Page 3 of The Midnight Hour
“Let me fix that,” I say, and I find the first aid kit and change the bandage; the wound looks clean but deep. I’ve come a long way, I reflect as I carefully wrap gauze around the area, from when I was so squeamish I nearly passed out when I had to stitch up Ruby after she’d nearly severed an artery. A sigh escapes me at the thought; it’s a distance I wish I hadn’t had to travel. I glance down at Kyle and see that he’s passed out.
Twenty minutes later, Daniel is just coming out of the woods when, in the distance, I hear the rattle and hum of some kind of motor. We exchange knowing glances and then we start to move.
“Let’s go,” he says.
We take the keys from our cars; the last thing we want is to provide transportation for anyone. I glance at the front tire of mine and see that it’s flat, but not blown out by a bullet, like I’d thought. I crouch down, and that’s when I see it—a rusty nail embedded in the rubber. An accident or intentional? It no longer matters. I straighten and head for the truck.
Daniel and Sam maneuver Kyle into the back, so he is slumped against the seat, his eyes fluttering open and then closed again. Mattie and Ruby slide in next to him, with Phoebe on Mattie’s lap. The little girl’s eyes are wide, but she doesn’t say a word. Daniel, Sam, and I take the bench seat in the front. All our stuff is in the truck bed, covered by a tarp, andDaniel thankfully wiped the windshield clean of blood, although there’s still the metallic taste of it in the air, along with a smell of tobacco and someone else’s sweat.
I don’t want to imagine that man’s body buried in a shallow grave, covered by leaves and just a little dirt, to be discovered by foxes and raccoons, and so I don’t.
“They had forty gallons of gas back there,” Daniel continues in a low voice. “So that’s good.”
Gas was one of our biggest issues with making this journey. In the last seven months, we’ve conserved and hoarded as much as we could, but we knew we wouldn’t have enough to get from rural Ontario all the way to Buffalo, a distance of some three hundred miles, and that’s without considering any necessary detours. Forty gallons will certainly help; it might even get us all the way there, although this thing looks like a gas guzzler.
Daniel starts the truck and I turn to Sam, who hasn’t spoken since he told me I shot that guy. His face is pale, and he is biting his lip as he stares out the window. I put my hand on his arm, and he twitches, as if to shrug it off. I return it to my lap.
“You okay?” I ask in a low voice, and this time it’s his shoulders that twitch. I have a feeling he is deliberately trying not to look at me, and unease creeps along my spine, settling in my gut.How did we get here?I wonder, even as I know how.
Seven months ago, we traveled from suburban Connecticut to rural Ontario in a naive and desperate attempt to recalibrate our family after so much had gone wrong. We’d come to my parents’ dilapidated cottage that no one had stepped foot in for seven years, thinking somehow this change would reset us. I’d envisioned a montage of Hallmark moments—bonfires and s’mores and candlelit card games, spontaneous hugs and important, healing chats. What I got was a nuclear holocaust five days after we arrived.
Really, I know it was a blessing that we’d been there at all, away from the disaster, the radiation, the fallout. Nine initialstrikes across America turned into dozens more, leaving most of the United States and some of Canada unlivable, as far as I knew, although the truth is no one really knows anything. This is not a comfortably predictable disaster movie or even a smugly certain governmental strategy for a potential extinction-level event; it’s reality, and it doesn’t unfold the way anyone expects. It doesn’tunfold, at all; it both explodes and collapses, it trickles away, and it surges up. Endlessly.
Over the last seven months, I know that all the major infrastructure of North America has collapsed, the government has more or less disappeared, the military melted away. Civilized human beings emerged from terrified hiding and some formed into roving gangs while others did their best to protect themselves. And that was in just our little part of rural Ontario. Who knows what has happened elsewhere; Daniel experienced some of it, but so far he hasn’t given any details. He was gone for six months, getting Sam from college at my command, yet another jagged piece of our fractured relationship. When he returned, he was a different man, silent and tense-jawed, yet with a resignation about him that seemed to be soul-deep, and scared me…but at least he’d brought back Sam.
