Kerans gazed across the room at the shadowy mound of the other man in his sleeping bag.
“What do you figure happened?”
“Hell, I don’t know. You heard the radio as well as I did. Something got loose from a military lab. Terrorists. Maybe just a mutation. Ebola, something like that.”
Another conversation they’d had a dozen times. It was like picking a scab.
A long time passed. Kerans didn’t know how long it was.
“It doesn’t matter, I guess,” he said, adrift between sleep and waking.
“Not anymore,” Lanyan said, and the words chased Kerans down a dark hole into sleep.
Lanyan woke him into that same unearthly blue light, and for a moment Kerans didn’t know where he was. Only that strange undersea radiance, his sense of time and place out of joint, a chill undertow of anxiety. Then it all came flooding back, the plague, Felicia’s fall, the blizzard.
Lanyan’s expression echoed his unease.
“Get up,” he said.
“What’s going on?”
“Just get up.”
Kerans followed him to the window. Natalie crouched there, gazing out into the sheets of blowing snow. She held the pistol in one hand.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“There’s something in the snow,” she said.
“What?”
“I heard it. It woke me up.”
“You hear anything, Cliff?”
Lanyan shrugged.
Wind tore at the house, rattling gutters. Kerans peered into the snow, but if there was anything out there, he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see anything but a world gone white. The streetlamp loomed above them, a bulb of fuzzy blue light untethered from the earth.
“Heard what?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It woke me. Something in the snow.”
“The wind,” Kerans said.
“It sounded like it was alive.”
“Listen to it blow out there. You could hear anything in that. The brain, it”—he hesitated—
“What?” Natalie said.
“All I’m saying is, it’s easy enough to imagine something like that. Voices in the wind. Shapes in the snow.”
Natalie’s breath fogged the window. “I didn’t imagine anything.”
“Look,” he said. “It’s late. We’re all tired. You could have imagined something, that’s all I’m saying.”
“I said I didn’t imagine it.”
And then, as though the very words had summoned it into being, a thin shriek carved the wind—alien, predatory, unearthly as the cry of a hunting raptor. The snow muffled it, made it hard to track how far away it was, but it was closer than Kerans wanted it to be. It held for a moment, wavering, and dropped away. A heartbeat passed, then two, and then came an answering cry, farther away. Kerans swallowed hard, put his back to the wall, and slid to the floor. He pulled his knees up, dropped his head between them. He could feel the cold radiating from the window, shivering erect the tiny hairs on his neck. He looked up. His breath unfurled in the gloom. They were both watching him, Lanyan and Natalie.
“It’s the wind,” he said. Hating himself as he said it, hating this new weakness he’d discovered in himself, this inability to face what in his heart he knew to be true.
Came a third cry then, still farther away.
“Jesus,” Lanyan said.
“They’re surrounding us,” Natalie said.
“They’re?” Kerans said. “They’re? Who the hell do you think could be out there in that?”
Natalie turned and met his gaze. “I don’t know,” she said.
They checked the house, throwing deadbolts, locking interior doors and windows. Kerans didn’t get the windows. You wanted to get inside bad enough, you just broke the glass. Yet there was something comforting in sliding the little tongue into its groove all the same. Symbolic barriers. Like cavemen, drawing circles of fire against the night.
As for sleep, forget it.
He leaned against the sofa, draped in his sleeping bag, envying Felicia the oblivion of the oxycodone. Her skin was hot to the touch, greasy with perspiration. He could smell, or imagined he could smell, the putrescent wound, the inadequate dressing soaked with gore.
Across the room sat Lanyan, the Benelli flat across his legs. At the window, her back propped against the wall, Natalie, cradling the pistol in her lap. Kerans felt naked with just the hunting knife at his belt.
The snow kept coming, slanting down past the streetlamp, painting the room with that strange, swimming light. Lanyan’s face looked blue and cold, like the face of a dead man. Natalie’s, too. And he didn’t even want to think about Felicia, burning up under the covers, sweating out the fever of the infection.
“We should look at her leg,” he said.
“And do what?” Natalie responded, and what could he say to that because there was nothing to do, Kerans knew that as well as anyone, yet he felt compelled in his impotence to do something, anything, even if it was just stripping back the sleeping bag and staring at the wound, stinking and inflamed, imperfectly splinted, oozing blood and yellow pus.
“Just keep doling out those drugs,” Lanyan said, and Kerans knew he meant the oxycodone, not the amoxicillin, which couldn’t touch an infection of this magnitude, however much he prayed—and he was not a praying man. He couldn’t help recalling his mother, dying in agony from bone cancer: the narrow hospital room, stinking of antiseptic, with its single forlorn window; the doctor, a hulking Greek, quick to anger, who spoke in heavily accented English. We’re into pain management now, he’d said.
“How much is left?” Natalie said, and Kerans realized that he’d been turning the prescription bottle in his hands.
“Ten, maybe fifteen pills.”
“Not enough,” she said. “I don’t think it’s enough,” and a bright fuse of hatred for her burned through him for giving voice to thoughts he could barely acknowledge as his own.
After that, silence.
Kerans’s eyes were grainy with exhaustion, yet he could not sleep.
None of them could sleep.
Unspeaking, they listened for voices in the storm.
At two, they came: one, two, three metallic screeches in the wind.
Lanyan took one window, Natalie the other, lifting her pistol.
Kerans stayed with Felicia. She was stirring now, coming out of her oxycodone haze. “What is it?” she said.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
But it was something.
“There,” Natalie said, but she needn’t have said it at all.
Even from his place by the sofa, Kerans saw it: a blue shadow darting past the window, little more than a blur, seven feet long or longer, horizontal to the earth, tail lashing, faster than anything that size had any right to be, faster than anything human. There and gone again, obscured by a veil of blowing snow.
Kerans’s own words mocked him. Imagination. Shapes in the snow.
He thought of that icy snow tapping like fingernails at the window.
Let me in.
Felicia said, “Dave? What is it, Dave?”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
Silence prevailed. Shifting veils of snow.
“What the hell was that thing?” Lanyan said.
And Natalie from her window. “Let’s play a game.”
Nobody said a word.
“The game is called ‘What if?’” she said.
“What are you talking about?” Kerans said.
“What if you were an alien species?”
“Oh, come on,” Kerans said, but Lanyan was grim and silent.
“Way ahead of us technologically, capable of travel between stars.”
“This is crazy, Dave,” Felicia said. “What is she talking about?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“And what if you wanted to clear a planet for colonization?”