Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  “You’re going to have to pull yourself out, Weasel,” Billy said. “Can you drag yourself out with your arms?”

  Weasel croaked something in the affirmative. Billy pushed down hard with his lever, the limb cracking but not breaking. Weasel groaned again, but this time the timbre was different, a bit of relief mixed in with the pain. Billy pushed down even harder, and the pile of logs shifted again. “Almost there,” Billy grunted. “Give me a hand, Darius!”

  Darius did not move, and Billy finally took the extra step he needed, two feet deeper into the log pile, to improve his leverage, the two feet Jake had been urging him to take in his mind. Billy’s boot crunched on something and the log above him, the canted log that Billy had tested a moment ago to ensure it would not fall on him, came alive. A tension-loaded limb, held back by the number-four deadfall trigger, an ancient and deadly catalyst that could hold back such tremendous weight or energy, a trigger Jake had whittled so painstakingly that evening—the same style trigger Jake had used to kill his first snowshoe hare—that tension-loaded limb whistled forward in a perfect arc, its length marked with yellow scars where the smaller branches had been trimmed away, and struck Billy three inches below his left collarbone. Billy stumbled backward as the limb rebounded in the opposite direction, waving back and forth in the light from the flashlight.

  Billy staggered back several feet, his shoulders slumped, his breath whistling oddly. Weasel called out something to him and Billy turned his head a fraction of an inch.

  “Billy?” Darius said.

  Billy’s hand crept up to his chest and touched the dark spot blooming there, pressing his fingers against it. He looked at the darkness on his fingers, cocked his head to the side, and slumped to the ground. The flashlight had fallen, and the beam was now pointed toward the log pile. In the light that spilled from the ground up to the dark sky, Jake watched the branch that had struck Billy finally rock to a stop. The eight-inch shaft Jake had affixed to it at a right angle was still there, the broadhead from Garney’s arrow dripping blood into the log pile. From the ground, Billy exhaled. The exhale went on for a very long time, finally ending in a quiet rattle, almost lost in the wind.

  Darius watched him for a second. Then he turned to face the spot where Jake still lay. “Come on, then,” he said.

  Jake wormed his way off the logs and stepped into the clear, the stick held flat against his leg. He’d been trained in hand-to-hand combat. That training had been with other weapons, and it had been when he was younger and wearing good boots and not scraps of denim on his feet—the rest of his pants were under the log pile, the legs that had lured Weasel in to Jake’s trap. Despite all of those things, the battle haze had descended fully on him now, and he had to hold himself back from rushing forward. Darius waited for him, a dark silhouette with the tangled shadows of the deadfall behind him.

  “The one-two punch,” Darius said. He had dropped his knife hand to his side, and they stood looking at each other from a distance of twenty feet. “I’m impressed. Did the first one trigger the second?”

  Jake took a step forward. “Separate,” he said. “Each one was independent of the other.”

  Darius glanced at Billy’s crumpled form. “It went into his heart.”

  “Yes,” Jake said. He moved forward several more feet. “I was just hoping to catch a lung.”

  “Lucky.”

  “You can stop talking now.”

  “Luck runs out,” Darius said. Jake took another step forward, Darius’s features coming into focus: the bent nose, the hooded eyes, with the lighter scar tissue slicing through his eyebrow. The flashlight was fading, but there was still plenty of light. Plenty.

  “Yes,” Jake said, “it does.”

  Darius looked at him. “They’re all dead.” Behind them, Weasel gave a whining gasp. “Or dying.”

  “I’m not done yet.”

  “Are there any more traps out here?”

  “No,” Jake said. “No more traps.”

  “Then I could walk away?”

  Jake lifted the stick away from his body, letting the faint and yellowing glow from the flashlight wash across it. “Theoretically.”

  Darius dropped his knife, and the blade stuck into the ground with a scratching whisper. “Then let me.”

  “What?”

  “Henry was right,” Darius said. “There’s been enough death.”

