Page 64 of The Midnight Hour
Fortunately, Dorcas was willing to help. She drove him with Cal in his car—a giant of a man with a shiny bald head, a shambling gait, and a wide smile. The car was a clunker—a twenty-year-old Ford Fiesta that rattled and coughed the mile back to the exit ramp and the abandoned jeep. Sam still wasn’t there, and it was clear the car had been completely looted—the windows broken, the tires slashed, their supplies taken.Again.
Daniel had forced his mind away from the grim prospect of starting over with absolutely nothing and shouted hoarsely for Sam, willing his son to hear and respond.
“He would have left the car,” he told Dorcas and Cal, knowing he sounded truculent. “He would have left if he’d thought there was going to be trouble, and taken his grandmother somewhere safe.”
Left, though, Daniel asked himself, or been kidnapped? But why would they kidnap a young man and an old woman? For what possible purpose?
“Sam!” he called again, desperation turning his voice ragged. “Sam.”
And then, finally, a hoarse whisper. “Dad?” Sam crawled out of the woods—his clothes torn, his face muddied, his eyes wide. “Granny’s safe,” he said, and Daniel sobbed with relief.
It had happened just as he’d told Dorcas—Sam had seen a truck blazing down the exit ramp and decided to abandon the car, taking Jenny into the woods, where they hid while the carwas looted, its windows broken, the tires slashed for good measure—and no good reason.
Cal drove them all back to Dorcas’ house, where they recuperated with more coffee and soup. Jenny fell asleep in the bed Daniel had vacated earlier, while the rest of them discussed what to do.
“There’s a car lot on the outskirts of town,” Cal had suggested. “A Subaru place. ’Bout a hundred cars there, I’d say. I haven’t checked it out, but surely they haven’t all been taken. And I think I could figure out how to hotwire a car, may the good Lord forgive me.” His weathered face creased in a wry smile.
A car lot. Daniel couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of such a thing before. There were car lots over the state, the whole country. All those brand new, shiny cars—hundreds and hundreds—just parked there, empty and waiting, and meanwhile people were stealing their rust buckets right out from under them. It was both absurd and pointless, but not as pointless as what they’d discovered when Cal had driven him and Sam to the car lot: five hundred cars, just as the old man had said, all parked there, pristine and gleaming in their neat rows—with their windows all shattered and their tires slashed to ribbons, just like the jeep.
Cal had surveyed the depressing scene, scratching his cheek reflectively. “I guess they did it just because they could,” he remarked, sounding sorrowful but not surprised.
Because they could. Was that why anyone did anything, these days? The sheer futility of it all, the utter, absurd pointlessness,filled Daniel with total despair and made him want to laugh and sob in exactly equal measure. But worst of all, he realized, succumbing neither to laughter nor sobs, was the fact that he still didn’t have a car.
“Well, you’re not going to be able to get a car from this place, that’s for sure,” Cal said, stating the unfortunately obvious.Then he shocked Daniel to a humbled silence when he added as if it were a foregone conclusion, “I guess you’ll have to take mine.”
“Yyy…yours?” In his shock, Daniel stammered. “I…I couldn’t.”
Cal smiled, a weary yet knowing curve of his lips. “I think you’ll find you could, son.”
“But… I mean… you’ll need it.”
“I don’t, as it happens. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s been convenient on occasion. But I don’t need a car.” He glanced at Dorcas with an almost tender smile. “Me and Dorcas, we’ve already decided, we’re staying put. When the good Lord takes us, well then, He takes us, and that’s that.”
“Amen,” Dorcas murmured, smiling.
Daniel could not believe, or really understand, these two people’s peaceful equanimity. But already he knew Cal was right; he found hecouldtake the car, and quite easily.
“Are you sure?” he asked, and to his shame he realized he was already holding his hand out for the keys.
“I’m sure,” Cal replied, and gave them to him.
The Ford Fiesta lasted for forty miles before it gave out, gasping to its end on Route2 outside of North Adams as they crawled along the Massachusetts/Vermont border, heading for Lake George, and then up around Champlain to New York’s border with Quebec. Daniel had pored over the crumpled ten-year-old road atlas he’d found in the glove compartment of Cal’s car, trying to figure out a workable route. Of course, that didn’t take into account the far more pressing concerns—food, water, and shelter, none of which would be easy or perhaps even possible to find.
By that point, Daniel was starting to get a better, and grimmer, measure of the situation, at least regionally—refugeesflooding the roads, heading either north or west, away from the radiation and the devastated cities, a general lack of food and water, no humanitarian aid or military presence, an atmosphere of toxic fear. Violent gangs were less of a problem than people like him who were so desperate they’d do anything. That felt even more dangerous.
He’d been planning on traveling only at night and holing up somewhere during the days, but it took just one afternoon to drive the forty miles, and then they were carless. They’d already drunk the water and eaten the granola bars Dorcas had kindly given them, and they had nothing. Literally nothing but the clothes on their backs, in the middle of winter, over four hundred miles from home, and with an elderly and frail woman in their care. Daniel didn’t think it could get much worse.
The next month had them moving snail-like across a wintry landscape of northern Massachusetts and then upstate New York, sleeping in abandoned houses or barns, with Daniel making sure Sam and Jenny stayed inside as much as they could while he went out and looked for food. Once, he found a looted 7-Eleven with three cans of baked beans forgotten on a bottom shelf. He’d been ecstatic, until he’d realized they had no can opener or anything that could act like one. He’d ended up making a hole in the can with the Fiesta’s car key, and they’d had to siphon the mixture out with their mouths, one measly bean at a time. It was better, he told Sam, than starving.
When they found a place Daniel deemed safe and warm enough, they stayed, mainly for Jenny to regain some strength, although it was hard for her to do that when there was so little food. Still, Daniel knew he and Sam needed to regain their strength as well; they were all weakened from the journey.
Jenny struggled to walk for more than a few yards at a time, and he and Sam took turns carrying her, but it was far from easy, especially when they were feeling so weak themselves. They needed a car, Daniel thought, more than once, and eachtime with increasing hopelessness. They needed a car or eventually, somewhere between here and Flintville, Ontario, they were going to die, whether they found food or not.
Somehow they managed to eke out an existence as they inched steadily—or, really, not so steadily—northwest. Occasionally, Daniel would find something that kept them going for a few days or longer. Once, he snuck into a woman’s house to discover her long dead on the sofa, and a cupboard of dwindling food supplies—a sack of rice, a can of corn, another of peas—all of which he took, and without a backward glance at the poor woman’s corpse. She was dead, he thought, determined to be ruthless. She didn’t need it. She didn’t need to be buried, either. He doubted there was anyone left to mourn her.
They’d continued on in this way through January, but in February Jenny developed a fever and Sam a cough. They were too spent to go any further, and Daniel knew they needed to rest for longer—and he needed to find more food.
And so they sat here in this run-down ranch house, staring at the ugly wallpaper while Jenny slept in one of the two small, shabby bedrooms, both of them waiting and wondering what to do, because that was all that was left.
