Strange Highways

holding on to the door frame, then balancing against the porch wall. The dog slipped out after him. Meg followed, closing the door behind them.
     Holding the Mossberg in her right hand, using her left arm to support Tommy, she helped the boy across the porch, down the snow-covered steps, and into the yard. With the windchill factor, the temperature must have been below zero. Her eyes teared, and her face went numb. She hadn't paused to put on gloves, and the cold sliced through to the bones of her hands. Still, she felt better outside than in the house, safer. She didn't think that the rats would come after them, for the storm was a far greater obstacle to those small creatures than it was to her and Tommy.
     Conversation was impossible because the wind keened across the open land, whistled under the eaves of the house, and clattered the bare branches of the maples against one another. She and Tommy progressed silently, and Doofus stayed at their side.
     Though they slipped several times and almost fell, they reached the barn quicker than she had expected, and she hit the switch to put up the electric door. They ducked under the rising barrier before it was entirely out of their way. In the weak light of the lone bulb, they went directly to the station wagon.
     She fished her keys out of her coat pocket, opened the door on the passenger side, slid the seat back all the way on its tracks, and helped Tommy into the front of the car because she wanted him beside her now, close, not in the backseat, even if he would have been more comfortable there. When she looked around for the dog, she saw that he was standing outside the barn, at the threshold, unwilling to follow them inside.
     "Doofus, here, quick now," she said.
     The Labrador whined. Surveying the shadows in the barn, he let the whine deepen into a growl.
     Remembering the feeling of being watched when she had parked the jeep in the barn earlier, Meg also scanned the murky corners and the tenebrous reaches of the loft, but she saw neither pale, slinking figures nor the telltale red glimmer of rodent eyes.
     The Labrador was probably excessively cautious. His condition was understandable, but they had to get moving. More forcefully, Meg said, "Doofus, get in here, right now."
     He entered the barn hesitantly, sniffing the air and floor, came to her with a sudden urgency, and jumped into the backseat of the station wagon.
     She closed the door, went around to the other side, and got in behind the wheel. "We'll drive back to Biolomech," she said. "We'll tell them we've found what they're looking for."
     "What's wrong with Doofus?"
     In the backseat, the dog was moving from one side window to the other, peering out at the barn, making thin, anxious sounds.
     "He's just being Doofus," Meg said.
     Huddled in his seat, angled awkwardly to accommodate his cast, Tommy appeared to be younger than ten, so frightened and vulnerable.
     "It's okay," Meg said. "We're out of here."
     She thrust the key in the ignition, turned it. Nothing. She tried again. The jeep would not start.

    7

AT THE HIGH FENCE ALONG THE NORTHEAST FLANK OF THE BIOLOMECH property, Ben Parnell crouched to examine the rat-size tunnel in the half-frozen earth. Several of his men gathered around him, and one directed the beam of a powerful flashlight on the patch of ground in question. Luckily the hole was in a place where the wind scoured most of the snow away instead of piling it in drifts, but the searchers had still not spotted it until they'd made a second circuit of the perimeter.
     Steve Harding raised his voice to compete with the wind: "Think they're in there, curled up in a burrow?"
     "No," Ben said, his breath smoking in the arctic air. If he'd thought that the rats were in a burrow at the end of this entrance tunnel, he would not have been crouched in front of the hole, where one of them might fly out at him, straight at his face.
     Hostile, John Acuff had said. Exceedingly hostile.
     Ben said, "No, they weren't digging a permanent burrow. They came up somewhere on the other side of this fence, and they're long gone now.'
     A tall, lanky young man in a county sheriff's department coat joined the group. "One of you named Parnell?"
     "That's me," Ben said.
     "I'm Joe Hockner." He was half shouting to be heard above