The Shattered Gates by Ginn Hale

can make ourselves less obvious?”
    Having a question to answer made John feel better immediately. It offered him a sense of control and knowledge. He didn’t know where they were, but he could begin to make maps. He didn’t know whose tracks he had followed, but he could make sure that his own tracks were hidden from now on.
    After that night he hunted more carefully. He found himself once again digging down to the cold earth and touching it, growing familiar with it, not just as an amusement, but because he depended on this land now. He needed to know in a breath if the least detail was out of place. If a stranger crouched in the dark stands of trees, or if men lay in waiting behind the drifts of snow, he had to sense their presence before they sensed his.
    Their need for fire troubled John the most. Smoke was too easy to spot; its scent carried too well. Bill and Laurie now marched a mile south of the shelter and cooked under the cover of the trees. For each meal, they had to haul the supplies and raw food out and then carry everything back. It was exhausting for Bill, who could hardly breathe, but he didn’t complain. None of them wanted to risk their lives for convenience.
     Steadily, the snowdrifts grew wetter, and the air, even at night, turned warmer. John saw changes in Bill and Laurie and even in himself. All their voices had grown quieter, their hair longer and wild. They were often silent, just sitting, listening to sounds in the night outside their shelter. An animal tension infused their motions and gnawed at their sleep.
    Whereas Bill had previously been slim, he now seemed wasted. His inability to either run or fight bred a desperate stillness in him. He could crouch against the dark trunk of a tree, small and perfectly motionless, becoming almost invisible.
    Laurie’s cheeks were chapped red, and her bone-like hands were marred by cracks and calluses. Her body had lost all traces of femininity. Thin strings of ligament and muscle barely covered the bones of her arms and legs. She had learned to hunt, but still hated to leave Bill alone. She watched over him constantly.
    From the looseness of his clothes, John knew that he too had lost weight. The thick meaty feel of his body had been reduced to a hard leanness. Hunger and constant motion had eaten away the soft curves of his cheeks. He had become nearly as angular and weather-beaten as the bare, black trees. His beard was thick and shot through with white.
    Recently, as the days had grown longer, he had begun spending more time out alone. He gave Laurie and Bill their privacy and the time to enjoy it, since he could give them little else. And sometimes, when they would curl up close to each other or kiss, John would feel desperately lonely. He preferred to be away at those times.
    Always he wanted to return to the spot where he had lost the key and where he had first seen the man’s tracks. Truly, a foolish temptation. He certainly didn’t want to follow any more tracks to another scene of human immolation.
    But he wondered if something might not appear there again. Maybe a door back home. So he approached cautiously. He no longer walked straight from one point to another. He circled and kept to the stands of bare trees.
    He was still a few dozen yards from the exact spot when he felt a sudden chill and  caught a faint odor in the air. Something felt out of place. He remembered having the same sense the day he had come across the shattered yellow stones by the wolf rock.
    John crouched down under the cover of the trees and concentrated. He scanned the expanse of white snowdrifts and the four dark patches where trees grew close. Then he heard something—a sound like a whisper. His attention whipped back to the closest drift of snow. He stared at the perfectly white expanse, and, as he did, the faintest gray shadow coalesced in the air. Instantly, it darkened, and a man suddenly appeared, suspended a few feet above the snowdrift, hanging in