Chapter 7 The Price of Warmth #2
Nell looked at Mae, then at the floor.
“No.”
“Then you wait.”
“She doesn’t have family here.”
“Most don’t.”
“I held her hand.”
Inez’s face softened by a degree.
“Then keep yourself clean enough to hold it again.”
Nell wanted to argue. Dane could see it gather in her shoulders. Instead, she stepped back, swallowing the words like something bitter.
Otto lowered himself onto a quarantine mat near the fireplace and let out a sound that made two nearby children giggle.
“I am becoming floor,” he announced quietly. “Tell my story with dignity.”
Elias stood beside the lobby window, looking toward the parking lot where Tomber sat among the barricades.
“I need tools. Real tools. Lift if they got one. That steering won’t hold down long grades.”
The older man with the clipboard, whose name turned out to be Paul Brigg, looked offended by the idea that anyone might inventory his garage without a committee.
“We don’t let strangers into the maintenance bay.”
Elias stared at him.
“Then don’t call me stranger. Call me the man keeping that truck from steering itself into your breakfast room.”
Paul looked at Dane as if hoping for a more reasonable translation.
Dane said, “He means please.”
Elias snorted.
“I do not.”
Lark stood apart from everyone, near a support beam, one hand braced lightly against his ribs. People in the lodge watched him more than the others. Some recognized the military pants. Some only recognized the posture. After Cedar Draw, the difference may not have mattered.
A small boy approached Nell while she sat on the edge of a bench with the cooler between her feet.
“What’s in the box?” he asked.
Nell looked at him.
“Medicine.”
“For bites?”
“No.”
“My dad got bit.”
Nell’s face shifted.
The boy said it with the plain exhaustion of children who had learned adults reacted too much to certain facts. He looked about eight. His hair stuck up in the back. One sleeve was too long and had been folded over his hand.
Nell said, “I’m sorry.”
“He’s outside now.”
Nell’s eyes lifted toward the doors.
The boy pointed vaguely uphill.
“Not right outside. Buried outside.”
“Oh.”
“My mom says don’t ask people about boxes, but boxes are usually interesting.”
Nell gave a small, tired smile.
“Your mom sounds smart.”
“She cries in the pantry.”
The smile vanished.
Before Nell could answer, the boy’s mother appeared and pulled him back with an apologetic nod that was more fear than manners. She looked at the cooler, then at Nell, and hurried away.
Dane saw Nell notice.
Warmth had a price. So did being strange.
Rosa emerged from the side room nearly an hour later, sleeves rolled, face drawn.
“Mae’s asleep. Inez drained the wound, started antibiotics, splinted what she could. Leg’s bad, but not hopeless if infection stays down.”
Dane leaned against the wall near the hallway, because standing unsupported had become less convincing.
“And Lark?”
“She wants to examine him. He’s avoiding her.”
“Sounds military.”
“She also wants to examine you.”
“Unnecessary.”
Rosa looked at his knee.
“Your limp is getting louder.”
“My limp doesn’t talk.”
“It’s practically Otto.”
Across the room, Otto lifted his head.
“I heard my name and resent the context.”
Rosa did not smile. That told Dane she was more worried than she wanted to show.
She stepped closer, lowering her voice.
“Inez says we can stay until nightfall if we help with perimeter watch and don’t bring trouble.”
“We brought trouble before we arrived.”
“She knows.”
Dane looked toward the front doors, beyond which Tomber rested under gray afternoon light.
“Did anyone here mention Milemen?”
Rosa’s expression changed.
“Not openly. But they have rules about them, and everyone looks at the road like it owes them money.”
“Reeve’s reached here.”
“Or fear of him has.”
“That reaches farther.”
A crash came from the far side of the lobby.
Dane turned.
Lark had knocked over a chair.
Not by accident. A man in a red flannel shirt stood three feet from him, fists clenched, face twisted with the reckless courage of grief. Several people rose around them. The teenage guard brought up his shotgun halfway before Inez snapped his name from the medical room doorway.
The man in flannel pointed at Lark.
“I know that uniform.”
Lark stood still, hands open.
“I’m not wearing the jacket.”
“You think that matters?”
“No.”
“My brother was at Cedar Draw.”
Lark’s face did not change, but something behind it went rigid.
“What was his name?”
The man stepped closer.
“Don’t you ask me like you get to care.”
Rosa began moving toward them. Dane caught her wrist lightly.
She looked at him.
He shook his head.
Not yet.
The man in flannel shoved Lark in the chest. Lark absorbed it, barely, one hand going to his bandage. He did not shove back.
