Chapter One

Tomorrow died on the last morning of May. There were those who saw it happen, who watched the shadow fall, who felt the chop of the guillotine as the world lost its head. Everyone else witnessed only the aftermath, for the event itself lasted no longer than a moment. They stepped outside from windowless rooms, they climbed up from crowded subways, they pulled back the blinds to let in the sun, and found the nightmare waiting for them.

John Hawthorne saw it happen.

He stood behind his house, down a path his feet had worn through the trees. The trees were harsh things, fossils with knobbed branches and leathered bark, and past the last of them was a small dirt clearing—a piece of desert trapped up in the mountains, looking out over the brown flatlands of Phelan and the distant dry lakebed known as El Mirage, which was already giving off a hazy shimmer beneath the new sun.

It was half past seven, and John had been standing in the same spot since well before dawn. This was something he had done every day, without fail, for more than twenty years. He was a tall man, lean but solid, two hundred plus pounds in a body that didn’t show it. He had a face made to be framed against a severe horizon, with ashy black stubble that did nothing to hide his cheekbones or soften his jawline. His age showed only in his green-going-gray eyes. Time had acted on John the way it acts on minerals deep underground, changing them, hardening them. If asked how old he was, and if he felt inclined to answer, he would tell you he was north of fifty and south of sixty. More than that he couldn’t say. He had stopped counting. Had no reason to care.

John raised his mug to sip his coffee, which had long since gone cold, when he heard someone crunching up the winding gravel driveway below.

A boy.

The neighbor boy, to be exact.

Nicholas Krauter was the only child of a single father, a man named Matthew who made his living selling motorcycles he was too scared to ride himself. John knew his type well, all suit and smile and soft belly, with just enough spine to hold a shirt up straight. The kind of guy who could get heartburn from a mean look or a stomach ache from a sharp word, so it came as no wonder that Nicholas was such a sad sight.

The boy pushed at his bicycle like a galley slave at an oar, bowed over the handlebars and gasping for air. John watched him struggle along, wondering what in the hell he was doing here. It wasn’t to borrow a cup of sugar, that much was certain. Nobody ever visited John, except for Mariah. And she would not be coming his way again. Not after the last time. The only time.

“You lost?” John called down.

Nicholas stopped in his tracks, swaying, and squinted up at John on the rise. He waved once—a surprised, limp-wristed flap of his hand—before removing his helmet and starting up the embankment on all fours. It was tough going, thanks to the loose rocks and sticker bushes. When he finally made it to the top, he collapsed onto his back. John considered helping him up, but his hand, stuck in the pocket of his faded blue jeans, couldn’t be bothered.

“Huh-huh-hello, Mr. Huh-Hawthorne,” Nicholas said as he found his feet. The sound of his breath was a stick dragging on a violin string. Foxtails clung to his striped t-shirt. His skinny white legs, poking out from a pair of cargo shorts, had caught a tremble they couldn’t let go. “Jeez, your hill sucks. You’d think I’d be used to it, considering I live on a hill too, but nope, nu-uh. You ever get nosebleeds living way up here? I do, like every night. Sometimes I wake up with my face crusted to my pillow, and I think something’s grabbing onto me, like an alien or something. Hey, what’s your mug say?”

Nothing. The mug said nothing. It was a plain white mug.

“I don’t do small talk, kid. And definitely not before the frost has had the chance to melt.”

Nicholas was quiet for a moment. “There’s no frost, though. It’s not cold.”

So, the cold was inside then. Sometimes it was hard to tell. John was always cold when he stood out here. “Don’t you have school?”

“Yeah. School is why I’m here, actually.”

Traffic hummed on Highway 2. The sound came and went, so soft that it somehow reinforced the silence around them.

“There’re these kids,” Nicholas said. “Bradley Jacobs. Wesley Porter. Peter Casanova. They’re a real bunch of assholes.” He looked guardedly at John, and from that look John understood that Nicholas did not swear around his father, that his father knew nothing of what he was about to say. “When we were in third grade, Wesley pressed a stick to my throat in the library. The stick was a placeholder, you know—take a book out and put the stick in. He pressed it there like it was a knife and backed me up against the bookcase. He didn’t say anything, just smiled at me until I got so scared I yelled out. The librarian came, but by then he’d put the stick down and gotten out a book. Oliver Twist. The librarian knew something had happened—Wesley Stupid Porter reading Oliver Twist? As if! But she didn’t know what was happening, and I couldn’t say because he was still there, not looking at me, not looking at either of us, just smiling so only I could see. That’s what grownups don’t get. Like my dad. He thinks if you tell a teacher, the teacher will make it better. He doesn’t understand that a smile like Wesley’s is happy to wait.”

