“The chimney! Rachel, there’s heat—a stove, something! Someone’s in there! This is where the survivors came!” She couldn’t wait for Silver’s slow gait to bring them closer. She slid off the mare’s back and ran toward the church, shouting, the dogs running with her, barking as if they shared her joy.
“Mary! Mary, wait!”
Mary didn’t hear Rachel, not until she caught up with her and grabbed her arm. “Mary, if there is anyone in there, we don’t know who it might be!”
With an effort, Mary tore her gaze away from the church to look at Rachel. “What?”
“We don’t know who’s in there. It could be Rovers.”
Mary took an aching breath. Rachel was right. She looked up at the chimney, at the wavering air above it. But someone was in there.
They walked slowly toward the church, Rachel ordering the dogs to heel, her rifle ready in her hands. Mary listened intently, but the only sound was the rasp of their breathing. They were thirty feet from the entrance when one of the double doors swung open.
Rachel snapped, “Mary, hold the dogs!” and stood with her rifle raised, aimed at the door.
Mary knelt and grasped Shadow and Sparky’s collars, stared at the door, at what came out of it.
A dog. A big, tawny dog, German shepherd in his lineage.
He was carrying something in his mouth. He gazed at them with amber eyes, a ridge of hair rising on his shoulders, and for seconds the tension was borne out in silence.
Until Mary recognized what the shepherd held in his mouth.
A hand. A human hand.
And she screamed.
As if that sound were a cue, six more dogs scrambled, snarling, out of the door. The shepherd dropped his burden, baring a serrated arsenal of teeth as he led the attack, snow exploding under his paws. Sparky and Shadow barked and lunged against their collars, but Mary held on when her only impulse was to run. She flinched at the crash of the rifle. Rachel only fired into the air, but the shepherd stopped, then bolted into the trees south of the church, his pack at his heels. Neither Sparky nor Shadow stopped barking until the last dog had disappeared.
Rachel knelt by Mary and said shakily, “You can let go of them now.”
Mary loosed her rigid hold on the dogs’ collars. “It’s like something out of a Russian folktale—the wolf pack chasing the troika.”
Rachel stroked Sparky’s head. “Dogs are only a few thousand years removed from wolves. They both survive by packing. Where’s Silver?”
Silver had retreated to the street, and Rachel had to go retrieve her. The mare wasn’t anxious to approach the church, nodding her head nervously and pulling at the reins. Mary waited for Rachel, then together they approached the door, but a few paces short of it stopped, and Mary stared at the hand in the snow. A cracked arm bone was attached to it, hung with black-red, frayed muscle. Meat. Mary felt a painful surge in her stomach.
Rachel only glanced at the hand. “The dogs were probably scavenging in the church. You won’t find anyone alive in there.”
“But the chimney, the heat…”
“Well, there’s the basement. The door is around at the back. Fellowship Hall, one of the hottest gambling spots in town.” Then when Mary looked at her blankly, she sighed. “Bingo. Mary, don’t you think if anyone was alive in there—”
“No! Fellowship Hall. That’s where they’ll be!” And Mary turned away from the doubt in Rachel’s eyes, set off around the side of the church, kicking through the drifted snow, only vaguely aware that Rachel was following her. At the back of the church under a portico, she found the entrance to Fellowship Hall. She pounded and yelled, jerked at the doorknob, and finally the ice that sealed the door gave way.
A landing, a short flight of stairs leading down into a pocket of dimness. “There’s another door, Rachel. Come on!”
The survivors would be here. It made such perfect sense. A big room, underground, where they’d be safe from radiation, where it would be easy to keep warm. They must have some sort of nonelectric stove. Mary reached for the doorknob, but Rachel was shouting at her. “Can’t you smell that?”
Mary couldn’t even hear her. She flung the door open and was three steps into the room before the smell hit her, as palpable as a blow: the sticky, foul smell of death. She covered her mouth and nose with her hand, tried not to breathe, but her pounding heart demanded more air, forced her to inhale the hideous stink.
A cavernous room with a low, beamed ceiling, the only light a pale glow from a propane stove near the door. Rows of folding tables had been put to use as beds. This had been a makeshift hospital. And now it was a charnel house, the table beds occupied by corpses shrouded in bloody, vomit-stained blankets. Her eyes fixed on the bodies nearest the light, on tumid faces smeared with the blood of uncontrollable hemorrhages, on gray skin speckled with red petechiae. The light faded into darkness a short distance from its source, but it was enough to delineate this chamber of horrors. It was enough, as the heat from the stove was enough to maintain the temperature at a level that sustained the processes of decay.
“Lassa.” Rachel’s voice was muffled by her hand. “Oh, damn, they all died of Lassa. Mary, let’s get out of here!”
Mary turned, lunged for the door, ran into Rachel, who had suddenly stopped, staring at the body of a man lying near the door where the glow of the stove lighted his bloated caricature of a face. He was fully dressed; he had apparently simply fallen there.
Rachel whispered, “Reverend Gillis. This was his church.”
Somehow, it intensified the horror to know this corpse had had a name. Mary looked into his swollen face and saw a tiny, flickering movement in his eyelids. “Rachel, he—he’s alive! Look at his eyes!”
Rachel was trying to pull Mary toward the door. “He’s not alive. That’s only maggots.”
Mary staggered, felt darkness closing in like fetid water. She stumbled out the door and up the steps, fell and crashed against the risers, heard panting cries that didn’t stop until she reached the outer door, until she sank to her knees and vomited in the snow.
When the spasms stopped, her ears were ringing, shadows hovered at the edges of her vision. She took a handful of snow and let it melt in her mouth, spat it out. Finally she looked around, saw Rachel sitting on her heels, back braced against one of the columns supporting the portico, Shadow and Sparky crouched on either side of her, panting out clouds of vapor, ears flat against their heads. Rachel was pale, her eyes haunted. She asked, “Are you all right?”
Mary nodded. She couldn’t seem to form even the simple word yes. She clenched her teeth to stop their chattering.
Rachel rose. “I found the propane tank. The one that supplies the stove.” She gestured toward a white mound near the door. The snow had been brushed off the top to reveal a silvery surface bisected by a riveted seam.
Rachel helped Mary to her feet, then took her arm and led her to the street. “Wait here,” she said, and in a few minutes returned with Silver and the dogs. Mary didn’t question her, didn’t speak. Rachel handed her Silver’s reins and a rope looped through both the dogs’ collars. “Hold them for me. Mary? Do you understand?”
Mary didn’t understand her purpose, but she could still understand the words. Rachel walked toward the church, and Mary gripped the reins and rope, shivering uncontrollably, saw Rachel stop when she had covered half the distance to the church, then raise her rifle and, after a moment, fire. The recoil rocked her back. Mary gasped at the shock of the report, held fast against the animals’ lunging. The propane tank exploded with a dull thump. Orange flames billowed, attacked the white clapboards with a vicious crackling.