Hours passed. The night deepened with the snow.
Dan tried not to count the bodies in the snow. He knew that was the kind of thing a madman would do. Counting the dead as a way of passing the time. That wasn’t right.
Then after a time he realized that there were no more dead to count. The road stretched ahead, pale despite the darkness of night. Smooth and unbroken.
Dan stopped for a moment and set Mason down. The kid was out on his feet and he sagged against Dan, leaning on his thighs, fingers hooked into his pants pockets, eyes closed.
“It’s okay,” whispered Dan, smoothing the boy’s matted hair. “We’re safe.”
Saying that was dangerous. Believing it was dangerous.
So dangerous.
There was hope in that concept, and hope was like a backstabbing friend. You could trust it sometimes, and then it would turn and drive its blade deep.
They had to be careful. They had to learn to live without trust. To live without assumption or expectation.
To live without.
That made the road so hard, so long, so lonely. And the man and his little brother were too far gone to be company to each other.
Dan never stopped watching. He never let his attention slacken.
“I’m cold,” said Mason, and the way he said it jolted Dan. It was in a sleepy, dreamy, resigned voice.
Dan knelt, feeling his brother’s face and fingers. They were like ice. The temperature was plummeting, and the fog was turning to crystals in the air. It was so humid he knew that it would start snowing soon.
Panic flared in his chest. He rubbed Mason’s cheeks and arms, trying to coax the circulation, fighting to keep alive the spark of heat in the boy’s limbs. He took Mason’s icy fingers and put them in his own mouth, breathing his own heat onto them.
Mason’s eyelids fluttered, but his eyes didn’t open.
“Please,” begged Dan, feeling tears break from his eyes and run like boiling water down his cheeks. “Please. God . . . please.”
He was aware, as everyone was aware, that prayers were not being answered anymore. If they ever had been. While on the road, Dan had a lot of time to think about all the desperate and needy ones who had begged for God’s mercy in times of war and famine, in wretched hospitals and on sinking ships. If there was a plan in God’s mercy, or his lack of mercy, Dan couldn’t see it. He still believed, but the structure of his belief had collapsed with the world. Those nights hiding in a church had not restored his confidence that grace would be afforded to him. He was pretty sure he didn’t deserve any anyway.
But Mason was a kid.
Six years old.
Dan did not believe in the concept of original sin. That seemed like bullcrap to him. Sin was earned. Babies don’t have any. They can’t, or God is a jerk. Dan didn’t think God was a jerk. Merciless, maybe, but not an actual malicious jerk.
So where was mercy?
Where, in the endless dark of this night, was his grace?
“Please,” he prayed as he tried to rub life back into his brother’s flesh. “Please.”
5
“Danny—?”
Mason’s voice was so pale, so empty.
But it was there.
The dead don’t speak. They can’t.
Only the living can do that.
Dan hugged his brother to him. He pulled the ends of his coat around the boy. Maybe together their heat would be enough.
Maybe.
Sobbing, Dan picked Mason up and squinted into the darkness. The snow clouds must have been thinner than he thought, because he could see light. Moonlight? Was it a full moon? Or a gibbous moon?
He didn’t know. He’d come to learn the phases of the moon during his months on the run, but it had been cloudy for days.
Still, there was light.
Cold and . . .
Yellow.
Yellow?
Dan frowned at it. Moonlight was white. Moonlight on snow was blue.
This was yellow.
And it was wrong. It seemed to reach up to paint the undersides of the trees. It wasn’t coming down from the clouds.
Yellow light.
Not sunlight yellow. There were hours of darkness left to go.
Yellow.
Like . . .
He was running before he knew it.
Aching, weary legs pumped as if he’d been resting for hours. He could feel his heart hammering inside his chest. Like fists beating on a door.
Like hope pounding to be let out of Pandora’s box.
The road snaked and whipsawed as it climbed the mountain. There were houses on either side. Doors smashed open or boarded up. Blood streaks and spatters. Bullet holes. Nowhere he dared go.
The light was ahead. Up the hill. Near the top.
No.
At the top.
His legs were trembling so badly that he knew he couldn’t go on much more. He needed to set Mason down. He needed to rest.
But not out here in the cold. In the snow.
Not in any of those houses where death had come calling.
The light was stronger.
Closer.
Brighter.
Dan rounded another bend. Another. Another.
And then there was a long space of nothing. Just trees and empty fields on either side of the road. The snow was unbroken up here. Nothing and no one had come this way in hours.
There was a huge stand of old trees. Oaks and pines and maples. So heavy they blocked the view of the top of the hill.
But through them . . .
Through them.
The yellow light.
He could see it shining on the snow, glimmering on each snowflake.
So close.
“Hold on,” he whispered to Mason, but the boy did not respond. He was limp in Dan’s arms. “Hold on.”
Dan kept going along the road, up the road, to wherever this road led. If it led to a pack of the dead, then he knew he would drop to his knees and try to hide Mason with his own body. Or maybe he’d just smother the boy. Choke him out and leave him to come back as one of them. They never wept for hunger.
