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This was yellow.
And it was wrong. It seemed to reach up to paint the undersides of the trees. It wasn’t coming down from the clouds.
Yellow light.
Not sunlight yellow. There were hours of darkness left to go.
Yellow.
Like . . .
He was running before he knew it.
Aching, weary legs pumped as if he’d been resting for hours. He could feel his heart hammering inside his chest. Like fists beating on a door.
Like hope pounding to be let out of Pandora’s box.
The road snaked and whipsawed as it climbed the mountain. There were houses on either side. Doors smashed open or boarded up. Blood streaks and spatters. Bullet holes. Nowhere he dared go.
The light was ahead. Up the hill. Near the top.
No.
At the top.
His legs were trembling so badly that he knew he couldn’t go on much more. He needed to set Mason down. He needed to rest.
But not out here in the cold. In the snow.
Not in any of those houses where death had come calling.
The light was stronger.
Closer.
Brighter.
Dan rounded another bend. Another. Another.
And then there was a long space of nothing. Just trees and empty fields on either side of the road. The snow was unbroken up here. Nothing and no one had come this way in hours.
There was a huge stand of old trees. Oaks and pines and maples. So heavy they blocked the view of the top of the hill.
But through them . . .
Through them.
The yellow light.
He could see it shining on the snow, glimmering on each snowflake.
So close.
“Hold on,” he whispered to Mason, but the boy did not respond. He was limp in Dan’s arms. “Hold on.”
Dan kept going along the road, up the road, to wherever this road led. If it led to a pack of the dead, then he knew he would drop to his knees and try to hide Mason with his own body. Or maybe he’d just smother the boy. Choke him out and leave him to come back as one of them. They never wept for hunger.
If that happened, maybe he could find a way to kill himself, too. It would be better to go wandering with Mason than to let the boy go on alone.
