Nate shook his head. “Generators make noise. Noise has a bad habit of attracting attention. That’s the last thing we need right now. Look what happened this morning.”
“Hunter messed up. I’ll be the first to admit it.” Her thin lips formed into a weak smile. She was trying to lighten the mood by pleading guilty right off the bat, but it wasn’t working. “Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for…” She paused, apparently not sure what to say.
Nate folded his gloved hands over the top of the metal rod and let it take his weight. “Lauren, I’ve never told you how to raise your kids, have I?”
She shook her head. “Never.”
“And I shouldn’t. Not simply because you’re their parent and I’m not. But also for the most obvious reason. I don’t have a child, at least not yet. So I’ve been careful not to overstep those bounds. What happened today was not all Hunter’s fault. He didn’t tell those guys to rob us. He asked me earlier if he could use my truck to recharge his tablet. I told him no, after which he probably went and asked you the same thing.”
She nodded. “You know kids these days. They can’t live without their electronic devices.”
“Maybe,” Nate replied, working to keep his heartbeat steady. “But now we have to live without an extra vehicle. And mine only fits two. So if push comes to shove, we’re three seats short of being able to make it out of here. Yes, it might just be a truck. Maybe with Hunter’s salary he could afford to buy you all a new one. But it’s looking more and more like that old world is gone. That truck might have been your ticket out of here. And now it’s gone too.”
“You think we’ve spoiled him, don’t you?”
Nate wasn’t sure if it was a question or an accusation. “I think you’ve been trying to make up for Evan being at work all the time. I think for a while, it probably felt like the right play. Who knows, maybe ten years from now, we’ll be having the same conversation, except you’ll be telling me I’ve been spoiling my daughter. Hunter’s got a lazy streak and it’s best to nip that in the bud sooner than later. He also put us all in danger. We need to start thinking like a group instead of everyone for themselves.”
Amy appeared at the door leading into the house. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
Lauren spun around. “No, not at all. Nate and I were just discussing Hunter.”
Amy’s eyes fell, as though she had a good idea how that had gone. “I wanted to let you know I’ll be with the boys for a little bit. We’ll be sealing the windows upstairs with clear plastic.” Doing so would help keep out the cold and minimize the heat needed to warm the house.
“Sealing the windows?” Lauren repeated, as though Amy had been speaking in a foreign language.
His wife giggled. “Maybe you should join us.”
He caught Amy’s eye and he winked a moment before both women disappeared inside.
She was something special. She could keep a cool head in a crisis and help rally the troops after the dust settled. Looking back, it was really rather unnerving to consider how chance had brought them together. For years, the loss of Nate’s sister had left a gaping wound in his soul. He’d been in university at the time, studying computer science and a rising star on the judo team. When she was alive, his mother liked to remind him how stubborn he could be. And he supposed if by stubborn she meant determined and never willing to give up until the job was done, then yes, sometimes he could be as stubborn as hell.
Which made his fall from grace all the more remarkable. Less than two months after his sister’s disappearance, Nate had finally reached his goal and become head of the judo team. It didn’t only mean a certain level of prestige, it also opened the door to the Olympics and after that sponsorship and an abundance of other possibilities.
The match where everything changed hadn’t been particularly noteworthy. Nate had been mopping the floor with one opponent after another. Throw your enemy off his feet and onto his keester—in a nutshell, that was the goal. Nate could sweep in either direction. His shaved head—yes, even by then—and menacing appearance only worked to his advantage. His final match was a large guy named Peter Alexander. He hated people with two first names. There was no real logic to the feeling, especially since given names are given and we don’t usually have much say in the matter, if at all. Pete was a heavyweight, just like Nate, except he was close to three hundred pounds, little of it muscle. Flipping a guy that big was doable, but your technique had to be flawless or bad things tended to happen.
A young girl in the crowd. That was all it had taken. She was the spitting image of his sister. Maybe it was her ghost, come back to him the way Banquo had appeared to Macbeth. Nate had seen her right as he had grabbed Pete by the lapels of his gi and was making to fling the big man over his hip and onto the mat. It should have been one big Pete mess on the floor, like flinging the Kool-Aid guy and watching him shatter. Except Nate had been the one who shattered. His left knee to be precise, pinned under all three hundred pounds of Peter Alexander.
That day his dreams of Olympic gold had also ended. As soon as the three surgeries on his knee were done, Nate had packed up all his stuff into a VW camper van and left Illinois, never a hundred percent sure why. Perhaps it was because he had lost the two most important things in his life. Day to day, he found himself searching for a reason to get up in the morning, maybe even a reason to live. He’d discovered that reason three weeks later while working on a family farm in Nebraska. Or rather, that reason had discovered him. Amy had been a lot younger then and far more naive. They both had been.
When his work on the farm was done, he’d convinced her to travel with him. He had gotten to know the family in the months he’d been working there and Amy’s father knew him as an honorable man who would defend his daughter with his dying breath. The two of them had left to see the rest of the country. There was a big old world out there and to a couple of kids approaching their mid-twenties, it seemed an awful shame to let it go to waste.
Still physically in the garage, but wavering somewhere between past and present, Nate heard a voice call out from somewhere far away. He turned and saw his sister’s face, smiling back at him. She looked happy, proud that he’d travelled through that dark night of the soul and come out the other side. Life was a series of tests. That was a lesson Nate had learned early on. Some passed, some failed, but everyone played the game, whether they wanted to or not. Nate could see that life was at it again. They were being tested and this time, it would be the biggest test of all.
Chapter 17
Nate was standing on the front porch, testing out the small white Geiger counter he’d bought at an online prepping depot two months ago. A cord led from the device to a five-inch wand. After inserting a fresh set of batteries, Nate turned the knob on the Geiger counter and held the wand out. The device made a few tiny crackling sounds. The dial twitched ever so slightly.
Footsteps thudded from inside the house a second before the door swung open. It was Amy and she was out of breath. “Evan’s on the phone.”
Nate slid the device into his jacket pocket and hurried to the phone. “Tell me you have good news.” Nate said, trying to steady his own breathing.
“The situation seems to be under control,” Evan told him. He sounded relieved, but incredibly weary. “Once the latest delivery of diesel for the generators arrives, that’ll buy us another forty-eight hours. There’s something you should know. This same struggle hasn’t gone so well in other parts of the country. There have been meltdowns. One in California and…”
“I know,” Nate cut in. “A neighbor of ours has a shortwave we’ve been using to collect information from the rest of the country. This isn’t isolated to Illinois or even to the Midwest. The power’s out in all of North America.”