He hummed to himself as he bumped down the trail. He realized the place was farther than he’d thought. The chair was all charged up, so it would be able to make it there and back. But still, as he got deeper into the forest, he couldn’t help feeling this was not the smartest thing he’d ever done in his life.
Finally, he came around a bend, and there it was: a large metal building that seemed unusually high. To the left was another structure, lower but longer than the first. Between them was some sort of massive air-conditioning unit, connected to the building by huge steel ducts. There seemed to be nothing going on, though. No African women, no vehicles, no steam coming from the chimneys, no lights. It was completely desolate.
He rolled to the taller building, found the door locked. There was a small window, but he couldn’t see in. He rolled to the second building. The door to this one was open. He looked inside. In one corner lay a very large pile of what appeared to be sweet potatoes. The rest of the building contained a variety of industrial machines. Judging from the work flow, it looked like the potatoes were going into some sort of masher, which piped something to large stainless steel vats, which then led to a number of smaller vats or cookers. There was a lot of stainless steel piping.
Could he have been wrong about his suspicions? Sweet potatoes, he knew, yielded even more ethanol than corn. Was that all that was going on out here? How stupid he had been. A wave of shame crashed over him as he realized how susceptible he’d been to some imagined conspiracy between Collier and his father. He wished he could call his father now and apologize for his misguided fears.
Evan turned his wheelchair around and went back outside. The wind had picked up a little. He touched his hair, found it frozen solid. He was shivering pretty hard now.
This was not so good. He needed to get back to the house.
He rolled out behind the two buildings, using them to shield himself from the wind. By the edge of the second one he found his father’s Cat D8 parked in the snow. Dale Wilmot had started in the business driving a Caterpillar, and he enjoyed using it around the property, knocking shit down or flattening ground. Like everything he did, the old man was a perfectionist with the Cat. Whether moving a pile of earth or digging a trench, his work was meticulous.
But here was a mess of broken earth, lumps and piles scattered here and there that hadn’t been entirely covered with snow. Since his father couldn’t have done this, he realized it must be Collier’s handiwork. But what had he been doing here? It looked like he’d been burying something. Maybe some kind of industrial residue that his father didn’t want dumped in the stream where he occasionally fished.
Evan rolled out over the lumpy ground, trying to get back onto the main path to the house. He pushed the chair sideways, spun it around, and then pushed it forward. For the first time since he’d left the house, the chair got stuck.
He backed up, then rolled forward, then backed up again. He cursed. The bottom of the chair had snagged on something. He rocked it back and forth, and felt a kindling fear in his belly.
If he got stuck out here, he was well and truly screwed. He leaned over and tried to look under the chair. But he couldn’t lean too far without the danger of pitching over, which would only make a bad situation worse. Now that he’d stopped, he noticed this his entire body was trembling from the cold. It was a deep, biting, bone-deep cold that felt raw and burned.
He tried to spin the chair around, but the tires wouldn’t grab the ground. The snow was coming down heavier, so hard that he could barely make out the Caterpillar, only five yards away.
Suddenly the chair broke free. He paused and turned to see what had caught him. It was a root, poking out of the ground.
Then his eyes widened. That was no root. It was a delicate black hand. A woman’s hand, dusted with frost.
He moved closer and could see the fingers curled, as if the woman had been trying to dig herself out of her frozen grave. It was one of the African women who had been working with Collier. Now she—and maybe everyone—was dead, judging from the size of the frozen bed of earth that surrounded him. What he’d discovered was far worse than his initial suspicion would have led him to imagine. But he still lacked the context to understand why this had happened or what Collier and his father were up to.
He blasted forward, heading back toward the metal buildings—or what he thought were the metal buildings. But when he reached the vague dark shapes rising above him, he realized it was just the edge of the woods.
He looked around and realized he’d lost his bearings. All he could see was the trees and the snow. He pushed forward along the tree line while the snow absorbed all sound around him. It was almost as if he were enduring some diabolical sensory deprivation experiment. The tires of the wheelchair spun as they tried to grip on the slippery surface. He halted momentarily, then pressed on.
A minute later the tires spun again. He jiggled the joystick, waiting for them to catch, but they just kept spinning. He looked down and saw that the wheels had cut a trench. The initial friction had melted the snow—which then refroze into a solid glaze of ice.
His heart was pounding now. He jiggled and rocked and yanked on the wheel with his hand. But nothing worked. Nearing panic, he pressed the joystick to the forward limit. The tires made a soft buzzing sound on the ice. But the chair didn’t move. And after another minute, he could hear the frequency of the wheels’ buzzing begin to lower slightly. He was running spat down the batteries.
“Help!” he called. “Margie! Can you hear me?”
But the deep silence of the forest was his only answer.
A sudden resolve eclipsed his fear as he realized that there was only one thing left to do. He unstrapped the Velcro straps from his legs and slid to the ground.
The cold ground burned the stumps of his legs. Since coming home, he’d refused to do the therapy that would have prepared his stumps for prosthetics, and as a result, they were uncallused, thin-skinned, and sensitive.
He began to crawl.
Once he’d been a football star and soldier and a horseman, proud of his body and what it could do, the punishment it could endure without giving out on him. But now? It wasn’t just that he’d been blown all to shit. It was also that he’d lain there feeling sorry for himself, letting his body weaken.
He still had the will, though. However different he and the old man were, Dale Wilmot had bequeathed him that one thing: will.
I’m not gonna die out here.
He crawled on and on, pushing himself, working through the fire that shot up through what remained of his limbs until they became completely numb.
I’m not gonna die out here.
After several hundred yards, he stopped in the middle of the trail to rest. Although the snow was still coming down, it had slackened a little, falling gently on his face and on his eye and on his outstretched tongue. It was peaceful, and the cold was like a blanket, and he closed his eyes so he could sleep.
29
WASHINGTON / IDAHO
A light dusting of snow covered the ground when the plane landed at Spokane International Airport in Washington State, just over the Idaho border. The airport was barely large enough for four gates, and Nancy Clement suspected its claim of “international” status was an exaggeration. Because of its size, however, she was able to purchase a last-minute ticket that she paid for at Dulles airport with her personal credit card, and to walk directly from landing to the Budget Rent A Car counter. The man at the counter was a morose-looking Indian guy who was missing all his upper teeth, giving his speech a lisping quality.
“Could be a vide out,” he said, nodding his head as though in support of the notion that the worst possibilities are always the ones that actually come to pass.