by Ilsa J. Bick
“Okay, okay, you big baby.” Dismounting, she looped the reins around a stout oak. None of the horses liked this part of the woods. Nothing good lay down that right-hand trail.
“So totally lame,” she muttered, darkly. Trotting by her side, Mina turned her a look, and Ellie said to the dog, “Bet if it’d been you and me, they wouldn’t have given up so fast.” Yeah, but when Jayden and Hannah found her and Mina, they hadn’t been hurt like Chris. Mortally wounded was what Hannah said about Chris, which was a fancy way of saying hurt so bad I can’t fix it. But there might have been a chance. Chris could be really strong, or Hannah might be wrong. Not trying wasn’t fair. Tom and Alex always tried. They would’ve fought …
“You know, Ellie, it really doesn’t do you any good to think about this. You’ll just get to feeling sorry for yourself and all.” She let out an exasperated sigh. Why was she remembering Tom and Alex and her dad and Grandpa Jack so much today? It couldn’t be the fishing. She fished all the time. “Yeah, but I miss them all the time,” she said, mad that her nose was starting to itch again. Soon she’d be bawling like a little kid. Focus on the positive: that’s what Grandpa Jack always said—and Hannah and Jayden and Isaac were nice.
“But they’re not Alex.” She veered for the left fork. “They’re not T—”
By her side, Mina suddenly alerted with a soft but distinct huff.
Uh-oh. Caught in mid-stride, one boot above the snow, Ellie went absolutely still. In her chest, her heart slapped a fast fish-flop of alarm. Mina was looking not left but down the right fork. Not growling—a good sign—but her dog’s ears were up, her body stiff. So that was not good. Not bad. Growling was bad because growling meant either unfamiliar adults, for whom she had no use, or people-eaters, for whom she had even less. Wrong time of day for them anyway. But something was spooking the dog. What?
From the sky came another harsh bray, and that was when she finally heard what it was that Mina had picked up. Heck, for all she knew, her horse had probably spooked early because Bella could hear what she hadn’t. But now Ellie did: a sound like … voices? Lots of them, too, like a crowded school yard at recess, coming from somewhere down that right fork. She watched Mina listening. The dog was still alert but not growling. So … not dangerous? Probably no adults, anyway; no people. Not alive, anyway.
Then it dawned on her. “Oh boy,” she said, and almost—doh!—smacked her forehead like Homer Simpson. The birds. The crows. That was why there were so many. Crows were scavengers, drawn to death. It was just like Jayden said: if you wanted to know where that poor wounded deer was, look for the crows. Made perfect sense.
Yeah, but do I want to go down there? Because now it was a choice, wasn’t it? Someone would have to check this out. It would take her a good hour to dump her gear, slog back to her horse, then hoof it back to the farmhouse. She was here now. Someone had to put that poor deer out of its misery, and she should grow up already. Tom would do it. So would Alex.
Carefully squaring the auger across the mouth of her pail, she unlimbered her rifle and threw the bolt. At the sound, Mina’s tail whisked in approval.
“Yeah, better safe than sorry. So, come on.” Ellie gave her dog a pat. “Let’s make it quick.”
The walk wasn’t terrible, although this wasn’t Ellie’s favorite trail or place in the universe. Within ten minutes, the chattering swelled and consolidated into caws and squawks. The racket was enormous, like on the mountain in the Waucamaw when Grandpa Jack died and her head seemed to explode. This time, though, instead of blackening the sky, glossy crows seethed and roiled in the trees.
Wow, something’s got their attention. A cold finger ticked down the knobs of her spine. Something told her that this had to be more than birds waiting for something to die. But what could it be? She dropped her eyes to the snow. The last time she, Jayden, Hannah, and Eli had been down this trail was a week ago. In between, there’d been snow, and she saw where their tracks had filled.
And she also saw fresh tracks. People tracks.
Oh boy. One set was small. Not much bigger than hers, actually. A kid? Her hands tightened around her rifle. A kid, a hurt kid?
Or this might be the kind of kid she really didn’t want to meet. No, it can’t be a people-eater. Mina would know; she always knows. She checked the dog, who was still on alert but keeping pace. Again, not alarmed but definitely telling her that something wasn’t quite right. The dog’s attention was fixed straight ahead, and now Ellie looked that way, too—and heard herself pull in a hard gasp.
