Enter Darkness Box Set Page 16

  “What’s the rush?” Brad asked.

  Sammy waved a limp brown form in Brad’s face, nearly brushing his nose with the animal’s fur. He had the recently deceased creature in an unnecessarily tight grip. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Yeah, it’s a rabbit,” Brad said, keeping his tone deadpan. “She’s seen one before.”

  Sammy shook his head emphatically as Brad rose to his feet again and took a moment to stretch. “No, this isn’t the same.”

  “What’s different about it? Four feet, two ears…”

  “This one’s different because it’s one that I caught,” Sammy said with an air of great importance.

  “Oh, so you think your rabbit is better than mine?” Brad asked, faking a look of wounded pride.

  “Duh,” Sammy said with a grin before running ahead once more.

  This time, Brad let him go. They were pretty close to the cabin by now. Of course, if Anna saw her son before she saw Brad, he’d never hear the end of it.

  He pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and picked up his pace only enough to keep the boy in sight. They’d been out in the woods since sunrise and it was getting late. He considered himself an energetic guy, but he wasn’t eight-year-old kid energetic.

  Nine-year-old kid, he corrected himself silently.

  He had been keeping careful track of the days in a notebook since he’d been moved to the safe house. Once he’d gotten to the cabin, he’d drawn up a calendar so that he didn’t forget anything, and Anna had informed him a few days before that Sammy would turn nine today. Sammy himself hadn’t said anything about the day being significant.

  Actually, he might not even know what today was, or what made it special. He didn’t seem to have the same need to mark time that Brad and Anna did. But his mother had wanted to make the day as special as she could. Brad wasn’t sure what she was planning to do, but he’d held up his end of the bargain by keeping Sammy out almost all day.

  It was the first time he’d taken the boy so far from the cabin in the five weeks that he and Anna had been back. Probably because Anna was damn near pathological about keeping Sammy where she could see him. Brad was glad that she’d let him free today, though. He enjoyed the kid’s company and hunting alone got boring.

  The hunting trip they’d gone on today had gone very smoothly, even if they didn’t bring back quite as much game as Brad could have gotten alone. It had gone much better than any of Brad and Lee’s hunting trips ever had, to be perfectly honest. Lee had tended to be impatient with both Brad’s hesitation to shoot and his strong dislike of bugs.

  Once, Brad had scared away a massive buck when he’d discovered an Eastern Harvestman crawling up his arm. He’d yelled so loudly that he’d probably scared away every bit of game in a five-mile radius.

  “Jesus Christ, it’s harmless, you idiot!” Lee had hissed as Brad scrambled backward, smacking at his clothes and checking obsessively to make sure that he’d gotten the creature off of him.

  Lee had been popping up more and more in his thoughts lately, and Brad knew exactly why. For the past five weeks, he’d been expecting his father to walk through the cabin door. So far, it hadn’t happened, and the questions had begun to wear on him. There was so much evidence that his father had been there.

  In addition to the first-aid kit being low on a lot of key things, there were other things missing. Some of the knives that Brad remembered Lee preferring weren’t there. Anna had also mentioned a few things that seemed pretty conclusive. There had been several full buckets of water in both the kitchen and bathroom when she’d arrived at the cabin. There had also been a few empty jars in the trash can that was housed under the sink.

  Of course, that didn’t mean that the person who’d been using the cabin was necessarily Lee, but it was more likely than not, wasn’t it? Brad honestly wasn’t sure. He didn’t see a survivor giving the place up willingly and there hadn’t been any signs of a struggle. They might have died, but if the nanovirus had killed them after they got there, they hadn’t died anywhere around the cabin. The bots had been pretty quick-acting, and he doubted the person would have gotten so far away that he wouldn’t have found them by now.

  Now, every stray creak and groan of the floorboards had him feeling jumpy. He was constantly looking for tracks or signs that someone had approached the cabin. So far, he hadn’t found any, but the thought of his father coming back worried at him night and day.

