Music Box (The Dollhouse Books, #4) (5 page)

Darkness descends over me. There is no way of getting back to Cassie... unless I travel back to Miami and jump inside the refraction near the bay there.

The small boy’s eyes are round as he looks at me with an open stare.

The man breaks the silence. “How about I ask you a few questions, eh? How did you get here?”

I stare at him, trying to make my hazy mind function, trying to answer with something believable. “I was taken prisoner. But I... escaped.”

“Escaped, did you? And whoever took you prisoner allowed you to keep all of these?” He holds up an array of knives, picks, rope and grappling hook, and a machete.

I recognize the weapons as being mine, but there’s no explanation I can give that wouldn’t be a lie. To tell them what really happened wouldn’t go well for me. I can tell these people are from the normal world, a world in which people don’t know about ghosts or travel through shadow tunnels.

“Please. Thank you for saving my life. But if you’ll return those to me, I’ll leave now and not bother you further.”

The woman sits in a tentative pose on a chair at my bedside. “And how will you know which way to go, if you don’t even know where you are?”

“If you’ll point me towards Miami, I’ll start walking.”

Her expression is faintly incredulous. “Well now, first you’d need to cross the border from Canada to America, and then keep heading south, for oh, a few months.”

My mind goes blank. “Canada...? I can’t be that far north.”

Her husband wraps the weapons in thick canvas, depositing the package in a trunk beside their fireplace. The weak fire glows orange on the weather-beaten skin that is exposed between his cap and blondish beard. “Someone took the trouble to bring you all this way, and then dump you in a lake? That’s a far-flung story in more ways than one, eh?” He shrugs. “But perhaps it’s too late to care. We’ve already taken you in and kept you safe for days. As I said, we’re heading out from here.” He hesitates before speaking again. “I have a proposal for you. You come with us and help protect our family until we reach the camp.”

My breaths are rapid in my chest. I’m in Canada. With no easy way back. Maybe with no way back at all.

The woman raises her gaze in a quick single motion to her husband, giving a slight shake of her dark head. “We don’t know who he is. He could be with the...
others
.” She says the last word in a hushed tone.

He crosses the wooden floor toward me. “We’ll give you no weapons. And if you make a wrong move... we won’t hesitate. Do I need to say more?”

“No.” The muscles in my back pain as I force myself to sit upright. “Which way is the camp? I need to go south.”

“Chicago, Illinois. It’s the direction you want to go.”

The fuzz in my head fades. “I’ll come with you. But I need some form of defense. What’s the point of having me along if you leave me useless?”

“We don’t plan on allowing anyone close enough for you to show what you can do,” the man tells me. “Our plan is safety in numbers. My brother and his kids live in a town that’s on the way. We’re heading there, then making our way to the camp together. Now, can you walk?”

Pulling my legs over to the side, I place my feet on the floor and test the weight of my body. My limbs feel sore and awkward.

My knee joints are stiff as I make my way to the window. Outside, snow falls on a sharp angle. “I’m ready to go.”

But I’m not ready, and it takes hours before my legs obey me and walk straight and solid. All the while, the boy cautiously zooms his airplane in a downward motion, while his eyes remain fixed on me. At his age, probably the only thing he knows or remembers about planes is the sight of them falling from the sky—when the freeze came in the middle of summer eighteen months ago, their engines seized up. No planes are ever seen in the sky, anymore. Blizzards are unpredictable and frequent.

Outside, snow begins to fall.

––––––––

E
THAN

The landscape is bleak, swallowed in a film of grayish-white. At least the snow is hard enough to walk on without stepping in it knee-deep. Still, trudging through snow takes its toll. The couple take turns carrying the boy. I’m asked to walk ahead.

We walk on for hours without seeing anyone at all.

I drop back, stepping in line with the man. “Can I know your names? We’re going to be in this together for days, after all.”

He blows out a line of white air. “Jack.”

“And your wife and family?”

“Deandra—Dee. Our kids are Mia and Jared.”

His words are short—not giving out any more information than asked for. But at least he told me. If these people are all I have to defend me on this trek, then I want to at least be on a first-names basis.

“I’m Ethan. Ethan McAllister. From a small town in Australia.”

