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"There's one thing we could do."
"What's that?"
"Drill for oil."
Bill waited to see if he were joking. Then he blurted, "But
that's inappropriate technology."
Atwood followed Wallace into the church. "Yeah."
There were three coffins, one of them supported by six bearers. A
dozen or so mourners were scattered through the pews. Atwood
walked slowly up the aisle, looking left, then right. He didn't see any
seven-foot supermen. Spectrally thin, the flyer had said. No one
present fit that description. There was one woman, tall and skinny,
though not seven feet by any stretch. How did the government
know if the aliens were men or women?
The woman locked gazes with him. Her eyes were red-rimmed
and wet with tears. Her nose was running and her cheeks were
puffy. Embarrassed, Atwood let his gaze drop. He turned to his
partner. "Come on, they aren't here."
"What about the van with the Minnesota plates?" Bill
whispered.
"Heh. The border isn't that far. You can see Minnesota from
the bluffs. Families have got relatives on both sides of the river.
You see anybody here who's seven feet tall?"
Atwood winced as Bill gripped his arm tight. He saw his partner
pointing surreptitiously at belt level so the mourners could not see.
Pointing at the coffins. Atwood sucked in his breath. One of the
coffins was easily long enough to hold a seven footer. He stepped
over to it and ran his hand along the plain pine wood top. Looking
up, he located Wallace.
"Look, I really hate to ask you this, Mr. Wallace; but I'm afraid
you'll have to open this up. National security."
"National security?" The old man seemed amused. Atwood
wondered if he would ask to see a warrant. Folks seldom did
anymore.
"I can't tell you any more than that, sir." He smiled
apologetically and scratched his beard. "They didn't tell me much
more. This one isn't your handyman, is it?"
Wallace shook his head. "One of his friends, from out of
state."
Atwood nodded. "Then you can't vouch for his identity."
Wallace gazed silently at the coffin. "The lumber of the world,"
he said.
"Eh?"
The old man looked at him. "The dead are the lumber of the
world. Their bones are the ribbing and shoring that hold it up."
Atwood waited while Wallace located a claw hammer. He could
feel the eyes of the mourners on his back. Watching with a dull
anger. Atwood gritted his teeth. It was a lousy duty to pull.
The nails groaned as they came out of the coffin lid. Atwood
remembered tales of elaborate, plush-lined coffins of shiny
mahogany. There were special people, funeral directors, whose sole
job was to manage an elaborate and impressive funeral display.
Today there were just too many funerals. Sometimes the coffin was
a canvas bag. Sometimes, not even that.
The lid came off and Atwood gazed into the box. The light was
bad; the angle, wrong. He stood aside to get a better view.
A tall man, but not seven feet. So thin he looked almost
wasted. He had the skin of a youngish man, yet with the hint of age
around the eyes. Atwood glanced at the hands folded across the
breast. Long, bony fingers, blackened with frostbite at the end, as
were the nose and ears. He sniffed. The corpse had been washed,
but the smell of death was there.
Atwood stepped back. "All right." A wave of the hand. "Nail it
back up." He brushed his hands vigorously, although he hadn't
touched anything. "Come on, Bill. We've bothered these people
enough."
Wallace did not follow them out. In the narthex, they pulled on
their outdoor gear, strapped the snowshoes to their feet. "Was
that one of them?" Bill asked. "The corpse?"
Atwood shrugged. "He was tall enough and skinny enough to
fit the profile."
"Aren't there supposed to be two of them? And what about
the people who are supposed to be helping them escape?"
Escape to where? he wondered. "We'll pass the van's VIN
along and let Minnesota check it out. But you heard what Wallace
said. His handyman and a couple of friends. You saw the frostbite,
didn't you? Jesus. No heating oil. No gas. They've been written off
by the government. They've got to move south or die, and they're
too stubborn to move. You wanted to do something for them, Bill?
Then let them bury each other in peace."
***
The six pallbearers watched the deputies leave. The whole time the
long coffin had been searched, they had held the shorter coffin
aloft. Alex was growing tired. His arms ached from hanging onto
the coffin handles and he was sure the four men holding the
corners were just as tired. After all, they were bearing his weight
and Gordon's and the coffin's, too.
"They're gone," said Wallace's wife at the back of the church.
Alex sighed and relaxed. He slumped gratefully to the floor.
Thor, Bob, Fang and Steve lowered the coffin to its cart. Bob
groaned and rubbed his shoulders. "I thought they'd never leave."
Gordon, leaning on the middle handle on the other side, had
to be pried loose, his grip had grown so tight. They led him to one
of the pews and let him stretch out.
Alex pushed himself to a crawling position. Sherrine left her
pew and helped him back upright. Then he walked in slow, careful
steps to the nearest pew and dropped into the hard, wooden seat.
He kneaded his thigh muscles. One thing about being snowed in for
three days at Wallace's farm- he and Gordon could now stand
upright and walk, at least for short periods. Like Steve said,
practice every day. Still, what if the security officer had noticed him
hanging onto the coffin instead of lifting it?
Enoch leaned over him. "You all right, Gabe?"
"I'll be fine. That's the longest I've stood up in . . ." In thirty-
odd years, he realized.
Sherrine patted his shoulder. "Before you, know it, you'll be
walking across the room on your own."
Alex laughed. Who would have thought that walking required
the mastery of such complex skills? He had walked as a child, but
could not remember the learning of it. He would look on pedestrians
in the future with a certain amount of awe.
"It was good of you to take us in like that," Alex told the
farmer.
Wallace grunted. "Seven warm bodies during a norther? My
wife and I would have froze to death without you. Like poor Jed and
his friends."
Alex glanced at the coffins. "Yeah."
Enoch had been waiting for the handyman and his friends to
come to his huddling place when Thor appeared on his front porch.
After the storm had subsided, they had all gone out looking and
found the bodies only a few hundred meters from the farmhouse.
Judging from the tracks that had not filled in with snow it appeared
that the three had been walking in a circle. "It happens," Enoch had
said. "When the wind blows the snow up, everything whites out
and you lose all your sense of direction. Thor, who had known the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]