But I was determined to make it to the house. At last, I reached the back step. I tugged open the screen door.
In the light of a lantern, I saw a familiar silhouette.
“Elijah,” I breathed.
He turned toward me. He was taller than I was, with dark hair and hazel eyes. But his gaze was hooded. I’m not sure of the exact point at which I began to think of him as my enemy. Maybe it was when he had gotten baptized before I did, crossed that invisible divide from ordinary to blessed. Maybe when he had insisted that I do it, as well, and that we should be married without tasting the Outside world. But it was certainly when he found Alex and me together and brought the Elders to my doorstep.
I flinched away from him. “What are you doing here?”
He looked at me from under the brim of his hat. “What are
you
doing here? You don’t belong here anymore.”
A lump rose in my throat. I had no answer. I wanted to say: “This is my home. Of course I belong here.” But the words would not come.
I heard something beyond him, in the living room. I knew that sound, from the church.
I pushed past Elijah to see what it was. I stopped cold in my tracks.
Something lay in the shadows, bloated and dark. It curled around the room, thick and black as a rotting tree trunk. It was a massive snake, at least thirty feet long. It scraped around the bottom of table legs, behind the couch and wooden chairs and treadle sewing machine, its scales moving against the hardwood floors.
Impossible.
I knew it for what it was. It was no snake. It was pure evil. It was in my house.
I wheeled to Elijah. “You let it in.”
He stared past me. The snake’s head, as large as a pumpkin, came into view. Its eyes reflected the lantern light like those of the vampires. I could tell that Elijah was hypnotized by it. Glamoured.
I grasped his arm and shook it. “Where are my parents? Where is Sarah?”
Dazed, he pointed to the snake. It gathered its coils to itself, and then I noticed that it had a lumpy, engorged shape.
I stopped breathing. As it slid past me, I counted one lump . . . two lumps . . . three lumps.
The snake turned its head toward me and opened its mouth. Its fangs were as white as a vampire’s, and its hiss was the one I heard from the undead creatures in the night.
The sound of a predator.
***
I woke with a start, against Alex’s shoulder.
“Shhh.” He stroked my hair. “It’s all right.”
I felt warmth on my face. But it wasn’t the heat of the fire. The church had burned down to black timbers and red embers. What I felt was the warmth of the late morning sun, melting through the last of the gray clouds.
I pulled my bandaged arm into my lap, wincing. It was sore, but the swelling seemed to have gone down. I saw Ginger and Pastor Gene sitting a few yards away, talking in low tones. Horace grazed in the grass beyond.
Beside me, I saw my
Himmelsbrief
, weighted down with a small stone. Alex must have taken it out of my pocket and carefully plucked open the folds to dry it. The ink looked a bit blurry, but it was still legible. I hoped that would be enough.
“I’m going to be all right,” I said. I couldn’t stand the worried look on his face. I reached up with my uninjured hand and pressed my palm to his cheek.
“I was worried.” He turned his head and kissed my fingertips.
I cast my eyes down and blushed. I felt the hand of God in this, but I didn’t know how to say this to Alex. I didn’t think that he would really believe it, not the way that I did. There was a vast chasm of something between us. Faith. He was still a good man, upright and much kinder than many people of my own sect. But I didn’t understand how he could do the right thing without thinking that God was watching. I knew that he had his own moral compass that led him, and sometimes it seemed stronger than my own.
Pastor Gene had stood up and was approaching us.
“How are you feeling, Katie?”
“Weak,” I said, honestly. “But much better than before.”
He crouched beside me. “It’ll take some time before you’re feeling normal again. Bites can take a long while to heal entirely. But I think you had some help.” He winked.
I felt Alex glowering above me, but I smiled back at the pastor. “Thank you, Pastor Gene.”
My smile faded as my gaze tracked back to the burned-out husk of his church. Two walls were standing, with the wet roof caved in over it. The structure was no longer habitable, and the vampires could reach in and pluck us out like sweetbreads if we tried to stay.
His eyes followed mine. “It’s just a building,” he said. “All the people who were in it are gone.”
“Come with us,” I said. “We are going north. To Canada.”