He eyes me from beneath his thick eyebrows. “You’re a long way from home, Ethan McAllister.” He looks younger than I thought he was before. The craggy beard and the effects of extreme weather on his face have made him seem fatherly—but he’s probably no older than his mid-thirties.

“Yeah.” I can’t explain how I came to be in the US, and if he doesn’t ask, then I’m not going to have to make something up. The safest thing is to change the subject. “How do you know about the place you’re heading to? I mean, there’s no one around in any direction—who told you there’s a rescue camp?”

He nods as he gathers his thoughts. “There was a mass airplane drop of pamphlets by the army. Told us about Camp Greenwillow, in Chicago. Seems there was an earlier camp, in Minneapolis, but they’ve moved everyone out of there already. Anyway, we hung on. We had enough food stores and supplies to wait it out—until things got better. I made the trip down to see my brother two months ago. We decided that if things got desperate for me and my family, we’d come down to his house—and we’d all travel to the camp together.”

“The people from the Minneapolis camp—where’d they move them to?”

“You ask a lot of questions, eh?”

“Just trying to understand. Why are they shifting people elsewhere?”

“Probably not enough food supply. There’s the Great Lakes in Wisconsin and Michigan—maybe there’s enough fish there to feed the people. If not, then the flyer said they might have to take people straight across to New York City.”

My leg muscles tighten, and I’m forced to stop. “That’s on the ocean.”

“Well, yeah? More fish in the sea than a lake.”

“I just think they’re better off keeping people away from the ocean, that’s all.” Something tells me it’s not a good idea to keep questioning Jack. If the army doesn’t know what’s out there in the Atlantic, I can warn them when we get to the camp—but there’s no point in telling this park warden any of that now.

My legs start paining from fatigue. I force them to function—keep walking.

Relief washes through me at the sight of buildings ahead. Somewhere to rest. We blunder through the snowdrifts that almost threaten to bury us alive on the outskirts.

The town is small—all low-lying buildings with some of them barely keeping their rooftops above the snow. Jack knocks on doors, rattles door knobs. No one answers, and in the unlocked stores and homes we walk into, there is no one. It’s like a white, frozen ghost town.

“Maybe they’ve all moved on to the camp.” Deandra squeezes her children’s shoulders. ’We’ll be there too, soon.”

“I’m going to try Barney Jones’ farm,” Jack tells her in a grim tone.

Her brow wrinkles. “Don’t you remember? Barney went to live in an old folk’s home last spring.”

“Yeah. But his farm hasn’t been touched—his middle-aged kids have been wrangling over what to do with his estate. He had a couple of snow mobiles in his shed. Always said he was keeping them in case he needed to make a quick escape. Poor Barney, they got him in the end.”

“He had Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t stay at the farm.” Dee’s voice is soft as she looks across at the wind-blown ice decorating the distant pine trees.

“But back to the snow mobiles,” said Jack, “he kept them ready-to-go. His kids are city folk—I don’t think they even bothered to poke around his property.”

Her eyes widen. “Okay, let’s go look.”

I follow Jack and Deandra to a place that sits on the other side of town. Barney’s house must be small, because I can’t see any sign of it—but the barn is huge.

Jack breaks the barn’s lock with a hand tool. He opens the door just a fraction to ensure that the snow stays out. The barn stinks of animal fur and droppings—even though the animals are long gone. And grease—the barn stinks of grease. Crammed full of machinery, tools and memorabilia—the barn seems like it had belonged to a human packrat. It was a wonder the old man was able to move about in here. Jack stomps about, looking under sheets of canvas, and between the 12-foot corridors of shelving—where Barney had stored everything from books to antique signs to old gas pumps.

“Here,” Jack calls.

I walk with Deandra to the snow mobiles that Jack had uncovered. The mobiles are metallic blue Kawazakis, with red stripes and faded lettering—they looked a few decades old. I help Jack pull them out.

Jumping onto one of the vehicles, I try starting the engine.

Jack places a firm hand on my arm. “Don’t.”

“Just trying to see if they’re still working.”

“We don’t want to make noise... and alert anyone. Last time, I came this way, there were some odd people about. But the mobiles should be okay. Barney showed me them and got them going ’roundabouts eighteen months back. A few months before this crazy winter set in.”

