by Urban Waite
His plan was to dig in deep. Get back into the woods and into the mountain valleys and rocky strongholds of the range and make a place among the trees and crags. He thought now about all that had been attempted. He’d paid a price for what he’d done. Perhaps Eden’s Gate and The Father had been right about him all along, about his sin. About the demon that lived inside of him, that would not let him forget the sins he’d inflicted on his enemies and on all he loved. Will had thought somehow that helping Mary May would give him solace. He wondered now if it had.
He thought about all there was yet to do. He did not have an answer for any of the thoughts roaming about his mind yet, and he crossed upriver, using the shallows to skirt back and forth along the waterway, moving ever farther north. The rocky outcroppings grew around him as he went and the feeling that things unseen were closing in on him, moving in the shadows and thickets he crossed through or following along beside him on the high spines of rock that often cut the light from the river valley down below.
He felt haunted by this feeling and often he paused midstride, or even halfway across a series of stones that spanned the river, and he would turn his eyes back on the path he’d taken and his ears would try to pick the slightest irregularity from the rush of water and overhead breeze. He thought about Eden’s Gate. He thought about those men who had been waiting for him at his cabin. He thought about the ghosts that followed him and what they wanted.
In a sense Will had saved Mary May, but it was not the kind of salvation any of them had wished for, or even thought to expect. He had come down off the cliff with Jerome and they had seen her there holding her brother and Will had wondered whether that brother in death was different than the brother in life and whether those two could ever be the same, as Mary May had so desperately wanted him to be.
Will knew that feeling, too. He knew what followed him through the trees and up the river was not anything he could touch or hold. It was an idea of the loved ones he had left behind, it was guilt and hope, it was memories of a past life that he thought might not be his life at all. He knew that feeling just as Mary May did now. He knew how one remakes the past in the image they want to see of the future. He could not blame her for that, people had been doing the same for millennia and it was nothing new to have hope, to want to try and make a change. It was nothing new to deny the past and embrace the future.
He set his bag down when he came to a little glade that ran a quarter mile up the valley, lined on all sides by paper birch and the thick underbrush of the mountain. He crossed to the river with his canteen and dipped it and watched the bubbles rise in the slow current, and then he drank fully. The water overflowed at the edges of his mouth and ran down through the scraggly hair of his beard. He realized now that he was half wild, that he had most likely been half wild even when all this had started and Lonny had come to him asking about the bear.
There were stores he had taken from the house he had shared with his wife and daughter, and he took a can of green beans out now and pried the top off with the opener he had taken from there as well. He had let himself into the house for only a moment and filled the bag with what he could, then left without a last good-bye to the house or the memories there. He knew they were never truly gone to begin with. He hoped that was something Mary May might learn about herself as well.
The sun was out above and he sat with his back leaning against the pack, his hat tipped down to shade his eyes. He dipped a finger down into the beans and then pulled them out one at a time. He ate them that way, keeping his eyes always on the shadows beneath the trees and the path the water cut among the rocks that lined it and the greater forest all around. There was something out there that was not memory or ghost and it was watching him from out of the forest he had passed through only minutes before.
Without moving but to set the can down and to gather up the rifle, Will watched the place among the brush that he was sure held whatever presence hunted him. He watched the shift of the brush, the way it caught and pulled, like something back there had taken hold. He stood now and moved closer, his feet cautious as they went. Will ready to run if he needed to, or ready to shoot, or simply ready for whatever it might be.
The flash of brown was the first thing he saw. The bush moved again and he saw the fur. It was a grizzly bear, but he could not tell its height or girth or anything more than that he was not alone. He thought of the big boar grizzly he had seen in the lightning storm that night. He thought of that same bear seen across the river a couple days later, probably returned to whatever haunts it had before. But Will knew it had not disappeared, that nothing disappeared, wherever it went it was always somewhere, like a ghost or like a memory that never seemed to fade.