He shook his head. “It’s time for me to come out of hiding, to see what remains of my family and the rest of the world.”
My brow knit. “Where will you go?”
His gaze drifted off to the horizon. “I have nieces and nephews out west. And following the sun doesn’t seem to be bad advice these days.”
He patted my cheek, pressed his hand to Alex’s shoulder. I saw the green tail of a garter snake in his beard. He rose up, took one last look at the church, and walked across the field with his hands in his pockets.
I gripped Alex’s sleeve. “Will he be all right . . . alone?”
“Yeah. I think so. And I don’t think he’ll be alone.”
In his wake, the grass rippled, and I saw the shadows of snakes following him.
***
We turned away from the smoldering fire. I carefully climbed up on Horace’s back. I cradled my wounded arm in my lap, but the jostle of the horse’s stride made it ache enough to set my teeth on edge. But walking was just as bad, and Ginger had ordered me to conserve my strength.
We headed north, as we always did. I did not turn back to the burned church. I saw Ginger looking at it sadly as we moved across the meadow. I imagine that Lot’s wife had much the same expression on her face.
“Don’t look back,” I said. “It’s
Gelassenheit
. God’s will.”
She shook her head. “It would have been good to stay someplace for a few days. To rest. But not with the snakes.”
I lifted my chin. “And not with the fire. Fire is something that all Plain people fear.”
“Because of no fire department?”
“
Ja
. By the time that someone can run to find a phone, it’s usually too late. And it is a particular fear in the winter.”
“Why winter?”
“Because our chores stretch beyond the daylight hours. And we carry lanterns around many flammable things in the barn. One overturned lantern can engulf a barn in minutes. It can kill animals, people . . .”
“I guess I never feared fire much before,” Ginger said. “But now that those modern conveniences are gone . . . perhaps I will again.”
“It feels strange to be afraid of something so essential to survival,” Alex said. “I wonder if Prometheus knew how much we would fear it.”
“Who is Prometheus?” I asked.
“In Greek mythology, he was a Titan, one of the old gods that were a generation before Zeus and the rest of the Olympians. Zeus asked Prometheus to create man, but in doing so, Prometheus felt some sympathy for his creation. Prometheus watched man struggle to find enough to eat, to build places to live, and felt pretty darn sorry for our incompetence.
“So he brought us a gift. He stole one of Zeus’s lightning bolts and gave it to man. It was the gift of fire. It kept man from freezing to death, helped him cook food. It saved man from a short life of cold savagery.”
I shook my head. Alex’s stories were exactly that—good stories. But I did not believe in the underlying morality of those old, cruel gods.
Ginger kept walking backwards, looking for the fire. And I resolutely looked forward, remembering how Lot’s wife looked backwards, full of salt and tears. No good could come of that.
Within hours, my fear proved to be a prediction.
We smelled the fire before we saw it.
It wasn’t the benign, warm smell of wood smoke. This was acrid, chemical. It was the stench of man-made things burning: plastic, gasoline, rubber.
We’d walked through the morning, having found a two-lane road. Horace trotted along the soft shoulder to save the wear and tear of pavement on his hooves. The clop of his hooves on the earth created a mechanical marching rhythm and an ache in my bones. We didn’t speak, shuffling along at Ginger’s pace. She struggled and wheezed a bit, but we went steadily. There was no traffic. No cars. Just buzzards circling in the distance. And a dark haze on the horizon.
The road fell away at a crossroads, and we plodded over a hill that seemed to go on forever. When we reached the crest, we stopped.
A city lay below us in the valley, burning.
I sucked in my breath. I had never seen a city before. I had imagined that it would be as I had seen in books and newspapers: skyscrapers laced with gray ribbons of road and overhung with the glitter of electric light shining against mirrored glass. It would be towering and vast and glamorous, full of life and movement. This was where I had intended to go on
Rumspringa
, a lifetime ago.
I was here, but this was not what I had pictured. There were tall buildings surrounded by a black cloak of smoke. Orange flames reflected on broken glass. Stilled cars blocked congested streets.
I stared ahead. “Should we go down there?”
