Afternoon (The Daylight Cycle Book 3) Read online

  “What’s that?”

  “When are we leaving?”

  Jamie expelled a pent-up breath and said, “When do you want to leave?”

  “It’d probably be better if we did it tomorrow,” Erik replied. “It’s better we do it now while I’m feeling better than wait until I’m at death’s door. Besides—” He spread an arm “—I’m feeling better than I have in days.”

  “But you still look like shit.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you too.”

  They laughed.

  It was just like old times—they, the two best friends, the brothers in arms, uniting over the commonality in each other’s lives.

  It took only a moment for the realization to set in.

  This wasn’t like old times. This wasn’t okay.

  If his current health was any indication, he was dying.

  The weight of the world rested upon his shoulders—and, possibly, a new dawn for mankind.

  That fact, sobering as it happened to be, was what compelled him to nod and tighten his hold on Jamie’s arm as he watched the party return from their supply run.

  Tomorrow, they would rise at dawn and make their way into the wilds of western Idaho.

  Who knew what they’d face.

  *

  They raided a total of seven houses over the next several hours—procuring, through their efforts, several dozen cans of food, tons of bagged and boxed snacks, protein bars, weapons and enough sweatshirts and sweatpants to clothe them for months on end.

  By the time Dakota collapsed in bed at the end of the night, he was almost ready to pass out.

  “So,” Jamie said, settling down on the bed beside him when he returned from speaking to Erik in the guest bedroom. “We’ve decided that we’re leaving tomorrow. First thing in the morning.”

  “Have you already discussed this with the rest of the group?” Dakota asked, bundling himself beneath the blankets as outside the temperature continued to drop in tune with the coming snow.

  “Yeah. Rose and Steve have already given Kevin a hand-drawn map of all the houses you guys raided today, and Desmond has already agreed to help Kevin with additional supply runs if they need anything.”

  “I hate leaving them here,” Dakota said.

  “I know. I do too. But there’s no point in dragging them in another vehicle. That’s just four more people we’d have to worry about.”

  “Did you know Desmond and Steve were sleeping together?”

  “No, but I kind of figured they might be, given the way Desmond’s been clinging to him the past few weeks.” Jamie shrugged and leaned back, throwing his hands behind his head as he looked up at the ceiling. “It’s really none of our business anyway.”

  “I just feel bad that Steve’s leaving him behind.”

  “It’s not like we’re going to be gone forever, Dakota.”

  He didn’t want to think that. He dreaded thinking that if he were truly being honest with himself. The fact of the matter was, though, that no one knew what would happen on their trip. They could just as easily get into a car accident and all end up dead if they weren’t careful, or be ambushed by a group of marauding survivors who cared about nothing except their own survival. Such was the way of this new world—to kill or be killed, to survive or not survive, to perish or not perish.

  Dakota closed his eyes, then opened them when he felt Jamie snuggle against him. “It’s getting late,” the army man said, “and we’re going to have a long, hard day ahead of us tomorrow.”

  “Do you know how we’re going to get there?” Dakota asked.

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “I think so.”

  Though Dakota wasn’t exactly reassured by that comment, he nodded and burrowed into the blankets beside Jamie.

  Outside, darkness reigned supreme.

  Soon, dawn would be upon them. And with it a new day would come.

  Chapter 4

  They determined, via a map and the approximate timing that their trip would take, that the best and most efficient route would be found going from Rigby to Blackfoot and then to Atomic City before they ultimately attempted to use Highway 20 West to take them the rest of the way to the city. Knowing that they would likely be forced to detour, they made alternate plans to take the longer route should the route along the interstate be blocked.

  “It could take us a few days,” Jamie said as he looked at the map before them. “Or it could take us a few hours, though I highly doubt it’ll be the latter. Either way, I expect it’ll be smooth sailing once we get past some of the major cities.”

  “If we can get past some of the major cities,” Dakota replied.

  “If,” Jamie agreed.

  Though he dreaded the idea of traveling by foot, Dakota knew they at least had to take that into consideration, especially if they were forced to leave behind their spacious vehicle in order to get around roadblocks.

  With a nod, he looked up at Kevin and Desmond.

  “If you don’t hear back from us in a few days,” Jamie said, “or, at the most, a week—”

  “Then we’ll expect the worst,” Desmond said, sniffling. “I know.”

  Steve wrapped an arm around they younger man and kissed his hair. “I’m sorry, hon,” he replied. “I wish I could take you with us, but there won’t be enough room.”

  “Are you sure?” Desmond asked. “I can sit on the floor. I swear I won’t take up that much space. I promise, I—”

  The way Steve looked into the red-headed man’s eyes silenced him instantly.

  Desmond—once again close to the waterworks he’d displayed earlier—buried his head into Steve’s shoulder and sobbed.

  Dakota couldn’t imagine what Desmond was going through. Were he in his position, he would likely go mad from just the thought of Jamie leaving him behind, but to actually know he was leaving? That had to be another form of hell entirely.

  After stepping around the table, Dakota set a hand on Desmond’s shoulder and tilted his head up so he could look into his reddened, tear-stained face. “Hey,” he said. “Everything’s going to be ok. All right? I won’t let anything happen to Steve. I swear on my life I won’t.”

