“What is it?”

He didn’t answer. I glanced back at Grayson, snoring slightly, then opened the door and got out.

I had parked on a stretch of rural highway that didn’t have any streetlights, or the lights were few and far between. Maybe everything had frozen and burst. The foothills made a jagged rim around the road like broken teeth. Roads had been bulldozed through the hills long ago for the heavy machinery that lumbered back and forth for logging and mining—roads that had no names. I could see zigzags of dirt running through the trees.

“It’s here,” Dance said.

“Did you get a signal?”

“No.”

I stumbled over the ground, catching myself just before I fell. There was something in the snow.

“It’s dead,” Dance said. “An animal.”

He helped me straighten up. The thing that had tripped me had fur, tipped with bronze, but it lay still. The fur didn’t ruffle in the wind. It didn’t move. It was frozen.

“There’s more.” He pointed to another form in the snow. “And there’s a deer, I think, in the pool.”

“What pool?”

He led me a little farther into the darkness. We were far from the cars that were passing on the highway. Too far from the truck, I thought.

I felt the weight of the gun in my pocket. The shadows before me arranged into a rectangle. A black pool. It wasn’t frozen all the way. The pool had been halfheartedly covered by a tarp, its corners flapping in the wind. There was a chain-link fence, collapsing on one side around the pool, and a shed, its sides blasted with snow.

The wind shifted, and I smelled something sharp and chemical. Even the cold couldn’t mask that, even the clean scent of snow. “This is an injection well, for fracking,” I said. “This is supposed to be guarded.”

“Well, the guard left.”

I saw the deer in the pool then, the shape of the deer, which seemed not to be an animal, not to be anything at all, a torso unbound by time—except that there were antlers, a white rack. They almost looked beautiful, bone painted by snow.

But the body had a stillness I could not unsee. It buzzed with it, bobbing in the pond.

I thought of the Pumpkin King, made a scarecrow in his own dead garden. It was more frantic than the most frantic movement: the stillness of death, a frenzy of no longer caring that legs had broken off like icicles, that nostrils had filled with slime. Death had no shame. The deer carcass floated, antlers pointing at the sky.

“Everything’s fucking falling apart,” Dance said.

We did not get a signal on my phone. The truck started, and we drove in silence for a while.