Cold Ennaline Read Online Free PDF Page B

little mounds or piles of earth, as if someone’s buried something. As we continue, the ridges get higher and wider, jutting up above even the highest crops, brown islands in a sea of yellow and green. It’s as if a wild and giant animal has clawed through the skin of the world.
    There are signs of overgrowth, too: whole trees sprouting from the lip of the ridges, nearby crops growing twice as tall as they should, and giant bulbous flowers spilling out across the field. The flowers are invariably pink, ugly colors, fleshy colors, and the trees have pale, almost luminescent bark. There’s something grotesque about it, something surreal.
    Sometimes we see animals by the side of the road. Some are regular roadkill, I guess, but others are positioned in such a way that we can see a strange, black ash spilling out of them. As if they’ve been burned up from the inside.
    Father Nerve’s hands are white around the steering wheel. He’s driving too fast, but this far from civilization, there’s rarely any police to slow you down. Now and then I hear him praying under his breath, prayers for the earth and the sky but also prayers for us. I want to ask him about the god, but I’ve come to understand that at this point, Father Nerve is as lost and ignorant as we are.
    We reach the Piedmonts’ property at dusk. The sky has changed color again to a yellowish-blue, like a healing bruise. We all clamber out of the car, picking at our sweaty clothes. The Piedmonts live in a long, wooden ranch house—a big house, but not the country mansion I expected—and their fields contain only grass and sheep. We wait outside the house for a few minutes, stamping our feet and casting nervous looks at the sky, until Father Piedmont arrives.
    “You came,” is the first thing he says. “Good. We’ve work to do.”
    “Is the Bishop here?” Father Nerve asks.
    “The Bishop will be coming,” says Father Piedmont. He takes a deep breath and puts his arms behind his back, drinking in the smell of the strange wind. “Can you feel the god?” he asks us. “Smell that air, taste it. He has awoken, make no mistake.”
    Ray’s face turns white, and he runs away from us, around the side of the house. Soon we hear the sound of him throwing up.
    “Weak,” Father Piedmont mutters, and Ro winces. Clearly despairing of his sons, Father Piedmont turns to me. “What do you think of this all, Ennaline Whitehall?”
    “I can smell it,” I say. I try to keep a grateful smile on my face, but it’s hard. I’m struck suddenly by how unprepared I am for this adventure. I don’t know how long we’re going to be here. I haven’t brought any changes of clothes. I don’t even have a toothbrush. I’m sweaty and my hair is filthy and the twins are scared and sick and I don’t know what to do at all.
    “Come with me, Ennaline.”
    Father Piedmont takes my arm and leads me away from the house and into the fields. Wordlessly he points north. I realize that a big rise in the distance, a rise that’s big enough to be a cliff, is actually another ridge. Its surface is lush with greenery and jungle-like plants: ferns and flesh-colored flowers. The ridge is only a few hundred feet away from the Piedmonts’ house.
    How close is the god to us now? I wonder. Is he right under our feet?
    I’m amazed we haven’t felt or seen the god moving the earth by this stage. There have been no earthquakes, nothing that would suggest a giant being is trying to force their way out of the earth. I think about the silly tricks we used to do to get people to believe in the god, to confirm their faith: the lightbulbs and string and hidden recording equipment. We just wanted to give people evidence that the god was there. And now here we are, with the marks of the god scratched indelibly across our country, as bold a proof as anyone could make for the existence of the god.
    I wish I could be truly happy about it.
    I wish I wasn’t so scared.
    “When did it happen?” I