"It"s never too late, Mike."
I sighed and returned my gaze to the horizon.
"I"m going to stay down here for a while," I said to her. "Is that okay?"
"Come to bed soon."
"I will."
With everyone gone, I sat and stared at the glow of Washington in the distance, rolling through the images of my trip there and back in my head. To the rest of them, I"d been gone only two days, but to me, it seemed like years. An eternity had pa.s.sed in my mind, and the world had changed.
I sat quietly for an hour or so, the anger was boiling up inside me. Finally, I stood up, turning my back on Washington, and walked inside.
Days 37-41 Last Days of January.
THE WEATHER HAD turned overcast and soggy again-miserable weather for going outside, but good weather for fishing.
"They must have had no choice," said Susie, still trying to understand what had happened.
We were descending to the Shenandoah River, down the mountain and into the valley toward the west. A fine mist hung in the air.
I hope it doesn"t start to rain.
Anything that got wet would stay wet for days. Fog stretched into the distance between the trees. There were only two other cabins on this whole side of the mountain, and we kept away from them on a wooded trail as we wound our way down.
"Maybe you"re right," I replied. "Maybe this is what war looks like now. I wish I"d been better prepared."
Modern warfare-over before the first shot was fired.
My mind couldn"t help cycling back, remembering what I"d read about the cyber-threat, d.a.m.ning myself for not taking it seriously. I should have done so many things differently, protected Lauren and Luke better. It was my fault.
We reached the river and walked along it. The track was muddy, and I looked for other footprints. None looked fresh.
"You can"t prepare for everything," said Susie after some reflection. "And maybe this is better."
The skin on her face was waxen, paper thin and translucent even in the gray light. It was flaking off in chunks near her scalp. She caught me looking, and I quickly shifted my gaze.
"Hey, can we eat that?" I asked, wanting to change the topic.
Brownish, oval pods were hanging from a collection of bushes just off the trail.
"Those are pawpaws," said Susie. "Surprising the squirrels didn"t get those."
We walked over to the bush, and she pulled them off.
"They"re spoiled, though. These fruit in the fall." She put them in her pocket anyway.
"So what do you mean, maybe this is better?" I asked as we collected the rest of the spoiled pawpaws.
"I meant that a cyberattack is better than being incinerated by a bomb."
I said nothing, following along behind as we made our way back to the river. I wondered how the Borodins were doing, what had happened to the captives-if they"d let them go, or if they"d starved to death.
Susie bent down and pulled on one of the fishing lines we"d set in the bushes. She shook her head, and we advanced to the next one. Tall, thin birch trees rose up out of the banks of the Shenandoah. Yellow leaves carpeted the forest floor. We pa.s.sed by a small set of rapids that gurgled and bubbled. In the pool at the end of them we"d set several lines. The survival guide on my phone said such pools were a good place to fish.
"Maybe we should just surrender," said Susie.
"To who exactly?"
"The Chinese?"
"You want to walk sixty miles to surrender?"
"There must be someone we can talk to."
"I don"t think that"s a good idea."
After the attack on our first day here, we were too afraid to go near any other cabins. Through the trees we could sometimes see people, but we would stay away, keeping our distance.
"There"s always hope, Mike," said Susie, as if she was reading my mind.
Even if we did give ourselves up, where would we go? Would a Chinese prison camp be any better? I remembered the streams of refugees I"d walked with through Washington. Where had they all been going? My mind filled with vague images of old war movies, of concentration camps in steaming forests in Vietnam. It was safer to stay where we were. We had to hide, survive, and do what we could.
"They"re going to leave eventually," she added, thinking what I was thinking. "They have to. There"s no way the UN or NATO would allow them to stay."
We reached the collecting pool at the bottom of the rapids, and I stepped out onto a rock and reached down to pull on another line. It felt heavy, like it was stuck, and then it began pulling back.
"Hey! We got one. It feels big!"
Catfish in the Shenandoah could get up to twenty or thirty pounds.
"See?" said Susie, smiling. "There"s always hope."
I pulled the catfish up out of the water, and it dangled helplessly in front of us, trapped by something it didn"t understand. I should have been better prepared. I shouldn"t have let this happen to my family. As the fish spun on the line, I glimpsed into its eyes, and then grabbed it by the tail and smashed its head against a rock.
Days 42-48 First Week of February.
THE FOREST CAME alive in the light of the full moon.
Moving slowly, silently, I crept through the trees. Tiny creatures scurried in the darkness, and an owl hooted, a haunting bark that echoed in the cool air. A carpet of stars hung above me, visible through the bare branches of the trees. The stars didn"t seem distant; they felt close, as if I could climb to the top of the trees and touch them.
The night cloaked me.
I"d become aware of the cycles of the moon. Asleep in our room, I could feel it in the same way I"d become aware of the sky, of the changes in air pressure and the winds that signaled a coming rain. Just weeks ago my senses had been numb, divorced from nature, but I was changing.
I was becoming animal.
The violence we"d seen shouldn"t have surprised me. Humans, by nature, were violent. We were the apex predators, each one of us alive only because our ancestors had killed and eaten other animals, outcompeted everything else to survive.
