I laughed softly.

  “I’m sure northern Idaho just caught a glancing blow from this blight thing,” I said.

  From the back seat, Grace reached forward, a credit card in hand.

  “Gas is going to be my treat.”

  We all laughed now, Neil fixing on the rectangle of plastic Grace held.

  “Why do you still have that thing?” he asked through a chuckle.

  “Civilization is going to come roaring back someday,” she said. “And I’m getting some shoes when that happens.”

  “Me, too!” Krista said.

  The light moment was nice. And real. But it had to end. I backed the Buick into a reverse three point turn across the highway and got us moving again. We had miles to put behind us. As many as we could. If we were lucky, we could make it to Bonner’s Ferry by nightfall.

  We weren’t lucky. Not in any way we could imagine.

  Twelve

  “Do you see that?”

  I slowed just as we turned onto Highway 2 from the 93 Bypass on the western edge of Kalispell. Neil’s question came almost exactly at the instant that I, too, saw the tire tracks in the snow.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Grace leaned forward and looked past us. Her mood darkened at the sight of multiple impressions on the roadway dusted white, all coming from the town.

  “How many?” she asked.

  “At least two,” Neil said. “Going the same way we are.”

  He brought his Benelli up from where it rested against the seat and took it in hand. I looked to Grace and nodded toward my AR where I’d stowed it on the wide back seat. She passed it forward and I placed it next to me.

  “How did we miss those on the way through here?” Neil asked. “We crossed twenty yards west of this spot.”

  He was nearly exact in his estimation. We had, just a few hours earlier, passed across Highway 2 as we paralleled the edge of the city.

  “We weren’t looking at the ground,” I said. “We were looking at buildings. And for people.”

  He shook his head. Not in disagreement, but in disgust at our failure to spot such an obvious mark of human presence.

  “Those can’t be more than a couple days old,” he said.

  Grace looked between us, a thought rising.

  “That explosion yesterday,” she said. “Wouldn’t this be about where it came from?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or west of here.”

  “The way we’re going,” Neil said once more.

  “Wonderful,” Grace said.

  Neil glanced next to Grace, his gaze settling on Krista. She was buckled into the seat, book open on her lap.

  “You be ready to get her down low,” Neil said softly to Grace.

  No acknowledgment came. None was needed. Grace sat back, closer to her daughter than before we’d stopped.

  I started driving again, turning left onto the highway, following the tracks without wanting to, passing driveways and dirt roads leading to secluded homes and fallow farms.

  “It’s just two,” Neil said, the tracks becoming more distinct in areas. “Both look like truck tires.”

  The wide profile now easily seen made that apparent, neither set of tracks leaving the highway for any of the turnoffs. We mirrored their path, weaving west, until, twenty miles from Kalispell, we could go no further.

  “Stay sharp,” I said

  I pulled to a stop in the middle of the road where a jumble of towering pines had gone horizontal, snapped at their bases, dozens sprinkled across the roadway like toothpicks dropped from a box. Wind had come in from the north at some point and toppled the once mighty trees.

  “The tracks are gone,” Neil said.

  He was right. Both sets had turned left off the roadway, disappearing down a gentle embankment. Had they gone around the blockage? Or were they hidden off in the grey woods, watching us?

  Neil and I stepped from the car. Grace did the same, Krista just inside now, kneeling on the edge of the back seat.

  “Ideas?” I said.

  Neil walked to the right edge of the road and looked west, past the deadfall blocking our way. He turned back toward me and shook his head.

  “Has to be half a mile covered with downed trees,” he described.

  I swore silently to myself. Traveling west on this route was out. We could no more take the Buick off road here to circumvent the fallen trees than we could when trying to head south from Kalispell.

  “North into Canada, then west,” I suggested, but my heart wasn’t in that possibility. “The weather will be worse.”

  “Or impossible,” I added.

