“What happened?” Simon asked in French.
“I don’t know. It just went out from under me. Lucky I didn’t crash us into a tree and kill us both.”
The truck had left the road and plowed through the newly fallen snow. The fluffy whiteness came almost to the top of the truck’s hood. A deep path led back to the road.
“Hey.” The handler pointed down the road at a pair of approaching headlights. “Someone’s coming.”
The driver returned to the truck cab and brought out a roadside flare. He triggered the ignition and a blaze of sparks carved a hole out of the darkness before settling down to a deep ruby glow. He tossed it onto the road.
Simon waited, but he stood apart from the other two men. There were more good stories to tell at the moment than bad ones, but the tales of thieves and murderers still ran rampant. If the people in the other truck intended to do them harm, Simon felt he still had a chance to escape cross-country. He could survive in the harsh climate.
He stood silently at the truck’s side, taking advantage of the shadows. The vehicle was another truck from Paris. The new arrival was loaded up with supplies as well.
Leah Creasey sat inside the cab, but she got out with the driver. She looked swallowed up by the big coat she wore.
The drivers quickly sized up the situation, then the man who’d driven the wrecked truck came back to Simon.
“The truck,” the man said, “isn’t going to go anywhere. Even with the winch on the other truck, we’re more likely to get them stuck as well. Jacques and I will stay with the truck, but the other driver has offered to take you the rest of the way.”
Simon studied the older man’s face. Everything in Simon screamed to go, not remain stuck here. But that wasn’t how his father had brought him up. He’d been brought up to keep his word, and now—in the face of everything going on in London—that seemed important to do.
“I said I’d help you unload the truck in exchange for the ride,” Simon replied in French.
The driver waved the offer away. “It will be hours, perhaps days, before anyone arrives to help us, my young friend. You’ve said you have family in the refugee camps. Go. Go and take care of your family.”
Simon didn’t argue. He thanked the man and started for the back of the truck.
Instead, the driver of that one waved to him. “Up here. Sit in the cab with us. There is room.”
Staring through the frost-covered window, Simon saw Leah looking back at him.
“Hurry,” the driver said. “There are people much in need of these supplies.”
Reluctantly, Simon opened the door and clambered inside. Leah scooted over, but there was still barely enough room.
“It’s going to be a tight fit,” Simon said. “I can sit in the back.”
“Nonsense. We’ll be fine.” The driver engaged the gears. “Perhaps a little more warm than we otherwise might have been.” He smiled beneath his mustache. “Lucky for you we came along, eh?”
Simon nodded and looked out the window at the two men they’d left with the truck. Not so lucky for them. Then he breathed out and the window fogged, erasing them from view.
Hours later, Simon came awake as the truck driver changed gears and pulled off the main road. A sign beside the road announced Coquelles.
Leah slept beside Simon. Her head rested against his arm, rocking gently with the sway of the truck.
“Not much longer,” the driver said.
Simon looked down at Leah and thought about waking her. In the end he decided against it, thinking there was no reason for her to dread what she was about to find out.
“You’re planning to go to England?” the driver asked.
“Yes.”
“You have family there?”
“My father.”
The driver glanced at Simon. “Things over there…they’re not so good, you know.” Concern showed in his weathered face.
“I know.”
“Perhaps your father, he will be in the refugee camp. One can hope so, eh?”
“Sure,” Simon said. “Maybe he will be.”
But Thomas Cross wasn’t at the refugee camp.
The camp was a collection of featureless prefab buildings plunked down all around the small town that lay at the other end of the channel tunnel. For a time the underground and underwater railway line had been nicknamed the Chunnel but the name hadn’t stuck.
The prefab buildings had been added when the survivors first started coming over from England. From the stories Simon gathered, many of them had come over by the tube, almost reaching the other end from Folkestone, Kent, before the power had gone off. For days, several others had trickled through on foot, till finally the monsters had shut down all egress through the channel tunnel.
Monsters.
That was what they were calling them now. Simon knew the name fit. He’d read about them in the Underground nearly every day of his life.
The survivors were lost and traumatized. Most of them were still awaiting word of family and friends, but hope dimmed with each passing hour. Boats and ships seldom made passage across the English Channel now. More often than not, captains brave enough to take their vessels across the water were getting sunk. And there were precious few survivors left to pick up along the coast. The monsters hunted there as well.
With dawn breaking in the east, a golden glow in a vague dirty-cotton sky, Simon found the man he’d been told about. Bolivar Patel was a salvage expert who’d plied his trade in the frigid North Sea and in the English Channel. Tanned and fit, he was in his early fifties, spry and fierce. His East Indian heritage showed in his dark skin and hawkish nose.
Simon found the man in the cantina after hearing he’d arrived less than an hour earlier with a boatload of survivors. Most of them were children whose parents had stayed behind.
The cantina was crowded, serving out soup and bread to hundreds that came up with bowl
