Susan brought the Explorer to a fishtailing stop. The road had stopped shaking several turns back, but in the freak blizzard she had kept on driving, debating her destination, the hospital or the police station. She had settled on the former. Her hands were still trembling when she took the vehicle out of gear.
“You handle this pretty well,” Mark said. “You handled it all pretty well.”
“Not that good. Trust me.” She stroked his arm. “Are you hurt?”
“My whole body is one big toothache. But I’ll live.”
“What the hell happened back there? What were you shooting at?”
“A warning shot. I thought something was watching me. Tracking me. Something different than the eyes.”
“Different …”
“A bear,” Mark said, with slight hesitation. “I don’t know what else it could have been. I found tracks.”
He told her about the doe. Then the remains.
“What do you think it was?” Susan said.
“If I had to guess … I’d say a child. But it wasn’t. God, I hope it wasn’t.”
“I can’t take much more of this, Mark. I can’t deal with killer trees and Minnesota earthquakes.”
“How about killer storms?”
“What are you saying? It’s controlling the weather?”
“Have you ever known a blizzard to just come out of nowhere like this? Or even seen one this bad?”
“… No.”
Mark told her of the unexpected tempest that had struck on his return—and how all those years ago, the same thing had happened to the woodsman.
“It’s coming,” Susan said, staring helplessly into the storm. “It’s coming, and we can’t stop it.”
“Susan—”
She put up a hand, hesitated, then said what had been on her mind since he first told her of the missing children.
“It wants all of us, Mark. Not just Kelan. Not just those kids. It wants everyone. Right now it’s trying to stop us, buying time for itself. But it’s more than that. It’s cutting this town off from the rest of the world.”
“And then? After the storm?”
“And then,” Susan said darkly, “it’s free.”