Spores

by Ike Hamill

  “Hold there, Len,” Patrice called.

  Leonard looked over his shoulder. Patrice had a coil of black and yellow rope in one hand and was swinging a big loop in the other. Patrice let the thing fly and it shot towards him. Leonard put out a hand, but the rope came up short. Patrice pulled it back in, coiling it as he shuffled forward. They both heard the fractures as they cracked through ice. Leonard felt them, vibrating up through his hands and knees. The ice was a coiled spring, ready to release its energy and shatter.

  Patrice froze, wound up, and tossed the end of the rope again. This time, it slid to a stop only a few inches away from Leonard’s foot. He hooked it with the toe of his boot and pulled it. He was going to call out to Patrice to lay flat, but his friend was already doing that. Patrice pulled himself forward to give Leonard more slack.

  “Get control. Stay calm,” Leonard whispered to himself as he looked back towards the open water. Somewhere in the back of his head, his deepest survival instinct was telling him that this was all useless. The snowmobile rider was already dead. There was no point in risking his own life. Leonard pushed back that voice with his own whisper. “Get control. Stay calm.”

  “Two tugs if you want me to pull,” Patrice yelled.

  “Got it,” Leonard said. He was trying to frog-swim forward across the ice again, but making no progress. It felt like his own survival instinct was physically holding him back from the edge. He started to push himself back up to a crawl when the ice made the next move. It shattered under him and he plunged into the deepfreeze. His body tightened up immediately, forcing the air out of him.

  Chapter Three - Hunting

  (Jake)

  JAKE’S HANDS MOVED AUTOMATICALLY. He flicked off his own safety and his finger found the trigger of his rifle. His weapon was still pointed at the ground, but with one easy motion it would swing to Andrew.

  “What the fuck did you do?” Jake asked.

  Andrew looked down at his hands and then gently laid the rifle in the matted grass at his own feet.

  When he turned back to Jake, he blinked furiously and then wiped one of his watery eyes.

  “That was terrible. You saw, right?”

  “I saw that man’s head explode into pink mist,” Jake said. “What the fuck, Andrew? You better get the fuck up. We’re going to go see if there’s anything that can be done.”

  “No!” Andrew gasped. He rose to his feet and took a step towards Jake. Even though Andrew was unarmed, Jake took a step back and raised his rifle to the man’s belly. His finger was poised on the trigger. In his entire life, he had never pointed a loaded rifle at another man. Cold fear rushed through him.

  “What the fuck, Andrew?”

  Andrew put up his hands like a TV bank robber being caught. He dropped his head and shook it.

  “It was terrible. You saw it though, right? You saw it too?”

  “Start walking, Andrew,” Jake said. He let his rifle sag. His finger stayed where it was. He wanted to march Andrew away from the other gun and he wanted to verify that the running man was indeed dead. From what he had seen, the running man had to be dead. Through the field glasses, the head had exploded like a pumpkin with a cherry bomb in it. The bullet must have gone in through the eye and bounced off the back of the skull or something. Jake had seen headshots on plenty of rabbits. His brother insisted that the meat tasted better when they didn’t know death was coming, so he always shot them in the head. Even with their tiny skulls, Jake had never seen one explode like that.

  “No,” Andrew said. “We can’t go near him.” He started to move towards Jake again and then stopped when he remembered the gun.

  “What?”

  “Listen,” Andrew said. “We go and we get the police. Whatever you want, but we can’t go near him. He has to be contagious.”

  “What?”

  “You saw, right? Tell me you saw.”

  “You tell me, but do it while you’re walking. First thing we’re going to do is see if we can help the man. If we can’t we’ll cover him and mark the location. Then, we’ll…”

  “No,” Andrew said, shaking his head and backing up. “No way. We can’t. The way he was running, and all the way out here? The way he was dressed? And that growth on his face and the blue skin on his arms. Jake, listen, it’s not safe. He had something bad.”

  “Stop backing up, Andrew, I mean it.”

  Andrew kept shaking his head.

  “We can’t,” Andrew said. Andrew looked back towards the hill where the man’s body had fallen. It was hidden from where they were standing, but Jake still had a good sense of exactly where he must be. Without warning, Andrew turned and ran. Jake raised the rifle and watched his hunting partner run for the trail that led back to the cabin.

  “Shit,” Jake whispered as he lowered the rifle. He bent and picked up Andrew’s rifle from the grass, unloaded it, and slung it over his shoulder.

  He felt like he was standing at the edge of a cliff and he had just watched, helpless, as an acquaintance had jumped over the edge. Andrew was no longer a friend, he was a story that Jake would tell at parties sometime in the future.

  “Yeah, I don’t know exactly what they call it—psychotic break, or whatever—but the guy just snapped,” Jake would say, frowning down at his beer. The story would draw in everyone around him. They would all want to know about the day that Andrew snapped and killed an innocent man for no reason. Jake would be the calm hero of the story, keeping everything together while events descended into chaos. Jake marched through the tall grass towards where the running man had fallen.

  “I went to try to save the poor guy, but it was too late,” he would say to the throng of people gathered to hear the tale. “It was Andrew’s first time hunting, but he was a crack shot. Once I verified that the poor guy was dead, I went and summoned the authorities to come and take Andrew away.”

