Bits & Pieces (14 page)

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.

So he said the kind of thing you'd say if the world wasn't broken.

“Shh,” he said softly. “Don't let Santa know you can see him. He has to do everything in secret. That's how it's done. It has to be in secret or the magic won't work.”

That kind of thing made sense to a six-year-old.

It damn near sounded reasonable to Dan.

Things had to be done in secret, or the magic wouldn't work.

Survival was a kind of magic. At least it was these days.

He backed up very slowly. Without haste. Haste meant panic. He didn't want that to be the message of his body language. He backed into Mason and gently pushed his brother out of the kitchen. Dan took the lantern with him.

Then he stopped, thinking it another step past the moment.

“Stay here,” he said. He reentered the kitchen. The back door was closed. It had a bar across it. There were shutters mounted inside the windows. Dan closed the shutters very slowly. They were heavy. Solid panels of wood that had been reinforced with strips of metal. The work was good. Someone knew what they were doing. The shutters completely blocked the windows. There was another shutter for the kitchen door.
He shut that, too. Thick cotter pins hung on lengths of airline cable. Dan slotted them into place and felt his heart begin to beat normally.

He went out to the dining room. Mason was scooping handfuls of corn and peas into his mouth.

“Eat slow or you'll get sick,” said Dan.

The boy nodded. He didn't have the strength to eat fast.

Dan's stomach churned. He wanted to eat. Needed to. Had to.

But he didn't. Not yet.

Instead he went through the house and made sure all the shutters were pinned in place. He pulled the drapes over them to block out any stray splinters of light. The front door had brackets for heavy cross-grain timbers, and he hefted them into place. Oak. Heavy. Safe.

Then he took the lantern and went upstairs.

More candles. Sleeping bags. Stacks of boxed goods. Food. Medical supplies.

Guns.

Guns.

Jesus Christ.

Guns and ammunition.

Hundreds of gallons of water in one, two-and-a-half, and five-gallon bottles. Cases of soda. Cartons of powdered milk.

Dan was crying by the time he finished checking the rooms.

There were beds for nine people. All the beds had been slept in.

But there was nobody home.

Nobody.

It made no sense.

Why would they leave this place?

They'd found a way to keep themselves going. They'd found food and clothing and everything they'd need. There was enough to keep them safe for months. Maybe for years.

They'd even cut down and decorated a tree. Wrapped presents.

Cooked a feast.

So where were they?

Why had they left?

He thought of the man in the yard. Granddad.

Okay, so the old man had died. But there was no blood inside the house. No sign of violence. Nothing to indicate that the man had died and reanimated in here. No evidence that he'd attacked and killed his own children and grandchildren.

He was outside.

And where were they?

Dan stood at the top of the stairs. He held a shotgun to his chest tighter than if it was a talisman. Tighter than if it was Jesus on the cross.

“Dan—?” called Mason.

“Shh!” hissed Dan as he leaned down the stairs.

“Come on. It's getting cold.”

Not the house.

The food.

Dan came downstairs.

He pulled out a chair for Mason. He sat in the one next to him.

“Is it Christmas?” asked the boy.

“I—I guess so.”

“
Do we get to open presents?”

Dan glanced at the presents. There were so many of them. Surely some would have to be appropriate for a little boy. Maybe socks. Maybe a toy. What did it matter when you had nothing at all?

“Sure,” he said. “In the morning. Presents are for Christmas morning.”

He reached for the carving knife and fork.

Mason looked at him, his eyes wide and filled with light. “Don't we have to say grace first?”

Dan wiped at the tears in his eyes. He bent and kissed Mason on the top of the head.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess we do.”

They said grace. It surprised Dan that he could remember how to say thanks.

The words came.

Slowly, in shuffling steps through his mind. But they came.

He said grace.

They said amen.

Outside the wind howled and the snow fell. Outside there were moans on the wind.

Inside it was warm.

Inside it was Christmas.

Dan stuck the tines of the fork in to steady the turkey and to steady his own trembling hands. Then he began carving.

Everyone always talks a lot about survival.

I'm not sure I understand what that means, though.

We survived First Night. When the plague started and the dead began attacking the living, some people survived. Thirty thousand people, as far as we know. Tom thinks there's probably more, though. Other towns like Mountainside, Haven, and the other seven. Maybe too far away for us to have heard anything about them. Maybe in other countries. As Mom always says, “It's a big world.”

She's right. It's really big.

There used to be seven billion people on
Earth. Could all of them have really died?

Chong and I talk about this a lot. He's like me—he doesn't believe that we're the only ones left. He says it's “statistically improbable.” He says that natural barriers like rivers, canyons, deserts, mountains, and stuff would have given people a chance to escape or defend themselves. I think so too. But I also think that there are places that were built to be defended. Castles, military bases, underground bunkers, high-security places. Mr. Lafferty at the store says that there are hundreds of secret installations, and thousands of bases around the world. He thinks that maybe there are millions of people still alive.

But everyone's cut off.

How will we ever find them?

How will they ever find us?

(On First Night, fourteen years before
Rot & Ruin
)

It rained the night the world ended.

A hard, bitter, soaking rain, as if God and all his angels were weeping. Fanciful, sure, but to John Kellogg, pastor of the Pittsburgh Three Rivers Church, it seemed likely that heaven should mourn the end of all those years of living, of building, of crafting laws and striving to refine the humanity of the race. The whole process, from dropping out of the trees to the mapping of the human genome, should have amounted to something more substantial, something not so easily smashed flat and brushed away.

But it didn't, and the steady rain felt like tears to him. God's tears.

It was a strangely religious moment for a man who had been gradually losing his faith, year after grinding year. Caring for the homeless. Running shelters for abused women and runaways. Watching people drop out, one by one, from the twelve-step meetings held in the church basement. Trying to comfort mothers of sons killed in deserts half a world away for reasons even the politicians couldn't quite agree on.