That stretched back through time, through my human ancestors, to my protohuman ancestors, and then even further back. Each and every one of those animals that I"d descended from, in a long line all the way back to the beginning of life on Earth, had survived by killing before being killed. I was the last in an unbroken string of millions of killers.
So it shouldn"t be surprising that humans were violent.
Technology couldn"t revert, but humans could, and they did with startling ease and rapidity when the trappings of the modern world melted away. The tribal animal was always there, hiding just beneath our thin skins of lattes and cell phones and cable TV.
In my dreams during the days I was trapped in the dingy, lice-infested hallway. Lauren would float before me in her bubble bath, clean and untouchable. And always, there was the baby, slippery and cold. During the days, I slept away my hunger, but with the setting sun and rising moon, my hunger and anger returned.
The full moon had awoken me. I felt it dragging me outside like an invisible hand, the hair on the nape of my neck standing up. It led me down to the Baylors" house with a knife in hand, ready to slash and kill.
But n.o.body was there.
I took the forest path down and around the mountain, toward a cabin I"d seen through the trees on our walks to the river. I"d been returning there, night after night, to watch, to prepare my hunt. The cabin"s roof glowed dimly in front of me, and I crouched in the woods, waiting.
In one of the windows I could see a lit candle, its flame flickering hypnotically. A man came into view, his face reflected in the light of the candle. Is he one of the ones from the Baylors"? I couldn"t tell. He looked out the window, directly at me, and I held my breath. But he didn"t see me, couldn"t see me.
He was talking. Someone else was there.
When I"d gotten up once during the day, I"d pa.s.sed by the mirror in our room and was stunned by the reflection. Someone else was looking back at me-sunken cheeks with a shaved stubble of hair atop a withered head, ribs sticking out with skin that hung in wrinkled sacks from my arms. I stared at a prison camp victim, and only my eyes were my own, staring back in shock.
The rising moon each night gave me strength, fueling an anger that simmered inside.
Why should I give up? My grandfather had fought in World War II. Who knew what horrors he had to survive? My grandmother said he never talked about the war, and I was beginning to understand why.
The man in the window leaned forward and blew out the candle.
I gripped the knife in my hand, a razor claw for killing, and with my tongue I felt my teeth, the sharpness of my canines. I"d never mentioned to anyone that the kid, the cowboy who"d driven me back here, had hugged me when he"d said good-bye. The sad look in his eyes, it made me angry.
I didn"t need pity.
Crouching in the dark, with my thoughts urging me into the cabin, I thought of that young cowboy again, of his tenderness with me.
Looking at the cabin, I imagined them sleeping inside and I began crying.
What am I going to do? Kill them?
Maybe there were children inside, and even if there weren"t, what had these people ever done to me? What was I thinking? My stomach spasmed painfully with hunger. Quietly, I began to back away, stealing into the night.
I was an animal, but I was also human.
Days 49-55 Second Week of February.
I JUST WANTED to sleep.
"You sure?" asked Lauren. She wanted me to go out and check the squirrel traps with her. "Luke is coming."
There was a time when I would have questioned the wisdom of taking our two-year-old son on a walk to find trapped rodents, but I just rolled over, turning away from her. Looking at her was difficult.
"Naw," I replied after a pause, kicking around the sheets of the bed. "I"m really tired."
Closing my eyes, I waited for her to leave.
She sighed loudly.
"You"ve been sleeping for days. Are you sure?"
I pulled the sheets around my head, trying to block out the sun shining in through the windows. "Please, I"m just tired, okay?"
For a long time she stood there, but eventually I heard her footsteps retreating and the creak of the stairs as she went down. I squirmed, trying to find a comfortable position, but the lice were back, infesting everything. If I lay still enough, sleep would come and I"d stop noticing them.
I wanted to stop noticing everything.
I was a fixer, someone who fixed things, solved problems. Tell me a problem, something that was bothering you, and I"d find a solution, help fix it. But there was no fixing this, there was no way my mind could find a path through this maze. I imagined walking south, walking north, finding a bicycle, going and talking to someone on the road-but every option was fraught with danger and uncertainty.
So I slept.
The only thing I would get up for was to eat, but I"d become tired of eating "forest greens," as Susie called them. We were eating weeds. Sometimes, once every few days, there would be a catfish. We"d have to eat the whole thing in a day or two before it spoiled. Susie was trying to salt some, but I wasn"t sure that would work, and I"d never liked catfish to begin with.
Squirrel was better, but they weren"t easy to catch. We"d trapped a few, but they began getting smart to our traps and were keeping away.
We weren"t the only ones struggling for survival.
It didn"t matter anyway. Anything I had to eat, I tried to save for Lauren. As my stomach continued to hollow inwards, hers continued to bulge outwards. Her baby b.u.mp was plainly visible under her clothing. In my head I tried to remember what day it was, what week.
We"d lost power in the last of our phones, and with no watches, time began to lose meaning.
Twenty-two weeks. She"s about twenty-two weeks pregnant.
Lauren was halfway through her pregnancy.
And then what? Looking at her reminded me of what was growing inside.