Reapers (22 page)

"
Lucy?
" A funny look flooded Tilly's face. Some of it was surprise, which Lucy had expected. But most of it was something different. Something that made Lucy expect to look over her shoulder and see that Kerry had shed his skin and emerged as a six-foot spider.

Because nothing else would explain the commingled horror and disgust awash on her friend's face.

Tilly slammed the door and snapped the bolt shut.

II:
BLIZZARD

14

In the pines and the snow, Ellie froze mid-step. It wasn't the body or its gnawed-up state that stilled her. Everyone born before the Panhandler had seen enough bodies to grow tolerant of them, if not exactly inured.

It was the fact there was a body at all. She should know better, but she couldn't accept the fact that as recently as four days ago, she'd seen Quinn walking around, hugging Dee, pledging to help his dad recover their grain from the Franklins. This piece of meat on the forest floor—half buried in leaves, features lost in the attack or to hungry carrion-eaters—she couldn't reconcile it with the Quinn Tolbert who would soon become a permanent part of her own family.

So while Dee's shrieks faded to hitching, jittery sobs, Ellie stared.

Sheriff Hobson knelt down beside the corpse, hitching up the leg of his pants. He wore thin leather gloves against the cold, but he pulled these off, finger by finger, then reached into his pack for a pair of thin latex. He touched the remains of the young man's face, turning it side to side. As Ellie's mind regrouped, he got out an honest-to-god magnifying glass and inspected an exposed cheekbone.

"Light, please?" he beckoned.

Ellie walked close and raised her lantern. "Do you see something?"

"Bit of a scrape on the bone."

"Given the condition of the body..."

"I'm aware the skin wasn't borne away on the wings of angels," the sheriff said, unusually testy. He rocked out of the way, crablike, and held out his magnifying glass. "It's the manifestation of the scrape that has me nonplussed."

Ellie glanced at Dee, who had balled herself up in the leaves and snow, then took the glass and moved close to the body. The blood was frozen, and with the eyes and nose and mouth missing, she was better able to pretend this was an object and not a dead human.

Hobson pointed to a thin line across the pink-stained bone. "You see?"

She looked closer. It was an inch long and needle-thin. "And?"

"Unless we're dealing with a species of landfaring pike, I don't know many animals with teeth that fine."

"A knife? So he was killed by people, not animals or weather."

The sheriff steepled his hands in front of his chin. "At the risk of indelicacy, can we take a step back? What I see is a body that fits the general description and our timeline. But we still haven't confirmed it's
ours
."

Ellie nodded, absorbed this, then nodded harder. "You're right. I shouldn't be jumping ahead."

Hobson closed his eyes and shook his head lightly. "A natural process. When stress increases, rational faculties diminish. I expect that, when our ancestors were ambushed during a cave-calculus lesson, they discovered the solution could wait until they'd finished fleeing from the tiger."

Still, she was embarrassed. So obvious in hindsight. But this wasn't the time to indulge in self-laceration. "Dee, what was Quinn was wearing the night he disappeared? Dee?"

"I don't know," the girl whispered.

Hobson gestured to the body. "Well, surely he wasn't wearing a jumpsuit, was he?"

"Almost looks like a prison uniform," Ellie said. Snow fell on the body and didn't melt. "Back at their office, did you smell the oil?"

"The lights were electric."

"Automotive oil. When they came in from the side door, the smell came with them. I think they were working on machines."

"Could be a mechanic's garb." Hobson raised his latex-gloved finger to his mouth, perhaps to tap it against his teeth, then arrested it a few inches away and stared at it guiltily. He lowered it and leaned close to Ellie. "Were the two of them...intimate?"

Ellie glanced up sharply. "What the fuck does that matter? She loves him."

"I was wondering," he explained, with admirable patience, "if she might recognize any distinguishing physical characteristics."

"Dee," she said. "I know this is awful. You hurt worse than the world. But Sheriff Hobson wonders—"

"I heard him." Dee lay on her side, eyes wide open. She rolled to her knees. Leaves stuck to her hair; her face was damp with tears and melted snow. "Quinn has three moles in a line below his left hip. I used to call it the Belt of Orion."

