The Crash of Hennington

—I mean check her desk.

Jacki could hear some sounds in the background, echoes wrapped in echoes. The numbers were gone, but she was so cold. Her vision began to go white.

—This has to be it. And here’s a syringe.

—Give it to me.

—You’re going to inject her?

—Look at her. She’s going to die otherwise.

—Do you know how?

—No, but I can take a guess. Hold her arm still.

—Oh, my God.

—Here goes nothing.

—Oh, my God.

Honey ran through her veins, and she was warm again.

29. The Crash at the Pond. (#ulink_961258cc-4b29-513f-88c1-66bad657fd14)

While the others pushed past her, she stood and regarded her muddy footprint. This was it then, the final clue. It was too early for the grass to be bitter. It was too early for the air to smell so much of dust. It was too early for the eagles to have left their aeries for more verdant hunting grounds. And now, it was definitely too early for the water to have pulled back far enough for mudflats to emerge at the pond’s edge. Drought was coming, was already here in the smaller places, poking its nose at the corners of things. She had lived through a drought when she was a calf, but even with the help of the cubes of dried grass and small stone ponds of water that had seemed to appear from nowhere throughout the city, she had watched many of the older herdmembers and a good number of the younger ones grow weak and finally die. It was a horrible time, the days filled with endless droning sun, the nights filled with the bleats and moans of herdmembers mourning both their hunger and their dead. Lean times had come and gone since, but nothing like that terrible season. Nothing, that is, until what now hovered on the horizon, poised to reach in its hot, dusty fingers and snatch the last blade of grass from them.

She looked out at the herd, squinting to see as they lowered their heads and drank, the water lapping at their toenails. Some of them, perhaps many of them, perhaps even herself along with them, would be dead by the end of the season. Hardship was natural, even drought was natural, yet still the burden on her was far from light, and deep in her crowded, instinctive brain, there was the unpleasant coldness of doubt. She walked slowly over to the water’s edge to join the other herdmembers in a drink. Stopping, she sniffed the air and turned to look behind her.

Something grabbed her horn.

She jolted herself back and wrenched her head up into the sky. She heard a short cry as one of the thin creatures fell down into the shallow water, away from where its grip had been on her nose. She gathered herself quickly and looked down into its eyes, staring back up at her. She was not afraid, only startled. The thin creatures had never been any danger to the herd and especially not one this tiny. She brought her massive head down for a closer sniff. The herd nearby stopped to watch, all eyes on her, straining against their collective myopia, as she took in the smells of the thing. It was mostly sweet with a faint sickly odor of food too ripe, of mother’s milk gone bad. It must be one of their calves, and a very, very young one by the smell and size of it.