“What are you doing?” Morrigan asks me.
I show her the snow on my glove. “What do you see? Look deep.”
My daughter pulls off a mitten and tentatively touches the white fluff. “They’re so tiny. Itty bitty crystals.” She looks at the start of our igloo. “But they can form something so big.” She gently takes my handful of snow and adds it to a brick of our structure. She steps back and looks up at the snow on the pines, an entranced look on her face. I’ve seen it before at our home. She is an outdoor girl and loves to lose herself in the nature around her.
I’m proud of her. Teaching her to love and respect the nature around her has been one of my goals since Morrigan became mine. A face flashes in my mind. Morrigan’s birth mother. I send out a request that she have peace. She will never know the wonderful gift she gave me.
I thank nature for its abundance. The beauty around me. The life it gives me. My child.
While hiding, I spend my time thinking. It is clear that we can never return to our home as long as my father still hunts us. I’ve agonized over telling the police what I know, but I doubt their ability to believe me. And can they protect me and Morrigan 24-7? Of course not. It’s best if we stay in the shadows, but we can’t do it forever. The fact that he found us in the woods tells me his resources are still vast.
I must kill him to remove the threat from our lives. From my daughter’s life.
I see no other option.
A sharp pain rips open my heart. How can a child kill a parent? Would Morrigan stab a knife in my chest if I posed a threat to her? What if there were a threat to her daughter? I shake my head. She needs to have her own child to understand how a mother would die to protect her children.
As my mother did for us.
“I’m hungry,” my daughter announces.
“It’s nearly lunchtime. Let’s go back to the cabin, make some sandwiches, and then we can work more on the igloo.”
Morrigan considers the plan, nods, and then takes my hand. We slowly work our way through the deep snow back to our temporary home.
My little one is so serious sometimes, weighing every decision. She has changed since my mother’s murder. Anxiety sometimes overtakes her, and she won’t let me out of her sight. Tears have been shed for her grandmother; she misses her, but knows she’s no longer in pain. She clings to me in her sleep at night, refusing to sleep alone.
I curse my father for creating this fear in my daughter.
“Who’s that?”
I freeze and look up from my snow-covered boots. A hundred feet away is a man in blue winter gear. He stares at us and then darts away, his strides awkward in the powder. Red and black scents reach my nose as he vanishes. Anger and hatred. I couldn’t see his face, but his posture and his stance strike recognition in my brain, setting off alarms.
The threat has been much closer than I envisioned.
I know where he is going. He will return for us.
Our hiding spot is no longer a secret.
And I realize I have been wrong. Very, very wrong.
THIRTY-TWO
“You’re going to break your neck,” hollered Kaylie. “And I don’t know enough medical shit to put you back together!”
“Language.” Mercy tentatively tested a foothold.
“You’d shoot me if I did what you’re doing!”
The teenager was right. Mercy was perched on her cabin’s steep roof, a broom in one hand and a safety line around her waist. One side of the A-frame cabin’s roof was ideal for solar panels with its southern exposure, and an opening in the pines created the perfect position for her home to suck the energy from the sun. Last year she’d taken down a few of the trees to widen the space. Now the long lengths of those trees were indistinguishable mounds under the snow. Some of the fallen trees had been neatly sawed into fifteen-inch lengths for her woodstove. Eventually she’d split them with her ax.
She stretched and brushed the snow off a panel. She’d been happy to see that very little snow had stuck to them, but she wanted them completely clear. The power surplus was stored in rechargeable batteries. Currently the cabin was occupied only a few days each month, and she had plenty of power, but the thought of the system being the slightest bit inefficient had been enough to drive her to the roof.
Three of the panels were out of her reach. Grinding her teeth in frustration, she worked her way back to her ladder and climbed down.
“Thank God,” muttered Kaylie as Mercy’s feet finally sank into the snow. “I was practicing how I’d tell Truman that you were dead.”
“I’m touched.”
“None of the scenarios went well.”
“Good thing I survived.”
“Yeah, but all sorts of freak accidents could happen out here. Bears, falling trees, explosions.”
“Explosions from what?” asked Mercy, amused at her niece’s concern.
“I don’t know. The diesel and gas in the barn? The propane tanks?” Kaylie waved her arms in the air, a darling vision in a hot-pink snow coat with matching gloves and hat. Not exactly dressed to blend into the landscape like Mercy, in her pine-colored coat and black pants.
“Diesel stores better and is safer than gasoline,” Mercy recited, hearing her father’s voice in her head.
“You store both! And you sound just like my father.” The teen deflated, her arms at her sides and a hint of tears her eyes.
Poor kid is worried she’ll be alone.
Mercy pulled the teen close, cursing herself for making light of Kaylie’s fears. “I miss your dad too. I’m sorry if me crawling around up there made you nervous.” She wiped a stray tear off Kaylie’s cheek with a gloved finger. “Levi had the same knowledge drilled into his head that I did. Our father was tyrannical about it. I bet I say a lot of the same things your dad did.”
“Hurts,” Kaylie mumbled.
“I know.” Levi’s death had left a wound in Mercy’s heart too. One she’d delicately patched by caring for his daughter. “Let’s get your stuff together for the soap. That’d be a good project for today.” Kaylie had a fascination with soap making that didn’t surprise Mercy one bit. The experimentation and blending of ingredients echoed Kaylie’s baking skills.
“You’re trying to distract me.”
“Would you rather mope the rest of the day? Your father knows you love and miss him.”
Mercy steered the girl up the steps to her home, wondering if she’d said the right thing. She didn’t want to pass over Kaylie’s sorrow about her father’s death, but she wouldn’t let the teen grieve the day away.
Their afternoon’s drive to the cabin had been smooth. Virtually no traffic was on the roads, and two-thirds of their route had been recently plowed. Mercy had chained up her Tahoe as a precaution once they’d turned off the main road, and the vehicle had handled beautifully.
In a real emergency they might have battled the people escaping the city. Big cities would have the worst problems.
We have a fragile and highly independent infrastructure.
Her father’s lectures echoed in her brain. Power failures. Municipal water failures. Disruption of food distribution. Collapse of law and order. Migration out of the cities.
No one would stay in the center of a major city once those resources vanished. People would flock to the country, seeking natural sources of water and food.
There is a thin veneer of civilization in our society. It will get ugly.