John grunted.

“Now it’s worse. It’s every day, and if it’s not Wesley, it’s Bradley, and if it’s not Bradley, it’s Peter—Peter’s the biggest dick of them all. He pushed me while I was going down these stairs and I skinned my knee and my bag was so heavy it swung me around onto my back, like I was a turtle. Then last week, all three of them came into the bathroom while I was in the stall and started kicking the door, screaming at me to open up. The whole thing was shaking and I thought it was going to come down on me, and then it started to… one of the walls tipped in, and Peter climbed up onto it with a wet wad of toilet paper, like he’d soaked it in the sink, only he hadn’t used the sink, he’d pissed all over it. He shouted ‘BOMBS AWAY, FAGGOT,’ and threw it at me. It hit me right in the mouth. I could taste it.”

“What’s this got to do with me?”

“My dad says to stay away from you. He says everyone in town stays away from you, but he won’t say why.”

John stroked his coffee mug with a callused thumb and said nothing.

“What would you do?” Nicholas asked. “You can tell me that at least, can’t you? What would you do if somebody pushed you?”

“Kid. I did the pushing.”

Nicholas nodded. It was a defeated motion, a pathetic little dip of the head, and it made one corner of John’s mouth curl down in distaste.

“You think there’s an easy fix,” John said. “That’s your problem. You had an idea you’d come up here and I’d say a few words that would make everything better. But there’s no such thing as an easy fix, not in this life. You say these kids are assholes. Well, the world breeds assholes. The world’s dark inside and it smells like shit, and it’s not going to change for you. You’re the one that needs to change. You. Look at you. One puny hill had its way with you. You’re twelve years old—”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Eleven.”

“When I’m talking, you’re as old as I want you to be, and your lips are shut. Got it? It doesn’t matter if you’re eleven or twelve or twenty-five. What matters is what you’re made of and how much you’ve got of it, and frankly, kid, it’s a surprise your skin has anything to stick to. Still, you have some nerve coming up here, so I’ll do you a favor. I’ll tell you how I see it.” A wind had begun to rise, much stronger and sharper than the wind blowing from the valley and the desert beyond. “Your old man let you down. Somewhere along the way he forgot to be a father to you and he became your wet nurse instead. He built a warm cozy nest for you out of his love . . . only you can’t trust love. Love is a liar. It’ll tell you you’re safe, that everything’s okay, and all the while the wolves are outside clawing at your door. And when they get in, your love will leave you. It’ll blow out like a candle and leave you in the dark, for the wolves and their teeth.”

It was quiet. And cold. John Hawthorne hadn’t felt this kind of cold in a long time. It prickled his skin into tiny bumps, lifted the tiny hairs on the back of his neck.

“Mister?”

John looked down between his feet, at the rough piece of slate pressed into the dirt. He had forgotten what he was going to say. Something about the woods. About going out into the woods, and learning them. Or letting them learn you. Something about giving up what made you feel good, and getting used to hurt, so you wouldn’t be soft when the wolves came. But the wolves weren’t always outside. Sometimes they were inside, too. Sometimes the wolves were inside, too. “Your dad was right, kid. You should have stayed away from here.”

“But—”

“Go home.”

Nicholas followed John’s gaze down to the dusty stone embedded in the ground. “Theo? Who was Theo?”

“Now.”

John’s voice had changed, and whatever Nicholas heard in it sent him running—falling—down the embankment. He mounted his bike, sped off without a backwards glance, and was gone.

John Hawthorne remained standing on the rise. That was the fact of him, perhaps more than anything else: he remained. He stared down at the marker between his feet, at the name scratched crudely into its iron-gray surface. Theo had been a good dog. They had gotten on well, mostly. But in the end, Theo had been his son’s. Every bone in Theo’s body, and bones were all that was left now, had belonged without question to a sixteen-year old boy named Trevor Hawthorne. John closed his eyes. He could not call up the memory of that night twenty years ago. The memory was gone, had never been. And yet he could feel it all the same. Woods moaning in a howling wind. Branches creaking under a frosted white moon.

There are things the brain forgets, but the blood remembers.

Oh, the blood remembers.

He raised his head, opened his eyes to the day, and the winter he carried inside settled back into his marrow. The sun laid a warm hand on his cheeks, his brow. It was the last time the sun would touch him. He stood there, looking east from his high place in the San Gabriels, breathing in a wind that smelled of last year’s wildfires, of smoke and cinder and destruction. He stood there, at 7:47 a.m., on the precipice of a great and terrible journey that would take him across a hollowed, gutted America, a nightmareland born on the grave of a sane world.

He stood there in the light.

And then he stood there in the dark.