  “We’re running out of options,” Neil said. “We can’t go east. Not a chance.”

  Neil had come that way. His emphatic denial of that route as a possibility spoke to what they’d gone through, beyond even what Grace had shared with me.

  “We may have to give up the wheels,” I said.

  Hoofing it. That’s what lay ahead of us. It would take days to reach Bonner’s Ferry, and there was no guarantee we’d be able to resupply once there. Or at any of the smaller hamlets before that.

  “What do you think?” I asked my friend.

  “If we have to then we—”

  “Wait,” Grace said, interrupting, her head angled left, to the south. “Do you smell that?”

  I walked to where she stood, next to the open passenger door. My gaze tracked hers, looking across a wide meadow beyond the road, greyed earth dotted with snow.

  “Smell what?” Neil asked.

  Her nose twitched, drawing in the cool air. And something thin upon it.

  “I must be going food crazy,” Grace said. “But I smell steak.”

  What we’d been reduced to eating shouldn’t drive a person mad, I knew, but it was entirely conceivable that the absence of real food, of good food, could trigger some wanting memory. Some sensory ghost to trick the mind.

  But here, it wasn’t that. I knew so for certain as soon as I sampled the air. I smelled what she did. Beef. Steak. Being cooked.

  I looked across the top of the car and knew that the same scent was now reaching Neil. Krista hopped from inside the car and clambered onto the roof of the Buick, sniffing the air manically, her head twisting like a weather vane, nose finally pointing the way we were all looking. South. Across the dead meadow. Precisely where the wind was coming from.

  Neil came from the front of the car and stood next to me.

  “That’s beef, right? We’re sure?”

  I knew what he was gauging. How certain was I that what we were smelling was not what some had taken to cooking over open flame? That horror, I knew, had a distinct aroma. It was not appealing, and, more importantly, it was not this.

  “Damn sure,” I said, looking to my friend. “Someone’s out there having a barbecue.”

  To think that, much less speak it, was absurd. This was a remnant of the old world. Picnics in parks and backyard get-togethers. The simpler time. The good time.

  I retrieved my binoculars from the car and glassed the meadow. A thick line of greyed trees, most barren of empty limbs, bordered the field about a half mile off. And just above them, something was moving, dirty white and slender, appearing and disappearing in an arcing motion beyond the dead woods. Like the blades of a large propeller, spinning in the breeze.

  “Windmill,” I said, and handed the binoculars to Neil.

  It took him just a second’s look to affirm my observation.

  “Looks like an old one,” he said, scanning the area more closely now. “There’s a dirt road up beyond the blockage. It leads past those trees.”

  He lowered the binoculars and looked to me, then to Grace.

  “Those tire tracks head up that road,” he added.

  So the mystery vehicles hadn’t simply gone off road to get past the fallen trees. They’d been traveling to this precise spot. To whatever lay back there, beyond the decaying woods.

  “I think we should check it out,” Neil said.

  “You have no idea who—” Grace hesitated, rephrasing her worry. “No idea what’s out there.”

  She was right. But so was Neil. And if there was a chance at food, real food, some impossibly true sustenance harkening back to the old world, I believed we had to face some risk to get to it.

  “I’ll go,” I said, and grabbed my AR from where it lay on the front seat.

  “You sure?” Neil asked. “It was my idea.”

  I checked that I had a round chambered in the AR, then gave the 1911 on my hip a once over before securing in its holster again.

  “If I get over there and everything’s okay, I’ll fire a single shot,” I said. “If there’s trouble, I’ll fire two.”

  Neil nodded. Grace reached up and helped Krista down from the roof of the car.

  “I can’t see down here,” Krista protested.

  “We’re going to stay here,” Grace said, taking Del’s rifle from the back seat. “Behind the car. It’s safe here.”

  That was a hope, I knew. A reasonable one, but still tinged with an element of doubt. ‘Safe’ was thin proclamation to make in the new world.