  He would love to see his father again; that wasn’t the problem. No matter what issues had come between them in the past, he still loved his father. And, he thought—from the beef jerky he’d found in the pantry, plus the facts that his room was a time capsule and that his father had kept all of his old clothes—that Lee had loved him and missed him, too.

  The problem was what Lee would think of Anna and Sammy. The cabin hadn’t been built to house a large group of people and Brad knew that Lee hadn’t seen himself as a savior. His father had always been incredibly strict about not mentioning the location of the cabin or what it contained. He didn’t even do his stock-up shopping trips at the same stores every year. Sometimes, he went as far as Pennsylvania or Delaware to resupply the cabin’s cellar just to make sure that no one would catch on to what he was doing. He wasn’t a big fan of what he referred to as the “untrained, uneducated masses.” Brad had a feeling that his father would consider Anna and her son to be millstones around his neck rather than companions in a time of trouble. And that could be a problem, because Brad would protect them with his life.

  The realization had startled him when it had happened, a few weeks after he’d found Anna again. She and Sammy had been out on the dock, bringing in the last of the day’s catch. He could still remember the way the sun had dipped behind them, outlining Anna’s lithe form as she gestured across the water.

  Trusting her again hadn’t been easy. In the weeks since she’d returned to the cabin, Brad had found himself watching her, measuring her words. Had she really meant what she’d said? Was she really trustworthy, or was he just so desperate not to be alone that he was ignoring red flags? After all, knocking someone out and stealing their supplies was pretty much the biggest, reddest flag there was. And yet, as he stood there watching them, he knew what he had decided.

  He hadn’t said anything about his decision to her that day, or any day after that either, but he thought that she felt the sense of relaxation. Things had been much smoother between the two of them since that day.

  As Brad followed Sammy out of the forest and down to the edge of the medicinal garden, he saw Anna open the front door and step out onto the porch. She leaned on the railing, smiling at the two of them as she waved hello, and Brad realized that his father was wrong about at least one thing. Other people were just as important as a full pantry or the ability to hunt. He needed Anna just as much as she needed him.

  “Mom, look what I caught!” Sammy called, holding up the rabbit and starting to run as he approached the porch. “Look!”

  “You caught that?” Anna called back, sounding impressed. “Good job, Sammy!”

  “Thanks!” he said, waving the rabbit around once more. “Do you want to help me skin it?”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Anna said, wrinkling her nose. “Right now, I’ve got dinner ready.”

  “What did you make?” Sammy asked eagerly, dropping the rabbit onto the porch. The kid liked showing off, but there was pretty much nothing he liked more than eating.

  Brad scooped the limp animal up as he followed them inside. He stopped and sniffed appreciatively the minute he stepped into the hallway. He could smell roasting deer meat and veggies. With another sniff, he realized that he definitely detected potatoes and onions in the mix. Anna handed him a crate and he put Sammy’s rabbit and his own catch into it.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking the crate from her and putting it down in the corner of the kitchen. “It smells great in here, by the way.”

  She smiled up at him happily. “Yeah, it loo
ks good, too,” she said. “I mean, not to pat myself on the back, but compared to the first few meals I made, it’s a major improvement.”

  “I told you that you’d get the hang of it,” he said as he began to set the table quickly. “Wood stoves can be a pain.”

  “And it’s a serious learning curve when you’re used to frozen dinners,” Anna agreed. “But I definitely did this deer some justice.”

  She pulled the roast out of the oven and Brad’s mouth began to water. It had been a long day of walking and all he and Sammy had taken with them was some turkey jerky and water. Anna put the pan down in the center of the table and Sammy dropped into his chair, reaching for his fork and knife already. Brad pulled him back up before he could touch anything.

  “What are you supposed to do first?” he asked.

  Sammy sighed in a long-suffering way and went off to wash his hands. Brad pulled some glasses down from the cabinet and filled them with water from the bucket by the sink. He handed them to Anna and began to cut the deer meat into three servings, putting one on each plate. Then, he started dishing out servings of vegetables. He’d been right about the potatoes and onions, but he’d missed the carrots. There was also a liberal dash of rosemary and garlic.

