The Flock by J. Todd Scott

LIMON, COLORADO

October 2025

When I get home tonight to find our front door kicked wide open and wild wind and fresh snow still blowing through it, I know the world is coming to an end.

My Rennie is gone, and Noah is dead.

I know in that bruised place in my heart; I know the way only a wife and mother can, although honestly, I’ve never been much of either.

I don’t need to follow that blood-black trail from our porch past the gravel drive, beyond the trees and falling flakes, to know my husband’s dead body is out there in the dark, somewhere.

Yet I can’t turn away from that ominous stain, brightly haloed in my headlights, even as Rennie flies farther and farther from me.

She might as well have real wings now.

My angel . . . my miracle.

Noah’s violent, blood-soaked passage—where he stumbled and fell outside our front door, then crawled hand over fist across the snow after our daughter—is a warning, a message.

A sign.

And if there’s anything I do know a lot about, it’s symbols and signs.

I’ve spent my whole life seeking and searching for them, waiting and worrying about them, running from them.

I steal a few moments to kneel next to that horrible mark: to touch it, trace it with my fingers, the way I traced Noah’s stubbled chin only hours ago. He hated that beard but grew it for me. I was mad when I left earlier, and he was too. Now I’ll never be able to apologize or say I’m sorry again—forever sorry, for so many things—and Noah will soon be snowed over, forgotten, left behind.

Like me.

Because that’s the real message written in bloody snow in front of my ruined house—

It was never about you at all, Sybilla.

It was, and always has been, about Renata.

And the End of the World.

I circle fast on foot to our backyard, where I buried the gun.

It’s dark and dead here, too, shadows holding even more shadows.

The porch lights are off or out, the hidden security lights and the sophisticated alarm system Noah installed for me either cut or disabled, so I use my phone instead and follow its watery glow and try not to cry.

I’ll need another phone soon.

But there are no footprints or boot treads here, no signs of struggle or blood. This snow is fresh and cool and untouched and goes on and on, and part of me just wants to go on and on, too, and never look back. And if it wasn’t for Rennie, I just might lie down here and let the snow cover me. Or go out past the trees to Noah and wrap my arms around him, one last time.

Let this falling snow fall over both of us until it’s over.

All these years I’ve spent waiting for the world to end—searching for the signs, a crazy, inexorable calendar in my head—only to discover now the day’s finally come, as real and unforgiving as Noah’s frosted blood on my fingers, that I was never truly ready at all.

I didn’t see it coming, not like this.

The End doesn’t always start with falling birds or shooting stars or a great flood or a fiery cataclysm. Sometimes it’s just blood in the snow and a dead body in the dark and a missing little girl. Noah, Rennie—my whole world—all gone now.

As if they never existed at all.

I run to Rennie’s old play set, chasing the phone’s pale glow in my hand.

It looms in the dark like a crashed car or plane, shrouded in freshly fallen snow.

The big play set is true Georgia pine, because Noah only wanted the best for our daughter, and he also planted three trees to shade it, one for each of us: Colorado blue spruce, which, over thirty years, can grow more than seventy-five feet high.

Noah used to tell Rennie those trees were alive, watching over our makeshift family, protecting us, remembering us even long after we are gone. And although I thought that was silly, hopelessly romantic, it was sweet and beautiful, too, and honestly, not any crazier than the things I was raised to believe at the Ark.

Noah wanted to be a writer, before he met me. So I helped him plant those trees for Rennie, for us, and then waited to see what birds might flock to them, seeking shelter in their growing branches. None did.

But buried near Rennie’s play set, marked by Bert the Beagle’s old tie-out stake and hidden under the spreading limbs of one of Noah’s trees, is a six-quart plastic Sterilite latching box I stole from the Dollar General, and in a way, that plastic box holds memories too.

My life before Noah.

The Ark of Lazarus.

Ten grand I’ve saved, a dollar at a time. A clean ID I bought off the dark web.

And a Colt semiautomatic handgun.

Now I’m finally crying.

Still crying.

Still digging.

Frantic, as my tears freeze on my face, wrestling that box from the unforgiving ground with the old spade Noah used to plant our summer garden. The spade is heavy and cold in my bare hands, and I can’t feel the wooden handle or even my fingers, but that’s okay; I don’t want to feel anything at all.

The snow tastes sooty, ashes on my tongue, the aftertaste of the massive High West fire that’s been burning across Colorado for weeks now, threatening to jump the Continental Divide.

The entire Southwest is on fire again, flames more than three hundred feet high, higher than our blue spruces will ever grow, although that doesn’t matter anymore.

Nothing does, except Rennie.

Fires are signs, too, sometimes.

And for the second time in my life, the whole world is burning down around me.

I have two days at most to save my daughter and maybe, just maybe, stop the End of the World.

But please, please, understand . . . if it’s a choice between Rennie and the world—

That really isn’t a choice at all.