The clearing was small and dominated by a gray limestone building with a slate roof. Two windows were set on other side of a wood slider. A ramp ran down from the slider in a broad tongue.
The hex signs painted on the stone were kind of weird. Just below the eaves were five-pointed, bone-white stars that ran around the entire building, and that Hannah said were supposed to represent heaven. Above the double slider was a single high arch, outlined in black paint and filled in with purple. Within the arch were three evenly spaced blue triangles. The arch was supposed to be a false door—a Devil’s door, Hannah said—designed to trick Satan into bumping his head.
There were other hexes, too: painted half-arches, done in the same design, above and below each window so if a witch tried to climb in, it would trip over what Isaac called a witch’s foot.
With all those hex signs, at first glance you’d think barn. But that made no sense, because this building was all stone and really far out, way off by its lonesome in the woods and well away from fields and pasture. Neither Jayden nor Hannah had a clue as to the building’s original purpose. When they first came across it, the structure had been totally empty.
To Ellie, though, those windows always looked like empty sockets with funky purple and blue eyelids. If she let her own eyes defocus a little, she could see the skull.
Which was kind of apt, considering what was inside.
Something, it seemed, had reached out and grabbed those crows, too, because there were hundreds. Birds lined the slate roof, clung to shingles, clutched the eaves. More crows swarmed over the snow or strutted up the ramp like soldiers. They oiled over the building in a heaving mass of bright eyes, gleaming feathers, and black beaks.
Crows knew where death lived, all right.
Because that gray skull building was where the bodies were.
22
Eight days after the mine went, at the very beginning of March, the crows came in big black thunderclouds. Tom knew what they meant. Hang around a war zone and you learned. Want to figure out where the bodies are? Look up.
A fact: the colder it is, the slower things decompose. But it’s also true that a mine’s deepest levels are very warm, even so hot that they’re impossible to work without fans and ventilation. Evidently, the old Rule mine was just warm enough for people to start rotting, fill with gas, and bob to the surface of that new lake like so many human-skinned balloons.
The question was when to go. Cindi came every morning, so that was out. Afternoons were safest, but there were the lookouts to consider. He didn’t want anyone, especially Cindi or Luke, to figure out what he was doing. They would try to stop him or insist on coming along, and he needed to be alone for this. So that left late afternoons. Time it just right, and he could ski it pretty fast, skirting the path that would put him in the lookouts’ sights, and still have daylight to spare, although it would be well past dark when he got back.
When. Really, wasn’t it more a question of if he came back? Ever? Or never? Because, in some ways, Tom was already gone, finished, used up. He had never been like this before either—not after Afghanistan, not after Jim. Not after he’d been shot and Harlan had taken Ellie. Not after Jed and Grace, when he’d thought, Yes, kill all the enemy; no sweat. Despite what he’d said to Luke, choosing life with no hope of seeing Alex again was only going through the motions. Putting one foot in front of the other until you couldn’t walk anymore.
Regardless, one thing was crystal-clear.
It stood to reason that she was up there, at that lake, with all the other dead.
And there was absolutely no way in hell Tom would let the crows have her.
He had taken the Long Walk before. In Afghanistan, the bomb suit was always a last resort, when robots wouldn’t work or, as in his case, there were choices to be made in no-win scenarios. So he had walked, alone, toward death many times. Yet, somehow, this was even worse, the longest and loneliest walk of his life.
The lake was surreal: a logjam of partially decomposed bodies mired in ice and black with crows. From the looks of it, the Chuckies had believed in stocking up on rations for a rainy day. Or maybe it was just that there had been a lot of hungry little Chuckies in that chow line, and it was easier to take a quick trip down to the corral whenever you needed to rustle up a little grub. There were plenty of dead Chuckies, too, which were easy to distinguish from the other dead. Not only were the Chuckies all young, nothing—not even a crow—touched them.
Through binoculars, he glassed the lake, skipping his careful gaze from face to face. Paying him no mind, the birds jabbed at empty sockets, jackhammered bone, jumped from one hideously distended body to the next, as if playing a complicated game of hopscotch. One crow skidded to a landing on the icy bloat of a man’s belly before working its way to a safer perch on the nub of the old guy’s nose. The bird stabbed down and pried loose a flap of cheek with its beak. The frozen, greenish flesh came away with a tinkle that reminded Tom of crinkly cellophane.
