Koda stands a moment more by the grave, head bowed in respect. Then she turns once again to the care of the living.
Back in the house, the second and not nearly so satisfying cup of not-quite-coffee in her hand, Koda wrestles briefly with herself whether to leave the oven on for Louie. She opts for safety and her mother’s training in the end, turns it off, ruffles the sleeping dog’s ears a last time, and returns to her truck. As she swings back out of the driveway, she thumbs her CB on. “Tacoma. Tacoma, come in.”
“Hey, Koda! You comin’ home already? You got a flat? You need me to come help you?”
“Hey yourself, bro. We’ve been there, done that. Mom and Dad need you at home.”
“Yeah, sure.” A whole world of adolescent male discouragement is loaded onto the two words.
Virginia. Charleston. Koda’s hand clenches on the mike. I won’t let that happen to you either, little brother. Not while I live. But she says, steadily, “Is Dad around? Phoenix?”
“I’ll get ‘em. Hang on.”
It is Phoenix who takes the call. “Dad’s out in the barn. What’s up?”
Guardedly, Koda describes what she has found at the Hurley ranch. “It’s the same pattern. Paul and the boys are dead. So are an elderly couple I think were his aunt and uncle. The girls and Virginia are missing. Soon as you can, you and Dad need to come get the food out of the pantry and take the livestock, including a small shaggy dog named Louie.”
“Louie?” There is laughter in Phoenix’s voice.
“Yeah, Louie. Mom’ll like him. There are trailers here; you just need to bring the trucks.”
“Gotcha.”
“And listen. Nobody’s been here since they were killed. If you see more tracks than mine, one set coming and another set going—
“Gotcha again,” he interrupted her. “We’ll be careful. You do the same.”
“Yeah. Later.”
“Later,” he echoes, and breaks the connection.
9
Kirsten pulls along the drop off curb in front of the Shop ‘n Go Market. Jumping out of the van, she walks to the back and opens the large cargo doors, displaying an interior which now has a number of five and ten gallon gas cans, filled to the brim with fuel. Gas had taken her awhile to get, given that without any electricity to power the pumps, she had to resort to siphoning, which left her nauseous and with the foul taste of gasoline in her mouth.
Asimov whines at her from the rear bench seat and she looks at him. “You stay here and guard the truck, boy. No chasing cats, or dogs, or rats, or whatever else strikes your fancy. You just stay here, alright? I’ll be back in a little while.”
The large dog whines again, but finally settles down, propping his big head on the top of the seat and looking at her through soulful brown eyes.
“Not this time, boy. I’m sorry, but I need to move quick and not be chasing you around the store. We’ll be on the road soon, I promise.”
With a long suffering sigh that would do a Jewish mother proud, Asimov seems to accept his mistress’ terms and drops his head off the seat, stretching his body along the back in preparation for a nap.
Nodding in satisfaction, Kirsten steps away from the van and walks toward the wide glass doors of the supermarket. Engaged in her thoughts, she doesn’t stop until forced to do so by a thick sheet of glass pressed tight against her body. Stunned, she takes a step back and stares at the door for a moment, perplexed.
Then she utters a shaky laugh and mentally slaps her head. Without electricity, the automatic doors have become as useful as a flag to a hen. Stepping forward, more cautiously this time as though the doors might suddenly grow fangs and attempt to bite, she wraps a hand around the small handle and pulls. It takes most of her strength, but she manages to bully the door open wide enough to slip through.
And steps immediately back outside again as the high, sweet stench of decaying food and rotting human assaults her senses for the second time that afternoon. It’s a good thing that her stomach is filled with nothing but hunger, or she would be adding to the stench.
Wiping heavily watering eyes with both hands, she takes a few deep breaths of cold, outside air and contemplates her options.
There aren’t many. The next store down is a SavMor Pharmacy, but unless she plans to spend the rest of her time on the road subsisting on cheese crackers washed down by swigs of cherry-flavored laxative, the grocery store is the only game in town.
Reaching into her back pocket, she pulls out a gray bandana, flaps it out, and ties it securely around her nose and mouth. It won’t do much, she’s quite sure, but it’s better than nothing.
She hopes.
Girding her figurative loins, she steps back to the door and once again bullies it open by main strength. Her stomach immediately twists and growls out its outrage as the stench assaults her senses anew, but she silently commands it to shut up, and takes a step forward into the store.
Her gaze is immediately drawn upwards by a large, bright sign that catches the rays of the slowly dying sun.
Wednesdays are Senior Days at Shop ‘n Go! Golden age discounts for our golden age members!
Without looking down, she mentally calculates the days, and a grimace spreads hidden over her face as she realizes that today is Friday. Finally allowing her gaze to lower, she finds herself in the middle of an abattoir.
Elderly men and women had heeded the sign and died in droves. They are scattered through the aisles like fallen trees, still dressed in their Sunday best. A smattering of younger people, mostly adolescent boys and a couple of grown men, lay sprawled out by the cash registers and the manager’s booth. The enemy had caught them unaware and they’d never had time to defend themselves, not that they could have against their inhuman murderers.
The lights flicker and hum, dimming and brightening in a pulsing rhythm courtesy of the backup generator that is obviously breathing its last.
The aisles are so tightly packed with corpses that she’ll never get a cart down any of them. Resigning herself, she grabs two hand baskets and carefully makes her way over and around the dead, searching for what she’ll need to survive the long trip she has ahead of her.
