At the sight of those wild, sidling beasts, our sled dogs whimpered and moaned. There was no end to their fretting — they stammered forward and back against the leather, swiveling their heads round to one another for support.
“We’re here, aren’t we?” Gerry asked.
“Yes,” I said, rather triumphantly. “We’ve made it.”
“Okay, then,” Gerry said, and began letting the dogs go. He said, “We appreciate your services,” to each dog as he unbuckled its lead, and that marked the last time I ever saw humans and canines working together. That was the last time dogs ever lent a paw to help us with anything. The surprising thing, what really blew me away, was how each dog, instead of running away, bolted downhill to join the packs of loose dogs. Good riddance, I thought, though I didn’t say it. Nobody wanted any more of my predictions that dogs would become the bane of humanity. Time would bear me out.
The University of Northwestern North Dakota clock tower was visible, and that’s where we were headed, even though we’d have to cross a shallow pan of fields where the dogs were engaged in mischief. Gerry led the way. The hill was a big one, so he pointed his sled in the right direction, told the kids to hold on tight, and trusted gravity to get them most of the way to the university. Once they were off, Dad and Farley lined their sled up with Gerry’s tracks, and Trudy brought up the rear, with Eggers and me crouched low in her litter.
Things started out okay — we floated nicely for a few yards — but I had no idea how fast a sled could go. We were tobogganing! All I could think of were those roller-coaster cars plunging through Parkton’s downtown during Glacier Days. We stayed gripped to the tracks of the sleds ahead, and never had I felt such velocity.
You could hear Gerry’s kids wooing and wowing their way down the hill as we advanced upon what looked like the town junkyard below. At a certain point, however, their shouts of joy became screams of panic. “Look out,” my father yelled from the litter ahead. The wind had my eyes all teary, so it was only too late that I understood where we were really heading.
The city of Croix had developed no system for the burning of animal carcasses, and we were barreling at breakneck speeds toward acres of frozen hogs, poured who knows how many deep in the marshlands below the university.
Gerry’s sled burst upon the hogs, clacking along stiff bellies and backs until the sled dumped and all were thrown. Dad and Farley bailed at the last moment, tumbling through sprays of white, but it was too late for us. We were riding it in.
Eggers and I braced ourselves as we pounded down upon the brown mass and rattled out upon the plain of them, yellow hooves beating the struts off, exposed ribs tearing loose our crossbars. The sled finally tipped, and we were battered out upon the icy blue meat. Eggers had a blackened eye, and ribs I thought were healed reasserted themselves. There was no regrouping. We all began making our way to the other side, to the lawns of UNND. We had to get out of the field of pigs. Mostly, they had been shot. Mustard-colored ice dripped from holes in their bodies, and ice — liver-red and tobacco-brown — froze them together into one mass. The lug soles of our boots left prints in their skin.
Just when I’d gotten used to hogs, I discovered that, near the end, Croix had taken down all its beasts. Horses, sheep, goats, and cows lay upon the terminus of the heap. I’d endured almost the whole stretch without breaking down, but right at the end, four little petting-zoo donkeys nearly broke my heart.
On the other side, I didn’t wait for the others. I called to them and, receiving their thumbs-up, forged on ahead. Though Croix had been a smaller town, the mayhem here was worse. Cutting across campus, I could see down the side streets. Signs of final horrors were everywhere — barricades, bodies under cars, bullet holes all over. The campus was vaguely familiar, and I made for the agriculture department’s hothouses, the only buildings on campus lacking layers of snow.
At the main nursery, I burst through the doors. For two weeks, my central occupation had been to bar from my imagination all the horrible possibilities that could have befallen this place. I’d kept at bay images of the glass broken, the plants wilted, the structure burned or washed away. As long as it survived intact in my imagination, Yulia was alive, Vadim was alive.
And here I was. Inside, a propane space-heater kept the place warm. The bulk of the building was filled with rows of experimental crops; the wings contained exotic plants from the world over. The aisles, however, were packed with houseplants, regular-looking things, in all different pots. You had to duck under the canopies of overgrown ficus plants and squeeze past the fat arms of rubber trees. There were junipers in terra-cotta pots, and poking from an urn were the nosy trumpets of a creeper. I even had to fight several spider plants hanging from overhead racks. As I waded through all that damn greenery, it suddenly dawned on me that Yulia had gone door to door, as my father and I had, except she’d rescued the houseplants of Croix.
“Ahoy,” I announced.
Through some baskets of bamboo, I made out movement. I began running down the row, and when I emerged at the other side, I saw Yulia and Vadim seated on stools at a pruning table, eating a lunch off of white paper.
“Dr. Nivitski,” I yelled, “it’s me.”
Yulia wore a white smock. Her hair had gone wild. She held a can of soda in her hand. When she turned and saw me, she stood. She wore no eye shadow, no lipstick, and her face looked aged and puffy.
I pulled back my hood and lifted my goggles. I suppose I was no Soviet Romeo, either. I walked a little funny because of my ribs. I hadn’t bathed in a month. The winter sun had shown me no mercy.
“Finally,” I said, “Yulia, I finally found you.”
I began walking toward her, arms out. I sought to lock her gaze, but her eyes were desperately flashing from my clothes to my arms to my beard to my hands, and they would land no place on me. “It’s Hank,” I said. “Hank Hannah.”
That’s when she ran. She exclaimed something drastic in Russian, and ran.
I guess I didn’t understand what was going on. I went to Vadim. From where he sat, I could see the last glimpse of Yulia as she ran down a row of seedlings, smock flowing behind her. She stopped at some sort of root cellar, bent down to open the doors, and shut herself inside.
Vadim was eating a slice of frozen pizza.
“She won’t be out for a long time,” he said.
“Doesn’t she know it’s me?” I asked him. “Didn’t she recognize me?”
“You came through the dogs, didn’t you?” Vadim asked me. “How did you get through them?”
“What?”
“I don’t ever go out there alone,” he said. “Professor Winslow went out there alone, and he never came back.”
“Who’s Professor Winslow?” I asked.
“This was his hothouse,” Vadim said. “This is his pizza.”
I brought the boy with me to the cellar, where, indeed, the insulated doors were locked. It looked like they stored plant bulbs and seeds down there.
“Yulia,” I shouted through the doors. “It’s Hank Hannah from South Dakota. We’ve come to rescue you.”
There was no response.
Vadim was drinking a soda. “She doesn’t speak English anymore,” he said.
“Yulia?” I called. “Yulia?” I turned to Vadim. “Talk to her,” I said.
“It won’t do any good,” he told me.
“Then tell me,” I said. “What’s Russian for ‘We’re here to help’?”
“She gets like this,” he said. “The longer you yell, the longer it takes for her to come out.”
“Doesn’t anything work? Won’t anything bring her out?”
He shrugged, sipped his soda. “You don’t happen to have a Draculunus vulgaris on you, do you?”