Tom watched the crow work the meat into its mouth and down its gullet. If that had been Alex, he’d have drawn down so fast with Jed’s Bravo, that crow would’ve been a cloud of blasted feathers and red mist and in hell before it knew it was dead. Or maybe I only wound the thing. Then grab it, rip it apart. He could see that, too. As detailed as any flashback, the movie spun out in his mind: the bird struggling as Tom squeezed harder and harder until he felt the thready kick of its heart against his palms and now the crunch of bone.…
Only then, somehow, the movie shifted in his mind. Instead of a crow, now Tom had a boy by the neck and the boy was bucking and fighting, but Tom was riding him, strangling him, watching the boy’s face turn purple, killing Chris Prentiss for what he’d done. This vision was so real, Tom could feel the frantic scratch and cut of Chris’s nails over his hands.
You can’t get away, Chris; I won’t let you go. I’m strong and I will kill you, I will crush you, I will make you pay for what you did to her …
A deep moan worked its way from Tom’s chest. God, killing Chris would feel good, it would feel so good, and, Jesus, he wanted that. This need to kill something was the claw of something new, scraping the cage of Tom’s ribs, raging to be born.
But I can’t let you out. Untangling his mind from the vision made the sweat pop on his upper lip. Got to hang on. Pressing a trembling hand to his chest, Tom felt for the two tags hanging from a beaded chain around his neck. One tag was Jed’s from Vietnam; the other had belonged to his son, Michael, who’d died in Iraq. Tom gripped the dog tags the way his grandmother used to clutch a rosary. Got to stop this. Can’t let myself get lost in this thing.
His tongue ached from where his teeth had sawed through flesh. He spat a coin of blood, watched it melt into snow stenciled in irregular stars from the birds. A lot of animals up this way, actually. His eyes drifted to some elongated, five-fingered splays that had to be raccoons, and then to a single deep trough scalloped from snow. Wolves, probably. They’d be heavy enough, and most packs went single file. Crows, wolves, raccoons scavenging a meal. He swallowed against the rusty tang of his blood, then spat again. A lot of animals. His gaze skated over a smaller set of prints that looked almost like a dog’s. Foxes have been busy, too. No wonder. All these bodies, the lake was practically a …
“A buffet,” he whispered, and at that, his thoughts stuttered to a halt because he’d suddenly realized what kind of prints weren’t there.
Wait a minute. Blowing the mine was like kicking over an anthill. While a whole lot of Chuckies had died, the rest had dispersed, presumably heading north toward Rule. There’d been no activity at the mine since. But he’d been in a war zone. Survivors always came back to salvage what they could. Yet his were the only human prints around the lake—which made no sense. All this free food and nothing to stop new Chuckies from moving in, or the old ones from drifting back. Except no one had.
So where the hell are they?
Hoisting himself onto a flat-topped boulder, he glassed the shore right and left. No human prints at all, that he could see. He turned his gaze directly west. The sun was already midway to the horizon, its thin light beginning to curdle to the color of a fresh blood clot. His eyes touched first the debris-littered flat before shifting to the ruined trees. The night the mine blew, Chuckies had come from that direction. In his mind, he replayed what he’d seen as the mine deteriorated beneath their feet: those boys, black as ants, lurching across the snowpack. Five came on foot, but two had been on skis. Eventually, the Chuckies had opened fire and driven him, Luke, and Weller from the rise. But what Tom hadn’t given a lot of thought to was why those boys were headed this way in the first place. Why run toward a disaster? More to the point, what was up here that was nowhere else?
