by Ilsa J. Bick
“Nathan was hit with a mace,” he said. “That big log? I heard his neck break. Did he come back from the dead, too?”
“No. His body’s still in the death house.”
Still. He could feel the scream trying to squeeze past his teeth. That’s where I was. They thought I was dead. They put me with Nathan. Then how—
“We’ll bury him come spring, if you like. We don’t cremate remains, although we did butcher his horse for our dogs. We also have Nathan’s belongings—clothing, rifle, a radio? I suppose they’re yours now.” The old man paused. “I know you don’t agree, Christopher, but I’ve had ample time to examine you. From the extent of your injuries and visible wounds—well, what’s left of them—Hannah did the right thing.”
“Left of them?” Every time this old man opened his mouth, Chris felt his mind scrambling to keep up. “What do you mean, what’s left of them?”
In reply, the old man reached and peeled the sheet from Chris’s chest down to his waist. “You have half a dozen wounds, three of which are quite serious. This one”—the old man laid a dry palm over Chris’s right side, just below his ribs—“was the worst: a through-and-through that collapsed your lung. Your difficulty breathing? Hannah said you had tracheal deviation.” He touched a finger to his own knobby Adam’s apple. “Your windpipe had shifted to one side. That happens when air collects inside your rib cage instead of the lung. And do you remember the pain in your belly? That was probably from blood pooling in your abdomen. But look now.”
Chris craned to peer down at his stomach. A pink eye of taut, raw-looking scar tissue, about as big around as a half-dollar, stared up from his abdomen, just below the shelf of his ribs. My God. He heard his sudden intake of breath. The first time around, when he came to … he remembered the old man’s hand on his stomach. How can this be?
“You have a matching exit wound to the right of your spine. From its location, I suspect you sustained a laceration of your kidney as well. Yet that, too, is almost healed. Here.” Chris felt a tug at his left wrist as the old man worked the knot. “As long as you promise not to choke me again, let me … There. Look at your hand, Christopher.”
At first, he thought there was nothing, but then his eyes picked out the half-moon of the mostly healed slash running from the web between his thumb and first finger down to his wrist. He stared, dumbfounded.
“A spike did that,” the old man said, although his words were faint, nearly lost in the sudden buzz that filled Chris’s ears. “As you can see, the thumb was nearly severed. But here you are, almost healed. All your wounds are in much the same condition.”
“But how?” He turned his hand over, then made a fist. It didn’t hurt at all. “That’s not possible. How can this be happening? Why am I still alive?”
“Can’t say.” The old man threw up his hands. “Is it the tonic? Or a mistake, as you say? A combination of both the tonic and your physiology? Or is this only a miracle or magic?”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” Chris managed through numb lips. He recalled the dark guttural mutters, the strange incense that filled his nose. And his hands, on my chest; I remember how I felt something … leaving. A bolt of fresh fear burned a path through his chest. “I don’t believe in miracles.”
“I don’t either. Although you could argue that an eight-year-old slip of a girl finding the strength to hoist a seventeen-year-old boy onto a horse to be a touch miraculous. That is, until you consider that the human body reacts to emergencies by flooding the tissues with adrenaline. This increases blood flow, gives more energy, greater strength. So Ellie was frightened; it was an emergency, and her body reacted. She even gave up her coat for you and should have been really cold. But she never felt it because the same physiological mechanism also kept her warm. So, see?” The old man spread his hands in a no-tricks-up-my-sleeve gesture. “No miracles. Just science.”
“But that’s not what you were doing when I woke up. That wasn’t science.”
“No, that was faith, like the grudafoos.” The old man stroked a finger over a wooden charm hung around Chris’s chest on a leather cord. “Ellie believed it would protect you. Whether it did is immaterial. It was something she could give, and in return, that gave her courage. It gave her faith. But all emotions are chemically mediated and may be manipulated. Every drunk, every lover, any ecstatic mystic knows that. There is no heart”—the old man palmed his own chest, then touched a temple—“without the head.”
“So what were you doing then?”
