by K. M. Fawkes
“I’ve never had a dream that felt so long,” he said now. “I couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few hours, but it felt like days had passed. I don’t know that I can say I really rested, since I seem to have spent most of the dream walking and now I’m exhausted.”
“You know it was only a dream, right?” Anna asked. “The lights only came back in the dream because some part of you wanted them to come back.”
“I know, I know,” Brad said. But inwardly he wasn’t so sure. Once or twice in his life he had had dreams that were so vivid it was like someone had projected a film reel across the white canvas of his mind. Later parts of these dreams had come true with what felt like uncanny accuracy.
When he was fourteen, the last summer he had stayed with Lee at the cabin, Brad had dreamt that he was wandering across country from farmhouse to farmhouse; but at each house he stopped in he found the lights had gone out and corpses lying on sofas, in the bedrooms, in the bath. The dream had shaken him. Lee had warned him not to think too much about it, that only a fool paid too much attention to the content of his dreams, but he had never forgotten it. In light of recent events it had come to seem eerily prophetic.
“I wish you could have been in the dream,” he said to Anna. “I mean, you were—but as a character, not a spectator.”
He didn’t know how to put into words what he was feeling. There was something unbearably sad about living through an experience with someone only to find that they had no memory of it. Rationally he knew those things hadn’t really happened to Anna, but still it felt like someone had reached into her head and erased her memories.
Sensing how much the dream must have meant to him, Anna softened a little. “What did the librarian say to you when you asked about the lights?”
“Nothing really helpful,” he said wearily. “Mostly a lot of guff about literature and art being the only things man had ever done that were worth saving.”
Anna bristled slightly. “That doesn’t sound like you at all.”
“I was pretty annoyed, honestly.” Brad laughed. “It felt like I was being slapped in the face by the old lady who used to check out my books when I’d go into the library on weekends. She didn’t even seem to care that most of the world’s population was dead; she just wanted to save the books from being forgotten.”
“Well, it gave her something to live for, at least. I’d imagine it’s probably easier to get up in the morning if you think you’re part of some sacred mission to preserve human culture.”
“I read about these Irish guys one time,” said Brad. “These monks who were living after the fall of the Roman Empire, which must have been like the end of the world for them. They gathered in these monasteries in Ireland and started copying all the great books of the Western world by hand. That’s the only reason we have them. Imagine being that committed to something. Imagine having that much dedication.”
“The only thing I’m committed to doing is getting the kids back,” said Anna. “After that, who knows?”
“There’ve got to be things you enjoyed doing before.” Brad rose and used his coat to stamp out what remained of the fire. Overhead the day was slowly brightening with scattered streaks of cloud in the east. “I’m not even just talking about hobbies. There was a time in my life when hunting was hugely important to me.”
“Maybe I’ll think about having a hobby when I’m no longer worried if I’ll live till morning,” Anna replied quietly.
Brad couldn’t argue with her there, even as inwardly he wished he possessed half the joy in anything that the old woman in the dream had shown toward her beloved books. He had spent so much of the past year just trying not to be murdered that he had almost forgotten what it was like to enjoy things, or that enjoyment was even possible in this battered world.
As they had done so often lately, his thoughts turned toward Emma, the wife of the college professor with whom he’d had a fling some ten years before.
“A woman I admired once told me that everyone needs one consuming passion, even if it’s something as basic as collecting albums on vinyl,” he said.
“You think maybe she was speaking to you through the woman in the dream?”
Normally such a question would have been too mystical for Brad’s liking, but Anna had caught him at an odd moment.
“Maybe her memory seeped into the dream, became its own person.” Maybe he had been so affected by it because it was like having a last chance to speak with her again. He wanted to ignore what she had said, but he couldn’t dissociate her words from the memory of her.
“I wish we could find a quiet town that still had power,” said Anna. Brad resumed his seat at the back of the car and she edged in close to him, laying her head, with its straggly, uncombed hair, on his broad shoulder. “We could live out the rest of our lives there. But you know in real life that town would be overrun by cranks and militants and megalomaniacs within a matter of days. And when it inevitably imploded, we’d probably all die.”
“That’s the real lesson here,” said Brad with a grim laugh. “We’re probably all dying.”
Although he had succeeded in cleaning Anna’s wound the night before, they both knew the fix was only temporary: soon, within the next day or so, it would have to be treated again with proper medicine.
A rift had been slowly forming between them since the previous day because both were pursuing different objectives: Anna wanted to find the children and Brad, sensing the futility of locating his father, who might have been hundreds of miles away by now, wanted to focus his energy on saving Anna.
They had been able to ignore the rift for much of the previous day because Anna’s wound had taken precedence over their other concerns; but now, as the sun rose pale-golden and pristine over the woods that hedged the Canadian border and another day loomed ahead of them, Anna once more floated the idea of hunting down Sammy and Martha.
“Look,” she said as she rinsed her feet and hands with water from a nearby stream. “I know you want to get my leg dealt with before we go looking for Lee and the kids—and appreciate that, I do—but I’d rather not put the search off a day longer.”
