He reached the top of the hill and paused for a moment to look down at us. That uncanny hood, eyeholes like a moth, or giant white fly...then he was gone.

I reached the crest before Dance, and looked down. “Oh, no.”

A valley stretched before us, broken by a stream. More white swarmed the valley: people wearing white coats and furs. Another camp. Another group. In the center of the valley near the stream was a picnic shelter, and in front of it: a pile of junk, stacked together like a funeral pyre. I recognized something in the jumble.

My duffel bags.

“Wait, Wil. What’s the plan?” Dance tried to hold me back, but I shrugged him off.

“We get our stuff. That’s the plan.”

I was out of breath from running up the hill after the boy, but I launched myself down the other side of it, kicking up a spray of snow. At the bottom of the hill, people looked up at the sound. There was no way we were going to surprise them now. I stumbled down into the valley, and right into a blanket being held out for me.

I was wrapped in the blanket before I realized what was happening, like a runner finishing a race.

Two women held the blanket. One tucked the end around my neck. It was soft and worn, white fleece. But it smelled of mold. The woman looked willowy and faded, ethereal but beaten down. She had long, greasy hair beneath the hood of her white coat. She moved with hazy, dreamlike motions, not looking me in the eye.

“We wear white here,” she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Dance made it down the hill behind me. The women were ready for him, too. They threw an old, white sleeping bag around him. He looked at me, too surprised to resist.

This could have been a kind gesture, strangers helping us out in the cold, keeping us warm. But I didn’t think so. A man was coming toward us through the snow.

Wrapped tightly in the blanket, I couldn’t get to my pocket.

The man wore a sheepskin draped across his shoulders. His chest was bare to the waist, pocked with cold, a red rash slashed across it like poison ivy. I thought again of the gun. I did not try to touch it, to draw attention to it, to struggle too much in the blanket. I thought of Jake’s flip-flops: of men who were too arrogant to cover up, to dress sensibly, who thought they were beyond the reach of weather. I looked at the man’s pink skin.

“Hello, friends,” the man said. “You’re just in time.”

“I think you have our things.” I shrugged off a side of the blanket to try to point at the pile, and both the women rushed forward to tuck the blanket back in.