Medicine Bow

The weather caught them a day on from Rock River, a cold front sliding down off the mountains ahead of its time, the sky going the color of a bruise and the wind coming around hard out of the northwest with rain in it that was half sleet, and there was no shelter in the open and the cold rain was the kind that killed you slow and stupid, soaked you and then stole the heat out of you until you lay down, and so when the next town came up gray through the weather she took them into it, against every rule, because the rule against towns and the rule against dying of the wet had come into conflict and the wet one won.

The town was called Medicine Bow. There was an old hotel on the main street, a grand thing for such a place, all dark wood, and she thought about it and passed it by, because a big obvious dry building was where anyone would shelter and where anyone might be sheltering already. She took them instead down a side street to a low brick building with a faded cross still bolted over the door, a clinic, the kind of little town clinic where in The Before a doctor had come through two days a week to look at the old people's hearts and the children's ears, and she got the door open and got them in out of the killing rain, and it was dim and dry and smelled of dust and old paper and the ghost of the cold clean smell that clinics used to have.