“I was calling on God to heal you,” the old man said simply. “I was also suggesting to you that it might be time to wake up—and you did, rather spectacularly. And don’t bother objecting. I’m sure it was coincidence and no miracle. There is only what we don’t understand. Of course, this”—he touched Chris’s stomach—“I don’t understand at all.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Chris said.
“Do you remember it at all? Because we think you were dreaming, and for quite a while, too. Days. Your …” The old man traced a circle in the air before his own eyes. “They were moving as they might in intense REM sleep.”
“I—” His tongue tangled. Dreams, all those dreams, they felt so real. “I only remember a little, right before …”
“Yes?” the old man prompted. “Did you see something, Christopher?”
The nightmares were in pieces, daggers of glass from badly smashed mirrors—and, he thought now, just as a dangerous. I saw Lena and Peter—and my father.… He felt his heart suddenly sprinting in his chest. Lena. God, in all that had happened, he’d forgotten about her. She’d been with him. Where could she have gone? And didn’t she know Jayden? Yes, she said she was in a group of ten kids, with Jayden. So that means I’ve found a group, her group.
“Christopher?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Chris said, hoping he didn’t sound as frightened as he suddenly was. If Lena wasn’t dead, where was she? Could she have headed back to Rule? But Lena’s no good in the woods, not alone, and she was sick, pregnant. She’d said that Peter was the father, so that must be why he’d linked the two of them together in his nightmares. Her going back to Rule made no sense either, especially since Jayden was here. So what had happened? Had she simply freaked out and run into the woods—and become lost? She’d never survive that. Could the Changed have gotten to her? But then why didn’t they kill me? Maybe it was as simple as they couldn’t get at him. Lena was easy pickings. Yet that made no sense. The Changed wouldn’t have cared if he was alive, barely alive, or dead. Meat was meat. By rights, he ought to be in pieces, or bare bones.
Regardless, saying anything about Lena now would be a mistake. His mind went through the same mental calculus as it had with Ellie and Alex. Telling about Alex wouldn’t have helped the little girl, and might make things ten times worse for him. He was at a disadvantage here, and effectively a prisoner. These people were not his friends. Hannah had only proved he couldn’t trust them.
So keep your mouth shut. They’ve already tried to kill you once. Say nothing.
“It was a pretty bad dream,” he said. “That’s all I remember.”
“I see.” That dark gaze was clear and very direct, and Chris had the uncomfortable feeling that this old man read exactly what was behind his eyes. “Was it the only one?”
“I don’t know,” he said, resisting the urge to sneak his gaze elsewhere.
“You sounded very frightened.”
“I was scared.” This was true. “I couldn’t move. The dream felt very … real.”
“Ah.” The old man nodded. “Probably a hypnagogic hallucination. They can be quite frightening because your body’s still in the grip of a sleep paralysis. It’s the brain’s way of protecting you from yourself. Otherwise, we’d all act out our worst nightmares. Given how long you’ve been in REM sleep, how active your brain’s obviously been, I’m not surprised.”
“Could it be a side effect of the poison? I mean, another one, oth
er than not ending up dead?”
“Perhaps.” The old man showed a thin smile. “Intense dreams were commonly reported. That was the point of ingesting the mushroom to begin with. This particular genus is loaded with psychedelics, toxins, and other interesting compounds.”
“Mushroom?”
“Amanita pseudomori. The False Death mushroom. Apt. It and a cousin, the Fly Agaric, have a very long and colorful history. You can read about it, if you wish. In any event, Jayden—quite a bright boy, a real scientist—he thinks the decoction induced a bizarre sleep-coma. That, combined with the cold, put you into a hibernative state. Slowed down your metabolic processes, somehow protected your brain. It’s a decent theory. We know that coma is sometimes protective for brain-injured patients, children who’ve drowned in cold water.”
“My brain wasn’t injured. I didn’t drown.” I bled out. I couldn’t breathe. And what explains the scars?
“No, you didn’t. You’re quite unique, Christopher, beyond the fact that you’re still you.”
