Angels Mark (The Serena Wilcox Dystopian Trilogy Book 1)

Angels Mark Chapter 2

There was no turning back. Farther and farther she drove, past suburban housing developments with their hundreds of tasteful white Christmas lights lining identical roofs on identical houses, past vacant department stores bearing illuminated icy parking lots, past gas stations with a surplus of frozen cut pine trees leaning against quick-stop stores, and past banks displaying the current outside temperature of -17, not including “wind chill factor”.

After a long stretch on the freeway the steady blur of traffic lights, holiday lights, street lights, and headlights tapered off. Serena slowed to the 30mph speed limit to meet up with the wreath-lined streets of the small town of Cannon Falls, Minnesota, which was a frequent pit-stop for truckers driving between the Twin Cities and Rochester. The town, with a population of around 4,000, had benefited from media attention after former United States President Obama selected Cannon Falls for a town hall meeting stop on his tour of the Midwest states. The presidential stop helped The Old Market Deli become a tourist attraction, due to its framed photographs of the former president ordering a “Tom Turkey” sandwich. To this day, the chair he sat in was marked with duct tape.

As she reached the only traffic light in the town, she stopped in front of a multicolored canopy of Christmas lights draped across the intersection. She studied the lights as she waited for the light to change. She could almost hear the crackling of ice crystals as the lights swayed. She tracked the rocking motion of the lights with her eyes, eyes dry and bloodshot from fatigue and the hot air from the minivan’s heater. She willed her eyes to stay open. She looked in the rearview mirror. Her green eyes had so much red around them that Serena thought, I have Christmas eyes. Oh no, I’m getting slap-happy. I need to snap out of it. I still have twenty miles left to go.

One second, two seconds, three seconds. There were no other vehicles around. It was tempting to ignore the red light, but she couldn’t risk a traffic violation, or the unlikely event that a car would come out of nowhere and zip through the intersection, colliding with her, so she waited for what felt like a long time but probably wasn’t. She surveyed the downtown area, noticing lights on behind one of the storefront windows: chiropractor Fletcher was tending to an emergency after-care patient who had been rear-ended in an auto accident an hour earlier. All other buildings were dark. Finally the light changed and she was on her way.

She drove past Cannon Falls’ post office and grocery store, which shared a common parking lot, and past its only public school complex; all grades K-12 were taught among the two brick buildings located at the edge of town, just inside city limits.

Earlier in the day the area was a hub of activity with teen drivers leaving school, parents picking up students, and orange-yellow buses lined up along the full length of the sidewalk. Now the area was deserted, lit only by security lights.

As the school faded away from view, she passed St. Ansgar’s Lutheran Church, a church that held both traditional and contemporary worship services, and served as an emergency shelter for the neighboring school district for emergencies that, post 9/11, included terrorist attacks and bomb threats. Serena idly wondered if the church had been full of school children on that horrible day that was the catalyst for everything else that happened.

St. Ansgar’s was the last sight of Cannon Falls -- and the last sign of civilization. After she drove by the outlying residential areas, and a few rural properties, nothing greeted her as she maneuvered the windy roads and icy bridges between Cannon Falls and Red Wing.

Tangled leaf-less trees, Halloween trees, filled the bluffs on both sides of the desolate road, not a home in sight -- nothing but the moonlight that bounced off the snow and provided an eerie violet-white glow that illuminated the darkness. Other than the moonlight, which was partially obscured by cloud cover coming in, it was pitch black, the kind of blackness that only the most rural areas are steeped in.