Page 73 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“All right,” I tell her, straightening and starting toward the door. “Let’s do this.”
No one answers my quiet knock, which I’d expect, and I can’t peer in the windows, since they’re boarded up from the inside. I don’t want to draw attention to myself, but I need to be heard. I walk around the back, looking for signs of life, any evidence that someone still lives here. And then I find it, in the yard, under a tree. A snowman—crooked, lumpen, with twigs for armsand a stone for a nose, pebbles for a mouth and eyes, standing lopsided, protected by the spreading branches of an evergreen.
I stare at it for a moment, with its rictus smile and black, staring eyes, and it feels like both the saddest and most hopeful thing I’ve seen in a long time. I whirl toward the back door, and this time I hammer on it.
“Please. If you’re in there, Justine, can you open the door? I’m a friend of Darlene Wasik’s and my little girl needs antibiotics. She’s got a wound that’s gone septic—she’ll die without them.Please. Darlene’s daughter Kerry is here with me—she knows you. Please. Please.” Eventually, I run out of words. No one stirs in the house. I think about breaking a window.
Then, amazingly, I see a face at the window—a woman has pushed aside one of the boards a few inches and she stands there, unsmiling. Her dark hair is pulled back in a braid, and she’s staring at me with pitiless eyes. She’s also holding a gun—not just an old .22 or .303 hunting rifle like I have, but a proper gun, something that shoots about a hundred rounds a minute. It looks like something a SWAT team would have, and I know by the grim set of her face that she means business.
“Please,” I mouth, and wait.
She moves away from the window, and a few seconds later, she opens the door, that fearsome gun pointed right at me. Strangely, I don’t feel any fear.
“You’re not from around here,” she says, and I shake my head.
“My parents had the cottage on Lost Lake.”
She nods; she knows it. “You’re holing up there?”
“Yes.”
Another nod and then she gestures toward the door. “Get inside.”
Kerry and I come in without a word.
I blink in the darkness; the place is tiny, and completely dark with all the windows boarded. It’s also set up like a battlefield—furniture tilted on its sides, for cover, I presume. I feel a shudder of apprehension, the first true emotion I’ve felt since I shot that man.
“Let’s go down to the basement,” the woman—I’m assuming she’s Justine—says. She triple-locks the back door and then we head down to the cellar, which is a space of about twelve feet by twelve, and is clearly where she lives. There is a little girl of about three years old asleep on a nest of blankets in the corner. There is also an arsenal of weaponry stacked against one wall that rivals anything I’ve seen so far.
“My brother’s,” Justine explains briefly when she catches me staring. “He loved guns. Was waiting for a chance to use them. He killed himself the day after the first strikes.”
I have no idea what to say to that. “Do you have antibiotics?” I ask, and she stares at me levelly.
“Why should I give them to you?”
“Because my daughter will die without them.” I mean to make it a statement, but it comes out like a question, a plea. In this new, cruel world we live in, why should this woman care about a stranger like me?
I glance at Kerry, who shrugs. There’s not much we can do. Justine has the medicine—I think—and the weapons. We’re at her mercy in more ways than one.
“I’ll give them to you,” Justine announces abruptly, “if you take me with you.”
I stare at her, shocked. “You mean—”
“To Lost Lake. I’ve heard about that place. Darlene used to tell me about it. Private, its own lake, its own land. You could be safe there.”
“What’s it been like here?” Kerry asks quietly.
Justine gives her one skewering glance. “Bad. I don’t know how much longer we can hold out. There’s too many of them.”
“The guys in the truck?” Kerry guesses, and Justine nods.
“They control the whole area. They’ve tried to break in four times. I’ve killed one of them, which makes them out for blood even more. The woman in the house across from me was raped and killed three days ago. She was sixty-five.”
My stomach roils at that thought. I want to help Justine, just as I helped Kerry and Darlene and Kyle. I want to be that altruistic person, but we’re on our very last food stores and we already have a lot of mouths to feed.
“How old is your little girl?” Kerry asks, and Justine softens.
“Phoebe. Four next month.”
