She took three masks and three pairs of goggles—the extra items being for Ann—and put some sports drinks in her backpack, and then thanked the clerk for his help.

“What should I do with … them?” he asked, pointing to the dead robbers.

Mary suspected that there wouldn’t exactly be any murder investigations happening anytime soon, if ever, and that by nightfall, there would be dozens, if not hundreds of corpses on the city streets. She also guessed that the coroners would probably not be working, given the lack of useable vehicles and the general state of chaos.

“We’ll help you drag them out onto the street,” she said. “Once they’re out there, they won’t be your problem anymore. Just get the blood cleaned up off the floor and forget about them.”

After checking that the coast was clear, Mary, James, and the clerk dragged the bodies out onto the street and left them there. They went back into the store, and the clerk locked the door behind them.

“Where you go to now?” the clerk asked. “You live in the city?”

“No, we’re heading to the high school a few blocks from here,” Mary answered, “and then we’re getting as far away from the city as possible. It’s going to get really bad in the next few days. Sorry, what was your name?”

“I’m Sanjay.”

“Pleased to meet you, Sanjay. I’m Mary. And this is James. Anyway, what I was saying was, it’s gonna get really bad. Make sure you’ve got enough food and water—maybe fill up your bathtub and any other big containers in your house, if the faucets are still running—and lock yourselves up. Take all the candles home from your store; there isn’t going to be any electricity again, I don’t know for how long. Weeks, months, maybe years. Don’t open the doors for anyone, don’t go out yourselves. Do you have a gun?”

He shook his head, looking anxious. “No…”

Mary bent down and picked up the robber’s pistol, which was still on the floor near the counter. She checked the weapon, made sure it was working and clean, and then handed it to the young man. “You do now. Keep this in your house, and if any bad people try to get in, use it. I don’t think the cops are going to be coming to help if there’s trouble; you guys are going to have to help yourselves.”

She gave him a quick rundown on how to use the pistol, and then she and James got ready to go.

“Come this way,” he said, calling them behind the counter. “Safer to go through the back alley, I think.”

“Thank you, Sanjay,” Mary said. “And good luck. I hope you and your family get through this disaster all right.”

“Good luck to you, too, Mary,” he said. “And thank you again, James, for saving my life.”

He led them through the stock room behind the counter, and then let them out of the back door. They moved through the alley quickly and quietly, always on the lookout for danger. The clouds of tear gas from the street hadn’t penetrated the alley, but Mary and James kept their masks and goggles on, nonetheless.

The alley was a long, narrow one, and Mary was thankful for the concealment and shelter it provided. It emerged onto a large street near the school, and Mary made sure she scouted out the street for possible threats thoroughly before exiting the alley.

There was still intermittent gunfire and shouting coming from only a block or two away and more than a few confused and frightened-looking people running around or huddling behind abandoned cars, looking out for the riot police and army men, but for the most part, the street seemed safe, at least temporarily.

“Come on, let’s go,” Mary said to James.

They hurried across the street and jogged down the sidewalk, keeping a respectful distance from anyone they came near, whether the people they came across looked threatening or not. A few people called out to them or tried to get them to stop, but they simply veered around them. Mary wasn’t about to stop for anyone and knew that even the most innocuous-looking person could turn out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

They traveled across two more blocks, and then, finally, they got to the school. The front gates were locked up, and the buildings looked as if they were all closed up too, but that didn’t present much of an obstacle. Mary and James—who was quite out of breath now, after having run about a mile—moved around to the rear of the school and hopped over the fence there, then cut across the grounds to the fields.

Mary made a beeline for the old oak tree at the bottom of the grounds, and the closer she got, the faster her heart began to beat. She didn’t know what she would do if Ann weren’t there; they’d gone through hell to get here, and if it had all been for nothing, she didn’t know if she could go on.

“Aunt Mary … wait … I … just need it… to…” James gasped, stumbling along behind her, totally out of breath.

Mary ignored his pleas and steamed on ahead; he would be able to catch up in a few minutes, and there was no danger out there. She had to get to the tree and see if Ann were there. Once she got within a hundred yards of it, she broke into a run, and then, in the final twenty yards, a sprint. But the closer she got, the more her heart sank, for it was obvious that there was nobody there.

She reached the tree’s girthy trunk and dashed around it, looking everywhere. There was nobody in sight.

“Ann, my baby girl, where are you, where are you?” Mary whimpered, crumpling against the tree and bursting into tears. “If I’ve lost you, I don’t know what I’ll do. I won’t be able to go on…”

“Mom!”

Mary’s spirits soared. The voice had come from directly above her. She scrambled to her feet and looked up into the messy tangle of thick boughs and bushy green summer leaves. And there, looking down at her from the branches a few yards up, was Ann.

14

Ann, Mary, and James had a meal beneath the oak tree; they all needed an hour or so to rest and replenish their energy levels. It was eerily quiet and peaceful out here, but in the distance, they could hear the sound of gunfire and deep, booming explosions. Ann told them the story of how she’d escaped the museum with Sandy and described the various ordeals they’d had to go through after that, and then Mary and James told Ann their story. After they’d eaten and rested, Mary got the two teenagers up and urged them to prepare to leave.

“How are we gonna get out of town, Mom?” Ann asked. “Are you going to take one of the cars from where you work? Most of them should still work, right?”

“There’s a bunch that still work, despite the EMP attack,” Mary said. “I was gonna take the Army Jeep, but there’s an eighteen-wheeler blocking the entrance to the workshop. It’s so frustrating; it would have been a perfect vehicle for the dirt roads in the mountains.”

“But if you can’t get it out, what are we gonna do?” James asked, looking worried. “Are we gonna have to, like walk all the way to the mountains? That’ll take … I don’t even know … a week? More?”

Mary was stumped; she’d been so utterly focused on just getting to Ann, she hadn’t really considered what the next step of the plan might be. Before she could respond to James, Ann spoke up.

“Let’s go look in the bike shed. I bet a bunch of kids abandoned their bicycles there. Riding in the mountains will be tough, but it’ll be way faster and easier than walking.”

“I uh, I don’t know how to ride a bicycle,” James said. His cheeks reddened with a deep blush of embarrassment, and he quickly looked down, staring at his shoes, and he shifted them around on the grass.

A wave of despair crashed against Mary’s mind. The thought of having to walk all the way to the mountains seemed like an insurmountable task, especially considering all the perils and dangers they would have to face along the way. Plus, having to walk meant that they wouldn’t be able to get out of the city before darkness fell, and this was the last place Mary wanted to be after nightfall.

Suddenly, however, a blazing spark of an idea brightened the shadows of her mind.

“I know where a vehicle is!” she exclaimed excitedly. “Yes! I’m sure it’ll still be there! And thank God I brought my toolbelt and a few essential tools along with me. I knew they’d come in handy! Come on, you two, we’ve got a gas station to get to.”

“A gas station?” Ann asked warily. “What are you talking about, Mom?”

Mary didn’t answer, though; she was already striding purposefully ahead. Ann looked at James, shrugged and shook her head, and then followed her mother. James hurried along behind the two of them. They walked around the perimeter of the school grounds, listening out for the sounds of shouts or gunshots and carefully scoping out the streets before they jumped the fence and exited the school.

Mary took them through the neighborhood to the west of the school; it seemed to be the quietest, and while it was a little longer than going directly to the gas station, she knew it was far wiser to choose safety over speed and convenience. They ran into a few groups of people on the streets, but they were, for the most part, confused and frightened rather than predatory or aggressive. Even so, Mary kept the teens close to her and gave any people she encountered a wide berth. She also carried her .45 openly now, keeping it in her right hand, and told Ann and James to carry their guns openly too. She was determined to avoid making the same mistake she had in the convenience store—a mistake that had almost gotten her killed. Law and order had clearly broken down, and the only law now in place was the age-old law of the jungle: kill or be killed. And, after what James and Ann had had to do, Mary knew that the teenagers understood this with as much chilling clarity as she did.

Thankfully, though, the journey to the gas station, a trip of around two miles, was mostly uneventful. They did come across a group of young, thuggish-looking men who tried to intimidate them, but a few ice-cold glares and purposefully pointed firearms on the part of Mary and the kids scared the goons off; they weren’t looking for a fight, they were looking for easy targets. As for the mysterious, sinister terrorists in black, they didn’t run into anymore, although, from the sound of it, these ominous men were presumably having fierce gun battles with the army and police in the inner city. Throughout the whole trip to the gas station, there were regular bursts of gunfire and explosions, and dark plumes of smoke were rising to the sky from many spots in the middle of the city.

Finally, though, they reached the gas station, shaken up and nervous but unhurt. A few vehicles had been abandoned around the station and at the gas pumps, but Mary’s eyes quickly fell on the one she’d come here for: a ’74 AMC Javelin AMX muscle car.

“I have a feeling I know which car you’re gonna take,” Ann said, looking at the beautiful vintage vehicle.

“Cool ride,” James said with a grin, smiling for the first time since this whole episode had started.

“This jerk came into the workshop earlier,” Mary said, “right about the time the EMP went off. He said that his car had stalled out here and wouldn’t start, asked me about fixing it. Good thing I remembered.”

“But Mom, you just said that the guy told you it was broken down,” Anna said. “What use is it to us?”

“I’m pretty sure I know what the problem is, and it should be an easy fix,” Mary said. “And I’ve got everything I need right here to fix it up,” she continued, patting her toolbelt. “Shouldn’t take more than fifteen, twenty minutes.”

They walked over to the car, which was a spotless vehicle in orange paint with black racing trim.

“Damn, this is such a sick ride!” James remarked, tracing his appreciative fingertips across the gleaming hood.

“The guy was an asshole, but he kept his car in great condition,” Mary said. “Looks like it just rolled off the showroom floor, doesn’t it?”

Before anyone could say anything else, a harsh shout from behind them startled them.

“No looters or robbers are welcome here! Clear out right now, or I’ll fill your thievin’ hides with buckshot!”

Mary recognized the voice right away, so she didn’t draw her pistol. “It’s just me, Bill,” she said, turning around.

Bill, the elderly manager of the gas station, knew Mary well, since her vintage car workshop was only a mile down the road, and she often brought vehicles here for fuel.

“Mary!” he said, and all traces of aggression had vanished from his voice. He lowered the shotgun he was holding and frowned, shaking his head. “I can’t see a damn thing, when the power went out a few hours ago I was in the back room, and I tripped over something in the dark, and my damn glasses fell off. Couldn’t find ‘em, and I’ve been blind as a damn bat since then! What in the hell is going on? I’ve never seen a power outage like this one. And I’ve heard explosions and gunfire from all over town, but aside from that, it’s dead quiet. I haven’t heard a single damn car for hours! I’m freaked out, I gotta say…”

“That’s because it’s not a power outage, Bill,” Mary said with a sigh. “I’ll explain everything to you in a minute but let us help you find your glasses first. James, do you wanna go with him and help him find his glasses? Ann, you can help me here.”

“Thanks, Mary, I’m glad you stopped by here,” Bill said. “Without my glasses, I haven’t been able to do a damn thing, and I’ve just been stuck here. Some looters or some criminal scum tried to break in an hour ago, but I scared ‘em off with the shotgun. Little did the bastards know I wouldn’t have been able to hit ‘em even if they’d been standing a couple of feet in front of me!”

“I’ll help you find your glasses, sir,” James said. He put his backpacks down and accompanied Bill into the gas station store.

Mary and Ann, meanwhile, got busy with the AMC. The owner had left it locked up and had taken the keys, but that didn’t turn out to be much of a problem for Mary. She used a piece of scrap wire to unlock the door, and then popped the hood. She had a quick look around the engine, and checked the wiring, and saw that what was preventing the car from starting was the exact thing she’d suspected when the owner had first told her about the problem. Luckily, it was something fixable with the basic tools she had with her.

After around fifteen minutes, she’d completed the repair, and she climbed into the driver’s seat. She was mostly certain that the vehicle, being an early ‘70s model, would have been unaffected by the EMP, but there was only one way to find out. She pulled a chunk of wiring out from under the steering wheel—in the absence of the key, hotwiring the vehicle was the only way to get it started—and whispered a silent prayer before touching the two wires together.

There was a spark, and the big V8 roared to life. Mary almost cried with joy, and she leaned her head onto the steering wheel for a few moments and closed her eyes, the deep rumble of the powerful motor pure music to her ears.

“Oh my God, it works, it works!” Ann exclaimed, jumping up and down with glee next to the car.

“Don’t get too excited, Ann,” Mary said drily. “We have a little problem here.” Her own joy was fizzling out quickly, for now, that the vehicle was running the gas gauge had come on, and it was showing that the fuel tank was nearly empty. And with the gas pumps being permanently out, she couldn’t think of how she would manage to get enough gas into the car to get even a mile down the road, let alone out of the city and into the mountains.

James and Bill came out of the gas station store. James had managed to help the old man find his glasses, so he could now see again. Mary explained the EMP situation to Bill, and he shook his head and sighed.

“It’s like something out of our worst fears back in the Cold War days,” he said. “I always suspected something like this would happen. Young people, who never lived through those days, they got way too complacent about stuff like this. Way too, complacent.”

“Are you prepared for something like this, though?” Mary asked him.

“You bet!” he said grinning. “I’ve got a lil’ bunker in my backyard, filled with cans of beans. Built it way back when nuclear war was a real threat, although, in the last few decades, I been using it to get some peace and quiet from my wife when she gets in one of her moods. Don’t worry; I do change out the canned food regularly! They ain’t the same beans from the 1970s. The only thing is, I never counted on cars not working. Now I’m stuck here, and I don’t know how I’ll get outta the city. Lord knows my knees can’t handle a walk of ten miles…”

“We can take you with us and drop you at your place,” Mary said. “It’s not too far outta the way from the direction we’re heading. The only thing is, this AMC is running on empty, and your gas pumps aren’t going to be pumping anything but air for … well, maybe ever. I’ve got plenty of good vehicles in my workshop, but we can’t get any of ‘em out because of the eighteen-wheeler blocking the gate. Ugh, I can’t believe we’re so close to getting out of this damn city, but this little thing is holding us back.”

“Don’t you worry about gas, young lady!” Bill said, grinning mischievously. “We’ll get this hotrod’s tank filled right up. It’ll take a while, but we can do it.”

“How?”

“Come on into the store; I’ve got plenty of hand pumps, hoses, and plastic gas cans. Crowbars too. Look at all the abandoned cars all over the place; we can suck enough fuel outta their tanks with the hand pumps to fill up the AMC eventually. And we can bring a whole bunch of gas cans with us.”

A smile of relief broke across Mary’s face. “Of course! Hand pumps! All right, everyone, let’s get pumping.”

Everyone got a hand pump, a hose, and a fuel can, and they went around sucking fuel out of the abandoned cars. Soon enough, they got enough to fill up the AMC and a few gas cans. Now, charged with a fresh sense of hope and cautious optimism, the four of them piled into the car. Mary started it up again, gave the motor a few quick revs, and then drove off, heading into the unknown chaos that lay ahead.

15

It didn’t take long for Mary to realize that she had greatly underestimated how much attention a working vehicle would draw. While they’d managed to avoid drawing much attention on foot, now that they were in a moving, functional car, people’s heads were turning wherever they went. It wasn’t only pedestrians who stopped walking to stare at the car; while Mary kept her eyes on the road, the passengers in the car saw windows and doors opening, with people who were shuttered in their houses staring out at them.

It didn’t take too long for them to run into trouble, either. The first incident happened a mere mile from the gas station. Mary had taken a long, meandering route, intending to drive through the suburbs, skirting around the city that way instead of taking the more direct course through the city center. She knew that the streets in the suburbs would be more open and less clogged with abandoned vehicles, but she was also hoping that they would be free of police or army roadblocks, or traps set by the sinister men in black.

Although these groups seemed to be absent from the eerily quiet suburbs, Mary and her group quickly discovered that the suburbs were also highly dangerous. The first hint of trouble came when two men, upon hearing the sound of a vehicle, ran out of their house with guns in their hands, yelling at Mary to pull over. From their aggressive stances and the wild looks in their eyes, she knew that they weren’t asking her to stop for help; they probably wanted to carjack her and take the vehicle at gunpoint. She dropped down a gear and floored the accelerator, spinning the tires and sending the AMC hurtling forward at speed. She aimed it straight at the men, who, as she’d hoped, chickened out, dropping their guns and diving out of the way of the speeding car.

As she sped away, though, her heart was hammering, and her pulse was racing, and her fingers wrapped around the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip. She had escaped without being shot at this time, but she knew that she would likely encounter predators with more resolve and a more vicious, ruthless temperament before the end of this perilous ride.

She had Ann up front with her in the passenger seat. “If anyone tries anything like that again,” Mary said to Ann, “lean out the window and give ‘em a warning shot. We can’t afford to lose this car.”

“Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll keep us protected,” Ann said grimly, gripping her pistol tight.

They traveled along in terse silence. Mary tried turning on the car radio, but it was the one thing in the vehicle that had been damaged by the EMP, and it was completely dead. The only sound was the deep droning of the V8 motor.

The suburbs weren’t as quiet as Mary had hoped. They saw more groups of people out on the streets whichever way they went, and every time they passed a group, the people would shout at them and run after the car. Mostly they were pleading with Mary to stop, with looks of fear and confusion on their face, no doubt wanting to ask to hitch a ride somewhere. But almost as often, they were met with aggression, with people screaming at them with wild looks in their eyes and fierce expressions on their faces, and these people would throw rocks and other projectiles at the car when Mary sped past them. After twenty minutes of driving, the formerly pristine bodywork was riddled with dents, and two of the windows were cracked.

Still, for all the damage and trauma these incidents caused, Mary, drove on with grim determination, thankful that it was rocks and cans being hurled at the car instead of bullets being fired at it, and that it was angry civilians screaming insults at them rather than soldiers or terrorists threatening their lives.

She knew that she would have to swing back onto the city roads eventually; there was no other way to get onto the main highway that led out of the city and into the mountain districts. That was the part of the journey she was dreading most, for she was sure that roadblocks would be up, and the car would attract the attention of the police or army, or whoever it was who was manning the barriers. As worrying as the thought of having to deal with this was, there was little she could do but continue onward and figure out how to handle these barricades when she got to them.

“Get ready for trouble,” she said grimly to the others. “I have to head back into the city to get to the highway, and I know we’re probably gonna run into some trouble.”

It didn’t take long for them to find trouble either. Before they were even out of the suburbs, they ran into a large gang of hostile men on bicycles. The men weren’t terrorists, but they were dressed like inner-city gangsters and wore bandannas that covered their faces. They were all armed, and they must have heard the car coming from a long way off. Mary saw them following the vehicle on their bicycles for some distance, and more and more of them seemed to join the pursuit. They would ride along behind her for a while, then break off and scoot down side streets, while different men on bikes would zip out of nowhere. They would sometimes flash their pistols and submachine guns at Mary, but Ann and James pointed their firearms at the men, which seemed to get them to back off. However, they did not give up their pursuit of the car. Because of all the abandoned vehicles cluttering the streets, Mary couldn’t find any stretch of road clear enough to outrun them, and as more and more of them seemed to appear out of every street and alley, she became increasingly afraid.

Finally, when she turned onto one of the main streets, a large group of them formed up their bicycles into a large mass between two abandoned vehicles, completely blocking off the only way through the road. Mary saw what they were doing and slammed on the brakes, intending to do a U-turn and head around a different way, making a detour of a few blocks down, but the bicycle gang must have heard her coming from a long way off and prepared this trap well in advance, for in the rearview mirror, she saw more of them on their bikes blocking off the rear of the street, dragging a bunch of dumpsters out of some side alleys to form a blockade and hem her in.

There were no side streets, no alleys, and tall buildings, all hunched tightly together, lined the streets. There was no escape now, and even though Mary and everyone in her party was armed, they were outgunned by the bicycle gang by a significant margin; in front of them were at least a dozen or more men, and behind her were almost as many. Every one of them had a handgun, and more than a few had submachine guns.

The men said nothing; they simply waited behind their blockade, silently daring Mary to either abandon her car or get into this deadly game of chicken with them. In many ways, their silence made for a far more menacing and ominous atmosphere than a situation in which they’d all been shouting and screaming at her.

“Wh-, what are we gonna do?” James stammered. “They’ve uh they’ve got us locked in here.”

“Sons of bitches,” Bill growled, grimacing. “Disgusting sons of bitches. Who knew that people would descend to this level of savagery within hours?”

There were fifty yards of open street separating Mary from the bunched-up group of cyclists in front of her. She knew that with the raw power of the V8 and the brutal acceleration the AMC was capable of, she could cover that distance in seconds, and be traveling at a good speed when she hit them … a murderous speed, for sure.

She stared coolly at the masked men and slowly revved the motor a few times, the deep growl barking out a challenge to them. In response, they said nothing, but raised their firearms and pointed them at the car.

The AMC was fast, powerful, and beautiful, but it was not bulletproof. Could Mary accelerate hard enough to avoid getting killed in a hail of bullets? Would the men have the nerve to face down a muscle car hurtling toward them at high speed and aim their shots effectively, or would they scatter in panic when she charged them?

The alternative was to give up now and get out of the vehicle, handing it, and, no doubt, their guns too, over to the gangsters.

Mary knew that she had to make a choice and that whether she and her party lived or died in the next few seconds would depend entirely on the option she chose.

So, with her heart in her mouth, she did it. She made her choice.

16

“Everyone, get your heads down and keep ‘em down until we’re clear!” Mary said. “I’m ramming the bastards.”

“Mom, do you—” Ann began, but Mary shut her down right away; there was no time to argue or debate, and she’d made her choice. If she allowed these men to take the car and their guns—and possibly Ann—she would be signing everyone’s death warrants. She had decided that she would rather go down fighting than a prisoner.

“Down now!” Mary snapped, throwing the car into first gear, stomping on the accelerator and dumping the clutch.

The tires screamed, spinning frantically and throwing up clouds of smoke, and the car hurtled forward as if shot out of a cannon. The G-force of the acceleration pressed the passengers’ bodies into the seats, and Mary gripped the steering wheel tight, aiming the vehicle squarely at the clump of men on their bikes. They opened fire, and she ducked her head down below the dash as bullets peppered the hood and punched holes through the windscreen. Inside the car, the passengers’ screams of terror were drowned out by the throaty roar of the motor.

The men hadn’t expected Mary to do this, and while a few of them stood their ground and started shooting, many dumped their bikes and sprinted out of the way as the car came careening toward them. In the space of a mere two seconds, it became obvious that Mary wasn’t bluffing, and that she fully intended to run over the men who were blocking her path. Those who had stayed had no time to react, and the heavy steel projectile slammed into them at incredible speed.

Bodies and bicycles were both flung violently up into the air and crushed under the wheels and body of the AMC. The car was launched into the air, ramping over a mangled body, and for one or two terrifying seconds, it was completely airborne. It came down hard in a shower of sparks, with the body bottoming out and dragging for a second on the asphalt. The car swerved and fishtailed, and Mary almost lost control, but she managed to wrangle it back into a straight line.

She didn’t slow down; she kept the accelerator floored, paying attention only to what was in front of her. From behind, she heard gunshots, and a bullet punched through the rear windscreen in an eruption of broken glass, but she didn’t take her foot off the pedal. She slalomed between a trio of abandoned vehicles, sliding the wheels and throwing the passengers in the back seat around, and then braked hard for an upcoming corner and swung through it with the tires smoking and screaming.

The street Mary turned onto was clogged up with abandoned cars, but she didn’t let that stop her; she drove onto the sidewalk and floored it, smashing over trash cans and other small obstacles. Only when she’d raced past another three or floor blocks, blasting through the intersections with their dead traffic lights, did she finally slow down and check in the rear-view mirror to see if anyone was following them. She was relieved to see that there were no longer any men on bicycles pursuing her.

“Is everyone okay?” she asked.

“Shaken and most definitely stirred,” Bill said, dusting chunks of broken glass off his shoulders, “but otherwise okay.”

“I’m okay, Mom,” Anna said, “I think.” She was also covered with chunks of broken glass and was checking herself to make sure she was indeed fine.

James had squeezed himself so far down into the footwell he was pretty much stuck, and Bill had to help pull him out. “I’m uh, I’m okay, I think, Aunt Mary,” he said. “Just a couple bruises and I feel a bit dizzy from getting my head slammed against the side of the car when you took that one corner like an F1 driver, but uh, yeah … I’m okay.”

Mary kept driving; she wanted to stop and check the car for damage, but people on the streets were coming out from behind their hiding places and looking out of windows at the sound of the car’s passing, and many of them had sinister rather than curious expressions on their faces, and she didn’t want to risk it.

The damage she could already see was extensive; the hood of the car was riddled with bullet holes, and it had crumpled in from where one of the gangsters’ bodies had smashed into it. There was grisly evidence of the damage the speeding vehicle had done to the men; blood was splattered all over the one half of the hood and drops of it were smeared all over the broken windshield. That wasn’t the only damage to the glass; there were also five bullet holes in it, one of which had punched another hole straight through the passenger seat. Mary shuddered when she saw that one; if Ann hadn’t crouched down, the bullet would have taken her straight in the chest, and she could have been killed. Another of the bullets that had gone through the windshield had slammed into the back seat and missed James by a mere inch. Mary couldn’t believe how close to death both of the teenagers had come, and she whispered a silent prayer of thanks to whatever guardian angels had been watching over them.