  Jake strode several steps forward, grasping the spear in both hands, feeling the solid, deadly weight of it, the heft and balance exactly right, perfectly in tune with his thoughts, his emotions. He was enraged rather than pacified by this sudden cowardice. When he was a few yards from Darius he leapt forward, moving with a speed he had not used in years, a speed he thought had departed him and that he now found diminished but certainly not gone. It was a speed he had used to great effect in various ways, and with which he now moved towards Darius’s right side and swung the spear like a baseball bat. Darius brought his hand up at the last moment. There were two cracks. The impact drove through Darius’s forearm and struck him on the side of his head. He took one awkward side step and fell to the ground.

  Jake was on him immediately, his knee pressed into Darius’s sternum. The spear had cracked and broken, but in the light Jake could see that it had fractured in such a way that, although it was shorter, it was also sharper. The end was like a stiletto, tapering to a point, which he pressed into the hollow of Darius’s throat. Darius was stunned, the side of his face bleeding. Had he not brought his arm up, Jake would have crushed his skull.

  “Come on,” Jake said. “Open your eyes.”

  Darius’s eyelids fluttered. Jake gave him a moment to focus, testing Darius’s body with his knee, ready to plunge the sharpened end of the spear into his throat at the first flexing of muscle. But not wanting to, not quite yet.

  “Come on,” Jake said. “Can you feel it?”

  Darius tried to swallow, and his Adam’s apple pressed against the point of the wood. Jake held the spear where it was, and a line of blood trickled out from the cartilage. Darius mumbled something and one of his arms twitched, scratching in the leaves and pine needles.

  “Can you feel it?” Jake said again. “What you wanted for me, for Rachel.” He pressed the point of the stick deeper into the hollow of his throat. “What you gave Henry.”

  Darius’s eyes opened all the way. His left hand, the unbroken one, continued to scratch and twist in the forest floor. For a moment, Jake allowed himself the luxury of seeing himself through Darius’s eyes, to peer upward at the stars with this monstrous dark shape over him. To feel the point of the stick on his throat, the awful throb on the side of his face—waiting, waiting—not understanding how it had come to this and certain it was a mistake, somehow. But knowing also that mistakes happen.

  “This is what you wanted,” Jake whispered, twisting the stick a bit, enlarging the hole he had started. Darius’s eyes opened a bit more, his breathing tightening. “This is what they felt.”

  Darius’s lips parted, a grimace or perhaps a smile, and a second before Jake plunged the stick into his neck he heard his name. It came from above him, whispering down through the pine needles from the cold starlight above.

  “Jaaake . . .”

  He paused, one hand still wrapped in the collar of Darius’s shirt, his knee still pressed against his sternum, the hot throb of his own pulse in his ears.

  “Jaaake.” This time his name was followed by laughter. Something moved through the air above him, the crackling of branches, as though something were descending from the treetops, drifting down to the jumble of the blowdown.

  From inside the logjam Weasel gave a whimpering sob and then fell silent.

  Jake looked up. There was a silhouette atop one of the other blowdowns, a shape that blotted out a portion of the night’s stars. The light from the dying flashlight did not reach it and Jake was glad for that, glad that whatever stood there was hidden from view. He looked, and although it was hidden in the darkness of the
Canadian night, Jake knew that it looked back at him. Looked and watched and waited. And he understood, with an insight so clean and terrifying that it could not be anything but the truth, that this man, if it was a man, had spoken not to stop him or forewarn him, but only so that Jake would acknowledge its presence before he proceeded. So that he would know he killed with an audience, and that the audience approved.

  Suddenly he was cold again, the adrenaline and the red haze gone, his arms breaking out in gooseflesh. His muscles felt suddenly stiff, clumsy with pain, all the pain and aching that had gone away now flaring up in a complete and sudden return, as though in response to this presence, like a ship signaling back to a lighthouse beacon. Pain signaling to pain, cold reflecting back to cold. Jake’s breath plumed out into the dark sky and passed over his eyes in a veil of white smoke. Then his breath evaporated. The shape was still there.

