White is the color of the north. White is the color of death.

Before her the white road lies unmarked. Ten miles from home, and no traffic has passed here since the snowfall stopped just at dawn. The only sign of life is a line of small four-toed prints running along a barbed wire fence line. A fox, moving fast.

Koda’s gloved fingers curl stiffly about the rim of the steering wheel. Her feet, numb despite three pairs of wool and silk socks and the fleece linings of her boots, somehow manage to find the accelerator and the brake as needed. Snow and ice limit her speed, even with the chains. Which, she thinks, is just as well. She cannot afford an accident.

She can’t afford to turn on the heater, either. It is not that she fears sensors or spy satellites. Her truck’s V-8 will show up in the infrared half the size of Mount Rushmore in any case. She has more than enough gas in her double tanks to make the forty miles to Rapid City and back, taking farm-to-market roads like this one to avoid the Interstate, enough to scout the extent of the devastation in this corner of South Dakota. The trouble is that she has no idea if she will be able to buy or scavenge so much as another drop between now and her return.

Take nothing for granted, her father said as she hugged him good-bye. Trust nothing and no one. Come back safe.

The wound in her side aches with the cold. She holds the pain away from her, just as she does the memories of the night before. There will be a time again for rage, a time for mourning. She cannot afford them now.

Twelve miles, and a sign appears on her right, to the north of the road. Standing Buffalo Ranch, home to Paul and Virginia Hurley and their five kids. The welded pipe gate leans open, the cattle guard clotted with snow. There are no tire marks on the narrow road that leads up to the ranch house and barns, out of sight over a low ridge. Koda can just see the spokes of a generator windmill, its three blades and their hub hung with ice. No tire marks, possibly no electricity. No one out doing anything about it.

She swerves the truck into the turnoff, the chains racketing on the metal grill as she crosses the cattle guard. Beside her on the seat, blunt and angular in its functional ugliness, is the Uzi she took from one of the things that killed the MacGregors. If what she has begun to fear is true, she will not need it. Still, it gives her comfort.

Blasting another of the things to atoms would give her more.

How many dead? How many taken?

She has no answers to those questions.

Why? Dear God and all the saints, spirits of my ancestors, why?

She has no answer to that question, either.

Koda does not realize that she has some spark of hope left until she sees the ranch house door swinging open and the snow in the entryway. The point of light, infinitely small as it is, winks out. Gone. Darkness. The white expanse between house and barn is unmarked. Two vehicles are drawn up in the carport. One is Paul Hurley’s Dodge Ram crew cab; the other is an SUV she does not recognize. She pulls up behind them, crosswise, and waits. There is no movement behind the gauzy front curtains, none behind the smaller window near the driveway where a bottle of Dawn dish soap and a long-handled sponge perch on the sill beneath a gingham ruffle. When she thinks she has waited long enough, she waits as long again. Still nothing.

Slowly Koda takes her hands from the steering wheel. She lifts the Uzi from its resting place beside her and slings the strap crosswise over her left shoulder, maneuvering it past the wide brim of her hat. Briefly she checks the magazine. Very carefully, she eases her door open and slithers down and forward to crouch behind the bulk of the still-running engine. There is a moment when she is, blessedly, almost warm with its heat. Then the wind, not strong but straight off six feet of packed snow and ice, reasserts itself, and her feet remind her that she is standing calf-deep more of the same.

Koda whips from behind the truck and runs low and as fast as the snow will let her for the front porch. She comes up short with her back against the wall, her weapon raised. For the first time she hears a sound from within the house, a small dog barking incessantly, somewhere toward the back and up. She eases through the doorframe and into the front hall. Nothing. Beyond is the living room, where a feathery dusting of snow lies across the dark green carpet and a small aquarium holds angelfish, brilliant and ethereal, suspended like jewels in ice. The dining room, separated from the parlor by an open arch, seems in order, Virginia’s proud collection of majolica serving dishes still stately in their place of honor along the sideboard. Only the CD tower lying across the door to the den is out of place, with its flat plastic cases spilled out beside it.

Koda knows what she will find when she enters the room and has braced herself for it. Paul Hurley is there, still on the couch in front of the television, empty eyes staring at the ceiling with his head bent back against the cushions at a ninety-degree angle. A Budweiser can tilts floorward in his half-open hand. David, youngest of the five children, lies at his feet, an obscene red blossom of blood and torn flesh in the middle of his back. Shotgun. Eddie, older by five years, sprawls in the lounger, neck broken like his father’s, a bag of potato chips still in his lap.

Cold inside now, no longer feeling the frigid air, Koda takes the can from Paul’s hand and attempts gently to move his fingers. Their rigidity tells her what she already knows must be true. When she turns David over, as much not to have to see the terrible hole in his body as to see his face and know for certain that he is David, he slips from her stiff hands and thumps solidly against the television cabinet. Frozen. Frozen cold and dead.

It is a line from a poem from some forgotten moment of her childhood, lifetimes, eons distant from this time and this place. It goes round in her head, over and over, Frozen. Frozen cold and dead. Her own horror is beyond her understanding. She has seen harder deaths, has dissected human bodies as part of her training. Still the line of the poem goes round, as if to keep her mind from worse things.

Frozen. Frozen cold and dead.

