Invasion: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Novel (Sympatico Syndrome Book 3) Read online

  He knew his dad still blamed himself for Trent’s death even though there was nothing he could have done to prevent it—not without being psychic. Hunter sought to change the subject. “I’m guess I just think the baby will miss everything I took for granted, like cellphones and microwaves, and…” He tried to think of something else that he really missed. If he was honest, he liked the simplicity of this new life and he found he enjoyed the physicality of it. When something needed to be done, there wasn’t some service to call or machine to do it.

  His dad cut into his thoughts. “He or she will probably do better than any of us dealing with this new world. It won’t be new to them. It’ll just be normal—it’ll be all they’ve ever known. Besides, what’s the point of surviving the virus if we don’t have children?”

  Hunter thought on that. His dad was right. “Yeah. I guess. It would be really weird to live in a world without children.” He envisioned growing old and being one of the very last people alive on the face of the Earth, and shivered. The loneliness of the scenario was too horrible to think about and he rejected it. His father was definitely right. They needed children. All of them did.

  Chapter Three

  Cole drove across the ice with Hunter beside him in the SUV. With the deer stashed in a garage on the mainland and no need to go beyond the town there was no reason not to take the car except it used some gas, but he’d trade a little gasoline for the chance to get the short trip done in a matter of an hour or so. He’d had enough of traipsing around in the snow and the warmth of the SUV felt like a luxury. He shook off the guilt of using precious fuel and reasoned there were still untapped potential sources nearby.

  He was certain there were vehicles in garages and if they could get into a gas pump at a gas station, they might find a bonanza. Sean had mentioned using a generator to get a pump going, but there needed to be some kind of switch, but he was confident he could put one in if he had the switch available.

  His main worry was would there even be gasoline in the storage tanks at gas stations? He remembered everyone filled up their tanks in the last few days when panic set in. Lines for fuel had wound around blocks it wouldn’t come as a surprise if many stations had run out of gas. The virus hit so hard and so fast most of the suppliers would have also succumbed to the virus. Hell, there had been stations where customers had died with the pump in their hands.

  His mind wandered as he drove over the ice, scanning ahead to find the best place to leave the lake and drive onto shore. What would be fantastic would be finding a tanker truck full of gas. It would be like hitting the motherlode. If they found one, they would have plenty of gasoline to take them wherever they wanted to go. He made a mental note to keep an eye out for one.

  None of them knew how to drive a semi-truck but they could worry about that if and when they found one. Of course, these days it was mostly a matter of just getting it going—there was no worry about rules of the road since traffic was a thing of the past. But, all of that was a job for another day. For now, the SUV had enough gasoline for a few trips back and forth from the island to the mainland. In a few weeks they’d have to drive the car back over and store it onshore when the weather warmed.

  “After we get the deer, I want to drop by the house where Steve and Mike’s friends are staying and give them an update. It should be easy to find. Steve said he plowed a route there.” Cole gritted his teeth when the vehicle hit what must have been a chunk of ice beneath the snow. The path Steve had plowed was only a faint outline with the way the wind had blown. It was still better than the surrounding ice though, so he took the path straight onshore a little farther north than they usually went. The docks were farther south and so that was the spot they had grown used to entering the town.

  Cole scanned the houses, recognizing a pale blue home as being one that marked the edge of town with the houses spaced farther apart. Lucas and Zoe’s was a block south. He supposed they should stop and check if their dad ever came back. He didn’t hold out hope, but they had promised the kids they would check regularly. The last time had been before Christmas, so Cole made a mental note to stop on the way back to the island.

  Even though he was coming from slightly north of where he left the deer, he had no trouble locating the home. It seemed odd that with the world so different now, that finding an address was still just a matter of following the streets and house numbers. He supposed that would change in the coming years until some new rendition of a mail service started up again.

  “Wow, Dad. He’s a beauty!” Hunter held the rack of antlers. “We’ll get a lot of meat from him.”

  “I sure hope so.” The buck was frozen solid, which was a good thing as far as the meat was concerned, but they had to tie him to the rack on top of the SUV, one leg sticking up at an odd angle.

  Hunter prowled the garage and found a few items they could use, mostly tools, but also a hose. “We can always use more hose for the garden.” He tossed it in the back of the SUV.

  Cole nodded, and approached the door from the garage into the house. He’d wanted to explore it when he’d left the deer but there was no time. They’d taken to marking an X on houses that they had checked already, usually leaving the mark on the front door. Hunter had run around to the front and reported no X, so they donned masks, and checked their weapons. Cole had a handgun and a rifle; Hunter just his pistol. They hadn’t heard a thing since entering the garage, but they were taking no chances.

  Hunter had found a crowbar hanging on a hook in the garage—another sign of the low likelihood of anyone being around. Survivors wouldn’t have left a tool for breaking and entering so readily available. While his son pried the door open, Cole scanned the garage, noting a twenty-pound bag of kitty litter. He made a note to take it with them thinking it could come in useful if they got stuck in a ditch somewhere.

  As the door opened, Hunter recoiled, turning away as he coughed and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes.

