by Merry Farmer
He continued to rifle through Kutrosky’s things. His eyes had adjusted enough to make anything within arm’s reach visible. The beacon was gone, its pedestal overturned. The beacon wouldn’t have done him any good anyhow. The pile of Kutrosky’s clothing, however, was a goldmine.
He found a coat made of thick, silvery pelts and threw it on over his shoulders. There were hats and gloves in the pile as well. He grabbed some then moved on, searching for a backpack, something to carry supplies in. He would need everything he could get his hands on if he was going to find and rescue Grace. Eating was the last thing on his mind in that moment but if he didn’t take some of the food he’d discovered and a water-skin with him he would die of starvation and dehydration before he could regret it.
There were rough sacks woven from course yarn in a stack of baskets that had been grouped together like a cabinet. Danny took one and started filling it with food, matches, and another knife, all found in the baskets. Kutrosky’s people may have been haggard and starving, but Kutrosky himself was a packrat, just as he had been with his storage rooms on the transport ship. It only raised the urge to eliminate him.
When he reached the bottom of the stack of baskets, his hand hit cold metal. A gun. His heart stopped and he blinked, staring at it, panting, willing it to be real. He handled it, caressing the curves of the barrel, the handle, the trigger. Calm descended on him. He checked over his shoulder across the room to where Kinn had just cut through the plastic ties on his wrists. Kinn saw Danny with the coat and sack and dashed to the pile of furs now scattered on the floor to equip himself.
Danny swallowed and snatched the gun from the basket, tucking it into the waist of his pants, palming the pouch of bullets in his pocket, and closing the fastenings of the coat.
“We should go north, away from Kutrosky,” he said, standing and slinging the sack over his shoulder. The cold metal of the gun against his hip was the shot of confidence he’d been waiting for. “Kutrosky wouldn’t have taken Grace with them. She would have slowed him down. She must have been taken off by the people who went to the north.”
“How do you know?” Kinn jumped to his feet, parka barely fitting over his thick torso. His face was cast in deadly shadows by the flickering light of his torch.
Danny thought fast. “Kutrosky wants the transmitter first and foremost. His ship is close enough that it could be here in a matter of days—maybe even hours—if he can contact it. He thinks we have the transmitter in our settlement, so that’s where he will go as fast as he can.”
“Do you have the transmitter?” Kinn strode across the room to stand towering over him. He balled one huge hand into a fist.
Danny was beyond being intimidated. “I think we might.”
“What kind of fucked up answer is that?”
“It’s the best answer you’re going to get.”
He stepped away and found a pair of snowshoes near the door. Propping his torch against the wall, he sat to strap them on. Time was ticking. He needed to get out and start searching for Grace. There was no telling where she could be, who had taken her if Kutrosky hadn’t. She may be better off with a pack of hungry guards who she could sway with the promise of food, but it was just as likely that she could starve herself. She was too fragile in her current condition for him to wait a second before searching for her.
Kinn turned over more baskets and crates until he found a second pair of snowshoes that looked as though they had been damaged and were awaiting repairs. It was half a stroke of luck. Kinn might not be able to keep up. Danny stood, grabbing his torch, and making sure the sack was secure over his shoulder. Without waiting for Kinn, he climbed out into the night.
The snow had intensified while they searched the hut. It swirled around him as he followed the path back down to the mounds where every trail of footprints was beginning to fade. Kinn wasn’t as far behind him as he liked. Danny glanced across the camp to the hill in the south.
His determination faltered. His friends were out there in the darkness. Heather was probably scared. Kutrosky could hurt her and Stacey. He could hurt everyone he’d lived his sorry life with for the last three seasons. They had no idea what was coming. Sean, Carrie—if she was still alive—Gil, Beth, and the rest of the people who had gone from being strangers to reluctant comrades to friends were on the verge of an attack by half-mad marauders, crazed with hunger and Kutrosky’s promise of salvation from the skies.
