Shadows

At his side, Raleigh suddenly bristled. The dog let out one very small wuff which it choked off almost immediately, as if realizing that making any noise at all was a big mistake.



Tom knew, in an instant. Oh shit. He had a moment to be thankful that he had not started a fire. A glance at Dixie showed that the mare’s eyes had gone pearly with terror. She was chuffing. Please, be still, he pleaded, silently, stretching for Jed’s Bravo. The rifle was already chambered, and he eased back on the safety, wincing a bit at the soft rasp of metal.



He listened, ears straining. Nothing. No sound. The moon’s gangrenous glow turned the snow deep pewter, barely distinguishable from the darker trees. His breath clouds were tangled gray webs. He let go of another, longer breath, blowing as if through a straw, watching where it moved. Off to his left, and Raleigh was staring right. So he was downwind.



Good. If these things go by smell, I might be okay.



Something rustled. Tom’s heart jumped like a hooked fish. A whisper of snow and then a thud. Footsteps. Another thud. Not snowshoes, he decided. So there must be a well-traveled trail he hadn’t seen. He pivoted right, from the waist, slotting the rifle so his cheek rested against the stock. He let his eyes drift offcenter, the better to see in the moon’s ashen glow.



Two shadows ghosted through the trees not fifty yards away. Both had long hair, and he thought the smaller, slighter one might be a girl. Her right hand clutched a stubby rifle, maybe something with a pistol grip. The larger one was broad and very big across the shoulders like a linebacker in full gear. Then the boy Chucky made a misstep, staggered—and suddenly sprouted a third arm.



Oh my God. Gooseflesh pebbled his skin. They’ve got a body. Stooping, the boy hefted the body, shrugging it back onto his shoulders, grunting a little at the weight. Now that he understood, Tom could see that the body had only the one arm, the right. The left ended in a blacker-than-black hole at the shoulder joint.



Then the head fell back, and the dead girl’s long hair fanned away from her face—



Alex. Horror blasted through his mind. Alex?



Turning, the girl Chucky raised her rifle to her mouth—and tore off a bite.



Not a rifle.



An arm. The girl ripped at the meat. Her jaws worked, and in the gleam of that sick light, he saw the white ripple of her throat as she swallowed.



No. NO. Tom felt the earth suddenly split beneath his feet, and then he was falling and falling and he would never stop, never, and Alex . . . and Alex . . . and Alex and—



“NO!” he screamed. His finger convulsed. The night broke apart with a roar. A tongue of orange flame shot through the dark like a comet. Behind, he heard the horse bray in alarm. The girl’s head vanished in an instant, but the explosion lingered in purple afterimages burned onto his retina: her skull bursting in a chunky halo.



Pivoting, already adjusting, he shot the Bravo’s bolt and fired again. Another roar. In the bright muzzle flash, he saw the boy, caught as if in a strobe, half-turned, his mouth open in a look of stupid shock—and then the bullet drilled into his chest and he went down.



As the roar died, he heard the dog barking. Dixie was still rearing, screaming, trying to tear from her tether, her front legs jackhammering the snow.



Alex! In the next second, he was lurching as snow grabbed his feet and whippy twigs slapped his face. Air tore in and out of his lungs. The dog churned alongside, working so hard to keep up it had no breath to bark. Perhaps ten yards away, his feet registered the sudden change in the snow. He stumbled out on a path already broken and tamped down with repeated use. Ahead, he saw all three: the body, the Chucky with no head, and the boy. He spotted the half-eaten arm, too.



“Alex,” he said, brokenly. “Alex.” He fell to his knees by the dead girl with only one arm. She was facedown, her long hair dragging over black, bloodied snow. Reaching out with one palsied hand, he eased her over.



“Ah, God.” Not a girl. Not even close. In the bad light, he couldn’t tell how old she’d been, but the woman’s cheeks were weathered. Her hair was the color of gravel and dragged from a large flap of scalp peeled from forehead to crown, revealing skull that was smooth as a cue ball. Her nose had been gnawed away to bone. The eyes, too.



Oh Christ, oh God, oh shit. He was gasping. Sweat poured down his neck; he could feel his clothes sticking to the skin of his back and chest. And he was weeping, too: huge, ripping sobs of relief. Stop, stop, stop! He tore off a glove, jammed a fist into his mouth, bit down until his teeth sawed through and his mouth went coppery with blood. Stop, you’ve got to stop. It’s not her; it’s all right to be happy that it’s not her, but you’ve got to—



Then. The boy. Coughed.



More gurgled, actually. Tom heard the boil and splash of blood and a hissing rush of air with every breath the boy drew.



That sound sobered him in a way nothing else could. Live through enough firefights, see enough buddies go down, and any soldier recognized a sucking chest wound when he heard one. With every breath, the boy pulled air into his chest. Eventually, the pressure would stop his heart unless the boy bled out first, which he just might.