“I know you know your way around an engine,” Bill said, clearly impressed, “but I had no idea you could handle a vehicle like a race car driver too!”

“Yeah, Mom, that was the fastest I’ve ever seen you drive,” Ann said. “That was awesome!”

You wouldn’t be thinking it was so awesome if you knew how close you’d come to being killed, Mary thought, but she didn’t say that out loud. She also didn’t want to tell her daughter where she’d learned to drive like that. In her time as a teenage runaway, one of her boyfriends had been a car thief and Mary and he had taken many stolen cars for reckless joyrides. She had ended up doing a stint in prison because of it and had learned her lesson and been on the straight and narrow path ever since then.

“I was just doing what I had to do,” Mary eventually said, with all these memories swirling around her mind. “It was adrenalin that helped me drive like that. I hope I don’t have to do it again.”

A crunching thump on the roof of the car made everyone yelp with fright, and to the rear left of the vehicle, Mary saw a group of men running toward them, throwing things at the car and yelling aggressively. She stomped on the gas pedal and accelerated away before they could get close enough to become any more of a threat.

Throbbing anxiety was growing increasingly dire within Mary as she drove, for she was getting close to the huge bridge over the river that was the only route out of town into the northern mountains. She knew that there would likely be a roadblock here. She whispered a prayer as she turned the final corner before the onramp that would take her onto the bridge, hoping against all the odds that it would be clear.

She drove up the onramp, weaving around the many abandoned vehicles on it, and turned onto the bridge … and immediately, her heart sank. A crushing feeling of tightness constricted her chest, for the entire bridge was blocked off by US Army troops, who had set up concrete barriers and a massive gate. She stopped the car and stared at the soldiers, who were around a hundred yards down the road, right in the middle of the bridge. They had seen the car and were observing it with binoculars and talking among themselves. Most of them were aiming their guns at the vehicle. Behind the barricade were a few vehicles—Humvees and old Jeeps—so Mary knew that the army had at least a handful of working vehicles. However, she suspected that due to the rarity of any working vehicles, they would be very interested in the AMC, and not in a nice way.

“What are we gonna do now?” Ann asked worriedly.

“I don’t know,” Mary murmured, staring with dismay at the Army barricade. “They’re not gangsters, at least, so maybe we have a chance of reasoning with them and getting them to allow us through.” She said this, but she wasn’t sure how many of these words she believed.

“I’m a veteran,” Bill said gruffly. “I served in Vietnam. Drive-up the barrier. I’ll talk to ‘em.”

Mary didn’t think that the army would care that Bill was a veteran, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do at this point. She couldn’t turn around and go back through the city; she’d only just made it out alive. It would be a crushing blow if the army refused to let her through the checkpoint, and even worse if they tried to confiscate the vehicle. However, even if these things happened, she thought, they could find a way to cross the river farther downstream and continue on foot. Anything would be better than going back into the city, especially now that it was late in the afternoon, and twilight would be falling soon. Whatever happened here, Mary was determined to escape the city before dark by any means necessary.

“All right, everyone, just stay calm,” Mary said. “And for now, put your guns away. We don’t wanna cause any unnecessary tensions with these guys.”

“I’ll talk to ‘em,” Bill said determinedly, “they’ll listen to me.”

With her heart in her mouth, Mary drove slowly up to the checkpoint. When she got within twenty yards of the gate, an officer walked out, holding his hand up and signaling to her to stop. Seven or eight privates ran out, flanking the car on both sides and aiming their assault rifles at the occupants. Mary noticed a strange wildness in the soldiers’ eyes; they seemed to be staring at the rumbling car with an unsettling mixture of fear, awe, envy, and aggression in their eyes. Suddenly, she felt as if driving up to the barrier had been a terrible idea.

The officer, a sturdily built middle-aged man with close-cropped blond hair, had a pistol in his hand, but unlike his troops, he kept it aimed at the ground instead of pointing it at Mary and her party. He wore a thin smile on his strong-jawed face, and there was more than a hint of menace in his pale blue eyes.

“The road is closed, ma’am,” he said coolly. “And I’m going to need to see some paperwork for this vehicle.”

Bill saw from the insignia on the officer’s uniform that he was a lieutenant. “Listen here lieutenant,” he said, leaning forward over Mary’s shoulder to talk to the officer. “I’m a veteran, and I served in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne. I took a commie bullet for this country at Dak To in ‘67, and got a Purple Heart—”

“I respect and thank you for your service, soldier,” the officer said coldly, cutting him off, “but I don’t care if you’re the president’s brother. If I don’t see some papers in the next few seconds, we’re gonna have a problem here. A serious problem.” He curled his finger around the trigger of the pistol.

“What paperwork do you need to see?” Mary asked, trying to stall for time, her mind racing as she tried to come up with a plan to get out of what was quickly becoming an increasingly dangerous situation.

“That question alone tells me you don’t have the documents you need, ma’am,” the officer said. “I’m going to have to ask you all to step out of the vehicle, nice and slow, keeping your hands where we can see them.”

“No, no, I have some papers with me,” Mary said, desperately trying to play cool, “and I’m on government business, but you, sir, you haven’t shown me any credentials or—”

“I’m not going to say this again,” the officer growled, whipping his pistol up and aiming it at Mary’s face. “Get out of the car. Now.”

“You asshole,” Bill snarled. “Who the hell do you think you are? You’re no better than the thugs who tried to carjack us back in the city! Where’s your commanding officer? I wanna speak to the commanding officer here!”

“I am the commanding officer!” the lieutenant roared, any pretense of civility now flung out the window, “and if you goddamn civilians don’t get out of this car right now, I swear to God, I will order my men to open fire! This is the last time I’m saying it! Get the fuck out of the car, or we will open fire! Do it now! No more talk, get the fuck out!”

Mary took her hands off the wheel, keeping them where the lieutenant could see them, and sighed slowly, and sadly, the game was up. There was nothing she could do or say now to keep the car. They would have no choice but to continue on foot from this point onward.

“Okay,” she said softly. “Relax, we’re getting out.”

“Move it!” the lieutenant snapped. “No more—”

A tremendous flash of light temporarily blinded everyone in and around the car. It was accompanied by a deep, earth-shaking boom and a concussive force that ripped men’s bodies apart and blew out all the windows of the AMC and hurled the car over in a vicious, tumbling roll. Mary barely even had any time to register what had happened before everything faded into deep and silent darkness.

17

When Mary regained consciousness, she was overwhelmed for a few seconds by complete confusion and disorientation. For the most part, all she could hear was a shrill whine screaming monotonously in her ears, but beyond it, sounding terribly far away, was the sound of guns firing and men yelling. Thick, black smoke was billowing everywhere, and she could barely see a foot in front of her, much less breathe properly. Yet another factor that contributed to her intense disorientation was the fact that she was upside down.

It seemed that she was in some sort of terrifying nightmare, from which no sense of anything could be made. Then, however, the events of the previous few minutes came rushing back into her head. The army barricade. The soldiers surrounding the vehicle. The officer pointing his gun at her face and demanding they get out.

Then an almighty explosion. With this onset of mental clarity out of the fog of confusion, Mary’s thoughts immediately went to her daughter. “Ann!” she gasped, coughing and scrambling frantically in the smoke-choked gloom, trying to extricate herself from the seatbelt that was keeping her strapped upside-down to the driver’s seat. “Ann, talk to me, are you okay, where are you?!”

“Help, Aunt Mary, help,” a strangled voice called out through the smoke, somewhere behind her.

“James!” she cried. “Where’s Ann, is she okay? Ann!”

“I can’t move. I’m trapped under the old guy. I think he’s … he’s…”

“Mom!”

“Ann!”

“I’m hurt, Mom, but I’ll be okay. I think.”

“Where are you?” Mary had a knife on her, and she fumbled around, trying to get it out so she could cut the seatbelt and escape.

Outside, men were yelling and shooting, and the sound of thunderous explosions was vibrating the bridge.

Just then, two familiar shoes and legs appeared next to Mary, outside the car. One leg was drenched with blood, and Ann was clearly limping. She had been flung out of the car when it had rolled, it seemed.

“Aunt Mary, please help, I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” James gasped from somewhere behind Mary.

“Hold on, James,” Mary said, finally getting a grip on her knife. She pulled it out and began sawing frantically through the seatbelt.

Ann, meanwhile, got down onto her hands and knees, grimacing with pain and feeling woozy but doing what she could to help. She peered into the car, which was lying on its roof after having been flipped over multiple times by the force of the explosion. James was lying on the ceiling and was pinned down under Bill’s limp, bloody body. Bill was neither moving nor breathing, and Ann was sure the old man had been killed.

James saw Ann peering in through the shattered window. “Ann,” he croaked, struggling futilely under the dead weight of Bill’s body. “Help, I … can’t … breathe…”

Ann reached in and grabbed Bill’s shirt, pulling at his body and doing her best to get him off of James. She couldn’t move him; however, he was simply too heavy.

“James, hold on!” she yelled. “I’ve gotta get my mom out first!”

“Hurry, please,” James gasped.

With pain blasting through her right leg, Ann crawled over to the driver’s door. Mary had almost finished sawing through her seatbelt, and when she did, she slid out of the seat, her shoulders pressed against the crumpled roof of the car, and then with Ann’s help, she managed to crawl out.

“Quick, Mom, James is stuck!” Ann said. She and Mary grabbed Bill’s body and managed to haul it off of James, who sucked in a great gulp of smoky air and immediately started coughing.

A spray of bullets peppered the car, and Ann and Mary both hit the ground, covering their heads. “We have to get out of here,” Mary gasped. “James, can you move?”

“I’m, ugh … okay now … I think,” he spluttered, coughing.

“Bill, Bill, can you hear me?” Mary asked. Grunting and groaning with effort, she managed to turn Bill’s body over, and when she did, a blade of grief stabbed through her core when she saw his lifeless eyes staring blankly at her. “Oh my God, Bill,” she whispered sadly.

Another burst of bullets hammered the car, spurring further urgency into Mary. Somewhere close by, a soldier returned fire at the unknown enemies. She knew that they had to get out of here, and she knew that they wouldn’t be going any farther in the AMC. “Come on, Ann, help me get James out!” she said.

The two of them managed to drag James through the shattered rear window. He was bruised and covered in cuts, but none of his wounds were serious. “Goodbye, Bill,” Mary whispered to Bill’s corpse, and then she grabbed the backpacks from the smashed-up car and led the two teens through the choking clouds of black smoke toward the military barricade. She had seen a massive cut across Ann’s thigh, and another smaller, but equally deep, wound across her calf but knew that getting out of this battle zone alive was her first priority, before attempting to take care of her daughter’s injury.

“Let’s go!” she said. “Move fast and keep your heads down!”

The bridge was covered with rubble, corpses, and the grisly remains of soldiers who had been blown to pieces by the rocket, or whatever it was that the terrorists had fired at the barricade. Because of all the smoke, the three of them could barely see a few yards ahead of them at any time, but Mary kept to the far right, seeing as the sounds of soldiers shooting were coming mostly from the center and left of the bridge.

She came across the lieutenant’s corpse and bent down to hastily search his pockets. A tiny surge of triumph ripped through her when her fingers curled around a set of car keys. Whether it was for one of the Humvees or one of the Jeeps didn’t matter; as long as she was able to get into one of the vehicles and hightail it out of here, that was all that mattered.

“Come on, quickly!” she urged when she got to the concrete barrier.

The concrete blocks the army had set up to create the barrier were only around four feet tall, so they were easy enough to climb over. Because the remaining soldiers had their hands full with the terrorists, and because of the impenetrable denseness of the clouds of black smoke choking the bridge, none of the soldiers could see Mary and the teenagers scaling the barrier.

They ran over to the nearest Jeep, and Mary tried the keys in the ignition, but they didn’t fit. “Dammit,” she muttered, running over to the next vehicle, one of the Humvees. Just as she reached it, another rocket came streaking in from the city, smashing into the barrier on the far side of the bridge with a horrendous force and a deafening, blinding explosion of light and sound. Even though they were at least twenty or thirty yards away, the force of it knocked James and Ann over and flung chunks of debris out everywhere, hurling broken chunks of concrete and twisted shards of metal out in all directions. A hail of debris came down over the next few seconds, and the three of them could do little but curl up on the ground and keep their heads covered while their hearts thumped with fear and a shrill, incessant whine screeched in their ears.

“Everyone okay?” Mary asked once the initial shock of the explosion had passed.

“I’m okay,” James said, struggling to his feet.

“Yeah, I’m okay, too,” Anna gasped, but Mary could hear her daughter sounded weaker. Ann was losing a lot of blood from the wound on her leg, and they needed urgent attention, but Mary had to get them all out of the battle zone first.

“Let’s try this one,” Mary said, running over to the nearest Humvee. She jumped into the driver’s seat, slid the key into the ignition, and this time it fit. She turned the key, and the motor roared to life. “Get in, hurry!”

Ann and James piled into the back, and Mary slammed the door shut and put the Humvee in gear.

“Hey!” One of the soldiers had noticed what was going on, and he raised his assault rifle and started shooting, but the vehicle was bulletproof.

Mary floored the accelerator and raced away, with bullets hammering the back and side of the Humvee as she sped out of the combat zone. She blasted out of the clouds of smoke, and saw, with intense relief, that there were no more soldiers or roadblocks ahead. There were plenty of abandoned vehicles blocking the bridge, but it was easy enough to get around them. Soon Mary had crossed the bridge and got onto the freeway leading to the mountain towns. There were a lot of dead cars all over the highway, too, but there was plenty of room to drive on the shoulder of the road. Mary, worried that the soldiers might pursue her, raced along the shoulder of the road at high speed. Even though she knew she had to check out Ann’s wounds as soon as she could, Mary couldn’t afford to stop, not until she was sure she was safe from the soldiers.

After a few minutes of driving, she came to the offramp that would take her to the area of the mountains she was headed. She glanced in her rear-view mirror just to make sure nobody was coming after her, then headed down the offramp, pulled off the road and got out, leaving the motor running.

“Ann, how’s your leg?” Mary asked.

“It hurts pretty bad,” Ann said, grimacing. She’d been able to put on a brave face up until now and had sat stoically in the back without crying, but now that the adrenalin was wearing off, the pain was becoming much more noticeable. Ann had also lost quite a lot of blood and was feeling woozy.

Now that the air was no longer thick was black smoke and Mary was able to get a close look at her daughter’s leg, the cause of the wounds was obvious to see; twisted shards of metal, most likely from the AMC’s door, were stuck in Ann’s leg. The wounds were bleeding quite extensively, but Mary knew that the bleeding could become lethal if she pulled the shrapnel out of the muscle. She had first aid training, but this, unfortunately, was beyond her ability to deal with. All she could do for the moment was tie a tourniquet around Ann’s leg to slow the bleeding somewhat.

“There are some like, army rations and stuff in the back here,” James said, trying to be helpful while Mary was tying a tourniquet with a towel she’d found in the Humvee.

“Are there any energy bars, glucose gel, anything like that?” Mary asked.

James rummaged through the box. “Yeah, plenty of that sorta stuff.”

“Ann, sweetie,” Mary said, “have a few energy bars and some of those packets of glucose gel. You’ve lost a lot of blood, and you need to get your energy levels back up.”

She and James had some too; they were also feeling weary and drained, after everything they’d been through. Mary was doing her best to stay determined and positive but seeing the full extent of the wounds on her daughter’s leg had struck her like a sledgehammer blow to the skull. The tourniquet had slowed the bleeding a lot, but blood was still oozing from the wound, and if the twisted metal wasn’t extracted from the wound soon, it would become septic and possibly deadly. She didn’t know what she was going to do now. Mary needed to find a doctor to remove the shrapnel, but where would she find anyone who could help?

Of course, if the place she intended to go was the same as it had been all those years ago, there could well be someone there who was capable of helping Ann. However, there was no way of knowing whether that was the case or not, and if that gamble failed, they would be stuck in the middle of nowhere with nobody to help Ann at all. The other option would be to drive to one of the county hospitals, but would any equipment in these hospitals even function? They would also likely be swamped with thousands of injured people from the day’s chaos.

Mary checked the gas gauge of the Humvee. There was just enough gas in the tank to get her to one of these destinations, either the mountains or a hospital, but after reaching whatever destination she chose, they would likely be stranded.

“Where are we going to from here, Aunt Mary?” James asked.

The sun was setting, and the shadows were growing darker, and without any of the artificial lighting that usually flooded the city and everywhere around it, the coming night would be darker than any in living memory. Mary knew that she couldn’t linger here any longer; she needed to get far away from people, for it would be the two-legged animals who would be the most dangerous creatures skulking through the shadows of the coming night.

“We’re going into the mountains,” Mary said. She had made her choice, and she desperately hoped that this wasn’t a mistake that she would have to pay for with her daughter’s life.

18

After driving for around half an hour, everyone had the chance to wind down from the madness they had just escaped from. Mary made good progress, driving at high speed along the shoulder of the freeway, where there was a clear and open path, unobstructed by abandoned cars. But when they got off the highway and began to enter mountain territory, the roads started clearing up, with fewer stopped vehicles blocking their path.

The last of the day’s light was shining on the city in the distance behind them, and the sight they saw was a surreal and nightmarish one. Huge fires burned through the town, and the horizon was black with smoke. They were too far away to hear any explosions or gunfire, but they could see bright flashes lighting up the gloom all over the city. The black-clad terrorists and the US Army were still fighting fiercely in the streets, it seemed. Everyone in the vehicle was thankful that they had escaped the madness. It would surely be hell on earth in the city throughout the coming night.

James finally spoke, breaking the silence. “Where exactly are we going, Aunt Mary? I mean, you told me you knew of a safe place deep in the mountains, but you didn’t even tell me exactly what kind of place it was.”

“It’s a really simple place,” Mary answered.

James’s question had prompted a flood of memories of a completely different life, one so alien to the one she had lived in the city that it almost felt unreal as if it had never happened.

“Life’s very different there. Don’t expect much. It’s little more than a log cabin; I’m talking really basic stuff. It’s very rustic, and there’s nothing but the bare necessities, but in times like these, we should be thankful that we’ve got a place to go to where we actually do have access to those bare necessities. In a few days all the water in the city is gonna run out, and then what are people going to do? Drink the water from the polluted river? They’d be better off draining car radiators and drinking that. Make no mistake, as crude and simple as the place we’re going is, we’ll be better off than anyone stuck in that hellhole back there.”

“That’s all good, Mom,” Anna said, “but you didn’t really answer James’s question. What is this place? A camp, a farm, a hunting shack? Does anyone live there? Is it your place, like, some sort of second home you never told me about?”

Mary sighed. She had never told her daughter—or anyone in her post-runaway life, really—about the place she’d grown up, or her father, who was the only living member of her family. The memories had always been too painful, not because of any abuse or trauma she had suffered as a child, but rather because of her own guilt at the pain, she’d caused by the selfish act of running away. Mary had been a strong-willed and stubborn teen and had butted heads one too many times with her father over the way he chose to live. She’d had one too many arguments with him over the normal childhood of which she felt she had been deprived due to the way he’d raised her. She hadn’t been willing to accept any compromise on his part; their relationship had, in her mid-teens, eventually broken down to the point of his way or the highway, and she had, in her bitter frustration and longing for a so-called “normal” life, chosen the road.

Mary knew she had to have broken her father’s heart. For all their disagreements and arguments, she had always been the apple of his eye, and the day she had left for good would forever be burned into her mind as one of the worst days of her life. Her stubbornness had prevailed, though, and for all the regret and pain she felt, she had never looked back. Now, though, circumstances had finally forced her to confront her past and return to the place she had sworn to never set foot in again.

If anything or anyone was even there, of course. It had been almost twenty years since Mary had run away, and at this point in her life, she had lived more years in the city than she had in the mountains with her father. For all she knew, the place could be an overgrown ruin. Or the property could have been purchased by someone else, and she’d find hostile strangers living there. Her father was in his forties when she’d run away, so he’d be in his sixties now; it was reasonable to assume that he was still alive. Her dad had sworn that he would never leave his land while he still drew breath. Still, as healthy as he was, any number of accidents could have befallen him, and many things could have changed. The truth was, there was simply no way of knowing whether he and the cabin were still there or not. However, at this point, Mary had no other options. She’d decided that if he was gone and the land was overgrown and the cabin ruined, she would simply rebuild it, using what knowledge she had retained from her childhood. If there were other hostile people there … she would think of something else.

“Mom, did you hear me?” Ann asked, interrupting Mary’s train of thoughts. “What is the place?”

Mary sighed slowly before answering. “It’s home,” she said. “The place where I grew up. My father’s cabin.”

Ann’s face scrunched into an expression of confusion for a few seconds. “But you always said grandpa died when you were a kid,” she said. “And you said you grew up on the West Coast.”

“I’m sorry, Ann,” Mary said softly. “I couldn’t bring myself to tell you the truth, all these years. It’s just that the past is … it’s very painful for me.”

“You mean my grandpa is still alive?” Ann gasped, incredulous. “All these years you said he was dead and that you came from the West Coast, but, but he’s actually out here in the mountains and still alive? What else is a lie, mom?!” she demanded, her disbelief turning rapidly to rage. “What else have I believed my whole life that’s actually a fucking lie?”

“I’m sorry, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” Mary said, on the verge of tears, with all sorts of powerful emotions swirling and swelling within her. “It was all to protect you, not to hurt you. You have to understand—”

“You lied to me my entire life!” Ann yelled. “How can I trust anything you say to me now?! I had a grandpa who was living just a few hours away, not dead in some grave on the West Coast like you told me! I can’t believe this. I can’t fucking believe it!”

“You have a right to be upset, sweetie,” Mary said, fighting back the tears. “I did lie to you all this time, and all I can say now is that I’m sorry. I … I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

James was sitting in the back, feeling extremely awkward, being stuck in the middle of this intensely emotional argument. He could feel Mary’s shame and pain and guilt, and since these were emotions that he was very familiar with, his heart went out to her. He also felt a great deal of empathy for Ann, too, for he knew all too well what it was like to have a parent who lied. His father’s lies, though, were of a very different nature to this one, and were far more malicious and self-serving—lies about forgetting birthdays, how much he’d had to drink, how he was working on stopping his violent and abusive behavior. Also, because of how he’d grown up with his deadbeat father, James knew that regardless of this lie that Mary had been telling her daughter, she had been a stellar parent in every other way. She had done everything she could to provide for Ann and do the best she possibly could for her. He felt that even though it wasn’t his place to butt in, he had to speak up.

“Aunt Mary,” he said softly, his voice cracking the tension-thick silence like an ax through brittle ice, “I just want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. You uh, you had no obligation to help me out or take care of me or anything, but since I was a little kid, you took me under your wing-like, like I was your own. You were like the mother I never had, and, uh, you showed me that even after everything my father did to me, there were good people in this world. Thank you.”

“Thank you, James,” Mary said, choking on a tight knot of a sob in her throat. “You’re a good kid, you always have been. I consider you part of the family. I’ll always have your back. I’ve made some mistakes and very bad decisions in my life but taking you under my wing is something I’m pretty damn sure I did right.”

Ann refused to say anything. She stared sullenly out of the window, her jaw clenched tight, and Mary realized it would be better to just leave her alone for the time being.

Night fell, and the darkness outside was thick, dense, and more intense than anything Mary had seen since her childhood days of living in the cabin, many miles from civilization. She didn’t want to stop driving, but she only vaguely remembered the route and had to consult a map. They approached a small town, and, acutely aware of the dangers any sort of human settlement posed, Mary blasted through it at high speed. She wasn’t about to let anyone ambush them or force them to stop.

Only once she’d put a couple miles between her and the town did she slow down and pull over to the side of the road to consult the paper map she’d brought with her from her apartment. She flipped on the cabin light of the Humvee and checked the route; they were on the right track, and there were maybe two hours of driving to go, half of which would be on pretty rough dirt roads. She checked the gas gauge and saw that they were running low. There was definitely enough to get them to the dirt roads, but how far along those tracks they would get was uncertain. She realized that they may well have to abandon the vehicle and walk much of the way, which wouldn’t be ideal considering the state of Ann’s leg. All they could do at this point, however, was go on and hope for the best.

They had a few more snacks and drinks, and Mary checked on Ann’s leg again. Ann still refused to say anything to her mother. The silence and tension in the Humvee were palpable. What was of far greater concern to Mary than her daughter’s sullen silence, though, was Ann’s worsening condition. Despite having glucose and snacks, Ann’s face was looking pallid, she was swaying in her seat, and having difficulty keeping her eyes open. As much as it pained her to watch Ann’s health declining rapidly like this, there nothing Mary could do at this point but keep going.

Not wanting to hang around too long, Mary got moving again. The drive was a long, silent one. They went through another small town, and again, Mary blasted through it as fast as she could, hoping that nobody would try to stop them or pursue them. Thankfully, while she did think she saw hints of movements in the shadows, nobody came after them, and there were no roadblocks or ambushes.

They finally made it to the dirt roads, and about a mile in, the Humvee’s gas gauge was showing empty. Mary kept on going, keeping the revs as low as she could to stretch out the last few dregs of gas in the tank, and prayed that they could get as close to the cabin as possible before they ran dry.

A mile later, though, they were forced to stop, not because of running out of gas, but because of an obstacle in their path. The full moon had come out from behind the clouds, so now, at least, the landscape was illuminated in a gentle, silvery-blue glow, and in this light, Mary rounded a corner and had to bring the Humvee to a stop when she saw the dirt road disappearing into a broad, fast-flowing river in flood.

