He took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”
He turned to look at me, and I gave him a Mom glare.
“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t say anything else. And I decided not to press him, for now.
We passed scatterings of trees and long, open valleys as the ground gave way to tundra, the hills surrounding us going as bald as old men. My legs were starting to burn, and I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. Amazing that not that long ago I felt frozen to the core. Now, despite all of my questions and all of Jeryl’s and Jax’s damn secrets, I felt alive. I felt fantastic. We’d already passed the farthest I’d been from the camp and we were still going. North, north, north. I was really doing something. Getting out into the real world. Living.
* * *
The sky was growing dark by the time we found it. We wouldn’t have found it at all if not for Wolf. It was covered in snow and looked like any other mound of earth. But Wolf sniffed it out, dug into it, and wouldn’t leave it be.
The horse. Stiff. Its mouth was gaping, and its large, glassy eye was wide open like it was surprised to be dying. Reminded me of a cartoon. We searched around the thing for Nayan’s body, kicking through the snow, hoping to step on an arm, a foot, a face. Not a very normal hope. We turned up nothing, and honestly, I was a little relieved. I didn’t want to see another dead body. But I had to get a grip on myself. The goal was, as far as I knew, to kill Nayan, not give him a stern warning.
When we didn’t turn anything up and couldn’t find his footprints, we moved on. Behind us, the uncovered body of the horse lay, waiting for a wolverine to split it apart and carry it off in pieces.
It was weird being out there with Jax. I was used to marching through the snow with Jeryl: hunting, setting traps, that kind of thing. I’d gotten used to Jeryl’s movements, the sound of his breathing, the way his pant legs swished together. But with Jax, it was all new. When he walked, everything about him seemed fluid, every movement purposeful, calm. Except for his hands, which were balled into fists. Every once in a while, he’d scan the surrounding hills like he was watching something, but he’d never stop. Having him there was like seeing the world through his eyes. And it was a bigger, wilder place than I remembered.
We traveled well into the night before we made another igloo. Jax didn’t want to stop. My boots felt like they were full of cement, and my face was red and raw. We were moving through a wide, flat valley. The stars were out in full force. And the only noise we could hear was the sound of our boots scraping and crushing and lifting and repeating in the snow.
I wondered what Mom was thinking. Worried obviously. And furious. She’d probably send Ken out to look for me. He knew where I liked to hunt, so he’d have checked all the likely spots. They would have figured out by now what had happened. The blizzard was the problem. The blizzard would have hit them the same as it hit us. Normally, Mom would have counted on my finding Jax and Jeryl easy. But because of the damn blizzard, she’d worry I was somewhere frozen to death. Guess I nearly was. But it couldn’t be helped now. They’d just have to sweat it out. And I had to be prepared to take a whole lot of crap when I got back.
With the three of us working, the igloo took us about a half hour to make. The concept of an igloo is simple. Putting it into practice is the bitch of it.
You clear away a space in the snow that acts as a rough blueprint to where you’ll start to stack your bricks. Typically, it’s a large circle with a cylindrical entrance. Ken used to say that it looked like a stumpy penis. Then you start gathering and packing, gathering and packing. You use your knife to shape the bricks, then start stacking them around. You can use a handful or two of snow as a sort of mortar to fill in the gaps. You stagger the blocks and angle them slightly inward, making them smaller and smaller as you go and using your knife to make sure each layer is flat and even.
Then, once you’ve closed it off, you use more loose snow to fill in whatever holes you’ve got left. Like I said, it’s tiring work, but it’s amazing how warm that snowy little shelter can get. We worked in silence. Everyone focused on the task at hand. And there was a comfort to that. Brick by snowy brick. Kneeling in the ground next to one another.
At first, Jax wasn’t happy about having to stop, but Jeryl was adamant.
“Resting will make us faster.”
“I don’t need rest.”
“You don’t think you do, but you do. Nayan will be resting.”
“You stay, I’m moving on.”
“And what if I shoot you in the back?”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Just asking a question.”