✽✽✽

The shadow did not sweep across the desert. It did not come as a wave rolls over the ocean, or as a dust storm gusts over the plains. It was immediate, like standing in a room and switching off the light . . . only this room reached as far as the eye could see. It was the blue-backed mountains that creased the horizon. It was El Mirage and the town of Adelanto, and sprawling, scattered Victorville, with its chaotic blacktop arteries clogged by rush-hour traffic. It was flat Phelan and rolling Pinon Hills, chain link fences raised around empty yards, lonely brown space where the wind never stopped blowing and Joshua trees stood like forgotten scarecrows. Land and sky and everything in between—all of it vanished in an instant.

Stars glimmered overhead.

A pathetic sprinkle of lights shined across the desert.

John Hawthorne stood on his shadowed rise, the sun’s afterimage fading from his vision, like the last hot coal in a dying campfire. The hand holding his mug of coffee trembled once, just once. His breath, which had caught in his chest, continued in a slow exhale.

It was quiet. It had never been this quiet in his life. He waited. He listened. The sound of crickets came first. A chirp here and there, tentative, curious. Somewhere far off, a siren began to wail, tracing the rise and fall of the mountains. Then the screams started. He could not tell them apart, could not separate the men from the women from the children. In the dark, their screams all sounded the same. In the dark, they all screamed like newborns.

As the night woke up around him, he heard madness.

Okay, he thought. Okay.

John turned and headed for the house. He did not need his eyes to guide him. His feet had made this path themselves, step by step, season after season, and they knew every gnarled root, every dip and rock. He took his time. There seemed no reason to hurry—what had happened had happened, and what would come would come. The trees around him were solid black silhouettes set against softer darkness. As he neared the sodium lamp burning over his back porch, the texture of the trees returned by degrees, until he could not only hear but see their leaves stirring in the wind. A squirrel clung to the trunk of a hemlock, frozen, its eyes pinched tightly shut.

John hoped it had a few nuts stashed away.

He did not think this summer would bring much warmth.

In the kitchen, standing under a single weak bulb, he washed his mug, then put it in the drying rack and stared out the window. A hectic, scattered glow pockmarked the mountainside. More lights turned on, describing the town below, the senseless pattern of its streets. It was like watching a rash spread. He thought of his brother Marshall, up in his cabin in the Rockies—the Hawthorne boys had left behind the woods of their childhood, but they had never truly escaped them. Was Marshall standing at his own window now, looking out over his own wilderness? Had he already opened the scotch? His tastes had always run closer to the top shelf. Glenlivet or Laphroaig, poured over a single tiny cube. God, a drink would go down nice, wouldn’t it? But then, when it came to John Hawthorne, a drink always went down nice.

The rash of lights continued to spread until all of Wrightwood had been enflamed in yellow and white.

“What are you going to do?” John asked himself. He was caught off guard by how quickly and easily the answer came to him.

Mariah.

She would still be asleep. She worked late at the town bar, and she never cracked her blackout curtains before noon if she could help it. Perhaps the commotion had woken her, but he didn’t think so. The one night they had spent together, he’d shouted himself awake from some unremembered dream, and Mariah hadn’t so much as twitched next to him.

John nodded, his hands pressed down on the ridge of the sink. He would go to Mariah so that she did not have to face this alone. He owed her that much, at least.

He did not second-guess his decision. That was not his way. He picked up his cellphone from the counter. It was a late model, too old for texting, and that suited him fine. There were no missed calls. No surprises there. Everybody would be trying to call somebody this morning, which meant that no one would get through to anyone. This morning? he thought. Whatever this was, it was not morning anymore. That word had been buried. One more grave, one more tombstone.

John slipped the cell in his pocket and reached for the keys to his truck, then let his hand drop. No. Quicker to stay off the roads. Wiser. He shut off the light and left. A few paces down the driveway, he paused. Looked over his shoulder. He’d been wrong, it seemed, about no one getting through to anyone. His house phone had begun to ring. It trilled, and trilled, and trilled. He hesitated a moment. There was still time to turn back.

If he had turned back to take that call, the course of everything to come would have been changed.

But he didn’t.

Turning back was not John Hawthorne’s way, either.

He descended the hill into the dead morning, his shoulders squared inside his denim jacket, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. Behind him, in the dark of his living room, the answering machine clicked on and a voice that he had not heard in over twenty years—a woman’s voice, so soft it was hardly there—carried through the empty house.

“I’m all tucked in,” it said. “I’m all tucked in and ready for dreaming. Come to the blue house by the ocean. Come to Haverhill, Maine. I need you. My son needs you. He’s . . . oh but I’m tired, Daddy. Come and wake me.”