“How are we gonna get across this, Aunt Mary?” James asked.

“I don’t know,” Mary said. “We’ll have to get out and try to get a feel for how deep it is. We might be able to get across.”

She and James climbed out of the vehicle and walked up to the edge of the rushing river. “See if you can find a long stick,” Mary said to James. “And then—”

“Don’t fuckin’ move,” a new voice growled from the shadows at the side of the road. The ominous sound of a pump-action shotgun being cocked accompanied the threat, and the hiss of gas lamps being turned on and the scratching sound of Zippos igniting them was followed by a gush of white light flooding the immediate area.

“Down on your knees, both of you,” another voice, harsh and raspy, snarled. “Do it, or I’ll blow the backs of your stupid city-slicker skulls out. Down on your fuckin’ knees, hands behind your heads, now!”

19

Mary’s heart almost stopped, and her blood felt as if it had frozen in her veins. Her pistol was in her pocket, but James had left his in the car. The menacing edge in the men’s voices told her that these were hard, rough men who wouldn’t hesitate to hurt them, and, what was more, she didn’t even know how many of them there were, or where they were. Trying to reach for her gun now could get her and the teenagers killed. With no other option open to her, all she could do was obey the gunmen.

“Do what they said, James,” she said softly, moving slowly and getting down on her knees and putting her hands behind her head.

She was doing her best not to panic, but it was difficult to keep the surges of icy terror at bay. All she could do was pray that the men would be happy with taking the Humvee and would leave her and the teenagers unharmed after robbing them of the vehicle. It was pretty much out of gas anyway, so she would have had to abandon it in the next mile or two. However, she suspected, with a feeling of terrible dread percolating in the pit of her stomach, that stealing the vehicle was not the only reason the men had ambushed them.

She heard them approaching from behind her and turned her head to look.

“Don’t fuckin’ turnaround, bitch, keep your eyes on the water!” one of them snapped.

Next to her, James had also got down onto his knees and put his hands behind his head. Mary could almost feel his fear. From the sound of the boots crunching on the dirt road, it sounded like there were at least three men, possibly four.

“Take a look inside the Hummer, Jake,” the first man growled.

Mary heard one set of boots turning and heading toward the vehicle, but the others kept coming in her direction. “You can take the Humvee,” she said calmly. “I’m not gonna resist. Just let us go, please.”

“Where you going, huh?” the first man asked. “Why you driving out here in the woods?”

“My father and his family live out here,” she answered, hoping that mentioning the fact that she had relatives out here would make them think twice about hurting her.

“There’s another bitch in the Hummer!” the man who’d gone to inspect the vehicle yelled excitedly. “She’s passed out or something. Real pretty, an’ look like she’s sweet sixteen, yes sirree, she’s real pretty, young and tight…”

The way the man said that made Mary’s skin crawl, and her heart started pounding frantically in her chest. “Just take the Humvee and leave us alone, please,” she repeated.

“You don’t belong here,” the first man said. He was right behind Mary now, and she felt him pressing the barrel of his shotgun into the back of her head. “You lil’ city bitch, with your pretty hair, that tight ass…”

“Don’t talk like that to her!” James suddenly yelled. “You—”

A dull thud cut James’s off words, and Mary saw him flop forward onto the ground, knocked out from a sudden blow to the back of his head the second man had struck him with the butt of his rifle.

“If you hurt my kids,” Mary hissed, her protective motherly instinct filling her with fresh courage, “I’ll—”

“You’ll what, you little whore?” the first man growled into her ear, pressing the barrel of his shotgun more forcefully into the back of her head. “Don’t move, don’t even fuckin’ breathe,” he snarled. “Denny, keep your rifle on this skank while I frisk her.”

“I got her covered, Carl,” the second man said.

The first man’s breath was foul and humid, and the stink of it was making Mary gag as he put his grubby paws all over her. He found the pistol quickly enough and pulled it out of her pocket with a dark chuckle. “You even know how to use this?” he mocked. “Denny, take this .45,” he said to his friend, who took the pistol. He took Mary’s knife as well and unclipped her toolbelt and tossed it to the side. He then took her wallet out of her back pocket and flipped through it in the light of his gas lamp.

“Take the money and the cards if you want them,” she said, doing her best to stay calm.

“So your name’s Mary, is it?” the man said mockingly, examining her driver’s license. “And these are your lil’ lambs, then, huh?” He paused to laugh at his own stupid joke, but then his voice abruptly took on a much harder and more sinister tone. “Well, lil’ Mary, you and your lambs just ran into the big bad wolves … and we’re gon’ have ourselves some fun with y’all tonight.”

“Please, no,” Mary whimpered, suddenly feeling crushed and utterly helpless as she realized what was coming. “Just take the Hummer and leave us alone, please. Don’t do this, I’m begging you, please don’t do this.”

“Shut your goddamn mouth,” the man snarled. “I’m gon’ put something real tasty in that pretty lil’ mouth of yours, and you’re gon’ shut up and take it like a good lil’ whore.”

Tears started running down Mary’s cheeks as she heard the man, who was now breathing hard with excitement, standing up and unzipping his pants behind her. She couldn’t believe that she’d gotten this far and had survived everything she’d been through only for this to happen, so close to the end of her journey.

“I’m next, Carl. Jake can wait!” the second man said excitedly.

“Shut up, asshole,” the first man snarled, grabbing a fistful of Mary’s hair and yanking her head back. “You just keep your goddamn gun on—”

The loud crack of a rifle shot echoed through the night forest, startling a nearby flock of birds, who scattered in panicked flight and a chorus of squawks from the dark treetops. Behind Mary, her assailant dropped dead with a large hole blown through his skull.

“Oh shit, Jake, get your fuckin’—” the second man screamed, but he too was cut off by a crashing rifle shot from somewhere in the darkness, and his limp, dead body flopped down on top of Jake.

“You son of a bitch!” the last man howled, firing his revolver blindly into the forest in all directions. “Come out and fight me like a man, you—”

Once more, the rifle boomed, and the third man’s body slithered down the side of the Humvee, painting a broad slick of blood, brains, and skull fragments down the vehicle’s door. Then there was complete silence, and the only sounds Mary could hear were the gurgling rush of the river, the pounding of her pulse in her temples, and her ragged gasps of panicked breath. She didn’t dare to move, not knowing whether the hidden sniper was a friend or an even worse foe. She was frozen with fresh panic and a sense of complete and utter helplessness. She knew that she was now entirely at the mercy of the unknown shooter, and all she could do was stare in fear at the river water as it rushed obliviously over the rocks.

The light of her assailants’ gas lamps just reached over to the far side of the river, and then she saw a dark, lone figure materializing out of the trees. He was a man, tall and broad-shouldered, holding a hunting rifle, but beyond that, she couldn’t discern any details.

“Stand up,” the man called out across the rushing river. “You’re safe now.”

The moment Mary heard his voice, she almost fainted, for it was a voice she knew well but hadn’t heard for almost twenty years. “Dad!” she gasped, her head reeling.

“Welcome home, baby girl,” the man said. “Welcome home.”

20

“Dad, is it … is it really you?” Mary gasped. She was so overwhelmed with emotion—and with everything that had happened to her in the last few hours—that she felt as if she was going to pass out, or throw up, or run around in circles screaming like a maniac … or all three simultaneously.

“It’s me, baby girl,” he said. “And I recognized you the moment I laid eyes on you. You’ve grown up to look just like your mama; you’re the spitting image of her right now. Is that … your son? Is he my grandson?” he asked, pointing to James, who was groaning and starting to come to after having been knocked out.

“No, not technically,” Mary answered. “He’s uh … I’ll explain later. But you do have a grandchild, Dad, and she’s in the Hummer. She needs medical attention, though, and she needs it bad. I … I don’t know what I’m gonna do, my, my baby’s, she’s…” Then the tears started flowing. Now that she’d found her father, against all the odds, Mary no longer had to hold it all together and keep up her strong, stoic façade. She could finally allow all these pent-up emotions to be released.

“It’s okay, Mary, it’s okay!” her father said calmly from across the river. “We’ve got a doctor here on the homestead, a damn good one. A nurse too. Your daughter—my granddaughter—will be in good hands. We just have to get her there. You can’t drive across the river here; we deepened this section on purpose, to keep vehicles out, but there is a ford half a mile upriver. I’ll have to show you the secret track through the woods, though.”

“I don’t think there’s enough gas in the tank for that,” Mary said, sniffing and sobbing, but trying to retain some semblance of control over her emotions. “It’s been running on empty for a while.”

“Okay, that’s fine. I’ll take her with me on the dirt bike, leave her with the doctor, then come back for you two. I’ll cross the river, there’s a secret path with stepping-stones just fifty yards upstream. Carry her up there, I’ll meet you on the riverbank.”

“Okay, okay,” Mary said, She was too overwhelmed, exhausted, and mentally drained to do anything but agree and go along with whatever her father said at this point.

“Ugh, what’s happening, where am I?” James groaned groggily from the muddy ground. He had risen to his hands and knees but was still feeling too dizzy to get up onto his feet.

“James, are you able to stand, honey?” Mary asked, bending down next to him. Across the water, her father walked upstream to get to the point where the stepping-stones were.

“My head hurts,” James groaned. “My glasses, I can’t see anything, where are they?”

Mary groaned; she was running out of time, and now there was another problem to have to deal with. James was as good as blind without his glasses, and it seemed that they’d been knocked off when the attacker had smashed a rifle butt into the back of his skull. She could only pray that they hadn’t been hurled into the fast-flowing river and been lost forever. For a few moments, she was torn with indecision; should she help James try to find his glasses, or leave him on his own while she carried Ann up to her father? Given the urgency of her daughter’s situation, the answer to this dilemma came to her quite quickly.

“James, you just wait right there, okay? I have to get Ann to my father. I’ll be back in a couple minutes to help you find your glasses.”

“Uh, okay, okay, Aunt Mary. Just uh, don’t take too long, okay? I can’t see anything; I feel like I’m blind.”

She felt bad for leaving him there like this, but she had to get her daughter help as soon as possible. She hurried over to the Hummer, glancing with burning contempt at the dead bodies of her would-be rapists as she stepped over them and picked up one of the gas lamps that were still burning on the ground where the goons had dropped them. She shone the lamp on Ann’s face, and her heart sank when she saw how pallid her daughter was looking and how shallowly she was breathing. None of the gunshots had woken her up; she really was out cold.

“Is she conscious?” Mary’s father called out from upstream.

“No, she’s out like a light!” Mary called back.

“Take the belts off those dead scumbags then,” her father called back. “I’m gonna need ‘em.”

Mary did as he said and removed the belts from the corpses. After that, she picked up her daughter, struggling with her weight; even though Ann was a relatively petite person, like Mary, she was a dead weight because of the fact that she was unconscious. Gasping and grunting with effort, with her limbs shaking from exertion, Mary carried Ann upstream, her limbs and back burning with every difficult step. Her father met her halfway, though, for he had crossed the river quickly, and he took Ann’s body from Mary, cradling her gently in his strong arms.

“She’s a beautiful kid,” he said, smiling proudly.

It was a surreal moment, and Mary felt as if she was in a dream. She, Ann, and her father were standing in a patch of bright moonlight, and she could see his features clearly. He had lost much of his hair, and the lines on his face were deeper and more pronounced, but his strong jaw, tall, proud nose and deep-set eyes, which burned with keen intelligence, were just the same as she remembered from twenty years ago. She wondered if he was thinking the same thing about her. There was so much she wanted to tell him, so many things she wanted to say, and she was sure he had plenty to say to her as well, but in this urgent moment, there was only real-time to say one thing. “Thank you, Dad,” Mary murmured with tears glistening in her eyes. “You saved our lives.”

He smiled and gave her a simple nod of acknowledgment in response. “We’ll talk later,” he said. “Right now, you need to help me with her. I’m gonna sit her down on that tree stump over there, and you’re gonna use those belts to tie her shoulders to mine and link her waist to mine. That way, she won’t fall off the back of the bike when I’m riding.”

They did this, using the dead men’s belts to strap Ann’s body securely to his back. Once they were done, he told Mary to wait in this spot, and that he’d be back in around an hour to pick her and James up. He promised that Ann would be in good hands. Mary watched her father go, crossing the river via the hidden stepping-stones, with her daughter—his granddaughter—strapped to his back. She still couldn’t get over just how surreal this all was.

After a few minutes, she heard a dirt bike being kick-started to life across the river, and she had to smile. Mary recognized the engine note at once; it was the same old dirt bike she’d ridden as a girl, the first machine she’d learned to wrench on. She listened as the bike drove away, standing still and almost drowning in a flood of memories. Only when the sound of the bike had faded completely into silence did she move again, walking back along the river to the Hummer and James.

“Who was that guy you were talking to, Aunt Mary?” James asked when she got back to him. “Did I hear you calling him Dad?”

“That’s right, James,” she answered. “He’s my father … I haven’t seen him in twenty years. I still can’t believe it’s him, but it is. It’s him all right.”

“Where’s he taken Ann?”

“Back to the homestead. There’s a doctor and a nurse there. He’ll be back for us in an hour. While we wait, we’d better find your glasses. How’s your head feeling?”

“It really hurts. I’ve got one hell of a headache,” James said, rubbing his head. “And uh, there’s a dead guy right behind me, isn’t there? And one a couple yards away.”

“There is, yes. Try not to be too freaked out by it, though,” Mary said, even though she was feeling just as freaked out as James was by the close proximity of the corpses. Anger still ran hot through her veins every time she looked at the bodies, and if they hadn’t been dead already, she’d have put bullets through each of the men’s heads. The thought of what these monsters had been planning to do to her and Ann made her blood boil. She forced herself to look away from the bodies and focus her attention on James. “Come on, let’s look for those glasses.”

She handed him one of the gas lamps, even though she knew he was barely capable of finding his lost glasses even with the assistance of the light, and she took another one and searched the area in front of him. A quick search revealed that there was nothing nearby, and she was becoming increasingly certain that the glasses had been flung into the water. She squatted down by the edge of the river and held the light up over the surface of the water. The water was clear and clean, and she could see the rocky bottom of the river in the area immediately around the gas lamp, but there was no sign of the glasses. She dipped her hand into the cold water to get a sense of the strength of the current and found that it was quite powerful.

“Did you, uh, did you find ‘em yet?” James asked, sounding worried. “There’s nothing by me.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said despondently, “but there’s nothing here either. I’ll keep looking, though, okay? They have to be around here somewhere.”

She said this, but at this stage, she was quite certain that the glasses had been swept away by the current. Nevertheless, she continued to search for a while longer. Not surprisingly, her search was fruitless. “I’m sorry, James,” she eventually said. “I think they’re gone. It looks like they got thrown into the river and carried away.”

“Oh no,” James murmured, his face falling. “What am I gonna do? I can’t see a thing without my glasses.”

Mary wasn’t really sure what to say. “You remember your prescription, right? We can, um, we can find a pair that’ll work for you.”

“Find a pair where?” James murmured, sitting down and holding his face in his hands. “The whole world’s been shut down. That’s what you told me. It’s not like any optometrists are gonna be open now. Maybe they won’t ever be open again. I’m … shit, I’m gonna be pretty much blind for the rest of my life, aren’t I?”

“You’re not gonna be blind,” Mary said gently, sitting down and putting her arm around James’s shoulders. “We’ll make a plan. There’ll be a way to get you a new pair of glasses, even if it means we have to break into an optometrist or something. Don’t worry, okay, we’ll figure something out.”

“It just … it just sucks, Aunt Mary,” James said, shaking his head sadly. “I wish I had a good pair of eyes. Now, now I’m just gonna be a burden to you and your dad. You should have just left me back at my dad’s. I’m useless now. I can’t help you guys do anything.”

Mary gave James a sympathetic squeeze. “James, have you already forgotten that you saved my life? Come on, kid, don’t put yourself down like this. Without you, we wouldn’t have made it here. Yes, it’s true that you’ve got a temporary disability now, but seriously, don’t talk like that. Don’t say you’re useless because you’re not. You’re absolutely not, you hear me? I don’t regret bringing you along, not one iota. I’m glad I brought, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ll find a way to get your sight back. My dad will figure something out, trust me, he’s like MacGyver.”

“MacGyver?”

Mary chuckled and shook her head, grateful for this moment of levity in what was a dark and grim situation. “You’re far too young to know what I’m talking about. It was a TV show when I was a kid.”

“TV,” James murmured, getting a faraway look in his eyes, almost like a drug addict thinking about his next fix. “Do you … do you think TVs will ever work again?”

“Sorry to break this to you, kid, but no. I’m pretty sure they won’t.”

“No TV, no computer, no phone, no Xbox,” James murmured sadly. “What am I gonna do all day?” he asked earnestly.

Mary chuckled again. “Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty out here to keep you occupied, and none of it bad for your mind and health like all those things you just mentioned. You’re going to have to go on a forced detox from all that stuff, but you’ll be grateful that you got away from it all after a few weeks of country living, trust me.”

They carried on chatting for a while and started to feel relaxed as if their ordeal was finally coming to an end. Mary got some drinks and snacks out of the backpacks and enjoyed a leisurely meal in the moonlight by the river. Their relaxation session was, however, interrupted by the distant sound of an engine coming steadily closer. But it wasn’t Mary’s father’s dirt bike.

“Oh no,” Mary said, her pulse starting to race again. “Just when I thought we were safe … Get in the Humvee, James, hurry!”

She pulled out her .45 and waited with bated breath as the sound of the vehicle grew ever louder, her finger on the trigger, praying that she wouldn’t have to fight anyone else tonight.

21

As the sound grew nearer and clearer, though, Mary could hear that it was coming from across the river, on the side of her father’s homestead. Her rapidly pounding heart slowed, and a sense of relief slowly washed over her. It was her father; it had to be. Sure enough, after a few minutes, she saw two headlights slashing through the dark forest across the river, and when the vehicle got close enough for her to get a look at it in the moonlight, she saw that it was an old ‘60s pickup truck. This made her certain that it was her father who was approaching, and no more enemies. This suspicion was confirmed when the truck pulled up to a stop on the opposite bank of the river, and her father got out.

“You all right over there, baby girl?” he called out to her.

“We’re fine, Dad,” she answered.

“Wait there,” he said. “I’ll come across and help you with your stuff.”

He shut off the truck engine and headed upstream to the secret stepping-stones, and after a few minutes, he got to the Humvee. Once again, a surreal feeling came over Mary, and she could scarcely believe the man standing next to her was really her father, or that she was here, experiencing this moment, in reality. She was quite sure that he was probably experiencing similar feelings.

“Dad, this is James,” she said. “He’s our neighbor, but I regard him as part of the family.”

“Pleased to meet you, son,” Mary’s father said, extending a hand to James, who took it and gave it a firm handshake. “My name’s Ted.”

“Great to meet you, uh, Mister Ted, sir,” James said, somewhat awkwardly.

Ted chuckled. “Just call me Ted, son, just call me Ted. Now, first things first, let’s gather up these scumbags’ guns and ammo; we don’t want to leave any weapons lying around for any other nasty scavenger types to pick up.”

“What about their bodies?” Mary asked.

Ted shrugged. “There are wolves and bears around here. Nature will take care of ‘em. And these bodies will hopefully serve as a warning to any other marauding types who come around here with the intention of thieving and plundering. These three had it coming to ‘em, by the way. I’ve seen ‘em around these woods before. I chased ‘em off my land a few times before. Dismantled some illegal wildlife traps they set, too, and caught ‘em dynamite fishing in a section of the river last year. Real scumbags, these three. They harassed my female students relentlessly whenever they went into town. When these assholes weren’t out here maiming wildlife for fun, they were drinking all day, looking for fights in town, and harassing anything with a skirt on.”

“I’m glad you stopped them before they…” Mary trailed off. “What were you doing out here anyway? And who are these students you’re talking about, anyway?” she asked, hurriedly changing the topic.

“I was on sentry duty tonight,” he answered. “Ever since we saw smoke rising from the city earlier, the students and I have been rotating guard duty at various points around my land. I knew trouble would be coming, and when I heard your Humvee coming up the road from a few miles away, I headed down there to see who it was,” he continued, patting the pair of binoculars that hung around his neck. “My eyes almost popped out of their sockets when I saw who it was, of course! I also saw these bastards following you. They were camped out in the woods about a mile from here. I think they’ve been living in the woods for a few weeks. I guess they got evicted from wherever they were staying in town.”

“And who are these students?” Mary asked.

“You’ll see when you get to the homestead,” Ted said with a smile. “Things have changed a lot since you were last here, baby girl. I don’t know how much of the place you’ll recognize. All the changes have been for the better, though; I think you’ll be impressed. Anyway, we’ll have plenty of time to catch up later … and Lord knows we have a lot of catching up to do. For now, though, let’s get your supplies out of this vehicle and across the river.”

“What about the Humvee?” Mary asked.

“What about it? You said there’s not a drop of gas left in it, so there isn’t much we can do but leave it here. I’ll come back tomorrow with a can of gas and drive it back to the homestead. Don’t worry about it, just get your supplies and let’s get moving.”

“Oh, Ted, I can’t really see too well right now,” James said. “I lost my glasses in the river, and I’m pretty much blind without ‘em.”

“That’s okay, son,” Ted said. “I’ll make a plan to get some new glasses for you, and I’ll carry you across the river.”

Mary didn’t doubt that Ted could do this. Even though he was in his sixties, he was strong and fit. Mary guessed that he still did plenty of wood-chopping, hiking, hunting, and gardening, as he’d done in his younger days. The three of them gathered up the weapons and supplies and then headed over to the section of the river where the stepping-stones were.

“Come here, son, I’ll carry you piggy-back across the river,” Ted said to James.

James felt more than a little embarrassment at having to be carried like a child by a man in his sixties, but there was no other way he could get safely across the river. He reluctantly got up onto Ted’s back.

“All right,” Ted said, easily coping with the teenager’s weight, “leave those other backpacks here. I’ll get you guys across first, then I’ll come back for ‘em. Mary, you need to pay very close attention to my feet; step exactly where I step. I don’t wanna have to fish you out of the river a mile downstream, because if you take one wrong step, you’ll be in six feet of fast-flowing water really quick.”

“Okay, Dad,” she said. “Lead the way, I’ll follow.”

Ted stepped into the river, and his feet and ankles disappeared into the water. He had done this crossing so many times he could have gotten across blindfolded. To Mary, though, it looked as if he were walking straight into the rapidly flowing river with almost suicidal carelessness. It was difficult to simply have the faith to take the plunge and step blindly into the water, but she did this, stepping exactly where his feet had been and was relieved to feel solid rock a few inches below the rushing water.

“You good back there, Mary?” her father asked as he took a short jump to reach the next stone.

“Yeah, I’m good,” she answered, keeping a close on her father’s footsteps.

They took it one stone at a time and were eventually able to cross the river. Mary was grateful when they got to the other side and didn’t care that her shoes were completely soaked and cold. James was also grateful to get down from Ted’s back and get a bit of his dignity back. However, he still had to take Mary’s hand to be led to the car, seeing as he couldn’t really see much of where he was going, even with the gas lamps illuminating the area.

Now that the obstacle of crossing the river had been cleared, Mary’s thoughts immediately went to her daughter.

“How’s Ann?” she asked.

“My doctor is operating on her leg right now,” Ted answered, “and I’m sure he and the nurse will be done long before we get back.”

“Operating on her?” Mary asked, the urgency in her voice plain to hear. “You mean, with surgical instruments and stuff? How is that possible?”

“Good gas lamps, some chloroform, scalpels, stitches, rubbing alcohol, and, of course, many years of expertise. You’d be surprised what a good doctor can do, even without electricity or the usual machines one finds in a hospital.”

“She’s, um, she’s gonna be okay, right?” Mary asked.

“The good doctor said she’ll be right as rain,” Ted answered with a smile. “We’ve got some general antibiotics she can take as well, just to minimize the chance of any infection setting in. What happened to you guys that she got all that shrapnel in her leg in the first place?”

Mary sighed. “It’s a long story, dad. I’ll tell you on the way to the … homestead, right? So it’s not just a cabin anymore, huh?”

“I kept the old cabin for nostalgia sake,” he said, “and I still live in it, but it’s only a tiny part of the homestead now. You’ll see when we get there. Come on, get on in.”

They got to the truck, and Mary gasped with shock when she saw that there was someone in it. Ted laughed. “I guess I should have told you we weren’t alone!”

A young, good-looking man with a bushy beard and long but clean and neatly combed blond hair got out of the truck. He was dressed in a black jacket and camouflage pants and was holding a hunting rifle. He stared at Mary with an expression of awe in his eyes and a friendly smile on his lips.

“Wow,” he said, “so you’re Mary, huh? The prodigal daughter returns. I’m Callum, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Callum,” Mary said.

“Callum’s one of my students,” Ted said. “He’s been here for five years now, and I’m guessing after today that he’s postponing any plans to leave, ain’t that right, Callum?”

Callum chuckled. “Indefinitely, Ted. I’m gonna be harder to get rid of than a bad case of fleas.”

“You’ll get to know everyone soon enough,” Ted said to Mary. “Let’s get you and James back to the ranch now, though. I’m sure you could both use a good, long sleep after everything you’ve been through.”

