“We waited too long.”
“That’s not the right way to look at it.”
It was mid-morning, and we were out back of the cabin, filling the wood-fired hot tub with logs.
Who else but Chuck would have a wood-fired hot tub? I laughed to myself.
The fresh mountain air was incredible, and it was warm, at least ten degrees above freezing. Through the birch and fir trees, the sun was shining down on us. Birds were singing.
“We’re all here, we’re mostly healthy,” I continued. “So what if we’re missing some supplies?”
There was fresh water, mountain snowmelt, bubbling down in a small creek right next to us, and we had a few days’ worth of food. Chuck had shown me how to use an app for identifying edible plants in the woods, and we could fish and trap animals as well.
I had no idea how to trap, but there was an app for that too.
Chuck picked up another log with one hand, holding the injured one against his body. He threw the log into the woodstove at the side of the hot tub. The cabin was on fairly flat ground. We were grabbing wood from a pile under the back deck, standing in the leaves. “You’re right.” He laughed and shook his head. “Unbelievable, isn’t it?”
Luke was at our feet. He’d found a stick and was running around, joyfully whacking leaves with it. With his ten-word vocabulary, he couldn’t tell us how happy he was to be out of that hallway, but the smile on his face said it all. I smiled too as I watched him. He had dirt on his face, a shaved head, grubby, ragged clothes—squealing in the woods, he looked like a little wild animal. But at least he looked happy.
Whoever had raided Chuck’s place hadn’t taken quite everything. They’d blasted open his storage safe-room, but there were still spare clothes in the upstairs closets, and the bedrooms were intact. Most of the food and emergency equipment from the storage lockers was gone, along with the fuel from the generator and the propane canisters. But they’d left coffee.
After sleeping like a baby on fresh sheets, I’d gotten up early and spent the morning on the swinging loveseat on the porch, boiling a pot of coffee over an open flame in a fire pit. We were at over two thousand feet in elevation, and from the front porch, there was a beautiful view eastwards, down the mountain ridge toward Maryland. It had been more than a week since I’d had coffee, and drinking a cup of it, sitting in the swinging chair, breathing the mountain air under a blue sky—it was magic.
I remembered reading that some people thought the Renaissance had happened partly because of the introduction of coffee to Europe, thanks to the invigorating effect caffeine had on the psyche. I laughed. That morning I could believe it. It was almost enough to make me forget the horror we’d lived through, to stop wondering if the world was burning down around us.
As I sat with my mug, I’d noticed a smudge of black rising in the distance. Chuck told me it must be from the chimney of his neighbors, the Baylors.
“How long do you think Tony will be?” I asked Chuck.
We’d promised Damon that we’d drive him to his parents’ home. Tony had volunteered to take him over to Manassas, where they lived, or as close as he could get to it safely. They’d left about two hours ago, after a round of tearful goodbyes and promises to keep in touch. If Damon had never come into our lives, everything would have turned out very differently, and probably much worse. In many ways, we owed him our lives, and his departure felt like losing a member of the family.
Chuck and I had debated whether one of us should go too, but I didn’t want to leave Lauren and Luke, and Chuck felt the same about Susie and Ellarose. The truck’s GPS was working, so finding the way back wouldn’t be a problem for Tony.
“Should be anytime, depending on how far he got.” Chuck raised his eyebrows. “If he comes back.”
Chuck had half an idea that Tony might try to take off and drive down to Florida, where his own mother was.
Just then we heard the growl of an engine. Chuck reached for the shotgun propped up on the woodpile, but then relaxed. It was the sound of our truck. Tony was back.
I laughed. “If he comes back, huh?”
“You boys heating that up for me?” came a singsong voice as the deck door slid open.
It was Lauren. She laughed, self-consciously rubbing the stubble on her head.
When we arrived the night before, after calming Chuck down, we’d all stripped down and left our lice-infested clothes in a pile at the side of the front deck, dressing in whatever we could scrounge from the closets inside.
We all shaved our heads too, even the women.
“This is just for you, baby,” I laughed, banging on the side of the hot tub. It was the first time in my life that I’d had a bare scalp, and I rubbed my sweaty, bald pate.
The hot tub had been covered and was still full of water when we’d arrived. That was a godsend because there was nothing coming from the city pipes that snaked up the side of the road, and filling it from the creek would have taken a day or two. We weren’t heating the tub to lounge around in. Chuck had done an inventory in the cellar, and the chlorine tablets were still there, so we were super-dosing the water to try to clean our clothes, and ourselves.
Around the front, I could hear the truck crunching across the driveway, and then the engine switched off. A door opened and slammed shut.
“We’re back here!” I yelled.
After a few seconds Tony appeared in the dappled sunlight at the side of the cabin. He looked comical. Tony was a few inches taller and quite a bit huskier than Chuck, so the clothes in the closets barely fit him. The jeans were two inches too short, and way too tight, and the jacket and T-shirt were much too small. With his freshly shaved head, he looked like an escaped convict on vacation.
He saw us smiling at him and laughed. “I feel like I’ve joined a cult—shaved heads, hiding in the mountains.”
“Just don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” sniggered Chuck, nodding toward the hot tub. He leaned down and inspected the woodstove, now burning vigorously.
Luke saw Tony and ran over to be picked up.
“Everything good?” I asked.
Tony nodded. “Lot of people down there, and I didn’t want trouble, so as soon as we got near his place on the main road, he just jumped out.”
“You see anything?” asked Susie. “Talk to anyone?”
“Nobody’s got any power, no cell signal. I didn’t want to risk stopping to talk, not by myself.”
There were no radio stations to tune in to up here and no meshnet or cell networks. Being here was better than being stuck in the death trap of New York, but we were pretty much cut off from any connection to the outside world.
We’d left the generator in the apartment—it was too heavy to carry—so the only way we could generate electricity was with the truck. Chuck had plugged all our phones into the cigarette charger, so they were all ready to go. We could use the phones to communicate with each other, as a mini-meshnet, and they were still useful as flashlights and for the survival guides we’d stored on them.
“So what’s the plan?” asked Tony.
“Let’s get cleaned up, do some washing, get an inventory of what we have—and relax,” Chuck said. “Tomorrow we’ll head over to our neighbors’ place down the road, see how things have been here.”
“Sounds good. One thing, though—I think the muffler is loose, probably from landing tail-first in the snow.” Tony laughed. “That was pretty spectacular.”
“I’ll get the tools from the cellar and have a look,” I said. I knew a thing or two about cars.
“Perfect,” said Chuck, grinning. “Let’s get to work, then.”
We had never talked again about the missing bodies from the second floor, but now the memory flashed in my mind. I wanted to forget it, to pretend it hadn’t happened. It all seemed like it was a million miles away now.
I made my way to the cellar, looking at the yellow carpet of leaves under the thin birch trees. Something didn’t feel right, somehow. Taking a deep breath, I shook my head, putting it down to stress, and opened the rickety cellar doors.