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“Where’s Mom? Is Mom safe?”
I checked my cellphone to see if my ex had called, but the battery was dead and I had forgotten to pack the dashboard charger. Their mother and I had gone through a bitter divorce, which we tried to keep from the boys, even though we split custody. Tomorrow was the usual day I turned them back to her. She would be frantic with worry when she didn’t hear from us, but I convinced myself it was better to have no contact until the plague passed. The government had censored pictures of what happened to women infected by the rapeworm, but we heard rumors.
“Yeah, she’s safe,” I promised. “She wants me to tell you that she misses you.”
His eyes brightened for a second, then he sank back down into my arms. “You don’t really know.”
I held him until he fell back to sleep. He started to wake up every time I tried to put him down or move him, so I leaned the seat back and fell asleep myself.
When I woke up in the morning, the windows were frosted over with ice, and the sun coming through them was bright and harsh. Josh was in the car too, in the passenger seat, curled up with his head against my arm.
They both looked untroubled in their sleep, the way they always had until just a few months before. I knew I would do whatever I had to do to keep them safe.
After we woke up, I checked our supplies. We had our fishing gear, and I had my grandfather’s old single barrel shotgun in the trunk, with a couple boxes of shells. There was also his old.38 Special revolver, the one he bought to protect his store and then never needed. I had just the rounds inside that, and no extras. I didn’t like guns, and wouldn’t have owned these if I hadn’t inherited them.
I checked out our supply of ca
“Dad, you know what we forgot to pack?” Josh said while we ate ca
I picked up the can opener where he’d left it on the ground, and put it back in my kit. “No, what?”
“Twinkies. They’re the perfect food. They never go stale. They survive anything.”
I gri
“I thought you said we were going to have fun,” he said.
The way he said it threw the lie back in my face. But I gri
Over the next few weeks, Josh and I ate ca
We moved camp twice. The first week, we heard cars roaring by on the nearby roads, so we moved to a clearing farther back in the woods. A week later there were days of planes flying overhead-fighter jets and helicopters-so we moved farther back under the trees. We spent our days watching the skies, staring at the roads, jumping every time a squirrel crunched through the leaves, dashing out our fire any time we heard something like a gunshot.
At night, when the boys were sleeping, I listened to the radio for news. Scientists still hadn’t found a way to remove the rapeworms from brain tissue without killing the patients. We were no longer in touch with the rest of the world: the Middle East was the first to go completely silent. Americans were moving north across the border into Canada.
I thought about following with the boys, but the gas gauge in the car read empty after I fell asleep one too many times listening to the radio with the engine ru
It was the second week of December when I took the shotgun out to try for a deer, telling the boys they had to stay in the tent until I came back. I was a half mile away when I heard an explosion, and then another, something far away but powerful enough to make the ground shake. I ran all the way back to our camp, and the boys were ru
Snow fell that night, the first snowfall of the year that was more than just flurries, three or four inches of it before morning. There was a glow on two horizons, west toward Cinci
Nick had the leftover peanut butter jars, which he had filled full of acorns he collected in the woods. He sat there, shaking them louder and louder, like some kind of shaman trying to ward off evil, until I snapped at him, and told him to be quiet, I just needed some quiet to think.
Before we curled up in our blankets that night, I told the boys to hold my hands. We sat there silently, but I prayed that we would make it. All we had to do was lay low and survive long enough, and my boys would have a chance.
It was in the morning, when we went outside, that we saw the footprints in the snow.
Josh spotted the tracks first when he left the tent to pee. I heard him ru
We all three went. I carried Nick, if only to keep him from hanging onto my legs and tripping me. He growled and bit my shoulder and pounded on me with his fists.
“Look, they’re the same size as mine,” Josh said. “It’s just another kid. Maybe he’s out here all by himself.”
Nick squirmed out of my arms at that point, eager to take a look himself.
Together, we trudged through the snow, following the straight line of the trail through the woods. When we came to the road, I realized how stupid I’d been.
“Don’t move,” I whispered to the boys. And then stepping over to a pine tree, I reached inside and broke off several branches, using them to try to cover up my tracks as I retraced them.
Nick fidgeted, shifting from foot to foot, kicking up the snow, but Josh wore a look of horror. “If we can follow them, anyone who comes by here could follow us.”
I nodded. “We’ll go back to camp, stepping in the same footprints as we go, okay? We’ll use the branches to cover our steps.”
“What about the other boy?” Nick asked as I scooped him up in my arms.
“What?”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “He’s probably really scared out here.”
“You can’t leave him out here, Dad.”
I damn well could, I thought, but then I saw their faces. If the boy was infected, he would have walked straight into our camp.
“Okay,” I said. “But you two have to stay here. You can hide inside this pine tree, and watch me go.”
I thought that would be the breaking point, that Nick would change his mind, but he scrambled through the branches, spilling snow, as soon as I put him down. “I’ll take care of him,” Josh said.
I crossed the road, brushing away both sets of prints as I went. I figured to take a quick look around, then report back to the boys that I couldn’t find anything. We’d move our camp again, and this time I would keep a better eye out for other people.
But I was only ten or twenty feet off the road when I saw a splash of camouflage, bright green against the snow, amid a flash of movement.
“Hey, come back!” I called.
I ran after the kid-it was definitely a kid-without bothering to cover my tracks. I came into a small clearing, and saw him standing on the other side, half-hidden by a tree.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”