Robby tugged on Nate’s hand and tried to pull him backwards. Nate wouldn’t budge. In fact, Nate tightened his grip and started to pull Robby forward. The grip stung Robby’s lacerated hand.
“What are you doing? Let me go,” Robby yelled.
“Come on, Robby,” Nate said. “We’re home.”
Robby dug in his heels, squeezed his eyes shut, and tugged on his hand, trying to pull it from Nate’s. The man locked an iron grip on his hand. Pain flared from Robby’s palm as blood began to ooze from his recent wound. Finally, his hand popped free and Robby fell sprawling to his back, with his arm up to shield his eyes from the light. He flipped over and pushed to his feet, fighting against a thick stream of people, who walked towards the light.
He saw one or two corpses with missing eyes, grinning as they trudged ahead, but mostly Robby saw normal-looking men and women of all ages, locked in shuffling trances. They walked shoulder-to-shoulder, and Robby squeezed between them to make his retreat. He burst through a line of tall men, dressed in identical gray pants and white shirts, and finally got a glimpse of the magnitude of the mass of people trudging towards the light. The landscape sloped upwards from the light and people shuffled towards him as far as he could see. He spun as far as he dared to the left and right, and saw the same thing in every direction—endless people. Their faces wore broad smiles; their eyes sparkled with the light from the ball of light that drew them. Nobody spoke or made any noise. The only break in the silence was the gentle shuffle of feet.
What he didn’t see was equally amazing—no snow; no road of ice; no tractor perched at the top of a hill. His adventure in central Maine transformed somehow into this climb through an endless crowd of people. Up ahead, perhaps fifty paces from Robby, a hand shot up and waved.
Robby’s jaw fell open as the shout carried through the thick air.
“Robby!”
It was his father’s voice calling and his father’s hand waving. Robby shut his eyes fast, but before he did he saw that his father was flanked by his mother on one side and grandmother on the other. They all smiled at him with the same blank look.
“No, no, no,” Robby said as he shook his head. Tears leaked out of his squeezed-shut eyes. He both waited to hear his father’s voice again and prayed it wouldn’t come. Robby reached out and pulled himself through the crowd, pushing through the shifting flow of people. They didn’t care. Their rapture took all their attention away from Robby plowing the wrong way through their migration.
“No, no, no, no,” Robby repeated again and again as his hands turned to fists and he blindly smashed through wave after wave of people. When he ran out of people to pull against, Robby kept running with his eyes shut, now yelling, “No!”
Another earsplitting crash of thunder from behind him drove him to his knees. Robby clutched his ears, his eyes still shut, and collapsed to the ground. He curled up in a ball as two more explosions burst through his head.
“Robby? Robby?” a voice asked.
Robby shook his head and some part of him registered the cold surface pressed against his face.
“Let’s go, Robby. We should get moving,” the voice said.
It took Robby a second to recognized Brad’s voice. He opened his eyes slowly, not quite willing to trust his ears.
Brad was holding out his mirror.
“You dropped this,” Brad said. “The ball of light looks like it’s collapsing. We should go.”
Robby took the mirror and held it up. It took a second to orient himself, and then another to understand what he was seeing. Only a couple of eyeless people still marched towards the light, and they had farther to go than their predecessors. The ball shrank down and developed continents of splotchy brown spots, which swam over its surface. Another peal of thunder rolled across the ice and blue light flashed as an eyeless corpse merged with the light. Robby saw the ball expand a tiny amount and then contract as it absorbed the body. The massive throng of smiling, migrating people was gone, replaced again with the cold icy road.
Robby let Brad help him to his feet and they jogged up the slope towards the tractors.
AT THE TOP of the hill they found Pete, Romie, and Lisa at the back of the second sled. They had one snowmobile on the ice and were wrestling a second down from a trailer.
“Robby!” Lisa shouted. She grabbed Robby up into a big hug. “We didn’t think you were going to come back out.”
“Come back out of what?” Robby asked.
“We need to pull down a third snowmobile,” Pete said. “We shouldn’t ride three on one of these.”
“It’s okay, Pete,” Romie said. “We’ve made it this long. What’s makes you think we don’t have time to pull another snowmobile.”
“Who knows how much time we’ve got?" Pete asked. “We’re rolling the dice, is all I’m saying. After all this, we’re just standing around?”
“Then get moving,” Romie said. “I’ll finish unhooking this one. You and Brad get down to the next one.”
Brad and Pete took off down the ice and doubled their pace when they heard the next blast from down the hill. The sound crashed louder, and rumbled longer, than the earlier explosions. Lisa straddled a snowmobile and motioned for Robby to get on behind her. Romie fired up the other one and drove it down the ramp to the ice. Together, they caught up with Pete and Brad and helped them unstrap the third snowmobile. Soon, without any gear except what Pete lashed to the snowmobiles before they left Portland, the five people streaked away on their snowmobiles.
Robby rode behind Lisa. He gripped her around the waist, and looked back over his shoulder for the first few miles. He tucked his gloveless hand in a fold of her jacket. The glow from the ball of light was barely visible against the clouds now. Somewhere on the other side of the clouds the sun rose. Robby thought he saw a couple more blue flashes radiating from under the ice, but it was hard to tell if it was real or just an illusion created by his over-tired eyes.
Soon, Robby rested his head against Lisa’s shoulder and hoped she wasn’t as tired as he was. It had been a long night of fighting for their lives and driving. It would be so easy now to just drift off to sleep and lose control of the snowmobile. Robby thought he should offer to switch positions with Lisa and take over the driving for a while, but before he could will himself to tap her on the shoulder, he nodded off.
“WHERE ARE WE?” Robby asked.
“Welcome back to the Dead Ferret,” Brad said. “You’ve been here before. In fact, this is where I first met you, remember?”
“Vaguely,” Robby said. He sat up on the couch and glanced around the dim living room. His boots, glove, hat, and jacket had been removed, but he was still dressed. Someone had draped a warm wool blanket over him and in the corner a kerosene stove radiated heat. “We’re here because of Buster and Glen?”
“Yes,” Brad said. “We figured it might not be safe over at the apartments. We don’t know if there are friends of those guys still wandering around.”