Free Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker Page A

will?”
    Hazel’s growl cut them off. “I’m not letting you shut those machines down.”
    A silence ensued before the first doctor spoke. “Mrs. Bell. Youshould prepare yourself for the possibility that your husband may be in a persistent vegetative state.”
    Hazel’s reply was as good as a slap. “You gentlemen do your jobs and I’ll let the good Lord do his.”
    Just then the younger of the two doctors glanced up and spied Mercy lingering in the doorway. He scowled and, without further warning, twitched the curtain across the door. Mercy took the hint and backed out the doorway toward the nursing station. The staff was abuzz with the circumstances of the accident.
    “Maybe they’ll put up a guardrail on that stretch of road now,” the charge nurse sniffed. “It’s a death trap.”
    A much younger nurse sighed. “Jimmy in rig two told me that the bus only rolled off the road like that because of another car. Some dude in a pickup. Drunk, probably. They found the truck crashed into a tree a little ways from the scene, and I guess they went out to make an arrest. An ex-con from Titan Falls. Name of Snow, or something like that.” Mercy let out an involuntary gasp, and the charge nurse looked up and frowned.
    “The night before a holiday no less,” a third nurse injected. “It’s terrible. Little kids and everything.”
    The charge nurse was more direct. Her voice flew to Mercy’s ear like a wasp with its stinger cocked. “I hope they punish the bastard who did this. I mean it. Someone should pay for this. Someone really should.”
    Mercy needed fresh air. She made a beeline for the waiting room and the front doors. As she passed through them, she shivered. Even when she left the woods, it seemed, she was never really out of them.

Chapter Four

    J une and Nate didn’t speak in the car after the accident. It really was brutally cold, the night so absolute and dark it smothered like a hangman’s hood. June, completely shaken by the events of the evening, drove as if she were narrowly escaping some unseen danger—a lurking wolf maybe, its yellow eyes plotting, or contact with some poisonous species of spider.
    Nate gazed out the black passenger window, and June knew without asking that he, too, was picturing the still form of Suzie on the stretcher, the blob of her red mitten falling out of her pocket like the heart of a gutted fish. June put her foot down and drove a little faster even. She couldn’t erase that image from her son’s mind (or indeed her own), but she could take him somewhere safe. It was lucky, then, that they were headed to the lake cabin—the safest place June could think of. It sat ten miles west of Titan Falls—not so far that driving to it was any kind of trial, but wild enough that the press of woods around it always felt dark and dangerous to June, and never more so than tonight, when something terrible, something no one could take back or put right, really had happened.
    Cal’s great-grandfather had hewed the cabin’s logs himself and thrown up the frame using hand tools and the famous McAllister gumption, but he’d gone overboard and the place had ended up turning into more of a bunker than a true house, fortified against bears, snowdrifts, and the passage of time itself. An enormous, rough-cut porch overlooked the egg-shaped lake and the scrappy dock, while inside, the cavelike rooms offered respite from high summer’s humidity and vague clouds of biting insects. In the summer, though, when the house was opened up, the character of it completely changed. It became the kind of place where people felt comfortable walking dripping wet into the kitchen, grabbing a cold one from the fridge, and slamming the screen door on their way out. In fact, there was a line of water stains dotted across the living-room floor from generations of McAllisters doing just that.
    Like all the other McAllisters before them, Cal, Nate, and June spent their summer evenings crouched over an