  Sammy walked back into the room just as Brad was filling his plate. “Can I have more potatoes?” he asked as he pulled his chair out once more.

  “That’s enough for the first serving,” Anna said. “Remember to start small so we don’t waste anything.”

  Sammy nodded and dropped down into his chair, reaching for his utensils quickly. Brad waited for Anna to sit before he took his own seat and she gave him a smile. They’d had the friendly debate that formal manners might not exactly be necessary anymore. Brad had insisted that a person never knew when they’d be invited to a survivalist dinner party and Anna had ended up conceding, and admitting that she liked the consideration.

  “How was the hunting?” she asked as they began to eat.

  “It was a lot of fun!” Sammy said, his mouth full of potato and meat. “I almost got another rabbit before I got this one, but it was really fast, so I didn’t.”

  “It was pretty close,” Brad confirmed. “The hunting’s getting a little thin, though. Everything’s gonna be hunkered down, soon.”

  Anna looked at him seriously, her fork resting on her plate as she went still. “What does that mean for us?”

  “Nothing too drastic,” Brad said with a quick shrug. “We’re going to need to do a lot of prep, but we’ll make it through the winter just fine.”

  “What do we need to prep?” Anna asked, ever-practical.

  Brad pushed his hand through his hair and let his breath out. “It’s going to sound like a lot,” he admitted. “But don’t freak out.”

  She nodded, motioning for him to continue as she began eating once more.

  “We need to do the final harvest,” he said. “And we need to make sure that we save seeds from everything we want to replant.”

  Anna nodded. “That makes sense. Is there anything else?”

  “Yeah. It wouldn’t be a bad plan to make as much medicine as we can—teas and tinctures and things just to have on hand. A looting trip for extra clothes and supplies would be good, too. We should get some more wood chopped and get some meat dried. We definitely need to dry some fruit, too. We could plan some menus with the food we have on hand so that we keep it balanced, nutrient wise. We—”

  Anna held her hand up to stop him from continuing. “Okay, okay. Wow. That really does sound like a lot. Will we have time before it gets too cold?”

  “The snow is a few weeks away, at least,” he said. “It shouldn’t be a problem to get everything done.”

  “Can I have more potatoes?” Sammy asked again, holding up his plate to show that he’d cleaned it.

  “Sure,” Anna said, sounding just a bit distracted. She ladled more of everything onto his plate. “You really worked up an appetite out there, huh?”

  “Yep,” Sammy said, spearing a potato with his fork and stuffing it into his mouth. He chewed quickly and then asked, “Can I help when you start making the medicine?”

  “Yeah,” Brad said. “I’ll need all the help I can get.”

  “Where should we start?” Anna asked, and Brad heard a slight tremble in her voice. When he glanced across the table at her in the light of the oil lamp, he could see that she looked overwhelmed.

  “With the harvest,” Brad said. “Once we get that done, then we’ll start drying things and making medicine. Then, we’ll chop some more wood. Then, we’ll go looting.” He smiled at her. “See? It doesn’t seem that bad now, right?”

  After a moment, Anna nodded. “Sure. I guess we can handle it.”

  “We can,” Brad said confidently. “You’ll see. Once we get started, it’ll go pretty fast, and we’ve got plenty of time before winter kicks in.”

  She smiled at him. “Okay. I trust you.”

  He couldn’t help the smile that spread over his face at those words. “Thank you, Anna.”

  “Now, you guys sit tight,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Brad popped the last potato into his mouth and shared an inquisitive look with Sammy. Their unspoken questions were answered when Anna stepped back into the kitchen a few minutes later with a pan in her hands. There was a single candle in the middle of it and the smell of chocolate wafting from it.

  “Happy Birthday to you,” she began.

  “Happy Birthday to you,” Brad joined in.

  “Happy Birthday, dear Sammy,” they sang together.

  “Happy Birthday to me!” Sammy jumped in with a grin, clapping his hands and bouncing in his chair. “I didn’t even remember! How did you remember?”

