Extinct (39 page)

“Take care,” Sheila said eventually. She’d become preoccupied with the view out the windows.

Brad stretched the band of his headlamp over his hood and tested the light before leaving the apartment. He turned the knob to be sure it was unlocked before pulling the door shut.
 

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In his room, with his blankets pulled up to his ears, Robby stared at his bedroom door. Just enough light from the cloudy night filtered through his curtains to allow him to see. He had slid the dresser, filled with the clothes of a husky teenaged boy, against the door before he crawled into bed. Robby did this every night. Logic guided most of Robby’s actions, but not this one—not any of the desperate things he did to feel safe enough to fall asleep.

He counted to forty-three before he stole a glance over his shoulder at the window. No eyes were looking back at him through the window. Nothing he could see was trying to get in.

Robby clutched the visor mirror to his chest. It was the mirror from the Volvo he’d adopted down in New Hampshire. It was the mirror where he’d seen his father’s eyes looking back instead of his own on that night outside the rest stop. When sleep wouldn’t come he knew he could always look in the mirror and see his father’s eyes.
 

He counted to thirty-eight before he pushed down the covers to make sure the closet door was still shut. Robby returned his eyes to the dresser and reset his count back to one. If he could count past forty-three before feeling compelled to look at the window, then perhaps he could eventually get some sleep.

Four. Five. Six. Seven. There’s nothing in the window. My window is at least forty feet above the street.

More than two-dozen times he’d told his story—recounted to another survivor how he’d ended up living in Portland after the big storm—but he’d never mentioned what happened the first night at the rest stop in the stolen Volvo.
 

Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.

He didn’t even allow himself to think of that night except when it crept back in around the edges of normal thoughts as he tried to fall asleep.
 

Twelve. Thirteen.

It was the curse of his treasured mirror. He held onto it because reflected in the small vanity mirror, his own eyes looked just like his dad’s. But the mirror also reminded him of that night; of what happened when he’d drifted off to sleep while watching his dad’s eyelids slowly droop closed.

Fourteen.
 

If he could hold off until forty-four, then he was making progress against his compulsion to check the window.

When he held the mirror, Robby heard his dad’s voice in his head.
“You’re being silly, Robby. You know that, right?”

Fifteen. Sixteen.

All he wanted was to go to sleep and give himself over to dreams he could easily forget in the morning.

“Yes, Dad,” Robby thought.

Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.

Robby fell asleep.

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The hallway was cold. It almost felt colder than outside. Brad walked right past the stairwell next to the elevators. Those stairs didn’t have any windows. Going down those stairs at night felt like descending into a deep cave below sea level. At the bottom level he would pause, afraid to open the doors, afraid seawater would rush in and drown him.

Instead, Brad took the walkway to the parking garage and used those stairs. With open doorways at each landing, and big windows looking out to the cloudy night, he wouldn’t need his headlamp to find his way down. Brad brushed a gloved hand lightly down the bannister as he wound down the stairs to street-level. He paused at the second floor landing to look out the window. Across the street, in the direction of the highway, a brief flicker of light caught his attention. It was gone before he could pinpoint the origin.

Before exiting the stairwell, Brad tightened the scarf around his neck—adjusting it to cover the lower half of his face—and braced himself for the wind. The hinge squealed as Brad pushed open the door and stepped out into the night.
 

Brad walked up the sidewalk and stayed close to the building on his left. Most of businesses had awnings, so the old snow on the sidewalk was intermittent. He crossed in and out, from dry pavement to a thin crust of trampled snow. He and the others had walked the streets dozens of times since moving into the apartment building, so individual footprints were impossible to distinguish except for the odd stray.
 

Brad stopped when a set of footprints veered from the others and headed off across the street. He stopped and stared. There was something strange about the footprints. The clouds didn’t offer enough light for any detail. Brad looked up and down the street before turning on his headlamp. Once he did, he knew why the prints looked strange. First, the prints were too small. The stride matched his own, but the length of each print was tiny. Brad hunched and followed the prints as they dropped over the curb and headed diagonally across the street. On each left print he could see a perfect print of the sole of the shoe. On each right, the print was twisted; smeared by a foot that turned as it lifted.
 

Brad shut off his light and crouched in the middle of the street while he waited for his eyes to readjust to the dark. He wondered if Brynn had left the prints. Brynn’s feet would be small enough, but Brad couldn’t remember if Brynn had walked with a limp. He doubted it. Brynn had leapt over the table to get to Lisa’s fresh bread. Wouldn’t he have noticed if Brynn had limped while making the jump?

Brad shuffled across the street and ducked into a doorway. The footprints continued up the street a few feet away from him and then disappeared under an awning. They didn’t reappear on the other side. Either the owner vanished or they entered the building. Given all the vanishings, either explanation seemed reasonable to Brad. The thin layer of snow hadn’t melted or really drifted in the past couple of months, but it had blown around enough to soften the edges of other footprints and tire-tracks. These prints were so crisp. They had to be recent.

Brad looked back towards the apartment building. He could fetch Pete and they could investigate the tracks together, or he could just wait for morning and not wake anyone else up. He glanced in the direction of the highway. Brad took his first step back towards the apartment building.

The sound of a child sobbing stopped him. It seemed to come from the building where the footprints ended, but it was so quiet that Brad couldn’t be sure. He turned back to look, but kept his feet moving in the direction of his temporary home. Warning klaxons fired off in his brain. His instincts told him to run—run from the weird footprints, and run from what sounded to be a child in distress. Brad stayed calm and moved cautiously, back towards his building.