“I’ll see you at dawn, Ted,” Callum said, and then he turned and walked off into the trees.

“He’s taking over my sentry duty here,” Ted explained as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “I could also use a good night’s sleep, even though I haven’t been through anything like you guys have. I’ve gotta be up at dawn, because that’s when everything gets going at the homestead, but don’t worry, tomorrow you two can sleep in as long as you want. Don’t let that become a habit, though, because you’ll both be rising with the sun like the rest of us soon enough!”

They all piled into the truck, then Ted set off, driving along the bumpy dirt track through the woods. A tidal wave of emotions crashed through Mary’s mind as they drove. She told her father the whole story of what had happened since the EMP had hit, starting with the jerk who had come into her workshop just before everything had shut down. Her mind, however, was awash with memories. This had been the dirt track she’d quietly ridden her bicycle down, late one night, almost twenty years ago, with a bunch of clothes, a few belongings, and some canned food in a backpack on her back. Of course, there’d been a wooden bridge over the river in those days, and the trees lining the dirt track had been a little smaller. Still, much of it was the same as it had been that night she’d snuck out and ridden through the night. Mary had ended up hiding in the back of a truck in town, whose unwitting driver had taken her to the city, where she’d survived on her own ever since then. There was so much to tell her father, but she didn’t know where to begin. And she felt so guilty about what she’d done. She didn’t know how to begin, so she just kept on talking, her words coming out in a rapid-fire chatter, about everything she’d been through in the last few hours.

When they got to the homestead, Mary’s jaw dropped open with surprise. While the road had been largely the same as it had been when she’d run away, much of the land around the cabin was unrecognizable. There were crop tunnels, chicken coops, fruit and nut trees, a stable with horses, and a whole lot more buildings. It looked as if a few dozen people now lived here. Ted pulled the truck up and parked it in the carport attached to the cabin.

“I’ll show you two around tomorrow morning, whenever you’re up and about,” Ted said. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of questions … and, of course, we’ve got about twenty years of life to catch up on. Right now, though, let’s get you to bed. I asked one of the students to make up a spare bed for you in the living room of my cabin for tonight, James, and for you, baby girl, well, I’ve got a little surprise,” he said, flashing her a wink and a warm smile. “Come on in. Leave your stuff here in the truck, and we’ll sort it out tomorrow.”

“Wait,” Mary said, “before I do anything else, I want to see Ann and make sure she’s okay.”

“Of course,” Ted said. “Come this way.” He got out of the truck and led Mary and James across the homestead to a trailer, inside which a light was shining, silhouetting several human figures against the thin drapes. Ted knocked on the door, and a few seconds later, it was opened by a kind-looking, gray-haired man in his seventies, wearing surgical gloves, a surgical mask, and a white lab coat.

“You must be Ted’s daughter, this girl’s mother,” the old man said. “I’m Ray. I’d shake your hand, but…” He chuckled, for his gloves were covered with blood. “She’s doing just fine, by the way. Some of those bits of metal were embedded pretty deep, but she was lucky. No major veins or arteries were severed, and they didn’t hit bone either. She’s going to have some bad scars on her legs, unfortunately, but she’ll be okay, and while she’ll walk with a limp for a while, she’ll soon be back to a full range of motion, I’m sure.”

“Can I see her?” Mary asked.

“Of course, come on in,” Ray said, stepping aside to let Mary into the trailer.

Inside, Ann was laying unconscious on one of the bunk beds. Her leg had been bandaged up, and an intravenous drip had been hooked up to her arm. And while her face was still looking pallid, there was a little more color in her cheeks than there had been a few hours ago. Mary knelt down next to Ann and squeezed her hand and stroked her hair.

“Dr. Krueger was a military doctor, baby girl,” Ted said. “He served in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a bunch of other out-of-the-way places. He’s had plenty of experience treating severe battle wounds and working in the crudest and basic field conditions too. He’s a real asset to our homestead. Under his capable care, I’m sure that Ann will make a full recovery. I can’t wait until she wakes up; I can’t wait to meet my granddaughter properly!”

“Thank so much, Doctor—” Mary began, but Ray held up a hand to silence her.

“Just Ray, please,” he said, smiling. “And I’m most happy to help.”

After leaving the trailer, they headed into the cabin, which, unlike the rest of the place, looked rather like how Mary remembered it. Her father’s simple, minimalist taste hadn’t changed, and there were few things but the bare necessities inside his home. “You can sleep right there, James,” he said, pointing to a camp cot that had been set up in the corner of the small living room.

“Thanks, Ted,” James said, plopping himself down on the cot. “This wave of tiredness is just hitting me like, like a speeding bus right now,” he said. “I’ll be asleep before my head even hits the pillow.”

“The bathroom is down the hall to your left,” Ted said. “There’s no power here, of course, but I’ll leave a gas lamp and a lighter next to your bed. All right, Mary, you can come with me now.”

Mary was a complete mess of emotions now. She couldn’t believe she was actually back here, the place where she’d grown up—the place she had once sworn to never set foot in again. She was grateful to be back and grateful for all she’d learned on her own, for everything she had been through up until this point had made her who she was—but she couldn’t help feeling guilty about abandoning her father, and for all the wasted years that now stood between them. She did her best to hold back the flood of tears that were threatening to gush from her eyes at any moment, and Ted quietly led her down the hall to the familiar old room at the end of it—the room in which she’d grown up.

“Open the door,” he said when he got to it, and she could hear that his voice was choked up with intense emotion now, too, and a rim of tears glistened in his eyes.

With her heart in her mouth, Mary opened the door, and when she did, a wave of shock and surprise smashed into her like an unexpected baseball bat to her skull, for her room was exactly as she had left it, right down to the ‘90s boy band posters on the walls, some cassette tapes and music CDs on her desk, and her old favorite doll sitting on a tiny rocking chair in the corner.

She couldn’t hold it back any longer; she burst into tears and fell into her father’s arms, and he hugged her tightly.

“You’re back home now, baby girl, you’re back home,” he said hoarsely.

Mary was back home, finally, and she felt safer than she had in years.

22

When Mary woke up the next morning, she was disoriented for the first few seconds of consciousness, for it felt as if she’d awoken from one dream only to find herself in another. She had dreamed of this room often over the last twenty years, and to wake up in it now and find it the same as it had been in her dreams and memories left her head spinning.

After a few seconds, though, she remembered how she had come to be here, and everything that had happened the previous day. She got out of bed, drank the glass of cool, purified stream water that Ted had left there for her, which tasted better than any water she’d had for years, and then she opened the drapes.

Now that she was able to see the homestead in the daylight, she was able to see the full extent of the changes that had taken place here since she had left. Her eyes, however, were drawn not to all the new buildings and installations, but rather to the sky. The entire eastern half of the sky was thick with a pall of smoke that blotted out the sun, and the sunlight that was able to fight its way through the smoke came through as a pale, weak yellowish glow, which gave everything a surreal and dreamlike look.

While she was looking out of the window, she saw Ted nearby, pushing a wheelbarrow with some sacks of compost in it.

“Dad!” she called out.

“Morning, baby girl!” he said, abandoning the wheelbarrow to walk up to the window. “How was your sleep?”

“Like a log,” she said, “I didn’t wake up once.”

“Good to hear,” Ted said. “You needed it, I’m sure.” He followed her gaze and looked at the smoke-choked sky and frowned, shaking his head. “It’s from the city,” he said. “You’re lucky you got out yesterday. We can’t see what’s going on from here, but from the amount of smoke in the sky, I’d say that about half of it burned to the ground last night, maybe more. I can’t even begin to imagine how many people must have lost their lives.”

“It was looking bad before we got out,” Mary said. “I can’t believe how quickly everything descended into chaos and anarchy.”

“I can,” Ted muttered darkly, shaking his head and grimacing. “I saw this coming. I saw it coming decades ago.” He sighed and stared at the ground for a few seconds, but when he looked up again, his frown had vanished and had been replaced by a warm smile. “I need to get back to work, baby girl,” he said. “The soil isn’t gonna prepare itself. There’s plenty of fresh food for breakfast for you and James; you remember where to find it, I’m sure.”

“I do, Dad,” she answered. “I’ll see you later.”

She took a shower—the warm water was provided by simple matte-black-plastic water bags on the roof which absorbed sunlight to provide heat—and then went and enjoyed a simple but delicious and nutritious breakfast, consisting entirely of things that had been grown on the farmstead and eggs from the flock of chickens. James was still asleep, snoring contentedly on the camp cot in the living room, so Mary left him to sleep and went straight to Dr. Krueger’s trailer to check on Ann.

When she got there, she found that not only was her daughter awake, but she was up and about, albeit leaning on a crutch. She and Mary shared a long, emotional embrace and sat down outside the trailer and chatted. Ann’s rage from the previous day had dissipated, and she was ready to forgive her mother for having kept the secret of this place and her grandfather from her for all these years. Ann had seen the smoke on the horizon and was feeling grateful that they had escaped the hell into which the city had no doubt descended.

Ted joined them after a while, and he and Ann talked for some time, getting to know each other a little better. Ted offered to show Mary and Ann around, and they set off on a tour around the homestead.

“For the last seventeen or eighteen years or so, I’ve been running this place as an experimental farm in conjunction with a number of universities,” Ted explained. “I’ve been working with their best soil science, sustainable agriculture, permaculture, hydroponics, water quality, environmental science, and crop management students, doing all sorts of work with the latest science on how best to grow things in harmony with nature while regenerating the soil and maintaining biodiversity instead of destroying it. A lot of students have done their masters and doctorate work here with various projects. And I’ve learned a heck of a lot too.”

He showed them several crop tunnels, and some specially designed greenhouses in which they were able to grow tropical fruit without any electricity or powered heating, and a fish pond which provided both the nutrients for many of the hydroponics crops, as well as fish to eat.

“We don’t use any electricity or gas-powered machinery here,” Ted explained. “Every bit of machinery you see is either run by gravity, from the action of water running from the nearby creeks and the river, is hand-cranked, or hooked up to stationary bikes. It’s all water or people-powered, no electronics, no batteries, no fossil fuels. People’s cellphones and laptops are about the only electronic items we have here, and if they hadn’t all died simultaneously yesterday, we wouldn’t have known a thing about the EMP.”

“It’s amazing,” Mary said. “I mean, you were already doing a great job living off-grid when I was a kid, but this is another level completely.”

Ted smiled proudly. “This has been my dream ever since I was a young man. It makes my heart swell with pride to see it in action and to see it working so well.”

“How many people live here?” Ann asked. “There are a lot of cabins and trailers around.”

“Right now, we’ve got almost fifty people here. The land could support a good few more, too, without taking much strain. Many of ‘em are current students, but some of ‘em are former students who, after graduating, decided to come back here with their families and stay on permanently. I welcome anyone who’s a good person and a hard worker; as long as they contribute meaningfully to this place and nurture the land instead of destroying it, they’re welcome to stay.”

“I guess they’ll all have to stay now, whether they want to or not,” Mary said glumly. “It’s not as if there’s anything to go back to out there.”

“No, there isn’t,” Ted said. “But most of ‘em, even the current students, had already talked to me about staying here long-term anyway.”

“How do you run this place?” Ann asked. “What sort of government do you have, if you want to call it that?”

Ted chuckled and gave her a grin. “You’re a smart little lady, huh? You into politics?”

“History’s my favorite subject at school,” Ann said, “and reading up on different systems of governance is something I’m really interested in.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re so interested in history, young lady,” Ted said. “It’s an important and much-misunderstood subject, and I think this country would have been in a much better place if a lot more people had been as interested in history as you are. Alas, here we are, never learning from the mistakes of the past and doomed to keep repeating them for all eternity. Anyway, to answer your question, we’re a democracy here. But a democracy with a twist; if you don’t put in enough work, you don’t get to have a say in how things are run or what directions projects will take. If you come here and try to freeload off others, you don’t get to have a say in anything.”

“So it’s more of a meritocracy, then?” Ann asked.

“Yes. And we don’t have group votes on everything, either; if something is in an area of one person’s very specific area of expertise, then they get a far bigger say in it than someone who doesn’t know anything about that subject. For instance, if Dr. Krueger and the nurse say we need this and that in order to maintain our medical standards, we listen to them; we don’t just ask a bunch of people who are ignorant about medical issues to vote on it.”

“That makes sense,” Ann said.

“Exactly,” Ted said. “You don’t just get on an airplane and have the passengers vote on how to fly the damn thing. You sit down, shut up, and let the qualified pilot do it. We apply that principle to a lot of the governance here too.”

“So, about the whole no slackers allowed thing,” Mary said, “I assume we’re going to be put to work with everyone else?”

Ted smiled. “In good time. Ann won’t, of course, as she’s injured, and James can’t do much without his glasses, although I think a few hours a day on one of the stationary bikes that power the pumps would do wonders for the boy’s fitness; he doesn’t seem very athletic.”

“He’s got a good heart, but he’s spent most of his life sitting in front of a TV,” Mary said. “His father, our neighbor, was an awful man, a violent drunk who did nothing when it came to raising that poor boy.”

“I see,” Ted said. “Well, there’s no better place for him to have a fresh start in life than here. He doesn’t need his glasses to pedal a stationary bike, and the fresh air and exercise and healthy produce and fruit here will do wonders for him, I bet.”

“I wanna help, too,” Ann said eagerly. “I’m sure there must be something I can do that won’t hurt my leg.”

“Well, sure, you can sit down in the kitchen and help with canning and pickling and food preparation. There are never enough spare hands in the kitchen.”

They talked a little more about the homestead, and the various tasks Mary, James, and Ann would be able to help out with. Both Mary and Ann were extremely impressed with how efficiently everything was run here, and all the homesteaders they met were friendly and welcoming. Eventually, the subject of James’s glasses came up again.

“We’ve gotta do something about his eyesight,” Mary said. “I know that he can sit and pedal a stationary bike and make himself useful that way, but he’s not going to have much quality of life if he can’t really see anything. There must be something we can do, short of traveling to town and raiding the optometrist’s place.”

“He’s near-sighted, right?” Ted asked.

“Extremely, yes,” Mary answered. “I don’t know his exact prescription, but he’ll be able to tell you.”

“One of the students here wears some pretty thick glasses, and I know he’s near-sighted too,” Ted said. “We could go see if he has a spare pair James could borrow for a while. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s something, right?”

“It’s worth a shot, yeah,” Mary said. “Let’s go see him.”

23

“Come, I’ll take you to his trailer,” Ted said. “I’ll give you a bit of a warning, though, he’s a little … strange. A bit of a loner who prefers to keep to himself. He knows a heck of a lot about soil science and chemistry, though, and he’s helped us get our soil pH in many of our growing beds nigh on perfect, all with natural additives like river clay and mushroom compost.”

They walked across the homestead to the far end, where there was a lone trailer parked in the middle of some trees, quite far from the others.

“I can see what you mean about him being a loner,” Mary said. “He’s as far away from everyone else as he can be without being totally in the woods.”

“Well, I don’t begrudge anyone’s need for privacy,” Ted said. “If he wants to keep to himself, that’s fine, as long as he pulls his weight when it comes to work, which he usually does.”

“Usually?”

Ted shrugged, and a hint of a frown came across his face. “He sometimes locks himself up in there for days with his computer. I’ve given him a few warnings, to be honest, when he missed his work shifts. Now, with this whole EMP situation, I don’t think that’s gonna be much of a problem anymore. That computer of his isn’t going to be of much use anymore except as a doorstop.”

They walked up to the trailer, and Ted knocked on the door. “William? You in there?”

“Coming, hold on, hold on,” a voice muttered irritably from inside.

“Relax, Will, I’m not here about work,” Ted said.

“Fine,” the voice grunted, sounded just as annoyed regardless.

The door was flung open, and in it stood a short, rotund young man in his twenties. He was shirtless, and his pale, heavy belly hung over his grubby jeans. His greasy, unwashed black hair, prematurely balding on top, was tied back in a ponytail, and his chubby face and throat were covered in a thick growth of stubble. Behind him in the trailer, Mary could see that the place was a slobby mess. The man’s face looked deceptively dull and almost moronic, but in his eyes, which looked unnaturally large due to his thick spectacles, there was a gleam of keen and almost dangerous intelligence. His eyes seemed to be drawn with a magnetic force to Ann, and Mary noticed a disturbing glimmer of lust appearing in them as he looked the teenage girl up and down. This furthered her immediate and almost instinctive dislike of him.

“Who are they?” he muttered rudely, nodding his head in Mary and Ann’s direction.

“My daughter and granddaughter,” Ted said. He seemed not to notice William’s creepiness and rudeness, or, perhaps, he was used to dealing with his attitude. “They’re going to be staying here on the homestead now.”

“Okay,” William said, still sounding annoyed. “What does that have to do with me?” His gaze once again drifted to Ann’s body, on which it lingered.

Mary noticed this, and a flare of rage and disgust ripped through her, but she held her tongue. As much as it angered her, she knew they had to be nice to this unpleasant man if they were to get him to lend James some glasses.

“Well, they’ve got someone else with them, a near-sighted kid who lost his glasses on the way here,” Ted said. “And we were wondering if you could lend him a spare pair of yours.”

“You understand that his prescription might be totally different to mine, right?” William said sourly. “It’ll probably be a complete waste of time.”

“I’d appreciate it if you could just allow us to give it a shot anyway,” Ted said, doing his best to remain diplomatic.

“I only have one spare pair,” William said. “What am I supposed to do if this guy breaks them or loses them?”

“We’ll go to town and get you another pair if that happens,” Ted said patiently. “This will only be a temporary thing, trust me.”

“I don’t want some idiot who can’t hang on to his own glasses wrecking my only spare pair,” William said, folding his arms across his chest. “I need those glasses. I can’t only have one pair.”

“Well he can barely see anything, and it wasn’t his fault that he lost them, he was attacked and beaten up,” Mary said, doing her best to be calm, but feeling like she wanted to reach out and slap him. “Please, have a heart, this poor kid can’t see a damn thing without his glasses.”

“We’re a community here, Will, and we’d do the same for you if you lost your glasses,” Ted said gently. There was a firmer edge to his tone now, though, and he was tightening up the pressure. “Look, I don’t want to have to get the rest of the community involved. You have my word that if anything happens to the glasses, I will personally go to town and get you a new pair.”

It was plainly obvious that William didn’t want to lend James his spare glasses, but he realized that continuing to refuse would cause more trouble than it was worth. Scowling, he turned around and stomped back into his trailer, and he came back a few moments later and shoved a glasses case into Ted’s hands. “If there’s so much as a single scratch on them when I get them back, you’re getting me a new pair,” he muttered, and then without another word, he shut the door in their faces.

“What a nasty jerk,” Mary muttered.

“He kept staring at me … ew,” Ann said, wrinkling her nose with disgust.

“He seemed to be in a lot more of a bad mood than usual today,” Ted said. “I guess he’s having withdrawal from his computer or something. He’s a bit of a strange fellow, but he’s not usually that unpleasant. I’m sorry you two had to experience that, but I promise that nobody else on the homestead is like that. And as much of an ass as William can sometimes be, he does know his soil science like nobody else I’ve met, and he does work hard when he needs to.”

“That doesn’t make him any less of a creep,” Mary said. As a woman, she noticed things that went over the heads of most men, and the vibe she’d gotten from William was one of distinct creepiness. She definitely wouldn’t be leaving Ann unattended anywhere near William.

“Let’s get out of here,” Ann said. “I’m sure James is awake by now.”

They walked back to Ted’s cabin and found that James was up and about. They handed him the glasses, and he smiled as soon as he tried them on. “They’re not really strong enough,” he said, “but I can see a lot better with them, so at least I don’t feel like I’m totally blind now. What can I do to help around here?”

Ted took them around the homestead and assigned everyone a task that would be within their ability to carry out. Each of them got busy with their jobs, content and relieved to be safe, but on the far horizon, the city continued to burn. While it was easy out here in this idyllic setting to forget about the chaos over the horizon, Mary knew that it wouldn’t be like this forever. In her mind, she began to prepare for its inevitable spread to reach the borders of the homestead.

Little did she know that the darkness of what was happening in the city would come to this peaceful place a lot sooner than she or anyone else could have imagined.

24

Late that night, after Ann and James had gone to bed, Mary and Ted sat on the porch of the cabin, quietly staring at the starry sky, which was bright and unobscured by the usual light pollution of civilization.

“I haven’t seen this many stars for years,” Mary said. “I’d forgotten how beautiful the night sky was out here, away from all the lights and smog of the city.”

“I try to look at the stars every night, baby girl,” Ted said. “They remind me of how small we really are and how fleeting our lives are. Hey, wait right here, I’ve got something for you.”

“All right, Dad,” she said.

He got up and returned later with a grin on his lips and tumblers of whiskey in his hands. “I hope you’re a fan of finely aged single malt,” he said, handing her a glass.

“Are you kidding?” she said with a laugh. “It’s the best drink around. Not that I drink much these days, but if I do have one, it’s gotta be quality stuff.”

Ted clinked his glass against hers. “Like father, like daughter,” he said with a smile. “And this, baby girl, is some very fine stuff. You know me. I’m a man of simple tastes, but this is one little luxury I like to indulge in every once in a while.”

Mary took a sip and sighed. “Mm, lovely stuff, Dad, lovely stuff. I hope you’ve got a good stash of this!”

“Oh I do, don’t you worry about that.”

They drank in silence for a while, listening to the calming sounds of the night and looking up at the dazzling display of stars in the clear sky. Mary finished her glass quite quickly and found she was feeling a little buzzed.

“Need a refill there?” Ted asked.

“Sure, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not. I’ll bring out the bottle.”

After Ted went back into the cabin to fetch the bottle, a tumult of memories began to cascade through Mary’s mind. Guilt at what she’d done all those years ago still gnawed at her innards with relentless persistence, but she didn’t know how to even begin to approach the topic with Ted. His footsteps interrupted these thoughts, and although Mary smiled at him when he returned to the porch, he could tell that something was worrying her. He didn’t pry, though; he knew she would open up when she was ready.

“Do you mind if I ask about Ann’s father?” Ted said. “And I understand if you don’t want to talk about it, of course.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she said. “His name was Alex,” she continued, feeling the usual strange cocktail of sadness, bitterness, and anger that she always did whenever talk of her former husband came up. “We met when I was twenty. I fell head over heels for him; he was so sweet and charming, really swept me off my feet. And he was a good man, a decent man with old-fashioned values—or, at least, I thought he was. A year later, I was pregnant with Ann, and we eloped—his rich parents didn’t approve of me at all. We drove across the country, got married in a Vegas chapel. Crazy, huh?” She laughed softly and shook her head. “We were going to start a new life in California. And we did, for all of two years. Alex quickly decided that fatherhood and being a responsible dad weren’t for him, though. He only got deeper into his partying and drinking while I was stuck doing my best to make ends meet and take care of a baby. And as much of an asshole as he was, I still loved him. God, I loved him. Even when he started disappearing for days at a time. Well, one day, he just never came back. After a week, I filed a missing person report with the cops. The week after that, I got a collect call from a payphone in New Orleans. It was Alex. He said he’d been doing a lot of thinking, and he’d needed some time alone, and … oh, I won’t bore you with the details,” she said bitterly, tears rimming her eyes. “The bottom line was, he wasn’t coming back. Ever.”

“I’m sorry, baby girl,” Ted said gently. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you during that time.”

“No, no, that’s my fault, Dad. It’s all my fault, don’t you apologize for it. At any time, I could have reached out to you and come back here. I mean, after Alex left me, I came all the way back to the East Coast, and I could have come back to you and asked for help. But I was too ashamed of what I’d done, too embarrassed about being a failure, too proud to ask for help, and too guilty that I’d broken your heart.”

“Mary, you don’t need to be holding onto feelings like that. The past is the past; it’s behind us. Don’t be a prisoner to guilt; it’ll just eat you alive. And I don’t want you thinking that your running away was all your fault. I know I played a part in driving you away. All you wanted was a normal childhood, and to have a normal teenage life, and I was so focused on survival and preparing you for disasters like this one, I refused to allow you to have anything of the sort. I know my own stubbornness played a big part in why you did what you did.”

“It doesn’t excuse the fact that I never called, that I never—”

“That’s enough, Mary,” Ted said softly. “We’ve both caused each other a lot of pain. Too much pain. We’ve lost twenty years, but now, at least, we’ve been given a chance to start afresh. So let’s leave the past behind, leave all that guilt and pain behind and wipe the slate clean. Here you are, back where you belong. That’s what counts.”

Choking down a sob, Mary nodded, and a single tear ran down her cheek. “Yeah, Dad,” she said, her voice cracking. “Let’s do that.”

They got up from their chairs and shared a long, tight hug, and both of them had misty eyes and knots in their throats when they eventually sat down again. From then on, they talked of lighter-hearted things, shared memories from Mary’s childhood and the good times they’d had when she’d been a young girl. They also talked about her mother; she had died of cancer when Mary had only been four years old. Thus, Mary’s memories of her mom were few, and those that she did have were hazy. She had always felt a gulf of sadness within her, though, about the loss of her mother, and hearing her father talk about the good times he’d had with her mother went away toward healing this old wound. During her childhood and teenage years, her father had always refused to talk about her mother; it had taken him many years to get over her passing. On this night, both of them thus felt a measure of emotional healing as they talked

By the time Mary eventually went to sleep, she felt as if a ten-ton weight had been lifted from her shoulders and a cancerous tumor had been successfully purged from her body. All of the guilt and sadness she’d been carrying around for years was gone, and finally, it seemed, her life felt whole again.