Ginger’s fingers knit in her coat sleeves. “There might be people down there. Radios. Survivors.”
My stomach growled.
“And food,” she added. “Supplies.”
Alex frowned. “It could be infested. Probably is. Dangerous.”
“It’s daylight,” Ginger said. I could hear the yearning in her voice for news. For hope.
“They can be awake during the daytime,” I reminded her. “All they need is shadow, indoors, away from the sun.” I had encountered a nest of them before in daylight hours, on an excursion from my old home to the nearby town. They had nearly killed me.
“It’s too dangerous,” Alex said.
“What if . . . what if we stayed in the open? Stayed on the street . . . found something to eat, and left right away?”
“There aren’t only vamps to worry about. Survivors could be just as violent,” Alex pointed out. “Especially if they’re hungry or desperate. Violence is the first rule after any disaster. We’re better off on the road.”
I pressed my fingertips to my lips. I didn’t want to believe that humans could be terrible to each other. But I’d seen what a disaster could do to even a small community, like mine. We had turned on ourselves, begun threatening each other with expulsion and dogma.
“We have to try,” I said. “There’s not going to be much more forage. Frost’s coming.”
Alex sighed and kicked at a rock. “Maybe we can find a car or something that runs.”
I leaned protectively against the horse’s neck. “We can’t leave Horace behind. All of us or none of us.”
He reached out and tenderly touched my cheek. “Horace will be fine. We can’t—”
He saw the ferociousness in my face. My grip tightened on the reins. “All of us or none of us,” I repeated.
His hand dropped and he stuffed it in his pocket. “It’ll . . . it’ll work out.”
We descended the hill and walked down a highway off ramp together. Horace’s hooves rang loudly against the pavement, piercing the silence. My heart clunked unevenly in my chest as we approached a truck stop that spread out by this, the first exit to the city. The blacktop lot was mostly empty, but my spirits lifted when I saw a few tractor trailers parked there and imagined that Horace could fit in the back of one of them. A convenience store, gas station, and deli were housed in the same building. A sign listing prices for diesel and unleaded fuel stood above advertisements for sodas, cigarettes, and sandwiches.
I could tell that the place had been abandoned. My heart sank. A chain was run through the handles of the front door and fixed with a padlock. Ginger grabbed the pay phone receiver and shook her head. “No dial tone.”
The locks on the building had done little good. The glass in the window was shattered, and I could see a toppled display of fruit pies inside. I slid down from the horse and found my stake in his gear. I tucked the weapon into the crook of my right elbow, pressing myself forward against the dizziness creeping into my skull. I reached with my left hand through the ruined window, conscious of the hollowness in my belly.
I snatched a lemon fruit pie from the display, clutched it to my apron. I peered into the half shadow inside.
Sunlight streamed inside the store about four feet. The only things that moved were the dust motes. I could make out toppled racks of candy and bottles of car fluids. I smelled stale beer spilled on the floor and wrinkled my nose.
“I think we can get in there,” I said, gesturing to the broad safety of the stripe of sunshine.
Alex looked inside. “I’ll go first, see if it’s clear. If it is, you can come in after.”
I opened my mouth, closed it. For all of Alex’s foreign manner, he did try to be chivalrous, to protect me.
I nodded, gripping my stake with my good hand.
Alex stepped through the shattered window frame. I held my breath, watching as the sunlight washed through his blond hair and poured over his shoulders. I glimpsed the reflection of sun on his knife. As he moved away from me, into the darkness, the daylight drained away. I could hear his footsteps crunching in the glass, but soon even that soft pulverizing sound fell silent.
I balanced my wounded palm carefully on a shard of glass in the window frame and strained to see beyond the silhouettes of ruined displays. I smelled curdled milk, tobacco, and sour coffee. Lottery tickets had been dragged from behind the checkout counter like streamers. The cash register was broken open on the floor, surrounded by glistening change.
“Alex?†My hand tightened on the shard, summoning a trickle of blood. I snatched my hand away, pressed the heel of my palm to my mouth to stanch the flow. I tasted blood—warm and coppery. It turned my stomach. How the vampires found sustenance in such thin liquid baffled me.