The sky outside her window lit up momentarily, but Emily could not see the lightning bolt. She did, however, hear the thunder that rolled in a second later; the pressure wave rattled the glass in the windows and sent poor Thor to his belly as he tried to wrap himself even tighter around her legs.
This dog was a tangle of contradictions, she was quickly learning. Here was this incredibly valiant animal that had pulled her, quite literally, from the jaws of death reduced to a quivering puppy as the thunderstorm raged on the far side of the house.
“Well, I guess we know what your Kryptonite is now, don’t we, Superdog?” Thor apparently didn’t see the funny side as he whined and continued to push himself against her legs.
“Come on. We might as well make the most of it. Let’s eat.”
Each evening since leaving Manhattan, Emily had placed a call to Jacob using the satellite phone she had picked up from the offices of the newspaper where she had worked. Ostensibly it was a nightly routine that Jacob insisted on so he knew she was safe, but Emily thought it was equal part Jacob’s way of helping ensure she remained connected to reality. It would be so very easy to lose sight of her goals out here, alone except for Thor and Jacob’s distant, but always welcome, voice.
The hiss of static filled her ear as she waited for him to pick up her call. The past few days had seen a slow degeneration of the quality of each call she made. Whether that was down to technical problems with the now unmonitored satellite or the red storm’s interference, she could not say. It was worrisome either way.
“Hello, Emily.” Jacob’s voice sounded distant as it ebbed in and out.
Emily quickly filled him in on her day and the disconcertingly violent storm that had forced her to hole up for the night. “What’s weird, though, is that the storm didn’t seem to touch this valley,” she explained.
Usually Jacob would find her revelation too fascinating to resist and offer some kind of a theory. So, when he didn’t offer up his usual attempt at an explanation for the weather phenomenon, Emily asked him if everything was okay.
He paused for a second before answering. “No. Things here have been getting a little…strained,” he admitted. “The shock of what happened has worn off, and we’re beginning to feel the pressure. I…we all left wives and families behind, and I think I held out a little hope that maybe there would be more survivors. Knowing that they are all dead, well, let’s just say it’s taking its toll.”
It would have been easy for Emily to offer up some kind of false hope to Jacob, but that would have been all it was. Instead, she simply said, “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault, Em,” he replied. “I can handle it. After all, we are all the family we have left now.”
“So, I’m thinking about trying my hand at a little grand theft auto,” she said, changing the subject.
“What?”
“I’m thinking of stealing a car.” She laughed. “Of course, I’m going to have to learn to drive it first.”
“That’s a great idea,” Jacob replied, his voice becoming all but inaudible above a sudden whoosh of static. “Make sure you choose something simple and automatic. It needs to be automatic.”
“It scares the living crap out of me, to be honest, but it’s going to take forever by bike, and I’ll probably freeze to death before I make it even halfway to you. And after my little encounter yesterday, I think I’ll feel safer with four wheels beneath me rather than two.”
“I have every confidence in your ability, Em. Just make sure you find some kind of open area to practice in before you hit the open road, okay?”
She promised she would take her time.
By the end of the conversation, Jacob’s mood had improved.
“Ride carefully,” he reiterated. “I need you here in one piece.”
Emily felt a cloud descend over her after she hung up. She had not given that much thought to Jacob’s plan. What would it be like to be stuck up there in that unforgiving land of perpetual winter? In fact, had either of them really thought through this plan of theirs? Were they supposed to spend the rest of their lives sequestered away in that research station?
The more Emily thought about it, the more she wondered if it was such a great idea to pin all her hopes on reaching the Stocktons. At some point she was going to have to talk with Jacob about his plan for what would happen once she got there.
But that was something she would deal with on another day.
The windows lining the far wall of the living room showed nothing but darkness now. Night had arrived as she’d talked to Jacob on the phone.
Emily caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirrorlike surface of the glass. She stood and walked over to the windows to take a better look. Her clothes were not too bad, a little sweat stained and a bit grubby, but it was her hair and lack of makeup that really hit home. She had bags under her eyes and her blonde hair was scraggly and knotted. Half-healed scratches from her flight and fight through the forest stood out starkly against her pale skin.
“You look like shit,” she told her mirror image. She surely could not deny it.
CHAPTER THREE
The storm had quieted at some point during the night, but red clouds still lurked ominously in the sky the next morning.
Emily heated a pot of water on her portable gas stove and sipped from a mug of steaming coffee as she wandered from floor to floor, room to room of the house, checking for anything that might be of use. In the master bedroom, on the large wooden mantelpiece above the fireplace, she found a framed photo of a couple, the home’s owners she presumed, smiling broadly out at her from the confines of a gold frame. She guessed they were both in their midfifties; she a pretty brunette with faint signs of crow’s-feet creeping in around her eyes, he with salt-and-pepper hair and a day’s worth of stubble across his lower jaw. Behind them was an ocean, deep blue and stretching off to the distant horizon. They both looked so happy. Even now, there was a sense of peace in the air, as if the owners had simply stepped out for a minute. She half expected to open a door and find someone sitting on a bed crocheting.
On the ground floor, she found a set of wooden steps that led from the bottom level of the house most of the way down to the flat valley floor below. The final hundred feet or so was a well-walked path of bare earth that wound its way through an open patch of grass and then into a copse of ash trees. Emily could see no signs of any footprints in the soil of the path, but here and there was some obvious new plant growth, blades of grass pushing up through the earth. Life was quickly reclaiming the path now that there were no humans to trample the young shoots.
Thor was intent on following scent trails, tail wagging as he moved in and out of the trees and then dodged back to follow another. Occasionally, he stopped and lifted his leg against the trunk of a tree or a bush and marked his territory.
The path continued into the trees for several hundred feet, winding left and right, occasionally forking off from the main route. Emily stuck with the original path. She was sure the sparkle of water she had seen when she’d arrived had been more toward the center of the woods, and this path seemed to be heading in that direction.
A few minutes later, she heard the unmistakable sound of sloshing water, and, as she rounded a bend obscured by a growth of thick black cohosh atop an embankment, Emily saw the pond. It was fed by a stream that ran down from the opposite side of the valley, its source unknown as it disappeared between the trees. At the sight of the water, Thor gave a joyful, deep bark and took off in its direction. Launching himself from the embankment, he landed with a splash that sent a wave of water high into the air.