Page 8 of The Midnight Hour
Maybe he had deserved it, after everything that had happened. Everything that he had done. Losing his job and then, far worse, lying about it for so many months. Taking out a second mortgage without telling her. Losing their home. Yes, there was great deal Alex had blamed him for, and he didn’t blame her for blaming him, but by God he was going to bringtheir son back safely, no matter what it cost him, and already he had a gut-deep feeling it might cost him everything.
“So what have you guys been doing?” Sam asks, and again the words sound incongruous, even wrong, as if Daniel has picked him up for Thanksgiving break and they’re heading home. They might hit a little traffic, grab a Starbucks, shoot the breeze. Daniel imagines his reply:Nothing much, your mom’s baking up a storm, Mattie and Ruby are excited to see you, I got tickets to the game…
He shakes his head slowly. “I couldn’t really say. I left Mom and the girls three days after the attacks, to get you.”
Sam’s eyes widen as he sits back in his seat. “Whoa…it took you that long to get here?” He sounds so surprised that Daniel lets out a hollow laugh.
“Yes, it did,” he replies briefly. He doesn’t want to go into it—the illegal, midnight trip across the St.Lawrence River, being shot at by the Canadian Border Control, spending a week in bed, delirious with fever, cared for by strangers who thankfully were kind. And then after…two weeks riding on a child’s bicycle, foraging for what food he could, avoiding the roving gangs and militias, and then, just moments ago, being hijacked by a bunch of teenaged boys. They’d wrecked his bike just for the hell of it and in response, he’d shot one of them.In the shoulder, he tells himself, but he’s not entirely sure how bad it was. He left them on the side of the road with no vehicle, ten miles from anywhere. That alone could have been enough to kill them all, never mind the gun.
The worst part is, Daniel thinks, he doesn’t even care.
“Tell me about you,” he tells Sam. “Clarkson looks like it was a pretty safe place to be?”
“Yeah, they closed everything off right after the attacks. Some rich alumnus sent in the Marines. A few kids left, to go back to their parents. My roommate, Tim, went, and some other guys on my hall…but the rest of us just stayed. It was okay.” Heshrugged, rolled his eyes, as if to invite some kind of commiseration that Daniel already knew he would struggle to give. “It was all pretty strict, you know? Rationed food, you only had certain time in the sports hall or gym, two minutes in the shower, all that kind of stuff…”
You poor baby, Daniel thinks with a sudden, savage bitterness, and then he bites his tongue hard, hating that he is thinking this way about Sam, his son. Ofcoursehe’s glad Sam had an easy time of it, relatively speaking. He’sgrateful. And yet something sharp has lodged in his soul, a splinter of resentment he doesn’t fully understand and really doesn’t want to feel, but it’s there, already tearing him apart.
“I’m glad you were safe,” he says, and knows, despite the tangle of his own emotions, that he means it utterly.
“It’s just…wild, isn’t it?” Sam remarks as he looks out the window. They’re driving toward Utica, down a straight road with barren fields on either side, interspersed with a few trees, leafless and stark. Right now, it’s hard to believe there has been a nuclear holocaust; there’s no sign of it in this bleak and wintry landscape, but Daniel knows they’ll come across something soon enough. An abandoned house. A shot-up store. A gang. “This is the first time I’ve been off campus,” Sam continues, studying the empty fields as if looking for clues. “They wouldn’t let us out. And we never got any news. It was like they thought we couldn’t handle it.” He turns back to Daniel, his expression matter-of-fact. “How many cities were hit?”
There’s something close to an eagerness in his son’s voice that makes Daniel bite his tongue again, just as hard. He does his best to keep his voice measured as he answers, “Nine, to start. And then more after. Retaliations, as well. But I haven’t heard anything definitively.”Has anyone, he wonders.