“You mean that I haven’t Changed. That’s our name for it. Your brother’s. He’s my …” His throat moved in another dry swallow. “My grandfather. Reverend Yeager?”
“Ah. Yes. I’ve been told that my brother and I have the same eyes.” Isaac Hunter’s were, however, still kind. “I suppose this makes you my great-nephew.”
“I guess.” He didn’t have a clue. “I was sent to find you.”
“I assumed as much. Was it Jessica?”
“In a way.” Jess, with black mirrors for eyes, in the Land of the Dead. And Peter was there, too, and Lena. He was suddenly exhausted, the events of everything that had happened finally catching up. “It’s kind of a long story …” And so pointless now. Nathan was dead. Given his dream, he bet Lena was, too.
What am I thinking? I don’t believe in magic or dreams. And yet he’d pulled … what? A Lazarus? That was crazy. He’d accept a weird coma before coming back from the Land of the Dead.
“I don’t understand what there is for me to find here, or why you’re so important,” he said. “Yeager’s my grandfather. That’s not news. So, fine, you’re his brother, and you’re either Amish or lead some breakaway sect. But so what?”
“Well, I agree,” Hunter said. “If that were the only story or all there was to discover.”
“What more is there?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much you know about Simon Yeager,” Hunter said, “and Penny Ernst.”
57
Somewhere west of Rule and four days after the ants—two weeks after the avalanche—Wolf led them down a single, unmarked, dead-end rut along an isolated and very large lake nestled in the cup of broad, rolling, forested moraines. From the lack of houses ringing the shore and that rut, Alex thought the lake might be privately owned, a secret getaway. About two miles in, she spotted a boathouse and lone stake dock, with a single slip, perched on the water’s edge down a steep hill to her right. On a high hill to her left and directly across from the lake was a rough-hewn, two-story house, with a large, chalet-style picture window on the left and a partially completed wraparound porch, still on bricks and cinderblock, running off the front door and curling around to the right. The house was surrounded on three sides by tall stands of densely packed evergreens and hardwood—
And the dusky, flayed, and gutted carcasses of four wolves, dangling like totems.
All the blood drained from her head. The last time she’d seen anything like this was just outside the Zone, guarding the way to Wolf’s feeding grounds and that arena with its grisly pyramids of decaying human skulls. Purple tongue jutting in a stiff apostrophe, one wolf dangled from a thick iron hook punched through its chest. The body hung to the right of the front door, where you might put up a cheery flowered banner: Welcome, Friends! To the extreme left, a second wolf, its eyeless sockets wide with eternal wonder, was suspended thirty feet up a weathered spruce. Alongside, a very large, navy blue Cordura stuff sack hung from a carabiner clipped to red paraline tied off around the trunk of a smaller adjacent tree.
A bear bag. She watched as the fingers of a light westerly breeze snatched the naked wolf and gave it a playful twirl. The paraline let out a soft squee. Her lips were numbing, as was her brain. From the aroma of chilled people-steak, she understood that the sack was where the Changed stored their kills. The idea that she’d come all this way only to be hacked up for storage in the equivalent of a deep freeze … Her throat began to clench, and she’d clapped both hands to her mouth, unsure if she would vomit or scream or both.
The front door opened then. A second later, a bull-necked boy lumbered out, trailed by another Changed: honey-blonde, blue-eyed.
The shock of recognition was physical, a splash of icy water. The hair wreathing the girl’s haggard features was what Alex recalled from a picture in yet another lake house. The square jaw, the nose were right. Willowy before, the girl was much thinner now. Well, mostly thin. Alex wasn’t really certain until the girl turned and Alex saw her in profile.
Then everything clicked into place: that green medic’s pack, the lengths to which Wolf had gone to save and protect her, his scent of lilacs and honeysuckle: safe and family. Regardless of how he might feel about her, she now understood why Wolf needed her, too. She finally got what was going on.
Penny Ernst—Peter’s sister—was pregnant.