His chest squeezed to impossible tightness as he thought about the rough cabins, the pavilion, the babies that had been born in the past months, all innocent. He should go after them, warn them. He should race to make it to his people before it was too late.
He twisted to follow the line of footprints that headed northwest to the forest. Grace was out there. She needed him. Her life could be forfeit if he didn’t do something fast.
Everybody needed him. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t be in two places at once. Saving Grace was what caused this whole mess to begin with. It was his mission, his purpose.
He turned once more to the south, heart aching for the people he’d left behind. With a frustrated growl he turned north. He had to find Grace.
Chapter Nine – Grace
Danny had no idea where he was going. The snow kept falling—lighter for a while, then thicker—as he trudged on over the higher, rockier hills to the north. The temperature had dropped again and ice stung his lungs as he kept up a punishing pace. Hope that they would catch whatever band of Kutrosky’s people had taken Grace faded with each mile they hiked. Doubts about whether he had chosen the right path made each new step heavy.
He searched, squinting in the dark blur around him, looking not only for hints of human life, but for trees, rocks, anything to define the haze of cold. He had nothing but his torch and Kinn’s behind him to light the vast, empty landscape.
“We should move closer to the forest,” he called over his shoulder, speaking to Kinn only because he needed to hear his own voice. “Kutrosky’s people wouldn’t have kept moving in the night. Grace would slow them down. They probably stopped for shelter…somewhere.”
If Kinn heard him, he didn’t reply. The only indication he had that Kinn was still with him at all was his own flickering shadow in front of him, cast by the light of Kinn’s torch. All Danny could make out in a stolen glance behind him was Kinn’s dark, hard face staring murder at him from the hood of his shaggy parka.
“The forest it is then,” he muttered and shifted direction.
In the blackness of a snowy night, the only clue he had that they were near the tree line was slightly darker shapes against blackness and a variation of sound that could have been swaying, cracking branches. He could have been walking off a cliff for all he knew. There was nothing to do about it but walk on without a sense of distance, without a sense of time.
When the first vague light of dawn brought shape and definition to the world, they were deeper in the forest than Danny thought they would be. The trees were close and tall, stretching back to God only knew where. The edge of the open stretches of snow-buried fields were only barely visible as a white line in the distance. Shades of grey, from the blue-tinted white of snow to the dark, wet trunks of forest trees, betrayed no hint of humanity. They were alone.
He switched course again and headed for the scant cover of the thicker evergreens. The dawn would take a long time to break, too long, but until they had more of an idea of where they were in relation to the little he knew of the geography of the area, they would just be walking in circles. He already feared the circles had gotten the better of him.
Without acknowledging Kinn, he leaned against a wide tree and shrugged his sack off of his shoulders. Exhaustion made every move an effort. His hands throbbed with barely-healed blisters as he shuffled in his sack for the water-skin. Wind swirled through the trees carrying hollow, unfamiliar sounds. Moaning, crying. It nagged at him, getting under his skin and sending knives into his heart.
The people he cared about most n
eeded help. More than just Grace. The high keening of the wind reminded him of Heather’s shrill scream. It reminded him of the wail of Carrie’s daughter as he’d pulled her into the world, a world that was about to come crashing down around her. And strangely, it reminded him of Stacey and Beth laughing over Alvin’s attempts to construct high-heeled shoes using bits of antler. They had a life, they had a community. They needed him.
Kinn planted himself against a tree opposite Danny and searched for his canteen. He glared at Danny with dark, hollow eyes as he found it, uncorked it, and took a swig. The heat of Kinn’s resentment could have ignited the entire forest in spite of the snow, but he sagged with exhaustion as he drank, too spent to attack. Danny felt for the knife he’d thrown in his sack, wondering if he had the will to use it, wondering if he would need to. They had reached a stalemate, neither one able to move.
