“Dan took care of them.”
“Yeah.”
Neither of us said what we were thinking, that his attack had been violent. That he had scared me when he plunged the crowbar into the woman’s eye … a visual I’d be having nightmares about for a long time after.
“We’re safe now. That’s what matters, right?”
I wasn’t sure we were safe. I wasn’t sure we’d ever be safe again, but I nodded and kissed her, then held her tight in my arms.
19
Now
She stays at the house for eight days, and thankfully never wakes up to a hallucination whispering her name again. Eight days trapped because the storm dropped several inches of snow and the wind piled it into drifts, some as high as her thighs. She has plenty of water, food, and warmth and the fire lulls her into a drowsy complacency that would have scared the old her.
New her likes the fire, the safety of the house, the routine she falls into of checking the doors and windows with blank-minded intensity. She reads books, romances mostly, with virginal heroines and asshole men and she rejoices that she’s a lesbian and married … and then grieves because she lost the woman who made her life worth living.
She switches to fantasy when she can’t take another I love you.
She tries to make it to the highway on the fifth day, but the drifts are still too deep. The sun is doing its best to melt them away, but every night the snow freezes and turns everything to ice. The drifts have wind-sharpened edges that threaten to slice her up when she ventures out.
There are no tracks around the place, no indication that any of them are around. She likes this, too, this knowing for certain that they haven’t sneaked up on her in the night. The tell-tale snow will give them away.
She still checks the doors and windows though.
Just in case.
On day eight, the snow has melted enough that most of the road is now visible, the ice only patchy. She loads up the rest of the food from the house and the jars of preserved jellies, veggies, and fruits she found in the basement. She adds several gallon jugs of water and two red gas containers from the small tank she finds in the barn. Thank you, Ivy, she thinks, because she can’t remember if they thanked her before. She hopes so. Ivy saved them more than once despite Lana’s misgivings over bringing her with them. She and Dan both, they …
She pushes thoughts of them out of her head as she drives back to the highway. She’s feeling confident she can get to the boys today or perhaps tomorrow at the latest if the pass hasn’t snowed shut.
Avalanches are a real danger without any management, and she hopes to all the non-existent gods that she won’t have to detour. The thought of such a delay churns her stomach and she hopes like hell nothing else goes wrong.
She doesn’t know why she doesn’t learn.
Over a hundred miles down the road, she sees an RV on an overpass. Someone is standing there, waving their hands like an insane person in front of a billowing sheet that reads, “I’m alive! Help!”
She hears Lana in her head telling her to push on, that their boys are waiting. Then she sees their boys up there, stranded, maybe at the end of their rope and she’s slowing before she realizes she’s doing it. She puts the SUV into reverse and backs up to the exit. She tells herself she’ll drive on if she sees any of them, because surely they’re around if this person is, but she doesn’t see any of them at all. The RV cants to the left and she sees why when she nears. The right front wheel is flat.
They’d had a flat once, too, and a nice lady named Norma took them in, saved them from the hordes that would have torn them apart if she hadn’t popped their head out of the door and said, “Get in here quick!”
The young man has a shotgun in the hands he holds above his head. When she rolls down the window, the guy says, “I’m alive. I swear. I can recite the alphabet for you, do math. Yeah, give me a math problem. I’ll solve it. Prove I’m not a nutter.”
It’s a good idea, and so she asks, “What’s thirty-two times five?”
The guy screws up his face. “Damn it. Something easier than that, I hate math. Oh, hold on.” He stands there for the longest time, thinking, and she’s almost about to relent when he says, “One sixty?”
“You got it. Where are you headed and what do you need?”
“I’ve got to get to Kirkland. I know, I know, it’s probably thick with them but my sister is there and …” His breath hitches and he looks at the RV to keep from showing his tears. “I have a few things, a lot of food, ammo. Can you … will you take me? Please? Two people are better than one, right?”
She knows that’s true, but she also knows that she doesn’t like watching people die. Of course, if she leaves him, he will die. She’s shocked none of them have found him and she tells him so.
“There was a huge herd of them a few hundred miles south. They followed me for a long time, I guess ‘cause the RV is big or
