First Light - An EMP Survival Novel (Enter Darkness Book 5) Page 6

  Whoever it was, they had thus far failed at killing their target.

  The bear attempted to rise on its back legs, staggered forward for two paces and returned to the earth with a violent lurch, startling a ruffed grouse that had been lurking just out of sight behind the base of a silver birch. In its death throes it seemed to be flailing desperately.

  Brad recalled the advice his father had given him in the event that he was unable to avoid a confrontation with a black bear. “Most bears will be afraid of you,” he had said. “They won’t want trouble. But if a bear gets within striking distance, you need to stand up straight, look him in the eyes and give him what-for!” When Brad had inquired what “giving him what-for” meant, Lee had stamped his feet and mimicked an aggressive posture. “And pray to God you don’t get attacked by a grizzly; there’s no reasoning with a grizzly.”

  Brad could at least be grateful for small mercies. Black bears weren’t the most aggressive of bears, and this one, while thrashing and angry, could have attacked more effectively if it hadn’t already been injured. On the other hand, the bear may have been drawn to them by the scent of Anna’s wound, which was still fresh. Perhaps fleeing through the woods with the scent of blood trailing behind them hadn’t been the wisest of choices, not that they had had many better options.

  The bear didn’t appear to have seen them yet—maybe the hunter had maced her in the attack that resulted in the mouth wound—but she was still heading unerringly toward them as if drawn to their scent. It would be wrong to blame Anna for this, Brad knew; neither of them had had a proper bath in some time and their scent was thick and musty and exceedingly human.

  Despite Anna’s avowed desire to die, she was holding fast to his arm and muttering fervent prayers under her breath. This surprised Brad: he hadn’t known Anna to be religious, but he had heard that during life-or-death moments the prayers a person had learned as a child might well up in their memory unbidden.

  Lee had never mentioned this, but Brad vaguely remembered reading in one of those in-flight magazines the story of a couple on a hiking trip through the Rockies who had survived a bear encounter. As the bear approached, the woman had smartly stepped out of the path and signaled for her husband to follow.

  Seeing that the couple posed no threat, the bear had brushed appreciatively past without offering so much as a hostile scowl in their direction. Granted, the circumstances had been a little different in their case—it was late spring and the Colorado bear hadn’t been driven delirious with injury and hunger—but this was likely his best chance to avoid a potentially deadly face-to-face encounter with the creature that now stood about twenty feet away.

  Gripping Anna firmly by the arm, Brad led her swiftly and silently down a narrow slope, away from the trail, into a thicket of low-bush blueberries fringed with hemlock and asters. A second grouse, bigger than the first, gave an indignant hiss and shuffled its proud wings. Brad kicked at it with the steel toe of his boot and it scurried out of the way, still glaring reproachfully.

  “Can we talk now?” Anna hissed.

  “In a minute,” said Brad out of the corner of his mouth. “I don’t want to risk her hearing us and running over here.”

  “Running?” Anna’s face paled. “How fast can they run?”

  “Faster than you, so I would suggest staying still and quiet until she’s gone.”

  The whole scene was beginning to remind Brad of those Choose Your Own Adventure books he had read as a child, where making the wrong decision on page 112 could land you inside the belly of an alligator on page 286. Except that they didn’t have a lot of choices here except to get out of the bear’s way and hope that she didn’t sniff them out. There was no way of telling how she would react to being shot in the face, whether it would make her wary of any further encounters with humans or compel her to seek revenge.

  Another moment passed in tense silence and Brad breathed a sigh of relief, thinking maybe they had escaped the worst. But just as he began leading Anna back up the slope toward the trail, the bear once again lumbered into view on its four legs, and this time there was no mistaking its intentions: it was headed straight for them.

  Brad could see that an encounter was imminent. His body stiffened as he went over the lessons his father had given him: back straight, feet spread apart, fists raised, don’t break eye contact. Terror clawed at his stomach; even in its shrunken and diminished state, this five-hundred-pound bear was a more formidable opponent than the dozens of men he had recently fought off while attempting to save Anna.

  Raising itself once again on its back legs, the bear let out a strangled howl that echoed through the woods. Affecting what he hoped was an aggressive posture, Brad shoved Anna out of the way and took a step or two forward, ignoring her panicked yells—

  A shot rang out, startling Brad and paralyzing the bear with a look of indecision. For a moment she seemed to be deliberating in an oddly human-like way; Brad was surprised to feel something like a kinship forming between them in the face of this shared threat. With an expression that could almost be read as apologetic, the bear turned and fled deep into the woods, leaving the two humans clinging tightly to one another.

  Neither of them spoke until she was safely out of sight.

  “What the hell was that?” whispered Anna, breathless. There was a corpse-like pallor to her cheeks. “Do you think we’re being followed?”

  It was hard to say. After those first shots the day before, the woods had gone silent. After a few hours had passed, Brad assumed that the hunter or hunters had left the area and moved on. If he had thought they were still lurking nearby, he would have been hesitant to sleep in the open with a fire blazing like they had done last night. “No way it’s the same hunter,” he said aloud. “We’ve been walking for almost a day.”