  “What is it? Dead bodies?” Cole hated finding corpses but he was becoming used to it. At this point, the presence of one didn’t automatically make a site a no-go. Most would be decomposed and now and what was left, frozen.

  Hunter shook his head. “No. Worse. It smells like a hundred cats pissed in here!”

  Cole moved forward as Hunter grabbed a clean lungful of air in the garage. Prepared for the stench, he still blinked hard as the ammonia from what reeked like giant a litter box assaulted his eyes, making them burn. Whatever was in the house was ruined by the stench of cat urine. Just as he turned to leave a pitiful mewl caught his ear. Could a cat be living inside? There was no way one would have survived this long. Feeling silly, nonetheless, he called out a soft, “Here, kitty!”

  “You heard a cat?”

  “Maybe. I heard something.”

  They listened for a moment. Nothing. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a quick look around. The odor wouldn’t kill them.

  With Hunter close behind, Cole moved forward into the home, surprised to find everything neat and tidy except for the smell. The kitchen counters had a thick layer of grime, but unlike a many of the other homes he’d been in, only a scattering of rodent droppings Most of the other homes they had been in had been a mess.

  With so much food available to mice and rats, the population of both rodents had exploded since the virus. It had been one advantage to being on the island. While mice had hitched rides to the island over the years in boxes or what have you, what they had was just a routine infestation. Occasional traps had taken care of most of them.

  The mainland was a different story. The combination of dead bodies to feed on, unprotected cabinets, and pantries full of boxes and bags of food had allowed the rodents free rein. But here, it was different.

  His hopes rose and he opened a cupboard. The top shelf held boxes of cereal, but all three had been opened at some point. He looked at them more closely— from the way the tops were tucked closed they had to have been opened before the virus. However, the bottom shelf
held large plastic canisters of flour, sugar, and rice. He opened the canisters, alert for signs of contamination then grinned. They looked pristine. What he found wasn’t something that would last them more than a week or so, but he would never pass on padding their meager supplies. He hefted the flour canister and guessed it held at least five pounds. He did the same with the others.

  The occupants of the house must have tried to stock up to some extent because all of the containers were full with about five pounds of white sugar, three one pound bags of brown sugar, and the last canister held five pounds of brown rice in bags. All were unopened and stuffed in the canister. As a bonus, he spotted a large bottle of molasses, one of corn syrup and the best of all, a large jar of honey. These people really must have had a sweet tooth, and he imagined a dollop of honey on one of Piper’s biscuits. His mouth watered as he set his finds on the counter.

  Before taking anything from the shelves, he grimaced at the nasty condition of the countertop, unwilling to set good food onto a dirty counter. He checked under the sink, and sure enough, there was a spray bottle of disinfectant. He gave the counters a few squeezes, the orange scent filtering through his mask but not quite eliminating the urine stench.

  A roll of paper towels still hung on a holder attached to the cabinet beside the sink and he reached for it without thinking. Until he did think. He thought about the person who put the roll on the wooden dowel and set it back on the brackets. He could almost feel his or her presence, imagining them hanging a roll of paper towels, making sure the roll spooled from the bottom, not over the top. It was such a mundane action and yet someone had put the roll up months ago probably with no inkling it would be the last one they would ever hang. His throat tighten for a few seconds before he shook off the melancholy thoughts. He ripped off a wad of towels and wiped the countertop.

  “Hey, Dad—cans!” Hunter carried an armload of canned food over to Cole’s clean counter. “Look.” He tapped the tops of the cans one by one, reading the labels with each tap. “Beans, pumpkin, tuna, salmon, and even cherry pie filling!”

  There were more but Hunter didn’t recite all of the contents. He dashed back to the pantry, returning with a dozen more cans. Tuna, baked beans—large cans—and, Cole peered at three of the cans. Butter? He didn’t even know butter came in a can. He added butter to his imaginary honey-topped biscuit. Now Cole was certain that the owners had tried to stock for at least a short time. Perhaps they had hoped to survive for a few weeks, praying the virus would have run its course by then.

  “And the piece de resistance…” With a flourish Hunter set two large tins down, their teardrop shape instantly recognizable. “Ham!”

  Cole laughed. “Well done.” His own finds were boring in comparison. “I found flour, sugar and rice.” He opened the cabinet beside the one with the canisters and found an array of baking goods. These sort of evened the score, if they were keeping score. He slapped the back of his hand against Hunter’s shoulder as his son blew dust of the tops of the cans. He pointed to the extracts in the cabinet. “Check it out.”

  There were a fair number of little brown bottles of various extracts and flavorings, and a large bottle of vanilla. Piper would be thrilled. He added a can of baking powder, another of cornstarch, and large box of baking soda to his collection on the countertop. They’d have to start moving these out to the SUV or he’d have to clean another countertop.

  “Cool. There are more cans, too. I think I saw soups and chicken stock. They haven’t even expired yet.”

  Cole threw his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, I give up. You win.”

  Hunter’s eyes danced above the edge of his mask. “I didn’t know it was a competition, but if it is, then you win hands down because you picked this house to stash your buck.”

  “True.”

