Nowhere Wild Read online

  Dedication

  For Lisa

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part II Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  Izzy

  (Winter)

  In the cold light of morning, Izzy Chamberlain began to tremble. Three strangers blocked the bottom step of the ransacked house. From behind her sister, Izzy eyed the knives in their hands, their sallow cheeks, and their long, uncombed hair. Broken pieces of wooden furniture fell from her arms and clattered onto the concrete porch.

  One of the men lurched toward them. Angie tossed her load of firewood at his chest. She pulled at the strap of the shotgun looped over her shoulder with one hand, while shoving Izzy back into the house with the other.

  “Run, Izzy!” Angie yelled.

  Izzy ran—through the house, and away from those men. Away from Angie.

  The screen door slammed behind Izzy as she vaulted down the three steps and into the backyard. She leaped through the neighbor’s stripped-down fence. Her malnourished legs could still run fast when necessary. Less than a year ago, shortly after her thirteenth birthday, she had run 10K races with her mother for fun. Now fear drove her legs.

  She paused only to see if Angie had followed. The door to the house she had just escaped opened with a squeal, and, for an instant, a mat of tangled hair appeared to be Angie’s long auburn locks. But from within the house, the voice of her older sister screamed again, before abruptly falling silent. Izzy’s illusion vanished, replaced by a weasel-faced man in a camouflage parka. The blade of a long hunting knife glinted in his right hand.

  Izzy bolted. She hopped a split-rail fence, turned north, and looped around the next block. Her legs found their own way to the two-story apartment building within sight of their home base, where Angie and Rick had told her to wait if they were separated or threatened.

  She wriggled through the broken front door of a town house, then tiptoed up carpeted stairs to the back windows from which she could watch the house she had fled moments before. Shapes moved by darkened windows. Cackles of terrifying laughter broke the silence of the neighborhood. Izzy could do nothing but wait. Warm vapors from her lungs fogged the frigid air as the relentless cold seeped into her muscles.

  She, Angie, and Rick had swept this apartment block two days before for food and supplies. There was nothing to eat here—there was never anything to eat. There had, however, been clothes in the closets that would fit her, and at that moment, she needed a new jacket. She had removed her old one when they began breaking the furniture for kindling. It remained on the counter of the house where Angie was trapped. Izzy raided a pile of clothes, grabbing a coat two sizes too big and a mismatched pair of mittens. She zipped up the coat, pulled on the gloves, and flexed her fingers. No frostbite. Not this time anyway. An hour without protection from this cold and this wind, and she wouldn’t just have frostbite; she’d be dead.

  She crept from one bedroom to another, then raised her eyes above the windowsill. The rear entrance to the house they had been looting loomed tantalizingly close. She waited and she watched and she listened. The numbing realization that Angie might not make it out rose like the northern-winter sun: cold and distant.

  Not even a glimmer of heat came from the hot-air register in front of her feet. She wiped her nose on her new sleeve. The smell of musty fabric made her cough. She’d find a better coat later. There were lots of clothes her size available. Few teenagers had survived long enough to see the winter. She had seen others in the early days, but eventually they had either succumbed to starvation or had vanished to the roads and the bush like everyone else.

  Clothes were easy to find now.

  People were not.

  Izzy searched the room for something, anything, she could use as a weapon. The men had knives, and there were three of them. Nothing here would help her overcome those odds. Angie had a gun, but she hadn’t fired it—oh, why hadn’t she fired it? The men’s faces wore that desperate look that Izzy had seen before on others they had met on the road: the look of men who had lost touch with what made them human. Not quite animals. Animals had fear, and for the most part, animals did reasonable, rational things. These men had abandoned rationality.

  To her right, across the parking lot behind the apartment complex and four houses down from where Angie was—captive? fighting for her life?—the door on a different house opened and a figure emerged. He was taller than the three men who had attacked Izzy and Angie. Izzy recognized his ice-studded beard instantly. Rick had returned early from his hunt. He looked up and down the narrow stretch of open yards, apparently unaware of the threat just a few doors over, then disappeared back inside.

  Izzy flew out of the apartment and sprinted around the block to the house they had called home for the past week.

  “Rick!” Izzy’s voice cracked with fear as she careened through the back door. “Rick! They got Angie!” The warmer air from the kitchen, liquid and luxurious after her time in the freezing-cold apartment, weighed heavy in her throat.

  “What?” Rick’s gruff voice practically rattled the plates in the cabinets. “Goddamn it!” He slammed a mug down on the counter. Four months of near starvation had changed his weight, but not the way he carried himself. He still towered over her like he always had. He pulled the Glock from the pocket of his coat. Izzy took an involuntary step back.

  “Where?” His boots fell like pile drivers onto the hardwood floor as he paced the room.

  “Four houses down. Three of them. We were getting firewood, and—”

  “Stay here.” Rick pushed her aside and stepped out the door.