If that happened, maybe he could find a way to kill himself, too. It would be better to go wandering with Mason than to let the boy go on alone.
Dan knew that this was a crazy thought. It was nuts.
He was nuts.
Of course he was. How could he not be? The world had ended. Humanity fell, the dead rose. None of that was sane.
Not one bit of it.
Dan kept going, ignoring the pain in his thighs and calves.
Chasing the light.
Chasing hope.
Ready to give in if hope was as false as everything else. Expecting it to be that way. Why should hope be any different?
The road curved around the big stand of trees.
Around.
Around.
And . . .
“God . . . ,” whispered Dan.
He nearly dropped Mason.
The light.
The light.
The light.
Oh God, the light.
6
The door to the house stood open.
Light spilled out onto the snow, into the night.
Yellow.
Golden.
Real.
Dan felt a pain in his heart, and for a moment he thought this was all a cheat, that his heart was going to burst right there, fifty feet from the front door of this house. This cottage in the woods.
This.
Home.
“Please,” he said again, this time not to God but to his own body. To his legs.
Forty feet.
Mason had not moved in a long time.
Thirty feet.
Wind blew past him and whipped snow into the open doorway.
Twenty feet.
His brother felt like a block of ice in his arms.
“Please . . . please . . .”
Ten feet.
When he reached th
e doorway, his questing left foot stepped down but the ankle and knee had no more to give. He fell forward and down. He tried to hold on to Mason.
Tried.
But his brother fell from his hands, landed, slid inside the house.
Dan fell on his face. On a thin carpet of snow over a thick carpet of soft fibers.
He felt toward the light, but he landed in darkness.
7
Dan opened his eyes and saw the wrong thing.
Not snow.
He saw a pillow.
On a carpet.
A pillow under his head, on the carpet.
It made no sense.
His mind struggled to understand it while his body struggled to wake up. There was pain everywhere. In the legs that had walked for so many miles. In the arms that had held Mason for so long. For too long. His biceps and forearms felt stretched. His fingers were like rusted hinges.
He could understand the pain.
Not the pillow.
He couldn’t understand the pillow.
“Danny—?”
Dan’s head whipped sideways, and there was a face. Inches away.
Mason.
Not frozen.
Not dead.
Not undead.
Mason.
Covered in dirt and dried snot and . . .
And . . . ?
Gravy?
It glistened on the boy’s cheeks and chin.
Mason was smiling.
Smiling?
Dan could not remember the last time his brother had smiled. He would have bet that Mason couldn’t do that anymore. That Dan himself couldn’t. That smiles had died out with most of the people. With all the people they’d ever known. Mom and Dad. Janie. Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Sally.
No more smiles.
Except that Mason was smiling.
“Mason?” he said. It came out as a croak.
Dan shifted, tried to roll onto his side. That’s when he realized that there was a blanket over him. No, a quilt. Thick and brightly colored. A quilt over him, a pillow under his face. And no wind.
The door was closed.
And Mason was eating something covered with rich brown gravy.
There was light in Mason’s eyes.
Actual light.
It took a long time for Dan to sit up. Years. It was like jacking up one of the great pyramids. Slow, requiring so much strength, so much engineering. Just to sit up.
He sagged back against the wall. They were in an entrance foyer. Eight feet long. Umbrella stand with two umbrellas, a hiking stick, and a yellow plastic Wiffle bat. Pictures on the wall. Seascape on one side. The kind you get at Ikea. Comes already framed. Smaller pictures on the other side. One big family portrait, lots of small individual pictures. Husband and wife, kids. Grandparents. A smiling dog with a lolling tongue. Dad was black, mom looked white. Kids were in assorted shades of coffee with and without cream. Grandfather—clearly hers, not his—with a heavy beard shot through with gray, and kind eyes. Dog was a chocolate Lab. Everyone looked happy.
“Is anyone here?” Dan asked.
Mason shook his head.
“No one?”
“Just Santa Claus,” said the boy.
Dan said, “What?”
8
Mason showed him.
He helped Dan up. Another feat of engineering. The floor canted and rippled, the room spun on its gimbals. Settled slowly. Became steady after a lot of crooked moments.
“In here,” said Mason.
He pulled on Dan’s hand. The kid’s fingers were still cold. Still too cold.
But there was warmth here. Heat.
When Dan staggered after his brother into the living room, he saw why. There was a fire in the fireplace. Nearly out, but still burning. There were candles standing in piles of melted wax. There was a Coleman camp lantern. Lots of light. More warmth than Dan had felt in . . .
In too long a time to remember.
He shivered as if his body was reluctant to release the cold stored in his cells.
Dan didn’t care about that. He didn’t even remember the cold. He barely registered the candle and lantern light.
Instead he looked at something in the corner and something in the adjoining room. His eyes—his whole head—kept moving back and forth between these things. Seeing them. Not believing them. Not understanding them.
