Onward

Day 36, night

Dante was in front of me before I could tell him not to be.

He didn't raise his rifle. He just stood up off the step and put his body between me and the river, big and solid, his heart slamming so hard I could feel it through the railing.

The red dot slid off my chest and settled on his.

"Move," the voice said.

"No," Dante said.

Behind the ranger station, out in the cedars, the four of them were on their feet. I could feel them the way you feel a storm coming through a bad knee. Every one of them was turned toward the river, toward that slow, steady heartbeat on the far bank.

The letters came up white.

[Threat to host detected.]

[Mission available: Defend the Mother.]

I thought about the bridge. The kid in the red jacket. The way the thing in my head had liked it.

"No," I said.

[Noted.]

Stay, I told them. Stay where you are.

They stayed. It felt like holding a door shut against wind.

"I didn't do your town," I called across the water. My voice came out hoarse. "Whatever happened to it. I didn't."

"Then what are you?"

"I don't know." I stood up slowly, one hand on the railing, and stepped out from behind Dante so the dot could find me again. It did. "A month ago I was a lineworker. Two days ago I woke up on a cellar floor where I'd been dead for four. I'm looking for my son. That's all I know."

Silence from the far bank. The river ran black and loud between us.

"Call them out," he said.

Dante turned his head. "Portia, don't!"

"He wants to see." I looked at the dark across the river. "If he's going to shoot me, he should know what he's shooting."

I didn't say it out loud. I didn't have to.

Come. Slow. Stop at the light.

They came out of the trees one at a time, heads low, into the edge of the firelight spilling through the ranger station door. Four gray shapes. They stopped where I told them and went still, and the snow settled on their shoulders and didn't melt.

I heard his heartbeat change across the water. Just a little. A man who'd seen something he'd been waiting three hundred miles to see.

"Back," I said.

They went back.

For a long time there was nothing but the river.

Then I heard him moving. Down the far bank, across a fallen snag thirty yards upstream, sure-footed as a cat on a wire. He came out of the dark with the rifle at his shoulder and didn't lower it once.

He was a few years older than Dante, mid-forties maybe, lean in the way of men who walk for a living. A sandy beard shot through with gray. A faded orange cap. An elk-hide coat worn shiny at the cuffs. And eyes so pale they looked like creek ice, the kind of eyes that had spent their whole life looking at things far away.

He stopped ten feet from me. Close enough that I could smell him. Gun oil. Old blood, animal blood, deep in the hide of that coat.

The hunger turned over. I locked my hands on the railing.

He looked at me for a long time. At my gray skin. At the hole in my jacket. At my hair.

I hadn't thought about my hair since I died. It hung past my shoulders in a stiff, matted mess, copper red and dark with the bridge.

"You're the one from the bridge," he said.

"Yes."

"I watched you tell them to stop."

"Not fast enough."

Something moved in his face. Not softer. Just different.

"Coldwater, Montana," he said. "Nine hundred people. I guided elk hunts out of there for nineteen years. On Day 9 a horde came down the highway. They didn't wander in. They came in a line, like somebody was walking them." His jaw tightened. "There was a truck behind them. Running dark. I heard the engine after it was over."

Dante went very still beside me.

"My brother's kids were in that town," he said. "I've been following the sign ever since. Three hundred miles. They don't drift. They don't scatter. They go somewhere." His eyes stayed on mine. "And tonight, four of them walked straight to you."

"I've had them for two days," I said. "Before that, I was dead. Whoever walked your horde, it wasn't me."

"But it could be something like you."

I didn't answer. I didn't know.

He stood there a long time. Then he did something I didn't expect. He slung the rifle, reached into his pack, and pulled out a snowshoe hare, fresh-killed, still limp.

He tossed it at my feet.

"Eat," he said.

Dante made a sound. "Are you serious?"

"I want to see something." He didn't look away from me. "I want to see what she does."

I looked at the hare. Warm, still. The smell of it climbed straight into my head.

I didn't want to do this in front of Dante. I didn't want to do this at all.

I picked it up.

I won't describe it. I'll just say that I did it, and that when it was over I was kneeling in the snow with blood on my hands and my face, and the hunger had gone quiet. Not gone. But quiet. Like a dog that's been thrown a bone and knows there's more in the house.

[Substitute nourishment detected.]

[Efficiency: Low.]

[Recommendation: Human source.]

"No," I whispered.

[Noted.]

When I looked up, Dante was staring at the river. The hunter was staring at me.

"Huh," he said.

"What?"

"It worked." He crouched down across from me, eye level, those pale eyes reading me like tracks in mud. "Animal meat takes the edge off you."

"Some."

"Then here's how this goes." He nodded at the dark, at the pass somewhere beyond it. "Every sign I've followed for three hundred miles points the same direction. Up toward the pass. You going that way?"

"My son is."

"Then I'm coming." He stood. "I'll walk behind you. I'll keep you fed. Deer, elk, whatever's moving. I'm good at it." He settled the rifle on his shoulder. "And if the day comes that meat isn't enough, I'll know it before you do. And I'll handle it."

Dante took a step toward him. "You touch her..."

"Dante." I wiped my mouth on the back of my wrist. "He's right."

They looked at each other over my head, two big men with two rifles and one fire, and I could hear both their hearts. Neither one was slowing down.

"Noah," the hunter said finally, to me, not to him.

"Portia."

He nodded once, and went inside to the fire like he'd been invited.

The letters came up as he passed me.

[Unregistered human: Noah.]

[Threat to Protocol: High.]

[Recommendation: Remove.]