An hour, and five trips later, she’s finally done. Canned goods, dog food, the few fresh vegetables and fruits she could find, water by the gallon, and several butane stoves she found in the clearance aisle share space with the gas cans in the van’s large cargo hold. A quick trip to the neighboring pharmacy, not nearly as crowded with rotting corpses, yielded first aid items, personal care items, and enough narcotics to land her in jail, had there been anyone around to arrest her.
She thinks for a moment, then steps into the cargo hold, grabbing her backpack and pulling out a fresh set of clothes. The ones she’s wearing reek of death and decay, and once she’s stripped them off—wishing mightily for a bath—she tosses them onto the pavement of the lot never to be used again.
Jumping out of the van, she closes the cargo doors, locks them against accidental opening, and returns to the driver’s seat. Asimov wakes up from his nap and jumps into the front seat beside her. Smiling and ruffling his ears, she tosses him a chew-hoof she picked up in the market, starts the ignition, and drives quickly away from the small town, leaving it deserted of the living once again.
10
She returns to a world of undisturbed whiteness. There has been no further snowfall, but neither has any melted. The flat white stretches away in all directions, broken only by fence posts jutting through the drifts at intervals. Icicles hang from barbed wire strung between like Christmas tinsel. The blank sky offers no light, casts no shadows. It is a world of the dead, for the dead.
For the first time, Koda is grateful for the miserable cold. Without it, without the growl of the powerful engine under her truck’s hood, her senses would have nothing to cling to. She has lived on the northern plains all her life, has lived with the winters that come sliding down over open country from the blue pack ice of the Arctic Circle. She has driven snowy roads in the depths of January, when, like now, her truck has been the only moving thing besides the howling wind.
This is different.
She is a woman on whom solitude rests easily. This is not solitude. This is isolation from the very idea of life.
Koda strikes the rim of the steering wheel with the flat of her hand, hard. Damn. Damn again. She hates being helpless before a disaster she does not understand, cannot quite piece together. All right, Rivers. Break it down and sort it out. Treat it as an epidemic. Find patient zero, chart the spread.
She knows her data set is incomplete, but the basic pattern has held true for the MacGregors, for the Hurleys and for all the survivors who have managed to make it to a CB.
Item. The uprising seems to be spread at least across North America. She does not know what has happened in Europe or Africa, Asia or South America. It is fairly obvious that less technologically oriented cultures are likely to have more survivors. At least temporarily.
Item. In all cases the men and boys have been slaughtered, together with the older women. Girls and younger women have disappeared.
Item. Two thousand years ago, the pattern would have been familiar. Kill the men, rape the women, sell the virgin girls as slaves.
Which makes no sense.
Try again.
Foreign attack? South Dakota has been riddled for decades with nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. So has North Dakota. The prospect of mutual assured destruction has kept them in their silos. Could the Defense Department codes have fallen into enemy hands? And if so, which enemy?
And if so, why now?
Abruptly she brakes the truck. There, cut deep in the snow ahead of her, are the tracks of another vehicle. She studies the marks carefully. Wide body. Wide, heavy tires, heavily chained. The asphalt shows through in places where the links have bitten through the ice. A truck of some kind, possibly heavily loaded.
She gets out of the pickup, Uzi slung again over her shoulder. Slowly, she walks up the road between the ruts but sees nothing that can tell her more. No conveniently dropped candy wrappers, no cigarette butts, no beer cans, nothing to tell her whether the occupants of the other truck are human or not. When she has gone a couple hundred yards she gives it up and turns back.
Now what?
She scans the flat landscape in all directions. White drifts, bare trees, the dark lines of fences. In the field to her left, there are humps in the snow that may be hay bales or frozen cattle. Most of her route into Rapid City will be through open country like this. She is a little more than five miles north of Elm Creek. There is a bridge.
The snow lies too deep for her to cut across country. The next intersection with another road is on the other side of that bridge.
She can turn around, or she can go on.
No choice. Back behind the wheel of the pickup, Koda pulls the fleece-lined leather glove off her right hand. Underneath it is another of knitted wool; below that a silk mitt. She turns the key in the ignition, then drives with her left hand. The right rests on the freezing metal grip of the Uzi in her lap.
A mile along she sees the first living thing that has crossed her path since she set out. Far out in a rolling meadow to her left, just this side of a line of trees, there is a spill of black across the snow. It moves, separates, shifts again. Ravens. Her gaze follows the line of the rise. There, high above, another bird soars with its wings held in a shallow V. Its form is black against the sky; in the poor light all she can see is a silhouette. Raptor. Not an owl. Not a falcon by the shape of the wings. Hawk or eagle, then.
The sight warms her slightly from within. She is not quite sure why, except that she is pleased to see other living things in this barren landscape. Going about their lives, unaffected by the disaster that has overtaken their two-legged relations. As she watches, the bird banks and turns south, moving toward the creek, and disappears from sight.
A half mile from the bridge, she is still following the tracks of the unknown vehicle. The road curves here, a long, slow, shallow arc that passes through a stand of lodgepole pine and will put her onto a straight stretch no more than a couple hundred yards from the creek. If there is danger, it will be here.
It is waiting for her at the bridge.
A cold stillness spreads around her heart as Koda takes in the blockade. Two troop-carrier trucks are drawn up across the road, blocking the bridge. Four figures in military green winter fatigues stand in front of them, three of them with M-1’s held ready, the fourth with a mobile launcher on its shoulder and a bandolier of grenades strung across its chest. Even beneath the bulky clothing, she can make out the bulge of pistols at their belts. In her rear view mirror, she sees two more muffled and heavily armed figures step out of the trees and take up position behind her.
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