The brush moved again. He could hear breathing. He could hear great lungs working and the movement of air. A branch snapped somewhere beyond and he almost jumped, pivoting slightly with the rifle still held in his hand. He did not know what was out there. Will had killed many in his life. Those that walked upright on two legs and those that walked on all four, and he had known even then that a price was owed. He was a sinner. He had taken and taken, and though he had tried to give back, he felt always that it was not enough.
He thought of his family back there in the cemetery in Fall’s End, he thought of Mary May and Jerome and all of Hope County. He knew all that had come to pass was only the beginning. He knew that whatever waited for him out there in the darkness, whether it was a grizzly bear or something else, was waiting for him still and would be waiting for as long as he chose to look away.
He took one step then another. He put a hand out to the brush and pulled away a branch. There was darkness beyond. An unknowable void that asked now for him to enter and see what had followed him for hours, and for days, and possibly for all the years of his life.
* * *
THERE WAS A GRAVE FOR DREW DOWN IN THE CHURCHYARD NOW. In the days that passed Mary May would go there and she would stand over the three of them and see the varying shades of green atop each one. Her mother’s grave was the oldest, then her father’s, and then Drew’s. The same dirt color as had been the earth through which Mary May and Jerome had dug themselves. Working in the nighttime to get the hole dug out six feet deep. Everyone in the town knowing what they were doing and none stopping to say a thing, none pausing, or even surprised to see another hole go in the ground and a body soon to follow.
The sheriff was the only one to stop by and really spend any time looking down into the pit they’d dug. He stood there, pushed up his hat with a finger, and looked down into that hole. When he finally brought his eyes to Mary May, he said, “I guess this means you found your brother.”
“Yes, it does.” Mary May sat in the shade next to Jerome. They had been working all through the night and into the morning and the sun had not yet fully crested above the church roof, leaving half the cemetery still in shadow.
“What did he die of?”
“His heart gave out.”
“That right?” the sheriff asked.
“That’s right.”
“Where are you keeping the body?” the sheriff asked.
“The county coroner’s office, same as where they took Mamma and Daddy.”
She could see him studying her. He turned and looked to the two other graves then turned and looked back at her. “If I go in there and ask what happened to him are they going to tell me his heart gave out?”
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t,” she said. “The coroner seemed to give it to us straight when Daddy was in there. An accident, I believe.”
“That’s what they called it at the time.”
“Did they change their minds?”
“No, not that I know of. But it’s getting hard to look past the circumstances here before us.”
“What circumstances are those?”
“Three dead from the same family in nearly the same amount of weeks. That’s something that is a little hard to overlook.”
Mary May looked up at him.
“You said it, Sheriff.”
“I know I did.” He was shaking his head and looking down at the grave again. “You think if I go in there and ask that coroner what happened he will give it to me straight?”
“Is the coroner still bearded?” Mary May asked.
“Last I checked.”
“Sure,” Mary May said. “I bet he gives it to you just as straight as he did when Daddy died.”
The sheriff turned and looked to where Jerome sat on the meager grass beside Mary May. He had taken his collar off. He sat sweating with the first few buttons of his shirt undone and his sleeves rolled up over his elbows. “What do you say about all this?” the sheriff asked.
“Faith is a powerful thing,” Jerome said.
* * *
SHE CLEANED A GLASS THEN SET IT DOWN ON THE BACK BAR AND reached and brought up another. She was at this work five minutes before the double cab went by with four men inside, the truck pulling a horse trailer behind. The brakes were heard next and the muted tinge of the brake lights seen in the frames of the barroom windows.
There was a baseball bat she kept on a shelf below her, and she reached and stood it beside her with the handle leaning on the bar. The brake lights went out now and there was the sound of a door opening then the clap of it closing once again. She continued to clean the glasses and watched the thin figure move past in the shaded tint of the glass then come to the door and push it open.
“Hey there,” she said.
“You open?” the young sheepherder asked. She could see he was bruised badly about one cheek, but the bruise was fading and it didn’t stop him from smiling at her when he spoke.
“In thirty minutes.”
