“No one’s come yet.”
“But they might. People are desperate. They might come walking out of those woods just like we did, and then what do we do? Fight them off? Let them in?”
“Tom, once we leave, there’s no telling what might happen. There’s no government, no one in charge other than maybe the military—and who knows what they’re doing?” She had another thought. “Wait a minute, you’re in the army. Where’s the nearest base?”
“South. Wisconsin. There’s Sawyer Air Force Base here in the Yooper, but that closed a while ago and got turned into a tiny airport and a pretty dinky museum. Couple planes on static display, mainly. Most of the original buildings are still standing, but there won’t be any soldiers based there now.”
“Maybe we should try to go south then.”
He shook his head. “The military’s going to be way more interested in protecting itself than helping us. Trust me on this. They’ve got a lot of guns, and guys who aren’t afraid to use them.”
“You’re not making a great case for leaving.”
“I’m not saying that. I’m thinking we should go, but I think we should head”—he hesitated—“north.”
“North? Tom, it’s going to snow. It’s already freezing out there.”
“Yes, that’s the point. People will move south and west, not north. They’ll go where it’s warmer.”
“Tom, the only thing north of us is Superior.”
“Not if we head into Minnesota.”
For a second, she was speechless. “Minnesota? You want to go to Minnesota? Tom, that’s hundreds of miles.”
“According to the ranger maps, it’s about five hundred miles to the border.”
“The border. You mean, Canada? That’s nuts. You want to go farther north, into Canada, at the beginning of winter?”
“Lot fewer people. More territory for the people who are left to spread out. There’ll be fish in the lakes, plenty of game if we stay out of the mountains. Come spring, we can grow things.”
“Tom, you’re making a lot of assumptions about what we can and can’t do. I don’t know anything about farming, and I’ll bet you don’t either.”
“We’re not talking acres of wheat or corn. I’m saying we find ourselves a safe place and then grow enough to live on. We can do that. People do it all the time. My parents always had a garden. Alex, if things are really as bad as what we’ve heard, it’s not like anyone’s going to be driving to the local grocery store anymore. That means we learn to fend for ourselves. I’m not saying it’ll be easy. I think it will be more difficult than we can imagine. But not facing up to that won’t help us.”
“I know that,” she said, a little irritated now. “Okay, say you’re right. Even if this was a good idea—and I’m not sure that it is—we’ve got Ellie to think about. You and I might make it, but you can’t expect Ellie to hike that kind of distance, sleep out in the snow. The rangers only left two pairs of snowshoes and cross-country skis, and none fit Ellie. That means we’ll have to carry her or figure out some kind of sled. Best case scenario, we wouldn’t make it for almost two months—and that’s if it doesn’t snow. No way we won’t run out of food.”
“An awful lot of people are dead, Alex,” he said quietly. “They died weeks ago, in the first few minutes.”
“Assuming you can trust rumors.”
He pushed through her objection. “That means a lot of abandoned houses and plenty of supplies, provided no one’s gotten there first.”
“It’s still really far. Think of how long it took us to make it here.” She saw how his face had changed. “What?”
“We might have wheels.”
Her mouth unhinged. “What?”
“That truck in the garage. It’s pretty old. I think it might actually work. I just haven’t …” He punctuated with a shrug.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You mean, we could drive? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“A couple reasons. Once the snow flies and it gets more than eight inches, a foot, we’ll be dead in the water, even with chains, and there won’t be snowplows. There’s also fuel to worry about. We’ve got some here, but inground tanks work on electric pumps. No electricity, no way to get gas.”
“But there’ll be a lot of abandoned trucks and cars, right? We’ll siphon off what we need. Tom, in a truck, five hundred miles is almost nothing. We could be there in ten or twelve hours. We could go anywhere.”
“Under normal circumstances. But how much you want to bet that the roads are parking lots? Everything stopped moving, all at once. If what we heard on the radio is right, then a lot of people flat-out died, just like Stan. That means bodies, lots of them. Where there are bodies, there are going to be scavengers, and I’m not just talking wild dogs. There’ll be raccoons, opossums, foxes, wolves, maybe bears. All those cars mean we’ll be spending half our time just trying to clear the road. Eventually we’ll run into something too big to move and then we walk.”
“What if we stay away from major roads?”
“Yeah, but remember that Spielberg movie War of the Worlds? Remember what happens when they try driving past all those people without wheels? They nearly get killed, and then they lose the van and end up with nothing. That’s how the real world is, Alex; that’s what’ll happen if we take the truck. There is nothing near what you think of as civilized out there. Everything is different.”
She saw his point, she really did. She had, after all, seen the same movie. “If we’re too freaked out to leave, then this isn’t any better than a prison.”
He was quiet a few moments. “What if we run into more of them?”
She knew what he meant. “Maybe they’re all dead by now. It’s cold. They’ve probably frozen to death.” Then she thought, Yeah, but if a brain-zapped ranger did set that booby trap, they might be a lot smarter than they look. This assumed there were more brain-zapped kids out there. Panicky radio broadcasts, fueled by rumors, weren’t facts. Although they believed everything else. So why not that?
“Jim,” he reminded her, “gave me the slip for more than two days. If there are more of those zapped kids or adults, I wouldn’t count them all out.”