"Cursed jumpsuits," the sheriff muttered. Ellie reached for its snaps. The sheriff waved her off. "I've got it."

"I'm not a shrinking violet, sheriff. I froze for a moment. I'm fine now."

She opened the man's shirt. The body was stiff with rigor or cold or both and it took the two of them to roll it on its side. The sheriff braced it while Ellie tugged down the jumpsuit top and exposed the man's hip.

"Light," she said. The sheriff stretched for the lantern and held it up. She touched the brown skin. It was eerily cold. "Dee, can you come look?"

Wordless, Dee walked on her knees through the leaves and bent over the body. "I don't see them." She glanced at its belly and moved his underclothes aside. "Doesn't shave right." Her eyes went brighter than the lantern. "Holy shit!"

Ellie grinned and embraced her. "Oh sweetie."

"I'll assume the verdict is good?" The sheriff eased the body to rest on its back. "That raises new questions, doesn't it?"

Ellie nodded. "Was the woman at the office just passing along a rumor? Or actively trying to throw us off?"

"Wounds are awfully rough." He pointed to the gashes in the neck, which had become more and more obvious as they'd wrestled with the body.

Ellie sat back and lifted her lantern. "No obvious sign of struggle."

"Rules out animals?"

"Right. But a person could have killed him elsewhere and dumped him here."

Hobson's eyes glittered in the lanterns. "Or taken the lad by surprise."

Dee laughed hoarsely. "Get married already."

They both gave her a look. Ellie tried to move the body's left arm, but it wouldn't budge. She set its brown fingers against the light contrast of her gloved palm. The nails were grimed black. She leaned in and sniffed.

"What are you
doing
?" Dee said.

"Smells like grease." Ellie let the hand go. "Add the jumpsuit, and I'd say he's one of their own."

"Explains rather neatly how the old woman knew about him," Hobson said. "And if she knew it
wasn't
Quinn, then it stands to reason she intended to mislead us—perhaps to obscure his trail."

"Let's take it as fact that she knows about the kidnappings. She doesn't necessarily know about Quinn." Ellie sniffed. Her nose was running and her knees were soaked through. "Let's find shelter. If the snow gets much deeper, the bikes won't be any good."

Ellie walked away from the body without a second thought for burying it. The ground was too hard. Anyway, it was extraneous to the mission.

A half inch of snow lay on the road. On flat stretches, the bikes could handle it without skidding, but at the tops of hills, they had to coast to a stop and walk their bicycles down to the bottom. Ellie's heavy trailer fought her the whole way; at the steeper points, Hobson helped her wrangle it while Dee walked the other two bikes along.

The first house they stopped at had broken windows and a dusting of snow across the front room. The second house came to them like a present: intact windows, unlocked door, a package of Presto logs shrink-wrapped beside the fireplace. They cleared the home for animals and people, then Ellie opened the flue and broke up the crumbling sawdust logs and banked them into a fire. A needle-thin draft pierced one of the windows, but the house soon grew warm enough that they stopped being able to see their own breath.

"What now?" Dee said, wrapped in a down sleeping bag in the middle of the room, smooth face lit by the flapping fire. "Where
is
he?"

"We're on track," Ellie said. "We'll find him."

But it was a thing she said, not a thing she believed. The world had grown too big and too dark to be certain of anything. Snow hit the window, glinted in the firelight, and melted away into nothing.

She woke in the middle of the night and quietly revived the fire from its embers. She woke again, uncertain of the time except that it was hours later, but she knew her body well enough to know she wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. She went outside to pee. The snow had stopped. Four inches lay on the ground, muffling everything to perfect silence.

She unwrapped the last of the artificial logs. The crinkling of the package woke the others. Dawn touched the snow, too hesitant to melt it. The bread had grown as tough as the jerky. Finished eating, Ellie unhitched the trailer from her bike and rode circles through the unpaved snow. Turning was difficult, and she skidded every time she braked, but she thought they'd be okay.

