The first edge of dawn broke along the bottom of the eastern sky and the wind picked up out of the trees.
We’d dozed fitfully. In the witching hour something settled softly upon the roof. It bore a musty smell, like hay in a barn. I stared up at it through the heavy grey. A metallic
scriiiitch
. A trio of dark sickles—talons, I realized, likely belonging to an owl—hooked through rust holes in the roof. Perhaps this was something this particular owl did often—a nightly observance? It took flight again, its heavy wing-beat carrying over the night’s tranquility.
There is a silence particular to the wilderness at dawn: every creature still sleeping, the earth resting, too. The rising sun reflected off the fresh-fallen snow, postcard-pretty. I sat on the bumper, staring bleary-eyed across the grey light of the clearing. The wolves were gone. My feet were swollen inside my brogans.
I pulled the shoes off, wincing. My socks were tacky and crusted—they appeared to be fused to my feet. I rolled the left one down to my ankle, noting how the skin beneath was fish-belly pale. Then I gritted my teeth and peeled it all the way off.
The sock made a gluey sound, like a strip of ancient duct tape coming off cheap upholstery. Translucent webs of fluid pulled away from the pink blister on my heel; it was as big around as the mouth of a teacup, peeled down through several layers of skin, edges curled up like the caldera of a volcano. A puck of milky skin was stuck to the inside of my sock. There was another deep blister on the pad of my foot, but the worst were my toes. The skin over the phalanges was an ulcerated, shiny red; higher up, the flesh had sloughed away to disclose my nail beds. The skin near the tips had a crystallized, wooden look, like a slab of steak forgotten in a deep-freeze. The end of each toe was black—not blood-blister black, but a terrifying withered black that indicated the flesh was past the point of regenerating.
Four toenails had fallen off. I touched the one that remained on my big toe. The nail sank into the flesh. A substance resembling blood-strung Vaseline oozed around the nail, which slid easily out of its bed—no less shocking than if I’d reached into my mouth and effortlessly pulled a tooth out. I brought the toenail to eye level, stuck to my fingertip, studying it with horrified wonder.
“Don’t bother looking at the other foot,” said Duncan, propped up on his elbow.
After shaking the toenails out, I put the sock back on, which was far more painful than pulling it off. Duncan cut vents in the sides of my brogans so I could slip my swollen foot inside. He cut swathes from the skidoo upholstery and lashed them round my shoes with duct tape. When he was done my feet looked as if they’d been dipped in pewter.
“You look cheery,” I said.
“I feel a hell of a lot better. Sure, it’s weird—a spike of metal skewering me like a moth on a pin, but I can breathe almost full.”
“Should we risk it?” I said. “We could stay here, keep the fire going. We’ve got all day to gather wood. You have to assume someone’s looking for us by now, right? A search helicopter’s sure to spot the smoke.”
“What about food?”
“We might be able to kill something. Anyway, I heard a body can go awhile without food. A week at least.”
Duncan didn’t disagree in words. He simply packed up our meagre supplies and crossed beyond the guttering fire.
“It can’t be that way,” he said, pointing towards the steep incline we’d crawled down the night before. “And it can’t be anywhere that way, either,” he said, gesturing to where the van’s hood was pointing. Eventually he pointed east, where the whitened crest of escarpment merged into the cloud-strung horizon. “That way.”
“Okay, Dunk. But how far?”
“Four hours? Six? We can make it out before night falls.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Such confidence! You’re an odd one, Duncan Diggs.”
“Odd as a cod, Owen Stuckey.”
We set off through the morning silence, boots crunching through the hardpack. The wind pushed gently at our backs. Our bodies were damaged, but the pain was manageable. We walked for half an hour before stumbling upon Drinkwater’s bivouac.
At some point in the night, with darkness falling and the snow swirling, he’d found a huge oak snapped in half. Its insides had been eaten away by termites and dry rot, leaving a hollowed-out bowl. The wood inside the bowl was scorched in spots. We sniffed the mingled smells of charcoal and urine.
“He … he
slept
in here?” Dunk said. “Holy shit.”
I doubted Drinkwater had slept. He’d probably scooped out the snow, hunkered down and capped himself in. He’d waited out the storm inside a
tree trunk
. He must be carrying a butane torch; he’d obviously set fire to the termite-softened wood.