Mia and Jared climb together onto the other mobile, excitement on their cold-stung faces.

Jack walks a few steps away, and I understand I am to follow. “Look,” he tells me in a low voice, “no one’s got any fuel left around here. And if someone who’s after fuel hears these engines, they might just want to take the mobiles for themselves. As soon as we start them, we’ve got to go and go hard, and we’re not going to stop. Understand?”

“Yeah. It’s the same situation back in Florida. Except, well, there’s no snow mobiles there. You walk knee-deep in snow or you go nowhere. The only ones with vehicles are the enemy.”

He glares at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Where I came from before here?”

“Kid, don’t try bullshitting me. There’s no snow in Florida. And just who are the enemy, eh?”

“You can think what you want, Jack—there’s nothing I can do about what you will or won’t believe.”

Deandra stands behind us, her brown eyes full of worry. “Let’s get moving. I’ll take one with the kids—you two take the other.” She gives me a quick glance. “You’d better drive the thing.”

I immediately understand. Jack is going to be the one to guard all of us—and keep a watch on me.

Jack strides away with his shoulders hunched. He thinks I’m either a liar or psychotic—or both.

The snow mobiles start after a few tries, as Jack predicted they would. Snow falls faster now. The landscape is so desolate, I wonder how Jack and his family survived out here all this time. Or how many other families are somehow surviving in the midst of nowhere, completely snowed in. Deandra steers her vehicle alongside ours. She seems to know how to avoid the deeper snow. Jack sits behind me giving short half-sentence directions. We’re making ground, only maybe not enough if this snowfall turns into a blizzard.

We ride out of town. I try to look for street signs or posts. But after half an hour of riding and looking out for signs, it seems that if there were any around here, they’ve fallen and been swamped under layers of ice. Not that I’d know the place names anyway, but here it feels like I’m in the middle of nowhere and not getting anywhere. If we get to a big town or city, I might get my hands on a vehicle with fuel, and I’d just drive it until it ran dry.

When a group of people run at us, it’s as though they just appeared out of nowhere. One minute there was nothing but wide empty spaces between snow-flanked trees, and now there’s a menacing-looking mob. Then I realize they didn’t just materialize. There’s a building completely buried—with people jumping from some kind of makeshift door escape hatch in the roof.

“Get out of here!” Deandra yells to me.

I follow her lead. Jack turns and fires a single shot behind us.

More people appear on the other side of us, seeming to climb out of the icy ground. There could be hundreds more—all waiting in their burrows.

Jared screams, clinging to his mother. Mia bends forward, arms around her brother, trying to shield him. Deandra tears ahead of us, on a narrow trail between icy hills. If people came at her from ahead, she’d either plough straight through them—or they’d stop her.

Jack fires another shot. I glance over my shoulder. Dirt sprays from a rock mid-air—someone must have tried to hurl a rock at us, before Jack shot it down.

Deandra’s mobile flies into the air as it heads over a sharp hill.

“Hurry!” Jack’s breaths are ragged in my ears.

Deandra’s zigzagging through trees. There’s unlikely to be any dwellings in among the trees—it’s the safest place to head right now. I follow after her.

Inside the thick of the forest, the scene looks like something out of a winter postcard. Hard to believe the surreal scene that we just escaped. We keep going for the next couple of hours without a break.

A blizzard strikes without warning. The whole world is white and gray. A town appears on the horizon, a mere blur that I might have missed if Deandra wasn’t heading straight for it.

Deandra rides into town and along what must be the main street. She continues on, winding through the streets. It’s a much larger town than the last, but it has the exact same feeling about it—abandoned. She stops alongside a tall house painted in a faded sky-blue. Jack jumps from the ski mobile and treads through the deep snow to the front door. When no one answers his knock, he moves around the perimeter of the house, seeming to be looking for another entry. Finally, he smashes in a glass pane and unlocks a window.

Our boots echo hollowly on the wide stretch of floorboards as we step inside.

In the huge wooden kitchen, the pantry door lies open—the contents looted. Snow plops down and lands on the kitchen counter. Above, there’s a hole cut into the ceiling and tiles missing from the roof—a patch of white sky showing.