She realized, of course, that this time of peace and happiness would not last; she knew that the chaos from the EMP strike would be spreading far and wide and that there was little they could do to escape it here. All they could really do was brace for the impact and hope that whatever devastation it brought with it could be minimized and contained.

Mary wondered how long it would be before the chaos reached the shores of this wonderful place. She closed her eyes and prayed that it wouldn’t be too soon, but she knew that this was wishful thinking.

She knew that it would hit sooner or later, but what she didn’t know was that the trigger that would set off an explosive chain of events would come from within this community, not from the outside and that it would begin sooner than any of them thought … a lot sooner, in fact.

25

Five weeks had passed since the EMP strike, and Mary, Ann, and James had adjusted well to life on the homestead. Mary now felt almost like her previous life in the city was some sort of extended dream she’d just woken from. Although she missed wrenching on classic cars, she was happy to work on the land out here and get back into the simple rural life she’d hated so much as a teenager. There were, of course, vehicles out here; there was the Army Humvee she’d come here in, and a few old trucks and dirt bikes from the 1950s and 60s. Ted had kept all the vintage vehicles in pristine condition, though, so they didn’t need much maintenance. Sometimes Mary would simply sit in the old trucks and think about her past life in the city, understanding, with bittersweet nostalgia, that it was something that she may never be able to go back to. Still, for the most part, she was content to work on the homestead.

James, despite his limited vision, which William’s spare glasses only partially helped, was fitter and healthier than he’d ever been in his life, and he happily pedaled for hours on the stationary bikes connected to various pumps every day. He and Ted had become surprisingly close, considering how very different they were. However, as much as Ted loved Mary, he had always wanted a son, too, and James was quickly becoming like the son—or grandson, now—that he’d never had. As for James, with his deadbeat alcoholic dad, he’d never had a strong, positive father figure in his life. The influence Ted was having on him in this regard was lifechanging. In the last five weeks, Ted had taught James how to ride a horse, shoot a rifle, ride a dirt bike, operate simple farm machinery—all pre-electric-era equipment, of course—how to track animals in the woods, and how to survive in the wilderness on his own. Against anyone’s expectations, the former video game addict had picked everything up quite quickly, and he was rapidly shedding the pounds of flab all those years on a sofa in front of a TV had put on his body. In its place, lean muscle was appearing.

Ann was still walking with a limp, but her wounds had healed. Although there were large scars on her legs, she had recovered around ninety percent of her former mobility, and Dr. Krueger was certain that in a few more weeks, she’d be as quick and agile as she had been before. Ted had a vast library of books, and as an avid reader, Ann had plenty of literature with which to occupy herself when she wasn’t helping out with various tasks on the homestead.

Mary and Ted had reconciled completely, and their relationship as father and daughter was stronger than it had ever been. They had both put the past behind them and were committed to working toward a bright, sustainable future for Ann and James and everyone else on the homestead.

Things were not entirely rosy on the homestead, though; William seemed to become surlier and increasingly anti-social, and he often shirked his duties and locked himself up in his trailer for days at a time. He also took an unhealthy interest in Ann, trying to get her alone and generally acting offensively toward her. Mary was furious whenever Ann told her about these episodes of harassment, and Ted went to have words with William on more than one occasion, threatening to kick him out of the homestead if his unsavory behavior persisted. The problem was, of course, the fact that if they forced William to leave, he would take his spare glasses with him, leaving James blind. Also, there was the security concern; William had been on the homestead for three years and knew the place—and its security flaws and vulnerabilities—inside out. If Ted kicked him out, there was no guarantee that William wouldn’t later come back for revenge, possibly bringing along a group of bandits and scavengers. Because of this, the family had to grudgingly accept that William had to be allowed to stay and simply do their best to keep him away from Ann.

The huge towers of black smoke from the city had darkened the distant horizon for a full week after the EMP event before they eventually burned out. But, even now, after five weeks, the occasional plume of smoke could be seen in the distance. Ted hadn’t gotten complacent with security, and everyone was required to put in sentry shifts around the borders of the homestead, around the clock, day and night. A few times, various sentries had seen people trying to get across the river, and on one occasion, some people in an old Korean War-era army Jeep had driven as deep into the river as they could get, before realizing it was impassable. Thus far, nobody had made it across. Ted made a rule that nobody was to use the secret stepping-stones in daylight, in case unfriendly eyes were watching. He knew that other people knew that the homestead was out here, and he also knew that hunger and desperation could drive people to invade. Ted was determined to protect the homestead at all costs. For now, the river was as good a barrier as any, but he knew it wouldn’t be a permanent one; when the water level dropped, as it always did when the seasons changed, the stepping-stones would be exposed. He would worry about that when the time was closer, though.

Despite the homesteaders’ commitment to vigilance and security, it wasn’t long before the madness that had thrown the rest of the world around them into chaos reached their borders. One morning, Callum didn’t return from his sentry shift on time, which immediately set off alarm bells in Ted’s mind. Mary, who had grown quite close to the young man, who was a permaculture expert from a local university, was also worried. She and Ted set off on a pair of vintage dirt bikes to go find Callum and find out what had happened, and why he hadn’t returned from his shift.

When they got to his sentry post—the same one by the river that Ted had been guarding the night Mary had arrived in the Humvee—they made an alarming discovery. Callum was laying on the ground, tied up, with duct tape over his mouth. He saw Mary and Ted coming and tried to yell, his cries muffled by the duct tape.

“Oh my God, Callum!” Mary cried.

They ran over to him, cut the ropes, and yanked the duct tape off his mouth.

“What happened?” Mary asked. “Who did this to you?”

“William,” Callum groaned, trying to stretch his stiff, aching limbs and joints. “The bastard tricked me. I don’t know what he did, but I was talking to him one minute, and the next I woke up all groggy and confused, tied up like this, with my rifle gone.”

“William?” Ted asked. “I know he’s a bad apple, but why would he do something like this?”

“How did it happen? Are you okay, did he hurt you?” Mary asked anxiously.

Callum groaned and grimaced as Ted helped him to his feet. “I’m really sore and stiff from being tied up like that, but he didn’t do anything else to me, as far as I know. It happened late last night, probably around twelve-thirty or one in the morning, seeing as I had only been on my shift for maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes. So I was patrolling the area here when I saw a figure coming down the path through the woods from the direction of the homestead. I figured it was one of us, but I was immediately suspicious; why would anyone be walking around the woods at that time of night? And I knew it couldn’t have been any kind of confusion about sentry shifts, because the next change wasn’t due for three hours. I challenged the person, and when they replied, I recognized the voice right away; it was William.”

“What happened next?” Ted asked.

“Well, I asked him why he was walking around all the way down here by the river, miles from the homestead, at that time. He said he couldn’t sleep and just needed to take a long walk. I was still = suspicious, and he was acting pretty weird. He also had a really big hiking backpack with him, which immediately told me he was lying. Still, I didn’t expect him to attack me or do anything like that. He asked if we could talk about something important, so I walked up to him. That’s the last thing I remember before waking up tied and gagged.”

Mary saw a handkerchief on the ground a few yards away, and she walked over to it and picked it up. It still had a faint whiff of chloroform on it. “I’m pretty sure that this is what he used to knock you out,” she said, holding up the handkerchief.

Ted looked at it, and a look of alarm came across his face. “If he used chloroform, he had to have broken into the medical trailer to get it … and if he’s deserted the homestead, he may have stolen a lot more items from our medical stores than just chloroform. Shit, dammit, we’d better get back and check the medical trailer, pronto.”

Callum hopped on the back of Mary’s bike, and the three of them raced back to the homestead. They headed straight to the medical trailer, but before they even stepped into it, they knew the news was bad. The door was open, and the broken lock and a pair of bolt cutters were laying on the ground.

“Oh shit,” Ted murmured, dropping his still-running dirt bike on its side and sprinting over to the medical trailer.

Before he could run inside the trailer, however, Dr. Krueger stepped out, and his face was pale with shock and worry.

“Someone’s cleaned us out, Ted,” he gasped, his hands trembling. “They’ve taken just about everything important. As of now, we’ve pretty much run out of our most essential medical supplies…”

26

“How much has he taken? How much do we have left?” Ted asked frantically.

“Who did this? You know who did this?” Dr. Krueger asked.

“It was William, but he’s gone. There’s nothing we can do about him. I’ll explain later. Just tell me what he’s taken and what we have left,” Ted said.

“It’s bad, Ted, it’s really bad,” Dr. Krueger said, shaking his head sadly and sighing. “Almost all of the antibiotics, most of the painkillers, a lot of the surgical alcohol, antihistamines, some instruments, some other really important things…”

While Dr. Krueger was listing everything that had been taken, Mary saw Ann and James approaching. Ann was holding James’s hand, leading him forward, and James didn’t have any glasses on.

“Mom!” Ann yelled. “Mom, someone stole James’s glasses last night!”

Mary clenched her fists with rage; she hadn’t thought she could possibly loathe William any more intensely than she already did, but now she knew that she absolutely could. If she got her hands on him, she swore she’d wring his scrawny neck.

“I’m freakin’ blind again,” James murmured sadly, looking as if he was on the verge of bursting into tears. “I can’t see a damn thing. It was my fault, though. I can’t believe I was so stupid. I always left the glasses on the table by the window, and with last night being so warm, I left the stupid window open…”

“It’s not your fault, sweetie,” Mary said, running up to James and giving him a big hug. “How could you have known that someone would have stolen them here, of all places? It’s not your fault at all.”

“What am I gonna do, Aunt Mary? I can’t see a damn thing now. I’m as good as blind. I feel so useless…”

“You aren’t useless, son, far from it,” Ted said firmly. “You’re just suffering a temporary setback, that’s all.” He had a determined look on his face now, and his jaw was set tight. “I should have kicked that scumbag out weeks ago, and to hell with the consequences. It couldn’t have been any worse than what he’s done to us now.”

“What are we going to do about this situation?” Dr. Krueger asked. “There’s not much I can do to help people without the supplies that have been stolen.”

“I’ll call an emergency meeting,” Ted said. “We’ll figure something out.”

An hour later, everyone who lived on the land had assembled in the central fire pit area, where large bonfires would burn bright and people would tell stories or sing songs late into the night. They all sat in a large circle on the logs around the firepit, with Ted standing in the center of the circle. He explained what had happened, and after people had had a chance to get over the shock of it, they got to talking about solutions to this problem.

“I say we head to town and raid the pharmacy,” one student suggested.

“Come on,” another countered. “It’s been over five weeks since the EMP. Do you honestly think there’ll be anything left in the pharmacy now? Everyone else will have stripped it bare long ago.”

“We should at least try,” another student said. “What’s the alternative, just sit here and accept that we’re going to be without essential medical supplies without even trying to find more?”

“I say we hunt that asshole William down and put a few bullets in him, and take back what he stole,” the first student muttered, punching his fist into his palm.

“He’s long gone,” Ted said. “He took one of the bicycles, and seeing as it’s mostly downhill from here, he could be over a hundred miles away by now. We’d never catch up with him, and we have no idea where he was planning to go anyway.”

“The hospital two towns over,” another student, a young, thin man called Zane, suggested. “That’s our best bet. Unlike pharmacies, they’ve got some seriously beefy security where they keep their meds. I don’t think most raiders could have broken in there. I should know, I was a medical student for two years before switching my major, and I did an internship in that hospital. It’s a really small place, but they’ll definitely have everything we need.”

“If most other people couldn’t break-in, how are we going to bypass their security?” the first student asked.

“I can get us in,” Mary said. “Before I decided to become a car mechanic, I worked as a locksmith’s apprentice for a few months. I may be able to crack whatever security they have there … but we’ll have to raid a locksmith’s place to get the tools I’ll need.”

“There’s a locksmith’s in the nearest town,” Ted said.

“Then we have to do this,” Dr. Krueger said. “Without antibiotics, even small cuts and infections could turn into death sentences here.”

“And James needs glasses,” Mary added. “Since we’re going to be raiding the town, we may as well get some glasses for him while we’re at it.”

“There’s an optometrist’s place near the locksmith,” Ted said. “We’ll get James some new glasses.”

Everyone murmured their agreement to this plan. It would be risky, but it was the only way to replace the valuable supplies William had stolen. The homesteaders decided to set off that night and took votes on who would go and who would stay. In the end, it was decided that Ted, Mary, Callum, and a handful of the strongest, most athletic students would go. They would go on bicycles since they were far easier to conceal during the day than horses would be. The plan was to leave shortly before sunset and travel through the night to get to the first town, which they would raid in the half-light of dawn so that they wouldn’t have to use any gas lamps, which would draw attention in the full darkness of night. Then they would camp stealthily in the woods during the day and set off again once night fell for the next town over, where the hospital was. After everyone had agreed to this, they ended the meeting, and everyone went back to their tasks and duties. Those who would be leaving on the raiding mission stayed behind to discuss details and strategy.

“What firepower are we taking along?” Callum asked.

“We’ll get one or two of the AR-15s out, just in case we find ourselves in a bad situation,” Ted said, “but it’ll have to be handguns, mostly, because we need to move fast and we’ll probably have to be climbing over things and getting into tight spaces.”

“And camping supplies?” Mary asked.

“It’ll have to be very minimalist, pure survivalist stuff,” Ted answered. “We can’t lug tents and thick sleeping bags around. I’ve got some ultralight gear that won’t take up much space or weigh much. There are a few small tunnel-style tents that we’ll be able to cover with leaves, making us pretty invisible in the woods during the day. As for food and water, we’ve got a ton of water purification bottles, which have the best filters money can buy; we can use ‘em to get clean, safe water even out of a muddy creek. Food, we’ll take some dried fruit, nuts, and jerky. We can’t risk cooking anything; any sort of flame will draw attention.”

“What other gear should we bring along?” one of the students asked.

“Wear camouflage clothing, of course,” Ted answered. “Gloves and tough boots, knives, a compass in case any of us get lost or separated from the group, some paracord, Zippos, and a small first aid kit. I’ll bring a hatchet and a hammer too.”

“And I’ll take my toolbelt and tools,” Mary said. “I’ll probably end up needing something out of it.”

They talked a little more and made a comprehensive list of everything everyone would need to bring. After that, they split up and agreed to meet back at the firepit in the late afternoon, with everything packed and ready to go, and their bicycles ready.

Mary took James and Ann aside to speak to them. Both of them were nervous and anxious on behalf of her, Ted and Callum, and the others who were going along on the mission. Mary did her best to reassure them that she would be safe, but she had a hard time disguising her own nervousness and trying to come across as confident. The truth was, she was just as scared and worried as the teenagers were, but she knew that there was no getting around the fact that this mission, however dangerous, simply had to be undertaken.

“Mom, are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Ann asked, looking worried.

“I’ll be fine, honey,” she said. “Don’t worry about us, your grandad knows what he’s doing, and Callum knows this area really well, as does Zane. We’ll be really cautious, and we certainly won’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“But there are going to be risks involved,” Ann said. “Look at what we had to go through before we got here to grandpa’s place. People out there are—they’re crazy and desperate.”

“I know, honey, I know, and that’s why we’re going to be extra careful. Look, I know it’s pointless to tell you not to worry about us because regardless of what I say, you’re going to worry. Just don’t worry too much, okay? And as for you, James, you just take some well-earned rest, all right? You’ve been working really hard the last few weeks, and you could use a break. We’ll get your glasses. I promise you I won’t come back until I’ve got a pair. You’ll soon be seeing the world with crystal-clear clarity again.”

“I hope so,” James said glumly. “I feel so helpless and useless now, without being able to see.”

Mary knew that this had to be hitting him hard, considering how much progress he’d made since arriving here. He probably felt that he’d been sent right back to square one now with the loss of his sight. She made a silent vow to do everything she could to get him a new pair of glasses.

The homesteaders had a hearty lunch together and ate an early dinner in the late afternoon, and everyone who was leaving to go off on the mission made sure that they ate their fill; they would need as much fuel as they could get to provide them with the energy they’d need for their long bike ride through the night.

After the early dinner, Mary, Ted, Callum, Zane, and a few other people said their farewells to their loved ones and then set off on their bicycles, riding into the woods as the sun began to set. A dark and uncertain road lay ahead of them, and Mary prayed that they would be able to traverse it without any violence or loss of life, but a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach and the tingling of her sixth sense told her that was wishful thinking and that death and darkness lay in wait for them, like a mountain lion ready to pounce.

27

The full moon provided ample illumination for their ride through the night forest, but this did not make their journey either easy or safe. Even with the bright, silver-blue moonlight shining through the treetops, the forest was gloomy, and the shadows were inky and thick. While the very real danger of wild animals was always there in the woods, the party of homesteaders was far more worried about the threat that two-legged predators presented. They rode in single file through the woods, keeping to the many mountain bike trails that crisscrossed the forest, and Callum, who had the sharpest eyesight of the group, took the lead, keeping a careful eye on the road ahead.

It was eerie and quite surreal riding through the woods at night without any sort of artificial light, and Mary felt almost as if she were in a dream or some sort of nightmare. Every sound made her jump, and every hint of movement on the periphery of her vision got her heart racing.

After two or three hours of riding, Callum held up his hand, signaling to the others to stop; he had spotted something. They all came up to a stop, as quietly as they could, and then gathered around Callum, who was peering intently through the dark forest.

“What did you see?” Ted whispered.

“Shh, look, up ahead, over there,” Callum whispered back, pointing to a spot of dark shadows downhill, maybe a hundred yards ahead.

“I don’t see anything,” Mary whispered. This, however, made her even more worried, and her heart was thumping as waves of anxious energy were rushing through her body.

“That shadow right there,” Callum said, pointing to one of the darkest patches of shadow, “isn’t a shadow. Watch closely.”

They observed the shadow for a while and saw that it was moving. Ted took a look through some binoculars and let out a soft, low whistle. “It’s a black bear, the biggest one I’ve ever seen. He’s eating something … can’t make out what. We can go on; as long as we make a wide berth around him, and don’t disturb him, we’ll be fine. Don’t ride, though; we’d better get off our bikes and push.”

They got off the bicycles and pushed them through the dark woods, giving the beer plenty of space. He paused eating and looked up since he could hear that they were near but did not make any moves since he didn’t see the humans as a threat. When they were at their closest to the bear—around sixty yards—Mary asked if she could take a look at him through the binoculars. She hadn’t seen a bear since she had been a little girl, and now that the sense of fright and fear had worn off, she was quite excited about it.

The group stopped for a minute, and Ted handed her the binoculars. Mary took a look through them and smiled as she marveled at the sight of the bear, but then, when she lowered the binoculars slightly and caught a glimpse of what he was eating, she gasped with shock.

“Oh my God,” she murmured, dialing up the focus on the binoculars to try to get a better view.

“What’s wrong?” Ted asked.

“The bear … he’s eating a person!” Mary gasped.

“My God, are you sure?!”

Mary handed her father the binoculars. “Take a look, Dad, I’m sure.”

Ted took a look through the binoculars at the bear, and from this angle, he could see that his daughter was right; the beast was eating a human being. “Oh my word,” he murmured. “She’s right…”

Callum raised his AR-15 and took aim at the bear, but Ted put his hand on the muzzle and gently lowered it. “No, don’t shoot, whoever it is that bear is eating is stone dead, and we don’t want to attract unnecessary attention by firing guns. Let’s just throw some rocks at it and scare it off.”

The party left their bikes and picked up some large stones, and approached the bear in a cautious semi-circle, closing in and throwing rocks at it until, with a growl, it reluctantly moved off. They approached the body warily, staring with horror at the corpse, which was shrouded in shadow.

“I don’t think the bear killed this person,” Ted said. “It’d be very unusual for a black bear to target a person as prey; black bears are much more timid than grizzlies. I think he was just scavenging the remains. Light up one of the gas lamps, let’s get a look at the body.”

Callum ignited a gas lamp, and the group cautiously approached the grisly remains. The corpse was that of a middle-aged man, and he was dressed only in his underwear. Aside from the fact that the bear had already devoured a good few pounds of his flesh, the most gruesome detail the light revealed was that the corpse had been decapitated.

“Oh God,” Mary gasped, gagging and coughing as she felt the bitter taste of vomit creeping up the back of her throat.

“I knew that the bear didn’t kill this guy,” Ted said grimly. “Look at his neck. Only a sharp blade could have taken his head off so cleanly. This isn’t someone who died from an animal attack. This is a murder victim. Whoever killed him must have taken his clothes and his stuff too.”

Callum gripped his AR-15 tightly and stared around him at the darkness with wide eyes, and everyone else’s hands also drifted to the grips of their firearms.

“Where the heck is his head anyway?” Callum asked.

They searched the immediate area, but there was no sign of the missing body part.

“Let’s get out of here,” Mary said. “I don’t think we should hang around here.”

Everyone agreed that it was time to move on.

“What are we gonna do about the headless John Doe?” Callum asked as they mounted up their bicycles and prepared to set off again.

“Leave him for the bear,” Ted said, sighing sadly. “It’s sad, I know, but we can’t afford to spend the rest of the night digging a grave, and at least he’ll be feeding the ecosystem here. Let’s be extra vigilant, everyone; we don’t want to get anywhere near the people who did this to him.”

They rode off in silence. Everyone was feeling on edge now after the discovery of the corpse, and the sight of it had ramped up their fears and intensified their collective anxiety. After another hour, they got to the outskirts of the town.

This was the closest any of them had been to civilization since the day of the EMP strike. While they were extremely nervous and filled with trepidation, they were also quite curious about what had become of the townsfolk and how they had been coping with life over the past few weeks.

The houses on the outskirts of the town seemed deserted; everything was shrouded in pitch-black shadows, and not a single spot of light, not even from a solitary candle, could be seen in any of the windows. The group wasn’t about to take any chances, though, and Ted and Callum told everyone to wait in the woods while they went on a scouting mission.

The others waited in tense silence for about an hour while these two went on ahead, moving with quiet stealth through the backyards and empty streets. The quiet, tension-thick minutes oozed by like hours, and the longer Callum and Ted were gone, the more Mary’s anxiety grew. Intrusive thoughts of terrible things happening to them, prompted by frequent flashbacks of the headless corpse, kept forcing their way into the forefront of her thoughts, and she struggled to stave off the panic and fear that kept clawing frantically at her innards. Eventually, though, she and the others saw two figures materializing silently from the shadows. Everyone kept their fingers on the triggers of their guns, only easing them off and letting out a collective sigh of relief when they heard Ted’s familiar voice.

“We’ve got good news and bad news,” he said, and from the tone of it, Mary guessed that the bad news was really bad.

“Let’s hear the good news first,” Mary said warily.

“Most of the town is deserted,” Callum said. “At least the places we looked. Houses have their doors hanging open, a lot of windows are smashed in. Almost no sign of life almost looks like a ghost town. Getting around without being seen shouldn’t be too much of a problem … but then there’s the bad news.”

The emphasis Callum put on the word “almost” told Mary that this word had something to do with the bad news.

“All right,” she said slowly, “so what is the bad news then?”

“We know whose body that was back in the woods,” Ted said grimly. “And it’s a sure sign that there’s someone in this ghost town. The former residents of these houses didn’t abandon them; they were either chased out of here or they met a worse fate, which I’m praying isn’t the case.”

“Whose body is it?” Mary asked, not entirely certain that she actually wanted to know the answer to this question.

“William’s,” Callum growled. “And whoever cut it off stuck it on top of a traffic light in the middle of town.”

“Oh my God,” Mary gasped.

“That’s not even the worst of it, baby girl,” Ted said. “You see, William’s decapitated head wasn’t the only one stuck on top of the traffic lights…”

28

Mary’s jaw dropped. “Are you … are you serious?” she managed to utter. Similar gasps and murmurs of shock and disbelief rippled around the group.

“I’m absolutely serious,” Ted said coolly. “Either some sort of sick serial killer is at work here, or a bunch of violent savages has taken over this town. Whichever it is has either driven everyone off or straight up killed a bunch of ‘em. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.”

“Do you think they’re still around, the people who did this?” Mary asked.

Ted nodded grimly. “We saw signs of life in the middle of town. Not any people, mind you, but sure signs that people had been here very recently: lots of smashed liquor bottles all over the streets, places where fires had been made in piles of tires, litter-strewn everywhere from looted homes and stores. I’m guessing they’re still here.”

“I didn’t see any lamps or candles or fires burning anywhere,” Callum added, “but that could just be because these monsters are sleeping. We have to assume that even though most of these houses and buildings look like they’re completely deserted, there are people—hostile people—hiding out in some of them.”

“We have to proceed with extreme caution,” Ted said. “And because of the terrible things we discovered in town, I want to change the plan up a little.”

“Change it how?” Mary asked.

“We were going to wait for the half-light of dawn to raid the locksmith’s place and the optometrists, but I say we do it now. Get in and out as fast as we can. From the look of what we found in town, they are killers are heavy drinkers. We didn’t see any lookouts or sentries, and we did have a thorough look around. I’m guessing they’re all passed out drunk, so right now would be the best time to do this.”

“You’re guessing,” Mary said, “but you don’t know that they’re all passed out. I don’t know, Dad, this sounds really risky.”

“And you don’t think it’ll be even riskier in the light of dawn when we are a lot more visible in the streets?” Ted asked.

“I know, I get your point, but the whole thing with the … with the heads on the traffic lights, it’s making me scare, Dad, real scared.”

