Page 65 of The Midnight Hour
“I could go out,” Sam ventures late one afternoon, far from the first time. Outside the sky is already growing dark, and a few mean-looking flakes of snow drift down indifferently.
“No.” Daniel’s reply is automatic; he has always insisted Sam and Jenny stay inside when they’ve rested. He hopes—God, how he hopes, praying earnestly every day—that the intermittent exposure will not be too dangerous for either of them.
As for him…well, he’ll take whatever happens to him at this point as long as he gets Sam back. Jenny, too, but considering her health and age he isn’t holding out as much hope for her.
“Dad, I’ve been in this place for a month,” Samfires back, sounding irritated and even angry, more than he has in all their travels. “Come on. Give me a chance.”
Daniel shakes his head, an inexorable back and forth. “No.” He won’t go into the reasons, the dangers, or the justifications, and so Sam just glowers at him. Daniel decides it was time he went foraging.
“You stay here with your grandmother,” he tells Sam sternly, knowing his son will never leave her alone. Thank goodness, because he needs him to stay inside. He will never, ever forgive himself if Sam is affected by the radiation, if he gets burned or poisoned or cancer or however it comes for him, which it won’t, because he won’t let it.
It is fully dark when Daniel ventures out onto the streets of this southern suburb of Albany, run-down and weedy and mostly abandoned. Albany, it seems, isn’t far enough to escape; people are heading further north or west, wherever they can go that feels safe…if such a place even exists.
He walks slowly, his feet dragging along the road, weary right down to his bones. He has no idea where he’s going to find any food. He supposes he’ll do what he’s been doing, with limited success, for the last month—sneak into abandoned houses or stores and hope someone forgot to take it all, gather up what scraps he might be lucky enough to find.
It doesn’t feel like nearly enough. He knows it isn’t. How long can they keep existing this way? He thinks of Sam’s cough still rattling in his chest, Jenny’s debilitating weakness, his own lethargy and gauntness. Something needs to change—but how?
He’s spent hours thinking about possible solutions. Could he find food in a school, a hospital, a warehouse, a farm? Every time he tries to look, all he comes across is broken glass and bullet holes. Nearly three months on from the first bombs, the world is still so very broken—and getting emptier. In the dead of winter, a nuclear war is a disaster. Lack of food and freezing temperatures have added to the horrific death toll. Yesterday,when he went foraging, he came across an entire family, huddled together for warmth—and frozen to death.
Up ahead he sees an apartment building of crumbling brick, its windows mostly intact although the front door has been left wide open, an invitation or maybe just surrender. Daniel hesitates, and then, slowly, cautious with every inching step, he goes inside, having no idea what he’ll find.
What he does find, as in so many other places like this, is emptiness and decay. There’s a musty, sweetish smell in the air whose source he knows too well. A cold wind blows through the hallway, rustling the trash that carpets the floor in drifts of paper and cardboard.
A few apartment doors are flung open, while others are tightly shut. Daniel steps through the first open door into a shabby three-room apartment that has been completely ransacked. Like so many other places he’s seen, it hasn’t been just looted but wantonly destroyed—windows and mirrors broken, sofas and mattresses slashed, what has to have been something like a sledgehammer sent through the TV. People high on coke or meth or fentanyl, taking their pointless pleasure or maybe just acting out their terror. Who knows? It doesn’t matter, anyway.
There’s nothing there, Daniel is sure of it, but he checks anyway, opening every single cupboard. He finds a handful of silverware in the kitchen, which he takes, and a dish towel. He pockets that, too, and then he moves on.
He works his way methodically through the building, going into the empty apartments first and then circling back to the ones with closed doors. Most of them are locked; whether there are people inside he doesn’t know and isn’t about to find out. He might be desperate, but it would be insanity to come face to face with someone wielding a weapon and defending their home.
He takes what little he finds—a women’s sweater, a pair of old sneakers, a blanket, and, best of all, a dented can of spaghettiand meatballs, already expired before the bombs. Never mind; food is food, after all.
On the top floor, he turns the knob of a closed door, and is surprised when it swings open. He steps inside, and stills when he hears the thin, fretful cry of a baby. For a second, his instinct, or maybe just his desire, is to turn around and leave. He can’t get involved with an infant, not when he’s already got two people to take care of.
But then he hears another sound—the croaky voice of a woman.
“Hello?” she calls out, her voice hoarse and papery. “Is anyone there? Can you help me, please? Hello?”
Still Daniel hesitates. Then, reluctantly, he moves forward, rounding the corner of the narrow front hallway to the small, dark living room, where a young woman lies supine on a sofa, a baby swaddled on the floor next to her.
She is clearly close to dying—utterly emaciated, the bones of her face as naked as a skull, her eyes sunken into her flesh. She reaches one scrawny hand out and then drops it in exhaustion. Her lank, dark hair lies in greasy strands next to her thin, pale face. “Hello?” she whispers. “Can you help me? Please?”
Daniel glances down at the baby, who is just as gaunt, its mewling cry pathetically weak, its tiny form nearly lifeless.
“How can I help?” he asks, and a smile breaks over her face, lighting her sunken eyes in a way that makes him feel wretched because already he knows he can’t help. It’s too late for her, and most likely for the baby as well.
“I’m trying to get to Buffalo,” she rasps. “There’s a…a military base there…” She trails off, catching her breath; just those few words have taken too much effort. “It’s a safe place. They’re letting people in. I need to get there.”
Daniel shakes his head slowly, regretful but firm. “Buffalo is three hundred miles from here.”
“I have a car,”she says.
He stares at her for a long moment. “You do?”
She leans forward, nodding eagerly, then collapses back against the sofa, gasping for breath. “A Honda Civic. It’s parked in a locked garage about a mile from here, on County Road. I put it there when the looting started…I figured it would be safe, when I was ready to drive out somewhere, get away from all this…but then I got sick, and Tiffany too…” She gazes down at the baby, her lips trembling as she looks helplessly at her daughter. The baby’s face is so wizened it looks more like an alien than a child. Daniel feels a stirring of pity.
“Do you want me to get your car for you?” he asks.
She nods, eager again. “Would you…” She pauses, gulps. “Can I trust you?” she asks, the question of a helpless child.
