by Alison Stine
“I’ll be right back,” Dance said. He turned up the collar of his coat, and headed outside, holding the phone high as he hiked up an embankment more snow than grass. The glow of my phone screen lit his face.
I shivered. It already felt cold, like a switch had been flipped. Grayson napped on in the back seat. I was about to get out and search for another blanket, when the dome light flickered on. Dance opened the passenger door but did not get back in. “Wil, you better come here,” he said.
“What is it?”
He didn’t answer. I glanced back at Grayson, snoring slightly, then opened the door and got out.
I had parked on a stretch of rural highway that didn’t have any streetlights, or the lights were few and far between. Maybe everything had frozen and burst. The foothills made a jagged rim around the road like broken teeth. Roads had been bulldozed through the hills long ago for the heavy machinery that lumbered back and forth for logging and mining—roads that had no names. I could see zigzags of dirt running through the trees.
“It’s here,” Dance said.
“Did you get a signal?”
“No.”
I stumbled over the ground, catching myself just before I fell. There was something in the snow.
“It’s dead,” Dance said. “An animal.”
He helped me straighten up. The thing that had tripped me had fur, tipped with bronze, but it lay still. The fur didn’t ruffle in the wind. It didn’t move. It was frozen.
“There’s more.” He pointed to another form in the snow. “And there’s a deer, I think, in the pool.”
“What pool?”
He led me a little farther into the darkness. We were far from the cars that were passing on the highway. Too far from the truck, I thought.
I felt the weight of the gun in my pocket. The shadows before me arranged into a rectangle. A black pool. It wasn’t frozen all the way. The pool had been halfheartedly covered by a tarp, its corners flapping in the wind. There was a chain-link fence, collapsing on one side around the pool, and a shed, its sides blasted with snow.
The wind shifted, and I smelled something sharp and chemical. Even the cold couldn’t mask that, even the clean scent of snow. “This is an injection well, for fracking,” I said. “This is supposed to be guarded.”
“Well, the guard left.”
I saw the deer in the pool then, the shape of the deer, which seemed not to be an animal, not to be anything at all, a torso unbound by time—except that there were antlers, a white rack. They almost looked beautiful, bone painted by snow.
But the body had a stillness I could not unsee. It buzzed with it, bobbing in the pond.
I thought of the Pumpkin King, made a scarecrow in his own dead garden. It was more frantic than the most frantic movement: the stillness of death, a frenzy of no longer caring that legs had broken off like icicles, that nostrils had filled with slime. Death had no shame. The deer carcass floated, antlers pointing at the sky.
“Everything’s fucking falling apart,” Dance said.
We did not get a signal on my phone. The truck started, and we drove in silence for a while.
If the guard had abandoned his post at the well, what else had been abandoned? Most businesses along the highway looked dark. Cars passed us, as frequently as stars, but the roadside diners and drive-throughs that would normally have traffic had none, just parking lots filling with white. We drove by truck stops and gas stations—had they closed for the night, or for good? Was everyone like us, like The Church and my mama, running?
At the first gas station with its lights on, I stopped. I refueled the truck while Dance ran inside. Prices had skyrocketed. Almost seven dollars a gallon. We had to wait in a line of cars for our turn. I had the canisters of cash, but I wanted to save that, for as long as I could.
I was the only one in my family, among the three of us, to have a bank account and card. Mama’s idea, and I was not sure that Lobo knew. I was glad now that she had insisted. I had put a little money in the account every time I met the paper bag boy: a little for the bank, a lot for the ground. My card still worked. I watched the numbers rise.
I had finished refueling and just replaced the pump when the digital pad began to blink, the numbers flashing. I heard a click, and the pad went dark.
The gas station had lost power.
Dance came out of the convenience store with his arms full of maps. Steam had clouded the store windows. Someone had laid flattened cardboard down in front of the door to catch the drips of boots. But nothing was melting, nothing was dripping. I saw a shape move at the window. Someone turned the Open sign over to Closed.
The people in line were getting out of their cars. Those still at the pumps replaced the nozzles or shook them as if that would make the gas come out. People were starting to shout, as if that ever did anything, turning to look at the store.
We left quickly. Grayson woke up, grumpy and rubbing his leg. Dance offered to drive while I slept, so Grayson and I changed places, but I didn’t want to sleep. I was too wired, too worried. My tiny house bounced behind the truck. The headlights of the cars passing in the other lane fizzed in the snow. I was not sure I trusted Dance to handle the truck on the icy roads, or Grayson to keep him under control. It would be just like a man to tag along, to tell me how to do things I already knew, like how to drive and navigate, to do them poorly himself.
But I must have slept. The last thing I remembered was Dance asking Grayson if he knew how to read a damn map. Then there was light. It was morning, and I smelled fire.
7
I stumbled out of the back seat. The truck had been parked inexpertly off to the side of the road, in a ditch that might hang us up later. I took a wide step over the ditch. The driver-side door dangled open, and in the grass before me, I saw a dead robin. Its beak was tucked into its body, the size of a shoe, head lolling. Its red breast looked almost obscene. Color in the white snow. I knew if I picked it up, it would feel weightless: the magic of its hollow bones. I walked carefully around it.