  “Jaaake.”

  His name again, so soft it could have been the wind, could have been the moan of the limb rubbing against the larger trunk of the spruce.

  Go ahead, he thought. Kill Darius, make him pay for the pain. Make him pay for the terror he had inflicted on the group, for the killing . . .

  There was movement underneath him, and before he could react he felt searing pain along his side. He fell away, rolling along the ground as Darius’s knife sliced through the air inches from him. All of his movements felt nightmarishly slow, the knife intensely animate by comparison, seeking to burrow in through his ribs for warmth and sustenance. He rolled twice more and came up holding the stick in front of him, but Darius was not on him. Blood was coursing down Jake’s back, and he could feel the laceration tearing open even more as he scrambled to stand. Darius was on his feet, his broken right arm held against his chest.

  That’s why I’m still alive, Jake thought. The first cut had gone along his ribs but not through them, and the other attempts had missed him cleanly. He was stabbing with his left hand.

  Darius still had the knife in his hand, but he wasn’t looking at Jake. His head was tilted upward, toward the silhouette perched atop the tangle of blowdown. The shape was still, except for a slight movement around it, a shimmering Jake thought might be clothes, or perhaps hair. The flashlight beam did not touch it, the light slowly extinguishing.

  Darius walked over to the log pile, tucked the knife into his belt, and picked up the fallen flashlight. Before Jake could yell at him to stop, before he could shield his eyes, Darius pointed the flashlight beam at the dark figure standing above them.

  The countenance upon which the flashlight beam, weak as candlelight, shone was plain and human and familiar. It—he—did not react to the light in any way. The pale yellow beam went trembling across the face and then, reluctantly, descended down the torso. The weak beam of light stopped at the abdomen, encased in the remains of a shirt stained with blood and dirt. Something was writhing under the tattered cloth, greenish black, something that seemed to be rooted inside his stomach and now was twisting in the light, recoiling from it.

  Darius jerked the flashlight back up, and as he did, the batteries lost their tenuous connection and the night went dark.

  “Hen . . . Henry?”

  The shape seemed to float down the log pile. Jake found the movements hard to follow in the darkness and knew that his eyes and perhaps his brain were not processing information correctly, that somehow he was hallucinating or embellishing what was actually happening. But the shape continued to move, and its face had been Henry’s and somehow it had not been. Could not have been.

  There’s life underneath us. Jaimie’s words came flooding back to him, poor lost Jaimie. More life below than above, sometimes.

  The shape reached the base of the blowdown, and now it seemed to merge completely with the darkness, the starlight not reaching it. Darius dropped the flashlight. He said his own name, Darius, whispering it in a breath of smoking white vapor. His name was repeated, and this time Jake could not tell if it was Darius who spoke or this other, this impostor in Henry’s clothes and Henry’s skin, who said it. It came closer, silent, until it was standing very close to Darius. Darius’s breath continued to plume out and break across the dark shape that was almost but not quite lost in the shadows of the deadfall, a dark shape whose breath did not smoke, whose chest appeared to be still. But there was movement below the chest, slithering and bulging under the fabric of its shirt.

  “Henry, I . . .”

  The shape leaned forward and whispered something into Darius’s ear. Something—an arm, Jake thought, it has to be an arm—reached out and caressed the side of Darius’s face. It did not look like an arm, though. It looked like a tendril, a tendril that had taken on the shape of an arm, an abomination of a human limb. It pressed against Darius’s cheek, slid across his mouth, and then withdrew.

  After a moment, Darius tilted his head back to the firmament, as though to howl. Instead he began to laugh, and a moment later the Henry shape joined him, their laughter twisting together and floating up into the star-studded night, wending through the broken limbs and the pine needles and joining with the night wind still howling from the northwest.

  Jake watched. If he chose to, he could walk over and join them and they would welcome him in, the joke would be shared with him, and he would laugh too, laugh and laugh as his pain finally and completely left him, the pain in his joints and head and heart. It would all be gone, and there would be something else—not happiness, but the savage pleasure of giving in.

