“Yeah. I bet you are, too.”
I didn’t respond, I didn’t have to. We both knew the truth of it. She was possibly the only adult female under thirty left alive in the county. We trudged westward, deeper into the woods and away from the highway. The shores of Lake Monroe were to the left and less than a mile off.
“Who do you think she is?” Vance continued when the land leveled.
“She’s probably up from Louisville. Plenty of people have been trying to get out to the countryside.”
“So what went wrong? Do you think one of them changed and caused the wreck?”
“It would have to be her if that happened, it was the driver’s neck that was ripped.”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking of the hoof-print I’d seen. I had hoped Vance would shut up and walk faster if I didn’t talk much. But as his brother, I knew better.
Vance glanced nervously over his shoulder at the girl between us. “She looks really normal. I bet something got in. Maybe they had a window down, and something flew in there.”
“Could be.”
“I hate the flying ones.
“Yeah.”
“You know, I’m not sure that we should take her back to our cabin.”
It was my turn to frown. I said nothing, but he had a point. You never knew who was dangerous.
“We should take her to the Preacher. We are supposed to be patrolling the highway, and we definitely have something to report,” said Vance, “He’ll know what to do, and I bet he could tell if she’s dangerous or not.”
“We couldn’t make it there before dark.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to carry her that far anyway. We’ll have to take her to the cabin. Then we could get out the Durango and drive her over.”
“It would still be dark before we got back.”
He nodded. We both thought about it as we trudged on. Things always got much worse in the dark. Vance managed to shut up for about twenty minutes, saving our breath for walking.
“What time do you think it is?” I asked him finally. The girl was slowing us down now, getting through the denser trees was a problem with a stretcher, and we had to hunt for open trails.
“It looks like four o’clock at least,” he said. Neither one of us wore a watch, of course. Watches didn’t work right anymore. Complex electronic things were useless now, they either ran too fast, or too slow, or simply spit sparks and died when you turned them on. No one knew why. The Preacher simply said that the laws of the world had changed, and it was time to learn how to live by the new laws.
“Let’s pick it up,” I said.
He glanced back at me, immediately suspicious. “Tell me,” he said with eyes narrowed.
I sighed and told him about the tripod-shaped print in the mud back at the wreck. Half-way through my confession, he dropped his end of the stretcher. The girl rolled partly off the stretcher and her head lolled into the leaves.
“You idiot, Vance,” I said, easing her back onto the stretcher. “What if her spine is damaged?”
“Then she’s dead anyway,” he snapped. “I can’t believe you had me running around in the woods cutting sticks to carry her without telling me something big was out there. I used to wear your hand-me-down feet- pajamas and the moment a girl shows up I can’t trust you anymore?”
“You would have run off.”
He scowled, stamped around and threw up his arms sputtering. “Maybe! But I would have
He had a finger pointed at my chest, and I looked down. “Sorry.”
Getting an apology out of me was rare, and he was impressed, but still angry. “
“It’s getting dark fast, we’ve got a ways to go, let’s just get going and pick up the pace,” I said. I took my end of the stretcher and looked at him.
Vance hesitated. He looked around at the trees, which seemed to crowd in closer every minute. A bird cried and the wind rustled the upper branches of the forest. He looked down at the girl, and I knew he was thinking about ditching her. He lifted an arm that had flopped off and placed it back onto the stretcher. We both saw smudged high cheekbones and eyes that would be wide and bright if they ever opened again. I wondered what color they were. Her hair was a honey-brown blonde. I could tell just by looking at it the color didn’t come out of a bottle.
I could not carry her alone and defend myself if Vance took off, so I was quiet, letting him think it over. We both knew he was deciding if she lived or died. He stared at her.
I think it was her face that saved her in the end. I wondered how many times over the millennia lives had been decided in just such a moment.
With a grunt of annoyance, Vance took up the stretcher again and we hustled deeper into the woods toward our cabin.
Three
We barely made it. Darkness comes fast in the woods, and tonight the setting sun was aided by sheets of mist which crept up from Lake Monroe. The fog pooled around the base of the hill, and moved its way up to the cabin. Both the mists and the darkness seemed to be in a race to beat us to the door. By the time we got there, the shadows from the trees formed a wall of impenetrable gloom over the clearing around the yard and the last yellow gleams of sunlight trickled through the branches. We set down the stretcher and scrambled to open the barbed wire barricades that were set up all around the cabin. Vance stabbed himself on the wire in his haste.
“Aww! Friggin’ wire,” he complained.
I watched blood well up on his hand in alarm.
“Don’t let the drops hit the ground,” I said.
“I know, I know, the scent.”
He wiped his bleeding hand on his coat. I chewed my lower lip, sure that some fresh blood had gotten on the wire and the ground, but we had no time to hose it down and dig it out now. We had to get inside.
In the cabin, the air was musty and dank, but smelled wonderful to me. For the first moment since we had set out that day on patrol, I felt the tension ooze out of me. I felt tired.
It was then, as I reached to close the cabin door, that I saw it.
A line of three-pointed prints crossed the yard and went around behind the cabin to the garage. Vance was looking over our guest whom we had laid out on the old ratty couch in the living room. I hissed unhappily and Vance was at my elbow in an instant.
“What is it?”
I pointed to the line of prints.
“It didn’t follow us, it beat us here,” said Vance. He made a show of smacking himself in the forehead with the palms of his hands. “I never even heard it. I don’t like this, Gannon.”
Neither did I.
We quickly overcame a slight pang of guilt and searched the girl’s backpack. Inside, we were surprised to find a passport.
“Czechoslovakia?” said Vance in bemusement. “Her name is Monika. That’s something anyway. If we have to bury her, at least we know her name. Is she some kind of student or mail-order bride or something?”
I handed him my find. It was a printout from a webpage. It was a profile from one of those people-search type pages. The picture at the top was Monika’s. She looked even better in the photo, and I noticed that her eyes were greenish. We read the note together.
