“Come on.”
Sloane nodded without looking at me.
I went down the ladder first; the metal rungs clanged softly under my weight. When my boots hit the floor, I stepped aside and waited. She stepped down beside me a moment later and immediately wrapped her arms around herself again.
The dim emergency lighting cast long shadows down the hallway.
“So that’s it,” she said. Her voice sounded empty.
“That’s what it sounds like.”
She let out a shaky breath and ran a hand through her hair.
“The whole East Coast. That’s millions of people, Callan.”
“Yeah.”
She stared at the floor.
“My mom lives in Vermont,” she said softly.
I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said nothing.
“I can’t even call her.”
Her voice cracked on the last word, and she pressed her lips together hard, fighting it; I watched her throat work as she swallowed it down—the grief, the panic, whatever was clawing its way up from inside her. She pushed it back, barely.
Something surfaced in my own mind then. My brother Finn.
He lived up near Bar Harbor, Maine. Not on the mainland—on one of the islands off the coast. He’d bought the island five years ago in a weird tax lottery thing, and the rest of the family had thought he’d lost his mind. A two-hundred-acre island with a single farmhouse, five small cabins accessible only by boat.
But Finn hadn’t just bought land. He’d built an off-grid bunker: solar panels, rainwater collection, a root cellar stocked deep with canned goods and dry stores, a diesel generator with enough fuel to run for months, tools, medical supplies, fishing equipment, hunting rifles, ammunition—enough of everything to sustain a small group of people indefinitely.
He’d spent years on it. Quietly. Methodically. While the rest of us rolled our eyes at Thanksgiving and made jokes about tinfoil hats, Finn had been preparing for exactly this.
I’d called him paranoid, called him crazy to his face more than once, but I wasn’t laughing now.
An island off the coast, surrounded by water on every side. Stocked. Fortified. Remote enough that whatever was tearing through the mainland might not reach it—or at least not easily.
If Finn were still alive—and knowing him, knowing the way he thought, the way he planned, his military experience, he almost certainly was—then that island might be the safest place left on the eastern seaboard.
I tucked the thought away carefully. Not yet. We weren’t ready. We didn’t have a boat, didn’t have a route, didn’t have a plan. But the seed was there now, planted deep, and I could already feel it taking root.
Bar Harbor was a long way from Bay City.
But it was a direction, and right now, a direction was more than we had five minutes ago.
“The captain didn’t say the whole country,” I offered.
Sloane looked up at me. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry.
“You believe that?”
I held her gaze.
“No,” I said honestly.
Her eyes dropped.