It's Not A Falling Tree

Chapter 6

"You must hurry!" The Voice commands as Andrew trudges through the snow with the chimera following closely behind.

Though the trio had initially tried to follow the woman who had escaped them into the forest, they quickly found that the monster was too big and bulky to navigate through the trees without extreme difficulty. As a result, they'd been forced to return to the road and continue searching for people from there.

Since then, they had visited three more houses and found nothing. While this was to be expected by this point, so many people left Story during the winter that the town's population fell by nearly half from November through March, it seemed to be taking a toll on The Voice. With each empty house they investigated, she grew more agitated. She'd keep yelling at Andrew to hurry, over and over again, to find someone, anyone, to feed to the monster. When the day started, she seemed so calm, but now stress and worry permeated each word she yelled into Andrew's mind.

In spite of her growing fury and increasingly frantic demands, or maybe because of them, something had begun to change in Andrew.

It had started when he saw the woman fleeing into the woods. The hint of recognition he'd experienced had ignited a small fire within him. He still feels compelled to obey The Voice, to lead the chimera where she commanded, but he no longer did so without question or awareness.

With each house he watched the monster destroy, he repeated the same questions in his mind. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Even now, as he walks through the snow, bathed in pale moonlight and completely numb to the cold, he wonders if he has to be doing this.

I could just stop, he thinks, and maybe he would if it were truly up to him. But right now, no matter what his feelings on the matter are, The Voice is still too overpowering. Her will, while it can now be questioned, cannot be ignored. And so, Andrew marches on toward the next house and toward the monster's next potential meal.

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Linda guides the beam of her flashlight back and forth over the corner of her yard where Grace thought she dropped the gun. Though snow has stopped falling and the clouds in the sky have parted, a strong wind continues to blow, which means that the gun has probably been covered under a layer of snow. Nonetheless, Linda's holding out hope that she'll be able to find it with the light from her flashlight.

Inside, Grace is holding Charlie and trying to ignore the pain radiating from her extremities. She's concerned about Linda, who has been outside for more than ten minutes. If she isn't back soon, Grace has decided that she'll find a pair of boots and a coat and go out after her.

Charlie looks up at Grace and then back toward the sliding glass door. He's not in a good mood. Not only has he had to deal with the awful snow each time he's gone outside today, he's also been woken up from a very pleasant dream, and now, he's being held by someone who he barely knows while his mommy is off doing who-knows-what outside in the dark. Had he been a less polite dog, he surely would have expressed his displeasure with a whine, or even a growl. But, because he is very protective of his "good boy" reputation, he keeps his irritation inside and quietly waits for his human to come back.

Back outside, Linda has caught a glimpse of something that looks like metal with her flashlight and wades through the snow in order to get a closer look at it.

"Thank you, Jesus," she says aloud as she nears the object and recognizes it as the barrel of a gun. Carefully, she reaches out and plunges her hand into the snow drift where it's buried. Then, after a few seconds of blindly feeling around, she's able to grab the gun and pull it free.