Shadows (26 page)

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.

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.

“All right, guys,” he said, gathering up Dixie’s reins. “Let’s go say hi.”

Just as Tom knocked on the front door, Raleigh’s head jerked left. A rumble rose from the dog’s chest. Craning around, Tom glanced toward the ruined prairie barn with its stone silo and caught a quick orange slink moving right to left.

“Hey, come on, boy,” he said to the dog. “It’s just an old barn cat.” Then the door opened, releasing a ball of warmish air that smelled of fried onions and something ripe and yeasty, like bread or maybe homemade beer, and he forgot about it.

Big mistake.

Wade King was passionate about swine. By the afternoon of the second day, a Monday, Tom knew more about hog farms than was probably good for him.

“Last coupla years haven’t been too good for the other white meat.” Wade King was as large around as his Berkshires, with a belly that could have used a wheelbarrow. Dumping a load of corn and barley into a bin feeder, he waddled out of the pen as the hogs jostled and snuffled around their dinner. “First, people decide hogs are good eating. Then they decide they’re too dirty. But pig manure, it’s gold for a farm you do it right, only people don’t want to hear . . .”

Count me in on that.
Tom slid a shovel under the third and last pile of pig doo. The floor was sloped, poured concrete and designed for easy drainage in the days when water came out of pressure hoses. As the winter got worse and Wade just couldn’t keep up, the manure pile had multiplied from one to three, each nearly up to Tom’s knees. Wade had propane heaters for the hogs, so the shit was only partially frozen and a lot still steamed. The smell coated his tongue; he’d gone through a half tube of toothpaste already.

“Thing gets to me,” Wade said, as Tom turned back for another shovelful, “is those jackboots in the EPA . . .”

Jackboots? He had no idea what Wade was talking about. That the man should rail against a nonexistent government struck him as vaguely ridiculous. God, he hoped Dixie appreciated this. At the moment, the mare was stabled with the other horse, her nose deep in a feed bucket.

Raleigh was a real problem, though. Neither Wade nor Nikki cared for dogs, which struck him as odd for working farmers. They hadn’t wanted Raleigh in the house, much less running loose around the animals. In the end, Tom had nailed together a rough shelter and put it and Raleigh out in the fenced-in vegetable garden. Raleigh had barked for half the night on the first day. When he’d let the dog out to run around, the golden had taken off for the ruined barn. Wade had a fit:
That dog scares my layers out of letting go of their eggs, it’ll be eating buckshot for dinner.
After that, Raleigh stayed in the dead garden. He only hoped the dog wasn’t getting sick. Maybe it was just excited by all the unfamiliar smells.

He was only aware that Wade had asked a question because the pause had spun out too long. “I’m sorry. What?”

“I said if you could see your way to stay a couple more days, I could use the help. Got that roof to fix, and I’m just no good on a ladder.”

“Yeah. Look, Wade, about that.” Tom slotted the shovel into the side of the wheelbarrow. “I think I’ve put you and Nikki out enough.”

“You still upset about the dog?” Wade flapped a hand larger than a ham-hock. “Things are so quiet around here and then the dog starts in. Just got on my nerves.” Wade brightened. “You know, we have some hamburger set by. I don’t know a dog doesn’t like that. We need to be friends is all. Get Nikki to mash some up with a couple eggs and—”

“No,” Tom said. “You should save your meat. I really need to be moving on come tomorrow.”

“What’s your hurry?”

“Just like to get where I’m going.”

“Where to?”

“East, I guess.” Lifting the wheelbarrow, Tom pushed for the open barn door. “Then south.”

Wade waddled after. “East Coast? Bad idea. They’re going to glow for about ten thousand years from what I heard.”

“Oh, I probably won’t go that far.” After the relative shelter of the barn, the wind cut his skin, and Tom blinked away tears. A gust snatched at the flagpole’s halyard rope. Snaps clanged against aluminum. Both the U.S. and now an old Colonial flag rippled and snapped like sheets on a clothesline. “I’ll probably stay in Michigan for a while and then maybe head down into Wisconsin again,” he said, only half of which was a b. Once he found Alex, they were heading north and away from this craziness: Minnesota, or Jed’s place on that island. Canada. “We’ll see.”

“Family?”

Tom tipped the wheelbarrow, then began raking out the load of pig manure. “No. I need to find someone, that’s all.”

“Oh?” Wade was balding, but he had eyebrows thick as furry caterpillars. One crawled toward his scalp. “Where?”

“I’m not exactly sure, but . . .” He hesitated. He’d been deliberately vague about where he was headed. Why, he wasn’t exactly sure. “She went to Rule the last I know.”

“A girl? In Rule?”

His tone made Tom look up. “There a problem?”

“You might want to reconsider.” Wade wore glasses with thick lenses and the kind of birth control goggles only the military could love. Wade
hawed
on a lens and scrubbed with a dingy red kerchief. “Way’s lousy with Chuckies. Thicker than ticks on a ginger mutt.”

Tom thought of the two he’d killed, and the half-munched corpse of the old woman. “How many are we talking?”

“A lot. Look, Tom, I don’t want to tell you your business.” Wade hooked his glasses behind his ears. “But it wouldn’t hurt if you stayed put a couple more days. Smells like another storm coming anyway.”

That Wade could smell anything over pig manure would be a miracle. “Maybe that’s a reason to go. The Chuckies will probably hunker down, and Rule’s only a few days away at most. If the weather holds, I can be there even sooner.” Tom scraped out the last of the manure and tossed the shovel back into the wheelbarrow. There were still the cow and horse stalls to clean out, and if he wanted a jump on the weather, he needed to get his gear together. “I appreciate your offer, but I really do have to leave in the morning.”

“Suit yourself.” Jamming his hands in the pockets of his worn barn coat, Wade shrugged. “I’ll just go tell Nikki to put by some hardboiled eggs, and I know we got a couple jars of—”

“You don’t have to do that, Wade,” Tom said, feeling instantly guilty.

“Forget it.” Wade waved off his objections. “Least I can do.”