Threnody (006).

(This is a 300-word-a-day novel project.)

The snow turned to scrub grass so gradually that she hardly even noticed. The ground was craggy now, cut occasionally with a ravine here and there. Now it looked to her more like west Texas. Maybe Oklahoma.

She had been walking perhaps three hours and in that time there had been no sounds: no birds, no hum of insects, no crows floating on updrafts. She mounted a small rise and saw that where the river was leading her was right into a thick copse of trees; they grew in a diagonal line, thick to both the east and the west, a natural barrier of tall, white-barked fingers, with leaves that were the pattern of sea shells – and after watching them for as long as she could stand it, she decided that they were the non-lethal sort. But just as she was about to carefully make her way through them she drew up short, her skin prickling up and down her arms: it sat there titled precariously to one side, its metal trailer covered with rust and dust. It was a semi-trailer, smashed in among the trees. She hadn’t been able to see it because they were so thick, but now it was like a tiger that had been laying in the bush, waiting to strike: it was a semi-trailer truck wedged tightly through the trees, its trailer split at the seams. Painted on the side in bright red letters was WHITTAKER’S FARM FRESH EGGS and a giant chicken with spectacles offering up a basket, and winking.

Jesse advanced on the cab of the truck with wariness, moving until she saw fingers on the wheel – the driver was slumped over the wheel with his head turned away from her, the unnatural angle of it telling her unmistakably that he was dead.