Year One (Chronicles of The One #1)(77)

He turned her face to his, kissed her. “I love you. I love both of you already.”

“Max. I feel the same.”

He took her hands in his. “I pledge to you, all I am, all I have or will have. I will protect you, defend you, love you with every breath. Be my partner, my wife, my mate, from this moment.”

Her heart simply swelled. “I will. I am. I pledge to you, all I am, all I have or will have. I will protect you, defend you, love you with every breath. Be my partner, my husband, my mate, from this moment.”

“I will. I am.” He kissed their joined hands, then sealed the promise with his lips on hers.

“This is all we need between us, but I want to give you a ring. I want that symbol for us.”

“Both of us,” she said. “The circle, the symbol.”

“For both of us.” He lay down with her again, stroked her as they lay face-to-face. “I didn’t ask if you know how far along you are.”

“Nearly seven weeks.”

She saw the understanding in his eyes. “Of course. It’s meant,” he murmured, holding his wife and child.

*

The mood stayed bright, a study in group cooperation, for two full weeks.

Max knew himself, and his brother. As predicted, they clashed more than once over practice and study. But Max reported to Lana they made progress.

Arguments broke out, but normal ones that ebbed and flowed as they might with any insular group.

An early March thaw melted some of the snow, and though it turned everything sloppy, the sign that spring would return someday lured everyone outside for longer stretches.

Poe scavenged a hunting bow and spent an hour practicing every day. Lana often watched him from the kitchen window as he shot arrows into a target he’d drawn on a square of plywood.

He was getting better. To her relief, he had yet to aim one of his arrows at any of the deer that wandered freely out of the forest.

Shaun and Eddie bonded over fishing and Xbox.

Poe went down with Max, and reported the Wolf Boy, as he called the boy Flynn, didn’t seem interested in joining the group.

Max slipped Lana some prenatal vitamins he’d found at the pharmacy.

As she entered her ninth week, Lana felt healthy and strong. She cooked, joined practices with Max and Eric, took long walks with Max or with Eddie and Joe, and participated—generally losing—in what became the three-times-weekly game night.

She knew Max pored over maps and routes, looking for the best direction for them to go in the spring. Though she’d begun to feel settled, even content, in their strange new home, she understood his reasoning.

They needed to find more people, a location they could defend rather than one with only one road in or out. And even with what they’d found in the little village, supplies wouldn’t last forever.

“Why wait?” Allegra asked at a group discussion. “Why not leave now?”

“Because we have shelter and supplies. We have heat and light,” Max reminded her. “We don’t want to end up traveling without any of that and get hit with a snowstorm. Another month, we’ll be past that.”

“Another month.” Allegra pressed her hands to her head, shook it. “I know I’m whining, but oh shit. We’ve already been here for ever. We haven’t seen another soul—except for that weird kid you ran into. If the goal’s to find people, we’re failing big-time.”

“And if we run into the wrong kind of people?” Kim asked. “When we’re not prepared?”

“Okay, I know things were crazy back at college, and even on the way here. But that was weeks ago. For all we know things are getting back to normal. They’ve got to have come up with a vaccine by now. We don’t know anything because we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“She’s got a point,” Eric put in.

“Yeah, and I get we’re in this box and don’t know what’s outside it.” Shaun shifted in his seat. “But Max is right about snow through March into early April. We had a thaw, so we’re getting antsy again, but it won’t last.”

“What, you’re the new local meteorologist?”

He flushed a little at Allegra’s swipe, but stuck. His friendship with Eddie had built his confidence, Lana thought.

“No, but I’ve spent a lot more time here than you. Than any of you. We were damn lucky to get here. We wait until we’re into April, we’ll have a better chance of getting out of the box without getting stuck or getting frostbite, and finding out what’s out there.”

“Tell them what you told me,” Poe said to Kim. “Come on,” he insisted when she stared at him. “We need to add it in.”

“Fine. Big downer.” She sat back in her chair, drummed her fingers on the table. “Back in February, we heard the report—Eddie heard the same one—out of New York. No progress on the vaccine, government in shambles, over two billion dead.”

“We don’t know if all of that’s true,” Allegra objected. “Or any of it.”

“Empirical evidence supports. What we saw with our own eyes. You can try optimism and hope progress on the vaccine flew from that point, and within another week or so they had it. Then you’ve got to get it produced in mass quantities, and distributed when transportation is also in shambles. But sticking with optimism, the vaccine is created, produced, and distributed. That takes time,” Kim pointed out. “People were dropping like flies. Would this vaccine immunize or would it cure? Would it cure someone already dying? At the rate those infected and not immune succumbed, we could realistically estimate another billion deaths. We could realistically estimate nearly half the world’s population wiped out. And that’s going with optimism.”