Everyone else murmured their agreement.

“I know, baby girl, and trust me, I’m afraid too. The kind of people who’d do something so depraved and psychotic are not to be taken lightly. But the bottom line is, we have to do this; we all knew it would be a dangerous mission, but this is about the lives of everyone in our community. If we don’t find a way to get the medical supplies we lost, not to mention a new pair of glasses for James, we’re gonna be in some deep trouble down the road.”

“We’re all frightened,” Callum said, “and rightly so. What I saw in town turned my stomach and chilled the blood in my veins … but as scared as I am, I know what I have to do. Everyone in our little community depends on us pulling through with this mission.”

“I wasn’t suggesting we pull out or give up,” Mary said, feeling defensive. “I’m just saying, are you sure it’s a good idea to go in right now? Maybe we should wait a bit and scope things out a little more thoroughly, just to get a better idea of who or what we’re dealing with.”

Callum shook his head. “I don’t think so, Mary. I agree with your dad. When he and I went in, it was dead quiet, not a sign of any movement anywhere, no sounds of anyone being awake. Whoever’s in there is probably asleep. This is our best chance to get in and out without being seen. After that, we can hightail it out of here and get as far away from this place as we can, and we’ll be miles away before they even figure out we were here. If we go at dawn, and they wake up shortly afterward to find out someone was here, they might send out a party looking for us, and they’ll be hot on our heels. I really think that, as scary as it is, the best time to go in and raid the place is right now, without delay.”

“It’s the probably asleep part of this plan that I don’t like,” Mary said, “but you’re right, I guess.”

Everyone agreed that although it was a scary prospect, given what Ted and Callum had seen, it was a safer bet to go in right away and try to get done as quickly as possible. They decided that once they got into the middle of the small town, they would split up into two groups. Ted and Mary would go to the locksmith’s place, while Callum would take the others to the optometrist. On the way into town, they would pass the local pharmacy, and they decided to check it out before looking at the other two places; if by some miracle the pharmacy hadn’t been cleaned out and they could find the medicines they needed there, they wouldn’t need to go to the locksmiths and could get James’s glasses and then go straight home.

“Remember everyone,” Ted whispered as they climbed over the fence of one of the deserted houses on the outskirts of town and crept through the yard, “stealth is the key here. Make sure you’re silent and watch every footstep you take.”

They walked past the house, and when they got closer to it, they saw that many of the windows had been smashed out, and inner-city-gangster-style graffiti had been spray-painted all over the walls. There was no question now about the fact that outsiders had taken over this town … brutal, murderous outsiders. Mary swallowed a dry mouthful of fear, and flashbacks of her ordeal of escaping the city on the day of the EMP attack came rushing into her mind. She prayed that they would be able to get in and out of this cursed town without incident.

They walked through the yard, which was overgrown with weeds, like all of the yards, they soon noticed and headed onto the street. Now the bright moonlight that had been such a welcome aid to them while riding through the night forest made them feel exposed and vulnerable, and they moved quickly from shadow to shadow, using the darkness beneath the large trees that lined the street for cover.

A few vehicles had been abandoned in the streets, and many more were sitting empty in driveways or front yards. All of them had been vandalized and had had their windows and windscreens smashed in, and like most of the houses, they were covered with ugly gang graffiti. It seemed that whoever had taken over this town had indulged in an orgy of utter destruction and mayhem.

It didn’t take them long to come across the first corpses. After turning the corner at the end of the block and heading onto another street, one that took them toward the center of town, Mary noticed a grisly and tragic sight. On one of the houses’ porches, a makeshift barricade of cement bags had been hastily thrown up; it looked like the owner of the house, and his family had tried to make a stand against the thugs. The whole porch area and the cement bags were riddled with bullet holes, and three bloated corpses, already well into decay, lay in various places on the porch. All three had had their heads cut off.

“Looks like there was one hell of a fight here,” Callum whispered to Mary.

They passed an abandoned car in the middle of the street opposite the porch. The vehicle was peppered with bullet holes; the gangsters had probably used it for cover while attacking the house and its defenders.

“It’s disgusting is what it is,” Ted hissed, his jaw clenched. “I didn’t always see eye-to-eye on many issues with the residents of this town, but for the most part, they were decent, honest folk. They didn’t deserve to die like this and have these monsters take over the place like this.”

“I know,” Mary whispered. “But there’s nothing we can do for these people now. They’re all dead, and those who weren’t killed had to have fled long ago.”

They pressed on, getting deeper into the town. The closer they got to the center of the town, the worse things got. They’d seen the occasional smashed liquor bottle on the street when they’d first entered the town, but the deeper in they got, the more evidence of mindless hedonism they saw. Soon they saw hundreds of beer can and liquor bottles smashed all over the streets and sidewalks, as well as a huge mess of discarded candy wrappers and chip packets.

“Looks like these scumbags survive on nothing but candy, chips, and booze,” Callum said, shaking his head with distaste.

They crossed another street, ducked down an alley that led between two buildings, and then got onto the main street. There, the group saw the grisly sight that had clued in Ted and Callum to the identity of the headless corpse in the woods. On the traffic lights were a number of severed human heads in various stages of decay, and William’s was one of them. As much as Mary had loathed him, she now felt pity for him, that such a terrible fate as this one had befallen him.

“This is where we have to split up,” Callum said. “Meet back here in a couple minutes.”

“No messing around,” Ted said, although, with the ominous sight of the severed heads staring at them, nobody really needed to be reminded of this. “Just get in and get out, real fast. Stealth is the key here everyone, remember that. And if you see someone, do not shoot at ‘em. Hide. Keep quiet. Only use your guns if there’s no other option and it’s a life-or-death situation. One gunshot will wake up the whole gang of monsters, and then we’re going to be in some serious trouble.”

“Good luck,” Callum said to Mary and Ted, and he gave Mary a quick, tight hug.

She felt a sudden surge of affection for him as she hugged him back, and along with it, a sense of intense worry about him.

“Be safe, and get back to us alive,” she whispered, her voice cracking unexpectedly with emotion.

“You do the same,” he said, and then he and the others took off swiftly into the shadows.

Mary looked at her father and gave him a determined nod. “Let’s do this, Dad,” she said.

“In and out, real quick,” he whispered back. “Let’s go, baby girl, let’s go.”

Then the two of them took off down the ominously silent street, watched by the unwavering and unnerving stare of the heads on the traffic lights.

29

It didn’t take long for Mary and Ted to come across a living person in this dead town. Mary was about to step in front of an abandoned convenience store—the whole storefront window of which had been smashed—when Ted grabbed her arm and held her back. When she turned around, he pressed his finger to his lips, signaling to her to be quiet, and then pointed inside the store.

She followed the direction of his finger, and her heart almost stopped when she saw what he was pointing at. There, a mere six feet away from them, lying on the floor of the convenience store, surrounded by a chaotic mess of food wrappers and booze bottles, was a man. He had clearly passed out there after a night of excess and was so still that Mary wondered if he was alive or dead. When she peered in more closely, though, she saw that his chest was gently rising and falling; he was definitely alive and sleeping. He was a large, muscular man, dressed in the style of an inner-city gangster, and in his hand was a submachine gun.

Chunks of glass from the broken storefront window were strewn across the entirety of the sidewalk like pebbles on a beach. Walking across this section without making a noise would be nigh on impossible. To get past the man, they would have to walk out in the middle of the street, away from the broken glass, right out in the open without any cover.

“I don’t like having to go right out in the open like this,” Ted whispered softly, “but it’s the only way to get past him without making a noise.”

Mary nodded, and they tiptoed out into the middle of the street, past the vast spray of glass shards. They felt terribly exposed in the bright moonlight with no cover or shadows anywhere near them, but there was no other option. With their hearts in their mouths, they walked along the street, keeping their eyes on the sleeping man but also frequently checking all around them to make sure nobody else was near; if there was one man here, there would likely be others nearby.

As soon as they could, they returned to the sidewalk where, at least, there were small trees that provided shadows and cover to hide behind.

“We’re almost there,” Ted whispered to Mary. “The locksmith’s place is around the next corner,” he said, pointing up ahead.

They flitted from shadow to shadow, keeping their eyes wide open. They didn’t come across any more passed-out gangsters, but when they got to the corner, they came across something worse: voices. And while they were distant, there was no doubt that they were coming toward Mary and Ted.

Mary’s heart started pounding frenetically in her chest, and waves of hot dread and panic pulsed through her body. Ted looked back at her, and his eyes were wide with sudden fear. Despite the anxiety surging through them, they managed to keep their cool.

“Hiding place,” Ted whispered. “Find one, quick!”

Mary hastily scanned the area, trying to work out the best place to hide. A large delivery truck had been abandoned in the street around twenty yards behind them, and both of them quickly decided that the truck would be the best place to hide; the shadows under it were inky black, and it would be unlikely that anyone would think to look under it.

“The truck!” Mary whispered back.

“Yeah, under it, let’s move!” Ted whispered.

Going as fast as they could while retaining an element of stealth, they scurried back to the truck and scrambled under it. They lay there in the darkness with their hearts thumping in their chests, and their fingers on the triggers of their guns. The footsteps and voices became louder and clearer, and soon they turned down the street, Ted and Mary were on. The two of them held their breath as the people came nearer. It was clear from the staggering gait of their footsteps and the slurred nature of the voices that the men were drunk.

“Yo, where the fuck is that fool, D-Ruzz?” one of the men growled as they walked in the direction of the truck.

“He fuckin’ passed out in a sea of Cheetos again, yo,” the other said, laughing.

“Motherfucker was supposed to be guardin’ the store,” the first man growled. “I’m gon’ beat his fuckin’ ass if he passed out in it.”

“Shit man, ain’t as if there much left to guard,” the second said, and the jovial tone had left his voice. Now his tone sounded much darker. “We gon’ be all outta food soon, T-Dawg.”

“We need to eat some real fuckin’ food, too,” the first man, evidently named T-Dawg, grumbled. “We can’t keep livin’ off a’ candy an’ chips an’ shit and cans a’ spam an’ beans. I need some fuckin’ steak man, an’ fried chicken an’ burgers. Shit, I’d even eat veggies. I have been feelin’ sicker an’ sicker eatin’ all this shit we been eatin’.”

“There ain’t no real food no more,” the second man said. “It’s all rotten, all the meat an’ veggies an’ fruit an’ shit. No stores, no electricity, no fridges…”

“That’s why we need to go to that farm or whatever the fuck it is that that motherfucker we caught in the woods told us about before we cut his ugly lil’ head off,” T-Dawg growled. “They got real food there, lots a’ it, he said … an’ we can take it.”

Mary and Ted’s hearts started pounding even faster; the gangsters had to be talking about the homestead.

The second man chuckled darkly. “We beat the shit outta him, didn’t we? And got all that medicine an’ shit he was carryin’, an’ another gun an’ ammo for our army—”

“My army, motherfucker, my fuckin’ army,” T-Dawg snarled viciously. “Don’t you ever say ‘our’ again you piece a’ shit, your head end up wid’ the others on the fuckin’ traffic lights.”

“S–sorry, T-Dawg, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, it’s your army, man,” the second gangster stammered. “Anyway, it was good that we caught that weak-ass lil’ fool. You right man, we need to go to that farm. We fuckin’ used up everythin’ here, an’ we gotta get our hands on some real fuckin’ food.”

The two of them walked past the truck and headed over to the convenience store. Under the truck, Ted and Mary waited with bated breath and their hearts in their mouths, scarcely daring to even breathe.

“D-Ruzz, you fuckin’ asshole!” T-Dawg roared, kicking the sleeping man in his ribs and giving him a violent and painful wakeup. “What the fuck you doin’, man? You were supposed to be guardin’ this store! Get the fuck up!”

While T-Dawg berated the sleeping man, who was groaning and trying to apologize as he woke up, Mary and Ted shifted under the truck to try to get a better look at the gangsters. Both of them were big men, but while T-Dawg was tall and lean, the second man was obese. Both men carried M-16 assault rifles, which looked like they had been looted from army troops, probably in the wake of the urban battles the army had fought against the mysterious terrorists in black on the day of the EMP strike. In addition to his M-16, T-Dawg had army-issue grenades hanging from his belt, and a huge machete sheathed on his hip—the instrument, Mary and Ted guessed, that he had used to decapitate people.

After kicking the man around for a while and yelling at him, T-Dawg tired of this, and he and the other gangster turned around and went back the way they’d come. They walked past the delivery truck, not suspecting for a moment that two people were hiding under it. Mary and Ted had remained undetected, but now they had another problem: the formerly sleeping gangster, D-Ruzz, was now awake and sitting on a chair on the sidewalk, keeping an eye on the street. The two of them were trapped; if they came out from under the truck, there would be nowhere to hide, and at least twenty yards of open space with no cover, illuminated by bright moonlight, stood between them and the corner of the street.

“What are we gonna do?” Mary whispered. “If we move, he’s gonna see us.”

“Let’s give it a few minutes,” Ted suggested. “Maybe he’ll decide it’s safe to go back to sleep. Right now, I’m a lot more worried about the fact that these sons of bitches not only know about the homestead but are intending to attack us. We have to abandon the hospital mission and get back and prepare defenses.”

“I know, but none of that is gonna matter if we don’t get out of this town alive tonight,” Mary whispered back.

“I’m thinking, baby girl, I’m thinking, give me a minute…”

They observed D-Ruzz closely as they tried to come up with a solution to their predicament. He was muttering under his breath, probably cursing T-Dawg for the rude awakening and beating he’d just received and pacing slowly up and down in front of the convenience store, his submachine gun in his hands. Every now and then he would stop and peer up and down the street.

“It looks like he’s got a bit of a routine there,” Ted whispered. “His movements are quite regular. See there, he takes about ten slow steps in one direction, then waits there for a while, looking up and down the street, then he comes back in the opposite direction and does the same.”

“You think that we should make a break for it when he turns and walks in the direction away from us, right?” Mary asked.

“Yeah, that’s about the only thing we can do, I think,” Ted said.

It was risky, but they had no other choice. It didn’t look like D-Ruzz was planning on going back to sleep any time soon, and they couldn’t sit and wait under the truck all night. It would have been easy for Ted to line up the gangster in the sights of his AR-15 and take him out, but they knew that even a single gunshot would trigger a battle, and they had no idea how many enemies they would have to face … and from the fact that T-Dawg had mentioned an army, they were both sure the number of enemies would be significant.

“Okay,” Ted said, “next time he walks in the opposite direction, we’ll get out from under the truck. You hide by the rear wheel; I’ll hide by the front wheel. We’ll wait for him to come back and look around, and then the moment he turns around and starts walking back that way again, we make a quick break and get around the corner. I just pray that there aren’t any more of these goons keeping watch on the next street.”

“All right, I’m ready for this,” Mary said.

They watched as D-Ruzz walked in their direction, and their muscles were taut and ready to spring into action. He stopped in his usual spot near the end of the convenience store and peered up and down the street with a bored, weary expression on his scarred face. Then he turned around to walk the other way, and Ted and Mary knew they had to move.

They scrambled out from under the truck and pressed themselves against the side, crouching behind the wheels to prevent D-Ruzz from noticing the silhouette of their legs. Ted peered through the driver’s window, from where he could get a look at the gangster. It was risky, as part of his head would be silhouetted, but he had to see what was going on.

D-Ruzz, looking as bored as ever, ambled along the sidewalk, reached his usual spot by the far end of the convenience store, stood there a while looking around, and then came back toward the truck.

“All right, he’s coming back this way,” Ted whispered. “Get ready to move, baby girl. Stay crouched low and keep your footsteps quick and light.” He watched as D-Ruzz reached his spot and paused to look around. “Get ready, get ready,” he whispered. “Okay, three, two … one, go!”

Mary didn’t look behind her at the gangster; with her pulse racing and her heart drumming a violent beat in her ears and temples, she took off at a quick, nimble run, doing her best to make her footfalls silent. The distance was only a short dash, but it felt as if she was sprinting the entire length of a football field, and it seemed to take forever to get from the truck to the corner. What was more, as silently as she was trying to run, she felt as if every footfall was a gunshot going off in the quiet night.

Nonetheless, no actual gunshot or shout of alarm rang out behind her, and before she knew it, she had rounded the corner and had her back pressed against the wall of the store there. Ted followed right behind her and pushed his back against the wall. For a few moments, the two of them simply stood there, each hardly daring to breathe. They both half-expected D-Ruzz to suddenly charge around the corner with his gun blazing, but after around a minute, when there was no sign that they’d been spotted, they were able to let out a sigh of relief.

“We made it, Dad,” Mary whispered. Her heart was still pounding, but now she was charged up on adrenalin.

“We did, baby girl, but we’re nowhere near safe yet. We don’t know how many more of these goons are around here, lurking in the shadows. I hope that Callum and the others haven’t—and don’t—run into any of these scumbags either.”

“Well, let’s not linger here,” Mary said. “Which way is the locksmith? I know we have to turn around and go back home to prepare defenses, but we might as well get the tools I need while we’re here.”

“It’s just across the street,” Ted said, pointing at a store halfway down the street. “Yeah, we may as well look, it’s not as if we can go back the way we came anyway. We’ll have to take a detour around through a few of these back streets to get to the meeting spot. I just hope we don’t run into any more of these people. Keep your eyes and ears open.”

“Don’t worry, Dad, after that, all my senses are on full alert.”

They scampered across the street, moving between the cover of various shadows and racing through patches of moonlight as quickly as they could. There was no sign of T-Dawg and his friend, who had gone down this street, or any other gangsters. Both Mary and Ted knew that enemies could appear at any moment, though, so they were both vigilant.

Almost all of the stores along this street had had their storefront windows smashed out, and their doors kicked in, and everything that was of any value had been looted. They passed a liquor store and saw that it had been completely cleaned out; not a single bottle of anything was left on the shelves.

Ted shook his head. “They’ve drunk the place dry. You have to wonder if they even know what water is, or whether they’ve just been surviving off of booze.”

The next store they passed was a small fishing and hunting store.

“Should we check if there are any guns or ammo left in there?” Mary asked.

Ted frowned. “I highly doubt there’s any guns or ammo, but there might be something that these clowns left because they don’t know how to use it. Let’s have a quick look inside.”

The angle of the moon meant that a lot of bright moonlight was streaming into the store through the smashed-out storefront, so it was possible to get in and have a look inside without taking out a Zippo or lighting up a gas lamp. Mary and Ted crept into the store and walked cautiously through it, taking care not to step on broken glass or anything else that would make a sound.

As Ted had predicted, there was not a single rifle left on the racks, and the ammo drawers had all been cleaned out. There was plenty of fishing gear left in the store, though, and a lot of camping and outdoor stuff.

“The idiots are complaining that they don’t have any fresh meat,” Ted muttered with a scowl, “but there’s plenty of fish in the river and everything you need to catch your fill in here. They’d rather just take what we’ve worked so hard to raise and grow. Scumbags, absolute scumbags. I knew that this is what people would do in this kind of situation, I knew it.” Muttering to himself about the evil nature of people, Ted moved to the darkness in the back of the store, seeing if there was anything useful back there.

A gentle breeze blew in through the smashed-out storefront, scattering a bunch of paper notes that were strewn across the floor. The wind blew one of them onto Mary’s boot. She bent down and picked it up, and when she held it up in the light, a strange, sad smile came across her face, for the paper was a $100 bill. She looked down and saw that there were dozens, perhaps even a hundred of them strewn across the floor.

“I wonder if this will ever be worth anything again?” she whispered, staring at the crisp bill, almost mesmerized by the sight of it. “A few weeks ago, people were killing each other over this, but now it’s nothing but scrap paper.”

“Yo!” a new voice, deep and raspy, suddenly snarled from just outside the store. “Don’t fuckin’ move, bitch. Don’t even fuckin’ breathe! Drop the gun and put your fuckin’ hands where I can see em!”

30

Mary’s heart jumped into her mouth, and her blood turned to ice in her veins. She looked up and saw D-Ruzz standing outside the store, aiming his submachine gun at her.

“I knew I wasn’t trippin’. I knew I heard someone runnin’ up the street back there,” he growled. “Drop that piece in your hand now, bitch, or your pretty lil’ head gonna end up wid’ the others on the lights. I ain’t sayin’ it again. Now.”

Mary dropped her pistol onto the floor and raised her hands above her head. Her only hope now was that her father, who D-Ruzz had not yet seen, would be able to help her without waking up the entire town with gunfire.

“Mm, you a sexy lil’ one, ain’t you?” D-Ruzz said as he walked into the store, his gun aimed at Mary’s chest. He smiled lasciviously at her and licked his lips. “T-Dawg’s gon’ want you for himself, but I’m gon’ take you for a ride first. Come here girl, let me—”

A thrumming sound came from the back of the store, and something whizzed past Mary’s face. D-Ruzz’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, and his gun dropped from his suddenly limp hands. He took one step backward, and then collapsed, falling with a loud crash to the floor. In the moonlight, Mary saw that there was an arrow protruding from his forehead.

Ted stepped out of the shadows, holding the compound bow he’d been examining when D-Ruzz had interrupted them. “Good thing none of those assholes thought to take the archery equipment, huh? I knew all that target practice with my bow back home would pay off one day. Come on, let’s move. I’m gonna take this with me, though, in case we need to make any more silent kills.”

“And I’m gonna take this,” Mary said, holstering her pistol and picking up the dead thug’s MP5 submachine gun, “in case we need to make some not-so-silent kills.”

Just then, Mary noticed something on the floor near the counter, among a strewn set of someone’s personal belongings, probably the store owner’s. She walked over to it and saw that it was, as she had suspected, a glasses case. She opened it up and examined the glasses within and noted that they were remarkably similar to James’s original glasses that he had lost in the river. She closed the glasses case and slipped it into a side pocket of her backpack.

“Let’s go,” Ted said, stepping over D-Ruzz’s corpse.

They moved cautiously out into the street and scanned it thoroughly for threats. Thankfully, it seemed that D-Ruzz hadn’t alerted any of his companions. The locksmith’s place was a few doors down. Because it was on the opposite side of the street, no moonlight shone in through the broken-down door, and Mary knew that she would have to use her Zippo to explore the store and find the tools she needed.

“I’ll stand guard by the door while you check the place out,” Ted said. “I hope this light doesn’t attract any unwanted attention. Try to be as quick as you can, baby girl.”

Mary didn’t need to be told twice; her nerves were already on edge after what had just happened, and she kept having flashbacks of the severed heads on the traffic lights. She crept into the store, lit up her Zippo, and made a beeline for the desk behind the counter, where she knew most locksmiths would keep their lockpicking tools.

The place had been looted, like everywhere else, but the thugs didn’t really have much use for locks, so they hadn’t taken much from here, they had simply engaged in a riot of destruction and vandalism. Mary sifted through the debris and smashed-up goods, and eventually found some drawers behind the counter. They had all been forced open with a crowbar, but the thieves had found nothing but tools in them, and since none of them knew what the tools were or how to use them, they had simply left them there. Mary saw that everything she needed was there, and she whispered a silent prayer of thanks and then put the tools in her backpack.

She closed the Zippo, plunging the store into darkness, and then hurried to the door.

“Come on, Dad, I’ve got what I need, let’s go,” she whispered.

“We can go back the way we came since that goon isn’t there anymore,” Ted said. “The others should be at the meeting spot now, too, so we can get the hell out of this damn place.”

They checked the street, then hurried out, and ran swiftly but stealthily back the way they’d come. As they passed the looted convenience store where they’d first seen D-Ruzz, a notion popped into Mary’s head.

“Dad, hold on,” she said. “I think we should check this store quickly.”

“What for? It’s been thoroughly looted, there’s probably nothing but junk left in it.”

“Why would they have someone guarding it then?” she asked. “There must be something worth protecting in it. Maybe they’re keeping the medicine they took from William in here, and some other valuable stuff.”

Ted scratched his chin. “You have a point, baby girl. Let’s have a quick look. You go in, I’ll keep watch out here.”

Mary stepped into the store and walked around it, shaking her head at the state of the place. It looked like a hurricane had hit it; there was barely a square inch of the floor that was visible due to the trash-strewn everywhere. There were a few bags of chips, cans of spam, and chocolate bars left on some of the shelves, but Mary was sure that there had to be something more valuable than a few items of junk food in here.

“Come on, D-Ruzz, what were you guarding in here?” she whispered as she explored the store.

There was cash lying around everywhere, as there had been in the hunting goods store, but she was sure that the $100 bills weren’t what D-Ruzz had been protecting. Finally, she got to the back of the store, where there was an ice-cream freezer. She peered into it and grinned. “Jackpot,” she whispered.

The freezer, which was broken, like everything electronic, was crammed to the brim with medicines and medical supplies of all sorts, and Mary recognized the most recent additions to the stash: they were the exact medicines she had seen in the homestead’s medical trailer—the medicine William had stolen.

“Dad, get in here, quick!” she said.

Ted raced in with his rifle at the ready, expecting some sort of trouble. However, when the moonlight revealed the look on his daughter’s face, he lowered the weapon.

“Open your backpack, hurry,” she said. She had already stuffed half her backpack full of medicine and supplies.

“My God,” he gasped when he saw what was in the ice cream freezer. “It’s all our medical supplies, and more!”

“Hurry, Dad, fill your backpack!”

Both of them got busy filling their backpacks up, and soon they’d managed to clean out most of the supplies in the freezer.

