Page 6 of The Midnight Hour
Which sounds like the biggest understatement ever. I open my mouth, but no words come out. Daniel’s gaze is distant and unfocused, and I wonder if he’s reliving whatever terrible things he saw on the way back to me. I want to assure him that he can tell me whatever it is that is so clearly haunting him since he came back with Sam. I want to promise him I will understand, and I want to believe that I would, but the truth is I just don’t know.
“But those…things…are going to be in other places, too, aren’t they?” I finally say quietly. “The gangs or fortresses or whatever. We’re likely to find that stuff anywhere.”
“They might be,” Daniel allows. “But in the cities…”
“But we won’t be in the cities,” I persist. “Not that close, anyway. And two hundred versus two thousand miles…? Do we really have any choice?”
Daniel is silent for a moment, his gaze shuttered. “Maybe not,” he says, and closes the atlas. It feels as if the conversation is over.
“Daniel…” I begin, wanting to have the courage to say something of what I was thinking before, but I feel him tense and so I let that trail away. “Do you think Kyle will be okay?” I ask instead, which feels like the safest subject at the moment.
“Hopefully, in time, as long as his wound doesn’t get infected.” He shrugs. “We’ll keep an eye on him, let him rest. There’s no real reason we can’t stay here for a couple of days, make surewe’re all fit and ready to go.” He tries to smile, but it’s like his mouth doesn’t quite work.
“And Sam?” I make myself ask. “He’s been so quiet.”
Daniel shrugs. “I think our shoot-out on Route114 freaked him out a little.” The words are wry, but his tone is grave.
“Daniel…” I don’t want to ask, but I know I have to. “Do you think those guys were actually all right? I mean…do you think that maybe they weren’t trying to hurt us?” Daniel is silent and so I continue stiltedly, “I mean, the bridge being out. Was that guy trying to warn us about it?” The notion, if I let myself dwell on it, torments me. Did I kill not just an innocent man, but a good one?
“That would have been awfully nice of them,” Daniel answers after a moment. I can’t gauge his tone, whether he’s being sarcastic or serious or sorrowful. “Just parked in the road, waiting for people to come by so they can give them a heads-up.”
“I guess…” I have a feeling he’s just trying to make me feel better. “But what if they were stopped for another reason—hunting or having a pee or whatever—and they heard our cars coming and decided to warn us about the bridge?”
Daniel shrugs, his face expressionless, revealing nothing. “That’s a lot of ifs, and the facts are, they were both armed, and they asked us to put our own weapons away without doing the same. He didn’t say anything about the bridge or that he was friendly, and in this world there’s no way we would have assumed it.”
“Maybe.” Heaven knows, Iwantto be convinced.
“Sam will get over it,” Daniel tells me. “I think it was just a shock, how it all played out. And he hasn’t really seen anything like that before.”
Somehow I have trouble believing that. “Even though it took you four months to get back to the cottage?” I counter skeptically. “Daniel, you were just telling me how bad it was outthere.” Although I still don’t feel like I really know. “Both of you must have seen some pretty awful?—”
“No,” Daniel cuts me off, his tone absolute. “Sam didn’t. Not that much, anyway. Not the worst of it. At Clarkson he was protected because some billionaire alum had brought in the Marines. It was almost unreal to him, at the start, like it was a movie or a…a video game.” He breathes out heavily, resting his hands on his thighs like he has to brace himself. “But what he did see was bad enough, trust me. We were carjacked at the beginning, and then later…” He’s quiet for a moment. “And he saw things from the car—gangs, violence, crowds begging and pleading…” He swallows and then shakes his head as if to clear a memory—of what, exactly, I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure he’s not going to tell me. “But nothing that close, that personal. Not me or you or anyone he cared about, which is different.”
He’s hardly told me anything, and yet it’s enough to fill me with unease, even dread. Those four months he spent traveling from Massachusetts to Ontario are a swirling blank to me, a vague haze of unwelcome possibility. What did my son endure? What did my husbanddo? I’m not sure I’ll ever know, but what I do know is that it has changed Daniel, maybe forever.
“Okay,” I say at last. “So we’re going to Port Granby, and then across Lake Ontario?” I make it sound like a vacation jaunt, when I know it is absolutely anything but.
Slowly Daniel nods. “Yes. But we’ll rest here for a few days first. I think we all need it.”
I glance back toward my children, gathered around the campfire, their heads close together although none of them is speaking. In any other normal-life scenario, it would be a scene to warm the battered cockles of my heart—my three children huddled together in stalwart camaraderie, having a moment.
But looking at them now, I feel only despair, that it has come to this for the children I’d give my life for, and gladly. They’re soyoung—only twelve, fifteen, and nineteen years ofage. They’ve seen so little of life, and yet far too much. What kind of future can they possibly have? What kind of future can I forge for them?
Because that is what I hope from this unknown, semi-imagined military base near Buffalo. A future…not for me or even for Daniel; I’m forty-four but I feel like my life is over, and I don’t even mind. But for Ruby. For Mattie. For Sam. And, I realize with a sinking sensation, for Phoebe and Kyle.Fiveyoung people Daniel and I are responsible for. How can I ensure they have something to look forward to, to hope for and to believe in? How can I make sure they let me, considering they don’t seem to even want to talk to me now?
I turn back to my husband. “What exactly do you know about this military base?” I ask, a plaintive demand.
He doesn’t answer right away, taking a moment to consider, his hooded gaze fixed on some undefined point in the night that laps our little firelit camp like the dark water of a dangerous sea. What is out there, I wonder, in that endless night? Can anyone see the smoke from our fire? Are they creeping closer, waiting to jump on us, toattack? I suppress a shiver.
“I know it’s somewhere southwest of Buffalo,” Daniel says slowly, and I turn back to him. “And that it’s protected. And that the people there are trying to eke out some kind of civilized existence.” He turns toward me, his expression resolute. “But all that is only what I’ve heard from other people. I have no idea if any of it is actually true. If the base even exists. But people were talking about it, on the road. Not just one group, but several. I got the sense there was someone in charge there—some ex-military guy.”
I let out a huff of hard laughter. “This sounds like a bad action movie.”
Daniel smiles faintly, his eyes creasing at the corners in a way that reminds me of how things used to be. Howweused to be. “Yeah,” he says. “What do you think happens when we getthere—they take away our weapons and turn us into slave labor?”
I give a considering frown. “That would be the best-case scenario.”
Daniel raises his eyebrows. “And the worst?”
