Unknown - The_Growing_589064

7

Her truck packed and warming, Dakota makes one last trip, plowing through thigh-deep snow to the back of her sprawling ranch. Her horses have been fed and watered and set free to wander, or to stay, as they will. Her house has been raided of all useful items, and only this one thing is left to do before she can begin her trek into the unknown.

The piled stone marker is covered with snow, a fanciful little hillock protruding from an otherwise flat landscape. Bending down, she carefully brushes the snow away until the rocks are uncovered to her gaze.

The front of the cairn is inlaid with a small, stone marker, carved in loving detail. The marker holds three simple words.

Tali.

mitháwichu ki

Tali.

My wife.

Ungloving her left hand, she brushes the very tips of her fingers against the words, eyes dim with remembering. A long moment is passed in this utter silence, until the sun spreads its rays over the barn and highlights the cairn in lines of dazzling gold.

With a slow blink to clear the tears welling in her eyes, Dakota reaches up and twists the simple gold band from her finger. She stares at it, watching as it sparkles in the newborn sunlight, then she tucks it reverently into a seam in the rocks, drawing her fingers over its warmth one last time before withdrawing.

“I’ll never forget you.”

8

She moves through a world gone all to white. White earth, white sky, bare, snow-covered trees. Ice swirls in netted patterns like her grandmother’s best crocheted tablecloth where the steady thump of the windshield wipers does not reach. Her breath makes a white cloud about her in the unheated cabin of her truck.

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.