Pastor Paul woke up in an overstuffed bed under several blankets with the smell of a fire in his nostrils and a sense of ease he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
It was so jarring that for a few seconds he wondered if he’d been forgiven—for what transgression he still did not know—and accepted into the bosom of the Lord.
Then he tried to move his left arm.
“Are you all right?”
The speaker was a young Asian woman in a rocking chair a few feet away, staring out the window with eyes that couldn’t see.
“What?” he asked.
“You cried out just now. Are you all right?”
“Did I? I apologize.”
“Don’t apologize for being in pain.”
She got up and found her way to the side of the bed with the help of her cane, and put her hand on his forehead.
“We don’t think you have a fever,” she said, “but we can’t find a working thermometer. How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been chewed up, spit out, and run over by a stampede.”
“Mm. I’m told that’s how you look as well.”
“You’re blind.”
“Yes, I am. I have been since birth.”
“I didn’t mean any offense,” he said.
“I’m not offended. I know I’m blind.”
She held out her hand, which he took.
“I’m Carol,” she said. “The others are Robbie and Bethany. They aren’t here right now.”
“I’m Paul,” he said.
“And you’re a priest?”
“I’m a nondenominational preacher, ma’am. Or I was. I guess I can claim to be whatever, the way the world is now. Are you a doctor?”
“No, unfortunately we don’t have a doctor. We found some bandages for your wounds and made do. What happened to you?”
“Depends on which part of me we’re talking about, I guess.”
“The shoulder, then.”
“A bear bit me.”
“A . . . bear?”
“Yep. Big one. They’re all big now—have you noticed that? Those coyotes you stared down last night . . . Wait, was it last night? Or have I been out for a while?”
“It was last night, but I don’t blame you for asking. We’re all missing time around here.”
He didn’t know what that meant exactly, but let it pass.
“Eastern coyotes are a hybrid breed, but they’ve always been mostly coyote and coyotes don’t grow that large,” he said. “That’s what I mean. Everything’s larger than it should be.”
“So, a larger-than-average bear bit you,” she said.
“Yup. He should have had me. I put the double-barrel under his chin and pulled and that was that. I wore his pelt for warmth for a few days. Did you get that snowstorm up here too, or did the Lord send that just for me?”
“We got it, although . . . if you don’t mind my saying, if I did believe in a god at one time, I wouldn’t now.”
He laughed. It made his whole body hurt, so he stopped right away.
“I don’t mind at all, Carol,” he said. “To be honest, it’s been so long since I spoke face-to-face with another person, you could curse my mother all afternoon and it would be the sweetest sound I heard in my life.”
She smiled.
“Are you sure you’re a man of the cloth, pastor?” she asked.
“Got a chapel in New Hampshire to prove it.”
“I think you’re too charming to be a religious man.”
“Sometimes that’s all we have going for us,” he said.
She felt around behind her until she located the chair, which she sat back down in.
“All right,” she said. “A bear. What about the face?”
“Mountain lion. Came at me from the trees. My own fault for not sticking to the highway, but I needed shelter. I shot him too, with the pistol. Knife would’ve been faster, but I couldn’t get to it.”
“And when you say ‘sticking to the highway’ . . . how far did you walk to make it here? Not all the way from New Hampshire?”
“No, I didn’t walk all of it. I had my truck running for a bit. Did you get a hailstorm?”
“We did. We appreciated it from indoors.”
“That’s the way to do it, yes ma’am. That was me being punished for pride, I think.”
She laughed.
“I think you should be punished for your pride,” she said. “Especially the part where you believe regional meteorological events are meant for you specifically.”
“Yeah, I can hear how it sounds. Same time, there aren’t a lot of other folks around for the Lord to direct His wrath at.”
He wanted to tell her about the angel that manifested before him and sent hailstones to destroy his truck. It seemed like this was a bad time to have that conversation, though, so he kept it to himself.
“Anyway,” he said, “that storm wrecked all I had except for the guns and the Bible in my pocket. I’ve been walking here since.”
“Why’s that?” she asked. “What made you decide to come here?”
