Chapter Two: Strangers

  “Who are you?”

  The woman was still protective of her children, her body tense. Her brown eyes darted from the ash piles to him, then back to the ash, as if she expected the men to rise again. Cole didn’t blame her. Ash was a strange kind of death. It didn’t look real until the wind shifted and you realized there was nothing left.

  “Not a threat to you,” Cole replied.

  The woman swallowed. Her daughter was still crying silently, tiny shoulders shaking as if she was trying not to make noise. Cole regretted the violence done in front of her, however necessary it was. There had been no other way. Still, he hated that her last clear memory of her father might be men laughing and dying.

  “Was this man your husband?” Cole asked.

  He wasn’t guessing. He had noticed the wedding ring on the man’s finger and hers. Two and two made four.

  She nodded again, then spoke, voice tight.

  “We don’t want any trouble, we’ll be on our way.”

  She began to grab her kids, eyes still on Cole, shifting her stance so she could pull them behind her. Cole could practically see the distrust humming in her, the kind that formed fast in a broken world. He sighed, rubbing his face.

  The promise he had just given to the now dead man echoed through him. A promise was a strange thing in the apocalypse. It didn’t keep anyone warm. It didn’t stop bullets. It didn’t close rifts.

  But it mattered anyway.

  “I know you’re scared. I know you’re hurting. You just lost a loved one,” Cole said. He kept his voice calm. “It’s dangerous, you know that, you’ve just seen that. If I wanted to hurt you, I could have already done so. I certainly wouldn’t have bothered saving you. I just promised your husband I’d take you where you need to go, let me do that.”

  Cole really didn’t want their deaths on his conscience. Besides, there were kids involved.

  The woman hesitated. She stared at the body of her husband, then fretted with her lower lip. Her gaze lingered.

  “He did save us, Mom,” the son said.

  The boy’s voice wasn’t loud. It was small and rough, like he didn’t trust himself to speak any stronger than that. His determined expression was still there, but Cole could see the strain in it now. He was trying to be brave for the both of them.

  Her eyes flicked closed for a moment, then she took a breath. Some of the tension drained out of her as she breathed. Enough to let the world in.

  “Okay,” she said. Then she said it again, like she was convincing herself. “Okay, yes, thank you. I’m sorry.”

  Cole waved a hand as if batting away a fly.

  “I understand. You don’t need to apologize. I would have done the same thing.” He nodded down the road. “Let’s walk and talk, okay?”

  Her head bobbed down in acknowledgement.

  The daughter’s silent sobs wracked her tiny body, but she walked with her mother, hand in hers. Every so often, Cole would pick up a word from her, small and broken.

  “Daddy…” she whispered.

  His gut twisted, and he cursed himself for not arriving sooner. Rational blame? No. But some things were beyond rational.

  They moved away from the body, leaving him there in the dirt. Cole’s eyes flicked back once, just once, before he forced them forward again. The road didn’t allow lingering.

  The world around them looked like the aftermath of someone taking a hammer to civilization. Cars sat abandoned at angles that made no sense, some with doors left open, some with shattered windows glittering faintly in the light. The wind carried dust along the cracked pavement. Far off, something banged in a building, metal striking metal, a hollow sound that could have been anything, or nothing.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Cole kept his crozier in hand, ready. He stayed close enough to step in if something came at them, but not so close he boxed Mara in. He knew what it felt like to be trapped between danger and the person claiming to help.

  After a few minutes, Cole spoke.

  “I’m Cole,” he supplied.

  The woman glanced at him, still suspicious, but naming yourself was a step. It made you less like a shape and more like a person.

  “Mara,” she said. “This is my son Evan and daughter Lily.”

  She placed protective hands on her children. The gesture was automatic.

  Cole flashed a smile at the children. It was the kind you gave when you were trying to show you weren’t a monster. Evan watched him with that same mixture of fear and stubbornness. Lily didn’t look at him for long. Her eyes were too wet, too tired.

  Cole’s thoughts were spinning as he did.

  He considered whether to turn them around and take them to Hawthorne. The journey would be a lot faster that way, and they would get to safety much quicker. Beds. Food. A wall. People who knew how to hold a line. Even if it was imperfect, it was something.

  He voiced this to Mara a few moments later, letting the words fall as casually as he could.

  “Listen, there’s a settlement not too far from here. I just left it, in fact. There’s good people there, other kids even, and they could help you, especially if I asked.”

  Mara bit her lip, then shook her head, platinum hair swaying a bit.

