“It’s okay, you know. We’ll take him back with us.” Micah soothes. “Most feed stores have dog chow. We’ll be able to find something when we get up to Moorhead.”
Kirsten blinks hard, forcing back tears that will embarrass her. Asimov leans against her, whining, and quite without volition, her arm goes around him, holding tight. Micah looks tactfully away and holds up the last few bites of his sandwich. “Hey, boy. Like peanut butter?”
4
Koda’s glance runs around the semi-circle of survivors there in the jail’s guardroom. It is an oddly tidy place: no MacDonald’s wrappers, no Pepsi or Coke cans, no papers piled in multi-colored triplicate on the watch officer’s desk. If not for the ghosts of bloodstains that linger on floor and walls, it would be almost as clean as an examining room. But that had been part of the droids’ appeaclass="underline" no more mess than a pet rock. She takes a quick tally of the women huddled in one corner—twenty-six.
But no, that’s wrong. There are twenty-five women and one little girl.
A red haze passes over Koda’s mind. There is a legend in the family from generations past, of a white lawman who violated her grandmother’s younger sister. The sister’s husband and his brother had waylaid the deputy one night on a lonely road and left him deep in an abandoned mine shaft with his testicles nailed to a beam. They had also left him a knife, and a choice.
But she has more practical matters before her. She raps out, “Siebert. Hobbs.”
“Ma’am.”
“Find a store with women’s clothing. Bring back something warm for these ladies. White if you can find it.”
“Ma’am.”
“There’s a sports shop two blocks north,” says the older woman who has spoken for the group. “There was, at any rate.” Then, “Who are you?”
“Sorry. These are the free forces of the United States, Colonel Margaret Allen commanding. I’m Dakota Rivers.”
“Oh, thank God,” the woman breathes on a long sigh. “We didn’t know, you see, if there were any survivors at all, much less . . ..” A wave of her hand encompasses the soldiers in the room.
‘What’s going to happen to us now?” The speaker is a younger woman, no more than twenty, whose long, pale hair lies perfectly combed across her shoulders. It is not vanity, Koda realizes, but some small snatch at dignity where dignity is impossible.
“We need to get you to someplace safe. You know the area better than we do—where can we leave you when we move out again?”
“There’s the Scout camp.” It is the thirteen-year-old. “No one will be there now. I used to go there every summer, and so did my—“ She pauses, swallowing hard, but her eyes are dry. “My two brothers. Brian was an Eagle Scout; he was a counselor.”
Koda silently curses to hell and worse the unknown persons responsible for the disaster. A child ought not to be forced into the emotional wasteland beyond tears. That is the province of adults. She takes a step toward the girl, meaning to hug her, but reads the minuscule flinch in the child’s shoulders, the rejection in her eyes. A touch will break her.
Again the blood-crimson mist filters through Koda’s mind. She wants to kill someone, badly. Her vision narrows, shrinks to a point. This, she thinks, must be what Wiyo feels when she holds at hover before she stoops on her prey. Or the wolf, when she sees the elk flounder in the snow. It is a yearning for hot blood slipping over the tongue that cannot be satisfied by the shattering of cold metal.
She shakes her head to clear it, and her vision returns to normal. “That sounds good. How do the rest of you feel about that?”
There are nods along the line, slow and wary. One woman objects, “No! I have to try to find my family.”
“Honey.” It is the older woman again. “Honey, if your family are someplace safe, you won’t be able to find them. If they aren’t safe—better you don’t.”
“She’s right, you know, ma’am,” Andrews puts in softly. “If your family are alive, the best thing you can do for them is make sure you survive.”
“All right,” says Koda, fishing under her camos for a list she has brought prepared and a pen. She addresses the youngster “Do you—” Then, more gently, “Can I call you something besides ‘you’?”
“Donna.”
“Donna. Do you know how to get to the camp?”
Donna nods.
“Great. Can you show Lieutenant Andrews on the map, please?”
As they spread the unwieldly sheet out on one of the desks, Koda scribbles mifepristone and oxytocin at the top of the priority-1 drugs. “Johnson and Martinez. Find a pharmacy and bring back everything they have on this list. If they have herbal meds, get these, too.” Blue and black cohosh, motherwort, long used by her people to ease delivery or to end an unwanted pregnancy. If this jail is the pattern, every milligram has suddenly become precious.
Johnson scans the list quickly, then meets Koda’s eyes. She salutes. “Right away, ma’am.”
“Hanson. Larke. Food and trucks, per plan. Check the jail garage. See if the sheriff’s vans will do and if you can get anything useful out of their gas pump. Reeves. Collect all the guns and ammo you can find here. Then help Hanson and Larke.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The soldiers scatter to her orders, and Koda marvels at their cohesion. They are a mixture of Air Force, Marines, regular Army, working as smoothly as if they had all been together since basic training. And all of them under the unlikely command of a veterinarian. “Hump it,” she adds. “We move out in an hour and a half.”
In the end, they set out fifteen minutes early, a box truck packed with supplies, and the rescued women riding double and triple behind the soldiers on their snowmobiles. A couple more of the machines have been liberated from the sports outfitters and are now piloted by some of the former captives themselves. A half dozen of the troops have no passengers, ranging loose before and beside the small procession, weapons ready. Koda watches them swing out onto the road, then glides into position at the front. A small warm spot has taken hold somewhere under her rib cage. It is one thing to stop the enemy. It is another to take back what they have stolen. Counting coup.
Koda glances upward, where a hawk keeps pace with them, her rust colored tail spread against the hard blue of the winter sky. Lelah wakan. It is a good sign indeed.
5
Three nights later, they are camped in a stand of woods beside the Lac aux Mortes. The foraging parties have left the convoy at East Grand Forks, just before crossing the Red River. Tomorrow the rest will turn back, and Kirsten will go on to Minot alone
They are still far enough away from the Base to risk a proper campfire. The pines give them shelter from aerial surveillance; infrared sensors will pick up body heat and the residual warmth of engines in any case. Aidan, bowl in hand, scrapes the bottom of the Dutch oven hopefully. “Ochone,” he says. “There’s not a molecule left.”
“Come sit down, Aidan.” Dan pats the fallen log beside him. “We have some convincing to do.”
Kirsten glances around the circle of faces, bright in the firelight, and knows with absolute certainty what is coming. “No,” she says. “Thank you. But no.”
“Kirsten,” says Alan. “It doesn’t make any sense for us to turn back now. At least let us go another twenty-thirty miles with you.”
“And before you say no again,” Caitlin interrupts, warding off her objection, “remember that none of us has any idea what kind of outward perimeter they’re maintaining. If there’s nothing, fine. If they have roadblocks or booby traps, though, you’ll stand a lot better chance if you’re not alone.”
“And a much greater chance of getting you all killed.”
Dan says softly, “It’s a risk we’ll be taking every day of our lives from now on, my dear. It’s no worse with you than anywhere else.”