The Hidden Survivor Read online

  The Hidden Survivor

  The Hidden Survivor Book 1

  Connor McCoy

  Copyright © 2018 by Connor McCoy

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter One

  He was dreaming again. He knew this because the lights were on, and then because Sarah was smiling at him, holding Clarence in her arms. The toddler was reaching out for him, giggling and squirming is his mother’s grasp. He reached out to take the boy, to embrace his wife and child. The boy’s little hands were warm on the bare skin of his arms. He breathed Sarah’s clean scent, holding them close. But they were pulled from him, fading into the distance as he woke into the cold darkness of a harsh reality.

  The cold of the night seeped in through the wool blankets, and he rolled himself tighter, trying to block the memories that flooded through him.

  Sarah.

  Four years on he still ached for her. He supposed he hadn’t mourned properly, or the pain would have dulled. Just the fact he still dreamed of them, both alive and well, spoke to his inability to come to terms with their deaths.

  He knew if he tried sleeping, he’d be haunted by his former life, but the thought of getting out of bed in the dark, lighting lanterns, stoking the fire, and worse, making his way through the frozen night to the outhouse was too much for him. He’d take on the memories. And there was a chance he’d drop back to sleep. He was sometimes lucky.

  But this wasn’t one of the lucky nights. Glen's mind flooded with the light of his Philadelphia home. Sarah’s laughter as she met him at the end of the day. Before Clarence was born, they often dined out in the best restaurants, rubbing elbows with the movers and shakers of the city. His advances in neurosurgery bringing him acclaim and celebrity. They were invited to the mayor’s home several times a year.

  He re-lived that blaze of glory with something akin to envy. As if he hadn’t been the one whose career was rising like a star. But it had been, and the envy was easier to handle than the loss. He still was alive after the automobile crash that had robbed him of everything he loved, but his desire to achieve, to thrive and grow, died with his wife and child. Exactly one year to the day after the crash he walked away from his surgical practice, and drove away from Philly, leaving everything behind.

  But the memories remained with him as he headed north from Philadelphia, heading for Northern Michigan and the haunts of his childhood.

  He drove through New York, stopping in Syracuse to trade his Lexus for an old beater of a Ford truck with a temperamental manual transmission, and rust flaking from the undercarriage. At the Canadian border, the border patrol agent looked from his enhanced driver’s license to his face several times.

  “Your name?” the officer asked him, watching him.

  “Glen Carter,” he said, forcing a smile. “I was ill and lost some weight,” he explained.

  “It’s more what you gained,” she said. “You look like a professional in your picture.” She eyed him from his torn jeans to his scruffy beard and greasy hair. “Where are you headed?”

  “I’m just driving through Ontario on my way to Northern Michigan. I own a cabin there.” He started to fish out the deed to the cabin, but she waved him on.

  “Enjoy your trip, Mr. Carter,” she said as he pulled away.

  He stopped out of sight of the border crossing and pulled down his visor to look in the mirror, examining his face. The border control agent had been correct. He had let himself go. It probably would be wise to look a little bit more like his ID photo when he re-entered the United States. At twilight, he rented himself a room in a budget hotel and bought a razor from the little shop.

  When Glen was done showering and shaving, he looked, and felt, more like himself than he had in a long time. He’d trimmed his beard down to a neat mustache and a chin strap beard and taken his hair from shoulder length to a high and tight cut, almost military-looking, with scissors and an electric razor. He was much thinner than he used to be, but at least his face resembled the one on his ID and the ghost of the surgeon he’d once been reappeared.

  He crossed the border near Sault Ste. Marie easily and drove south on Highway 75 and then west on Route 28 onto the familiar farm-lined roads of his childhood summers. Leaving behind successively smaller towns, he headed into the forested hills, relying on memory to find his way.

  The track to the cabin was so overgrown that he almost missed it. Luckily, his instincts had made him slow down, almost crawling along the dirt road the track led off. But he spotted the sign dangling from a vine that had saved it from toppling into the brush along the side of the road and being hidden forever. He considered clearing the worst of the growth, but why. The truck already was dented and scratched, it wouldn’t make much difference.

  He bounced along the half-mile track, sliding under some tree limbs, breaking others until he reached his destination. Boarded up and abandoned years before, the cabin was not the welcoming place of his memory. The front stairs were rotted, and the dock was tilting crazily into the pond. There was a lot of work to do here.

  The thought of the work heartened him. He needed something to focus his mind. Something that required his full attention. Something to take his mind off his desire to join his departed wife and child. He pulled his tool box from behind his seat and set to work pulling the plywood from the doors and windows.

