Page 28 of The Midnight Hour
“Hmm.” With his chin on my head, his voice thrummed through me. “There could be worse places to be.”
“That’s if we get there in the first place.”
Daniel looped his arms around my waist and drew me close. We’d touched more in the last few days than we had in months, maybe even years. I pressed my lips to his throat and closed my eyes.
“You know we don’t really have a choice,” he said, his voice caught between wryness and a sorrow I didn’t want to think about. Even in his lighter moments, there has been a grief in Daniel that tears at me because I don’t know its cause.
A sigh escaped me in a soft gust. “I know we don’t,” I told him. “But I’m still scared.”
“I think we’ll always be scared. It’s just learning to live with the fear.”
I smiled against his skin, determined to lighten the mood. “I think I saw that on Instagram, with a picture of someone climbing a mountain or something. Or maybe it was on a coffee mug.”
He laughed softly and pulled me closer.
“Daniel…” I felt him tense, even before I’d said anything, and I knew he knew what I was going to ask. “Do you think you and Sam…”
“I can’t tell you if we were affected by the radiation,” he answered me quietly. “But I did my best to protect him, Alex, I can promise you that.”
I inched back so I could peer up into his face, but it was too dark to see his expression. “And what about you? Did you protect yourself?”
His arms tightened around me again. “I did what I could.”
Which, I reflected, wasn’t much of an answer, but I accepted it because I had to…and the truth was, I didn’t really want to know.
Now, as we climb into the truck and leave the little idyll we created for ourselves over the last week, I try not to think about those terrifying what-ifs. The journey ahead of us is frightening enough.
Daniel traced it on the map last night—one hundred and eighty miles on Route11, heading northwest and then straight north. It’s a two-lane highway that cuts through the woods north of Toronto and Barrie; Daniel assured me we’d be no closer than one hundred and twenty miles to a blast site, and we wouldn’t go through any town centers.
“We could do it in a couple of hours,” he insisted. “It’s a fast, straight road, and we have enough gas.”
That’s not accounting for anyone unfriendly we might encounter on the way, or the very real possibility that the air base in North Bay will refuse to take new people, or isn’t a safe place to begin with. There are far too many variables, and yet, like Daniel said, this is our best option. Really, it’s our only choice.
I spare one last, longing glance at the little stand of trees that felt like the next best thing to a home, and then Daniel drives through the meadow, onto the empty road circling thepark, and then turns right onto the road that leads to Route118 and then Route11 north, and to our future…whatever it might be.
TWELVE
DANIEL
Six months earlier
Outside Utica, New York
As soon as they reach the farmhouse of weathered white clapboard, Daniel knows something is wrong. He was here just two days ago—two days!—and yet everything has changed. No light glows cozily from within; the whole place looks empty and abandoned, as just about every house they’ve seen since Utica has been.
Slowly he mounts the steps. It’s just past dawn, the light still gray and misty, and they’ve been making their way, slowly and painfully, through the back streets of Utica, to the relative safety of Route12. They’ve kept to shadows and hedges, sidling along, sometimes stopping for as much as an hour, to wait until someone or other—usually in a souped-up jeep or a monster truck—passes. At night, Daniel has come to realize, the vampires come out, looking for blood, dressed in camo and jacked up with weapons. He is hopeful that once they leave the city behind everything will become calmer. The smaller towns won’t have these monstrous armies, a crazed infantry wavingAR-10s around, high on coke and power. They might have to walk most of the way, and they’ll need to find food, but these dangers, at least, will have passed.
Now, as the front door of Tom’s farmhouse, once a haven of warmth and welcome, creaks open, Daniel is not sure.
“Is anybody here?” Sam asks in a whisper.
“I don’t think so.” Daniel steps into the hallway. The first thing he sees is a picture on the wall, a needlepoint sampler, hanging askew because someone must have knocked it. His heart sinks that little bit further. He imagines Hannah and Noah, the little baby Isaac, and he closes his eyes. They were here two daysago, shy and smiling. What happened?
“What happened?” Sam asks, echoing Daniel’s thoughts, and asking as if he knows, but he’s afraid he doesknow, because all the signs are here—a chair on its side, the rag rug in a crumpled heap, cupboard doors flung open. Thesilence.
“They must have left,” Daniel tells him. “In a hurry.”
Left…or were taken? He hopes, desperately, that it’s the former, but he has no idea. Slowly he walks down the hallway, the wooden floorboards creaking under his footsteps, to the kitchen. For a second, he can picture how it was just a few days ago—Tom’s wife, Abby, at the stove, the baby in his highchair, their German Shepherd Rocky’s tail beating a staccato rhythm on the floor, everyone’s heads bowed for grace. An ache starts inside him, deep and wide and painful.