“My brother had a baby in the car,” the man said. “Six months old. They told him to wait. They told everybody to wait. Then the soldiers started dragging people out if they coughed, if they cried, if they looked sick, if they looked scared.”
Lark’s eyes lowered.
“I know.”
“You know?”
The man hit him.
Lark’s head snapped to one side. He took a step, caught himself on the beam, and stayed upright.
Rosa pulled free of Dane’s hand.
“That’s enough.”
The man rounded on her.
“You brought him in!”
“We brought in a wounded man.”
“You brought in one of them.”
Lark wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand.
“I was one of them.”
The room went quiet.
Even the children near the fireplace stopped whispering.
Lark looked at the man, then at the others watching. His voice was low, but it carried.
“I stood at that checkpoint. I wore the uniform. I believed the lines on the map meant we were still keeping something together. Then command decided the waiting cars were contamination. They ordered us to clear the road with fire. I refused. Too late for most. Not enough for your brother.
Not enough for anyone who needed me to refuse earlier.”
The man in flannel stared at him, breathing hard.
Lark continued.
“I won’t ask you to forgive me. I wouldn’t. If hitting me helps you not hit someone who can’t take it, do it once more. Then let the doctor treat the people still alive.”
For several seconds, no one moved.
The man’s fist trembled. His grief wanted another body to enter. Dane knew that want. It was powerful because it promised shape. It promised somewhere to put the unbearable thing.
At last the man lowered his hand.
“Your sorry doesn’t give me my brother.”
“No,” Lark said.
The man stepped back as if the space between them had become necessary to breathe.
Inez pointed toward the medical room.
“Sutter. Now.”
Lark went without argument.
Rosa watched him pass, her face unreadable. Dane saw Nell watching too, her eyes narrowed in thought. Lark had not made himself innocent. That seemed to matter to her.
Evening came early in the valley.
Clouds crowded the peaks, and rain ticked against the lodge windows.
Elias disappeared into the maintenance bay with two lodge mechanics and emerged twice to ask for parts, wire, and permission to insult their tools.
Otto found the lodge’s radio corner and helped tune a receiver that had been used mostly for local warnings.
Rosa moved between Mae, Lark, and the general medical station until Inez told her she either sat down voluntarily or got assigned to peeling potatoes with the children.
Dane finally allowed Inez to examine his knee after she threatened to have two teenage guards remove his boot while he was sleeping.
“Old injury aggravated by impact,” she said, prodding with merciless competence. “Swollen. Unstable. You need rest.”
“Write that on the road.”
“I’m writing it on your face, since that seems to be where you store bad decisions.”
He almost liked her. That made him distrust her.
She wrapped the knee tightly and gave him anti-inflammatory tablets with instructions he half-listened to.
When she finished, he found Nell standing near the gift shop shelves, staring at a display of souvenir snow globes.
Inside each little globe was the lodge as it had been: lit windows, clean snow, tiny skiers forever descending without fear of reaching the bottom.
Dane stood beside her.
“You steal one, Elias will call it unnecessary weight.”
“I’m not stealing.”
“Didn’t say you were.”
“You thought it.”
“I think a lot of things.”
Nell touched one globe with her fingertip but did not pick it up.
“Mae asked if the kids got buried.”
Dane said nothing.
“I told her I didn’t know.”
“That’s true.”
“She asked if we could go back someday.”
The fireplace popped behind them. Someone laughed softly near the kitchen, then hushed themselves as if laughter needed permission.
Dane said, “People ask for impossible things when the possible ones hurt too much.”
Nell looked at him.
“Do you do that?”
The question found him tired.
He thought of Luis, not in the fire this time but in a truck stop outside Flagstaff, laughing with a plastic fork in one hand because Dane had sworn the cherry pie was terrible while eating a second slice.
He thought of his father forgetting Dane’s name but remembering the route numbers painted on his toy trucks.
He thought of the hand at the rest stop, lifting, falling, maybe real, maybe not.
“Yes,” he said.
Nell waited.
Dane looked down at the snow globes.
“I ask for a road where every choice comes with clean proof. Stop, go. Save, leave. Shoot, don’t shoot. I keep expecting the world to hand me the right answer before I have to live with it.”
Nell turned the globe gently. Snow drifted over the tiny lodge.
“I asked for being normal.”
He nodded once.
“That one too.”
For a while, they stood without speaking.
Then Nell said, “If Harbor Nine puts me behind glass, I’m leaving.”
Dane looked at her.
“You may not get the chance.”
“Then help me make one.”
That was not a child asking to be rescued. It was a person asking whether his promises extended past delivery.
Before Dane could answer, Otto’s voice cracked from the radio corner.
“Dane.”
Something in his tone cut through the room.