She rode the first bus of the day, alongside the shift workers, their heads down so they’d catch a little more sleep as the engine rumbled on.
Gray road burrowed a way through rows of browned wheat as tall as Saint, undulating like God had tugged the rug from beneath land farmers plied before it could settle. Pylons stood in slipshod formation like some grand steel army. A water tower of burnt red and no color in the sky at all.
At the town of Chesterwood she changed buses, the driver too interested as she sat alone behind him, watching fate loom, the horizon holding answers she was in no way ready to find.
Five miles out, a sign read 15 South as the world flattened and the grass yellowed and the verge turned to gravel the color of salt.
The bus crawled along, the gearbox ground out, the suspension bounced like a fairground ride.
She climbed out far from anywhere, the driver reluctant to leave, following her in his mirror till she cratered from sight; the dips and brows of hillside propped her from each side.
From the straight road she found woodland that carpeted a thousand acres, and she checked her map a dozen times before she found a hard yellow sign.
Caution Minimum Maintenance Road
Level B Service
Enter at Your Own Risk
She strolled down twin tracks, the grass between tall enough to fold beneath her sneakers. Crops tightly rolled to variegated bales checkered the fields haphazardly. A tractor sprayed with mud, its scoop left buried in the dirt. The track fed the mouth of woodland so dense she slowed as possum haw leaves slid to a gulley, their berries bright red against shadow behind.
Saint splashed through a stream crossing, her sneakers soon filled with the brace of cold.
She edged the bluegrass a long way, and in the distance were deer and raccoons and above ravens watched her like prey.
At the first fall of rain she looked through a canopy that stammered light as wind parted it.
The house came to view. Single story, a timber face worn till the browns bowed to chalk, a couple of shades darker where water fractured the seal. The roof was corrugated steel, and she counted three outbuildings, sloping like the ground was ceding to their weight. Another tractor with rusting chains that wrapped tires the height of a child. Another shack to the left, rotting, its frame exposed like charred ribs.
Saint moved with care. Loose leaves floated like snowflakes.
She discovered the first outbuilding empty as she peered through glass smoked by the haze of a dozen seasons.
She did not feel the kick of fear until she came to the largest barn, and through gaps in the wall saw the steel of a van.
Navy.
Chrome fender hanging from the front.
She heard something and spun, her breath falling short until she saw a fox squirrel head up the wide face of an American beech.
“Fuck,” she spoke beneath her breath, glanced up, and the rain died as quick as it had begun.
She trod down braids of nettle, stepped onto a porch of russet boards, and stopped dead before the door and listened.
Inside her bag was her slingshot.
And beside that her grandfather’s gun.