Page 199 of The End of the World As We Know It

Martin chuckled. “She’s mine,” he said. “Or I’m hers… It doesn’t matter now. Just as the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, or so my old bumper sticker said, a legion starts with a single recruit. Things have to begin somewhere, Val.”

“Don’t touch her,” Val whispered. “Come here, kiddo. It’s all right.”

“Oh, no no,” Martin said solicitously, turning toward the door, turning the little girl too, her dark hair falling over his wrist. “This is hardly a place to bring up a child. What with all thisverminin the house.”

Val was already lunging for the child, gone in an instant through the door Martin flung wide, and she hit the floor and rolled, snatching for the bow and arrows instead, as the house filled with the biting cold—and the dark, slithering creatures.

At close range, the bow was no good; she stabbed at the snarling forms till the arrow broke, then ran for the kitchen, sliding in the blood pooled and already freezing on the wooden floor. Bashir and Ethanwere already there; down the hall, dimly, they heard Lois screaming, abruptly cut off.

Even at this distance, the animals were unidentifiable; they were just thrashing claws and bristling fur, stinking of meat, their teeth yellow and half rotting out of blackened gums. After a half dozen had been hacked to death with her kitchen knives, the rest fled through the open door, their barking uncannily like cruel laughter.

Andhehad her, Martin or not-Martin or whoever the fuck he was, he had the only child in existence, in the killing cold, and God only knew who he would deliver her to—Val had thought her rage and horror were exhausted when Lois had tried to kill the child (Lois! of all people!), but she found an inexhaustible well of it now, buoying her like a raptor riding an updraft on a hot day. For several seconds she could not even remember that she was not alone, and found herself surprised when Bashir stopped her at the doorway, confused by the long, dark hand gently on her own.

“No,” Bashir said. “We’ll come with you. Get some more layers on.”

Val had read the accounting of that summer many years ago, and had forgotten most of it; but now, as she ran hunched and growling along the tracks in the snow, she remembered something they had said:He can call up storms, if he needs them. And others saying:He comes in the storm, if he wants.

And another:He can come as wolf or crow, or he can put on faces; but if he wishes he can come also as the hurricane or the flood. We have seen it. We have seen him in the wind.

Could he call upcold?

No, because he was dead. Dead as the rest of them, killed in a split second of heat and light that he did not call up.

They had started on snowmobiles, she and Ethan and Bashir, abandoning them when the trails in the woods ran out. The midday light was sickly and dim, as if they ran through an endless twilight,coughing and swallowing blood as the sides of their windpipes crystallized with every breath. The slinking creatures kept their distance now, just visible as shadows flickering through the trees. Val had dropped a couple of them with her arrows, Ethan one with his rifle. They did not fear humans, Val thought; they had beendirectedto pace them instead of attack, perhaps herd them.

Even now she admitted she had never truly believed in the stories. She had chalked everything up to mass insanity, to the hysteria of crowds and mobs. That there had been a “dark man,” a cult leader, she thought likely, just as she thought that Jesus had probably been real, a young rabble-rouser in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the talk about magic? No, she had not believed that, not deep down. There had to be another explanation, just as now, and she would find it afterward if she lived.

The cold dragged on their pursuit until they were nearly crawling. Val wanted to scream. Martin and the child were moving fast (and that, too, would have to be explained, the way they danced over the surface of the snow). “We’re losing them,” she panted. “We have to move faster.”

“We should go back,” Bashir managed, his voice indistinct, like Val’s, under multiple layers of fabric. All that could be seen were his eyes, dark and frightened through the goggles. “Val, I’m sorry. I know. But we’ll die out here.”

“Yes, you will.”

Ethan yelped, thrusting his body instinctively in front of Val, but the voice had come from everywhere and nowhere. “Face out,” Val hissed to the two men. “Back-to-back.” She stared wildly around them at the dense but empty forest, the crowding trunks of birch and aspen, the slumped swags of pine, seeing nothing.

“Isn’t it strange how people will run from shelter,” the voice went on. “From safety, from good things, warm things… into the cold. And here you are. Why did you chase me?”

“To get… Because you took…” Val’s teeth were chattering.Now that they weren’t moving, the chill was setting into her limbs; she thought they had, perhaps, a few minutes before hypothermia set in for good.

“Because Iwanted you to. Because out here, I hold your lives in my hand.”

“No,” Val whispered.

“The brave woodsman,” the voice laughed. “Coming to chop Little Red Riding Hood out of the wolf before it’s too late. Let me tell you something about the little girl in that story.”

And then it was there, on Val’s side of the triangle, the buck she had seen—and the thing she had told herself to remember. Not the eyes, brown and normal now, but the mouth, the nose, all too clear. It wasn’t breathing.It wasn’t breathing when I first saw it, either. And I knew… I knew…

“She goes on an errand for her mother,” the voice went on, emanating from somewhere in the buck’s chest. Behind it, Val saw the child, quite calm, still dressed in the T-shirt Val had given her, one tiny hand on the buck’s leg. Val’s entire body ached with yearning to run to her, sweep up the vulnerable little body; but she dared not move. Could not, probably, even if she did dare.

“But there are wolves in the forest,” the buck went on. “The mother knows this. What kind of story is that? You send your little girl out into the wide world, armed with nothing but her innocence, you send her to the murderers and the pedophiles and the kidnappers and the—”

“Stop it!”

“Why? Is it upsetting? The girl in the story isn’t real.Childrenaren’t real anymore. That was humanity’s last hurrah, the party on the deck of theTitanic. You know it was. But it doesn’t have to be. If you join me… if you give your will to mine… as your friend did… if…”

If you throw me and I break the way you want, Val thought. If you tell me you can replace my missing pieces with yourself and only you… That’s the way it works, isn’t it? You take away, and then you say we can be whole again. With you. We, us, the world.

The burning cold faded, and the trees around Val dissolved, and she watched it with the resignation of a dream. Therewasa fracture in her, of course. Anyone could see it, not just him. If you hungered for anything too much, you’d snap along that line as cleanly as a piece of glass. And oh, how she had hungered for a child…I stopped though. I stopped wanting.