In the corner of the room, dominating that whole part of the living room, standing eight feet high, was a Christmas tree. Covered in brightly twinkling multicolored LED lights. A battery stood on a small vase pedestal, wires running over and up into the tree, powering the lights.
The lights.
Christmas lights.
The tree was full and fresh, the pine scent perfuming the air, mingling with the burning logs. A living smell, even from burning wood and cut-down tree. It smelled alive. The lights looked alive. And around the base of the tree was a mountain range of presents. Carefully wrapped in bright paper with delicately tied bows.
Dozens of them.
Through the archway, in the dining room, was a table set for seven people. Forks and knives, linen napkins in a poinsettia pattern. Sparkling stemware. Silver plates and bowls and tureens.
All of them filled with food.
All of them.
Mounds of mashed potatoes and candied yams. Green beans smothered in baked almonds. Broccoli and cauliflower decorated with thin twists of red and green peppers. Bowls of peas and corn. A basket with one flap of a holly-patterned cloth peeled back to reveal the curves of honey-brown rolls. And in the center of the table, rising above everything else, was a whole roast turkey. A big one. Golden skin except where one part of the breast had been torn away by greedy little hands, and there it was pure white.
Dan almost fell down.
He wanted to, maybe should have.
This was unreal, after all. This couldn’t be here. Christmas was extinct. Christmas had died along with every other holiday. Christmas Day meant nothing more than any other day. There were a lot of days, and none of them were special anymore. They all ended with hunger and darkness, except the ones that ended in death.
Except . . .
Dan squeezed his eyes shut and took a breath so that he would be braced for the reality of an empty room and a bare table when he opened them again.
He opened them again.
The table was still there.
The food was still there.
“Santa brought us Christmas dinner,” said Mason. His voice was far too reasonable and normal. It jolted Dan, who turned and looked at his brother.
“What?”
“Santa did this,” said Mason. He wiped at the gravy on his cheeks, then licked the back of his hand. “It’s not cold yet.”
“Santa?”
“Sure. I saw him. Santa was here.”
“What?”
“Santa. He was here.”
“Here?”
Mason pointed toward the kitchen. “I saw him out in the yard. He had his red suit and white beard. It was Santa.”
There was no hysteria in Mason’s voice. There should have been. How could there not be?
Dan felt his heart begin to hammer again. “Show me.”
Mason took his hand again and led him through the dining room and into the kitchen and up to the back door. Light from a second Coleman lantern threw pale window squares onto the snow-covered lawn.
There was a man in the yard.
The man had a white beard.
He wore a red suit.
Dan moved closer to the window and studied the figure.
Then he stepped back. Slowly. Making absolutely sure not to make any sudden moves. He very carefully, very quietly found the dial on the lantern and turned down the gas until the kitchen was plunged into darkness.
Darkness was safe.
“Why’d you do that?” asked Mason. “Now we can’t see Santa.”
Dan said nothing.
Out in the yard, the figure turned toward the house
.
The beard was white. Sure. Except where it was red. There was snow on the red, so it was a layered effect. Hiding the truth. Changing the truth.
His shirt had probably been red to start with. A checked flannel shirt. Redder now by far. A belly. What someone might have called a comfortable belly. You say that about old guys with paunches. Mostly bald head, a fringe of white.
Red and white.
Fat.
Not jolly.
“Go back into the other room,” said Dan.
“But . . . Santa . . . ,” said Mason, not budging.
Santa. God.
Dan wondered who it was out there. Father? Grandfather? Or another survivor? Maybe a neighbor from one of the other houses. Maybe coming over to share the world’s last Christmas dinner. Maybe someone who had helped gather enough supplies to make it special. To give the family one perfect night. If so, what had happened? Why had everyone gone out? Did they want to take a Christmas picture in the snow? Did someone have an old Polaroid camera? Or a digital camera that they kept charged somehow? Had they been crazy enough—or felt safe enough—to go out and watch the snow? Had they sung a carol as the snow fell and thought that the dead were too far away to hear? Or that the storm would muffle their voices?
Something had happened, though. Something made them all go outside and leave hot food on the table. Their coats were gone. Their boots. They’d dressed for it, but they couldn’t have meant to be out there long.
Except . . .
There were footprints out in the snow, but if there was blood, the snow hid it. If there were bodies, they’d wandered off.
Except this one old man.
Except Mason’s Santa.
God Almighty.
He looked at his brother, at the unfiltered joy on a face that Dan thought had forgotten how to smile.
The truth is no blessing, he thought. The truth is no gift.
He knew he had to do this right. If he did it wrong, Mason would probably cry. He didn’t cry out loud much—even as young as he was, Mason had learned the rules. But this was different. The dinner, the presents. The man in red and white. Mason sounded strange as it was. Dan couldn’t risk dragging him back out into the cold. Not the cold outside, but the cold of the real world. It might break him. The kid was already cracked.
So, he knew, was he.
If Mason started crying, or worse, screaming, Dan knew that he would too.