Chapter 4: The Highway

Wyatt's POV

I have hauled cattle for sixteen years, and I know what an animal looks like when it has just figured out where the exit is.

Signe Haugen had that look, and she was sitting in my passenger seat.

Her trainee was jammed in the middle with a thermos between her knees, and neither of them had said a word since the Brandon ramp.

I drove with both hands on the wheel and the window cracked, listening.

That was the part that scared me, more than the kid on the dock.

Highway 11 was empty, and I couldn't hear a single other engine for ten miles.

"Say it," I said. "The rest."

She told me in short flat sentences, looking out at the beans going yellow in the fields.

A dust, and a fever, and a sleep, and a waking.

They hunt by sound and by heat, she said, and they don't get tired, and they don't feel a thing.

They aren't sorry, and they aren't angry. They just come.

The cold stops them. Below ten degrees they go stiff, and below zero they freeze where they stand.

"That's six weeks off, easy," I said.

"Four," she said. "The first freeze in the first life came on October fourteenth."

She said it flatly, like the name of a road.

"The first life," I said.

She turned her head and looked at me properly.

I had never had a woman look at me like that. Like I was a house she'd lived in, and then the fire.

"I'll tell you that part when you can stand it," she said.

"I can stand it."

"No. Not today."

I could have argued, and I didn't, because something in me had gone quiet and sat down.

Ever since the yard, I'd been trying to work out why.

It wasn't the thing about my mother's truck. That had hit me in the gut, and I was still sore from it.

It was smaller.

She had reached for the thermos before I could offer her any.

She had put her hand on the exact cup holder where I keep my coffee, in a cab she'd never ridden in, without looking.

My mother used to say you could tell a good dispatcher by the way she already knew where you'd be.

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