Page 74 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“Okay,” I say, the word bursting out of me, because I know I have no choice and, in any case, I can’t turn Justine away. How can I consign her child to this while asking her to help mine? “You can come. Both of you. Do you have a car?”
She nods. “A truck. I park it in the woods, about a quarter-mile from here.”
Relief fills me, a cold, sweet rush that weakens my knees. We have a truck, we have guns, we have antibiotics.
As long as Ruby is still alive…
“Let’s go,” I tell her. “We’ve been away too long already.”
It only takes a few minutes to mobilize; Justine gathers up her clothes and Kerry packs the guns and ammo in a duffle bag. There’s not much food, just a couple of cans of beans and Chef Boyardee. As we wait by the foot of the stairs, Justine bends down and gently scoops up Phoebe into her arms; the little girl snuggles against her, and I feel an ache of longing like a physical pain for my own daughter.
Then we are slipping out into the night like shadows, like ghosts, and ten minutes later, we find her truck, deep in the woods, covered in brush and snow. We move silently, swiftly,dumping the stuff in the back and then climbing in the cab—a squeeze, with the three of us, Phoebe on Justine’s lap. I’m driving, without any discussion about it; I’m not sure when it happened, but over the course of the night, I have become the person in charge. I tried to be it all along, heaven knows, throwing my weight around while leaning on Kerry all the while, but it is only tonight that Ifeelit.
I drive out of the woods and onto the road with steel in my heart.
TWENTY-FOUR
DANIEL
It is May, and the world is full of birdsong and beauty, when Daniel pulls onto the dirt road, the same road he turned into back in November, nearly six months ago, when he could feel the palpable tension between him and Alex in the car, and the thing he was most upset about was the loss of his self-respect.
It has been a long four and a half months since he found Sam. Four and a half months he longs to forget, yet remembers every time he closes his eyes. He’s a different man than the one who left here in November, when he was both resolute and resigned, determined to do the right thing. He has seen too much even to know what the right thing is anymore.
He has done too much.
He and Sam are both silent as the wheels of the car—the fourth they’ve been in since Clarkson—crunch on the dirt road.
Everything is lush and green, the road overgrown with long grass in the middle and washed away by the snows at its edges, so it is a bumpy and uneven journey. It doesn’t look as if anyone has been down this road in months, and he does not know whether that’s a good or bad sign. He has no idea what—or who—he will find at the cottage. Six months has been a long time—not just for him and Sam, but for Alex. For Mattie and Ruby.
Are they even alive?
Daniel hasn’t let himself consider the answer to that question.
The car bumps slowly down the road. Daniel breathes in and out evenly, but he feels as if he’s holding his breath. Something in him is suspended—waiting, expectant, utterly apprehensive. He has imagined this moment, the glorious, joyous reunion, for so long that, now that he’s on the cusp of it, he feels something close to terror.
They drive in silence.
When they reach the gate to the cottage’s road, Daniel breathes in sharply. Sam looks at him in silent question. He doesn’t remember the gate, of course. He can barely remember the cottage, beyond a few hazy memories.
But Daniel remembers. He remembers driving down the road, past the old wooden gate, its red paint peeling, just six months ago.
The gate is gone. The road is overgrown, far worse than the main road. The center verge is grassy, the stalks, waving gently in the spring breeze, at least two feet high. The trees and bushes have grown on either side, so the track is half-obscured, branches and leaves brushing the car as they drive up the lane.
Daniel is reminded of Prince Valiant, bravely cutting through the brambles to reach Sleeping Beauty’s castle. But the sense of righteous adventure that fairytale prince must have felt is so far from what he feels now, his stomach hollowing out, tears already pricking his eyes. He tells himself that Alex would hardly have made a priority of maintaining the road, that he himself had cut down trees to disguise its use, and yet…
It feels like a harbinger of doom. Of death. Just as the last four months have been.
Next to him, Sam shifts in his seat and says nothing. Daniel glances at his son, the boyish curve of his jaw now hardened andlean. When he’d found him at Clarkson, Sam had been well fed and protected, in the little enclave surrounded by the Marines. If anything, boredom had been his biggest worry; he’d been given three careful meals a day, had been able to exercise on the quad, read books from the library. Order, in this one place at least, had been maintained.
But when the Marines had let his son go, when Daniel had clasped his arms around his form, tears pricking his eyes, unable to believe he’d actually made it…that was when everything had started to go wrong.
They’d made it only as far as Utica before they were stopped by one of the many militias springing up all over the country. Everything they’d had had been taken from them—his gun, his backpack, his money, even his car keys. They’d been left on the side of the road, next to naked, with nothing.
And that had only been the beginning.
Halfway up the road, as they reach the bottom of the hill before the old barn, they see a tree trunk lying across the road, resolutely immovable. It is not one that Daniel cut; Alex must have cut others. They won’t be able to get across it. Daniel puts the car into park and slowly gets out; he moves like an old man now, every movement aching and deliberate. After a second, Sam climbs out too.
“Did it fall?” he wonders out loud.