He could end this. Tom stared down at the boy. A bullet to the brain; a quick slice across the carotids. Either would be the merciful thing, the right thing. Or, hell, he could try to save him. Well, in theory. He knew what to do. Every soldier did. Any soldier could.



There is no right. His mind was burned white, hot as a neutron star. There are no laws and there is no god. There is only here and now, and what I do next . . . what I do next . . .



The boy’s eyes were dark pits, and his face was gray. A black viscous pool was spreading beneath his body, leaking over the snow. The boy coughed again. Blood boiled onto his lips and ran over his chin to dribble down his neck.



I can’t save you. He slid his knife from its sheath. Not even I can justify that.



Tom tugged open the boy’s parka. The Chucky didn’t resist but only stared with eyes as dark and shiny as polished obsidian. The boy’s blood smelled of sweet iron. The bullet had cored midway down the right side of the boy’s chest. Straddling the boy, Tom slid his knife just beneath the sternum, then up and left. The muscles parted easily, and he went as fast as he could. Still, the boy flinched and Tom hesitated.



He could do this. The pommel ticked against his palm in time with the boy’s heart. He had to do this.



The boy’s gaze locked on his. His lips moved.



“No, don’t,” Tom said, and then he rammed the knife home, pierced the heart through, and gave the blade a savage twist.



A tick.



Another tick.



Tick.



Nothing.



The boy stared. And stared.



The dog growled, and that brought him back. “No, Raleigh,” Tom said. Taking back his knife, he plunged it into the snow until the blade was clean.



Then he got the hell out of there as fast as he could.



Two days later, he was in Michigan.



52



Venus was a hard diamond in the east. The air was dry as dust and going crackly with cold as the light drained from the sky. It would be dark pretty soon. But Tom had to think this one through. Once done, he couldn’t undo it.



Through the Bravo’s scope, he studied the farm from a screen of new birch and thick hemlock at the very edge of a wide, sloping, snow-covered field. The two-story farmhouse was solid, native stone with gable dormers, but looked to be in need of some serious work. The limp tongue of an American flag hung from a very tall flagpole mounted on a rise to the right. Thin, haggard smoke dribbled from a single, moth-eaten chimney that had lost its cap and teetered like a stack of kids’ blocks ready to fall with the touch of a finger. A low woodpile butted against a fenced-in rectangle that must be a vegetable garden. The ax-half of a sturdy splitting maul leaned against a pile of uncut rounds. To the left of the garden, a dead truck showed as a glint of windshield peering from humped snow, and at the end of a sinuous path stood three garbage-can-green Porta-Johns.



A cluster of outbuildings hunched beyond a wide, unbroken expanse—a road leading to the farm, probably, but one that hadn’t seen traffic in months. Of the two barns, a peaked gray prairie barn had seen better days, too; the southwest corner of the roof had caved in. In a paddock of trampled snow, a lone horse and solitary cow drooped over an old cast-iron, white-enameled bathtub while a trio of goats and six chickens drifted and scratched around a stone trough. Left of the prairie barn was a much smaller stable with sliders, and a longer, low concrete building running north-south with some kind of metal feeder silo. Adjacent to that, five enormous hogs huddled in an outdoor pen. Three more pens were empty, the snow undisturbed.



Balanced on his snowshoes, he gnawed his lower lip and thought about it. The Kings were the last people on Jed’s list. So far, he’d avoided people . . . well, the Chuckies didn’t count. So he could bypass these people, backtrack into the woods, and spend the night there.



But the animals were running on fumes. Raleigh was down to a handful of kibble. Dixie had run out of food two days ago. He’d stripped bark and dug down until he found mantles of moss he could tear from fallen trees, but Dixie only nibbled. Today, she’d stumbled and opened a large gash on her left foreleg from knee to fetlock. He’d used up two gauze rolls and an ace wrap before the bleeding stopped.



God, but he was so close! He could taste it. Finding Alex would be a good omen. A fresh start. Not atonement so much, but an embrace of his fate. Maybe, with Alex, the dreams would finally die. He had to get to her. Stopping for any reason felt like a mistake.



If he knocked on that door, he would rack up another debt he didn’t want to pay. It wouldn’t be right to take food and feed from these old people and give them nothing in return. From the looks of the place, they could use the help. So, there would go another day, maybe two. Maybe more. Lost. Poof. Just like that.



He could be selfish. God, hadn’t he earned it? But the animals needed rest. He rubbed a gloved hand over cracked lips. They had to do what he wanted—and he, of all people, knew what that felt like. It wouldn’t be right to drive them any further.



Anyway, if I can get Dixie healthy enough to ride, it ends up being the same amount of time, right? Just a couple more days.