  “Then these must be other people hunting in these woods,” said Anna. “We’re lucky we haven’t run into one yet.”

  Privately Brad wondered if it was the same person. How many people could still be alive and have access to weapons—not to mention ammunition—at this point?

  “We’ll keep walking,” he told Anna. “If we stick to the woods, they’re less likely to see us.”

  “What if someone shoots us by accident? And what was wrong with that bear? She looked like she had been injured.”

  “Probably wandered into a trap,” Brad said. “I’m wondering what she was even doing bumming around this late in the winter when she should’ve been in bed. Bears don’t give up hibernating unless they’re forced to.”

  “Maybe someone else found her.” Anna turned and continued up the path, as if wanting to flee this area. “I’m tempted to say you should fire your pistol, just to let the other guy know where we are. Maybe he could help us.”

  “There are so many reasons that’s a bad idea,” Brad replied. “Number one, we don’t know if this person can be trusted. Likely not. I don’t want to end up in some slave encampment—God knows there are enough of those now. Number two, I don’t want him to shoot us on sight.”

  There was a third reason, too, though it was one that he wasn’t ready to talk about.

  “I wonder if they saw the fire,” said Anna. “I wonder if they’re trying to hide from us.”

  “If they are, they’re not doing a very good job of it.”

  Brad stepped carefully over the body of a dead kestrel that lay on the path in front of them.

  “Who fires a gun if they don’t want to be noticed?” he asked. “And why did they fire in the first place?”

  “It was well-timed,” said Anna. “If he hadn’t fired the gun when he did—I say ‘he,’ but of course it could have also been a woman—”

  Brad’s mouth twitched slightly. “Some Annie Oakley of the northern woods?”

  “I’m serious,” Anna said. “The only reason the bear left was because she got scared and ran off. Almost as if the shooter knew.”

  “If he fired the gun to save us,” Brad said quietly, “he’s a lot closer tha
n I want him to be. I want to put some distance between us and these woods by the end of the day. There have been too many close calls, and I’m ready to bed down in a place with actual walls for the night.”

  Chapter 8

  Having decided to put some distance between themselves and the trail that they had been following for fear that they might encounter the hunter who had just—inadvertently or otherwise—saved their lives, Brad and Anna took a parallel route through the woods. Though Anna worried that they were likely to get lost this way, Brad assured her that he knew where the highway was and their precise location relative to it.

  They walked for two or three hours, numb and mostly silent, through the pathless woods, Brad sometimes having to use his axe to break off the low-hanging branch of an aspen or fir that obstructed their route.

  By mid-afternoon they emerged into an open cornfield bordered on three sides with rustic fieldstone walls and an apple orchard whose trees, to their surprise, retained some late-season fruit. It was the first time either of them had eaten since yesterday or the day before, and although it wasn’t the meaty nourishment that Brad had been craving, they were both glad to sit in the cool shade of an old wood-framed barn, eating and half-napping as they reflected on the numerous close calls of the last couple days and how lucky they both were to be still living.

  Early on in their journey Brad had noticed that Anna became much more motivated, and distracted from the pain in her leg, when they were united in bemoaning his father’s considerable villainy.

  As a boy playing with friends in the woods of southern Maine, Brad had found that he could easily dispel an argument by turning the gang’s attention to whatever unfortunate animal happened to be lurking nearby—a possum or groundhog or field mouse—and within moments the quarrel would dissolve in a haze of communal aggression. Even then Brad had been canny enough to know that the existence of a shared enemy had a miraculous power to join rivals. There was magic in it.

  Now, although Anna wasn’t even aware he was doing it, whenever she began to lose hope, to turn inward or pessimistic about their chances of locating the kids, he slyly brought up the subject of his father. Before very long Anna, unable to resist an opportunity for making known her contempt for her children’s captor, joined in.

  “I haven’t known him nearly as long as you have,” said Anna as they followed a winding path back into the woods, “and I already hate him. Granted, he probably never shot you in the leg.”

  “I hope you won’t be offended if I tell you that there are worse things than being shot in the leg,” Brad said. “When I was six or seven, at most, he did the whole Bridge over the River Kwai thing where he locked me in a tiny shed with a tin roof in the middle of summer because he had caught me sneaking his cigs.”

  “What were you doing smoking at the age of seven?” Anna asked, sounding alarmed.

  “I wasn’t smoking them. I was using them to make trades with other boys for things I actually wanted—stamps and trading cards and what-have-you. I tried to tell him that but he called me a dirty liar and said he was going to send me where all liars go, into the fiery pit. I thought he was talking about hell, and that he was going to murder me. But no, he meant a literal fiery pit in the field behind our house. I was thrown into the shed and given no food or water for twelve hours. I never stole his cigarettes again after that.”

  “You were right earlier,” Anna said gravely, her voice taking on a strange tone of respect. “I’m sort of glad he only shot me in the leg.”