  Thirteen

  Past the tangle of fallen trees blocking our way, I reached the dirt road, the wide path mostly covered by snow, clearly neglected. But not unused. The two sets of tire tracks that had left the highway made this plain.

  I paused before continuing, studying the tread impressions in the snow, greater definition here on soil than there had been atop the snowy asphalt. One set appeared older than the other, by several days, or at least before the most recent snowfall. The other had been made within the last day, maybe two. Hardly a sign of any debris existed in the crisp, jagged impressions, made by fat, sturdy tires. I let my gaze track them back to where they’d left the road before the blockage. Whoever had come through and gone up the road did so in beefy four by fours. Going off road hadn’t concerned them a bit.

  “Everything okay?” Neil shouted toward me.

  I looked back to him and nodded, then looked to the snowy dirt path ahead and began walking.

  Several minutes later, as I neared the thick stand of withered pines, the almost soothing whop whop whop of the spinning windmill blades began to rise. But with it came a painful screeching, metal scraping on metal. To me it sounded like a bearing going bad. The windmill, neglected, seemed on its last legs, its spinning shaft ready to seize.

  I eased around the finger of dead woods and paused. A clearing opened up before me. In and beyond it I saw several things. Farthest, across the whitened field, a house sat beyond a fence, the single story ranch little different than a hundred others within twenty miles. What did set the scene before me apart was the decimated truck laying in pieces on a blackened spot near the fence where the snow seemed to have been blasted away. I felt with my thumb to verify that the safety was off on my AR, then approached the scene of destruction nearer the house, stopping to survey the carnage.

  The front half of the vehicle rested upside down, the cab crumpled, an arm sticking out from within, nearly pinched off between the door frame and the crushed roof. The hand at the end lay open, skin on the palm showing no sign of decay. This was a fresh death.

  Or, as I was about to learn, a fresh kill.

  “It would be best if you lowered your weapon.”

  The male voice came from someplace impossibly close, but was tinged with a slight electronic hollowness. My gaze tracked toward it and found a metal speaker box mounted atop a fencepost, skim of snow atop it.

  “You can’t see me,” the voice said. “But I sure as hell can see you.”

  I looked toward the house. The man was there. Probably eyeing me through a telescopic sight, with a finger on the trigger of a rifle that could put an end to me before I’d have time to blink.

  “I’m not here to cause you any harm,” I said, hoping that the speaker had some way of picking up sound and carrying my assurance to the man threatening me.

  “I believe they would have made the same claim,” the man said.

  They...

  I glanced to the blasted truck, each half of it on opposite sides of a shallow crater. Some sort of mine had taken them out. A homemade IED, little different from the improvised explosive devices soldiers had faced in hostile nations across the sea. Now, the hostility was here. If it was that at all.

  For some reason the four by four, and those who’d been in control of it, had made the man behind the speaker take action. If he was simply out to kill, he clearly could have sent me to my maker already, no warning necessary, making me wonder if I had come upon a scene of death for death’s sake, or for purposes of self-defense.

  “Truly, I mean you no harm,” I said loudly. “We smelled...something back at the road. That’s all. I was coming to see if we’d all just gone crazy or if it was real.”

  Silence hung for a moment. I almost felt the man looking at me past crosshairs. There was no reason for him to trust me.

  Unless I gave him one.

  I lowered my AR and slung it so that it hung across my back. A few seconds later the speaker crackled once again.

  “Come on up to the house,” the man said.

  I looked behind. The road was out of view, Neil, Grace, and Krista could not see me. They had no idea what I was about to do. Or what I might be walking into.

  “All right,” I said, facing the house again. “I’m coming up.”

  The stench of new death washed over me as I moved past the upended cab of the pickup. On the far side of it I could no longer see the arm and the hand. But I could take in, in all its pure horror, a pair of bodies that had been thrown from the four by four, likely as it was launched into the air and ripped apart. They lay together, almost intimately, a man and a woman, their emaciated faces almost touching. His eyes were closed. Hers were open and fixed upward, sad and serene, as if she’d reluctantly welcomed her end.

