Untaken (34 page)

There was a knock on my bedroom door.

“What?”

“I brought you coffee,” called Brandon.

My mom would have spat, seeing me drink coffee, but my mom was gone for the time being and there was no one to stop me ruining my health. No one to fix the heat or bring more food. Probably no one for miles and miles around. Just a big white world of snow.

“You awake?” called Brandon

“Come in already,” I snapped.

The coffee steamed in the frigid air. The light reflected off the snow gave his skin a bluish caste. He looked like a dead person, or one of the monsters from the covers of his Uncle Bob’s lurid horror novels. He pressed the cup into my hands and it was only then that I realized how cold I was.

“Storm’s still going,” he said. “But I think we’re past the worst. This time, anyway.”

The coffee was bitter and scalding. No creamer. No sugar. We seemed to have forgotten a lot of things like that. It was surprising how all those little extras that lurked at the back of a normal kitchen cabinet were what made so many foods actually edible.

“We’re boiling water downstairs. All that snow will replace our drinking supply. Seems a waste us both sitting up here when the kitchen is actually warm for a change,” said Brandon.

“I didn’t ask you to sit here,” I said.

“I know. But I wanted to check you were okay.” He sat next to me on the icy bed. “I guess I wanted some company, to tell the truth.”

“Where’s Jake?”

“He and Dog are coloring.”

I smiled. The coloring books and crayons had been a big hit with Jake. The kid didn’t know what half the pictures were meant to be, so he colored them any old way—orange whales swimming through purple seas and so on—but the results were kind of cool. And it was nice to have some art in the cabin that wasn’t pictures of dead animals and naked ladies.

Brandon’s Uncle Bob hadn’t exactly been the artistic type.

“Keeps saying he’s hungry,” said Brandon. “I been trying to tell him about preserving supplies, but he’s like a regular little kid in a lot of ways, and he don’t want to hear it.”

“He
is
just a regular little kid. You can’t start thinking any other way. It’s not helping.” I didn’t know why he had to keep bringing it up about Jake being different. How was it helping?

Brandon shrugged. “I don’t want to fight. But if we actually make it through this winter, we’ve got to talk about it.”

“We’ll make it.” I only allowed doubt to creep in when I was in my own head. Coming north had maybe been a bad idea, but if I’d been on my own, things would have been worse, and I had to remember that when cabin fever set in.

I’d never let Jake see my doubts. And especially not Brandon.

“Maybe, when the snow melts some, we could try taking the car out to the lake,” Brandon said. “There are some vacation houses out there we didn’t hit yet. Could be there’s some good shit left.”

“I’m thinking we should take the gun out,” I said. “Maybe we can find some tracks to follow with snow on the ground. You can show me how to shoot.”

“Hunting?” His eyes lit up.

“It’s a hunting cabin.”

“Really? I only came up here for the swimming and the lobster rolls. If I’d known we were going to be hunting I would have stayed home.”

I cracked a smile. “I think it’s time, don’t you? We can’t go on scavenging old tins and stuff forever.”

Brandon looked uncertain.

“We can’t go on being stuck between the past and the future. Not if we’re going to get through this.”

“Someone will come to help us, won’t they?” he asked softly. I recognized that look, the stillness of fear that can tip so easily into resolve or despair, like a coin spinning on edge. “I mean, right now it’s just us, but…”

I nodded. “Right now, it’s just us. I’m sorry, Brandon.”

His hand lay on the bed, his fingers red and raw from his efforts to dig out the generator. I curled my own fingers into his, gave his cold hand a squeeze. “It’s just us. But that’s okay.”

The wind howled around the cabin, filling the window with the beautiful, deadly emptiness of snow.

Gracie

t’s gonna get cold.”

“I’m coming, Brandon. Give me, like, ten more seconds.” The sun streamed in through my bedroom window. It was nice to feel warm summer sun again, but the glare on the screen made it hard to see.

Grc97
: Have they moved yet?

6_Star
: Still sitting tight. Brattle, or just South of.

6_Star
: Staying down South it looks like. That’s good news, right?

Grc97
: Subtle. U ever gonna give up asking where we are?

6_Star
: Unlikely ;-)

Grc97
: U tell me where u are and I’ll think about telling u where i am.

6_Star
: Haha. California. You knew that. Also don’t type “u”. It may be the end of the world, but we still have some standards.

Grc97
: California. Real specific. Anyway, gotta go. B is yelling at me.

6_Star
: Stay safe.

