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how dumb I was for not listening to you?”
    He paused, one hand on a first-aid kit. “I guess you know that already. It’s why you’re almost green and pretty close to tossing up your tuna casserole.”
    No censure in his tone. She liked that.
    â€œThings are ... really messed up out there.” She had to smile at her understatement.
    â€œYeah,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry about this. I really am. I didn’t mean to scare you, but we didn’t have time to talk it out. Towns will be worse than the woods—more people, better hunting. Predators stay where the food is until it’s gone, then come looking for stragglers like us.”
    She couldn’t imagine. Having people referred to as food sent cold shivers down to her toes.
    He went on with a faint smile, “But I could do worse than to have somebody at my back who’ll take on one of those with a flaming block of wood.”
    â€œI must have more nerve than sense.” Jenna took a step toward him. “Let me help you.”
    He hesitated, as if considering her motives. She noticed that when he relinquished the med kit, his fingers trembled slightly. So, he wasn’t Superman.
    Although the gouge was deep and would scar, Jenna knew she couldn’t sew up a human being. Mason hissed with the first touch of peroxide, but didn’t make another sound. He might as well have been a pillar of scarred brown marble, his gaze fixed over her shoulder. His bare skin felt incredibly warm beneath her fingers, or maybe that was just in contrast to the lingering chill.
    â€œIt’s been a long time since anybody did anything for me,” he said quietly.
    â€œNot even Mitch?”
    It bothered her more than she wanted to let on, knowing he’d spent time with her father—time that should have been hers. Maybe if she’d been born a boy, she would have been allowed to join his private army. Mitch had been dead for years, but she couldn’t shake her bitterness.
    â€œ Especially Mitch,” he said.
    Jenna frowned. “I don’t get it.”
    â€œHe wasn’t my dad, and he didn’t want to be. He was trying to get me ready for a cataclysm nobody else believed in. He wanted to make me tough enough to stand against what was coming.”
    In the firelight, she saw in his tired face traces of hardship she’d never known. “Did he succeed?”
    His eyes went distant. “I don’t know.”

SIX
    Five days passed like a dream. Mason could never believe the science behind dreams, that even the most elaborate ones lasted mere minutes. Apparently time slowed in the subconscious, but it ground to a goddamn halt in the cabin. Five days of sharing space with Jenna. Five days of silences and meals and a crude little bathroom. Five days of lying awake on the sofa while she slept in the loft.
    What would kill them first, the creatures or the boredom?
    Mason sat at the kitchen table and threaded a worn piece of cheesecloth through the barrel of his AR-15, cleaning the rifle for the first time—the first time that day.
    Tomorrow, if he still breathed, he’d clean the damn thing again.
    Jenna, meanwhile, sat in the wing-backed chair, her legs curled beneath her and an open paperback propped on her knees. The moldy little library on the built-in shelves next to the fireplace had found its first and only patron.
    He wanted to hate her for seeming so content, but he needed her. At least, Mitch had said he did. Everything else the old man predicted had come true over the course of long years, so he held his patience. And Mason liked not having to fight with her—at least not since she discovered how he’d raided her closet back home, packing for the trek into the woods. No, that hadn’t been pretty. But ever since, they’d reached a sort of armistice.
    Not bad. Just more waiting. The whole damn winter would be that way.
    Until the silence yielded to something he