A Better World (21 page)

He and his wife looked at one another. Her smile was taut, as if she were trying to convince herself. Ethan stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, around both his girls, Violet the center of their sandwich, and for a moment they stood and breathed.

It would be dark soon.

“Let’s go.”

Hand in hand, they started walking.

Twenty minutes later, they left the road.

A dense forest of pine trees backed up to a row of two-story houses, their neatly mown lawns tapering into dirt and soft needles. He led his family along that terminator, skirting the edge of backyards. The sky’s bruised glow made silhouettes of the houses. He saw candles inside some of them, could imagine families huddling around fireplaces. The temperature was falling, but the effort of humping the pack kept him warm.

“Twenty-two miles,” he said.

“Nothing,” she replied.

“A little stroll.”

“Not even a marathon.”

A high privacy fence on one of the properties forced them farther into the forest. He walked ahead. The trees were dark geometries against the fading light. The needles stuck to his down jacket, and a sap smell rose. They walked in silence, just the sounds of their footfalls and the susurrus of branches swaying in the wind.

When it grew too dark to see, he took out the flashlight. The stark light blanched the trees. He cupped his hand around the head of it to muffle the beam, fingers glowing Halloween red.

A shift in the wind brought a distant siren’s wail. Nightfall would have made the riots worse. He could imagine cars burning on Lakeside Avenue, the smell of scorched rubber and the crash of shattering windows and the screams of the wounded.

The forest grew denser. Ethan bushwhacked through pine boughs, holding them for Amy and Violet to walk past before he let them snap back. He relied on the compass to keep them heading south. It would have been easier to follow the line of houses, but with tensions running so high, he was afraid someone might take a shot at people creeping their backyard.

Violet woke with a cry, not loud, but startling. Amy rubbed her back through the carrier, whispered, “Shh, it’s okay, go back to sleep,” but instead his daughter sucked in a breath and released it as a howl.

“She needs a change,” Amy said.

Ethan unslung his pack, then spread out his jacket as a changing table. “Come here, little one.”

Amy held the flashlight while he swapped the diapers. Violet’s poop was the color and texture of mustard, and smellier than usual from the condensed milk. She gurgled as he worked.

When he finished, he straightened, let his daughter lie on her back and kick. Funny, all he knew about evolution and the life cycle, and he had still been caught unprepared by the reality.
It was one thing to know academically that it took years for the brain and body to develop, and another to witness the slow progress of her eyes focusing, her muscles gaining control. He felt sometimes like a gym teacher substitute-teaching a biology class; he was reading the same book as his pupil, and only about a week ahead.

Amy had a hand planted against her lower back to stretch. The flashlight beam wobbled as she moved, a tiny circle of light surrounded by crushing darkness. “How far do you think we’ve come?”

“A mile and a half, two, maybe. Are you getting tired?”

“No. It’s just we’re going so slow.”

“Better to be safe.”

“I suppose.” She shrugged, then smiled at him. “Hey, something I meant to say earlier.”

“What’s that?”

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

An hour later, as he looked over his shoulder to check on his girls, something grabbed Ethan’s foot. He stumbled, yanked, tried to bring his other leg forward in time, but the weight of the pack threw him off. He fell, and his knee slammed into a rock. The flashlight skittered off into the woods.

“Ethan!”

“I’m okay,” he said between gritted teeth. He cursed, sucked in a breath, cursed again. His fingers explored his knee, every touch sending a zing, though the bulk of the pain was already receding to a hard ache. It didn’t feel like his jeans had been torn, but he couldn’t be sure in the dark—oh shit.

“The flashlight. Where did it go?”

“Oh shit.” Amy was just a dark shape amidst darkness as she shuffled around, kicking at the needles with her feet. After a
moment he heard the sound of the metal body off her shoe, and she bent down, then sighed.

“Broken?”

“Looks like. How about you?”

“Just banged up.” He planted a hand and rose slowly.

“Can you walk?”

He nodded, then realized she couldn’t see him. “Yes.” Ethan looked around, saw nothing but shades of black. The sky was only slightly brighter, the thick clouds hiding the moon and stars. “But I don’t think we can keep going this way.”

“We could camp here, start again in the morning.”

“It will be easier to sneak past the cordon in the dark.”

“So.”

“So.”

The office park was squat and bland. After the quiet isolation of the forest, it seemed alien and surreal, as though the world had been abandoned. The whole zombie apocalypse metaphor was starting to get to him.

Still, it had a broad drive they could follow easily, and though his knee twanged a bit, it felt good to move at a normal pace. He shrugged to shift the weight of the backpack and led the way.

They found themselves on an east-west street, three lanes and no cars. He flicked the lighter and held it as close to the old-fashioned paper map as he dared.

“I think we’re here,” he said. “Pleasant Valley Road.” There was no valley, and it didn’t strike him as all that pleasant. He found himself wanting to zoom in and switch to satellite mode. When he’d been a kid, he’d known the phone numbers of all of his friends, could dial them from memory; now, thanks to d-pads and mobiles, he barely remembered his own number and hadn’t
navigated on anything but an interactive GPS display in a decade. Technology made life so much simpler.

Yeah. Tell that to Cleveland.

Amy said, “It looks more populated to the west.”

“Right. East it is. Then we can pick up . . . this one, Riverview.” The street was illustrated with the thinnest line and ran a meandering course through the national park. It changed names a few times but led more or less directly into Cuyahoga Falls.

They set off down the middle of the lonely street.

It was almost nine when they saw the first of the others.

Sweat soaked his back, and his hips had started to burn. Twenty-two miles was a day’s march for a soldier, a reasonable hike for an experienced backpacker. But working as a research scientist didn’t offer much in the way of physical conditioning. Both he and Amy hit the gym when they could, but since Violet’s arrival, that had meant a half an hour snatched here and there.

At least they were making better time. Riverview Road turned out to be a narrow two-lane stretch of cracked blacktop with fields on one side and forest on the other. Skeletal towers strung power lines along the west side, and they passed the occasional rural driveway, just a mailbox and a dirt path.

Ethan was looking at his feet—not counting steps so much as feeling the rhythm of them like a drumbeat—when Amy put a hand on his shoulder.

Something white bobbed ahead of them, and by the time he’d realized it was a flashlight, the beam had splashed over them. It was maybe forty yards ahead, and all he could see was the pinpoint of light itself. A heaviness sank through him.

“Ethan—”

“No sudden moves,” he said. Slowly he extended his arms and turned them palm up, remembering the nervous teenager behind
the gun turret on the Humvee.
Caught is bad, but panicking them is worse.

As suddenly as it had hit, the light flicked away. It whirled in an arc that threw strange shadows off the trees until it pointed at the chest of a man. The barrel of a rifle stuck up above one shoulder, but he was dressed in hunter’s flannels, and beside him were two other figures: a woman and a boy of eight or so.

The light lingered for a moment, and then it swung forward and once again began to bob, heading away. Ethan released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

“They’re like us,” Amy said. “Trying to leave.”

Ethan nodded. They started walking again themselves, following the will-o’-the-wisp of the flashlight. “I wonder how many other people have the same idea?”