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THE DECISION TO bunk down in the manor house overnight is unanimous. We’re all done—thirsty, hungry, exhausted—some worse than others.
The sun’s sinking below the hills across the river, bringing night and the hunt ever closer. As safe as I feel here, the thought still sends shivers down my spine.
The house isn’t easily accessible from the river front and farther away than it looked. We trek back up to the cracked pavement and walk for a good half hour, but we’re rewarded before we even go inside. There are two summer apple trees in the back plot bursting with fruit. The yellow apples are tart, but juicy—a welcome improvement on the berry diet.
The wood of the manor door is swollen with damp. It takes Gabe a couple of hard kicks to splinter it free from the hinges and we enter into a spacious hallway with a broad staircase leading to the second floor. There’s a kitchen to our left, a dining room on the right that leads into a reception room with the bay window I saw from the river. A large fireplace and elaborate mantelpiece dominates one wall. Three couches are arranged around a low coffee table. An ornate grandfather clock.
Giant cobwebs hang from everywhere and a thick layer of dust coats everything; the floors, the stairway banister, the runner in the hallway, the window sills, the counters, the furniture...it’s like walking into a place where time stood still.
I guess it has.
The kitchen holds a wealth of gifts. Pots and pans that we can use to collect water from the river. A set of stainless steel knives that still have razor-edge blades.
I’m hesitant to open the refrigerator door, but turns out there’s no rancid smell. The spoiled food has solidified beyond recognizable organic form. Everything looks like hard clumps of ground or rock. I can’t even tell what it once was.
I hear wood creaking and groaning and peer out from the kitchen to see Kane testing the stairs.
He spots me and says, “If you’re coming up, keep on the side closest to the barrier.”
There’s a splintered crack in the middle of the first step. Looks like he discovered it the hard way.
Treading with care, I follow him up to a narrow landing. I jump a foot as something furry goes scuttling past, my heart racing. “Rat!”
“And spiders.” Kane swats at a cobweb hanging across half the passageway, clearing our path.
The action hollows out his jaw as he bites down against the pain.
“Kane, let me see your back.”
He hangs a look my way, his thoughts masked in a stony expression. “What?”
I deliberately didn’t phrase it as a question. I’m no longer asking. “You were flung against a wall so hard, you went squat. You look terrible.”
His brows pull together. “I’m fine.”
“Then you won’t mind showing me,” I say. “I’m not going away, Kane. Just show me.”
He studies me with that frown, then he shrugs. “Go ahead. Take a look.”
He makes me step around him, as if the effort will change my mind. I grab the hem of his form-fitting t-shirt, careful not to touch skin-on-skin as I peel the material up over his broad, muscle sculpted back.
The intimacy of what I’m doing bothers me. Bothers my pulse. My gaze skims everywhere my fingers refuse to touch.
I stop noticing his sculpted beauty, however, when I see the mottled red and purple bruises below his right shoulder blade. “You’re covered in bruises. This is bad.”
He steps out of my reach, turning to me as he rubs his shirt down. “Senna.”
I suck in my lower lip, meeting his sober gaze.
“I’m not a hundred percent, I know that,” he says softly. “But I’m not going to put you in danger by doing anything stupid. If I can’t go on and need rest, I will tell you.”
“You have dark circles under your eyes.”
“I didn’t sleep last night.”
I’d forgotten about that.
His hand comes out, his knuckles grazing beneath my chin. “If I need help, you’ll be the first to know. You have to trust me on this.”
“And you have to put some trust in us,” I say. “If we need to keep watch, we’ll take shifts from now on. You don’t have to do everything yourself.”
He opens his mouth, then sighs into a grim smile. “Fair enough. Now let’s see if we can find anything useful up here.”
Four doors open onto the landing. Bedrooms, I assume. My hand is on the closest doorknob when I freeze. “You don’t think... I mean, no one’s lived here for a long time, right?”
Kane smirks. “You’re afraid the owners are going to jump out at you?”
“I’m more worried they might have left their bones behind for us to find,” I say sharply.
“Few people died in their homes, but here, let me...” He moves around me, his hand reaching for the knob.
