It was reaching its dark hand inside her, taking her over. Her mind was fogged with it. Soon it would overwhelm her will to resist.
“It’s getting … harder.”
“When the time comes—”
“I’m not going to let it.”
All around, the snow was falling. Alicia knew that if she didn’t leave soon, she might get stuck. One last thing needed to be said. It took all her courage to form the words.
“Take care of Peter. You can’t let him know what happened to me. Promise me that.”
“Lish—”
“You can tell him anything else. Make up a story. I don’t care. But I need your word.”
A deep quiet ensued, encasing the two of them. Alicia had been alone with this knowledge for too long; now it was shared. She searched her emotions. Loss, relief, the feeling of crossing a border into a dark country. She was giving him up.
“In a way, I’ve always known this would happen. Even before I met you. There was always somebody else.”
Amy made no reply. Her silence told Alicia all she needed to know.
“You should go,” Alicia said.
Still Amy said nothing. Her face was uncertain. Then:
“There’s something I haven’t told you, Lish.”
Gray day into gray day. The continent’s vast inland empire of weather. Would it snow? Would the sun ever come out again? Would the wind blow at their backs or into their frozen faces? They walked and walked, hunched forward against the weight of their packs. There were no signs, no landmarks. The roads and towns were gone, subsumed like sunken ships beneath the waves of snowy prairie. Tifty confessed that he didn’t know exactly where they were. Central Iowa, northeast of Des Moines, but anything more specific … He made no apologies; the situation was what it was. Why couldn’t you have decided to do this in summer? he said.
They were almost out of food. They’d cut their rations in half, but half of nothing would be nothing. As they huddled inside a ruined farmhouse, Lore doled out the meager slices on the blade of her knife. Peter placed his beneath his tongue to make it last, the hardened fat dissolving slowly in the warmth of his mouth.
They went on.
Then, late on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth day, a vision appeared: materializing slowly from a colorless sky, a tall sign, rocking in the wind. They made their way toward it; a cluster of buildings emerged. What town was this? It didn’t matter; the need for shelter trumped every other concern. They passed through the outer commercial ring, with its husks of supermarkets and chain stores, flat roofs long collapsed under the weight of winter snow, and continued into the old town. The usual remnants and rubble, but at the heart they came to two blocks of brick buildings that appeared sound.
“Don’t suppose we’ll find anything to eat in there,” Michael said.
They were standing before a storefront, the front windows of which were amazingly unbroken. Faded lettering on the glass read, FANCY’S CAFÉ.
Hollis said, “Looks like they’ve been out of business for a while.”
They forced the door and entered. A narrow space, with booths of cracked vinyl opposite a counter with stools; except for the dust, which caked every surface, it was remarkably undisturbed. From time to time one found such a place, a museum of the past where the passage of decades had somehow failed to register, more eerie than ruins.
Michael lifted a menu from a stack on the counter and opened it. “What’s meatloaf? I get the meat part, but a loaf of it?”
“Jesus, Michael,” Lore said. She was shivering, her lips blue. “Don’t make it worse.”
Hollis and Peter scouted the back. The rear door and windows had been sealed with plywood; a hammer and nails lay on the floor.
“We’re not going to get much farther without food,” Hollis said gravely.
“You don’t have to remind me.”
They returned to the front of the café, where the others were bundling themselves in blankets on the floor. Darkness was falling. The room was freezing, but at least they were out of the wind.
“I’m going to look around,” Peter said. “Maybe I can figure out where we are.”
He slogged his way across the street, then moved down the block, peering in the storefronts. He tried some of the doors, but all were locked. Well, they could come back in the morning and open a few to see what was there.
At the end of the second block he tried a handle without looking—he was just going through the motions now—and was startled