Page 1 of The Midnight Hour
ONE
ALEX
We drive for six miles before our luck runs out. I can smell the smoke in my hair, taste its acrid tang on my tongue. My mind is reeling,reeling—we have left everything behind. Everything.
Everyone.
Kerry…
“Mom.” My daughter Mattie, just fifteen years old and utterly focused, calls out sharply. “Mom!There’s someone up ahead.”
I blink the winding gray ribbon of road into focus. Straight, green pine trees line it like bristling arrows on either side. We are in the backwoods of Ontario, Canada, driving away from oblivion and toward the utterly unknown, nearly seven months after a nuclear holocaust that devastated the world and our lives. A dried trickle of blood runs down my arm from where I was nicked by a bullet, and my heart is still pounding in my chest, hard enough to hurt. Less than an hour ago, my whole world imploded, for a second time. I picture black smoke swirling into the sky, and I push the image away. I need to focus, because now there’s another danger.
Up ahead a beat-up truck on monster wheels is parkedsideways, blocking the road. A man in a plaid shirt and weathered baseball cap is lounging against its bumper, working over a chaw of tobacco. He is holding a semiautomatic rifle like it’s a toy, slack against his hip, but I have no doubt whatsoever that he knows how to use it, and, moreover, that he’ll enjoy doing so. I think of the men who have burned down our cottage on Lost Lake, therelishon their grimy faces as they came to steal and plunder what was ours. It doesn’t take long for the animal to emerge from the man.
“Mommy.” Phoebe’s voice is quiet, more a question than a wail. She is four years old, and her mother died an hour ago, sniped by a broken-toothed man in a baseball cap. Does she even realize her mother is gone forever? Can she possibly understand? I don’t know if any of us can; the reverberations will continue thudding through us for a long time to come, but right now we have a new crisis to deal with.
“Mom…I’m not sure those guys are friendly,” Mattie says quietly. She has Phoebe on her lap, her arms laced around her middle, and Ruby, my twelve-year-old daughter, is sitting next to her, as silent and watchful as always. My husband, Daniel, is driving the car ahead of us, with our nineteen-year-old son Sam and Kyle, the kid we picked up along the way, a couple of months ago.
I can’t think about the people we’ve already lost, the sacrifices they made. The cost was high, too high, and it might be about to get higher. It’s all too much to take in, especially when there’s a guy who is blocking the road and he’s holding a gun.
The guy raises the gun a little, like a greeting.Hello there. Up ahead I see Daniel veer hard to the left, pulling onto the side of the road with a screech of tires and a spray of gravel. I follow suit, hunched over the steering wheel, keeping low in case he decides to shoot. I hear a pop, and then an exhale like a slow breath, and finally a sinking sensation. I realize the guy must have shot out my front right tire, and for what? Fun?Stupid, I think, my hands clenched on the wheel.He could have used the tires.
Remarkably, I do not feel remotely afraid. Too much has happened today for me to feel any more terror. My house has been burned down by backwoods terrorists; my best friend has died along with my mother; I’m on the run in a world that is on fire. I don’t have time to feel afraid of one measly guy with a gun.
Except, I realize when I dare to lift my head a little to peer out the windshield, there’s not one guy. There are two. The other one sits in the cab, looking relaxed, his head tilted back against the seat, his expression almost sleepy. These guys are toying with us, I think. They’re so sure of themselves, and, more importantly, they’re sure ofus.
Just like before when I’ve run into this type of backwoods hooligan, they think we don’t know our way around a gun. They assume we’re city slickers, simply by the cars we drive or maybe the way we look. Daniel is sporting a Patagonia fleece and I’m wearing a striped boat-neck top from Land’s End, relics of a former life when we were smug suburbanites and our idea of roughing it outdoors was mowing the lawn ourselves.
Well, things have changed since we came to Canada back in November, when my biggest worry was whether our turkey would defrost in time for Thanksgiving. Things have changed since Daniel made me practice shooting, the first time I’d ever held a gun in my hands, and it took me fifty tries to so much as nick the tin can on top of a stump. Seven months later, I’m hardened to the core; I feel as if I have no more softness inside of me, and I’m glad.
Observing these two cocky guys, I feel only a flicker of nerves, like a ripple in water. It’s strange, how calm I feel. Otherworldly, almost like I’m not entirely here. I’m floating somewhere up in space, watching this scene unfold with only a mild curiosity about how it might all go down.
“Mom,” Mattie whispers, and she sounds as angry as she does afraid. “What are we going to do?”
Up ahead, I see Daniel get out of the car. I glimpse the flash of Sam and Kyle’s scared faces in the back, like pale moons, before they bob beneath the seat. My husband’s movements are slow, purposeful, as if he’s got all the time in the world. As if there aren’t at least a couple of rifles trained on him.
I open my door.
The man leaning against the bumper is still looking relaxed, his gun slack but its muzzle still aimed toward me. The guy in the truck also has a gun, I see; it’s propped against the open window, tilted toward Daniel. The air is filled with birdsong, the rustle of wind in the trees. The road stretches in both directions, shimmering in the summer sunlight. It’s a beautiful June day, and I have no idea what is going to happen. Whether someone is going to die here.
“Hey there,” the man says in a drawl. His finger plays with the trigger of the rifle. Daniel and I have rifles, too; we’re holding them in a way that is just as trigger-happy as this guy, but we haven’t aimed them at anyone yet. But we will, I know we will, if we have to.
I’m carrying a Colt semiautomatic M-16 that belonged to Phoebe’s uncle, before he killed himself because he couldn’t take the Armageddon scenario he thought he’d been waiting his whole life for. It shoots thirty rounds and, while I can’t claim to be any kind of expert on guns, I think this one will get the job done if it needs to, because more potent than the weapon in my hands is the fury in my heart, the steel in my spine. I’m so ready to shoot someone who is threatening me or my family.
“You want to put your gun down?” the man asks Daniel, and his voice is mild, almost amused. He really believes we’re noobs and compared to him weare, but it still makes me angry. Guys like this have takeneverythingfrom me. Everyone. And I’m not letting another one take a single thing more.
“No, I don’t think I do,” Daniel replies, his tone an unsettling mixture of affability and deadly seriousness. “You’re blocking the road.”
The man frowns, his brows drawing together as he glances between us, and I know he is re-evaluating the threat we present, and I’m glad.That’s right, I think.This isn’t going to be as easy as you thought it was. I raise my rifle just a little bit, like a warning, or maybe a greeting back.Yes, hello there.I see you.
“Look…” the man begins, and now he sounds both weary and wary, his finger still on the trigger. “Let’s not get carried away here, okay? It would make it a whole lot easier for everyone if you just put the guns away.”
And walk right into whatever he has planned? The last time I faced these types of guys, they killed two women. The time before that, they shot at me. And the time before that, they tried to rape meandshoot me. I am not puttinganythingdown.
“Like I said,” Daniel replies, and now he just sounds serious, “I don’t think so.”
A second passes, taut, sparking with tension. No one moves; no one even breathes. From its perch on a tall birch by the road, a mourning dove lets out its soft, sorrowful coo, and an oriole chatters in reply. A single trickle of sweat rolls down between my shoulder blades, and my arm throbs where the bullet nicked me. My hands don’t waver. My rifle is still lowered, but only halfway.
