Page 18 of A Wilderness Within

What happened to a world where people vanished almost overnight? She remembered seeing an article once about places in certain cities that suffered from urban decay, and she’d clicked through a slideshow of photos showing abandoned train stations, empty shopping malls, crumbling opera halls. Each picture had held a quiet, melancholy majesty.

Beauty within decay and emptiness. Beauty within sorrow of an ended age. Perhaps someday a new species would take over, and it would marvel a thousand years from now at the crumbling superdomes and national monuments the way humans had done when they’d set foot in the ruins of castles in Scotland or the skeletal remains of the Roman Colosseum.

With a shake, she pulled her focus away from the windows and tried to busy herself with other tasks. It was so easy now to lose a sense of time and drift away in dark thoughts.

She put away their dishes after washing them, then sat down at the table and rolled her ankle around. It still hurt a little and was stiff, so she’d been massaging it a little every few hours. If they left tomorrow, she would be able to travel, just so long as she didn’t have to sprint.

Lincoln stayed down in the basement for a long time. It was eerie being alone upstairs, so she carefully came down the winding carpeted basement steps. To her surprise, the walk-out basement which opened up to the backyard was homey. A small bar was at one end and a family room with a TV, and a gas fireplace was opposite the bar. Next to the back door were two dog kennels stuffed with hay. Two red-and-brown chickens clucked contentedly as they sat in the kennels.

“Dog kennels?” she asked Lincoln.

He shrugged. “It’s the only thing I could find.”

Lincoln leaned against the pool table, his back to her as he watched the wintry landscape of the backyard and the creek beyond. She couldn’t help but admire his strong body, the way he seemed to fill the room with this quiet, brooding presence. He had a predatory and animal intensity, yet she’d seen flickers of compassion in him. He wanted her to think he was a solid wall, impenetrable, impassive, unyielding, but he wasn’t made of stone.

There was something about him, a melancholy perfection, a tortured beauty to him that warned her he had seen and caused pain to others in this world and that those actions still haunted him. He wanted her to think he didn’t believe that there was still good in the world, but deep down, he had to have hope or else he never would have helped her. He would have taken her, used her and left her to die. Instead, he’d helped her, and he hadn’t taken advantage even when she’d offered.

He remembers what it was like, how good people can be when we work together. I won’t ever give up, and I won’t let him either.She made the silent vow to herself.

Caroline joined him by the pool table and watched the clouds slowly circle in cold patterns above the leafless trees. Without the buzz of cell phones and the constant noise and bustle of her old life, time had slowed to a trickle. It had only been a few months since this nightmare began, but it felt like she had been on the run for decades. Those first panicked and frightening moments in the airport seemed like a lifetime ago. The woman she had been then was gone. Dead. A ghost. Now she was the woman who had spent a week helping others in her apartment complex find food, shelter, and medical supplies. She was the woman who’d lifted people over the Chicago barricades to help them escape. She was hardened but not broken. She was steel but not unbending.

“What do you miss most about the way things were?” she asked as she slid closer to him. Their shoulders touched, and she could feel the heat of his body from that single point of contact. He didn’t pull away, and her heart gave a hopeful, stuttering staccato of beats.

“I miss knowing where I belong,” he replied, his voice a little gruff. She studied his bearded face, wishing she could hear his thoughts.

“Where you belong?”

“Before the contagion, I knew what my job was, what my purpose in life was. I knew where to go and what to do. I had my unit. Horowitz, Phillips, Holt, Finch, Norton. They were my men, my friends. My family.” His voice roughened as he spoke.

“What happened to them?” She reached over and covered his hand closest to her with her own, but he still didn’t look at her. The brown of his eyes was lit by the overcast winter sky, and the color was softer, darker, like the wood of trees in an ancient forest.

“Horowitz and Finch were with me here in Omaha. We stayed in a bunker. Philips, Holt, and Norton were sent to assist in escorting key government personnel to safe locations.”

“Safe locations? Like the bunker you were in?” She’d heard rumors over the years that there was a bunker in Omaha for the president if the United States was ever invaded.

“Yeah.”

She hesitated, thinking of the American flag pin. “Were…you with President Whitaker in the bunker?”

For a long second he didn’t reply, but a tic worked in his jaw. At last he said, “Yes. Whitaker died only two weeks in. One of us had carried the virus into the bunker, but we didn’t know it until it was too late. It killed everyone…except me.”

“Oh my God,” she whispered, only too able to imagine the horror he must have endured. She could see he wasn’t going to talk about it anymore. Not right now. But after a moment he looked her way.

“What do you miss about…before?” he finally asked, his voice softer, but still gruff.

She took her time in answering. There were hundreds of things she missed—hot showers, warm beds, pizza delivery, even her email. But there was one thing she missed more than anything.

“People. The feeling of knowing that our world was full of people. I swear, some days I could almost feel the collective creative energy as they worked, played, laughed, and cried, as theylived, you know? I don’t think it occurred to me until recently just what Hydra-1 has taken from us. It killed blindly, without thought, without discrimination. It took our dreamers, musicians, artists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, farmers… The virus stole our future as well as our past.” She had to wait for a moment before she continued. “Who is left among us now to create a life for those born after us? We have nothing left…nothing. This can’t be the end, can it? We can find a way to rebuild, can’t we? I mean…we have to…right?” The bleakness of the world seemed to close in on her then, crushing the last bit of her hope. She shut her eyes, choking down an agonizing sob as it knifed the inside of her throat.

Lincoln’s arms wrapped around her, holding her tight, absorbing the trembling of her body as she cried. It felt good to let it go with someone around, to expel the negative surge of energy that was trying to drown her and to know that someone was there for her. Lincoln held her through it all and rocked her in his arms. In that moment, she started to realize how lucky she was that he’d found her. Underneath all that cynicism was someone who cared. He was like her own personal sun, one that burned through the gloom of this dark world.

Sniffling, she pulled back to look up into his fierce face and saw a deep need there. Not one of lust, but one of the heart. A need to no longer be alone.

“It isn’t true,” he said softly, his rich voice rumbling.

“What isn’t?” she asked.

“That we don’t have anything left. As long as there are two of us, two who can remember the world before, we won’t let it die. When I saw you that first time, you reminded me that this isn’t the end. I was trained to fight until my last breath, and I forgot that, until I saw you. But now…now I’m fighting not just for my country—I’m fighting for the world.” When he said this, she couldn’t help but feel he’d almost said he was fighting for her too, and she shivered and leaned close to him again, burying her face against his chest.

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