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But soon there were fewer. The higher they climbed, the fewer there were.
Fewer.
Never none.
They passed places where people had fought and died. Some of them were still there, but these were not the staggering dead. These bodies had terrible head wounds. Gunshots, blows from blunt weapons.
“Don’t look at them,” Dan warned his brother.
But the boy looked. Of course he looked. His eyes were filled with . . .
Nothing.
Mason had been too young to understand much of what was happening when the plague swept out of the TV news and into their lives. Since then there had been no chance to give him a sense of what the world was like. What the world should have been like. Horror was everyday. Horror was everywhere. So how could his brother, how could little Mason, have any understanding of how bad things were? For him—for both of them—every moment was built around moving forward, staying safe, scavenging food, finding water. Finding warmth.
Beyond where the bodies lay, a small lane spurred off from the main r
oad. A wrecked car blocked the entrance, but when Dan leaned over the crumpled hood, he saw that the lane was clear.
Dan nodded, accepting it as a gift. Believing it to be so.
He picked Mason up, kissed him on the forehead, set him down on the hood of the car, and pushed him gently to the other side. Then he climbed up and over to help him down onto the ground again. A signpost wrapped in withered creeper vines read SULLIVAN LANE.
He didn’t know where it went, but any road was good as long as it wasn’t the one they were on. Besides, the lane was lined on both sides by heavy pine trees that blocked the fierce winds. Without those winds, the temperature was bearable. The snow was piled in long drifts against the trees, but the center of the lane was barely dusted.
“Come on,” he said again. Mason tried to walk, and he made it for a quarter mile before his stumbling feet failed. Dan scooped him up before he could fall, and though his own strength was flagging, he carried his brother into the wintry night.
Snow fell the way snow does. Soft, quiet, quilting the world with whiteness, hiding the truth of what lay beneath. It dampened down the sounds from farther down the road. The moans. The cries. The gunfire. All of it was distant anyway, and the snow shushed it to silence.
It was powdery and dry, and it blew slow drifts across the road. The air was frigid and the temperature was dropping. Rags and newspaper were not enough.
Dan saw the uneven lumps in the road ahead and knew what they were. A fight that had ended the way these fights do.
Badly.
He kept going, though. What else was there to do? Keep moving or lie down here and wait for either the teeth of the wind or the teeth of the dead to do their work.
The only grace, and it was small, was that the wind blew at his back rather than in his face. It pushed him, ever so subtly, uphill.
So it was uphill he walked, clutching his brother in his arms, feeling the ten tons of the little boy turn to twenty tons, to thirty. Dan never once let go, though. No, sir, he did not do that.
Hours passed. The night deepened with the snow.
Dan tried not to count the bodies in the snow. He knew that was the kind of thing a madman would do. Counting the dead as a way of passing the time. That wasn’t right.
Then after a time he realized that there were no more dead to count. The road stretched ahead, pale despite the darkness of night. Smooth and unbroken.
Dan stopped for a moment and set Mason down. The kid was out on his feet and he sagged against Dan, leaning on his thighs, fingers hooked into his pants pockets, eyes closed.
“It’s okay,” whispered Dan, smoothing the boy’s matted hair. “We’re safe.”
Saying that was dangerous. Believing it was dangerous.
So dangerous.
There was hope in that concept, and hope was like a backstabbing friend. You could trust it sometimes, and then it would turn and drive its blade deep.
They had to be careful. They had to learn to live without trust. To live without assumption or expectation.