  Glen worked steadily through the summer months, often to the point of exhaustion. The dreams haunted him less often when his body reached the limits of its endurance. He rebuilt the front steps, repaired the listing dock, and built a shed to house the truck for the winter. Inside, he tore out the old brickwork around the fireplace, put in a wood stove and put in a firewall of native stone.

  His hands became scarred, and as he assumed he never would perform surgery again, he didn’t think twice about the bruises and sprains on his fingers. He dropped a stone on his hand and broke his pinky and ring finger, but didn’t bother with a doctor. He swore, threatened to shoot the offending rock, and taped the fingers together until they healed.

  He would not be returning to his old life.

  It wasn’t only the dreams that woke him at night. The first time the noise woke him he sat straight up in his bed, sure that whatever had made that hellish howl was in his cabin. He shook with adrenaline and tried formulating a plan. But when the guttural roar came again, it was clear that it was outside and moving away. He tried to calm himself, but it took ages before the shaking stopped wracking his body. He looked in the woods but didn’t know what he was looking for. Something huge. He began understanding why people believed in Big Foot and Yeti. How could there be no evidence of something that loud?

  Two years into his isolation, civilization ended. When the power went out and hadn’t come back on after a week, he dusted off the truck and drove to town to find out what had happened, but the place was in chaos. Cars stranded on the roads, people carrying firearms, if there were people at all. He found a woman siphoning ga
soline from the storage tank at a deserted gas station and asked her what had happened.

  She looked at him strangely. “Where have you been?” she asked, eyeing him suspiciously. “How can you not know?”

  Glen told her he’d been holed up in the woods and she nodded, her eyes losing some, but not all, of the distrust. “Don’t know for sure,” she said. “It only took about a day for the entire world to go dark. Some thought a sun flare put off an EMP, but some scientist up at MIT said a sunspot wouldn’t take out the whole world. We lost the radios before I ever found out for sure what took out civilization. All I know is that anything with a plug is junk. And the only people who can drive are the ones with old cars and bikes. Anything with a computer chip is toast.”

  “What’s the fuel for?” he asked her.

  “I’ve got a generator,” she said. “Until the gasoline runs out, I’ve got a fridge and a freezer and light.”

  “Anybody still got supplies around here? Candles? A spare generator, maybe?” he asked.

  “Only if you’ve got something to trade.” She capped her gas can and rolled up her hose. “Money isn’t worth anything. But if you have goods or a skill, you might be in luck,” she called over her shoulder as she moved away.

  “I’m a surgeon,” he said to her retreating back, and she stopped. “And I can build things. Can I borrow your siphon?”

  She came back slowly, her face betraying her interest. So while he filled the truck with fuel, he probed for more information. The town government was in upheaval. They hadn’t heard anything from the county, state or federal governments. How could they? No phone, TV or radio was working. The townspeople divided between two philosophies. Those that felt the need to militarize, and those who wanted a more open society.

  Town meetings quickly devolved into shouting matches between the two groups.

  “No ham radio operators in town?” Glen asked, handing back her hose.

  She looked thoughtful. “I don’t know,” she said. “If there are, they haven’t stepped forward. Don’t ham radios need electricity to work?”

  “Batteries,” he said, “that could be recharged with a generator.” He gestured to the fuel can she was carrying. “When fuel runs out, then a bicycle-powered recharger probably could be rigged up pretty easily. It would give you contact with the outside world. I’m having a hard time believing no one else has thought of this,” he said.

  “It’s only been about a week,” she said. “People still are waiting for the National Guard to come to the rescue.”

  “The National Guard is busy keeping the cities from becoming death traps. Now, can you introduce me to someone with supplies I could barter for?”

  She took him to see the owner of the local hardware store. An older man with a shotgun resting on the counter in front of him. They worked out a labor for goods exchange that had Glen installing bars over the windows and door of Hal’s Hardware, and in a week he was on his way back to the cabin with a tank full of gasoline, several barrels of fuel, a generator, ham radio, and lanterns. On the seat beside him in the cab rode 100-pound bags of rice, corn, and beans. He wouldn’t have a variety if he wasn’t successful hunting and fishing, but he wouldn’t starve.

  Back at the cabin he installed bars on his windows and rigged brackets on the inside of his doors to slot two-by-fours into at night. If things got bad in town, they might come looking for him, and he didn’t want to be caught unawares.

  In the year that followed Glen visited the town three more times, gathering more supplies. The last time he was met by armed thugs on the road into town. He wasn’t surprised, he figured it would come to that eventually. He made a U-turn and decided not to go back. He parked his truck in the shed, walked back out to the road and constructed a blind to pull across the entry to his driveway. The fewer people who knew where he was, the better.