  Izzy choked down a sob as she watched him leave. Three against one—three against two if she helped him. I should help him. Her feet refused to move. The tears began then, hot and burning against her frozen cheeks, like cinders from a campfire falling into fresh snow, sizzling all the way down to her chest. The first weeks after this had all started had seen her cry often. When Angie had been there, she would help stem the flow. Now the tears ran freely, and alone, Izzy could not stop them.

  It was only then that Izzy noticed the dead deer lying on the kitchen table: a young doe, skinny, most likely born too late the previous spring to have put on enough fat to survive the winter. Izzy could c
ount its ribs. In the old days, no hunter of any repute would have wasted a bullet on it.

  She rested her hand on the side of the animal. Food. Real food. The creature was cold but not quite frozen—the kind of cold that creeps into something that was alive and moving just a few hours before. The house grew quiet, save for the rumbling of her empty stomach. The floor floated away. The tiny kitchen spun as if the walls had flown outward, filling the air with swirling snow. The deer began to feel warmer—almost alive. The faintest beat of a pulse nudged her fingertips. Izzy tried to pull her hand back, but it stuck firm.

  The deer’s nostrils flared.

  Run, Izzy. Run now.

  Izzy sprang back from the deer. It lay there as before, still cold and still dead.

  The crack of Rick’s handgun made her jump again. Then three more shots. She pulled a knife out of the butcher block—a chef’s knife with a short, sharp blade. A tang of cold steel ran through the wooden grip, sucking heat from her hand like a vein of ice. She adjusted her grip to prevent her fingers from touching the metal.

  A fifth shot.

  The window over the kitchen sink provided a partial view of their backyard and the neighbor’s. Her eyes darted back and forth across the snow to the drifts clustered around trees and shrubs. The ground had been scalloped by the same gusts that had driven them out of the bush and back into town. Crisp brown grass showed through the thin white crust. The frozen blades rustled in the breeze.

  Another shot and Izzy ducked, the grip on her knife tighter still. The deer’s hollow voice echoed in her mind.

  Run, Izzy. Run now.

  Hunched low, she moved toward the back door, ready to flee, but as she reached for the door handle, an unseen force ripped it from her grasp. She tumbled onto the patio, dropping the knife to the concrete. A rough hand grabbed the back of her coat and lifted her up.

  “Get your stuff, Iz. We have to go.” Rick set Angie’s shotgun on the table, patted the stock once, then turned his eyes toward the sink. Izzy caught a glimmer of a tear sliding down his cheek. She gazed at the gun. Her eyes flicked to the door, then back to the gun.

  “Where’s Angie?”

  “She’s dead, honey. She’s . . . dead.” He left the room before she could ask anything else.

  Dead? Izzy grabbed the counter to steady herself. The blood in her veins stopped moving, packed hard by a single word, like the wind had packed the snow outside.

  Dead?

  Rick returned a minute later, his backpack in hand. The pack was always ready to go with essentials, but he searched the kitchen for more things to stuff into it. A box of table salt. A pepper grinder. A dishcloth. He pulled the Glock from his pocket and began feeding fresh cartridges into the magazine.

  “I need you to get your stuff, Iz. Now.”

  “I need to see my sister,” she said after a moment.

  A glimmer of pity crossed Rick’s face. “No, darling. You don’t want to see her like that.”

  He grabbed Izzy before she collapsed and brushed his hand over her blond hair as he hugged her close.

  “We’re going back into the bush. It’s not safe here.”

  Rick lifted the deer from the table and threw it over his shoulder. He gave Izzy a gentle push toward the room where she kept her pack.

  Izzy did as ordered, in a daze, her thoughts swirling around the horrible, impossible idea of never seeing Angie again. As her mind spun, the deer’s words—imagined, surely, but imprinted in her brain nonetheless—returned: Run, Izzy. Run now. But she had nowhere to run, nowhere safe to go. Angie was gone. Everyone she loved was gone.

  She looked back at Rick as she shouldered her pack. He bent low outside the door, picked up the knife she had dropped, studied it for a moment, and then held it out to her. It looked ridiculously small in his huge hands.

  Rick was all she had left now. He would protect her. She took the knife from him, pocketed it, and followed him out the door.

  CHAPTER 2

  Izzy

  (Winter)

  Rick led Izzy northwest through Thompson. An invisible rope pulled her reluctant feet across wind-drifted snow, down streets that had once been familiar. There were some footprints in the white, but they were far too rare. Ice crusted over a body-shaped lump in the alley between two houses. Izzy looked away. Her sister was now one of the countless dead, and she didn’t want to imagine Angie like that.

  Rick slowed as they turned past a park. Swings on rusty chains swayed in the breeze. A low groan crawled across the open ground with each oscillation. Izzy kept her eyes to the street. She knew these places too well. She had grown up three doors down from the park. She wanted to tell Rick not to turn onto that street, but she knew where he was going, and it wasn’t a coincidence they had ended up back here.

