Page 19 of The Midnight Hour
“A car two hundred miles away,” Daniel replies flatly. The man is already unzipping his pocket, taking out the keys. “In a barn near Rockport, Ontario.”
“Oh, yeah?” The man sneers at him, indifferent, but he takes the keys, which is so stupid and pointless Daniel could almost laugh—except he feels, suddenly and savagely, like putting his hands around this man’s throat and squeezing. He wants to see his eyes pop and his tongue stick out as the breath leaves his body. He closes his eyes, willing the image away, the deep sense of satisfaction it brings.
Shouting to his partner in crime, the man clambers into the car, followed by the other, and then with a roar of the engine and a squeal of tires they are gone, down the road toward Utica. In the ensuing, wintry silence, Sam collapses to the ground, retching.
“I thought…” he gasps, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “I thought they were going to kill us.”
“They might have,” Daniel agrees. He picks up the handkerchief the man threw to the ground and hands it to Sam, who looks at him with a kind of fearful awe.
“Dad, you were so…” He trails off, shaking his head. Daniel does not ask him to finish that sentence. He was so what? Cold? Indifferent? Weary? Hopeless?
All of the above, and not the kind of man he ever wanted to be, but he can’t dwell on that now. They need to obtain some kind of vehicle, as well as find shelter. It’s late afternoon, the sun sinking lower in a slate-gray sky, and the temperature is dropping. It will be hovering near zero by dark. They can’t afford to be exposed to the cold, as well as whoever else is roaming these ravaged wastelands.
“Dad,” Sam asks, his voice full of little-boy trust, “what are we going to do?”
Daniel has no idea. How far are they from Utica? Four, five miles? At the very least. “I think we’ll check out that army base that has food and fresh water,” he tells his son. “Elihu Root Army Reserve Center, right?”
Sam blinks at him. “Um, yeah, something like that, I think. Do you know where it is?”
No, he does not, and Utica is not exactly a small town. A small city, perhaps, with a population of maybe fifty thousand? Or, at least, that’s what it used to be. What it is now, he shudders to think, based on what he’s already seen while going to get Sam—guys like the ones he just encountered holed up in Walmart, barricading roads, shooting rounds off just for the hell of it, not caring who might get hurt, and no presence of police or military or anyone remotely trustworthy. How has it come to this, so swiftly? There’s no point, he knows, in lamenting the state of affairs; it simply is, and they must move forward.
“We’ll ask someone where it is,” Daniel decides. “Someone we can trust.” He thinks, then, of Tom, the quiet, steady man he met who helped and fed him, back on Route12, just two days ago. It feels like a lifetime already, but it isn’t. He can picture the gummy smile of Tom’s youngest, Isaac, only a baby, as he banged his spoon on his highchair. The quiet, dark-eyed olderchildren, Hannah and Noah, the calm capability of his wife, Abby. If he and Sam can get there, maybe they can regroup. Figure out a way forward. But that man’s farmhouse must be at least fifteen miles away…
That’s about six hours of walking, he tells himself. It will be dark by the time they arrive, close to midnight, but it’s still doable…and it might be their only option.
“I think I might know someone,” Daniel tells Sam. “But we’ll have to walk.”
Sam nods jerkily. He’s clearly scared, but he trusts his dad to think of a plan, to make it happen. His son might be eighteen, but right then Daniel feels as if he might as well be six years old, gazing at his daddy with big, trusting eyes. Doesn’t Sam realize howpowerlesshe is? They were just carjacked by two hillbillies high on drugs and he couldn’t do anything to protect himself or his son.
He glances down the empty road, a cold stretch of concrete under a winter sky. “Let’s go,” he says, and together they fall into step and start walking.
As the sun sets, the temperature drops, and Daniel’s mind slips into a numb haze. He knows he needs to think about what they’re going to do, how they can possibly get all the way back to the cottage in Canada without a car or any supplies, but it feels like everything is happening in slow motion, the gears in his mind barely turning over. He’s exhausted, near starving as well as freezing, and it’s all he can do to put one foot in front of the other as the road stretches on in front of them, seemingly endless.
“Tell me about Clarkson,” he finally says to Sam, rousing himself out of a near-stupor. “Before, I mean. I know we Skyped about it, but what was your favorite class? Did you get along with your roommate?”
“My favorite class…” Sam sounds as if Daniel is speaking a foreign language, and in a way, he is. What does any of that matter anymore? It’s a world that has been destroyed, perhaps forever. And yet Daniel wants, evenneeds, to hear about it. He wants to be a normal dad for just a few minutes, smiling and nodding as his son tells him how his economics professor issuperstrict.
“Yeah, your favorite class. Was it Econ? Or the history one? What period of history, again?”
“Modern European.”
“Right.” Daniel nods, the memories filtering through him like shards of broken glass, glinting with a barely held recollection of what once was, hurting him with their painful poignancy. “What is that, like 1850 to present?”
Sam shoots him a look like he thinks he’s crazy for caring, but then he continues, his voice growing a little stronger. “Yeah, around then. We started with the revolutions in 1848.”
“Right,” Daniel says again, nodding, trying to remember what he knows about that dim and distant past. “Were they in Italy and Germany?”
“And France and the Austrian Empire.”
“So back then it probably felt like the whole world was on fire,” Daniel remarks.
“Yeah,” Sam agrees, smiling crookedly. “Maybe kinda like this.”
And suddenly they’re both laughing, deep, from their bellies, hard enough to make tears come to Daniel’s eyes, although maybe they are real tears, because God knows he is so very close to weeping. But he doesn’t; he holds it together for his son as they keep walking and Sam, getting into the spirit of the thing, tells him about the climbing club he joined, how they’d hike out into the Adirondacks. Some kids even free-climbed, which was crazy hard, but pretty cool. Sam wants to try it, maybe, one day.
Daniel listens and nods, grateful for the soothing cadence of his son’s voice, the rise and pitch of syllables without him takingin all the words, just savoring the seeming normality of the moment, for however long it lasts.
Eventually Sam’s monologue trails away, and they both walk in silence. They haven’t seen a car or person in over an hour, which is hopefully a good thing, although the silence and stillness, along with the freezing temperatures and oncoming darkness, make Daniel feel uneasy. They need to find shelter, and soon. His face is numb, as are his fingers, even in the gloves he fortunately had in the pocket of his coat, and his toes.