  The day was proving fruitful as they carried their finds out to the SUV. There were no signs of the homeowners, but Cole poked his head into an office off the kitchen dining area and noted the diploma on the wall from a medical school. Another was for physical therapy. So, the couple who had lived here had worked in healthcare—that would have put them on the front lines. Now the minor stockpiling made sense—they had an inside look at what was happening, but it also explained why the owners weren’t here to use their supplies. They had probably succumbed in the first wave.

  Sorrow pressed against the back of Cole’s throat again and he coughed to cover it his reaction from Hunter. He had to stop doing this. Stop trying to piece together victims last moments and what they had been like. It would drive him slowly insane if he let it. Every time he tried to fall back on his training and consider the victims casualties—statistics—he was confronted with evidence that real people with real lives, were gone. And right now, he was faced with the evidence from this home when his eye landed on a photo perched on the desk of a smiling, middle-aged couple. Other pictures around it included small children—from the look of the images, some were probably their own children and the newer images, grandchildren. Cole shut the door, wincing when it slammed harder than he’d intended.

  “Everything okay, Dad?” Hunter poked his head out of the pantry, where he continued to rummage through rodent damaged boxes of pasta, cake mixes, and other items.

  “Yeah. Just expected the hinges to be rusty or something, I guess, and pulled harder than I meant to.”

  Hunter tossed aside a can of cat food then seemed to think better of it. “Buddy might like this.” He reached into the cabinet and found a dozen more cans.

  “I’m going to head upstairs and see if there’s anything useful up there—there could be some medications in the bathroom or something.” Middle-aged folks might have had a lot of medication on hand for ailments. At least, he hoped they had.

  He took the stack of clean sheets in the linen cabinet. Since they had plenty of room in the vehicle, he wasn’t averse to taking items that weren’t necessarily important for survival, but these sheets were in great condition and it would allow them to tear some of the ragged sheets that had been on the island when they arrived, into bandage strips, or cut them down for crib sheets. He grinned at the thought.

  After ransacking the medicine cabinet of the usual assortment of pain meds, left over antibiotics, sleeping aids and ointments for a variety of skin conditions—all tossed into a pillowcase he’d pillaged from the linen cabinet, he turned to look in the bedrooms when he heard it.

  This time there was no mistaking the noise. It was the sound of a cat, or possibly a young kitten judging from the weak meow. He set the pillowcase and other linens on a hutch at the top of the stairs and headed towards the meow. It seemed to come from one of the bedrooms, and from the look of it, the main bedroom.

  The bed was unmade, but not torn apart. It looked as if it had been slept in just the night before, and Cole stilled. Was someone still living here? Were they stealing food from other survivors? But he hadn’t seen any other signs of life and the deer hadn’t been disturbed since he left it there last night. This couple was never coming home again. If they could have, they would have been here. They must have been out, perhaps at work or even out getting more groceries, when the virus had hit them. They even could have been caught in one of the many pileups on the highways. The bedroom looked so eerie though—like he had stepped into a time warp from the year before.

  The covers of the bed were tossed back on each side and one of the pillows was still hollowed out in the middle. The other pillow had a matted ring of fur. There was so much, at first he thought it as a dead animal, but then he realized it was only fur that had been shed.

  The moment it sunk in, he put the pieces together. A cat must have lived in here since the virus. There was no other explanation for the sound and for the ring of fur. As neat as this home was, there was no way the owners would have slept on a pillowcase coated in cat fur.

  “Hey, Dad! Look what I found!”

  There was a note of excitement in Hunter’s voice. As he turned to head back downstairs, he
caught the twitch of an orange colored tail beneath the end of the bed. He got on his hands and knees and spotted a dangerously thin orange tabby.

  He held out a hand but the cat hissed and backed further under the bed. Cole straightened and sighed. The last thing he wanted to do was scare the poor thing, but he couldn’t leave the animal here to starve.

  Hunter entered the doorway, his arms crossed over his abdomen. “Look! I found a kitten!”

  Cole did a double take. Two of them? He glanced at the little head that peeked over Hunter’s forearm. A scrawny gray cat with green eyes stared back at him. “I think I found his friend under the bed.”

  “No way! Really?” Hunter started to enter, but Cole waved him back.

  “Wait. This one is scared. Can you grab one of those cans of cat food and bring it up here. I might be able to lure it out.”

  It took Hunter only a minute to return, two cans in hand. “One for your cat and one for mine.” Already he was claiming them. Cole chuckled as he popped the top off a can of salmon, or rather, delicate salmon pate in natural juices. He shook his head at the absurdly fancy description—as if a cat cared.

  As soon as the top popped, Hunter’s cat meowed and squirmed to get down, and so Cole pulled top off the second can and set it on the floor. Hunter let his cat down and the feline went straight to the can, gulping it down.

  Cole’s cat meowed plaintively but it took her a full minute to finally come from under the bed and approach Cole. He took a scoop of the food out with a couple of fingers and held it out to the cat. “Here, kitty. I won’t hurt you.”

  The cat licked its lips and finally stretched its nose out to smell his fingers, a tiny tongue darting out to get a taste. Overcome with hunger, that was all it took before the cat was literally eating from Cole’s hand.