Page 20 of The Midnight Hour
Then Sam suddenly grabs his arm. “Dad!” he says, sounding excited. “Dad, look!”
Daniel blinks through the twilit gloom, a ripple of shock going through him when he sees a sign for the Elihu Root Army Reserve Center.
“We can get food,” Sam says, sounding even more enthused. “And water and maybe other stuff. Maybe someone here can help us.”
Daniel looks down the empty road now shrouded in darkness; the only sound is the sweep of the wind against the hardened, snow-encrusted ground. There’s no one around—no person, no vehicle, not even a light. He does not have a good feeling about this, but he wants to catch Sam’s enthusiasm, to feel his hope. “Let’s have a look,” he says.
Together they head off Route12, down a smaller road. One side is an empty field, another a stretch of chain-link fence, with a few flat-roofed, concrete buildings of the Army Reserve Center visible behind, cloaked in shadow.
After about ten minutes, they come to the gates of the center; they’re wide open, and one looks dented, as if someone drove into it, hard. Daniel’s sense of unease deepens, his gut churning as his gaze darts around, looking for any sign of life. He had, like Sam, been half-hoping, almostexpecting, even, a place of bustling activity—security guards, trucks, warehouses full of food, a smiling doctor in scrubs standing by a medicaltent. He’d felt that palpable sense of relief hovering at his fingertips, that someone could take charge, even if just for a few minutes, so they wouldn’t be all alone in this.
Instead, the whole place looks empty and abandoned. The concrete is cracked, the buildings dark and ominously silent.
“Is no one here?” Sam asks uncertainly.
“It doesn’t appear so,” Daniel replies. He’s conscious of their intense vulnerability—no weapon, no vehicle, no food. They have nothing. And no one is here. At least, he now hopes no one is here, because if they are he doesn’t think they’re going to be friendly. That radio announcement must have been an old recording, from after the first strikes, because what is abundantly clear is that this is no longer a place to get food or fresh water or medical aid. This is no longer a place to get anything.
Still, Daniel walks forward, just in case…in case of what? He knows no one is here…and yet he keeps going.
In the parking lot in front of the main building, a few tents have been set up. They list now, like sinking ships, their awnings ragged and torn. A dozen or so plastic crates, empty, some broken, are scattered across the asphalt.
Daniel moves forward again to one of the tents, and that’s when he sees the sprawled body of someone, their legs visible from behind a table. From where he stands, he can’t see their face, but they are clearly dead. They have been shot in the stomach, and, judging from the state of what he can see, it happened a while ago. As his gaze moves around, he sees other bodies sprawled across the parking lot, some of them in military uniform. There must be a dozen people or more; all are dead, and most likely have been for some time.
Sam starts to walk ahead, and Daniel checks him with an arm flung out, hitting him hard in the chest. His son lets out a startledoof.
“Dad…”
“Let’s go.”
“What? Why?—”
“Let’sgo.”
Sam sucks in a quick, startled breath as Daniel wheels around and starts walking back the way they came. After a few seconds, his son follows. They’re both silent as they go back through the gates, out onto the street, and back to the main road.
“Someone shot that guy,” Sam finally says, his voice quiet.
His son must not have seen all the bodies, for which Daniel is glad. “Yes,” he agrees.
“Do you think it was the same guys who took our car?”
“It could have been anybody, Sam.” Daniel takes a deep breath. He is recalibrating his plans, his hopes, of how to get from here to the cottage. Right now, it feels like an unfathomable distance. “We need to find the guy I mentioned,” he finally says. “Tom.” He says his name as if he knows him as a friend, when all he really is is a stranger who invited Daniel in for a meal. But he was kind and honorable, and Daniel is sure he can trust him. If he can get to that farmhouse, he can make a plan. Somehow…somehow he will be able to get back to the cottage. To Alex and Mattie and Ruby.
Together they start walking back down Route12. Daniel estimates they have about six or seven more miles more to walk. It’s dark now, moonless, so he can barely see his hand in front of his face. This is a good thing because it means they can’t be targeted…or so he hopes.
After about half an hour, they come into the center of Utica, and he tenses, conscious that there are likely to be people about. They pass looted stores, houses either boarded up or broken into, abandoned cars with shot-out tires and shattered windows, everything possessing an air of emptiness and desolation and violence. They stick to the shadows, and twice Daniel guides Sam to lie flat on the ground, their cheeks pressed to the freezing concrete, as a truck or SUV careens by. When they reach the downtown, Daniel glimpses people outside a hospitalon the other side of the street, racing stretchers down a steep hill so they clang hard into the concrete wall of a parking garage at the bottom. He sees a flash of a pale, terrified face on one of the stretchers and tells himself he must be imagining it; surely no one could be that depraved as to treat other human beings that way, for no good reason. This was a civilized country, he thinks, up until about two minutes ago.
He guides Sam away onto a side street before he sees any of it, and they trudge on, one foot in front of another. At times, the world around them feels like an alien, abandoned landscape—at other times, an apocalyptic hell. Daniel can’t feel either his fingers or his toes. They’re on a side street of shabby, wooden townhouses, most looking empty or others shuttered up tight, when he hears the staccato volley of gunshots up ahead, and then the squeal of tires, the flash of lights. He pulls Sam onto the front porch of a house with the windows blown out; they both lie flat on their bellies, hidden by the porch railing, breathing hard as the truck races down the street…and then stops right in front of them.
Neither of them so much as breathes as they hear doors open and then slam shut, voices that sound both belligerent and jovial. Footsteps, thankfully moving away. A door opening and closing, directly across from them, Daniel suspects. More voices, another car. Wild guffaws of laughter and then the sudden raucous blare of rap music, making Daniel jump a little.
He hasn’t heard music, he realizes, since before the first bombs dropped. Already it feels like a relic from another world, harsh on his ears and yet making something in him yearn for all the things he used to take for granted—music, art, fresh coffee, hot, gooey pizza. It rushes at him, a barrage of simple pleasures that now are impossibly out of reach.
Next to him Sam shifts on the hard wooden boards of the porch. “What should we do?” he whispers. A scent of cigarette smoke drifts toward them on the cold air, along with themurmur of voices. The guys, whoever they are, are standing outside, maybe on the porch of the opposite house, maybe on the sidewalk or the street. They could, Daniel realizes, be there for a very long time. It sounds like they’re having something of a party.
“We’ll have to go around the back,” he whispers back. They can’t stay on this porch for much longer; it’s too cold, and they’ll be far more exposed and vulnerable in daylight.
“But if they see us…”