“We’d better get back to the meeting point,” Ted said, “before the others think something happened to us. Good thing you decided to look in this place, baby girl; you saved us all!”

With their spirits high and their mood now buoyant, the two of them walked out of the convenience store. Just as they stepped out onto the street, though, they saw a curious and disturbing sight. A block away, a firework rocket streaked up into the night sky, hissing and spitting out sparks as it raced upwards. Then it burst above them in a dazzling shower of pink arcs of light, and the boom of its explosion resounded across the dark, silent town.

“What on earth is going on?” Mary gasped, staring in both awe and horror at the lights in the sky.

Then gunfire broke out, and more firework rockets were fired into the air. From all over the town, shouts of rage and roars of aggression started to sound.

“Oh shit,” Ted murmured. “They’re signals, to wake up the army! We’ve been discovered! Run!”

31

Mary and Ted raced down the street, running at full tilt. There was no point in trying to be stealthy now; all they could do was try to survive and get out of town alive. A great roar was resounding through the town; T-Dawg hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said he had an army, it seemed. From the sound of the many roaring, howling voices, Ted guessed that there were at least a hundred people, maybe even more. If they didn’t get out immediately, they would certainly all be slaughtered.

He and Mary veered around a corner, only to find two armed men rushing out of one of the smashed-up stores. No words or threats were exchanged; the men, both burly, scarred street thugs, immediately raised their guns and started shooting. Mary dove behind an abandoned car, while Ted flung himself flat onto the ground and returned fire.

The thugs’ many bullets were poorly aimed, and they slammed into the car, smashing out its windows and punching holes through the doors, but Ted only needed two shots; each one snapped a man’s head back and made his body flop into a dead heap on the ground.

“Got the bastards, let’s move!” he yelled, scrambling to his feet.

He and Mary raced onward, while the sounds of shouting and yelling and stomping boots grew louder and more frantic behind them. It seemed like enemy men were crawling out from everywhere; the whole town was full of them.

“You’re dead, motherfuckers!” a gangster yelled, bursting suddenly from a graffiti-covered house to their right, an M-16 in his hands. He unleashed a burst of fully-automatic fire that kicked up spurts of dust around Mary’s feet and hammered the wall behind her, showering her with masonry dust, but adrenalin was surging through her veins, and instead of panicking she returned fire with the MP5 she’d taken from D-Ruzz, putting a short burst of rounds into his torso and dropping him instantly.

“We have to get into the woods!” Ted said. “The longer we stay on these streets, the slimmer our chances of survival are! This way!”

He jumped over a graffitied picket fence in front of one of the houses and sprinted through the yard. A gangster with a shotgun popped out of one of the broken windows and blasted a shot at Ted, which missed him by mere inches and took a football-sized chunk out of the fence next to him. But Ted was quick to return fire before his adversary could squeeze off another shot, and he slammed a few AR-15 rounds into the man’s chest. The gangster staggered backward into the house and collapsed, but Ted didn’t bother to wait and see if he was dead; there was no time for that. He just kept running, with Mary following hot on his heels.

They jumped the fence at the back, shot another gangster who ran at them with an Uzi in his hand, and then, after dashing across the backyard, they got into the woods. Sporadic bursts of gunfire could be heard nearby; it seemed that the other group of homesteaders was fighting a running battle as they too tried to escape the town.

“This way,” Ted said, racing through the trees. “From the ridge up there, we can lay down some cover fire for ‘em.”

Mary sprinted along behind him, charged up on adrenalin. After a minute or two of running, they got up onto the ridge, which looked down over the west section of town. They saw Callum, alone, running down one of the streets, pursued by a mob of over a dozen gangsters, with whom he was exchanging fire.

“Give ‘em hell, baby girl, give ‘em hell!” Ted said, taking aim at the gangsters.

He and Mary started shooting, picking off targets from their position of cover. The gangsters, unaware where this sudden attack was coming from, scattered in panic and tried to take cover themselves. This gave Callum a small window of opportunity to escape, and while Mary and Ted continued to rain down a storm of bullets on the gangsters, the homesteaders charged through one of the deserted houses’ yards, scrambled over a fence, raced through another yard and then got into the woods.

“Callum, up here!” Mary yelled. Her MP5 was out of ammo, and since she hadn’t taken any ammo from D-Ruzz, all she could do now was discard the weapon and draw her pistol.

Callum, breathing hard, his eyes wide with fear, raced up to meet them on the ridge.

“Where are the others?!” Ted asked. “Dammit, I’m outta ammo!”

“Nathan and Evander got shot, killed,” Callum gasped, panting and shaking. “Bruce, though, I don’t know, he was right behind me until a minute ago, then … I don’t know, I just don’t know…”

“Dammit, shit, dammit!” Ted cursed. Still, before he could begin to think about this, he had to make sure the three of them survived the next few minutes. “Move, before they figure out our position!” he said.

He led them on a high-speed race through the woods, zigzagging and slaloming through the trees, until, after five minutes, they got to another ridge, which was deeper into the woods but which still commanded a good view over a large portion of the town. They stopped here, and Ted took a look through his binoculars to see if he could see any sign of Bruce or the others who Callum had said had been shot.

He didn’t need to look for very long. One of the largest houses in the neighborhood had a big, flat deck as part of the roof, and T-Dawg and some of his men walked out onto it. Two of the men were carrying corpses, slung over their shoulders like sacks of potatoes. One was Nathan’s, and the other was Evander’s. What was far more alarming, though, was that T-Dawg had Bruce with him, and while the student was still alive, he was badly wounded and was bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound in his stomach, and only seemed to be half-conscious.

“Yo, farmers!” T-Dawg roared in the woods. “I know y’all are out there, and I know y’all can hear and see me! I got your boy here! Come out and show yourselves, and maybe I’ll let this scrawny motherfucker live!”

“Dad, what do we do?” Mary whispered.

“I know y’all can hear me!” T-Dawg roared. “Where the fuck y’all at? Show yourselves, come down here and face me like men! Y’all wanna fuck with us, come down here and fuck with us!”

“If we reveal our position now, we’re all dead,” Ted whispered back. “And we’re out of range to make any sort of accurate shot with our pistols. There’s … there’s nothing we can do.”

“All right, you chicken shit motherfuckers, y’all wanna hide like this, huh?” T-Dawg snarled. “Lemme show you what happens to people who fuck with me! Lemme show y’all!”

He drew his machete and gave his men a nod. They grinned and threw the dead bodies of Nathan and Evander down. Then they grabbed the corpses’ hair and pulled up their torsos. With two swifts, brutal swipes of his machete, T-Dawg separated their heads from their bodies. The gangsters on the roof and in the streets around the house cheered and howled with vicious bloodlust. T-Dawg laughed and grabbed each severed head and tossed each one into the crowd.

“Where the fuck are y’all?!” T-Dawg roared, pacing back and forth and staring up at the woods. “I know y’all saw that shit! Last chance to come out now, motherfuckers, or your boy’s head is gon’ be next!”

“Dad, they’re gonna, they’re gonna…” Mary whimpered, scarcely able to believe what she was seeing.

“We have to go,” Ted said softly, his voice bitter with sadness and crushing defeat. “Don’t watch what happens next … we have to go.”

Mary took one last look at T-Dawg and Bruce, who was being held by two of the gangsters. One of them gripped Bruce’s hair, yanking his lolling head up so that T-Dawg could look him in the eye before he killed him. Upon the ridge, Callum reached over and gripped Mary’s hand, squeezing it tightly and sobbing as he wept.

T-Dawg howled out an inhuman roar and slashed with his machete. And in the woods, Ted, Mary and Callum ran.

32

They cycled back to the homestead without sleep, riding through the dawn and the morning stopping only for short rest and food breaks. While they were stopped, nobody spoke; the pain of the loss of the others was still too sharp and acute. Finally, they made it back to the homestead in the afternoon.

If the fact that they had arrived back days early didn’t clue the rest of the homesteaders into the fact that something had gone badly wrong, the looks on their faces certainly did. Mary, Ted, and Callum all looked haggard and pale, and all wore deep expressions of pain and anguish.

“Mom, what’s wrong?” Ann asked, running to meet them when they rode wearily into the center of the homestead, by the firepit.

“Where’s everyone else?” Dr. Krueger asked, shuffling out of his trailer with a worried expression on his face.

Ted shook his head, and when he spoke, his voice cracked with emotion, and tears rimmed his eyes. “They’re … dead. Killed. Shot.”

“Mom!” Ann gasped, throwing her arms around Mary. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“I’m okay, sweetie, I’m okay,” Mary gasped, her voice also choked with raw emotion, hugging her daughter tightly.

“The town’s been taken over by a gang,” Callum muttered grimly. “We got our medicine back, but we paid the ultimate price for it. Nathan, Evander, and Bruce paid for it … with their lives.”

Cries and gasps of shock, horror, and grief erupted from the gathering crowd of homesteaders. Those who had been close to the three who had died broke down and wept, and others also struck with grief, did their best to comfort them while sobbing and weeping themselves.

Mary also broke down and wept, collapsing into her daughter’s arms. James, who could barely see anything, was helped over to Mary and Ann by another homesteader.

“I found … some glasses … for you, James,” Mary managed to gasp through her tears. She disengaged from her hug with Ann and dried her eyes. Still choking down tight sobs, she took off her backpack and took out the glasses she’d found.

James took them from her with trembling hands. “Thanks, Aunt Mary,” he said glumly. Even when he put them on and could finally see clearly again, this was not enough to lift his morose mood. “This is all my fault,” he muttered, his shoulders slumping and his head hanging low. “If you hadn’t left this place to go find some glasses for me, Nathan, Evander, and Bruce would still be alive.”

“No, no, James,” Mary said, taking him firmly by the shoulders and forcing him to look her in the eye. “It’s not your fault. Not at all, do you understand me? If anyone’s to blame, it’s William. He stole our medical supplies and deserted us, and regardless of the situation with your glasses, we had to go out and get those back. Without them, a lot more people would have died unnecessarily. It’s not your fault at all, James, not even a tiny bit.”

“I just wish I wasn’t so useless,” James murmured.

“Honey, you’re not useless, not at all,” Mary said, more gently now. “Don’t ever think that. Look at all the work you’ve done on the homestead in the last few weeks. Do you know how impressed Ted is with you? Come on, sweetie, don’t talk like that. And now that you’re able to see well again, you’ll be even more helpful and productive than ever, right?”

James only seemed half-convinced, but he nodded, nonetheless.

“Everyone, I’m sorry to be the bearer of even more bad news,” Ted said grimly after he had given everyone a few minutes to grieve and deal with the impact of the death of the three homesteaders. “But the deaths of our three friends are only the start of this.”

“What do you mean?” Dr. Krueger asked. “How can things possibly get worse? We got the medical supplies back, and may God rest the souls of those who died getting them, but you three are here, alive and well. What else is wrong?”

“What’s wrong,” Ted said coolly, “is that William’s damage didn’t stop at stealing our medical supplies and forcing us out there to get them back. He was captured by the same scumbags who have taken over the town, and before they killed him, they got information out of him. Information that will lead them here.”

More gasps of shock rippled through the crowd.

“Ted’s right,” Callum said grimly. “And believe me when I say that this is a danger that threatens not only our property and lifestyle but our very lives—the lives of every person here.”

“They’ve got an army,” Ted said. “An army of bloodthirsty killers, gang bangers from the city who have survived the apocalypse there because they were the toughest and most ruthless sons of bitches around. When they took over the town, they massacred the population there. They’ve committed acts of … unspeakable cruelty. I don’t even want to begin to describe what we saw there. But the bottom line is, they’ve burned up all the resources there, and they’re living off the last few scraps of junk food left in the stores they’ve looted. And like a plague of locusts, when they’ve burned through everything there, they’ll be looking for the next place to ravage. And we heard what they said. They know about this place, and they know that there’s food here. They’ve got a lot of guns, and they don’t bat an eye at killing and mutilating people to get what they want.”

“What are you trying to say, grandpa?” Ann asked, her face twisted into an expression of fear and alarm.

“What I’m trying to say, Ann,” he said, sighing and shaking his head, “is that we’re going to have to prepare for a battle.”

“A fight? Against people like that?” Dr. Krueger gasped. “Look, Ted, we all know how to shoot straight, and we’ve all hunted deer, but even so, going hunting or shooting at a paper target, and trying to pull the trigger on a man who’s doing his best to kill you, they’re vastly different things, things that I don’t think many of us are psychologically capable of doing.”

“I didn’t think I had it in me to shoot a man,” Mary said, “but when your life is threatened, and pure instinct takes over, you’d be surprised what you’re capable of.”

“And believe me when I say our lives are at stake,” Ted said darkly. “The leader of this gang of murderers is a psychotic warlord who calls himself ‘T-Dawg,’ and he has a penchant for chopping people’s heads off with a machete. He’s not the kind of man you can reason or negotiate with, trust me on this.”

“There must be some solution to this beside war,” Dr. Krueger said, shaking his head and wringing his hands. “I’ve seen war, I spent my life around war and its victims, and it’s something I never wanted to see again, especially not out here, in this little slice of paradise.”

“Doc,” Ted said, “I wish that peace could be an option here, but judging from what we saw in the town, there’s not a chance in hell that there’s going to be a peaceful resolution to what’s coming.” He turned to address everyone, raising his voice so that they could all hear him. “I want everyone to listen up!” he said. “From this point on, everyone is to carry their firearms with them at all times, with as much extra ammunition as you can manage! I don’t like this any more than any of you do, but this the bottom line: whether we want it or not, war is coming to this place! All we can do from this point on is be prepared … and pray that we’re able to survive the hell-storm of a battle that’s coming…”

33

The war came to the homestead sooner than anyone had hoped it would. At dusk, two days after Mary, Ted, and Callum had returned from their ill-fated mission, the homesteaders were all returning to their homes after a day of hard work in the fields and orchards when a dirt bike came tearing into the center of the homestead at breakneck speed.

The young student who was on it skidded to a halt near the firepit and dropped the still-running bike on its side in his haste to get off and communicate his message of alarm. “They’re here!” he yelled desperately. “The gangsters are here!”

Ted and Callum ran over to the young man, who had been on sentry duty near the river.

“What’s going on, Kenny?” Ted asked. “Slow down, tell us what’s happened.”

“The gangsters, the arm– they– they’re across the river,” Kenny gasped breathlessly. “They’re all there, maybe, maybe a hundred of ‘em, armed to the teeth.”

“My God,” Ted murmured. “Did they try to get across? Did they see you?”

“They saw me, yeah,” Kenny said. His eyes were wide with alarm. “And they gave me a message to give you. The leader, that T-Dawg guy, I guess, he said he wants to talk to our leader, man to man.”

Ted nodded slowly. “I see. They didn’t try to shoot at you or anything?”

Kenny shook his head. “No, they want to talk. Like I said, they all had guns, a lot of ‘em. They could easily have shot me if they wanted.”

“I guess I’d better go see what they want,” Ted muttered. “And I’ll bet it isn’t something we’re willing to give ‘em. Even so, talking will buy us some precious time. Callum, you need to get everyone ready for an attack while I’m gone. Get some makeshift barricades set up and saddle up the horses and get the other dirt bikes, the truck, and the Hummer fueled up in case we have to flee. I’m guessing that this is some sort of trap … but if it’ll buy the rest of you some time to escape with your lives. I’m willing to put my life on the line. Callum, where’s Mary?”

“She’s with Ann in the kitchen, I think,” Callum answered.

Ted gave him a nod. “I’ll go let her know what’s happening before I go.”

He headed over to the kitchen, where he found Ann and Mary helping to prepare the evening’s dinner.

“Baby girl,” he said softly, “they’re here.”

Mary had had a smile on her face and had been laughing and joking with her daughter. When Ted came in and said this, though, her face fell, and her smile faded, replaced with a deep frown and a look of intense concern. She knew exactly who “they” were, and what these four simple words meant. Ted didn’t have to say anything else; Mary ran over to him and threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly. Ann walked over to them and also put her arms around the two of them, for she too knew what this meant. For a while, the three of them just held each other tightly in silence.

Eventually, Mary spoke. “Do we fight, or do we run?” she murmured.

“I don’t know,” Ted said. “I’m going to speak to them now.”

“Speak to them?” Mary gasped. “Dad, are you crazy?! They don’t want to speak! You’ll get killed!”

“They sent Kenny with a message that they want to talk to me,” Ted said. “Believe me, baby girl, I know that their intentions are not good, but if anything, this will buy a little time for the rest of you to get ready. As for whether you should run or fight, well, I’m prepared to die fighting here. This land is my life, it’s what I’ve put everything into for the past few decades, and I’ll die defending it. As for whether anyone else should make that choice, that’s up to them. But for now, I’m going to put my life on the line to buy the rest of you some time.”

“Isn’t there another way, grandpa?” Ann asked, on the verge of tears. “Do you have to do this? Do you have to go?”

“There’s no other way, Ann,” he said, giving her one more hug, and when he stepped back from her, tears rimmed his eyes. “Now you two, you need to get ready. I have to go.”

Without saying another word, he turned and walked out. He told Kenny to get back on the bike and accompany him to the river. “You hang back. Stay where they can’t take a shot at you,” he told Kenny as he kickstarted his own dirt bike. “If they shoot me, come straight back here and tell everyone what happened. Callum and Mary will be in charge if I don’t make it.”

He and Kenny rode their dirt bikes down to the river, and the closer they got, the more fear began to well up within both of them. Neither said anything nor slowed down, though, for they were committed to seeing this grim task through, approaching the invaders with courage in their hearts.

When they got to the top of the ridge in the woods that looked down over the river, Ted caught his first glimpse of the horde. There were, as Kenny had said, over a hundred of them, and T-Dawg was at the head of the army, standing right on the water’s edge. From here, Ted could easily have taken a shot with his rifle and blown and a hole right through T-Dawg’s skull, and for a moment or two, he was sorely tempted to do this but realized that as satisfying as it would be, it would surely prompt an immediate invasion.

“Stay here, and keep your bike running,” Ted said to Kenny. “If I get shot, you turn and get back to warn the others as fast as you can ride.”

“Okay, Ted,” Kenny said nervously.

Ted left him on the ridge and rode his bike down the dirt track that led to the river’s edge. When he got to within a few yards of the water, he dismounted, killed the motor, and walked up to the water’s edge, staring coolly across the river at T-Dawg and his army.

The gangster gave Ted a mocking smirk and muttered something to his followers that had them hooting and howling with derisive laughter. Ted ignored this and addressed T-Dawg directly. “What do you want here?” he demanded. “You sent my man to bring me here to talk, so here I am. Open your mouth and talk.”

“Yo farmer,” T-Dawg said, folding his muscular arms defiantly across his chest. “I got a business proposal for ya.”

“Go on.”

“See, y’all got a lot of good food on your farm there,” T-Dawg said. “Your boy wid’ the glasses told us all about it. And all that good food y’all got there, well, we be fuckin’ needin’ it. But I’m a fair man, see, and I don’t want to work on no fuckin’ farm, diggin’ dirt all day and walkin’ around in pig shit. Me and my boys, we don’t wanna take yo’ farm. We just want to make a deal wid’ you.”

“I don’t see what sort of agreement you and I could possibly come to,” Ted said coldly. “But go on, put it on the table, I’ll hear you out.”

“Give us two-thirds of your food every week, and you get to keep the rest and stay on yo’ farm,” T-Dawg said.

“And what do we get out of this arrangement?” Ted asked.

T-Dawg chuckled darkly and flashed him an evil smirk. “Not dyin’, and not gettin’ yo’ redneck heads chopped off and tossed in this fuckin’ river is what y’all get.” A rumble of aggressive emphasis came from the men gathered behind him when he said this. “That’s what you get, motherfucker. You understand what I’m sayin’, man? Look behind me. There are over a hundred of us. We all got guns and ammo, and we hungry and pissed off. If we want to, we could kill every last one a’ you farmers before the sun rises tomorrow. You know that, and I know that. Your boy told us exactly how many of you are on the farm, so don’t bother wid’ tryin’ to bullshit me about numbers. I’d prefer to keep y’all alive, though, so y’all can give us food, see? But make no mistake, you old-ass country hick, if you turn down my offer there ain’t gonna be another one. You take my offer, or you all die.”

“I see,” Ted said calmly. “And how long do I have to give you our decision on this?”

“I’m a generous man, yo,” T-Dawg said, grinning savagely. “We’ll be back here at sunset tomorrow. If you farmers ain’t here by the water with some crates of food for us then, we’re coming across the river. And when we come across, bitch, we ain’t stoppin’ until every last one a’ y’all rednecks is fuckin’ dead.”

“You’ll have your answer tomorrow at sunset then,” Ted said. Without saying another word, he turned around, got back on the dirt bike, kicked the motor to life, and then rode up the ridge, to where Kenny was anxiously waiting.

“What did they say?” Kenny asked. From his position, he had been out of earshot of the exchange that had taken place.

“I’ll tell you and everyone else when we get back,” Ted said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

They rode back to the homestead, where news of what had transpired had gotten around. Everyone was waiting anxiously near the firepit for Ted’s return, and Mary, James, and Ann were overcome with relief when they heard the familiar sound of his dirt bike motor and saw him and Kenny come riding toward them.

After hugging a few people and assuring them he was okay, Ted got up onto a table to address the homesteaders. He relayed T-Dawg’s offer to them in stark terms. He had personally decided, the moment the offer had left the gangster’s lips, that there was no way in hell he would be handing over even a single carrot or apple to the criminals. Still, he knew that although he was the leader here and owned most of this land, that this was a democracy, and that everyone had the right to have their own say about how the homestead as a whole should respond to the offer.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t take too long for a heated discussion to break out. Many of the homesteaders were relieved that the gangsters had made any offer at all, instead of simply crossing the river and attacking the homestead without warning. This group, led by Dr. Krueger, believed that a diplomatic solution was the best option, and if giving up two-thirds of their food to the gangsters would avoid any further violence and loss of life, they were happy to do this.

Ted, however, made it clear from the outset that he wasn’t willing to hand over a single ounce of food that he and the homesteaders had worked so hard to produce. The two groups, which were split quite evenly in terms of numbers, debated the issue for quite some time. Tensions were running high, and even though everyone was doing their best not to let their tempers get too heated, things got close to blowing up into a full-on argument on several occasions.

“I can’t believe you’re choosing war, violence, and death when there’s a peaceful option on the table!” Dr. Krueger yelled at Ted. “I know how hard we’ve all worked to produce this food because, believe me, I’ve been digging and harvesting right there alongside all of you. I know how much it’s going to hurt to hand so much of it over to these violent thugs, and how horrid it’s going to be for us on nearly starvation rations, but nobody has to get killed this way! If those people invade, sure, we might take a few of ‘em out, but so many of us will die too! I can’t believe that choosing to fight them—which, I might add, is absolutely suicidal and crazy—is an option that anyone is considering! It’s madness, pure madness!”

“I know why you’re saying that Dr. Krueger,” Ted said, his jaw clenched tight as he did his best to keep his mounting anger in check, “but you do not see the bigger picture here. If we hand over most of our food, we get weaker, a lot weaker. We have to drastically cut down our own rations, and that means we can’t work as hard. And that means we can’t grow as many crops. If we give in to those monsters, we’re all going to die anyway! They’ll slowly starve us to death, sucking us dry like the parasites they are! And what do you think they’ll do when we’re no longer able to produce enough food for their unstable demands? They’ll come in here and kill us anyway! There’s no way that this is a sustainable option. Both choices give us death and killing, Doc. Can’t you see that? One way is just a lot slower and more agonizing and humiliating for us than the other, but the outcome of both choices is ultimately the same, give or take a few months.”

Dr. Krueger opened his mouth to respond, but no words came out. Instead, he simply stood there with his mouth hanging open for a few seconds, and then, finally, he slowly closed it.

“No matter where I go, I can’t escape war,” he finally murmured, staring sadly at the ground. “I had hoped this was the place I’d finally never see war again, but I guess I was wrong. You’re right, Ted. I’m sorry I’ve been arguing so vehemently against you. You’re absolutely right. Both choices involve death—one just means the suffering is a lot slower than the other.”

Dr. Krueger’s supporters were all silent for a while, but soon enough, they started to murmur their reluctant support for Ted. Ted expressed no joy in this minor victory; the reality of the situation was far too tired to feel happy about anything. “So we’re all in agreement then?” he eventually asked, after he’d given the dissenters a few moments to reconsider their position. “We’re not giving in to these thugs with their extortion and threats, are we?”

“No, we’re not,” everyone answered, some a lot more enthusiastically than others.

Ted knew that for the homestead to be defended effectively, every defender had to be fighting with all their heart and soul in the battle. “Listen,” he said, “if any of you aren’t fully committed to defending this place with everything you’ve got, I’d rather you left now. I won’t think any less of you; I’d rather you be honest now rather than fail us when we need you most. If any of you don’t want to fight and would rather leave the homestead and take your chances elsewhere, you should leave tonight and get a good head start on T-Dawg and his thugs. If you choose to leave, you have my blessing, and I wish you well. If you choose to stay and fight, though, I need to know that you’ll fight with everything you’ve got. I won’t put anyone on the spot right now, but we don’t have much time to waste, because we have to start preparing our defenses right away. Those who want to stay and fight meet back here an hour after dinner. Those who want to leave … well, you can go whenever you want. That’s all I have to say for now; meeting adjourned.”