“Alex?” This was right; he could taste the tingle, feel the thrill work through his veins. “Jesus. You weren’t interested in us. You came for Alex.” That had to be it. Hundreds of tasty meals to choose from, but they came for Alex and only her. But how did they know? The whistle was his first clue, but he’d heard it after spotting the Chuckies, so it could only be …
“Smell?” The word came on a breath cloud. “You smelled her? Oh my God.” Glassing the flat, he jumped his gaze over the snow, sweeping left to right, following the natural lie of the land and that flood of rubble. “You were on skis. You came up the rise. You came right for her; you didn’t deviate, you didn’t hesitate. So if you made it, if you were in time, if you were prepared because you knew where she was …” He was shaking, his thoughts tumbling like those numbered balls they used for a Powerball jackpot. “You go down, you get her, and then you book, fast as you can. Just point your skis, get yourself in the fall line, and bomb down—”
The words evaporated on his tongue as his gaze snagged on something spindly jutting from a small mountain of debris. A branch? No. Too straight. What was that?
“Oh God, oh God, oh please, please,” he sang as he slowly feathered the focus. “Please, please, puh …” Something inarticulate, breathless, not quite a shout, jumped from his mouth. His heart gave a sudden hard knock he felt in his teeth. “Jesus,” he gasped. “Oh Jesus.”
Because there, fixed in the binocular’s sights, was the black handle and wrist strap of a ski pole.
23
In winter, when someone died, there were three choices. You could bury the body, burn it, or store it. Burial was preferred; it was some religious thing for Hannah and Isaac. For Ellie, it was like, okay, whatever. But without backhoes, there was no way to dig deep enough for a proper grave until spring. A shallow grave was like an invitation to scavengers and—no one would say it, but they all thought it—maybe even the people-eaters, if they got desperate. Or if the people-eaters were like crows and would eat anything.
Cremation was a no-go. Isaac just wouldn’t allow it. That religion thing again, or maybe it was his and Hannah’s hex-y magic stuff … Ellie didn’t know. The only bodies they ever burned were the people-eaters. But they hadn’t crisped a single one since before Christmas because it was just too cold and Jayden thought the people-eaters had all gone south where the pickings were better.
Which left storage: a place where, in the deep freeze of the Upper Peninsula, bodies couldn’t, wouldn’t rot. No decay, no smell, no scavengers.
Yet now, at the death house, there were crows.
But I don’t understand. Stunned, Ellie turned a cautious circle, sweeping her gaze from the ranks of crows on the death house’s roof to the canopy overhead.
The majority of trees here were hardwoods and barren of leaves, their bare branches lacing together in skeletal fingers. Some branches now were so weighed down with birds they bowed. Where did they all come from? Why? The sound those crows made was almost mechanical, like thousands of scissors snapping open and shut. Yet the birds didn’t seem dangerous. Mina would’ve growled or barked or something. But Mina wasn’t worried. She was only … interested.
“Well, I’m not,” she said to the dog. This was way spooky. “We should go back. We should tell Jayden …” What? Gee, there were all these crows at the death house, and she’d been too pee-in-her-pants freaked out to take a look?
Alex wouldn’t wuss out. She tightened her grip on her Savage. Tom would go.
“All right, come on, Mina. We can do this.” Heart thumping, she eased down the path as her dog matched her step for step. Ahead, the birds milled, ebbing and flowing around the building like the waves of a ceaseless black sea. At the edge, where the snow effectively ran out and the crows began, she paused, then slid a boot forward six inches. The crows swirled away. She took another slow, sliding step and then another, as the birds first parted, then closed ranks after she and Mina passed. The effect was eerie, like skating through a pool of black mercury.
At the sliders, she paused. The doors weren’t locked. Isaac and Hannah always said the hex signs were protection enough. But to get in meant that Ellie would have to use both hands, and she wasn’t wild about letting go of her rifle.
“Don’t let anything bad happen, girl,” she said to Mina. Hooking the Savage’s strap over her right shoulder, Ellie wrapped her hands around the wrought iron handle and heaved. The door let out a grudging squall, its iron wheels grating against metal; the death house exhaled icy air that smelled of burlap and pine tar. Nose crinkling against the strong odor of resin, Ellie glanced up to check the birds. In return, the crows cocked their heads, turning the black pearls of their eyes to Ellie as if for a better look. Suddenly afraid to stare at them for too long, she quickly dropped her gaze and stepped from the ramp into the building before she remembered, too late, that all the birds had to do now was surge in after her. But they didn’t. Clacking and cawing, the crows rustled and bunched right up to the threshold. Yet not a single bird took wing or hopped to catch up and follow her in. Still, she slid the door closed, just to be on the safe side.