  They continued on their way through a part of the woods where the snow was beginning to melt and a cloudless blue sky was plainly visible through gaps in the trees overhead. Brad rarely talked about his father, but since the subject had been broached and Anna seemed interested, he shared more of the creative punishments that had been dealt out during his childhood: forcing Brad to stand with arms outstretched and two books on each arm; pretending that his pet cat had died because Brad had been neglectful in feeding it.

  “I’m standing there bawling my eyes out,” Brad said, “thinking the cat was dead, and Lee came over and told me that maybe if I prayed hard enough, God would bring her back from the dead. So of course I prayed and the cat came back to life. It took me another fifteen years to realize that he had never really died, that it was just another one of my dad’s games.”

  “So he’s always been sort of dementedly religious.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Brad. “Growing up, religion seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind, but he knew that I was interested in questions of God and faith and he loved to use that against me. It’s no different from what he’s doing now, honestly, just on a larger scale. The world is unstable and people are frightened and more susceptible to being scammed.”

  Brad told Anna about the phase of youthful rebellion he had entered after leaving home: how he had smoked marijuana for the first time; how a girlfriend had introduced him to bands like Pearl Jam and Guns N’ Roses, which he had been forbidden from listening to growing up; how he had quit going to church and began reading books by noted atheists. (“I found some of their arguments very persuasive, but I didn’t think I was ready to embrace full atheism”). He didn’t mention the fling with the professor’s wife, which had briefly threatened to become a full-on affair. Brad might have looted homes and murdered multiple people these past few months, but he was no home-wrecker.

  They had been walking now for something like three hours, but they had been so absorbed in their conversation and the weather had warmed enough that he hardly noticed the time passing. The temperature still lingered in the forties, but the wind was no longer slapping at their arms and thighs as if seeking a way into their clothes and for a moment the snow had ceased falling.

  In the warmer months these woods would be full of chipmunks—as a boy he and his friends had once built a wood catapult and hurled berries and nuts into the trees for them to eat—but for now they had disappeared to wherever they went to sleep off the winter.

  With the exception of the mysteriously non-hibernating bear, most of the creatures of the wood seemed to be sleeping. Brad might have found it unbearably lonely if he had been hiking by himself as Anna had suggested.

  He didn’t like to admit that a part of him had protested against the suggestion because he needed her with him—not as a man needs a partner but as one human needs the company of another, because he knows he’ll go mad otherwise. He knew men who had spent whole winters alone in cabins in the Maine woods—his father being a prime example—and there was something not right about them afterwards: they were like veterans of a war recovering from the trauma of combat.

  Brad needed Anna, not because he felt any lingering flicker of romantic attachment between them, but because she had become possibly his only friend in the world. Perhaps it was for the best that they had never hooked up.

  Besides which, the experience of trying to stay alive together seemed to have bonded them more than sex ever could. Anna was talking volubly now, recounting her experience living in the compound at the mercy of Auntie and Uncle—and being branded like cattle, the same way Martha had—with an ease and assurance that Brad had longed for back in the cabin but never gotten.

  She had been scared of him, then, he knew now. Once or twice she had alluded to events in her past or members of her family or a friend with whom she had briefly shared an apartment, but when Brad asked her about them she would grow strangely quiet, as if she resented him prying into her affairs. Then Brad would feel terrible, as if he had done something wrong, even though he had been guilty of nothing worse than curiosity about the woman he lived with.

  “So, I understand if you don’t want to talk about this,” he said, “but you’ve never really told me much about your sister, Emily. Were you close?” He used the past tense, as everyone did now.

  “You could say that,” said Anna. Despite the wistfulness of her tone, she didn’t seem reluctant to talk about it. “Twins tend to be, don’t they?”


  Brad hesitated, not wanting to ask too many questions.

  “What was she like?” he asked after a moment.

  Anna appeared to think on that as she waited for Brad to guide her over a moss-covered fallen tree that lay in their path.

  “We were opposites in most ways,” she said, “one of us animated, talkative, domineering, the other quiet and introverted. She used to call me ‘mousy,’ which I hated, and I would retaliate by calling her a motor-mouth who hadn’t stopped blabbing since the second she came crawling out of the womb.” Anna laughed. “We loved each other, if you couldn’t tell.”

  “That’s the impression I was getting,” Brad replied.

  They came to a bend in the trail that turned onto a narrow path with chunky stones laid every few steps, reminding Brad of a Japanese garden.

  As though energized by his curiosity, Anna described her relationship with her twin in its familial complexity—how Emily had taken the role of leader in the relationship, making up games and digging into old wardrobes for dresses which she would try to coax Anna into wearing. “We’re going to be a rich old married couple,” Emily would say, “and I’m going to be the wife and you’re going to be the husband.” And it wouldn’t matter that Anna didn’t want to be the husband, and that she didn’t especially want to dress up. Emily had chosen the game and there was no arguing.

  “Sounds exasperating,” said Brad.

  Anna shrugged. “She could be bossy and assertive, but she also had a magnetic personality. People were drawn to her. All the neighborhood kids wanted to play in our yard because getting to see Emily dancing and singing and performing plays that she had written was its own form of entertainment. She had more energy than any of us.