  I continued on, through an opening in the fence, my hands free of weapons and my own eyes, bright and alive still, fixed on the house as the front door opened and a man stepped out, rifle in hand.

  Fourteen

  “That’s far enough.”

  I stopped maybe five yards from the porch, the man who’d exited holding a hand out to emphasize the direction. His other held the rifle, finger just outside the trigger guard.

  “My name’s Eric Fletcher,” I said. “From Missoula, but I’ve been up at my place north of Whitefish since everything...”

  There was no need to give the event description. Any living, breathing creature with a brain larger than a walnut knew what had happened to the world. And the same creature could, from where I stood, smell the impossible.

  “We’re not crazy, are we?”

  The man looked me up and down. Appraising what stood before him. Maybe deciding if I was friend or foe, or some acceptable uncertainty in between.

  “You’re not crazy,” the man said, then put his rifle down, leaning it against the porch railing before coming down the steps and offering me his hand. “I’m Jack Miner. You want to see what’s cooking?”

  I almost laughed, but managed a nod, and followed the man as he walked along the front of his house and turned down the side, stopping next to a large stone barbecue, chunks of wood burning red hot beneath a long grill, large strip of meat sizzling upon the blackened lace of metalwork.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, regarding both the steak and the man I’d just met as one might a mirage.

  “This is my ranch,” Jack Miner said, gesturing to the land around us, fields and hills rising toward peaks in the distance. “If you’d been here two years ago you’d be looking out over three hundred head of cattle.”

  That might be true, I knew, but now the expanse was nothing more than a snowy landscape dotted with clusters of dead trees. How the beasts he spoke of transitioned to the single slab of meat cooking was unclear. At least it was to me. And obviously so.

  “You look like you need a little context,” Jack observed, not incorrect in the least. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  “Show me what?”

  He smiled and took the sizzling steak off the grill.

  “Come see for yourself.”

  The man led off toward the collapsed façade of an old outbuilding at the base of a small hill not far beyond the back of his house. I followed, passing near the creaking windmill, my gaze taking note of oddities about the structure. It bore the appearance of something near ancient, rust scabbing the metal and bits of old rope hanging from cross beams. Wood supports seemed tacked in place like an afterthought, as if nothing more than window dressing. Even the rhythmic whine of the turning blades came with a hint of falsity, the sound too precise. Too concocted. A good look upward as I skirted the tower only reinforced what I was thinking—suspended just below the bladed generator housing was a smaller fan, nearly hidden within the structure, whirling lazily along with its larger sibling, the distressed screeching coming from it.

  The windmill, all of it, was in perfect working order. It had only been made to seem abandoned.

  “Right over here,” Jack said, wrenching the broken door up from its tilted frame, the portal of the fallen shed opening at a steep angle.

  He paused at the opening, just darkness beyond and below. Above me the windmill screamed its lie. I felt the AR against my back. I could have it in hand in two seconds, the pistol on my hip in one. But Jack Miner stood before me unarmed. Calm. Even understanding.

  “I’ll go first,” he said, smiling at my hesitance.

  I nodded and he stepped through the opening, ducking. I heard something move. Something metallic. A handle, maybe, followed by a quick hiss of air and then a weak light built within the darkness.

  “Come on in,” Jack said.

  I kept my hand on my pistol and moved toward the light.

  Fifteen

  Through the old door I came upon a small set of crude stairs, rotting planks over sculpted earth, and just a few steps from that descent was another door, insulated steel, open to a lighted space beyond. Jack Miner stood inside and motioned me through.

  The chill hit me first, more than matching the wintry outside air. The size struck me next, the space long and narrow, like a shipping container. Except there’d been no such thing visible. Just the hill.

 

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