On the building to Brad’s right, a door fired open with a bang and a huge hooded figure emerged.

“Get down,” a gruff voice ordered.

Brad raised his hands but kept backing away.

“Motherfucker,” said the hulking figure. “I said get down.”

Brad couldn’t see the weapon in the man’s hands, but he heard the click of a shell sliding into the chamber of the pump-action shotgun. Based on the stance of the dark silhouette, Brad assumed he was the target of the gun.

Brad stopped, but didn’t have a chance to follow the order to get down. Just as he stopped, feet planted on dry pavement under the awning of a jewelry store, another man tackled Brad from behind. Brad’s arms shot out to take the worst of the impact with the sidewalk. His face came to rest just inches from the shotgun man’s shoes—black Chuck Taylors with green laces. The stock of the shotgun plowed down into the back of Brad’s head, knocking him unconscious.

Chapter 13: Underway

R
OBBY
WOKE
FACING
THE
window. It was too early—the sun hadn’t come up yet. Until he heard the door knob turning behind him, he couldn’t figure out what had roused him. Robby flipped over and threw back the covers in time to see the door pushing inward, stopping only when it hit the dresser.

He lay paralyzed with fear. He had nowhere to run.

“Robby,” Pete called from the other side of the door. “Robby, wake up.”

“Yup,” Robby said. He flew out of bed, shaking off his fear. “Give me a minute. I’ll be right there.”

Robby’s door drifted shut and Robby heard Pete moving down the hall. Pete was talking to someone else out there, but Robby couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Robby jumped into his clothes. He had laid out everything he needed the night before, and even in the nearly dark bedroom, he dressed quickly. He shoved the dresser aside enough to open the door and jogged down the hall. He found an assembly in the living room.

Sheila and Lisa sat on the big couch and Ted and Pete stood. Pete stopped talking when Robby walked in the room.

“Tell Robby what happened," Lisa said.

“Brad’s missing," Ted said. “I was on my way back over here when I saw tracks on Pearl Street. Two sets that I’m sure weren’t there when I went out. One of them could have been Brad’s. Both sets disappeared near an insurance building on the north side of the street.”

“He left to go check on Ted hours ago," Sheila said.

“He never showed up," Ted said.

“Something has happened to him,” Pete said. “Ted showed me the tracks. They end at an awning for an insurance building, like he said. We’ll start at that building; see if we can track him down.”

Their heads snapped around and Lisa grabbed her chest as the front door swung open. Romie strode in, letting the door swing shut behind her.

“What’s going on over here? I thought we weren’t getting together until sunrise," Romie said.

“Brad’s missing,” Pete said. “We’ve got to find him.”

“I told you guys not to trust that Nate guy,” Romie said, waggling her finger in Robby’s direction. “He shows up and suddenly people start disappearing. You think it’s a coincidence?”

“Was there a sign of struggle?” Sheila asked Ted.

“I couldn’t see any," Ted said. “But the tracks ended at dry pavement, so who knows.”

Pete stepped forward into the center of their loose group and raised his hands before speaking.
 
“We can stay in contact with radios and break up into teams of two. We’ll start with the insurance building and work outwards.”

Sheila began to stand, but stopped when nobody else moved. The rest of the group didn’t respond or move to comply. Pete’s eyes jumped from person to person, looking for agreement.

“Wait a sec, Pete," Romie said. “We’ve still got six people. We need to get to hauling those bodies or at least start redistributing the seventh sled.”

“Yes,” Robby said. “I’d be more comfortable if we could at least offload half of Brad’s sled to the rest. We’ve got some margin for error, but I’d rather not lose a whole sled.”

Pete’s voice started at a reasonable volume and rose to a shout. "Are you people kidding me? We’re going to move on and LEAVE BRAD BEHIND?”

Robby tightened his jaw, but didn’t respond.

Lisa was the first to answer. “Pete, listen. We’ve all lost a lot of people. All we can do is keep going. If we finish this mission, we have a chance to gain back some stability, but right now we’re living in a very unstable world.”

“Are you seriously conflating the big extinction with what’s likely happened with Brad? Like Romie said, it’s probably that Nate guy who got him. We can stop Nate. We don’t need a big plan. He’s just one guy,” Pete argued.

“By the same argument," Lisa said, “we can’t afford to let one man stop us from finishing this. We don’t have any guarantee that Robby’s plan will work, but it’s the only plan we’ve got to take this world back.”

Their heads snapped around once more as the door swung open again.

“What are we arguing about?” asked Nate. Brynn stood at his side with one arm around Nate’s waist.

“What did you do to Brad, you son of a bitch?” Pete yelled as he lunged for Nate. Ted stepped in his way and restrained the big man.

Nate took a step backwards and pushed Brynn behind himself. “What’s your problem?”

“Let me see his shoes,” Pete said, still struggling against Ted. He was pointing towards the feet of Nate and Brynn. “I want to see his shoes.”

“Calm down, big man,” Nate said. “We didn’t do anything.” He kicked off one of his shoes and flicked it over towards Pete. Pete didn’t bend to grab it.

“Not yours,” Pete said. “His.” He pointed towards Brynn’s feet.

Nate bent down as Brynn raised one foot. He plucked the shoe from Brynn’s foot and tossed it to Pete. The shoe bounced off Ted’s arm and Pete dropped to grab it from the floor. He flipped it over and ran a finger over the tread. He narrowed his eyes and tossed the shoe back towards Brynn. He kicked Nate’s shoe back as well.