Noises at the front door, a gust of cold wind. She doesn’t look up. She clears the baby’s mouth with her finger, then gently turns him over and rubs his back, his arms and legs hanging limp. One, two, three rubs. A little movement. Not enough. When the child finally gasps in air, his arms and legs do not move. She turns the child over—he is so tiny, a crumpled fairy frog—then lays him down across her thigh, flicks a finger against his feet. Nothing.
Annie is beside her now, her hands ready. She passes the child to Annie and gets up to check the mother over. Candice tore, but only a little; she’ll be okay.
She can hear people trying to be quiet in the kitchen. When she turns back to Annie, it’s been five minutes since the birth; they tap the baby’s tiny feet again and still he doesn’t react, though his chest heaves up and down. They don’t need to say anything to one another—instead Annie swaddles the baby and hands him to his parents.
They stay the rest of the night, keeping the wood stove alive, catching bits of sleep in turns in the armchairs. They try to feed the baby—first at his mother’s breast, and then with some formula from the clinic. In the morning the baby is still breathing but is otherwise unresponsive. The parents are vibrating with terror.
“What can we do?” Seth whispers.
“He lost oxygen to the brain,” Tasha says. “Because of the cord.”
“He’ll be able to move eventually—won’t he?” Candice asks.
Tasha doesn’t answer. She sees the mother swallow.
“He won’t latch,” Candice says. “I’m holding his head right up to my breast and he won’t latch.”
“He’s three months premature,” Tasha says, as gently as she can. “There is likely significant brain damage. He’s not moving his arms and legs because he can’t. He won’t latch because he can’t. We can try to give him more formula, but you should know that this is going to be difficult.”
“Difficult how?” Seth asks.
“He’s not going to have the life you wanted him to have,” she says, slowly. “You can take a car and try to reach another city, somewhere with a hospital that might be better equipped. If you find one, they might be able to do more for him than we can. Take a car—we can give you some of the gas we have left.”
“But what about the snow?” Candice’s voice rises in panic. “What happens if we take a car and leave and don’t find anything and he doesn’t latch?”
By now, they all know the stories Joseph has brought them. Haphazard militia who prowl what’s left of the highways, thieves who ambush families and steal their cars, leaving them to die on the road.
“We can give you more formula,” Annie says.
“And what if that runs out?” Candice looks at them both, her eyes wild. “What if we run out of gas? What happens if there’s no clean water or snow to mix the formula with when we’re on the road?”
Annie, eventually, says, “You’ll have anywhere from three days to three weeks.”
The mother closes her eyes. When she opens them again, they are bottomless in a way that reminds Tasha of Heather. “It’s so cold outside,” Candice says. “I could take him to the mountain, like other mothers have. It would be just like falling asleep.”
“What other mothers?” Tasha asks, her voice sharp.
Candice opens her eyes and stares at her as if from far away. “Mothers who leave their children in the snow,” she says. “Mothers who leave their children on the mountain. Everyone knows the stories.”
Tasha looks at Seth, at the people now huddled listening near the door to the kitchen. “Is this true?” she asks. How many mothers have taken their children away? She sees the bodies piled in frozen lumps at the base of the mountain, pilgrims on a climb to nowhere.
An older woman steps forward—thin like the rest of them, unbowed and tall. “It’s an old story,” she says. “Just something parents used to say to keep their children in line. Wolves who lured children up the mountain. Foxes who stole mothers away. My parents told me the same stories years ago.”
“Stories,” Tasha echoes. “Like the stories the others talked about in the fall? Only stories? You’re sure?”
The woman laughs. “You’ve been here long enough, Tasha—the whole city is filled with stories like this. Mountain superstition—that’s all it is. We can hardly get down the sidewalks. You think anyone is going to go near the mountain in the snow?”
“We’re not going up the mountain,” Seth snaps. “We have to try.”
Candice blinks, comes back to herself. “Yes,” she says, and nods.
Annie packs the car herself, loading it with as much food as they can spare, and all the formula they have. The other people from the house busy themselves clearing a path out of town as best as they can. Tasha gives the couple one of the flashlights from the clinic and a map—not that maps mean all that much anymore. She’s marked the closest city anyway.
“Be safe,” she tells them through the window of the car. They are terrified, almost babies themselves. The car creeps away down the road and disappears around a corner.
Three days later they come back, and they no longer have the child.
Cans of stewed tomatoes, cans of corned beef and Spam. Bags of beans and lentils. The food that is dropped off at various parts of the town is just enough to keep their stores from dwindling into nothing. And yet as the winter begins to rage in earnest, even these gifts are not enough. It snows constantly. Soon the food drops are only on the outskirts of town. Deliveries go unnoticed, buried under the snow.
Sometimes there are footprints. Someone on a horse.
Brendan suggests putting a guard at the front of the clinic, to try to catch the “Food Angel,” as some of the people have begun to say. Tasha vetoes this idea.
“Don’t you want to know?” Annie asks her, incredulous, one night as they lie together in the clinic. Elyse is back at the townhouse, huddled in blankets, sleeping alone. They told her she could stay, but she refused.
“You’ve done so much for me,” she said. “You deserve some time alone.”
But this is what alone time with Annie means now—it’s like lying on a mattress beside a stranger, the gulf between them growing wider by the day.
“Someone’s been hiding food from us all this time,” Annie presses. “Doesn’t that make you angry?”
“Maybe it’s not someone in the town,” Tasha says.
“Who else could it be?”
Tasha shrugs. “Look—it’s helping us get through the winter. Let’s just stop asking questions for right now, and be thankful someone is helping at all.”
“You’re making no sense,” Annie says. “You’re the one who always wants answers to everything! Why are you letting go of this so easily?”
Tasha thinks about this. What else could it be? Some strange visitor, creeping through their city streets at night. Magic? She feels a whisper of something black and dark against her soul and tries not to shiver. If that’s real, what else is real? What other stories might come to life?
“What are we going to do if we find them out?” she says, slowly. “Raid their stores? If it’s someone from outside the city, are we going to keep them here, make them give us everything they have? Whoever they are, they want to stay hidden. And I don’t think we can spare the energy to find out who it is. Things for the townspeople are already”—broken, she wants to say, but still she refuses—“bad.”
Annie stares at the ceiling, silent for a moment, then says, “We could go, you know.”
“What?”