“What about the radio? Is anyone transmitting?” Sam speaks knowledgeably, but Daniel suspects he’s relying on video games for his understanding of this brave new world—the oneabout a zombie apocalypse, maybe, that they forbade him playing when Ruby was in the room; Daniel vaguely recalls a scene on the screen of an NPC transmitting with a radio.
As for the radio now…? “I don’t actually know,” he admits in surprise. He hasn’t even thought about the radio; he’s been on a bike for the last two weeks, and before that, when he’d been driving from the cottage to the border, he’d had no reception. A few days ago outside Utica he’d met Tom, a kind man, who had a ham radio and had given him news about how military reserves had been called up, then had refused to serve and dispersed. Not a good sign, Daniel had reflected at the time, of things to come.
“You could try it,” he suggests to Sam now, and his son gives him the wry and slightly patronizing look teenagers have perfected for their parents, as if Daniel is so outdated and dumb for not thinking of this, but it’s still kind of cute and amusing.Parents.
Sam leans over to turn on the car radio, and a burst of static issues from the speaker like gunfire, making Daniel jump a little.
“Easy there, Dad,” Sam chuckles, clearly amused by his over-the-top response. “You know, you’re looking kind of rough,” he adds, his amusement now laced with sympathy. “When did you last shower?”
Shower?Daniel turns to give him a look of complete incredulity. “Were there showers at college?” he asks, recalling Sam had just said something about showers limited to two minutes, but he hadn’t really taken it in. Showers. It feels like an alien concept. “After the bombings?” he clarifies.
“Yeah, I mean they werelimited,” Sam replies. “But Clarkson has this whole eco thing going on. They had these rainwater harvesting showers that were totally off grid. I mean, they werecold, and you got, like, ten seconds in them, but yeah.” It’s more than Daniel has had in a month.
Sam twiddles the dial of the radio. More static. “I was wondering if the radio circuitry was destroyed by an EMP,” he continues conversationally. “An electromagnetic pulse,” he explains kindly, and Daniel forces a smile.
“I know what an EMP is.”
“But they were saying that didn’t happen,” Sam goes on, as the static continues on various volumes. “And cars are still working too, even though an EMP is supposed to take them out. At least, the modern ones.”
“How did you learn that?” Daniel asks mildly. “PlayingAtom RPG, orThe Last of Us?”
Sam glances at him, momentarily confused, and then a flash of something like hurt crosses his face before he turns back to the radio. “Actually, those video games are pretty realistic,” he says in a voice that to Daniel sounds deliberately mild but still needled with hurt. “A lot of research goes into making them.”
“I know.” Daniel feels he should apologize, but he can’t quite make himself, even though he didn’t mean to sound so cutting. “You’re probably more prepared for this kind of thing than I am,” he tells his son, an olive branch offered. “I’m getting all my information from disaster movies.”
“Yeah, those aren’t very realistic,” Sam replies sagely, as if video games are so much better. He straightens. “So, what did you see here on the way down? I really don’t know anything. Tell me what’s been happening.”
“They really didn’t keep you informed at Clarkson?” Now he is the one keeping his voice deliberately mild.
“No, they didn’t like to tell us anything, at least not after the first blasts.” For a second Sam’s seemingly unconcerned manner drops, and he looks serious, even sad. “Too many deaths, and you know, some kids were, like,reallyfreaking out. They were worried about their families and stuff and just generally…‘this is bad for my mental health’ took on a whole new level, you know?They just couldn’t cope. There were some suicides, even, but not anyone I know.” He falls silent.
“I’m sorry.” The wellbeing crises of just months ago that had dominated student services of most schools now seem lamentably laughable.
Sam shakes his head, all traces of vitality gone; he looks, Daniel thinks, like the little boy he still, in many ways, is. “New York, Boston, DC…it’s so weird, to imagine,” he says. “Like, is the Statue of Liberty justgone? I keep thinking about that, for some reason. And, like, I don’t know, the Met. The Lincoln Memorial. The White House…” He trails off, his expression distant. “Do you…do you think people back home were affected? I mean…”