  “You really mean that?” Desmond asked.

  “I mean it,” Dakota said.

  He wrapped the younger man in a hug, stood, and looked past Desmond to Erik—where, on the couch, their military man and only medic sat wrapped in a blanket, trying his hardest not to tremble in the oppressing cold currently seeping into the home.

  “I only ask one thing of the four of you while we’re gone,” Jamie said. “And that’s to stay safe, stay together, and to move the radio and yourselves into this home. It’s bigger, it’s safer, and there’s a basement you can retreat into if something happens.”

  “All right,” Desmond said. “I can do that.”

  “Are we ok with that, boys?” Kevin asked. Both of the teens nodded, regardless of the fact that neither seemed comfortable with the arrangement at hand.

  Dakota forced a smile in the hopes that the kids would return it. When they didn’t, however, and when Arnold turned and began to make his way toward the door leading out of the house, Dakota sighed.

  “Well,” Dakota said, looking from Rose, to Jamie, to Steve and then over his shoulder to Erik. “I guess this is goodbye then. For now.”

  “Please don’t let anything happen while you’re gone,” Desmond said, tightening his hold around Steve to the point where Steve grimaced and had to shy his bum arm away from him.

  “I won’t,” Steve said, returning the younger man’s hug with as much force as he could muster. “I love you, honey. Please stay safe, ok?”

  “I promise.”

  The two kissed for a long time—a statement of compassion and trust that could be seen on the tears that snaked down both of their faces—before breaking away.

  “I love you too, Steve,” Desmond said.

  With a nod, Steve strode into the living room and helped Erik to his feet. “Come on,
big guy,” he said. “We’ve got a big trip ahead of us.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Erik replied.

  They waited until Desmond and Kevin secured the massive wooden gate behind them before they began driving. Through the city of Rigby they traveled, occasionally passing zombies but more often than not only encountering corpses whose ends had occurred long ago. Always, Dakota wondered, just how much danger they would be in, just how much agony they would face come time they left the immediate sanctuary of their own personal utopia and meet the ferocity of the world head-on. The idea that one of them might die before this trip was over was enough to make him shake.

  You can’t think about that, he thought. Not now. Not ever.

  If he were to give in to the idea that one of them would die, then surely one of them would. Fate had a habit of playing on a man’s worst fears—of realizing them fully and without compassion should he begin to dwell on them for too long. It was like wishing for the world and only ending up with a grain of sand. In the end, you’d received something, but never the thing you wanted.

  He tightened the blanket he had around himself and bundled down in the center of the back seat. Flanked by Rose and Steve—both of whom were gazing out their own perspective windows with unease—Dakota watched as Jamie navigated the tumultuous road conditions and tried to contend with the ice and sleet that had accumulated due to last night’s snow.

  “We should’ve waited,” Erik finally said.

  “You’re sick,” Jamie replied. “We can’t afford to wait.”

  Erik said nothing. Rather, he coughed, reached up to cover his mouth, then coughed some more before finally settling down. He burrowed into his place in the passenger seat and didn’t say anything further after that.

  Dakota remained quiet for most of the morning, during which time Jamie continued to navigate the roads through Rigby and then toward the next small town of Ucon. Here, the North Yellowstone Highway was mostly empty, and flanked on both sides by flatlands, was smooth sailing. The trip was just beginning to get comfortable and Dakota had just started falling asleep when the vehicle began to slow.

  “Shit,” Jamie breathed. “Motherfucker.”

  “What is it?” Dakota started to ask.

  He didn’t need an answer.

  A menagerie of cars—most totaled and all piled together—blocked the path in front of them.

  There was no way they were going to realistically be able to get around them.

  “Fuck my life,” Jamie continued, bringing the truck to a complete stop as he considered the road in front of them. “I don’t know how or if we’re going to be able to make our way around this.”

  “Maybe we should just get out and walk,” Erik managed, sniffling.

  “Are you kidding? You’d keel over within half a mile.”

  “I’m just saying,” the man replied, straightening himself in his seat. “We’re only forty-five minutes out and we’re already running into problems.”

  “The weather will kill us if the zombies don’t,” Rose replied, turning her attention to the window at her side. “Try and go around them, Jamie.”

  “There’s a chance we’ll get stuck.”

  “Do you really want to risk abandoning the vehicle and walking through God knows what?”

  “Not really,” Jamie sighed, shifting gears. “Ok, here we go. Hold on.”

  Dakota leaned forward to take hold of the center console as Jamie turned the vehicle into the nearby snowbank. While it didn’t look deep, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t automatically sink to the bottom and therefor be trapped in a coffin of their own choosing.

  Come on, Dakota thought. This’ll work. It has to. It—

  The front of the vehicle sunk into the snow, its tires screaming hellfire as it attempted to find purchase on the ground below. When finally they did, Jamie gunned the engine, plowed the few feet they needed to get around the vehicles, then slammed his foot on the accelerator to get back onto the main road.

  Immediately the truck began to spin.

  “Shit!” Jamie cried.

  “Turn into the curve!” Rose cried back.