It’s tempting, but at the last second I brace my shoulders and twist the knob, pushing my way inside. I’m in the great beyond now, the wilds, the outside world where the entire global population was just about decimated. There’s no hope for me if I can’t deal with a few skeletons now and then.
There are no bones.
The door takes me into a bedroom that looks like it had been left in an immaculate state a century ago. The bed is made up with heaps of pillows, the stuffing spilling out in places, quite possibly gnawed by that rat and his extended family. The curtains are partly drawn, moth-bitten and sun-faded. The dresser holds a stand-up mirror and a weave basket filled with brushes and hair accessories, everything coated in a thick layer of dust.
“It looks so peaceful,” I say, drawing a finger through the dust on the mirror. A stripe of my reflection stares back at me. I barely recognize the look in my own eye, the blue washed out to a dull, haunted shade. “As if they just walked out and closed the door behind them.”
And never returned.
I give myself a mental shake and wipe away more dust from the mirror to get a proper look. I tuck the strands of limp hair torn from my ponytail behind my ear. There’s a streak of mud on my chin. I rub it off with the heel of my palm.
I turn, watching Kane as he rummages through the bedside drawers. “I always imagine the last days as utter chaos, society ripped apart and everything with it. You said few people died in their homes...?”
“The bloodsuckers are what remained after the plague swept the globe.” Kane finishes with the drawers and moves on to the wardrobe built into the wall. “We don’t know if it affected a small percentage of humans differently, or if the virus evolved near the very end. An immediate symptom of the disease was bloodthirst. People did not go home to die in their beds. The infected took to the streets in a desperate frenzy to hunt down humans and feed on their blood. Those they didn’t kill were in turn infected, and so on, and so on.”
I shift to get a view around his shoulder. Shelves neatly stacked with t-shirts and pants. The hanging space is crammed with dresses and coats and tops. Rows of neatly paired sandals and sneakers and heels and boots cover the floor inside the wardrobe. Judging by the size, I’m guessing this room belonged to a pre-teen girl.
“How do you know about the bloodthirst?” I ask. “We’ve always been told the virus spread too fast for anyone to figure out what was happening.”
“The Alder repository holds personal journals from our forefathers, the first survivors,” Kane says. “The virus spread like wildfire around the globe. There was no time for medical evidence or official details on the origins or kind of disease. All we have are observations from people as they were running for their lives.”
“Have you ever wondered if there are other settlements out here? Like Ironcross?”
“There aren’t, not on this continent, anyway,” Kane says flatly. “You saw what Grigore was capable of. All the diseased had those heightened senses, speed and strength. The abilities set in within an hour of infection. That’s the reason the virus spread so quickly and thoroughly across vast areas. There was no place to hide for long. Ironcross is in New York State. Our forefathers came from all four corners of the continent, the last survivors across north to south to east to west.”
We’re taught the basics of world and USA geography in school. I don’t have a real grasp on the distances he’s talking about, but I know they are vast. “Are you saying they walked across the entire continent?”
“All manner of vehicles were still operational back then.”
“They drove across states... But how did they all make their way to one little town in New York State? And why? Why not just make their own settlements wherever they were?”
Kane shrugs. “I have a million of my own questions I’d love to ask, but they’re not around to answer. We’re stuck with whatever they chose to write down.”
As he plucks a t-shirt from a pile, the material falls apart. He tosses it aside with a curse, dusting something off the hand that picked it up.
“Bugs,” he grunts. “Everything’s infested with bugs.”
My brow lifts. “Were you hoping to find something to wear?”
He throws me an amused look and returns to the bed, peeling back the covers and pulling up the sheets. Just like with the t-shirt, it seems most of everything in this room is held together by dust. The moment that’s disturbed, it falls apart into pieces of threadbare rags.
“Come on, let’s check the other rooms,” he says in disgust.
A thorough search yields a leather satchel and not much else. We considered hauling mattresses downstairs to sleep on, but they all showed signs of gnawing and brown spots that Kane suggested could be rat droppings—that’s when I decided I’d rather sleep on the hard ground.
The satchel is a good find, though. The strap is long, crossing comfortably over my shoulder, and there’s space enough for at least three days worth of apples to take with us when we leave.