  “No,” she said. “We can’t. We have to go back home.”

  Cole let his face morph into a quizzical expression. He wasn’t trying to be cruel. He was trying to be practical, and practical sounded cold when someone was grieving.

  “I don’t want to be mean here,” he said, “but do you see your condition? You need rest, you need food. The kind you get from a real shelter, without the worry of monsters, or worse, human beings.” He glanced at the kids, then back at her. “In Hawthorne, you could get that, get training to boost you up. Give you a real chance.”

  Mara appeared to think about it more. Her eyes went distant for a second, like she was picturing what that would mean. A roof. A bed. A moment to stop moving.

  Then she shook her head again, eyes troubled.

  “We wouldn’t be safe,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

  Cole blew out a breath, rubbing the side of his face with one hand.

  “Okay,” he said, trying not to let frustration leak into his tone. “Then spell it out for me. Why can’t I take you to the much safer settlement that has beds, food, defenses and people to defend you. There must be an awfully good reason not to do that.”

  He kept his voice deadpan, but Mara didn’t miss the sarcasm, even if she didn’t reply to it in kind. Her face tightened like she wanted to snap back and didn’t have the energy.

  “Because there are people after us,” she said. “They want something from me.”

  Her eyes flicked. Cole saw the way she kept her hands near her kids, the way she kept looking past Cole like she expected someone to appear.

  Cole’s mind flashed back to the encounter.

  “An artifact of some kind, right?” he asked. “What is it?”

  Mara looked away, chewing her inner cheek. Her hands passed through her children’s hair, a soft touch meant to calm them even when she couldn’t calm herself. The kids were looking down now, both of them quiet, as if they knew this was something their mother didn’t want to say out loud.

  “I don’t want to say,” Mara said. “Not right now.”

  Cole almost pressed the issue.

  He didn’t. He could. He probably should. If he was going to escort them, he needed to know what kind of danger was attached to them.

  But the woman didn’t trust him yet. She’d watched him turn two men into ash. That was a hard thing to trust, even if you were grateful for it. And whatever the artifact was, it had already killed her husband. She didn’t want to hand that weight to a stranger.

  He let it lie for now.

  “I don’t want to bring other people into this,” Mara said firmly. “Enough lives have been lost over it.”

  Cole looked upward, certain someone up there hated him.

  He wanted to go look for Nathan. Trouble with that was he hadn’t the faintest clue where to look. The demon had given him an image, but it didn’t point him in a direction. It sat in his mind like a taunt. Proof, but no path.

  He was sort of stumbling around out here, hoping he’d run across something.

  Escorting this family was as good a place as any.

  That thought should have made him feel guilty. It didn’t. It made him feel tired. Because it was true. He had no better lead than the road in front of him.

  They kept walking.

  The world was quiet in that uneasy way it got when nothing attacked you for too long. The silence wasn’t peace. It was waiting. Cole kept scanning the sides of the road, the line of trees, the gaps between cars where someone could hide.

  He caught Evan looking at him more than once, like the boy wanted to ask questions and didn’t know how. Questions about the ash. Questions about the halo. Questions about why a man would do what Cole did.

  Lily whispered “Daddy” again, and Mara’s grip tightened on her hand.

  After a time, they came up on a clearing.

  Trees off to the side, the road littered with cars. Some destroyed, some just left there, like people had abandoned them in a hurry. Parts of the earth were cracked, long jagged lines running through the ground.

  It wasn’t the best position, tactically. Not that Cole was much of a tactician, but it would do.

  The children needed rest.

  Mara needed rest too, even if she didn’t admit it.

  “We’ll stop here,” Cole said. “Set up camp. We need to talk some more. About where you’re going, and so on.”

  Mara looked uncertain again. Her gaze swept the clearing, the cars, the tree line. She was weighing risks the way any mother would.

  But Lily’s legs were slowing. Evan’s shoulders were tight. Mara’s breathing was shallow.

  Eventually, she shrugged.

  “Okay,” she said.

  They moved off the road slightly, using a car as a partial barrier. Mara eased Lily down near the wheel well, the girl curling inward, exhausted. Evan stayed standing for a moment, eyes scanning, then sat stiffly near his mother.

  Cole stood a few steps away, crozier planted, watching the horizon and the tree line.

  He wasn’t sure what was on the horizon, but he knew one thing.

  He wasn’t going to fail another child.

  Not if he had any say in it.

  And for now, he did.