  Jake had a friend, Kent, who had been present at two car crashes and one airplane crash. Kent never talked about those incidents unless someone asked. Someone always asked. Jake decided that he would be the same way. He wouldn’t go around talking freely about the time that Andrew went crazy and shot a guy, but if he was asked he would tell the story.

  As he drew closer, Jake spotted the trail that the running man had left through the tall grass. He raised his field glasses. A grass-covered mound was still in the way. He couldn’t see where the man had fallen. It was strange the way that Andrew had snapped. From what Jake had observed, Andrew was normally calm and cautious. If anything, he figured that Andrew would have gone home without shooting a single round on this trip. It was just plain bizarre that he had panicked and shot a person.

  “He must have seen something. Or thought he saw something,” Jake whispered to himself.

  But Jake hadn’t seen anything. Had he?

  There was definitely something uncanny about the way the running man had crested the hill. His nose had been turned up towards the sky at first, and he had been weaving. Then, as soon as Jake and Andrew were in sight, the man’s course had straightened out and he had run straight for them.

  “Probably needed help,” Jake whispered to the wind.

  That didn’t make all that much sense to Jake though. A person in desperate need of help, when they finally spot salvation, would yell and wave their arms, wouldn’t they? Out in the middle of nowhere, dressed like it was a summer day even though it was colder than hell, did it make sense to just run at the only people around?

  Jake looked back towards the trail where Andrew had disappeared, to make sure that Andrew wasn’t coming back for him. He was alone. Except for the dead body on the other side of the grassy rise, he was alone.

  “It’s not safe,” Jake heard in his head. It was Andrew’s panicked voice, but it was also something else. It was the voice that told him not to go over to Katie’s house that time when he was a horny teenager and her father had come home early. That voice had bailed him out of several really bad decisions. What if going to look at that body was a
bad decision?

  What was the other thing that Andrew had said? Something about a growth on the man’s face?

  Jake made his feet move forward again. He didn’t have to walk right up, lean down, and try to give the man mouth to mouth or anything, but he had to make sure, didn’t he? He had to make sure that the man was as dead as he had appeared through the field glasses when the bullet hit him. Jake made himself a deal—he would go to the top of the little hill, which had to be at least a few good paces away from the corpse, and he would simply verify, visually, that the man was dead. That was enough. If anyone asked why he didn’t go closer, he would simply say that he didn’t want to disturb the crime scene.

  Jake nodded and walked.

  Chapter Four - Meeting

  (Leonard)

  WHEN HIS MUSCLES TIGHTENED, all the air was driven from Leonard’s chest. His first instinct was to claw for the surface and drag in fresh air. That was a mistake. The air would come with plenty of water and it would only feed his hysteria. Instead of rushing to replace the air, he made his brain focus on something else—anything else.

  His left arm was looped through the lifejacket. His right arm was through the end of the rope that Patrice had thrown to him. Together, the two objects formed a picture that didn’t make much sense. The lifejacket wasn’t one of those puffy orange things that an inexperienced person might put on to go paddling around in a canoe. Those things usually ended up decorating the bottom of the boat anyway in case the game warden happened by. No, this was one of those fancy lifejackets that looked like a vest and zipped up in the front. Water skiers and wakeboarders wore those vests. The rope was odd too. The heavy end that Patrice had thrown out had a plastic bar that formed a triangle with the rope. Again, it was for the type of water sport where someone was dragged behind a boat. The lake was big enough for that kind of activity, but it was too far away from any road to make it practical. There would be no way to get a big boat in there to drag people around with. Why had someone taken the time to bring in a rope and lifejacket for those activities?

  The mental diversion had only taken a quick few seconds, but it worked.

  Instead of flailing around in the water, Leonard had used the brief mental exercise to regain control of his logic.

  The lifejacket had kept him afloat. Leonard let his face breach the surface and pulled in air. His body shivered with relief and some of his muscles loosened up a notch or two. Leonard let himself take one more cycle of exhale and inhale and then he turned his face into the water. He floated his legs up and suspended himself on the surface, looking down into the black. In the summer, snorkeling off of a dock and looking for a snagged fishing lure, he could hold his breath for a minute or more. In the freezing cold, he allowed himself to take another breath after only a handful of seconds. His eyes couldn’t make sense of anything down in the water. The cold stung too hard. He only wanted to squint his eyes shut every time he tried to look.

  He had to go down and get closer to where the snow machine had sunk. The problem was the lifejacket and the rope. The lifejacket wouldn’t allow him to dive and the rope was too short to drag along. If he made Patrice get closer to the center of the lake, there would be three people in the icy water.

  Leonard took another breath and moved the handle of the rope into his numb grip. He would give it two sharp tugs and let Patrice pull him in. They could both say that they did the best they could but there was no way to save the poor bastard who had sunk with his snow machine.

  It wasn’t good enough. Leonard had lived with regret before and he had gotten good at recognizing where it came from. If he tugged the rope now, Patrice would pull him in and he wouldn’t be able to sleep right for a month, maybe longer. Instead of tugging the rope, he freed his other arm from the lifejacket, put the rope through it, and left it behind. Leonard treated himself to two more cycles of deep breath and considered informing Patrice of his plan.