They were lost. There was no getting around it. He’d taken a gamble and it had landed them freezing in the middle of nowhere. They’d just spent hours wasting energy by hiking through the snow with no idea where they were going, losing any hint of the feeble trail they had followed in the first place.
“She could be on the other side of the next hill,” he said, unsure if he’d spoken aloud.
“She could be fucking anywhere,” Kinn answered, low and disgusted. “Fuck her.”
Danny didn’t even have the strength to snap any of the rude replies that bubbled up from his frustration. Waves of futility swept through him and he leaned his head back against the trunk of the tree, closing his eyes.
He’d failed. Faking authority had caused him to make one mistake after another. He’d let Grace talk him into madness out of some sense of devotion to her. She’d been wrong. They had no future. Not together, not alone. He’d been a fool to let her persist in her ignorant idealism. Now she was lost and he was no closer to finding her than he was in Kutrosky’s camp or before he’d left the safety of his own settlement to look for her. He was no closer to a life with her than he’d been the moment he met her at the launch site on Earth. With snow still falling he knew his chances of tracking her were dropping and the likelihood of him freezing to death while looking for her was rising. All because he had tried to save her from a fate he had helped orchestrate.
He slipped his hand under his coat to feel the hard metal of the gun against his hip. His hand closed around the handle, swollen and blistered finger inching toward the trigger. Kinn sat motionless against the tree opposite him, head drooped forward, arms resting on his knees, defenseless. The pouch in Danny’s pocket held half a dozen bullets, more than enough to finish off Kinn. And then himself. He drew the gun from his waistband with one hand and the pouch of bullets with the other. The others would join them in death soon enough. Then he and Grace could be together. He loosened the felt pouch and reached inside for the bullets.
A night bird called across the peach, dawn-streaked sky. Another answered it. Danny started. The birds cried out with the same tone that Stacey had used when she called him a cock-sucking coward. They’d been betting on him to kill himself all winter. His friends.
No. He wouldn’t do it. He closed the pouch and dropped it back in his pocket, shoved the gun back into his waistband. He sat straighter.
“I know you’re out there.” His whisper formed a cloud of frost in front of him.
Stacey was out there, probably still snarling at him and threatening to kick his ass for not letting her go home to her husband and child when she wanted to. Heather was still out there, foolishly believing he was a better father than Governor King. No, not foolish. A good father raised his children to be fierce and independent, to care for others. He could do that.
A fatalistic grin split his wind-burned face as he smoothed his parka back into place and took a last drink from his water-skin. Knowing Stacey, she was struggling free from whichever group of Kutrosky’s men held her. Heather would be trying her tricks to convince them she was harmless, then spitting in their eye if they fell for it. He chuckled at the image, more proud of her than he ever could have imagined. Jonah would follow her, do whatever she said with the startled look of a man who couldn’t believe he was in love. He knew exactly what that felt like.
He wanted to live long enough to hold Heather’s baby, at the very least. He needed to live long enough to tell her how any father would be proud to call her his daughter.
He was not a coward.
Adrenaline pumped through his veins and he pushed against the tree to stand. He would not sit idly by and let his friends suffer while he thought himself in circles, looking for a way to manipulate the situation, looking for a way out. The time for that was long past. He would not give up. He owed it to Stacey to prove her wrong. He owed it to Heather to get her out of the mess he had created so she could bring her baby into a better world. He owed it to every one of the people who were fighting to build a life on this God-forsaken moon. He owed it to Grace.
“Come on.” He steeled himself, putting the empty water-skin back in the sack and fixing it over his shoulder. “Wake up. We’re going back.”
“What?” Kinn jerked his head up from where he had been dozing. “What the hell? I thought we were going after Grace.” He struggled to his feet.
“We have no idea where she is.” He let his voice crack with emotion as he came to terms with what he was doing and everything it could mean. “She’s gone.”
“So we find her,” Kinn roared to full energy. “We look until we find her.”