  He took a step forward. A branch cracked under his step, and the two figures turned to look at him. In the darkness he could not tell one from another. They laughed again, not in mockery, and one of the shapes beckoned him closer.

  “Come.”

  Jake did not know who spoke. It did not seem to matter.

  “Run with us.”

  There was an honor in the invitation. Not all were worthy, not all would make good company. He understood this; he feared this. Jake planted his foot in the ground, feeling the stick he had stepped on pressing through his hastily made denim shoes, the pain clarifying his jumbled thoughts. Pain, he thought. It’s there for a reason. It’s there to remind you what happens when you don’t pay attention to life. It’s what makes you human. His thoughts flashed to Deserae, lying in her hospital bed hundreds of miles away. She was beyond pain. She had felt the sensation when he pinched her, but it had meant nothing to her damaged mind. But she was with him, her pre-injury presence imprinted in his conscience.

  Okay, then. It was not only rare earth elements that could transfer properties. All that was good and joyful and lovely about Deserae was still with him, pressed deep inside. And it was Deserae he heard now, her words whispering in his mind.

  Theirs is not your path, Jake. For a moment he could almost smell her light fragrance, could almost feel her warm breath tickling against his ear. Choose your own way.

  “Run with us.” One of the shapes—he thought it was Darius—had stepped closer. There was something smeared across his face. Blood, perhaps, from the blow Jake had given him minutes earlier. But the darkness seemed to be spreading out in a radial pattern rather than dripping downward, a darkness that was blotting out his features one by one.

  Not your path.

  The other’s head was cocked to the side, as though it heard the whisper of Jake’s lost love. Before it had seemed relaxed, completely at ease. Now it was tensed, and the slithering noises were intensifying. The Henry shape seemed to be growing and morphing at the same time, twisting and wending up into the night sky.

  Jake turned and ran.

  Chapter 16

  He woke with a start and sat blinking, trying to conjure reason out of the cold and dark air. His lungs burned as though from some deep-seated respiratory infection, and his feet were a throbbing mess, tacky with blood. The light around him was negligible, and although he had hoped for a moment that it was dawn, he knew now it was not. Knew that he had slept for minutes rather than hours, and the night still held the land i
n her silent, black fist. The only light was that of the stars, burning their thin alien light down upon the land. He was burrowed in under a fallen spruce and he was very cold, and as his consciousness returned, so too did his panic, for he could hear the sound of something making its way along the pine needles of the forest floor.

  Something was coming toward him in the woods. Jake pressed himself flat to the ground. He had plunged down creek banks and up creek banks, through swamps and over dry land, and the command to go with them, to run with them, had never stopped, had always been right there behind him. Now there was no more strength left in his body and what was coming would come, and it would find him or it would pass him by.

  It moved steadily through the woods. It sounded very large, far too large to be Darius or Henry or both of them combined. Perhaps a moose or a caribou or a bear drawn in by the smell of his blood. He could hear it scraping against the trees, pushing through the branches, almost as though it was deliberately making noise, trying to get his heart to thud right out of his chest. There had been two bad times in the desert, once when they had engaged a cell of insurgents outside a small, dusty town that was supposed to be friendly. It had been an even match, one of very few, and any illusions he still had harbored about the advantage of superior fighting tactics and weaponry had fled, along with the rest of his squad, as the slugs whistled around and through them, the sound of copper-jacketed lead punching into flesh like hard rain hitting a lake. Three casualties, and he had not been one, but he had felt death singing in the air and knew his tune was out there, that if he stopped to listen it would find him.

  The other time it had been friendly fire, and it had been very, very close, bad communications all the way through, shots fired and ordnance arranged, and then, at the very last moment, called off on Jake’s order. He had decided, in the end, that he would rather make a mistake on his side than on the other side, would rather be responsible for the deaths of his own men than those of someone else’s.