Brad fought a groan of frustration that threatened to rise up. He knew where this was leading, and he wanted to head it off at the pass.
“We’ll find them eventually,” he said as he splashed his cheeks with cold water. “Assuming we don’t die of starvation or exposure first.”
“You’re not a parent,” Anna shot back, “so I couldn’t expect you to know what it’s like to have your own child abducted. Knowing that the kidnapper is murderous and unstable, and that his idea of what constitutes looking after a child’s well-being basically meant bringing you up in a survival camp—and that was before he apparently lost his goddamn mind. Do you really think he’s going to care if Sammy and Martha get fed or not? Do you really—”
“Anna, you know I love you,” said Brad in exasperation, “but could you please spare me the lectures about ‘you’ve never had a kid’ and ‘you don’t know what it’s like’? I practically raised Sammy when we were living in the cabin together—”
“Except you didn’t raise him, not even a little.” Being shot in the thigh seemed to have made Anna markedly braver; it was hard to imagine her standing up to him like this before the shooting. “I birthed him, I raised him, and no one helped me. His own father didn’t help me. He didn’t give a shit about him. It’s only ever been me.”
“Don’t ever accuse me of not being invested in these kids,” Brad said slowly but heatedly. “You know better.”
“Do I?” Anna smiled in a deranged way. “Because you haven’t been acting like it. You couldn’t care less about where those kids went. You’ve been too busy trekking over the hills looking for a town with power because of some stupid dream you had—”
“CUT IT OUT!” Brad shouted. “The only reason we spent all day yesterday wandering through the north woods is because I was looking for medicine! And if somebody hadn’t been look
ing after you, you’d never have seen your precious son again because I’d be burying your smelly ass!”
Anna drew a sharp breath, exhaling a column of steam in the pine-scented air. She wore the look of someone who wishes they hadn’t brought up a painful subject but has already plunged too far ahead to turn back.
“I want you to go on alone,” she said resolutely. “You’ll have a better chance of finding the kids if I’m not limping along behind you, delaying the journey. I’m nothing but a liability at this point, and if you’re worried about my suffering you could just put a bullet in my head and be done with it.”
Brad goggled as if sensing that Anna had finally, fully broken with reality. There was a calm in her voice that suggested she had given this a great deal of thought. She spoke in an even tone devoid of hysterics or melodrama, as if already resigned to her fate.
“No way in hell am I doing that,” he said finally, “and I don’t want you to ask me again.”
“Brad—”
“You heard what I said!”
Removing the axe from the stump, Brad twisted the handle aggressively with both hands, as if wringing a turkey’s neck.
“I didn’t just save you from near-certain death at the hands of my father only to drag you out here and kill you myself because you were too much trouble. And I find it offensive that you think I would even consider doing that.”
“It’s not about that.” Anna seemed to be rethinking her approach to the conversation, as if hoping she could arrive at the same means through a different route. “Look, I’m sorry I even suggested that. But I do think it would be easier for you if you left me here and went on alone.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he muttered, starring sullenly at a cluster of spiky shrubs heavy with snow. He was so agitated that he couldn’t bring himself to look her in the face. “You’d be dead within two days, at most. I’d effectively be murdering you.”
“You’ll be murdering the kids if we don’t find them.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Brad could see that she wanted to be left here, that she was using every stratagem she could think of to goad him into doing it, and he didn’t appreciate it. “If that happens”—he couldn’t bear to even voice the thought—“if the worst happens, it won’t be because of anything you did, or I did. My father will be solely to blame, and he will be punished accordingly.”
“How?” Anna replied, her voice rising. “How will he ever see justice if you’re out here hunting for medicine for a woman who can’t even walk on her own?”
She knelt down against the back of a tall pine, idly brushing aside a jagged cone. She hadn’t touched her hair since before the shooting—neither of them had—and her matted appearance made her look slightly crazed. “There’s no place for those of us with disabilities now.”
“Quit spouting nonsense,” Brad snapped. “Your injury isn’t permanent; you suffered a gunshot wound to the thigh and you’re slowly recovering. In another week or two you’ll be perfectly fine, provided I can find your medicine.”
“And in the meantime our kids are probably being indoctrinated with a lot of toxic religious hogwash. Martha’s already lived through that—twice!—and even though Sammy managed not to internalize the Family’s teachings at the compound, who’s to say he can do that again? He’s nine years old, Brad!”
Anna was ranting now, wide-eyed.
“Did I ever tell you my mother spent her teen years in a cult?” she asked. “Every year at the harvest moon she would tell us the world was ending, because the moon was a reddish color and there’s some prophecy about it. Used to freak me and Emily out, until we grew up and realized the harvest moon is a naturally occurring phenomenon.” Brad was surprised to hear Anna mention her twin sister, whom she had only mentioned once or twice before. “You have no idea how much I hate cults because of that.”
“You’ve made it abundantly clear, trust me.”
Brad was torn between a sense of unspoken respect for Anna’s commitment to finding the kids and exasperation that he had inadvertently become the target of her rage and frustration.
Summoning the last of his patience, he looked her dead in the eyes.