Dance and Grayson stood in the road.
As I slept, the highway had turned into a rural route again, narrowing to a single lane. Hills rose on either side. We had stopped before a side road, a turnoff to the right.
But we couldn’t go forward: an accident stopped us. Two crashed cars had been abandoned in the middle of the main road. Their smashed noses met on the center line. The cars had burned. One was still smoking a little—that was what I smelled, the chemical melt of plastic. The cars had no glass in their windows anymore, no bodies that I could see. Whatever mistake or tragedy this had been, it was over.
Someone had spray-painted in red on the burned cars: PREPARE TO PAY. The sentence ran across the two cars, linking them like a banner.
Grayson saw me. “That’s not everything, Wil.” He pointed to a speed limit sign, near the ditch. More spray paint. A different hand, more careful, had written: Pirates.
“We have to take this right turn,” Dance said.
I woke up fast. “We are not going that way.”
“The highway is blocked.”
“Maybe.” The smashed cars looked beat-up, cheap. They would go for nothing at a junkyard. They had crumbled easily, meshing together.
“What does pirates mean?” Grayson said.
“Looters down the highway?” Dance said. “Maybe the cars blocking the road were the people who came before us. Who got robbed, and are trying to warn us. Look, we have a lot to lose. I’m fine with taking a side road just to be safe. We have maps now.”
I glanced at the side road. It looked rough, disappearing into curves, the road glittering like broken glass through the snow. “Seems pretty icy,” I said.
“If it’s too bad, we can turn around.”
“Maybe we can just push these old cars off the highway,” I suggested.
The men looked a
t me, then at each other. But we tried it. We positioned ourselves at the back of first one burned car, then we tried the other. We shoved on the count of three. Grayson’s boot slipped in the snow. The second bumper fell off under our hands.
But neither of the cars budged enough.
“What about driving through them?” Grayson said.
Now it was my and Dance’s turn to exchange a glance. We got back into the truck. I told Dance to drive—he had got us into this parking spot, he could get us out of it. We made it out of the ditch, back onto the rural highway, and inched toward the burned cars.
“We should get a running start,” Grayson said from the passenger seat.
“We’ll slide on the ice,” I said.
Lobo’s old truck had been off the roads and into the woods. It had outrun his enemies. It had had a tree fall onto its hood and had crashed into branches, through mud and floods. It had been pulled out of ditches with chains. And now it was going to blast through two crashed cars.
Except it wasn’t.
The front of the truck grated against the cars. It sounded like the night I had hit a guardrail when, exhausted, driving Lisbeth home, I had drifted to the side of the dark country road. We heard the sickening crunch of metal on metal.
“Stop!” I said. “These cars aren’t moving. If something breaks on the truck, we’re in trouble.”
“I could fix it,” Dance said.
“That seems risky,” Grayson said. “I smell something burning.”
Dance parked with a huff and pulled out one of the maps.
There were shacks in the distance, up on the hills, black and silent. I could not see the squint of any sunlight off their windows. Maybe their windows had no glass. I saw no smoke from a stove or cook fire. Nobody came by on the road.
“Let’s back up and take that turn,” I said.
“Off the highway?” Grayson asked. “You’re sure?”
“I am worried about the ice on that road,” I admitted.
“I’ve driven down worse, plenty of times,” Dance said.
“Ice beats pirates,” Grayson said.
We took the right turn.
I let Dance stay at the wheel. I sat up in the seat behind him, leaning forward, looking around. Grayson mumbled something about food or coffee, but I hoped the right turn, our shortcut, would be too quick to even think about stopping. And where would we stop? We were nowhere.
Morning meant nothing. The sun was out: weak and watery. It only made the landscape seem colder somehow, more brittle. It hurt to stare at it. The fields full of poverty grass looked sharp enough to crack. No wind waved them. I hadn’t seen any animals.
The road dipped and swerved. Each turn unveiled a secret of the road: ice slicing down the middle like a ribbon of fat. Or a chunk of snow, stained red. Or a child’s shoe, lost in a snowdrift. The brakes gritted on the ice and Dance swore.
We passed a stretch of land that had once been orchards. Ice encased the trees, shimmery as jellyfish. Row after row of them, shriveled and glinting. This sun wasn’t going to melt anything. There were large wooden crates at the edge of the orchard. They had been split, kicked, or splintered open by hungry people, thieves. There was nothing inside.
Pig houses, sullen as coffins, replaced the orchards. I didn’t see any pigs. Maybe it was too cold for them. Then something came into view in the distance. Gray and raised: a road, or runway.
Dance saw it, too. “Is that an airport?”
There were people on it, moving too fast to be walking.
“What the hell?” Grayson said.
The way they glided in and out of view... They were skateboarding.
“A skate park?” Grayson said. “Here?”
“Let’s turn around,” I said.
“How?”
It was already too late. The road was ending.
Our right turn was a dead end.