Sam, my son, my firstborn, who now is refusing to look at me. And I know the real question I’m asking is nothow did we get here, but how didIget here. How did I come to shoot a man without a flicker of fear or concern, never mind remorse or real guilt? How did I become this person I don’t really like, and yet I already know I don’t want to change?
Ican’tchange, because this is the world we live in now, and this is how you survive.
We drive for maybe half a mile before Daniel slows, and then stops in front of an old iron bridge that once crossed Snake Creek, a swathe of murky green water fifty feet below us. The bridge has collapsed into the creek, a jumble of giant rusted parts. We are silent, realization trickling through us, or at leastthrough me. And not just realization, but the guilt I thought I didn’t feel.
Was this why that man had blocked the road? To warn us about a blown-out bridge? Going sixty miles an hour on a back road, we would have sailed right into oblivion before we’d been able to hit the brakes.
It’s a thought I can’t cope with, not now. My mind rejects it the way a soda machine refuses a crumpled dollar.He shot first, I insist in my mind, but I know I’m not sure.
I turn to Daniel, who is staring at the bridge, his hands braced on the steering wheel, his jaw bunched and his gaze distant, almost as if he is thinking about something else.
“Turn around,” I say stonily, and, after a second, he gives a jerky nod. No one speaks while I stare straight ahead, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes as Daniel reverses and then we start back the way we came.
TWO
I crouch at the stream’s edge and cup my hands, letting the cold, clear water trickle through them as I take a much-needed sip. I close my eyes and splash my face, as the water spills down my chin and throat and dampens my t-shirt.
We drove for three hours, making just over one hundred miles, before we decided to camp for the night. It was, surprisingly and a little unsettlingly, all so much easier than I’d thought. We stuck to Route28 rather than get mired on some twisting back road, then potentially hijacked by someone with a bigger vehicle than we had, although considering the wheels on this thing I wasn’t even sure that was a possibility.
We’d bumped down the road a good twelve feet off the ground, driving down a straight shot of concrete where we barely saw anyone—a few wood cabins or breeze-block ranch houses in the distance, everything locked up tight. Once I glimpsed someone standing on a front porch, watching us blank-faced and unmoving. We passed a town that had burned down, now no more than a ruined husk of blackened buildings—a roofless church, a lone pump standing like a sentryamid the rubble of a destroyed gas station. Other towns had been abandoned, ghostly and desolate, doors ajar, a suitcase dumped in the street, a shopping cart left on its side.
Bancroft, once a tourist destination in this remote part of the world, had become a quasi-fortress, many of its quaint buildings now encircled by barbed wire, with a sign warning us that intruders would be shot. But they didn’t bother shooting at us as we drove through it, and I wondered if it was the monster truck, on its intimidating sixty-six-inch off-road tires. The few trucks and cars we passed on the road—three in total—sped right by us, like they didn’t want to attract our notice.
Still, I expectedsomekind of obstacle—a blockade, maybe a military presence, some semblance of threat or danger—but all was emptiness and silence, a stretch of road with trees on either side, punctuated by the occasional town or house. Rural Ontario, as it had once been, but surely no longer existed…except here we were. After a while, it became unnerving. Where had everybodygone?
Of course I knew the answer to that naive question. As we got closer to Toronto, one of the secondary blast sites, I knew everyone must have either fled or died.
“We don’t want to get too near to Toronto,” Daniel announced after two hours of driving. No one had spoken that entire time, not even Phoebe. “Not if we can help it.”
“Are we going to get radiation poisoning?” Mattie asked abruptly. She sounded matter-of-fact rather than concerned.
“Dude,” Kyle muttered, having come out of his pain-filled stupor about half an hour ago, “that wouldsuck.”
