Lauren picked out a beautiful spot to bury Tony. It was in a clearing in the woods, to the north of the cabin, just beside a stand of dogwood trees. They were bare now, but soon, in the spring, Susie said, they would flower and bloom.
It would be a beautiful place to rest.
Beautiful, yes, but under a few inches of decomposed leaves the earth was thick with knotted roots and rocks. Digging as deep as we needed to had required hacking away at the roots and levering out the rocks. It was hard work, made harder still by what we were doing.
Tony had volunteered to stay at our building when he could have left for Brooklyn. I was sure he’d stayed for us, for Luke. If he hadn’t, he’d be down in Florida, in the sunshine, with his mother. Instead, we were digging his grave.
There was nothing we’d been able to do for Tony. He’d been killed almost instantly. I’d tried to clean him up, but I’d resigned myself to covering him with a blanket. I’d sat and cried on the cellar steps, talking to Tony’s motionless body, thanking him for trying to protect us. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him alone down there, so I’d brought down a cot and slept with him.
The sun was out in a blue sky and birds chirped cheerfully overhead as Susie and I pulled Tony’s corpse through the leaves. He was heavy, well over two hundred pounds, so we dragged him in the blanket I’d wrapped him in. By the time we got to the clearing, a few hundred feet from the cabin, I was sweating, doubled over and panting from the effort. Susie and I did our best to lower him into the ground, but he slid in awkwardly, falling crumpled with his legs to one side.
“I’ll fix him,” volunteered Susie.
Gingerly, she climbed down into the hole, then set Tony in a comfortable position. I sat down in the leaves, staring up at the sky while I regained my breath.
“Is everything okay?” called Lauren in the distance.
Susie climbed back out of the grave, rubbing her dirtied hands on her jeans. She nodded at me.
“We’re good!” I yelled back, thinking exactly the opposite.
Gathering myself, I stood up. Through the bare trees, I saw Lauren holding Ellarose, and Chuck slowly making his way toward us. Then I saw Luke, running around in his jerky hop-step motion. He’d been asking for Tony all morning. I didn’t know what to say.
I pulled a grubby hand across the stubble on the top of my head and felt the sun’s warmth on my face. My mind was still numb, not sure what to feel except scared.
But we were alive.
Night was falling, and a crescent moon was rising. I sat on the front porch, back in the swing chair, standing guard with the shotgun. A fire was roaring in the wood-burning stove in the living room.
Chuck had been wearing a bulletproof vest that Sergeant Williams had given him when he’d dropped off the hazmat suits. He wasn’t sure why he’d put it on—just being careful, he said—but maybe it was why he’d been so bold, facing down those people, whoever they were, at the Baylors’ house. Even in the vest, he’d been badly injured, with stray shotgun pellets left in his arm and shoulder.
The injury to my leg hadn’t been too bad, just bruises and one deep gash where a nail had stuck me. Susie had bandaged it, and I hardly limped.
What the hell are we going to do now? We had no car, nearly no food—half of our supplies had been in the truck. Where this place had seemed magical just days ago, now it felt evil, threatening. I’d thought that maybe the madness was just in New York, that the rest of the world was still sane, but it seemed it was the same out here.
And then one of the stars moved. And blinked. Following the tiny light, I watched it descend while my brain tried to comprehend what it was seeing.
It’s an airplane! It had to be. Spellbound, I watched as it settled into a glowing patch on the horizon, and then something clicked in my mind. Jumping off the swing, I ran to the front door, threw it open, and ran upstairs.
“Are they back?” yelled Chuck as I hammered up the stairs.
“No, no,” I whispered urgently. Lauren and the kids were sleeping. “Everything is fine.”
I opened the door to a bedroom to find Chuck lying down, covered in bloody cloths. Susie was leaning over him, tweezers in one hand and a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the other.
“What can you see, right on the horizon, from here?”
Chuck looked at Susie and then back at me. “At night you can just see Washington—it’s about sixty miles away. At least, you could see the lights of the city when they were on. Why?”
“Because I can see Washington.”