The five-mile ride was an hour-long slog. Snow squeaked beneath their tires and draped the roofs. It had come early in the year, but the clouds were high and gray, suggesting more. Ellie had always liked snow—it slowed things down, seemed to clarify them; within that homogenous white world, each sound and movement stood out like blood on a porcelain floor—but in this age, it meant something more. The end of growth. Of easy days. You lived on what you'd gathered during the green months, and if you had to leave your home for unknown lands, the margins of survival were an act of threadlike fineness.

At the hexagonal office, an engine grumbled from the garage. Hobson got out his pocket watch and clicked it open. "I'm going to take a constitutional. I shall return in twenty minutes."

Ellie pushed open the door and rang the desk bell. After her third try, the man with the glasses and dirty fingernails came in from the side door.

"Nan's not in," he said. "Try back this afternoon."

"We found the body," Ellie said. "What was left of it."

"Was it him?" the man said. Ellie nodded. He lowered his eyes. "I'm sorry."

"People pushed death to the horizon for a couple of centuries. Now it's close again." She gazed at the side door. "My employer will want the body."

He frowned. "Have at it."

"We can't bear it on these bikes. Not through six inches of snow. I heard you might have some machines here?"

Until now, the man had maintained a look of awkward consolation. Now, professional interest emerged in his eyes. "Could be. What are you looking for?"

"We're from the mountains. Got any snowmobiles?"

"Sure," he said. "We've got everything."

He held the door open to a frigid underground garage. Parking spots were occupied by cars, trucks, tractors, combines, four-wheelers, ATVs. Many were partly or wholly dismantled, but others sat complete and ready, dust-free.

"Nice collection," Ellie said.

He glanced over his shoulder, smiling proudly. "This is our main business. We sell across the whole state—Buffalo, Rochester, the city."

"People buy these?" Dee said. "You can get cars anywhere."

"Sure. But ours run." His shoes echoed past the concrete pillars. He led them to the far corner and pulled a blue tarp from a bright red snowmobile. "Not much demand for these, but if you ask me, there ought to be. When the snow gets deep, the roads might as well not be there at all."

"We didn't bring much in trade," Ellie said.

"We have a credit program."

"What kind of terms?"

"Flexible for your needs."

"And in case of nonpayment?"

The man peered through his glasses. "Do you expect that to be a problem?"

"My employer would whip me skinless if I entered a contract without knowing the terms."

He blew into his hands and rubbed them vigorously. "That's Nan's business. I'm just the fixer-man."

"Looks well taken care of." Ellie walked around the snowmobile, examining it. "Do you deal in more organic forms of labor?"

The man tugged a single hair from his head, puzzled, then jerked his chin to the side. "That's not our trade. We didn't take your boy."

"Any idea who did?"

"This highway leads straight to the city. People come through here all the time."

"My employer's looking for some extra hands." She touched the handlebars of the machine, waiting, but the man offered nothing more. "We'll be back to see Nan about these."

He accompanied them through the garage to the lobby, then watched them walk outside. Ellie zipped up her coat. "Notice anything?"

Dee shrugged her shoulders high. "Should I have?"

"This isn't a test."

"I didn't trust him. He didn't feel right."

"How so?"

"Like he molests his cars' tailpipes." Dee walked toward the sidewalk where they'd left their bikes. "Plus, when you asked about Quinn, he got all weird."

"They slipped up when they told us about the body. Should have denied everything and let us twist in the wind. They got too clever."

"So what do we do now?"

"We take a run at Nan. If that fails, we tail them. Stake out the town. Stay all winter if we have to."

"In the meantime, what happens to Quinn?"

Ellie rubbed her nose. Footsteps crunched in the snow, saving her from an answer. Hobson walked up, cane in hand, a self-satisfied smile on his face.

"Learn anything, ladies?"

Ellie shook her head. "You?"

"Indeed." He tapped his cane against the soles of his feet, knocking off the snow. "Someone here drives a truck."

"Wonderful. We should find them and congratulate them."

"Let me drop one more detail: the owner of the truck is in the habit of carrying as many as six other men in it with him."

She met his eyes. "What did you find?"

"Follow me." He swept his cane north. Past the windowless garage attached to the office, he hooked left to a field between the garage and the highway. Tire tracks cut through the snow, half-blurred by fresh powder. Twenty yards from a blank door in the garage face, Hobson stopped and nodded at the ground. "What do you see?"