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There’s no more room.”
“You’re tracking mud right through the kitchen.”
I glare over the saucepan screaming with steam, watching the man drenched in rain water disregard my scolding. He sighs, dropping the bag with a heavy thud on the dining table, face twisted in frustrated defeat. Beneath the fabric seeps water, liquid pooling across the polished wood.
“Can you not put that on the table? You’re going to ruin it.”
He grumbles and nudges it to the floor, the contents smacking together as they land. He catches the towel I whip at him, wiping the surface down before slipping past me for the sanitizer.
“Where else am I supposed to put it?”
“Same place we normally do.”
“I just told you,” he says around the potatoes I pull out of the pan, roughing them up and tossing with butter and rosemary, “there’s no more room.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“What to do would be great.”
The pan enters the oven with a clatter after I pile in garlic cloves, door snapping shut along with my patience. Undoing my apron I toss it aside, pulling on my boots and tugging the cardigan tight around my waist. The roaring rain does nothing to deter me, sound filling my ears as I step into the night as the storm rages on.
“Did you try the well?”
He nods at my side, hand gripping the sack he’d abandoned as the rain lashes our faces.
“What about behind the barn?”
“No luck, especially with all the rain. I’ve been trying to stabilise the banks ever since we heard that the cold front was closing in. We still have stuff exposing, though.”
I grimace, heart dropping into my stomach as I stalk through the dead fields in the darkness, feet slipping with the squelch of my boots. The eyes of livestock glow back, soggy in the downpour and resonating with mournful wails. “How bad is it?”
“It’s down to the bones.”
“Oh god.”
“It could be worse,” he offers helpfully as our shoes reach the base of the hill, eyes scanning the ground.
“Could it, Ryan?”
He’s quiet. “No.”
Then my eyes find the weak point, dirt collecting in muddy pools and revealing the lid. I kneel down, knees soaking with the earth as my hands scooping the darkness away. Dampness works through, a faint smell forcing through the rain. “The water’s gotten in,” I sigh, “everything’s fucked; it’s all going to rot.”
“We can sort it. If we’re lucky the water’s only on the surface. It might just need a door change.”
“For our sakes, I’d hope so.”
“We could do it tonight, once we’ve sorted all this out.” He waves the bag, smell wafting into my wrinkled nose.
I shake my head, pushing my hair dripping in tendrils away from my face. “Not tonight, we can’t risk the torchlight. What we need to do is find a way to dispose of that.”
He runs a thoughtful, almost panicked hand over his saturated hair, staring at the flickering lights of the closest neighbour. “Bryan has working dogs.”
I stand, moving beside him and huddling for warmth. “He has 4.”
“Do you think that’ll be enough?”
“It has to be. We’ll take the bones around tomorrow, the dogs won’t care if it’s a cow or a whore.”