We’d fallen asleep on her couch that night, some old Christmas movie playing on her ancient TV, her head on my chest, my arm around her shoulders. I’d looked down at her face—peaceful, trusting, completely unguarded—and thought:This. This is what I want forever.
Three months later, came the deployment that changed everything.
Six months after that, I was gone.
Did she ever think about me? Probably not. It had been six years. She’d moved on, I had no doubt.
I wouldn’t blame her if she hated me. I kind of hated me too.
One of the puppies let out a particularly plaintive squeak, snapping me back to the present. The mama dog’s head swungtoward the box, then back to me.Are you going to do something about that?
“We’re almost?—”
I stopped.
We weren’t almost anywhere.
The road had disappeared. Not figuratively—literally. The world beyond my headlights was a solid wall of white, snow coming sideways, visibility reduced to approximately nothing. I couldn’t see the shoulder. Couldn’t see the center line. Couldn’t see anything except white-white-white in every direction.
“Shit.”
I started moving at a crawl, trying to get my bearings. This was officially a whiteout and I was still another five miles from home.
Normally would’ve been no big deal. But now five miles was 4.9 more miles than I was going to be able to make.
The mama dog whined.
“I know. I’m working on it.”
Options. I needed options. I could pull over and wait it out, but the temperature was still dropping, and a truck full of tiny puppies wasn’t going to survive a night in these conditions, even with the engine running.
Travis.
His place was only about a mile from here if I could stay on the road. The guy never left his house, which meant he’d definitely be home. He had heat, supplies, probably enough emergency gear to survive the apocalypse.
And he owed me twenty bucks from a poker game three months ago that he’d definitely thought I’d forgotten about. Fucking recluse computer genius needed to pay up, I didn’t care if he’d saved my ass during missions more times than I could count.
I turned the truck—carefully, so carefully—in what I hoped was the direction of Travis’s compound. The mama dog watched me with an expression that suggested she had serious doubts about my navigation skills.
“Trust me,” I told her.
The doubt intensified.
Ten minutes turned into twenty. The road curved when I didn’t expect it, forcing me to correct hard and sending the box of puppies sliding. The mama dog barked—the first sound she’d made since we’d loaded up—and I reached down to steady the box while keeping one hand on the wheel and my eyes on the nothing ahead of me.
“Everyone’s fine. We’re fine. This is fine.”
No one in the truck believed me.
But then—finally—the gate materialized out of the white. Travis’s gate, with its subtle cameras and its electronic hum that most people never noticed. I’d never been so happy to see a paranoid security system in my life.
The gate swung open in front of me—my truck had a sensor which allowed me in, a huge honor when it came to Trav that I didn’t take lightly—and pulled up the drive to the house. It looked almost normal from the outside—ranch-style, native stone, large windows. Regular, run-of-the-mill, small town Montana house.
The kind of place that didn’t advertise the fact that it was basically a bunker with five times the living space than the outer shell suggested.
I parked, gathered the box of puppies, and coaxed the mama dog out of the passenger seat. She was reluctant to leave the warmth of the truck, but when I lifted the box, she followed. Her babies were in there. She wasn’t letting them out of her sight.
The video intercom by the front door flickered to life before I could press the button.