“I never should have let you come.”
“I didn’t really give you a choice.”
“There’s always a choice.”
I’d stayed quiet like it didn’t matter to me either way, but my whole body felt as though it was about to fall apart one limb at a time. Starting with my throbbing feet. In the end, we decided to build the igloo, sleep a few hours, and then move. Once the thing was made, Jeryl got another fire going, and we all crammed in and lay down. Not Wolf, though—he stayed outside and curled up in the snow. I think he decided he didn’t like the fire.
I was watching Jeryl tugging his blanket from his pack when I asked him, “Why are you afraid of Immunity?” I was tired as hell, but I couldn’t help it. There was more Jeryl wasn’t saying, and I needed to know.
Jeryl grunted. “Not afraid.”
“Then why are we out here?” I locked eyes with Jax. He looked down into the fire.
“Because I don’t want Immunity anywhere near our camp.”
“Why?”
“They’re a bunch of quacks. Tried to control everything. They’d claim us as citizens of some such nonsense and try to make us abide by their laws.” It was the truth, but only part of it. I could see it in the old man’s eyes, in the quick way he spoke. There was more to the story, a lot more.
“Jeryl, what aren’t you telling me?”
His eyes narrowed. “Nothing. You remember Immunity. They were in Eagle. You saw them on the news. When they were in power, no one had any rights. They could do what they wanted to you, your family. They could keep starving women and children from unaffected zones and no one could do anything to stop them. They’d do whatever it took to find their damn cure. We don’t need those people digging into our lives. Our past.”
“Our past? What do you mean? We don’t have anything to hide.”
“Everyone has something to hide.”
“Like what?”
He scanned my face like he was looking for something. It was weird. I’d never seen him do it before.
“Get some sleep.”
“What? No. You—”
“Enough.” His voice was hard. I looked at Jax again; his eyes were still glued to the fire. Everyone has something to hide. Jeryl lay back, tucking his blanket over himself. Conversation over.
* * *
I woke up needing to pee. My body wanted sleep, but my bladder didn’t care. There was no sleeping this off. I got up and ducked out the exit. Neither Jax nor Jeryl stirred. When I stepped out of the igloo, I entered an alien world. The snow was glowing green. Green? I was probably overtired. I blinked, thinking my eyes were messed up. But nope. Green. I looked up at the sky and saw the glow just above the horizon. The northern lights. I’d seen them before, a couple years back. They weren’t like you see in the pictures, dancing waves of light, flapping like angel’s wings. At least, I’d never seen them like that. Jeryl said that the nuclear winter had somehow affected them. They didn’t come as often, and weren’t as vibrant. But they shone tonight, bright, green, casting a mystic feel across the frozen landscape. I almost woke the others to show them.
Wolf rose to his feet next to me, looking up like he was ready for anything. What’re we doing? Let’s go! I walked a ways, not wanting to pee too close to where the others slept. I could still ask for that much privacy. I made my way a few dozen yards across the long valley.
God, that
light was weird. And cold too. The air stung my lungs like I’d been chewing spearmint gum—also green.
I found a thick patch of bushes that I squatted beside. I had to shoo Wolf away. Dogs weren’t much for personal space. He meandered, sniffed at the ground here and there, looking at me with his tongue flopping out of his mouth like a Fruit Roll-Up. Remember Fruit Roll-Ups?
When I stood, I saw a slight stirring in the snow on the hill just west of the valley. A slow blur. The bizarre green night could have easily been playing tricks on me. But no. There it was again, more obvious this time. I watched as it grew closer and took shape. Then I realized what it was. A lynx. A freaking lynx! I’d been in the Yukon for seven years and I’d never seen one. Once, when Jeryl, Ken, and I took a two-day hunting trip up the Ogilvie Mountains, we saw some lynx footprints and scat, but that’s as close as I’d ever come.