  The vehicle did three complete rotations before it came to stop on the end of the road.

  Everyone sighed.

  “Ok,” Jamie said, inching the vehicle a few feet forward. “I think we’re safe.”

  “Do we have chains or anything we can put on the tires?” Erik asked, then coughed.

  Jamie paused, as if to consider the question, then hopped out of the vehicle.

  “Apparently we do,” Rose replied.

  They slept that night on the lonely stretch of road that led into Idaho Falls. Unwilling to travel through the city in complete and utter darkness, especially not with the lights on, they covered the windows with extra blankets and settled down for the night—Jamie and Erik in the front, Rose, Dakota and Steve in the back. As uncomfortable as it happened to be, it was at least warm, and soon, Dakota found himself drifting off to sleep.

  The following daybreak, they continued into the city of Idaho Falls and began to navigate toward the road that would take them to US Highway 20.

  The city was desolate—completely empty of anything living or dead, covered in trash, filled with abandoned vehicles and resembling nothing of what could have been its former self. Businesses were dismantled. Roads were scarred by battle. Glass littered the streets and bodies that had long been picked apart by animals and birds lay freezing in the streets. While driving, and while attempting to keep from the wreckage in the once-populated area, Jamie looked around with a sadness in his eyes Dakota had not seen since their initial arrival several months beforehand.

  It was home, he thought. Once upon a time.

  Though he’d been saddened to see his once hometown abandoned and covered in blood, it hadn’t impacted him as hard as he thought it would have. Thinking back on it, he could barely remember even feeling anything, other than batshit insane and scared out of his fucking mind that he and Steve would get eaten by zombies. He hadn’t wanted to leave that apartment. If he’d had it his way, he and Steve would still be there—waiting out the apocalypse and every little thing it entailed.

  But you never would’ve met Jamie, he thought. Or Desmond. Or Rose.

  Would that have really mattered, though, if he’d been content with being safe?

  Shaking his head, Dakota leaned forward to view the progress Jamie was making before them. “Is that,” he started.

  “The way to the highway?” Jamie sighed. “Yeah. It is. At least, the entrance closest.”

  Dakota had imagined, based on the proximity to a large city and the number of people that were within it, that they would have difficulty getting onto a major interstate, and as such had anticipated them having to detour in order to make it to their location. But this… this was something else entirely.

  A building had collapsed across the road, preventing them any further access to the highway.

  “What do you think happened here?” Rose asked, leaning across Dakota to get a better look at the carnage.

  “It looks like a bomb went off,” Erik managed through a string of coughs and wheezes. “Like maybe they were trying to level the building to block off the interstate.”

  “Maybe they were,” Dakota mused.

  “Well, it worked,” Rose added.

  “Guess it’s on to Shelley,” Jamie said with a sigh. “And then from there, Blackfoot.”

  “And if we can’t get on the interstate there?”

  “Then we walk,” Jamie said, easing the truck onto the side road and beginning to make his way through the city. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “I’d be perfectly fine with walking,” Erik offered, coughing.

  “Three-hundred miles?” Rose asked. “Are you kidding me? Even if we could make it five miles a day, that’d still take us months. Even if we could do ten.” She shook her head. “Our best bet is to bulldoze through anything we come into contact with—zombies, people or otherwise.
The truck is big enough.”

  “For what?” Jamie asked. “A small car? What if there’s a semi turned over, or a building?”

  “Goddammit,” Rose groaned, cupping her face into her hands. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

  “A whole lot of bullshit,” Steve said. “That’s for sure.”

  “We can’t start arguing now,” Dakota sighed. “We just need to keep going as fast as we can and as far as we can. Until then…” He shook his head. “There isn’t much more we can do.”

  “Unless we go off roads that aren’t highways,” Jamie said.

  “How long would that take us?” Rose asked.

  “My guess? No more than a day.” Jamie shook his head and continued to drive. “Let’s just get to Shelley. Then we can consult the map.”

  “How far is Shelley?” Dakota asked.

  “Ten miles, if that.”

  Dakota leaned back in his seat and sighed.

  They pulled over at a gas station and consulted the map Jamie had used to plan their initial trajectory. Foregoing the routes that he’d initially anticipated using, he drew a highlighter along the US highways rather than then interstates and projected that they would likely reach the outskirts of Boise by nightfall if they didn’t happen to cross through any major cities.

  “We’re going to do this the safe way,” Jamie said, concluding his highlighted route at the University of Boise. “We don’t go through large cities at night, we avoid highways if possible, and we only stop unless we absolutely have to.”

  In the passenger seat, Erik continued to dry-heave. He opened the door when it sounded like he was going to be sick, but quickly withdrew it when he caught sight of something in the distance near where a grocery store and other convenience locations stood. “Shit,” he whispered.

  “What is it?” Jamie asked.

  “One of those black things.”

  “The black things?” Rose asked. “You mean—”

  Rose paused as the reality of the situation sunk in.

  The creature at the mall, who had pulled from a tree an apple and then gorged upon it, with skin black as night and with eyes so dark nothing could be seen within them—surely this was the thing Erik was speaking of, for it not, then what could it be?