Page 41 of The Midnight Hour
Strangely, this idea fills him with something almost like comfort. It’s not stealing if they’re dead, and it means he won’t have to hurt anyone.
He keeps walking.
Just past the empty and vandalized Hungry Chicken Country Store, its wooden porch sagging and its windows broken, he crosses the Mohawk River onto Route5, near an RV park and marina. He hears a noise from the park, and stops, instantly alert. When he left the truck, he took one of the knives with him, stuck into his belt-loop, and he fingers it now, wondering if he’d be able to use it. If he even knows how.
He hears another noise, a sort of gulping sound, and slowly he turns. A little boy, about two or three years old, is standing by some bushes. His face is grimy and tear-streaked, and he isn’t wearing a coat even though the weather is hovering around freezing. Daniel hesitates. The boy stares at him and sniffs.
“Hey,” he finally says, and his voice sounds rusty, like he hasn’t used it much, and he hasn’t, not like this. “Are…are your parents around?”
The boy simply stares, unblinking, seeming as if he doesn’t even register him at all. With great reluctance, Daniel moves toward him. He scans the area, but all he sees are some dilapidated-looking RVs in the distance. There’s an air of abandonment about the place, and he wonders if this boy has been living on his own, and why.
“Where are your parents?” he asks. No reply. Daniel stares at the boy, who stares back at him. He does not know what to do. He has been walking for at least half an hour; he can’t bring this boy back to the truck, and neither can he bring the child with him, since he doesn’t even know where he’s going.
“Look,” he says. “Why don’t you go inside?” He nods toward one of the RVs. “I’ll be back in a little while. I’ll look for you then, make sure you’re okay.” He knows he is telling himself as much as, if not more than, he is this little boy, who looks as if he doesn’t understand a word Daniel is saying. “All right?” Daniel tries again. He points toward the nearest RV. “Go in there. Stay warm. I’ll be back.”
The boy stares at him for another long moment. Danielgives him an encouraging smile. Then, thankfully, the boy slowly turns and walks back to the RV. As he disappears inside, Daniel hurries onward, down Route5, toward Schenectady. He doesn’t look back.
Another hour of walking takes him to a promising suburb of the city, older homes with gracious lawns, now weedy and frozen, an air of shabby gentility hovering on the edge of true dilapidation. He can find a car here, he thinks, even as he acknowledges that many of the houses look empty, their cars gone along with their owners. Nearly a month after the first bombs, Daniel supposes people have run out of food. Have they gone looking for it elsewhere? Have they fled this suburb of Schenectady for something that seems safer?
A few of the houses look lived in; there are signs on the front lawns warning people away. Daniel gives them a wide berth. The back of his neck prickles, and cold sweat trickles between his shoulder blades. He’s pretty sure he’s being watched, and a knife does not feel like nearly a good enough weapon.
The road he’s on curves around to the left, and he follows it, keeping to the trees as often as he can. He scans the houses, unsure what he’s even looking for. A nice, shiny SUV with a “please take me” sign in the window? Panic starts to cramp his stomach, and he feels dizzy. He’s tootiredfor this. He’s too spent.
Then he sees it—a house that looks empty, but with a Chevrolet jeep in the driveway, at least twenty years old, but hopefully still drivable. He looks around, and he can’t see anyone. Quickly and quietly he walks up to the front door and tries the handle. It doesn’t budge. He looks around again, and then peers through the grimy window next to the front door. He glimpses a front hall, a coat stand, a table with a telephone. It looks like an old person’s house, judging by the black lambswool overcoat, the old-fashioned telephone.
He takes a deep breath, and then jabs his elbow hard through the window, shattering the glass in one clean break that is strangely satisfying. Carefully he reaches around through the jagged shards of glass still in the window frame; they catch at his sleeve as he flips the lock on the door. It clicks open.
He opens the door and steps inside. The smell in the house is musty and sweet, and catches at the back of his throat, nearly making him retch. Someone, he realizes, is dead in this house, and has been for some time. He is not about to go looking for the body, not when all he wants are the car keys. He breathes carefully through his mouth as he hunts around the hall for the keys—the table, in the pockets of the coat. Then he sees them right by the door, hanging on a hook on the wall. He exhales slowly in relief.
He is just taking them off the hook when he hears a creak behind him, and he whirls around, the knife in his hand before he’d even realized he’d grabbed it. A woman is standing there—tiny, frail, elderly. She trembles as she looks at him.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she whispers.
Daniel breathes out and puts the knife back in the belt-loop. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he tells her. “I’m just taking your car.”
Her shoulders slump. “Robert died last week,” she whispers. “Upstairs in the bed. It was the radiation that got him.”
A chill crawls along Daniel’s spine, turns his hand slippery. “We’re too far from all that,” he says, and he hears the waver of uncertainty in his voice. “And it’s been too long.” He’s sure he read somewhere, before this all happened, that the levels of radiation in the atmosphere are under dangerous levels after just two weeks. They started rebuilding Hiroshima and Nagasaki after just a few months; people reported to work the nextday.
And yet already he recognizes that this is different. There have been more bombs, over a longer period of time andof a greater power; he recalls reading that the nuclear bombs in modern arsenals are up to sixty times more powerful than the ones that were dropped on Japan. And how many have been dropped now? No one even knows but it’s most certainly in the dozens, judging from what they’ve heard on the radio.
Besides, people are different now. They don’t have the same pull-together, can-do attitude of the 1940s, everyone willing to sacrifice for the greater good, a sense of duty and honor more important than safety or comfort. Everyone is an individualist these days, concerned with their ownpersonal journey, which, when faced with a nuclear holocaust, means everyone is out for themselves. He has seen the truth of this every day of this hellish journey from Ontario to here.
The woman shakes her head slowly. Her hair is limp and white, her eyes faded into a mass of wrinkles. She has to be well over eighty. “He was out when it happened,” she tells him. “He saw the flash. We weren’t sure if it was from Boston or New York, but it lit up the whole sky like a firework.”
Daniel does not want to hear this. He does not want to imagine that he, and more importantly Sam, might right now be breathing in radioactive particles that are slowly killing them from the inside out.
“What happened?” he asks, with reluctance. “How do you know it was the radiation?”
“He had trouble breathing. Felt dizzy all the time. And then he got all clammy and sweaty and his stomach was swollen…I think from the internal bleeding.” She speaks both sadly and knowledgeably, and Daniel doesn’t know what to make of it.
“You’re nearly two hundred miles from either New York or Boston,” he says, almost like an accusation.
She shrugs. “He was outside a lot, trying to make this house secure. Helping other people…he was a good man.” Tears come to her eyes. “And he wasn’t the only one, either. Lots of people have died. Our neighbors…I heard her screaming, in pain. Itlasted for days. And so many people have left, but where are they going? Whereisthere to go?” A tear trickles down her wrinkled cheek, pooling in a deep seam. “I’m just waiting to die. Iwantto die,” she exclaims on a moan. “Why couldn’t I have gone first?”
Daniel has no answer to this. They’re sixty miles closer to the blast sites than they were in Utica, and it seems that has made a difference, although perhaps this level of desolation is coming to Utica and beyond, as well. Perhaps it’s just a matter of time, if the bombs keep coming, the radiation traveling downwind, the cloud looming over them all. “I’m sorry I have to take your car,” he tells the woman. It’s not so much an apology as a statement of fact.
“Robert is the one who drove it.” She stares at him sadly. “Where are you going?”