  “Nineteen years, Iz,” he said as they stopped in front of a white-sided bungalow beside the two-story house she had called home for most of her life. He moved off the center of the street, toward a tree at the edge of the sidewalk. His gloved hand stroked the maple as if it were a favorite pet.

  “I planted this tree nineteen years ago—the day Lois and I brought Brian home from the hospital.”

  Brian had taught Izzy how to spit and how to skate; how to play cards and how to shoot a basketball; how to get into—and out of—trouble on a routine basis. Though more than five years separated them, they had bonded. He became the big brother she never had.

  Their families had been close, too. Before Rick and Lois divorced, Rick and Izzy’s father had spent evenings on the screened-in porch talking fishing during the summer and watching hockey in the winter. In the backyard they built an ice rink that covered both properties. All the neighborhood kids hung out there when the ice was set. Rick kept the rink smooth and fast for months. Everyone in the area knew Big Rick.

  They wouldn’t recognize him now.

  “That was a long time ago,” Izzy said. She focused her eyes on her boots, denying the temptation to look at her old home. Without Angie, there would be no one to pick up the pieces if she broke down.

  Her heart burned. Three hours ago, Angie had been alive. Three hours had changed everything. Izzy turned back in the direction they had come. The wind had already blown granular snow into their tracks. Soon, there would be no trail left for anyone to follow. Once they left the town and hit the edge of the woods, the world would be the same in every direction: cold and white.

  “You remember that party we had a few years ago? When he turned sixteen?” Rick wiped his face with his glove. Izzy nodded but stayed quiet. The urge to look for Angie one last time swelled. She shuffled a step and stopped.

  Angie was dead.

  “We got him that old Chevy half-ton. Put that big bow on it. You remember that, Iz?” She remembered it. She had helped put the bow on. It looked ridiculous and lopsided, but they had laughed the whole time. When Brian saw it, he jumped off the porch with such pure joy. He picked up Izzy and tossed her into the air. Izzy, then just eleven years old, had squealed with delight. Brian was almost as big as his father, and she had been as light as a feather to him. She was nearly lighter now than she had been then.

  Two years after that party—just over a year ago—Brian headed to British Columbia for college. She hadn’t seen him since. Before the storm that knocked the power out in Thompson for good, he had been trying to return home. Three months—a lifetime—had passed since the phones last rang. Rick held out hope that Brian was still alive somewhere, but Izzy knew that he was probably dead. They were all dead now. Her father. Her mother. Rick’s ex-wife, Lois. Angie. Everyone except her and Rick. Two families. Two survivors.

  A patch of compacted snow crossed part of the sidewalk by the front porch. Izzy wondered how many times in the past week Rick had come here while he claimed to be out hunting. He stopped just short of the patch.

  “I miss them, Iz,” he said in a low voice.

  Izzy nodded and fought back more tears. It had been four months since her parents died. Four months? When had
the count gone from days to months? She looked up, finally, at the white house with the blue trim to her left, and remembered “that day.” The flu hit the town like an F5 tornado. Her father died first. Her mother, less than twenty-four hours later. Angie had taken Izzy outside, and they sat on the steps, huddled together, scared and shaking from fever. Lois had seen them and taken them in. She had been healthy then. Forty-eight hours later, she was dead. Rick stumbled back to his ex-wife’s house the next day, sick with it, too. Then it was just the three of them, weak and dehydrated, but spared by an immune response that graced a precious few. The girls hadn’t been apart for more than an hour since. Angie had always been there.

  Now she was gone.

  Izzy couldn’t hold back the sobs. Rick turned and caught her as her knees gave way.

  “It’s okay, darling,” he said, holding her close. “We’ve made it this long. We’ll make it through the winter. I know where we can go. We’ll be safe there. You’ll be safe with me.” He rubbed her back.

  “You want to come in? I need to grab the skis.”

  Izzy shook her head. “I’ll be fine right here.” She glanced back over her shoulder. Going into the house where her parents had died was not an option. Not today. Not ever. Even though Rick had hauled their bodies away—he wouldn’t say where they were now—she had not been able to cross that threshold since the day they died.

  “I’ll be right back. Holler if you see anything.” Rick patted her head, checked up and down the street, then disappeared around the side of his old house. Izzy leaned up against the tree and watched the snow swirl through the air. Rick returned a few minutes later, his arms loaded with supplies.

  “You remember how to use these?” he asked as he held up two pairs of cross-country skis and poles.

  “Sure.”

  “Good.” He handed her the smaller set, and a pair of boots. The boots fit, but just barely. Her feet had grown since last winter. Rick ran back to the house and returned with two sets of aluminum snowshoes. “We’ll carry these, just in case.”