There was no way to back up, no space wide enough for the trailer to turn. The road had turned to gravel. The sides of it fell away, crumbling, and the hills rose up, steep and spiky with dead grass. There were structures up on those hills. Houses. The road was ending in somebody’s land.
It ran right under a gate, which was thrown open. The right turn wasn’t a road at all, I realized.
It was a driveway.
This gate wasn’t like the one at the farm, a metal gate Lobo had bought at the tractor store. This one was homemade, welded from pipes and twisted from branches, lashed to a fence of wire. I was certain—if this place had power—electricity coursed through that fence. It ran as far as I could see. I had been seeing it as we drove and not even noticing. On both sides of the road, the fence bisected the landscape into nearly invisible squares, razor-thin and biting.
“Pirates,” Grayson said. “They aren’t on the highway. They’re here. It was a trap.”
Two men stood at the gate.
They wore hunting caps, vests, and boots. They carried guns, big and black. Rifles. They held them casually, like daughters; they were used to holding them or didn’t care how they did it. The men had seen us. They had been waiting for us. Likely, they had heard us coming a mile away on the road, ice crunching under our tires, the rumble on the snow. One of men held up his gloved hand—stop.
“Where are we?” Grayson whispered.
“It’s a compound,” I said. “Lots of structures, a fence. This is their land.”
“What do they want? Why do they have their guns out?”
The man who had made us stop approached the truck.
“Fuck,” Dance said, and rolled the window down.
The man wore aviator sunglasses. “Can we help you, gentlemen?” he said. He leaned into the open window and saw me. I swore his eyes widened behind the shades. “Lady.”
I looked away, at the fence. There was a dead deer hung on it, twisting in the wind.
Dance said, “We’re passing through, on our way to find family. We saw your skaters.”
It was the truth—but it felt like a lie. They had made us come down this road. They had given us no choice, with the blockade of cars. They had crashed them on purpose. It was these men who had blocked the highway, I was sure of it. Beyond the gate, I could see the skaters again, gliding in the white sky, jumping and spinning. It looked like freedom.
But it seemed off, everything seemed off. The fence was too long, the gate too elaborate. There were bits of broken bottles and jagged glass stuck at the top of the gate. What could I see past it? A sagging farmhouse. Some kind of concrete band shell near where the skaters were dipping up and disappearing down from view. Who would have built that?
And who would skate now, in winter? In the midst of this winter?
The man tilted his head to let me know he was checking out the inside of the truck: our food wrappers, blankets, and maps. I knew he was checking me out. I felt his gaze. I was as padded as a bear. I wore jeans lined with flannel, my coveralls, my coat.
But I wished I had worn two coats, wrapped myself in a garbage bag. I wished I had cut my hair short, wished the guards at the gate were women. Wished the world was women.
The other man had disappeared. Then we heard him shouting from the back of the truck.
“Mick,” he said. “They have a house back here!”
Mick, the man in sunglasses, grinned, a mouth of yellow teeth and chewing tobacco. “Cool,” he said.
Knocking on the passenger side window.
Grayson exchanged a look with Dance, then rolled it down. The second man was there. He stuck his head in, and talked to Mick across the seats, panting a little with excitement. “It’s a baby house,” he said. “Looks like it’s got a kitchen and everything.”
“Interesting,” Mick said.
“It’s not for sale,” Dance said.
“I didn’t ask you if it was for sale. But I wil
l ask you, what you have for trade.”
“Trade?” Grayson said.
Dance was speaking in a calm, quiet voice. “We just need to turn around. We’ll be on our way and won’t bother you.”
“Turnaround goes through our place.”
“Listen, sir.” Grayson held up his dead phone and shook it. “Do you know what’s going on? The weather? Any news at all? We can’t get any service.”
“Service? We never had service here. Shit. Maybe it’s an uprising.” The man looked into the distance. “Maybe it’s a Tuesday in West Virginia.”
“We’ll pass straight on through,” Dance said. “We won’t even stop.”
“You don’t have to stop,” the man said. “If you drive this way, you pay us.”
It was a racket. They had dragged the cars over to block the highway, and were hitting up everyone who took the turn. Like we had, dumbly, ignoring the warning spray-painted on the sign. Misreading it.
I stared at the back of Grayson’s head, his neck held stiff and alert. If we didn’t produce an item they wanted, the men would start riffling through our truck. They might find the grow lights, the cash, the gun.
I had stuffed the gun under the driver’s seat when it had been my turn behind the wheel, hiding it in a hole in the upholstery. Lobo had cut the hole for just such a purpose, digging out the seat stuffing, gray as entrails, and hollowing a slit for money or drugs or anything my mama or I might need to hide. The men at the gate might wonder why we had such things, why we had made a secret place for them. I looked at the men’s guns, their long barrels, magazines as big and black as the wings of a giant bird. They weren’t just rifles. They were semis—maybe fully automatic.
I sensed the leather pouch of seeds around my neck, warm and soft against my skin.
Grayson said, “What if we give you—”
But Mick said, “Oh, we don’t want any of your things. We have plenty of things. We’re stocked. We’re good to go. We’ve been ready for something like this for a long time.”