58
“… correspond with images of the naked, red-eyed, wild-man god known in Vedic mythology as the Red Howler, the Raw-Eyed Beast, or Red Storm. As father of the Hindu storm gods, Rudra was clearly linked to intoxication. With his mad eyes and golden hair, this is a white-skinned god, the divine link to the Land of the Dead …”
“Which doesn’t prove anything other than people have been getting high for thousands of years,” he muttered, eyeing the stack of books Isaac had carted up: The Ethnobotanical Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants. Medicinal Plants of the Great Lakes Region. Little Deaths: The Physiology of Coma and Trance States. Not light reading, but they’d kept him isolated in this bedroom for the last two days, and Chris had plenty of time on his hands. Anything was better than stewing over what Isaac had said about Penny Ernst and Peter, Simon, his grandfather—and Jess.
“Tempting as it may be to regard Rudra as the physical manifestation of the Fly Agaric mushroom, I believe there to be a much better candidate for this lost, mysterious, and mystical drink. Close study of Vedic poetry—with its frequent mentions of regenerative ‘death sleeps,’ resurrection, and divine visions—point to the much rarer and more lethal cousin, A. pseudomori. ‘Death sleeps’ clearly suggest comas of varying durations, during which times metabolic demands …”
From across the room came a timid knock. “Chris?”
“Come on in. Oh, sorry, I forgot. It’s locked.” Yes, it was perverse and a little nasty, but he was starting to go bat-shit stir-crazy. There were only so many sit-ups and push-ups a guy could do. Any longer in solitary and he’d be as beefy as an inmate. Now, the fact that he was feeling so strong after both weeks on the trail and some time in cold storage … he didn’t want to think about that.
An uncertain pause on the other side of the door. “Do you want me to go away?”
Don’t be a creep. It’s not her fault. Other than Isaac, the rest were hanging back, spending as little time with him as possible. As pissed as he was, he wasn’t sure he blamed them. “No,” he said, and shoved back from the table. “Come on in, Ellie.”
There was the thunk of a lock being thrown. The door cracked a few inches, revealing the worried eyes of that morning’s guard—a strawberry blond named Eli—and then a flash of golden braids as Ellie pushed past.
“Ellie.” Eli made a grab that Ellie easily dodged. “Jayden said we should wait for the dogs.”
“Mina knows he’s okay.” Ellie gave her dog an affectionate ruffle. “Don’t you, girl?”
“Relax, Eli, I’m still talking,” Chris said as Mina tro
tted over, gave Chris’s hand a welcoming snuffle, then immediately flopped on her back, tail thumping. Grinning, Chris obliged with a furious belly scratch that set the dog to squirming. “You like that, girl, you like it?” he said as the dog’s back legs pedaled. “That’s a good girl.”
“She’s such a baby.” Dropping to her knees, Ellie brushed aside a corn-tassel curl that had escaped her left braid to coil at her temple. “Like I never pay attention to her.”
“It’s okay,” Chris said as Mina stretched both front legs and let out a blissful moan. “I like it. My dog did this all the time.”
“You miss him?”
“Yup. Jet’s a good dog. I bet you’d like him.” Chris gave Mina’s belly a firm clap, then looked up at the little girl. “Going fishing?”
“She’s always going fishing,” Eli put in.
Ellie showed Chris an exaggerated eye-roll. “I was wondering if, maybe … in a couple days, if they let you out … you want to come with me?”
“Sure,” he said, then couldn’t resist the dig. “But I guess it all depends on whether Isaac and Hannah think I’m going to eat you.”
“God.” Eli’s face darkened. “Don’t be such a jerk.”
The hopeful shine on Ellie’s face dimmed. “They don’t think that, Chris. You know they have to be sure.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Don’t be such a turd. “Sorry. I’m not usually an ass … uh, such a creep.”
“It’s all right. You’re just upset.” But her smile was more tentative than before.
“No excuse.” Reaching across the dog, he tucked that corkscrew curl behind her ear and let his hand linger a moment, enjoying the flush of delighted surprise that spread over her face. Cute kid, but he could see the sadness in the slightly dusky hollows under her eyes. “The least I can do is be nice to the girl who saved my life … and don’t start.” He held up a finger. “It is so a big deal.”