“Here is where the Lord wants me. He had too many opportunities to claim my life on the way, and He didn’t take any of ’em. On that, at least, you’ve gotta agree. If not, I’ll tell you where the boar stabbed me, and the snake bit me, and we can just keep on going.”
“Well, as I said, we don’t have a doctor, but I do agree it’s surprising that you’re still alive after all of that. I suspect few would be.”
“You folks seem to be doing okay.”
“We’ve been very lucky. And even so, one of us has been missing since before the snowstorm.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Hey, you were the one petting the coyote, weren’t you?”
“Yes, that was me.”
“That was a little foolish, if you don’t mind my saying.”
She smiled. “That would be the majority opinion, yes. It seemed a reasonable choice, from my perspective.”
“I’m sure it sounded like a dog and felt like one, but those animals aren’t tame. They could have killed you.”
“Again, you’re not the only one to have said so. But if anyone was going to . . . I mean, if one of us were to go . . . No, never mind. I don’t think you would understand.”
“Go on and say what you were going to say,” Paul said. “I’ll keep it to myself. You want to check my neck? It’s a real collar.”
She nodded and carried on an internal debate for a while before answering.
“It would be easier for everyone if they had killed me,” she said. “Don’t you think? Robbie and Bethany would have gotten away and that would have been for the best.”
“Best for who?”
She nodded. “For everyone else,” she said. “Before the world turned into this, there were systems in place to make it possible for someone like me to live independently. There were bells and alarms, and I had a trained dog. I wasn’t a burden. The others won’t say it, but I know: I’m a burden. Touré . . . he might have said it, eventually. He was rude, but honest.”
“Is that the one who’s missing?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I think you’re wrong, Carol. And I think if you told the others that, they’d say the same thing.”
“Of course they would. That doesn’t mean it’s what they think. You haven’t been here. The choices they’ve had to make . . .”
“You’re right, I haven’t been here. But looking at this from the outside, you’re the best evidence I’ve seen so far that there’s hope for all of us. I don’t know Rob, or . . . What’d you say the girl’s name was?”
“Bethany.”
“Bethany. I don’t know them yet. Other than a few seconds last night, we haven’t been introduced. But I’m betting it didn’t once occur to them that what you’re talking about is even a possibility. Animals eat their wounded, and we don’t; you understand what I’m saying? The Lord can damn us to an eternity of this, but as long as we’re taking care of someone like you, I think we’ll be okay.”
She nodded, slowly. “Thank you, Paul. I think you might be a man of the cloth after all.”
“Was that too corny?”
“It was a little corny.”
“I’m out of practice,” he said.
She stood. “I’m going to find you something to eat. We have Noot bars and water. Will that do?”
“What in the heck is a Noot bar?”
“It’s what those of us who didn’t think to bring guns and knives to the apocalypse feed ourselves with.”
“Well, I’ll try it, then. I’m not in any shape to hunt, and I ran out of meat two days ago.”
She stopped at the door.
“You haven’t told me why yet,” she said. “You came so far, and said God wanted you to go on foot for some reason. Why didn’t you stop? Find a home in which to outlast the weather and stay there?”
“I had a good reason,” he said. “Her name’s Ananda, and until last night I thought she was the only other person left.”
Carol looked torn between asking if Ananda was, strictly speaking, real, and encouraging him to elaborate.
“And where is she?” Carol asked.
“Depends on how far we are from MIT.”
Bethany tromped downstairs, and was out of the house by sunrise.
Robbie was also awake by then and already packing up to head back to the dorm for what would likely be the first of many visits. They would need more Noot bars, especially with a fourth person now in the house, and . . . well, who knew what else the day might bring? Cambridge had tornadoes now.
He asked where she was headed. She lied and said she wanted to see if any of the library was salvageable. She did want to see if the stacks were still there, but that wasn’t what was really on her mind.
“Well, be careful” was all he said in response. She was expecting a lecture about how they had to stick together, but maybe he’d gotten tired of saying it over and over.
She did start at the library. It was burned to the ground, and still smoking. The old brick castle wing looked like it had weathered the inferno surprisingly well, though.