  “It’s kind of my job to remember,” Anna said with a smile. “It’s part of that whole ‘mom’ thing.”

  She set the pan down in the middle of the table and Brad could see that it was filled with a cobbled-together Rocky Road fudge. His mouth instantly began to water. There was no way that Anna had known—and obviously, she’d picked the dessert for her son and made do with what she had—but Rocky Road was Brad’s favorite kind of fudge.

  “Make a wish!” Anna said, her green eyes sparkling as she watched her son smile.

  “I wish—”

  “Don’t say it out loud!” Brad said quickly. “Otherwise, it won’t come true.”

  Sammy scrunched his eyes shut and wished, his lips moving just slightly.

  Anna cut into the fudge, portioning it out so that Sammy’s slice was the biggest. The boy gobbled the dessert down quickly. They didn’t eat a whole lot of sweets. For one thing, there wasn’t a lot of nutritional value in sugar. For another, there wasn’t very much sugar in the pantry. Anna ate nearly as quickly as her son, but Brad took his time to savor the sweetness. That was why he was the one that noticed when Sammy’s face drooped slightly.

  Was the kid comparing this birthday to others he’d had? Anna had said that she’d always thrown him a big party. They hadn’t had a lot of money, but she’d kept a special savings account for the purpose. Sammy wasn’t a spoiled kid by any means, but going from a skating party where his mom had rented the whole rink and invited his whole class, to a slice of cobbled-together fudge was probably a little difficult.

  “You know what this party needs?” Brad asked briskly.

  Sammy looked up at him, momentarily too curious to be sad, which was exactly what Brad had intended. “What?”

  “Games,” Brad replied. “It’s not really a party without them, is it? Come on.”

  He got up and walked away, trying to come up with something they could all play. There were board games, but he didn’t think that was quite what the kid would have in mind. Sammy and Anna followed behind him into the living room.

  “What are we going to play first?” Sammy asked eagerly.

  “Red light, green light,” Brad said, surprised by his own answer. His subconscious mind had really come through for him. He gave himself
a mental pat on the back.

  Anna gave him a grateful smile when Sammy grinned in excitement. They played two rounds of that before Sammy started to get bored.

  “How about freeze dance?” Anna suggested. “I mean, I know we don’t have any music, but…”

  Brad began to hum “Pop! Goes the weasel.” Sammy clapped his hands, and he and Anna began to dance. When Brad stopped humming, Anna was the first to freeze, mainly because Sammy was laughing so hard at her enthusiastic dancing.

  “Do it again!” Sammy called, and Brad obliged him.

  He didn’t call a halt until his throat got scratchy from humming nearly an hour later. They had switched from freeze dance to a kind of musical chairs game with rules that had gotten crazier and crazier with each game.

  “Aw,” Sammy said, out of breath and grinning from ear to ear. “Come on, it’s not that late.”

  “How about a game of poker?” Brad asked with a smile.

  Anna laughed, pushing her hair back out of her face and shaking her head. “How about I get you something to drink and we play I Spy?”

  She built up the fire and three of them took their places around it. Brad leaned back against the oversized armchair and took a sip of the hot tea Anna had brought him. Who knew that humming was such a strain on the throat? Sammy curled up against his mother’s side in the other chair and she wrapped her arm around his shoulders, dropping a kiss onto the top of his head.

  “I spy, with my little eye…something blue,” Anna said, starting the game.

  “Brad’s coffee cup!” Sammy said. “Come on, do something harder than that!”

  “I spy…something gray,” Brad said, and the boy twisted around, looking eagerly.

  About half an hour after Sammy had discovered the picture frame Brad was looking at, Brad cast Anna a smile and spoke in a low voice. “I spy a sleepy birthday boy.”

  Sammy had slowly moved from an upright position to where he was now, sprawled as flat as he could get in the chair with his head in his mother’s lap.

  “Do you think that nine is too old to be carried to bed?” Anna asked softly, brushing her son’s hair back off of his forehead with gentle movements.