I shook my head. It wasn’t the thing I would have chosen, true enough—but I didn’t think we had any options. “We don’t have a choice. We have to try to get somewhere safe. If we stay here, these bastards are going to kill us anyway. There’s a truck, but I don’t have the first clue whether it will actually run. And I don’t have the keys. I don’t know how to hot-wire a car, do you?”
She looked up and bit her lip, but I could see the humor in her eyes. “I let my skills slip a few years ago when I gave up crime,” she whispered.
I huffed out a laugh. “Me too. Which means this is our best option. For now. Soon as I find something else, I promise I’ll let you know.”
I turned my back on her, lifted the handles of the stretcher, and lunged forward, dragging my wife away from the cabin and into the trees—and praying that I’d given Randall and his cousins enough to think about that they’d stay put in the cabin, rather than coming after us.
The wind was lashing at my clothes, and driving ice and snow stung my face. I wished more than once that I’d thought to grab more clothing from Randall’s cabin, but I ignored it all and focused on our forward movement. I needed to move as quickly as I could manage now, while my adrenalin was still up from that fight. Needed to get as much distance between us and those men in the cabin.
Needed to get far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to find us.
In that, we had luck on our side. The storm was still raging around us, and that meant the snow was covering our tracks quickly behind us. With luck, we’d be out of sight before anyone came out of that cabin. Without tracks to follow, they would have no idea which way we went.
Unfortunately, that was as far as my planning went. I knew we needed to get to safety, but I didn’t have a damn idea where we were going to go—or what direction would take us any closer to civilization. Hell, I didn’t even know if civilization still existed the way it had when we’d driven into the woods the day before.
If that had truly been an EMP, it meant someone had set it off. Someone had launched it. It would have affected everything within the immediate area—going even further afield if it had been large enough—and that would mean that nothing electronic was working, at least in the towns around here. I’d seen what mankind did when things stopped working the way they were used to. It wasn’t pretty. And I could only imagine what was happening in the cities, with thousands of people panicking at the light in the sky, things suddenly not working, and potentially a lack of communication from anyone in the higher levels of government.
Hell, maybe we were safer out here in the forest by ourselves. Safer than we would be if we got into a city where everyone had lost their heads.
Then I remembered the men I’d left in the cabin and shook my head. Those men would be coming after us. I was sure of it. I hadn’t finished Randall, who might be just fine if he’d been wearing any sort of body armor—had there been any blood under his hand as he clutched his belly? And Logan probably only had a flesh wound, unless I’d hit an artery. The other two would eventually wake up—and none of them seemed like the kind of people who would shake their heads and let it go. Maybe the stupid ones, but not the other two. Yeah, I’d shot Randall in the stomach, but he was a survivalist. For all I knew, he’d been wearing Kevlar, just in case.
I hadn’t terminated him. And he would be angry as a bear. No pun intended.
They’d be coming after us. And our best answer—our only answer—was to get to some form of civilization, where we might have other people helping us. Or at least somewhere to hide.
8
I struggled through a frozen world of throbbing pain and slowly spreading numbness.
Exhaustion latched onto my limbs, combining with the heavy grip of knee-deep snow until I could no longer tell whether I was actually putting one foot in front of the other anymore. But I plowed ahead, dragging Angie’s litter behind me and checking in with her every so often. Manipulating her arms and legs and rubbing at her face, to keep the circulation up. Fighting until there was nothing left but the fight. Nothing left but survival.
I retreated into a place inside my own mind that I had prepared long ago, a place where I could disappear to escape the torment of the physical world. I’d gone there often while training for the military, and then again while serving in Afghanistan. Long marches, blistering heat, endless danger, all of the unbearable things I’d had to endure just to follow orders, to complete the mission. Now there were no orders. There was no mission except to keep my wife alive, but as I marched through a landscape of screaming white nothingness, the world around us faded until I could almost imagine I was back in the Middle Eastern desert. I could almost feel the sun burning into my limbs.
In the back of my mind, I knew it was only the sting of frostbite setting in. The pull of exhaustion, telling me to lay down and go to sleep, to let it all go. But I let myself surrender to the delusion, going forward with only one thought in my mind: I had to find safety. Had to find a place where there were other people. People to help us. People to save us.
I held to those thoughts even when the howling wind and driving snow melded with the blistering heat of a scorching sun, and laying down became my only option.
When I awoke, the house around me was bright. Bright and warm. The paint on the walls wasn’t quite white, but it was close, and I could see from the bed I lay in that the place was decorated with Southwestern art, fixtures, and knick-knacks that made the walls scream “hacienda.”
It didn’t belong in Michigan. Didn’t match the Cape Cod style that everyone used for their houses here. And that alone had my brain jerking back into gear, taking quick account of what it remembered—and what it didn’t. I jumped off the bed, tangled in blankets, and spun around three times, my eyes roving over the walls, looking desperately for danger, before I realized that I was alone.
Alone and in a house that held more color than my entire town. Where the hell was I? What the hell had happened out there? The last thing I remembered was pushing through the storm, Angie behind me in the litter…
“Oh God, Angie,” I gasped.
I jerked forward, my feet still tangled in the blankets, and nearly fell before I could get my feet free. Then I was running from the room, nearly shouting for my wife.
I got into the hallway and turned right, for no reason other than that it was my good side. I scanned the hallway, standing absolutely still and breathing heavily as I tried to get my bearings. I didn’t remember a thing. Not a damn thing. And that bothered me more than anything else. In all my time in the Middle East, I’d had one reputation: that of someone the other soldiers could count on. The one who never lost his head, the one who always had a plan for getting out of a situation.
The one who never, ever blacked out.
The fact that I’d blacked out now, when my wife was depending on me…
That was when I remembered laying down in the snow. Thinking that it was all too much, and that I’d better just lay down and rest for a second before I went on. Thinking that I’d only be there for a moment. Just one. And then I’d get up and start walking again—though I had no idea where I was going. I remembered how absolutely, horribly hopeless I’d felt about the whole thing. Angie wounded. Us lost in the forest with absolutely no idea where we were or what we were supposed to do about it.
I remembered closing my eyes while Angie screamed my name behind me.
And then I remembered voices. Not mine. Angie’s, and one that belonged to someone else. I remembered strong arms lifting me up… and then the jolting, swaying movement of a car.