There was nothing more in the universe that Danny wanted than to do exactly that.
“There are other people who need our help.” He dragged himself to face south, to lift one foot and put it in front of the other, knowing it might mean Grace was lost to him forever.
“Fuck them, the maggots! I’m gonna find Grace. I’m gonna find her sorry little ass and make damn sure she never does this to me again.”
Danny was through arguing with Kinn. “If you want to keep searching north, if you want to cross every hill and look behind every tree out here in this godforsaken snow, do it.”
“What?” A surprised shock of fear pinched Kinn’s face and hunched his shoulders.
“Go,” Danny told him, gesturing to the forest. “Go find her.”
Kin shifted, fidgeting with his sack before throwing it over his shoulder. “Fine. I will. And when I do, I ain’t ever going to let her leave my sight again.”
Sick despair gnawed its way through Danny’s chest. “At least she’ll be alive,” he croaked.
He was abandoning her to Kinn, to a life she hated, for people he wasn’t sure would call him a friend. He couldn’t let himself think about it. He hitched the pack higher on his shoulder and forced himself to pick up speed, heart breaking with every step.
“Where do you think you’re going, you mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch? You said Grace would be that way.” Kinn threw out an arm to the white and gray hills behind him.
“And you said you would go find her on your own.”
Kinn huffed out a breath, rolled his shoulders. He glanced around at the empty forest. “So you’re gonna ditch me? Ditch Grace?”
Danny stopped, turning to face him. “Kutrosky is sending an army to attack my people. I have to help them.”
“I don’t give a shit about them.” Kinn jogged to catch up to Danny’s side, shouting the whole time. “You said Kutrosky wouldn’t take Grace with him because she would slow him down, which means that Grace is this way.”
Every cell of his heart was saying the same thing, urging him to go back, to think only of Grace, only of himself. The night birds continued to call above him in the shivering breeze.
“Maybe Kutrosky did take her with him,” he argued against the voices in his mind as firmly as he argued with Kinn. “Maybe he thought she could lead him to the transmitter after all.”
“You don’t know that. You’re gonna go off to cry to a bunch of pussies who would just as soon piss on you as look at you? I don’t owe them anythin
g.”
Danny squeezed his eyes shut against the onslaught of words and emotion, fighting the lump in this throat as his soul tore itself apart.
He opened his eyes, fixed his gaze on the steadily lightening horizon, and walked on, certainty filling him. “This is what Grace would want.”
“Bullshit!” Kinn exploded, keeping pace with him. “To hell with what Grace wants. She’s mine. She has no right to walk out on me like this. I don’t want my kid to die in the snow. I want Grace. To hell with the rest of you.”
A faint thread of hope coiled in Danny’s gut. “That’s why she hates you.”
“Why are we meeting here?” Danny had snapped at Carrie the second he had ducked through the unmarked storage room door and found her scrambling through one of the large metal crates he’d been working with.
“Look, there isn’t time.” She didn’t look at him as she spoke. She placed something in the large crate then pulled back, knocking over a smaller box balanced on the crate’s lip. Hand-tools clattered across the floor.
He bent with her to pick them up. “Like hell there isn’t time.”
Carrie tossed tools carelessly in the box, mouth pressed closed in a grim line. She still didn’t meet his eyes.
“When I asked you how soon you could put your plan in motion, I was not expecting to be dragged down to the basement of the ship for a strategy session at one a.m.”
“This is no strategy session,” she muttered. She stood and pushed past him to carry the box of tools to the other side of the large crate, settling it inside.
The crates were all open, their contents scattered. The sight grated on Danny’s last nerve. He’d spent the better part of the last three months stocking three of those crates with everything a budding colony would need to survive and thrive. He’d picked Grace’s brain as subtly as he could for even longer to learn what supplies she would need for her vision of a free colony on Terra apart from Base One. It was too much work to stand by and watch Carrie toss everything out.