  Another year went by and Glen settled into a routine. Every day of decent weather he rose at dawn and spent an hour fishing in the creek downstream from his pond. Then he chopped and stacked wood. He spent the late morning searching for signs of humanity, and was happy when none appeared. If he’d been woken in the night by the sound of what he only could assume was a wild animal, he spent some time looking for signs of bears, moose, and wolves.

  There was no trace of anything that seemed large enough to emit the sounds that woke him, although he did see bear scat and trees that had been marked. He sometimes came across signs of moose, and about twice a year would see one standing in the pond or stream. He knew about the dangers of moose. A rutting bull easily could kill a man. He kept his distance.

  He ate his one meal of the day mid-afternoon; if he was home he’d cook and eat a warm meal. He carried home cured jerky and foraged for edible greens, fruits and berries if his wanderings had taken him far afield. He was keeping an eye on civilization, but from a good distance. He carried his binoculars and spied on settlements. They couldn’t be called towns anymore. Society had devolved. Every group he came across, large or small, was protecting itself against outsiders. Even neighboring towns that used to be filled with friends and relatives were looked upon with suspicion. The people no longer were considered family. Some bartering was tolerable, but that was all. Watching from the forest, Glen watched a woman turn her mother away. She needed something, Glen wasn’t sure what, but she had nothing to give in return. Angry words were exchanged and the older woman turned away, weeping.

  The younger woman gathered her children around her and herded them into the house, clearly worried about retribution. But the old woman didn’t live to take revenge. The leader of her compound shot her dead when she came back empty-handed. She laid in the road until nightfall, when something came out of the woods and dragged her away.

  Glen stayed away from other people as a rule, but he made a mental note never to ask the people in this valley for help. His skin crawled and a shiver went up his spine at the thought of the interactions involving the old woman. Turned away by her kin, killed and then left for the animals. One minute in the road, the next gone.

  After that encounter, if it could be called an encounter, it was more like a vignette viewed from afar. He stuck close to home, not caring to see what was going on in the “civilized” world. He was perfectly content to chop wood, hunt, and fish. He had no need of the company of others. It was a lonely life, but at least he was unlikely to be killed by his companions.

  Chapter Two

  A fox started visiting the stream above the pond that summer. Glen spotted her standing in the shallows, drinking. Then something caught her attention and she froze, watching the water intently. A moment later she sprang, diving head first into the water and coming up with a medium-sized trout in her mouth. The fish was struggling, thrashing back and forth and the fox dropped it in the shallows. But a moment later she had snatched it up again, carrying it out of the stream and dropping it on the sandy bank.

  The fox stood between the fish and the water and batted it landward with her paws and nose when it seemed it might escape back into the water. A few moments later, the struggle was over and the fox picked up the now motionless fish and trotted away.

  Glen decided the fox had the right idea and grabbed his fishing gear, making his way upstream to a curve where a small watering hole had developed. It was a good place to spend an afternoon fishing. He wondered where the fox had come from, she was the first he’d seen so close to the cabin. He sat on the bank for a while before he dropped his line in, wondering at the feeling of companionship he’d felt at spotting her. He hadn’t realized he neither needed nor wanted company.

  When he had three good-sized trout on his line he headed back to the cabin. Two of the fish he filleted for his own consumption, but before he started on the third he paused. He wished now he’d taken a bucket and brought the trout back alive. He could have rigged a holding area in the pond and used the fish to lure the fox back to the area. If he left a dead fish on the bank now, there was no telling what animal would find it.

/>   Probably not the fox who just had eaten.

  A good part of a week went by before the fox appeared again. Glen was sitting on his deck when movement on the far bank of the pond caught his eye. He spotted the white tip of her tail as she slipped through the reeds. A moment later she appeared on a bare stretch and dipped her nose to the water for a drink. Then she sat on the bank and watched the water for a few minutes, but nothing caught her eye and she slipped back into the undergrowth.

  Glen watched a while longer, but she didn’t reappear. He felt oddly let down.

  The next day he fashioned a small underwater holding tank using some chicken wire he’d found stored under the deck. He attached it to the dock with wire and then took his rod and bucket to his fishing hole. This time he brought back five good-sized trout alive in his bucket and dumped them into his fish cage. Then he sat on the dock to wait.

  The following day, back out on the dock again, he glimpsed the fox, but she had spotted him and didn’t stay. It was two more days before he saw her again. This time she appeared on the far bank and stood absolutely still, watching him. Glen moved slowly, dipping his net into the water and coming up with a trout from his tank.

  The fox licked her lips.

  Glen waited until the fish stopped moving and grabbed it by the tail, tossing it along the bank, as far from the dock as he could get it. The movement startled the fox and she disappeared into the undergrowth. Glen cursed under his breath. His plan hadn’t worked. He was just about to get up to retrieve the fish for his own consumption when he spotted her again and lowered himself back down.