“Look at this,” Dunk said.
A firepit lay ten feet from the tree, its coals still warm. A gutted carcass lay nearby. The smell gave it away.
Duncan said, “You ever hear the phrase ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a skunk’s asshole’? Drinkwater actually did.”
One of the skunk’s back legs was snapped and gored. Had Drinkwater found it in the fox trap he’d set for us? If so, that meant he’d carried it around for hours, trudging through the snow with a dead skunk strapped to his back.
Drinkwater’s tracks set off in a direction opposite to where we were headed. I considered: Drinkwater was exhausted, cold, probably injured. Depending on the freshness of that skunk, he might have food poisoning. Was he delirious? Did he even want to escape the woods? Maybe he wanted us to follow him like dogs chasing a coyote, running us in maddening circles. Was he happy enough to die if it meant killing us, too?
“We stick to our line,” I said.
The sun charted a course behind banks of iron-grey clouds. Though not especially bright, the day was unseasonably warm. The snow lost its glitter and took on a gleaming quality: long bands of light ran across its surface the way light fills the slack water between ocean waves. A booming
crack
rolled across the earth as dead timber split under a weight of heavy snow. A low pattering filled the air as clumps melted and dripped off branches.
I craned my ear over that pattering, searching for the
thucka-thucka
of helicopter blades. I desperately wanted to believe a search party
had been dispatched. At the very least, surely Silas Garrow would have wondered about us by now? Or Dunk’s parents, when he hadn’t come home?
Quicksilver shapes fled along the periphery of my vision. At first I figured they were chimeras born of sleeplessness and frayed nerves, but I focused and saw the wolves were back. Had they ever left? Loping a few hundred yards to either side—the two smaller ones, probably females, on the left, the big male on the right.
Ghost wolves
, I thought.
We reached a meandering creek. The snow had melted along its banks to expose dark brown mud. I wondered if it was the same stretch of water where Dunk had held a thrashing mudpuppy in his palm years ago. We navigated the frozen creek bed, boots whispering over the ice. I scanned for signs of human intervention: fence posts, trail markers, a moonshiner’s still. Nothing. Even the rusted pop cans and plastic bags—tumbleweeds of the modern world—were buried under the snow.
As the day entered afternoon, a rifle crack carried out of the woods. Both of us ducked instinctively, but my heart leapt. Could it be a hunter or trapper who knew how to get to a road? Next a hollow scream rose above the trees. It wasn’t a human scream but the sound of a creature dying in agony or fear.
“What the hell was that?” Duncan said.
This was followed by a wild sobbing howl: a sound made by a human, yes, although the voice box must’ve been nearly torn apart from the strain. The howl fled into the icy sky, climbing steadily before dropping, only to climb again: the vocal equivalent of an air-raid whoop. It was the howl of a madman, and it belonged to Drinkwater.
“You figure he’s following
us
now?” I said.
“Could be.”
A gassy, fetid stink rose out of the earth. The ice took on a sickly yellow tinge. Duncan put his foot down. The ice cracked; water surged through glassy fissures. It was the hue of an alcoholic’s piss with webs of blackly rotted matter suspended within it. My mind made a terrifying leap: could this be the same miserable grey muskeg we’d walked through as kids, the one that sucked the sneakers off our feet?
There are plenty of muskegs out here
, I told myself.
It’s low country. Water collects at the bottom of the escarpment
.
And I believed this, at least partially. That is the greatest trick of survival: making yourself believe the best-case scenario. It was when you started to believe the worst-case scenario that you were doomed. I breathed shallowly, trying not to vomit. The stink rising off the ice was nauseating. I couldn’t afford to lose whatever precious nutrients remained in my stomach.
“Hold up a minute,” I said, leaning heavily on a tree. My gorge throbbed against my Adam’s apple. The tree snapped, and I clutched desperately at the rotted trunk as I fell, splinters driving under my fingernails. My knees hit the ice, which spiderwebbed under my kneecaps. Rancid water seeped through to soak my trousers. A gas pocket ruptured, bubbles popping lazily through the ice. The stink was indescribable. Black dots swam before my eyes. I vomited helplessly into my mouth. It took every ounce of self-control to breathe deeply through my nose and swallow it.