Grc97
: U 2 ;-p

Thank God for that. The army guys had been moving closer last week. They’d made it to Harnford, a town just forty miles south of the cabin, but now they’d veered off East again.

I hadn’t been able to do much with the drives I’d taken from Doc and Terry. Everything had been locked up tight, encoded within an inch of its life. Thank God the internet had still been up.

I trusted 6_Star about as much as I trusted anyone, which was just slightly above zero, but there was no way I’d have been able to get into Doc’s files without her. Of all my old online buddies, there were only two of us left. Me and 6_Star, the last of the Outposters.

Brandon would flip if he knew I was talking to her still, but wasn’t it better to know where Doc and Terry and their pals were, rather than just hoping we didn’t cross paths?

According to 6_Star, a whole unit of them still combed the woods around Eastern Maine. Knowing where the army guys were, and especially knowing that they still had no idea where Jake vanished to, was the only defense the three of us had. I’d tried to explain it to Brandon, but he didn’t trust computers; he could barely turn one on. I’d tried to make him understand that I’d known 6_Star for years, that I couldn’t just get the stuff I needed from the drives we’d stolen myself, but Brandon was almost as bad as Mom when it came to computer stuff.

As if 6_Star was some creep trying to lure me into the back of a van! I was lucky 6_Star was helping me at all. To hear her tell it, things were a lot worse on the West coast, especially for people like 6_Star who were on the government side of things at the beginning.

6_Star was risking a lot to help us, especially when I couldn’t do anything to help her in return.

“I’m giving it to Dog if you’re not gonna eat it,” Brandon hollered from the kitchen.

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, Mom, I’m coming.”

I clambered down the wooden ladder that led to the next floor from my attic bedroom. The air on the ground floor was mustier, but the cabin smelled much sweeter now that it was warm enough to leave the windows open.

“Eggs again?” I said, flopping down at the kitchen table.

“
Cold
eggs,” said Brandon. “There’s coffee, too. That’s still hot, anyway.”

“Somebody needs to put a cork in those hens,” I told Brandon, digging in to the mound of fried eggs on my plate. We’d found the hens back in March. On a folksy smallholding set up for the tourist trade, out near Mustell. There had been cows, too. Some of them had been dead in their pens, and the rest of them had been living half feral in the overgrown back-lot. Neither I nor Brandon had felt up to dealing with the cows, who had rolled their eyes and tossed their heads in a distinctly unwelcoming way when Dog yapped at them, but the hens had worked out okay. Better than okay, actually. Now that the warm weather had come, they laid more eggs than the three of us could eat, even with Dog sneaking them away whenever she got the chance.

Brandon had the kitchen door propped open, and the breeze that blew in was thick with the scent of flowers and warm vegetation. Birds called to one another from the woods, and trees whispered and creaked in a companionable way. It was possible to be content in this strange limbo we’d made for ourselves for days at a time, before I remembered the world had ended.

When I’d first started talking to 6_Star, during the seemingly endless winter, the things I’d learned had been almost more than I could cope with.

Finding out that the disaster was worldwide. That no place in the world had been spared. Survivors were being advised to make their way to the handful of cities where the power was still on. New parliaments were being tentatively formed, violent wars were being fought. The bigger picture was no better than what we had here at the cabin, and with Jake to keep safe, there was no way we could have gone to one of the cities even if we’d wanted to.

The challenge of surviving the winter had helped. Keeping the cabin warm and food and water in our bellies had used up all the worrying we had in our systems.

It was now that we finally had the leisure to think again that things seemed so impossible.

Brandon would keep on and on about Jake, and what we were going to do about him until I’d get so mad that it was best to avoid talking to Brandon at all. There was nothing to “do” about Jake. As far as I was concerned, Jake was a regular little kid.

And when I’d try to talk about something sensible, like how to fix the cabin up for next winter, then it was Brandon’s turn to clam up. Pretending that next winter wasn’t coming wouldn’t stop it from happening. So, although we lived side by side every day, we hadn’t been talking very much.

I had nightmares a lot. I dreamed of running down dark corridors in slow motion, knowing something terrible was gaining on me with every syrupy step, and that I’d never escape it. Sometimes when I lay awake, Brandon’s yells would come up through the floorboards from the room below, and the next day, his eyes would be red and bleary. The nightmares were something else we didn’t talk about. Jake seemed the happiest out of all of us. He still stared up into the sky at night, but he didn’t make the patterns anymore. He spent his days exploring the woods, with Dog at his heels, and in the evenings, he told us all about the things he’d seen that day.