What she was there to do was reconstruct the path she had taken the night before. The spot where the preacher fell was marked by blood from the man’s shoulder, so she started retracing her steps by standing there and turning in the approximate direction of her departure.
I ran down THAT street, she decided. It was on the other side of Broadway, which was the road fronting the library.
She headed up the street. About halfway, she found the shed with the lock she’d picked the night before, confirming that she had this right.
Up and over the hill, she looked for a house on the left side of the street, with a driveway on the right and a tree out front.
There.
She sat at the base of the tree and felt the same knot in her back she’d felt last night. This was definitely it.
Up the driveway, the gravel made a familiar crunch under her shoes. She could see the skid marks left behind by the wheelbarrow, too. That gave her pretty much the exact position where she’d been standing.
She stood there again, counted down from three, and then spun around.
“Bang,” she said.
There was a bullet hole in the garage door now. It wasn’t a stretch to assume it hadn’t been there before.
But where’d the gun go? she thought.
She’d been woefully unprepared for the degree of kickback when firing a gun for the first time. Her wrist—which she thought at first was broken—still hurt, and probably would for a while. She also fell backwards, into the wheelbarrow, causing the skids in the driveway. And, of course, she lost her grip on the gun.
The next thing she did after that was get up, right the wheelbarrow, and get the hell out of there as fast as she could.
So where did the gun land?
Looking for it the night before would have been a waste of time had she even hesitated to consider the notion. But clearly it landed somewhere that was not out in the open.
Unless someone else had come by overnight and picked it up.
She walked around the front lawn, which was skirted by overgrown shrubs, until her eye caught something silvery beneath a bush. She got down on her stomach for a better look.
“There you are,” she said.
The gun had flown a remarkable fifteen feet from where she’d fallen over. This was surely a record of some kind.
She reached under the shrub and grabbed the revolver, then walked back over to the middle of the driveway and pantomimed her prior actions once again, this time with the gun in her hand.
Stop, spin, fire, fall down, she thought, while neither firing nor falling down.
Next, she walked the bullet’s trajectory to the garage door. Theoretically someone had been standing somewhere along the path when she fired, assuming she hadn’t imagined it all.
She had to admit, she probably had. Just like Carol had in the dorm. In fact, that was by far the most likely explanation for all of this: (1) Bethany got the idea of Carol’s bogeyman rattling around in her brain; (2) alone in the dark, she let her fear get the better of her; and (3) she shot the gun at a figment of her imagination.
There was something that felt wrong about the driveway, though, now that she was looking at it in the light. The surface was still damp from the rain the night before, but it was a soft pebble driveway rather than tarmac, and from a certain angle, it looked like one spot had been rubbed in the wrong direction, like a thick pile carpet brushed against the grain.
A patch of the driveway was a different color from the rest of it, and it was right in line with the flight of the bullet. If the discoloration had been red, Bethany would have been all over the idea that this was blood, and therefore proof that she wasn’t losing her mind, that she really hadn’t been alone, and that she’d even clipped the guy.
But it was yellow.
It took Robbie most of the morning to get one load of blankets together and into the cart.
Not because blankets were a particularly difficult challenge, in terms of packing, but because first he had to make sure everything they wanted to bring was collected in the same place. It would give him a good idea of the volume he was dealing with, to assess how many trips he would need in order to move all of it to the new location.
They hadn’t been in the dorm for more than a few weeks, but somehow they’d managed to spread stuff out all over the place, between four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two rooms in the basement, and the common room. It made him wish they’d thought to pack before leaving. Although if they had, they probably never would have come across the heavily armed priest.
Having the pastor around was an incredible relief. Or it was going to be once the man was ready to get out of bed again. Assuming he survived the wounds they found him with.
The guy had walked through hell in order to make it to them, doing what none of them had the skills or the tools to do. He could hunt, and he had guns. And thank God for both, because there wasn’t enough Noot to keep them all alive until spring. Not unless they found more, or figured out how to plant and grow their own Noot trees.
“Or we could just grow actual food,” he said to himself. “Crazy, I know.”
