Frozen Dinner Page 3

tooth.

  Fletcher stumbled to the dead woman’s side, pulled his coat off her face, checked her neck, but couldn’t get a good look. He turned her onto her stomach, flipped her over like an over-matched wrestler so that her face was pressed against the floor, and brushed her dark hair aside. There was no tattoo marring her skin. There was only a wound. A wound that looked just like a bite mark and—what was that? Was that bone? No. No it was—

  Fletcher looked back, looked back at the rotting corpse that lay draped over two seats, its arms outstretched, as though playing Superman, or reaching for the woman, looked back at the rotting corpse with the gap in its grin.

  Nestled in the torn flesh of the woman’s neck was a single human tooth.

  Fletcher met the woman’s eyes and wondered how he could do so when, just a second ago, she had been facing the floor.

  *

  The Snowcat rumbled to a stop and Kathy Willis leaned out the passenger side door, peered through the ND Selena night vision binoculars.

  “See anything?” Harry Bright asked. Bright was IGRIC’s Transportation Manager and lead on the now five day old search for Arnold Fletcher.

  Willis’s hopes were low, given that the flare had cracked the sky over a day ago, and blowing snow from the north had slowed the Cat to a stop-and-go crawl. But, as she scanned the green on black horizon, Willis felt relief flood through her and a laugh escaped her lips on a cloud of condensation.

  “He’s out there alright,” she said. “Looks like he took shelter in some downed plane and . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “There’re others with him. Two—no, three others.”

  “Well hell,” Bright said and fired up the Cat, “let’s go get ‘em. Fletcher and these new friends of his’re bound to be hungry.”

  ***

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