I stared at the thing for a while. Long gray fur hung from its cheeks, an old man’s beard, while the rest of its appearance was a weird hybrid: lanky legs like a wolf’s, the body of a cat, and the triangular ears of a fox. What a bizarre, awesome creature, somehow perfectly shaped to the green environment. I was not. I was the outsider, the intruder. The big cat moved forward, one careful paw at a time.
That’s when I heard the footsteps behind me. Close. Too close. Wolf bounded away as I spun around.
“Easy,” a voice said.
Jax. He was only about five feet from me. How the hell had he gotten so close without my noticing? Wolf rose on his hind legs and stuck his paws on Jax’s hips. “Dammit, dog,” Jax said while scratching the husky’s ear.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He took off his hat. An odd thing to do in the cold. His brown hair was half flattened, half sticking up all around his head. My heart was still galumphing in my chest. There was something about his face that set me on edge. Something about his expression. I couldn’t quite place it.
“I dunno. What are you doing?”
“Taking a piss. You mind?”
“Oh. Sorry.”
I looked back toward the hill. No lynx. Not even a sign of the animal. It was like it hadn’t even been there at all. Like I’d dreamed it.
“You should head back, get some sleep,” he said, turning toward the igloo.
I didn’t want him to leave, didn’t want to head back quite yet. “It’s like we’re on another planet, huh?” I said.
He turned back toward me, his gaze taking me in, then roaming back toward the green horizon. “You believe in aliens?”
“No,” I said.
“Sometimes I think we’re the aliens.”
“What?”
“We don’t fit here. We’ve never fit here.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.
“We need walls to protect us, furniture to sit on, heat to keep us from freezing. And we nearly destroyed the planet. Now we’re dying off. It doesn’t seem like we belong here.”
“So you think we came from another planet?”
“Why not?” He picked up a handful of snow and held it in his gloved hand.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He laughed. Not a long laugh. A short, barking ha.
We watched the empty valley. Each of us hyperaware of the other. The shushing of fabric, the groaning of snow beneath our feet, a gloved hand scratching a cheek. Each sound an invasion. But neither of us moved to head back to the igloo.
“I’m not going to have sex with you,” I said. You know when you have a sudden thought that seems important—so important that you have to say it out loud? Only, by the time you say it, you realize you really didn’t need to or shouldn’t have? Yeah. That.
He let out another barking laugh. “You just say what’s on your mind, don’t you?”
“And you don’t.” It was an accusation.
“I didn’t come out here to have sex with you.”
“I didn’t think you did,” I said, backpedaling. “Just wanted to be clear.”
He turned his whole body toward me. Blue eyes on mine. I took in his face, imagining a strong jawline underneath that beard. And there was that look that made me feel uneasy. What was it? “We’re on the same page,” he said.
“Good.” I looked away first. Dammit.
He stood. “Good night, Gwen.”
“Why do you call me that? I told you, it’s Lynn.”
“Maybe it’s because I like the way your nose wrinkles every time I say it.”
I felt heat rise to my cheeks and anger churn in my gut, and that look on his face made me want to scrub it with a hot washrag. “Screw you,” I said.
“Don’t stay out too late.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but I had no comeback. He smirked, and for a moment, I saw him. Really saw him. Like I could see who he was in the life before. His likes, dislikes, quirks, and imperfections. Then the smirk was gone, disappearing in a green flash.
He started back toward the igloo, Wolf bounding ahead of him.
I watched him go and, for a good thirty seconds, very seriously contemplated throwing a snowball at him. I even made a small one, cupping it in my palm as he worked his way back. I cocked my arm back, then stopped. Suddenly, I realized what it was about his face that bugged me. It wasn’t his expression. It was the fact that he didn’t look tired. Why wasn’t he tired? We’d gone all day with next to no rest. It didn’t make sense. He could shrug out of Jeryl’s ropes no problem, send a knife through a man’s eye easy as splitting wood, and when I’d been next to his naked body in that igloo, his skin was warm like he’d been sitting out in the sun. And now, on top of everything, he didn’t grow tired. Something was off. I watched him move in the snow, his legs pushing through the drifts casually, like they weren’t even there.
