Seat 14A #3
The counter is a desk with a sign on it that says closed, and a bell, and a laminated card explaining that the Red Creek location is staffed seasonally.
Dean is standing in front of it like he's trying to will a car into existence through sheer desperation.
He's not even looking at the card. He's just standing there, both hands on the edge of the desk, head down, breathing.
I walk over. "Closed?"
He doesn't answer.
"Dean. The desk is closed. There are no cars."
"There has to be a car."
"There's a vending machine and a baggage carousel that hasn't started. I don't think this airport has a car."
He straightens up. For a second I think he's going to argue, and then I watch him do something with his face, some internal rearrangement, and when he turns to me his expression is almost normal. Almost. There's still something moving behind his eyes, something he's working hard to keep in check.
"You should get on the bus," he says.
"So should you."
"I'm not taking the bus."
"Dean, it's snowing. It's twelve miles to this lodge and there's nothing between here and there but highway. You're going to walk?"
"Yes."
"To a motel. Twelve miles. In a blizzard."
"Yes."
I stare at him. He stares back. I've been doing this long enough to know when someone is posturing and when someone means it, and this man means it. He means it the way people mean things when they're out of options and running out of time.
"Why?" I ask.
"I can't explain."
"Try."
"I can't."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
He turns and walks toward the door, and I watch him go, and I tell myself it's not my problem.
He's a stranger. He's been a stranger for three hours, and he's spent most of that time being either silent or cryptic, and I have a bus to catch and a motel room waiting and absolutely no reason to follow a man I don't know out into a blizzard.
Then he pushes through the door, and the wind hits him, and I watch him walk into the snow without looking back, and something in my chest goes tight.
I know what a medical emergency looks like.
I've produced enough events to have seen a hundred of them.
The sweating. The shaking. The white face.
The way a person's eyes go somewhere else while their body stays behind.
The man from 14A is not okay. He is one wrong step away from coming apart, and he's walking into a snowstorm to do it alone, and I've spent my entire adult life making sure the people around me don't come apart on my watch.
I don't make the decision. My feet make it for me.
I grab my bag and push through the door into the white.
The cold is a physical event. It hits me in the chest like a wall, the kind of cold that steals your breath before you can use it, and the wind is loud, howling across the parking lot, kicking up snow that stings my face.
The bus is idling at the curb, exhaust pluming in the headlights, and passengers are boarding, hunched against the wind, and beyond the bus the parking lot stretches away into a wall of white.
Dean is already at the far edge of it.
He's moving fast, arms at his sides, head down, straight toward the dark line of trees at the edge of the lot. He's not walking like a man with a destination. He's walking like a man being chased, and I don't know what's chasing him, and I don't know why I'm following, and I'm doing it anyway.
"Dean!"
He doesn't stop.
"Dean, wait!"
I'm running now, boots sliding on the ice under the fresh snow, my bag banging against my hip. The wind tears the sound of my voice away and throws it back at me. I catch up to him at the edge of the parking lot, where the pavement gives way to a ditch and a line of pines, and I grab his arm.
He stops.
"You're freezing," I say. "You're going to die out here. Whatever this is, whatever you're running from, you can't outrun it by walking into a forest in a blizzard."
"You need to go back to the bus." His voice is wrong. It's low and rough, like he's been shouting, and there's something underneath it that I can't place, something that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
"I'm not leaving you out here."
"You don't understand what you're asking for."
"Then explain it to me. I'm a good listener. I've been told I'm an excellent listener. I once listened to a man talk about his dog for forty minutes."
He turns to face me, and the moon is up there, high and full and white, and its light is on his face, and I see it. I see something move behind his eyes. Not an expression. Something else. Something that makes the fear in my chest spike and my grip on his arm tighten.
"Dean. You're scaring me."
"I know." He says it like it hurts him. "I'm sorry. I should have moved seats. I should have stayed away from you. I tried to tell you."
"Tell me what?"
"I can't. If I tell you, you won't believe me, and if you don't believe me, you'll follow me, and if you follow me...
" He stops. Swallows. Looks up at the moon like it's a deadline.
"Please. Go back to the bus. Forget you ever sat next to me.
That's the kindest thing anyone can do for me right now. "
"Kindness is your plan? You're going to freeze to death in a pine forest to be kind?"
"Not exactly."
"Then what?"
He opens his mouth to answer, and something happens to him.
I watch it happen. I'm standing two feet from him, my hand still on his arm, and I watch his body betray him.
He doubles over, both hands on his knees, and a sound comes out of him that is not a word and not human, a sound that starts low in his chest and climbs, and his back arches, and his whole body goes rigid.
"Dean!"
I reach for him. My hand is on his shoulder, and his head snaps up, and I see his eyes.
They're not grey-green anymore.
They're gold. Bright and wrong and animal, catching the moonlight, and the pupil is a thin black slit, and I am looking at a face I don't recognize wearing the features of a man I barely know.
"Run."
The word comes out of him like it's been wrenched. Like he's fighting for it. Like every muscle in his body is at war with itself.
"Megan. Run."
I run.
I don't think about it. I don't argue. I don't ask why. I run, boots sliding on the ice, my bag forgotten somewhere in the snow behind me, and behind me I hear him make a sound that is not a scream and not a howl but something in between, and then I hear something worse.
Bones.
I hear bones moving. Not breaking. Moving.
Rearranging. A sound like a dozen tree branches cracking at once, wet and wrong and close, and I don't look back.
I can't look back. I run for the bus, for the headlights, for the warm yellow rectangle of the terminal door, and I'm almost there when I hit the edge of the parking lot and I can't run anymore.
I turn around.
The snow is falling. The wind is howling. The moon is high and full and white, and its light turns the whole world blue-white, the parking lot, the ditch, the line of pines.
Dean is gone.
The charcoal coat is on the ground where he was standing. I can see it, a dark shape in the snow, empty.
And where the man was, a wolf stands.
It's huge. Massive in a way that doesn't make sense, broad-chested and dark, its coat almost black against the blue-white snow. Its head is up. Its ears are forward. Its eyes catch the moonlight, and they are the same gold I saw in his face, and they are looking at me.
There are moments in life when your understanding of reality changes permanently. Birth. Death. Love. Apparently watching the man from seat 14A become a wolf in a Montana parking lot also qualifies.