“Anna, I know you’ve been through a lot, but if we’re going to get out of this shitshow alive there’s one thing we need to get straight right now: we are on the same team. We are in this together.”
Anna broke eye contact first. She looked down, and was quiet for a long moment, as if contemplating his words.
“You seem to be doing better than yesterday, at least,” Brad said, feeling a sudden urge to fill the silence. “For hours after the shooting, all you could talk about was wanting to kill Lee.”
“Is that really a mystery?” Anna asked, the first traces of a smile reaching her face. “Let me shoot you in the leg and see if you like it.”
“No can do,” Brad said with a smirk. “Even if I had a gun—”
“Brad, don’t lie to me. I know you’re hiding one.”
Brad was taken aback; after the drama of the past twenty-four hours, he’d been convinced that she wouldn’t have remembered the pistol he had concealed in the leg of his jeans.
“Well, anyway, we need to save our remaining bullets,” he said. “We can’t afford to waste them firing at each other.” Anna couldn’t possibly have guessed that he had only one bullet, and he wasn’t going to tell her. She was already on the verge of a panic and he didn’t want to push her over the cliff’s edge.
“It’s like that party question they used to ask us,” said Anna. “If you were stuck in a room with Hitler, bin Laden—”
She stopped. Brad knew where the question was leading, and at first he assumed Anna must have gotten stuck trying to think of a third person who was as evil as Hitler and bin Laden. But then she pointed to the edge of the clearing and he saw what had really flummoxed her.
Automatically grabbing the axe from the base of the tree where he had dropped it, Brad moved softly and swiftly toward Anna.
At the same instant, an enormous, starved-looking black bear staggered out of the circle of trees, clearly searching, as they were, for her next meal.
Chapter 7
The bear continued to lumber toward them up the path, crushing leafy fronds and fir and hemlock twigs under its padded feet. Anna’s eyes widened in a look of sheer terror; she turned to Brad as if wanting to speak, but Brad placed a single finger to his lips. If they made the slightest noise, they would give away their position, and it was unlikely that they would be able to outrun a bear.
Prevented from talking and incapable of moving, they had no choice but to remain where they stood—as still as the poplar trees that lined the path on either side of them—and hope that the bear didn’t notice.
If she came any closer, Brad was prepared to use the one bullet remaining in his pistol, but he didn’t know how effective a single bullet fired at close range would prove against an unusually large, half-starved black bear who had been untimely woken from sleep. Perhaps he could buy them enough time to get away.
Running now would be a quick way to get themselves killed, though.
In the panic of the moment Brad’s brain was fogging and he was having trouble remembering the bear survival tips his father had taught him during the “survivalist boot camp” he had led the summer Brad turned twelve. He could, however, still hear Lee distinctly saying, “DO. NOT. RUN. Don’t run from a bear. If you run, you’re a dead man.”
When Brad had asked him why, Lee had looked offended by the question. “Because bears can sense fear,” he had said, “and they’re quick runners. If you think you can outrun a bear, you will be very wrong and very dead.”
“Can I climb a tree?” Brad had asked.
“Only if you want to die in a tree.”
Looking back, most of his father’s suggestions had involved what not to do in the event of a bear encounter. “Don’t approach it, don’t try to distract it with food and most of all, don’t run.” He had advised carrying bear spr
ay during any wilderness treks—a mace-like deterrent that could be sprayed in their eyes in the event that they got close enough—but it wasn’t as if that was an option at present.
Through the fog of his memories, Brad realized that there was something unusual going on with the animal, in addition to the fact that it clearly wasn’t hibernating, as it normally would be at this time of year. The bear was hobbling on all fours down the path toward them, one of its front paws pressed against its chin as though nursing a crippling toothache. It came a few steps closer and Brad could see that it was bleeding from a gaping wound in its lower jaw.
A weird sense of pity for the creature came over him: it looked as though it had been shot in the mouth and was slowly dying. He wondered how long it had been since the beast had had any food; eating wasn’t going to be easy with its jaw injured.
The sight of the injury gave Brad pause for another reason. If the bear had been shot, she must have recently encountered a hunter with a gun; he couldn’t think of any other reason why she would come tumbling out of the woods nursing a bloody mouth injury. If she had injured herself naturally, by falling and hitting her head against a boulder or rocky cliff-face, she wouldn’t be bleeding from the inside of her mouth.
Brad found himself returning to the question of how she had been woken up in the first place. The most reasonable explanation was that she had been flushed out of her cave by a human. If that was the case, then he and Anna likely weren’t alone in the woods. There was someone else nearby, and that person was armed and willing to kill.
He thought again about the gunshot they had heard by the lake on the previous afternoon. Maybe this bear had been what the hunter was shooting at; but he and Anna must have walked at least fifteen miles since then, and the gun had been fired within a mile of their encampment.
The bear’s injury might have resulted from another altercation that had escaped his attention, but he and Anna had been silently walking through a mostly silent wood and he would have heard the sound of another gun going off. If there was another hunter close by, as he suspected, then they hadn’t made much progress by fleeing the lake yesterday as they had hoped. If this person was anything like his father, he would be skilled at camouflage and they wouldn’t see him until he wanted to be seen.