Everyone dispersed, and most went off and ate dinner alone, or with their families. Despite the almost unanimous support Ted had eventually garnered for the option of resistance against T-Dawg, he suspected that some homesteaders had just been paying lip service to this, and would slip away with their backpacks and whatever belongings they could carry throughout the evening.

However, when he returned to the firepit an hour after dinner, a deep swell of emotion filled his chest almost to bursting point—every single homesteader was gathered there with looks of determination and resolve on their faces, and weapons in their hands.

“We’re all here, and we’re all ready for battle,” Callum said.

34

That night Ted sent scouts out beyond all four corners of the property to make sure that T-Dawg’s men weren’t circling around or making plans for a multi-pronged attack. He knew better than to underestimate his opponent; as monstrous and brutish as T-Dawg was, Ted knew the man had to possess a decent amount of intelligence to have risen to his position as leader.

“Why do you think he’s given us until sunset tomorrow to make a decision?” Callum asked.

“Firstly, it’s a matter of practicality, I think,” Ted answered. “For us to gather and pack as much food as he’s demanding, it’d take the better part of a whole day. So he’s giving us a chance to give in to his demands. However, another part of it is that he wants to attack at night. He’s going to assume that we’ll be defending the place from well-lit positions, meaning that our eyes will be relatively blind to what’s going on in the darkness. He and his men have lived in pure darkness at night for many weeks now, so they’re very much used to it. As for us, we’ve been burning candles and lamps at night, so we’re used to operating with light, putting us at a disadvantage. Second, remember when we were in town, and the thugs caught wind of our presence? Fireworks shot up into the sky all over town; T-Dawg uses ‘em as signals. He wants to attack at night so that he can use these signals to direct his troops. He’s no fool; he’s definitely got some sort of strategy. However, he doesn’t know the lay of the land here, and we have to use that to our advantage. Especially as it’s about the only real advantage, we have.”

“There’s one other advantage we’ve got, one that he definitely won’t consider,” Mary said as an idea suddenly popped into her head.

“And what’s that, baby girl?” Ted asked.

“The river,” she answered. “Every time I’ve crossed via the stepping-stones, I’ve noticed how strong the current is. Now, I don’t know how he’s planning to get his men across, but I’m sure he likely doesn’t know about the stones.”

“He’ll probably have them swim or wade across, maybe with a human chain,” Callum said. “He might drag some canoes or kayaks up from town too. But you can be sure that he and his men will provide heavy cover fire for those crossing the river. If you think we can sit and pick ‘em off while they’re vulnerable in the water, I don’t think that’ll be possible without taking some hits ourselves.”

“Sniping isn’t my plan at all,” she said. “But what I will need is some strong hands, a couple big logs, some lengths of heavy chain, and the Hummer. I’ll need to do some work on it to prep it for what I want to do, and that’ll be difficult without any electric tools, but I think it’s doable. It’ll take all day if my team and I start at dawn, but I think it could hit the invaders really hard before the battle even begins.”

She explained her idea to Ted and Callum, and as she did, smiles began to spread across their faces.

“It’s a bit of a crazy plan, baby girl,” Ted said, “but you’re right, if we can pull it off, it’ll be totally unexpected and could take a lot of them out at once.”

“I think we ought to fell a few more trees, too,” Callum said, “because I’ve got a plan for ‘em.”

Callum explained his plan with logs to Ted, who nodded as the younger man spoke.

“Yep, yep,” Ted said, “that’ll work, especially if we draw ‘em into a pursuit by hitting ‘em just after they get across the river … depending on how many make it across, that is when my baby girl puts her plan into action.”

The three of them put together a plan of multiple stages of defense, which would involve falling back in controlled waves under the attackers’ advance. When it came to the defense of the core of the homestead, though, Ted realized that he had to have a contingency plan, in case all other measures failed and a large number of attackers did make it all the way to the center of the homestead. He gathered the homesteaders together, keeping in mind the identities of those who had sided most strongly with Dr. Krueger; these were the people least likely to stick around and fight to the death. This didn’t matter to Ted, and he didn’t judge them or begrudge them for this; he just wanted to give everyone an appropriate duty to their level of commitment.

“Dr. Krueger,” he said, “I know that you’ve changed your mind and that you’re willing to fight, but I need to keep you out of the fiercest fighting. There are going to be injuries, and you’re going to need to treat as many of them as possible. You’ll need a few assistants to help you, of course.”

Dr. Krueger had no objection to this, and neither did the people Ted assigned to assist him as medics and runners, for they had all been the staunchest objectors to fighting.

“What can I do, Uncle Ted?” James asked, eager to help, especially after the few days in which he hadn’t had any glasses and had felt quite blind.

“I wanna help, too,” Ann said. “This is my home, grandpa, and I want to defend it.”

“I know you’re both veterans of combat,” Ted said, and this was technically true, even if they were just teenagers who had never been trained or in the military. “And that’s really important, and something I respect tremendously. I also don’t want to put your lives in unnecessary danger, though, by having you out on the front lines, because your lives are very precious to Mary and me. I’m old now, and it doesn’t really matter if I take a bullet, but that’s not the case for you two; you’ve still got your whole lives ahead of you. I want you two to protect the women and children; they’re going to be in the cabin, which I need you two to fortify with as many sandbags as you can stack around the walls tonight. You two will provide the last line of defense if these scumbags make it all the way here … and if the worst happens, and they overwhelm us, it’s up to you two to lead the retreat and get the women and children safely out of here before the bastards can get their paws on ‘em. Got it?”

“Got it, grandpa,” Ann said.

“I’ll keep everyone safe, I promise, Uncle Ted,” James said proudly. “None of those guys will get past me.”

“I know they won’t, son,” Ted said, smiling proudly. “All right, everyone’s got their duties! None of us are gonna get much sleep tonight, so fill up the coffee pot and keep the fire under it burning. Let’s get busy, people—we’ve got a battle to fight tomorrow!”

35

T-Dawg and his men came ready for war; he had been quite sure from the look on the old man’s face that he would reject his offer. Most of the gangsters assembled on the riverbank at dusk were wearing bulletproof vests, and more than a few had military-issue combat helmets and battle armor, looted from the bodies of dead soldiers in the city. Every one of them had a firearm; most had more than one, and plenty of ammo.

T-Dawg was no fool; he was sure that the homesteaders would have snipers with rifles waiting in the slopes across the water, who would start picking his men off as soon as they started to cross the river. He had sent men up and down the river, looking for alternative points to cross, but none had been as suitable as this place—which was where the homesteaders would be waiting.

“We gon’ go in there now and kill those fuckin’ farmers?” one of T-Dawg’s lieutenants asked.

T-Dawg shook his head. “No, we gon’ wait until it’s fully dark, man. They won’t be able to get good shots at us wid’ out coming much closer to the river, and then we can shoot right back at the motherfuckers.”

From the top of the ridge, Ted, Callum, and the other snipers watched the enemy silently from their positions of cover. They could tell that a great number of them were there, but for the moment, it seemed that T-Dawg was keeping his men back in the cover of the tightly packed trees on the other side of the river.

Dusk fell, and both sides waited in tense silence.

“Dammit,” Callum whispered to Ted. “What are they doing? Why don’t they make a move? This waiting is driving me mad.”

“Steady there, friend, steady there,” Ted whispered back. “They’ll come, believe me.”

An hour passed, and T-Dawg still made no move. There was no moon on this night, and the darkness grew thicker and thicker by the minute. Soon the snipers could hardly see the river at all, let alone pick out targets in it.

“This is what he’s been waiting for,” Ted whispered. “Come on, we have to get closer to see what’s going on. I suspected he’d wait until it was fully dark before making a move, and that’s exactly what the sly bastard is doing.”

“We’ll be exposed to enemy fire down there,” Callum said, sounding worried.

“I know, but for Mary to use her weapon, we have to be able to get a look at their movements. Come on, let’s move. Keep it stealthy.”

Ted whispered some instructions to the other snipers to stay on the ridge, then he and Callum cautiously picked their way down the slope as quietly as possible, staying behind cover as they moved.

By the time they got close enough to actually see the water, T-Dawg was sending his first wave of warriors into the river. Many of the men were poor swimmers, having grown up in the inner city without any access to swimming facilities, and therefore the stronger swimmers went in first and made a human chain to help the non-swimmers.

“Looks like we got here just in time,” Ted whispered.

“Should I give Mary the signal?” Callum whispered back.

“Not yet. Wait for more of ‘em to get into the water. This is our only chance to strike a seriously potent blow and take dozens of ‘em out at once. We want to use it to its full effect.”

T-Dawg was waiting in the cover of the trees, watching as his men entered the water, one by one. He wasn’t about to get in himself, not until he’d seen a few of his men get safely to the other side, for he suspected that there would be some trickery or traps set by the homesteaders.

“Yo, this river is a lot shallower than yesterday, man,” one of the leading swimmers called out to the other gangsters. “Don’t worry, y’all, y’all can walk across most a’ the way, it’s way shallower! Shit, it’s only up to my waist most a’ the way, come on, get yo’ chicken-shit asses in!”

Emboldened by their comrade’s observations, more of the men entered the water.

“Come on, Ted,” Callum whispered, his tone urgent, “give her the signal! There are plenty of ‘em in the water now!”

“Hold on, hold on,” Ted whispered back, his eyes locked on the scene before him. Over a third of the invaders had entered the river now, and the first few were almost across on their bank.

“I’m giving her the signal,” Callum muttered. “Some of ‘em are almost across!”

“We can shoot down the ones who make it out onto our side,” Ted said firmly. “Just wait.”

“Dammit, Ted, we should give her the signal now!”

“Wait … wait … now!” Ted whispered.

Relieved to finally be able to give the signal, Callum cupped his hands around his mouth and performed an owl hoot. Another homesteader a few hundred yards up the river heard it, and repeated the call, passing it quickly on to yet another one higher upriver. The chain continued until the owl hoots reached Mary, who was waiting on the banks of the river in the Humvee, over a mile upstream. There, at the point where the river was narrowest, the homesteaders had spent the last twenty-four hours building a makeshift dam with felled trees. The supports holding the mass of water in place were linked to heavy chains, which were attached to the Humvee. Mary had spent the day working on the vehicle, adjusting its gearing to give it even more low-down pulling power. And now that the signal reached her, she started up the motor, but the vehicle in gear and started pulling.

Her calculations had been perfect. The Humvee took mere seconds to rip the supports out of the makeshift dam, and the whole thing collapsed almost instantly, sending a massive flash flood of vengeful water surging downstream.

At the crossing point, over half of T-Dawg’s men were now in the water, and a handful was getting out on the side of the homestead.

“They’re on our side of the river!” Callum whispered. “We need to start shooting, now, before it’s too late!”

“Not yet … it’s coming, just watch,” Ted whispered back.

The men in the river could sense that something was happening, but they didn’t know what. The current was picking up, and there was a dull, distant roar that was growing louder with alarming rapidity. In the thick darkness, they couldn’t see the rushing wall of water approaching, but they could hear it and feel it. Shouts of alarm started ringing out across the river, and men started struggling and abandoning their comrades in their haste to get across.

They were too late, almost all of those who were already in the water. T-Dawg watched with both rage and dismay as a wall of raging water came hurtling around the nearby bend in the river. The men in the water screamed in terror as it rushed toward them, scrambling to get to whatever bank was closest to them, but for the vast majority of them, their efforts were in vain. The torrent swept them away, carrying them downstream in a vicious flood of tumbling water. Those who weren’t drowned in minutes were swept over the edge of a huge waterfall a few hundred yards downstream and smashed on the rocks below.

In one potent attack, the homesteaders had cut the number of invaders almost in half, and on his bank, T-Dawg threw his fists in the air and screamed with murderous fury. Now, however, he was even more determined to kill every last one of them. “Light up the fucking place!” he screamed.

36

Two of his men had brought up heavy machine guns looted from dead army troops, and a few others had RPGs. They all started firing indiscriminately at the opposite bank, tearing it up as they sprayed it with thousands of bullets and blasted rockets across the river.

“Let’s get the hell out of here before we get cut down!” Ted yelled as bullets hissed through the air around him and thudded into tree trunks and the ground.

He and Ted raced back up the bank, and at the top of the ridge they were dismayed to find that one of the homesteaders was dead, hit by a stray machine gun bullet; both sides had now suffered casualties, although the toll taken on the invaders was far more severe.

Down below, the flashflood had already started to subside, and the current was slowing, and the water level lowering to its usual level. With their confidence boosted by a furious desire to exact vengeance on the homesteaders, the surviving invaders were once again cautiously entering the water. There was nothing the homesteaders could do to stop them now, and since the entire bank was being torn up by machine-gun fire and RPGs, they had no choice but to retreat and get into their second positions.

Mary, meanwhile, detached the heavy chains and drove the Humvee back to the homestead; her job was done, and her next task was to help with the defense of the land when, or if, the invaders made it there.

She and the other defenders listened with bated breath to the sound of exchanges of gunfire. She and another homesteader were manning a makeshift defense point, consisting of a number of piled-up sandbags, which covered the main path into the homestead. A large fire burned in the firepit in the center of the property, to provide light for the defenders, and more fires had been lit all over for the same purpose; the invaders wouldn’t be able to use darkness to their advantage here.

In the distance, from the direction of the river, she saw fireworks shoot up into the sky and explode in a bloom of dazzling colors. This beautiful display only brought dread to the homesteaders, though, for they knew that it was a signal used by their enemies. And if the invaders were using signals, it meant that they hadn’t been stopped, and were gaining ground.

The sounds of gunfire grew closer, as did the sound of dirt bikes racing through the woods and orchards. Mary watched as more fireworks were shot into the sky, and the latest batch came from a lot closer. Soon enough, the sounds of gunfire died down, and she saw the dirt bikes’ headlights stabbing through the darkness around the perimeter of the residential area; the defenders in the woods had been forced to make a full retreat. Even having swept half of T-Dawg’s forces away in the river, his numbers had still been too overwhelming to effectively counter.

Ted came racing into the homestead first, and he was followed closely by Callum and four other defenders. Ten had been in the woods at the outset of the battle, and dread coursed through Mary’s veins when she saw that three had not returned.

There was no time to worry about this, though. “Incoming!” Ted yelled as he dropped his dirt bike and ran over to a pile of sandbags. “Everyone brace yourselves, there are dozens of ‘em coming this way, all heavily armed!”

They waited and waited, but the attack Ted had expected to come from the main road into the homestead didn’t materialize. The defenders waited with their hearts pounding and their fingers on the triggers of their guns, but nobody came.

“Where the hell are they?” the homesteader next to Mary, a father of two in his late thirties, whispered to her.

The silence in the woods around the homestead was both eerie and ominous. Ted wondered what T-Dawg was doing and what his plan was. The man had been filled with blinding rage an hour earlier and had come charging up the ridge, firing a machine gun from the hip, but now he and his warriors seemed to have melted like phantoms into the darkness, all their fury fizzled out.

“I don’t know,” Mary whispered back to her neighbor. “But keep your finger on the trigger, because—”

Before she could finish her sentence, the homesteader’s head snapped back in a spray of blood, and his lifeless form slumped to the ground. A firework shot up into the sky, and before Mary could even scream, the invaders launched their synchronized attack. They had silently encircled the entire homestead and were now launching a full-scale assault from all directions.

They came howling like demons out of the trees, firing furiously at anything that moved, led by T-Dawg, who was blasting away with a machine gun in his hands and howling maniacally, laughing like a madman as he sprayed houses and trailers with a vicious torrent of bullets.

Mary had no time to think, worry or analyze anything, for the attack came on so rapidly, and with such force, that all she could do was shoot back with her AR-15, doing her best to pick off men as they came screaming toward her, spraying bullets with mad abandon.

She took out one attacker, who was firing an M-16 at the cabin where Ann, James, and the women and children were sheltering, and then swung her rifle around to pump three bullets through the torso of a huge man who was trying to rush her, who was firing a combat shotgun at her, with each shot tearing chunks out of the sandbags around her.

T-Dawg was zeroing in on one target: Ted. If he achieved nothing else tonight, he wanted to take the old man’s head, and he no longer cared about food or supplies; with the intense bloodlust coursing through him, all he wanted to do was destroy the homestead and slaughter everyone in it.

Ted was busy dealing with three of T-Dawg’s thugs who, under T-Dawg’s orders, had taken positions of cover behind a wall and were keeping him pinned down until T-Dawg could get right up to him. Ted fired back at the men, taking one out with his sharpshooting prowess when the man popped his head out from behind the wall to fire, but the other two blasted outbursts of M-16 fire that forced Ted to take cover behind the sandbags. When they stopped firing, he swung his AR-15 up to return fire, but at that moment, T-Dawg came leaping over the barricade, howling like a demon from the bowels of hell.

Ted tried to swing his rifle around to shoot T-Dawg at point-blank range, but the huge man moved incredibly fast, kicking the gun out of Ted’s hands before he could squeeze the trigger. He followed this kick up with a vicious knee to Ted’s stomach, and when the old man doubled over in pain, he threw down his machine gun, grabbed Ted’s lapels and yanked him up so that he could deliver three swift and brutal headbutts to his face in rapid succession.

The headbutts sent Ted flying to the ground, stunned, his face a crumpled mess of blood, his nose broken, and two teeth knocked out. T-Dawg screamed out an animalistic cry of triumph and then drew his machete. He had been waiting for this moment for a long time, and now that he finally had Ted where he wanted him, he was going to savor the next few minutes of vicious violence.

Mary saw what was about to happen and screamed, but as T-Dawg raised his machete above his head, ready to bring it down in a brutal hack, a small but intrepid figure came flying through the air and smashed into the huge man, bowling him over. Mary’s scream turned into a cry of surprise; it was James who had come sprinting out of nowhere and launched himself like a living cannonball at T-Dawg in a valiant attempt to save Ted’s life.

Mary began climbing over her sandbag barricade to race over to help James and Ted, who were now embroiled in a violent hand-to-hand struggle on the ground with the huge gangster, all while bullets kicked up puffs of dust on the firelit ground and slammed into sandbags and walls and ripped through trailers, as the defenders gave the invaders everything they had.

Before Mary could get to the three struggling men, however, a big man came barreling out of a dense section of shadow behind a storage hut on her right; he had been waiting there the whole time to ambush her when she emerged from the safety of her cover. Mary sprayed his chest with a quick burst of fire, but he was wearing a heavy bulletproof vest, and while the bullets made him stagger and stumble, they did not break through the vest and only slowed him down rather than stopping him.

Mary dropped to her knees as he rushed at her, roaring, with a long hunting knife in his hand, and took hasty aim at his face. She squeezed the trigger when he was mere feet from her, but no burst of flame emerged from the muzzle of the rifle—there was only an empty click—she had run out of ammo.

The man dived and tackled her to the ground, and they both rolled in the dust for a few yards from the momentum of his tackle. Then he was on top of her, growling like a rabid dog, trying to shove his blade into her throat, his eyes bulging out of their sockets like a madman’s as he hissed and spat and snarled like a beast.

Mary grabbed his wrist, fighting with all her strength to hold his arms back, but he was far stronger than her, and the blade kept coming closer to her throat.

“I’m ‘a stick that pretty head a’ yours on a spike, bitch, along with wid’ all the other heads a’ your farmers,” he growled, grinning like a devil as he slowly but surely overpowered her. The tip of his blade reached her throat, stinging sharply for a moment before it pierced her skin and began to slide slowly and terribly into her flesh.

This was it, Mary thought bitterly, this was the end; in a few moments, her life would be over, and there was nothing she could do about it. The man was simply too strong, and even though she was fighting with every ounce of strength she possessed, she could not stop him from skewering her throat. Even with this knowledge in her mind, though, she fought desperately on, refusing to give up.

“Look into my eyes, bitch,” he snarled as he pressed down with even more force. “I like to see the look in a motherfucker’s eyes when I—”

He didn’t get the chance to finish this sentence. A shot rang out from a few feet behind him, and blood and brains blew out of the side of his skull. All the pressure he’d been exerting on the knife vanished, and his limp body flopped onto Mary, and the knife fell from her throat and dropped onto the ground.

Mary gasped and struggled to get out from under the corpse, and when she did, she saw Ann standing a few feet away, holding a smoking pistol in her hands.

“I got him, Mom,” she murmured. “I got him.”

“Quick!” Mary yelled, grabbing her rifle and slamming a fresh ammo clip into it. “James and your grandpa! We have to help them! Over there, that—”

A heavy body slammed into Mary from behind, sending her sprawling and sending the rifle flying out of her hands. She hit the ground hard, with all the wind knocked out of her lungs, and wheezed heavily, trying to get some air back in. In the background, she heard a few gunshots ring out, and then Ann screamed in terror.

Mary, still half-stunned, rolled over onto her back and saw a terrible sight. T-Dawg—who had just smashed her into the ground—had Ann on her knees, with his left hand gripping a fistful of her hair, and his right holding his machete, which was dripping with blood.

“Say goodbye to this kid’s head, you fuckin’ whore,” he growled with a maniacal look on his face. “And when I’m done with her, you’ll be dead, too, just like the old man and that nerd I killed!”

A million thoughts were racing through Mary’s mind, but somehow, through the panic and terror and paralysis of fear that was gripping her at this moment, she saw the glint of steel near her hand: her dead assailant’s hunting knife. She lunged over, grabbed the knife, and flung it with all her might at T-Dawg’s face.

There were only a few yards between them, and T-Dawg barely even had the time to flinch, let alone attempt to evade or block the flying knife. The hurtling blade spun through the air and slammed into the side of his neck, burying itself deep into his flesh. He gasped and staggered back, reaching for the embedded knife with his free hand. A froth of blood gushed up from his mouth as his strength rapidly began to fail him. Ann jumped up, screaming, and ran before he could grab her again.

Mary got up, the air now returning to her lungs, and a righteous fire of vengeance burning in her heart. She walked slowly and calmly toward T-Dawg as he lurched and staggered weakly, still trying to bat at the knife stuck in his neck. He snarled something her, but no words came out of his mouth, only another gush of frothy blood. He took a feeble swipe at her with the machete when she got close to him, but she evaded it with ease and then snatched the machete out of his hand.

He lurched and staggered a few more paces, and then dropped to his knees, gasping as he drowned in his own blood. He looked up and smiled eerily … for Mary was standing in front of him with the machete raised high above her head. She brought it whistling down, and the blade split T-Dawg’s skull in half.

When the remaining few attackers saw their leader’s body drop dead at Mary’s feet, what little light remained in them departed. Their numbers had already been decimated by the homesteader’s steadfast defense, in particular Callum’s sharpshooting from a high sniper post in an oak tree, and this was the last straw. They turned and ran, fleeing desperately from the battle.

Mary dropped to her knees, her head spinning, and passed into unconsciousness.

Epilogue

It had been a year to the day since the night of the great battle. The homesteaders had gathered in front of the firepit and had built a huge bonfire to commemorate those who had sacrificed their lives on that fateful night. Four seasons had come and gone, crops had been raised and harvested and replanted, and the world had gone on turning. Even so, the pain from the loss of so many dear lives was not something the surviving homesteaders had fully gotten over.

The sun was setting in the distance as Mary stood up to address the others. “Friends, family members, and everyone who’s part of this kind, brave, and loving community, I thank you for gathering here tonight. It’s been a year since the night of the battle, and a tough one at that; as well as my father prepared this place and all of you for life in a world without electricity and modern technology, there were many things we struggled with. But we overcame those struggles, and we got through the winter. It’s thanks to all your hard work, perseverance, and dedication that we did it. And we’ll get through the next winter the same way.”

Everyone cheered and murmured out their agreements.

“I want to thank each and every one of you for what you’ve done,” she continued. “But there are a few people I want to mention specifically. But before that, Callum wants a word with all of you. Callum?”

“Thanks, honey,” he said, squeezing Mary’s hand and giving her a peck on the cheek. He and Mary were now engaged to be married.

She sat down, and he stood up to talk. “Everyone, I know there’s a lot to say about that night and that every single one of you put your hearts and souls into defending this land, but I want to first mention Dr. Krueger. He worked tirelessly without sleep for forty-eight hours straight, saving the lives of so many of us who surely would have died otherwise. And speaking of those patients, I think I hear something…”

Everyone stopped and listened, and sure enough, they heard the sound of hooves drumming on the ground. Two horses came galloping onto the homestead and mounted on them were Ted and James.

“Sorry, we’re late!” Ted said. “That lamb that wandered into the woods was tough to find, but we got him back eventually, didn’t we James?”

“We sure did,” James said proudly.

Both of them had numerous huge scars from the deep gashes T-Dawg had inflicted on them with his machete that night, and both had come close to dying from blood loss. With blood transfusions from Mary to Ted, and from Callum to James, though, and emergency surgery from Dr. Krueger, both of their lives had been saved. They would carry the battle wounds on their bodies for the rest of their days, but they wore them with pride, like medals of valor.

Ted joined Callum’s speech, thanking everyone from the bottom of his heart, and by the end of it, there was not a dry eye to be seen among any of the homesteaders.

The fire burned late into the night, and the whiskey flowed—as did both laughter and tears—and by the end of the night, only Mary and Ted were still awake, sitting by the cooling embers of the fire under a bright, starry sky.

“I’m glad I came back home when I did, Dad,” she said, reaching over and squeezing his hand.

“I’m glad you did, too, baby, girl. I’m glad you did, too,” he said.

THE END

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