Chapter Two
Disclaimer: I don't own Merlin.
Hal met them at a vehicle turnout outside the city limits. He was thin, blond, and had unusually dark gray eyes. He owned an iguana and a couple bearded dragons; he'd brought them along in his car, along with three of the shelter dogs and a cat. He greeted Helen and gave everyone else a long, searching look before asking if their was anything else they should pick up on the way to the cottage.
As they drove behind him along the winding road that had quite a bit more traffic that normal, it occurred to Garth that Hal seemed familiar. I think he's featured in a few of my bizarre dreams lately. But...I'm pretty sure I've never even seen a picture of the man before.
He distracted himself from that realization by trying to call his cousin Hannah; he'd gotten her number months ago from a friend of a friend. She didn't pick up, and he cursed.
"Garth, the kids," Helen snapped, her eyes on the road.
He twisted look to look into the back seat; Heidi and Ethan were asleep. Evan, wide awake, met his gaze. "Try again," he said quietly. "Please."
Swallowing, Garth faced forward and tried calling Hannah again. And again. She never picked up.
When the phone service gave out a couple hours later, it didn't come back.
The Prime Minister's muddled speech over the radio did nothing to reassure them or the many frightened people they saw along the roads.
The cottage was located in a little hollow on top of a mostly-wooded hill seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and was only accessible via a very long, narrow, unpaved driveway. It had one bathroom, three bedrooms, and not enough area in any other room to make six people feel like there was enough space. Yet the roof didn't leak, the well did still work even if they had to boil the water on the wood stove to be safe, and options were limited anyway, so they made the best of it.
At first, Garth worried a bit about the isolation. We're a long way from the nearest village, even...But he soon realized that was a good thing, with the news over the radio becoming steadily worse and people everywhere growing more desperate. It got to the point where they stopped daring to go to those nearest villages to look through dwindling supplies under the gaze of armed shopkeepers; there was no fuel left for the cars, anyway.
The earthquakes continued intermittently, and the weather became unpredictable. Hailstorms struck and cleared up in minutes, leaving the air baking hot. Gale-force winds swept through leaving humid calm in their wake. Rumors came up, stories of unexplained plagues, of terrifying monsters, of worse horrors lurking behind every corner in a world not insulated by technology.
About ten weeks after the first quake, the radio stopped working entirely.
Survival was tiring. Garth and Helen's mother's book came in handy for gathering what edible plants they could find; the weather killed of some growing things but many others, some completely unfamiliar to anyone, seemed to like it and grew like crazy. The local area apparently had an infestation of rabbits, which Hal somehow knew how to trap and butcher. He was also the one who suggested rationing and saving their supply of non-perishable foods.
Heidi and Ethan complained some...no one liked almost-unseasoned rabbit with nothing but bitter herbs to go with it, after all. Evan just shrugged and accepted anything, and most of the time they were all too hungry to turn anything down.
A couple times, people passed through...a young family of three, a couple pairs, a loner...all wary but polite, willing to swap supplies and information. Eventually, the scattered visits ceased.
Silence became more familiar every day, as the weight of isolation and the apparent end of the world settled upon them. The conveniences and entertainment of most technology seemed like faraway fantasies. Everyone had trouble sleeping...Evan always looked too tired to talk, Ethan acted bored and listless every day, and Heidi kept crying late into the night, according to Helen, who shared a bedroom with her...and none of the eerie dreams let up. Honestly, they had become almost boring.
One day, after a too-warm rainstorm that lasted all morning and left a cool, clear afternoon behind, Garth went out on the narrow porch to find Hal sitting on the steps, watching the dogs roll around in the wet grass. Not sure what else to do, he sat down, too.
Hal broke the silence first. "If the weather every settles down, we can plant a vegetable garden. I brought seeds."
"Yeah. That'd be a good idea." Garth watched the blue-eyed Husky Hal called Turquoise chase Jasper, a brindled greyhound, around the yard. Pearl, a small, silvery-white mutt, wandered over to the porch and flopped down by Hal's feet. Jade the cat padded out from under a porch chair and rubbed her head against Garth's arm. He patted her distractedly. "Why are all your animals named after gemstones?" Hal's iguana was named Malachite and his bearded dragons had the names Quartz and Agate. In their case, however, Garth had no clue which names belonged to which reptile.
In response to his question, the blond man laughed and said, "Old habits, I suppose."
"It's an old habit of yours to name animals after rocks?"
Hal glanced at him, lips twisted into an odd smile. "You have no idea, do you?"
Despite the sometimes-inexplicable trust Garth had in the man, Hal's words made him uncomfortable enough to get up and go back into the house.
Between bouts of sleeplessness mostly brought on by the snoring twins on the other side of his bedroom, he dreamed of giant, dark-scaled lizards...and a single, smaller white one...that night.
The first earthquake had occurred in early spring. The rest of the season, along with summer and autumn, passed with decreasing quakes and increasing unpredictable weather. Things only began to settle as winter approached, when everything started to die and it started to get cold.
Very cold.
"None of it makes sense," Helen said one day while she and Garth searched the icy, patchy woods for something not poisonous or disgusting or unidentifiable. "I'm no scientist, yet...If there was some sort of nuclear war, we would have heard about it before the radio went dead, and the winter would have set in sooner. Same with a gigantic volcanic eruption, or an asteroid…"
"And we haven't seen any zombies around." Garth bent to examine a plant, shivering under three layers of clothing, none of which were heavy enough. We're going to have to go looking for more warm clothes, and medicine...herbs only go so far…That means going further away, possibly getting closer to other people...Few of them will be friendly, not after so long...
Helen sighed and slammed the plant book shut. "There's no such thing as zombies, Garth."
"Maybe not, however…" Garth straightened, looked in her general direction, and stiffened, heart hammering in his chest. "...apparently there are such things as giant hairy pigs."
Helen spun around and stifled a shriek.
A reasonable reaction, given the snorting, red-eyed, van-sized boar currently staring them down.