The bike was loaded and waiting at the front of the dorm for the first of many trips. Robbie was at the back of the dorm, meanwhile, on the other side of the gate, looking at the river.
It was a beautiful day. Despite the now-leafless trees, it was easy to see how they’d been confused about precisely which season they were in the middle of. The weather was manic; it couldn’t decide what it wanted to do from minute to minute.
He would have liked to be able to spend more time close to the river if only to have this view now and then. At the same time, it wasn’t that far from the house, and Bethany had been right; the new place was definitely safer, and easier to defend and heat.
“All right,” he said. “Enough sightseeing. Let’s do this.”
He was about to head back inside when he heard . . . Well, it sounded like a horse. It probably wasn’t a horse; it was probably something terrible, not unlike when he thought he heard a locomotive and it turned out to be a tornado.
But in this case a horse was exactly what it was. Far more important, someone was riding the horse.
“Touré?” Robbie shouted.
“Robbieeee!”
Touré and the horse came to a stop in front of the gate, and Touré climbed down as fast as he could. Which wasn’t fast at all, as he appeared to have a bum leg.
“I can’t believe it!” Robbie said. He was crying and this time didn’t care who saw.
“Dude!”
Touré hopped over, Robbie met him partway, and they hugged for a while.
“I thought you were dead,” Robbie said. “I can’t—”
“I know, I’m sorry. I got attacked. Oh, man, I have so much to tell you.”
“Me too!” Robbie said. “And you have a horse? How do you have a horse?”
“Don’t call him that. His name is Elton.”
“Don’t call him a horse?”
“Yeah, he doesn’t know.”
“When did you even learn how to ride a horse?”
“That’s what you wanna ask me?” Touré asked.
“It’s the first thing I thought of. I have more.”
“Okay, well, I’m not really riding him, I’m kind of hanging on. I can’t believe he even got me this far; I thought he was gonna jump into the river instead. And he’s not mine.”
Elton snorted.
“Sorry, man,” he said, petting the horse’s neck. “Elton doesn’t belong to anyone, but I’m not the one who put that saddle on him. Her name is Win, and she saved my life a lot.”
Touré looked past Robbie, to the dorm.
“Hey,” he said, “um, you’re not . . . Are the others . . . ?”
“Oh, no, no,” Robbie said. “They’re fine. We moved. And we ran into that kid from before. Yeah, he’s dead now, and we set the library on fire, after a tornado. But we met this priest, who seems pretty cool, and all that was just yesterday.”
“You met a priest? I met an astrophysicist. Look, we have to get you guys over to MIT. Win’s there now. We have electricity, and heat. Ananda says she thinks we’re in for a crazy bad winter.”
“Ananda?”
“The astrophysicist.”
“Oh, cool,” Robbie said. “I think my guy is looking for her.”
“The priest or the dead kid in the library?”
“The priest.”
“Wait, wait, wait . . . Is his name Paul?”
“I left before I asked.”
Touré laughed, and then Robbie hugged him once more. He really never did expect to see Touré again, and it had been killing him for so many reasons. Today in particular, because he had been gestating an idea and Touré was the only person in the world who would take it seriously.
“Look,” Robbie said, “we have to go over all of it, but I think I’ve worked out what happened to us.”
“Is it a crazy theory that makes no sense and is probably impossible?”
“It is.”
“I’ve got ten of those,” Touré said. “Hit me.”
“It’s about how we survived.”
“Uh-huh. Go on.”
“I think . . . This is going to sound crazy,” Robbie said. “You’ll think I’ve lost it.”
“That’s the best kind of idea. Are you kidding?”
“Here’s what I think. I think we survived because we weren’t here when it happened. The mass extinction, I mean. We didn’t die because we weren’t here.”
“Here, where? Like, in Cambridge?”
“Bigger than that,” Robbie said.
“Not on the planet?” Touré said.
“Bingo.”
Touré laughed. “I love it,” he said. “So how did we end up off-planet for the apocalypse?”
“That’s the crazy part,” Robbie said. “I think we were abducted by aliens.”
Touré hugged him hard.
“I am so glad I found you again, man,” he said. “You’re not going to believe this, but I was thinking the same exact thing.”