More down-homeyness. Simple. Straightforward. Heck, why not?
Yeah. Fine. But there was such a thing as too much down-homeyness. Such a thing as where in hell was everybody? She’d asked the co-pilot as he’d helped her from the plane, but he’d pointed to the sky, said, “Snow coming. Sorry, but we’ve got to take off,” and the next thing, she was standing here, to all intents and purposes the last human being on the planet.
A golf-ball-sized knot seemed to lodge in her throat.
If this was somebody’s idea of a bad joke—
A sudden gust of wind whipped Lissa’s hair over her face and, as it did, wet stuff hit her in the eye.
Snow. Just that fast. Snow, not the kind you saw on resort postcards. The kind that meant business. Within seconds, it began blanketing her cotton jacket.
Lissa put down her suitcase, opened her shoulder bag and took out her cell phone. Marvelous things, cell phones. They meant safety. Security. Human contact…
Mostly, they meant they were useless if you couldn’t see those miserable little bars on the home screen.
“Hello?” she said. “Hello? Hello? Hello?” Nothing. “Dammit,” she said, dumping the phone in her bag and her hands in her pockets.
Man, it was cold! And that snow… It was coming down like crazy. You lived in La La Land long enough, you forgot about snowstorms. This one was doing its best to obliterate everything.
Lissa’s teeth began to chatter.
She could see the headline now. Spring thaw leads to discovery of body of woman dumb enough to fly into a place devoid of humans. No signs of life except for vultures and bears and…
Hell. Vultures and bears and…
And, what was that?
A light. A pair of lights.
“Yes!”
Headlights were slicing through the wall of snow.
And now she could see something. A speck. A blob of red. It was a car. No. A truck, bouncing toward her at breakneck speed, its engine howling like a demented beast.
Well, no.
It wasn’t howling. It was wheezing and groaning like a creature in its death throes. And it wasn’t red, it was the color of rust because, Jesus, it was rust. It was a pickup truck, probably older than she was.
And it was coming straight at her.
Lissa stumbled back. Felt her foot catch in something. Grass under the snow. A tree root. What did it matter? Her foot caught and she went down on her ass.
The truck skidded to a stop a couple of feet away.
The engine stopped groaning, the sound replaced by a tick-tick-tick and by the sound of its windshield wipers. Correction. Its windshield wiper. Swish, swoosh, creak. Swish, swoosh, creak.
Lissa got to her feet.
The pickup didn’t move.
The doors didn’t open.
The windows didn’t slide down.
Just that single wiper blade, sweeping across the windshield.
The cracked windshield.