I tilted my hand and heard the hollow thump of my snowball dropping to the ground.
17
We got an early start. And by early, I mean late. It was still somewhere just past the middle of the night. The green glow had faded to a dim shimmer, outlining the mountains in the distance. As we moved, Jax stayed a ways ahead of us, Wolf romping around him like he’d been sleeping for days. Jeryl stayed close beside me, and we walked in silence for a good long while, sucking frosty air into our lungs, stomping soft snow beneath our feet.
After a mile, we found Nayan’s footprints. So he was alive. That got Jax’s blood boiling. He didn’t say anything, just picked up the pace. The sun had risen but was hidden by a bright blanket of clouds, which blurred against the snowy horizon, making it seem as if we were walking into a sheet of white paper. A wind picked up. It had a good bite but wasn’t too strong. I saw movement on the hill just east of us and spotted three gray wolves trotting along. Wolf paused to look at them. There’s something inherently different between a wolf and a dog. It’s in the length of their legs, the way they move. And especially their eyes.
When they spotted us, they stopped. They looked so calm. It felt like I could walk up and pet them between the ears. But they were hunting. They were assessing. Were we predators or prey? They watched awhile longer, then wandered off, but their presence left me feeling uneasy. I kept glancing at the hill. I remember hearing their howls for the first time—our first year in the Yukon. I remember thinking that the sound was getting closer and wondering if they’d somehow make it into our cabins. I didn’t sleep that night. Something about wolves—perhaps the intelligence in their eyes, or their long snouts—scared me more than bears or cougars.
We continued on for maybe another half mile before Jax took off running.
“Hey!” Jeryl yelled. “Stop!”
Running through the snow is a frustrating thing. It’s like being in a dream where someone is chasing you, and you can’t quite run as fast as you want, no matter how hard you kick. The snow grabs at your pants and boots and you have to lift your leg absurdly high. Every step is a full-body workout.
Jeryl and I ran after Jax. But Jeryl was old, and no matter how hard
I ran, the simple truth was that the men had an unfair advantage. My legs were shorter than theirs. Jax crested a small rise and disappeared on the other side. Then the world seemed to hold its breath. I was conscious only of the snow slicing against our pants, our boots breaking through the colder layers closer to the ground, our lungs sucking in frozen air. And then: a gunshot. It rang out loud and clear. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
A voice yelled in the distance.
When we got to the top of the hill, what we saw made me sick to my core. It was a deep, penetrating sickness.
Nayan lay in a heap of bloody snow; his throat was cut and pumping thick red spurts onto the ground. He was holding his neck while his legs thrashed. Jax was walking away from the body. In front of him was Wolf, limping up the hill, his feet leaving bloody paw prints in the snow.
“Wolf.” Jax’s voice was soft, uncertain. It was the first time I’d ever heard him sound like that—meek. “Come here.” The dog stumbled on.
“What happened? Where’s Wolf going?” I asked Jeryl, my voice catching in my throat.
“Probably off to die,” Jeryl said. The words bore holes in my belly. Jax had a pained look on his face, but he didn’t seem to be wounded. I wanted to run to Wolf, to Jax, but I also wanted to turn around and run away from the scene, from Nayan’s bloody body, from whatever it was Jax was mixed up in. I wanted to pretend none of it was real. I watched that poor stupid dog limping away. Jax reached him, was about to lay a hand on his head, when a second gunshot sounded, followed by seven men and two horses emerging from the trees, the white star of Immunity pinned to several of their shoulders.
Next thing I knew, Jeryl was gripping my arm and pulling me down hard to the ground.
18
Jeryl and I peeked over the hill, our bodies flat against the snow. The men to our right hadn’t seen us yet. They were too busy focusing on Jax, who was across from them, walking slowly away. “Stop right there! The next bullet won’t miss,” the man in the middle of the group yelled at Jax. He had a black, thick beard, brown skin, and a dark green hat.
The Wolves of Winter Page 11