The dog’s yapping is louder here in the den. Koda steps carefully around the coffee table and climbs the stairs, setting her feet soundlessly on the treads. The barking grows clearer with each step, higher and more frantic. At the landing, she has a clear view of the master bedroom through the open door. The blue-and-russet log cabin quilt lies undisturbed, forming an angular pattern with the brass bars of Hurleys’ antique bed. In another room, curlers and makeup litter the dresser. Double closets stand open, with girls’ jeans and sweaters strewn over the floor amid broken glass from a framed poster of Britney Spears that tilts crazily against the wall. There are no bodies in the room, despite the clear signs of a struggle.

The yapping comes from behind a third bedroom door, this one closed. As Koda turns the knob and pushes it open, a small furry body flings itself against her knees, alternately panting and barking. She swings the Uzi behind her back, out of the dog’s reach, and hunkers down to soothe the frantic creature, gently rubbing its ears. “There, fella,” she croons. “There, baby. It’s all right. I’ve got you. There, there.”

As it calms, reassured by her experienced touch and the low monotone of her voice, she ascertains that it is a neutered male Yorkshire terrier, dehydrated and not recently fed. A bedraggled blue bow clinging to a tuft of fur above his eyes matches the polish on his manicured nails. Not a country dog. The tag on his rhinestone-studded collar identifies him as Louie and his mistress as Adele Hurley of Pierre, with address and telephone number.

Which, she notes with an unexpected sense of relief, explains the Suburban.

When she finally enters the room, Louie now quiet at her heels except for a low whine, she finds Adele toppled forward on the rug, the legs of her walker jutting absurdly past her hips. Blood has soaked her short grey hair, stiffened by the freezing cold into scarlet spikes. An elderly man lies half on and half off the bed, his battered skull partly concealed by a fold of the comforter. Clumsy with the bulk of her gloves, Koda removes his billfold from his hip pocket and thumbs through the plasticine card pockets until she finds his driver’s license. He is—he was, she corrects herself—Theodore Hurley, also of Pierre.

Koda knows that Paul’s father is long dead, having attended his funeral three years before. Theodore must have been an uncle.

A search of the rest of the house yields no sign of Virginia or her three adolescent daughters. In the kitchen Koda discovers that the hot tap is dripping and that there is still water from it. Thank you God for propane. She sets about feeding and watering Louie and examining the contents of Virginia’s pantry. As she counts the cans of beans and the Mason jars filled with bright gold and purple preserves, spiced peaches, pickled beets, a shudder creeps over her skin that has nothing to do with the cold. She feels like a ghoul, pawing through the remnants of a woman’s life.

Remnants that will help feed her own family and the refugees gathered in their home. Virginia would not want her good food to go to waste. There will, she tells herself, be no more trips to the Safeway anytime soon.

Koda finds the matches and lights a burner to make herself a cup of the Hurleys’ instant Maxwell House, then lights the oven, leaving it open so the room will warm. She closes the swinging door behind her as she returns upstairs to search the linen cabinet. Five blankets she carries down and sets out on a chair in the den; one, the thickest quilt she can find, she makes into a bed for Louie beside the stove. She is almost comfortable as she sips the dark brew—almost coffee, she thinks wryly— warming her fingers that seem to be gone all to cold bone against the thick earthenware of the cup. Almost she finds herself smiling as Louie turns twice widdershins and thumps down onto the mounded bedspread with a wheezy sigh, full-bellied and secure for the first time in days. Within seconds he begins to snore.

Promising herself another cup before she leaves, Koda pulls her gloves back on and slogs through the snow to the barn. The doors are closed but not locked. When her eyes accustom themselves to the dim light, she finds a pair of Holstein cows and a heifer huddled together amid the hay, their breath making cloudy weather about them. An Appaloosa turns his head toward her expectantly as she approaches his stall; his quarterhorse stablemate, more impatient, whinnies loudly and stamps. She rubs their noses in turn, speaking softly.

Half an hour later, the cows and horses are fed and watered, the stalls mucked out. In the process of finding and dragging out a sack of feed, Koda has also discovered a dozen red hens and a rooster along a shelf in an empty stall. Now, replete, they are back on their perch, clucking softly, settling down once more. Like Louie, they are as comfortable and safe as she can make them.

Only one thing left to do now.

Koda takes the snow shovel from its place against the barn wall and makes her way to the north side of the house, where the sun, when it comes out, will be slow to melt the drifts, where more fall will pile high. With it she digs a shallow trench, long but narrow, under the eaves. The ground beneath is frozen.

One by one, she brings the dead from the house and lays them in all the grave she can make for them. She expects the children to be the hardest. And while her heart clenches as she wraps their bodies, cold as any stone, and bears them out to their burials, it is the old folk who come nearest to breaking it. They should have died in their beds, at home, their children and grandchildren about them. Wise, content in their passing.

Ate, she promises her father as the silent tears spill from her eyes; Ina, my mother: I will not let you die like this.

Gently Koda drops the snow over the bodies; gently smoothes the surface so that there will be no sign of disturbance with the next fall. She turns to go.

It is too stark; there should be some ceremony, some leave-taking. The Hurleys are Irish Catholic, every man jack and woman of them for four generations all the way back to Ellis Island and a thousand years before that. She cannot find their priest in Rapid City and send him back; it is far too dangerous, even if he is somehow still alive. She will have to do, half-heathen that she is.

She searches her memory for the words, and they come to her, the Church’s prayer for those about to step onto the Blue Road of the spirit. She signs a cross above the snow and murmurs, “Go forth, Christian souls, out of this world: in the name of the Father, who has created you; in the name of the Son, who has redeemed you; in the name of the Holy Spirit, who sanctifies you. Into Paradise may the angels lead you; at your coming may the martyrs receive you, and lead you into the Holy City, Jerusalem. Amen.”