  He decided against it.

  Leonard left the lifejacket and rope behind and let himself sink into the darkness.

  * * * * * * *

  (Patrice)

  It was like losing a fish off the line. Patrice felt it when Leonard let go of the rope. He felt it go dead in his hands. If he were fishing, he would have dragged the rope back in, checked the lure, and then cast it out once more. But it wasn’t a fish and the only way the line would come alive again would be if Leonard made it back to the rope.

  “Fuck,” he whispered. “Fucking fuck.”

  He took in a deep breath, wishing there were some way he could share his oxygen with Leonard. When he let it out, his teeth chattered. He was lying prone on the ice and it was sapping all of his heat, right through his insulated coveralls.

  “Damn it, Leonard, come back,” he whispered. His voice was tremulous from his shivering.

  It wasn’t the cold that was making him shiver, it was the stress of the situation. He realized that if he acknowledged that, he could beat it.

  “Thirty seconds,” he said to himself. “I’ll give him thirty seconds and then I’m moving forward. Fuck the snowmobiler, I’m grabbing Leonard and at least the two of us are going to survive.”

  Patrice looked back over his shoulder, towards the cabin. He was missing something crucial and he knew it. He just couldn’t put his finger on exactly what. It hadn’t been more than three or four seconds, but he started crawling forward anyway. The ice was already making strange noises under him. It was moaning and squeaking.

  “Oh!” Patrice said. His eyebrows went up in surprise as he finally realized the crucial thing that he was missing. “Who is going to save me?”

  He could slide forward, dive after Leonard, and get back to the lifejacket, but then what? How would the two of them get back onto the ice? You were supposed to kick your legs until you could float your body to the surface, he remembered that much, but would that work in deep water? There was no good way to propel himself across the ice once he got back up. Any serious effort would probably just make him break through again.

  They needed a third person.

  Patrice rolled halfway over, turning his face roughly in the direction that Jake and Andrew had hiked off.

  “Jake! Andrew!” he yelled. If they were at the rendezvous point, they would never hear him. The only chance was if they had decided to come back early. Still, it was better than no chance at all.

  “Jake! Andrew! Help!”

  His call was answered by the echo of a distant shot.

  * * * * * * *

  (Leonard)

  Leonard forced his eyes back open, enduring the daggers that the cold drove into his eyes. His heartbeat was thudding in his ears. His body had burned through all of the oxygen in his lungs and implored his brain to listen to reason. Leonard forced himself to look around one last time. He saw the yellow of the snow machine first and then the blue jacket. Instead of up, Leonard forced himself downward, deeper. The water drove fresh spikes into his ears. Leonard blinked hard and swallowed, clearing his ears of the pain for a moment.

  The most frightening thing wasn’t the urgent need for air, it was how right it felt to let himself sink down into the dark. It felt like he belonged down there somehow. He imagined that below all this cold water he might find a warm pocket and he could curl up in that peaceful darkness and sleep.

  Leonard kicked his legs, propelling himself forward. It was too dark down there to see much, but it appeared that the snow machine was on the precipice of a deeper drop. The thing teetered, perfectly balanced. The jacket was almost within reach.

  Fresh pain jabbed into Leonard’s eyes. He squinted them shut as he reached and his gloved hand brushed the jacket. With one more blind attempt, he snagged it. With a death grip on the jacket, Leonard turned his face upwards and kicked. For a moment, the jacket hitched his momentum and then pulled free. Leonard could see the overcast sky above like a circle of fuzzy gray. He kicked and pulled, knowing he still had his grip on the jacket because of the drag of trying to pull the thing u
pwards.

  His eyes cleared as he ascended and he altered his course to take him towards the lifejacket and rope. Elation rose in him. Somewhere up in that gray, a warm fire and soft blanket were in his future. With that thought, his muscles locked. Leonard’s thighs and calves all cramped simultaneously and his upward momentum stopped. He felt himself slipping back down into the darkness. It had a hold on him and it wasn’t going to let go.

  He knew what to do—if he dropped his grip on the jacket, he could use his arms to pull himself up.

  The moment before his fingers released, reason returned. He had risked his life for this. He wasn’t going to let go. Leonard forced his legs to kick despite the pain. He reached and his hand closed around the rope.

  Leonard tugged and tugged, not stopping at two. He didn’t stop until the rope pulled and his head breached the surface. It felt like he had forgotten how to breathe air. His mouth was still clamped shut. His lungs didn’t know what to do. When it felt like he was going to explode, he finally managed to unlock his jaw and air burst from his chest, tearing his throat. The first breath of fresh air was so painful that it almost made him want to return to the dark water.

  Patrice was pulling.

  Leonard crashed into the edge of the ice and it bit him through his jacket.

  He realized that his fight wasn’t over yet.

  * * * * * * *

  (Patrice)

  Patrice held his breath when he saw turbulence on the surface. He waited, feeling completely helpless. His thirty seconds were up. He had promised himself that he would go rescue Leonard, but the time had passed.