“You okay?” Duncan asked.
Dark slivers lay under my fingernails. My knees were soaked with reeking water. I’d thrown up and swallowed stomach acid.
“Let’s just go.”
We left the muskeg and its sad shattered trees. The sunlight was fading and the snow took on a granular, slate hue. The chill crawled back into our bones.
The outline of a radio tower carved against the horizon. We progressed towards its lacework of man-made angles. Maybe it’d have a telephone or at least an emergency switch to pull … but no. It was only criss-crossed metal escalating to a cell-phone dish. Why
would
it have an emergency phone?
I slumped at the base of the tower, racked with an exhaustion that was almost comical. Maybe Duncan could roll me up like an old carpet and carry me over his shoulder.
“We could chuck rocks at the dish,” I said at last. “Maybe there’s a sensor that trips an alarm when it’s wrecked.”
The dish was over a hundred feet up. Could either of us heave a rock even halfway? Duncan hacked wetly; blood burped out of the needle. “Come on, Owe,” he said.
I barely heard him. I was thinking about the plastic vent on the side of my childhood house, the one that connected to the clothes dryer. In the winter, I’d come home after tobogganing and see white plumes coming from the vent. Crouching beside it, I’d rub my hands in the warm air. It smelled the way my mother did in dreams: of fabric softener and dryer sheets. The basement window sat next to the vent. One time I’d seen Mom hiding Christmas presents above the heating ducts, something that had made me sad: I hadn’t believed in Santa—Bovine had spilled the beans about the jolly fat man on the playground, ruining everything—but still, I
wanted
to believe.
“Get up,” Duncan said roughly. “We got to keep going.”
“In a minute.”
“No minute, man.
Now
.”
“Jesus Christ, Dunk.” I hated the timorous, whiny sound of my voice. It reminded me of when we were younger, how I’d always buckle to Duncan’s subtle commands. “I’m not fucking ready, okay?”
“If we don’t keep moving we’re going to seize up. Do you want to make it out of here today or not?”
“Where the hell
are
we? You said we’d be out of here in a few hours.”
“I said four, maybe five.”
“You see that
swamp
? Pretty sure it’s the same one we dragged our asses through as kids! Weren’t you thinking the same thing?”
“It could be a different one.”
“Oh
bullshit
, man. Bullshit. Look, I’m not putting this on you—”
“Really? ’Cause it’s sorta sounding that way.”
I stood. If this was going to happen, I needed to be squared up, looking my old pal full in the eye.
“I’m not putting this
specifically
on you,” I said. “The decision to leave the van, I mean. If we’re miles from safety—and yeah, I think we are—well, hey, that’s on me, too. I made that decision with you. But the fact that we’re here in the first place …”
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t give me the fucking thickhead routine, Dunk. I’ve sweated out smarter guys than you. I’m saying this whole thing with Drinkwater. This vendetta you’ve got against him.”
“I’m sorry? Weren’t you raging about having to bury his dog?”
“I want him, yeah. But you’ll chase him to Siberia.”
Duncan held his hands out as if presenting me with a fragile gift. “Don’t I have good reason, Owe? Eight
years
, man. I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it. And this whole thing—you helped set it up!” He fixed me with a baffled, pleading expression. “How is this not both of us?”
“Because it wasn’t both of us, was it?” I said, my eyes feeling hard as stones. “Never has been. You make it out like there’s some kind of equality between us. Maybe you even halfway believe it. But the order’s always been pretty clear: first you, then me.”
I knew I was charting dark territory here—old resentments burbling up. “What was your big idea, Dunk? Hop on the skidoo, chase Drinkwater down and what, drag him back to the sheriff? We
fly off into the night, driven by your all-consuming need for … for
what
?
Justice
?”
Duncan ran his hand through hair that was oily-slick, matted with the residue of burnt radial tires. “Just … fairness, man. That’s it.”
“Fairness? Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Fairness
? What world do you live in? Doesn’t the situation we’re in right now—doesn’t the sum total of your
life
—hasn’t it taught you that there’s no such thing? Fairness and luck are for other people, man.”
“You’re wrong, Owe. I’ve been very lucky in my life.”
I could only stare at him, gape-jawed. “Oh, really?”