The young herder stood looking around at the place, then he stepped up and took a stool as if he had been in her bar a thousand times before. “I guess you found your brother,” he said.
“I found him.”
“And he was the same as you remembered?”
“He was my brother but he was not the same.”
“I hate to hear that.” He looked around the bar now, at the chairs that sat atop the tables, and then he looked back at her. “Let me help you,” he said.
“Help me?”
“Yeah, I can take down the chairs. How old were you when you started working here?”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“I wasn’t much older than you. My parents used to own this place.” She watched him move away and take one chair down after another.
“So it’s in the blood?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And you won’t leave it?”
“No,” she said. She was watching him now. He had taken the third chair down off the table and she told him to sit in it. She poured him a water and set it down on the table before him. “I grew up here, right in this bar.” She smiled at him now. “I had my first kiss out back with some dumb cowboy. I wasn’t much older than you then. Almost got caught by my dad. Fuck, he loved this place. He loved it so much he couldn’t see that it was staying the same and the world around it was changing. I see that now. I see that clearer than he ever did.”
“Then they haven’t scared you off yet?” the boy asked.
“No,” she said. “They haven’t scared me. They took my mom, my brother. Daddy did what he could but it wasn’t enough.”
“You’re the only one left now, aren’t you?”
“I’m not the only one,” she said. “There are others like me who see the world changing and want to do something about it.”
“And you’re going to do that here?”
“No better place,” she said.
She watched him look her over. He stood now from the chair and she knew he would leave. “I’ll tell them about this place when we get there. I’ll tell them about you.”
“Where is there?”
“There is wherever this place isn’t,” the boy said. “It doesn’t matter to us. My father is driving me and a couple others out of here. I’ll find someone that cares and I’ll tell them about this place.”
“And you think that will make a difference?”
The boy shook his head. “I don’t know. All the things we’ve seen up there on that mountain, it certainly made a difference with me.” He looked away, out to where the truck was waiting for him. “That’s what you’re doing back here,” he said. “Trying? I guess all of us have to try in some way, don’t we?”
“Yes,” she said. “We do.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel wouldn’t exist without the fans who have made all the Far Cry games such a success. Thank you for your faith in these worlds, and these stories, and the characters that lend them humanity.
For me video games have always been an escape from the real world, but as video games began to reach new heights, that escape seemed to matter less and less, and the real world and the world of the video game began to merge. In this way video games became something else, not an escape, but something even more powerful and valuable to me. Something that required not just the willingness of the player to be involved and engaged within these worlds, but also the knowledge and understanding of what it is to be human, to see that human condition from many different perspectives and to sympathize with and understand them all. In short, the world of the video game has in many ways become like that of another world I have long found my own salvation within—the world of the novel.
I want to thank Ubisoft for creating some of the best video games this world has ever seen, and for pushing that world ever further with each new iteration and release. I want to thank my team at Ubisoft, Caroline Lamache, Anthony Marcantonio, and Victoria Linel, for reading my past novels and bringing this opportunity to me. This has long been a dream of mine. Thank you for bringing it ever closer with each new draft.
For the people of Ubisoft Montreal who are innovators and leaders in this industry, I want to give a specific thank you to Dan Hay, David Bédard, Jean-Sébastien Décant, Nelly Kong, Manuel Fleurant, and Andrew Holmes for answering my many questions and bringing me behind the curtain. I am continually impressed by just how much work and effort goes into building not just the game of Far Cry, but the universe that surrounds it from the ground up.
I like to think I’m older and wiser now that I’ve made a living at this for the past eight years, but the truth is I’m still learning. And though this is my fourth novel, each time it is different, and each path to publication takes new turns and new directions and I would not have made it if it was not for the people who supported me and who gave me the space to write this novel.
Nat, you’ve been there through all of this. Even from the first story you read of mine in a small literary journal. Thanks for always giving me your best.
To the Mineral School Artist Residency and to the founder, Jane Hodges, thank you for the classroom space where much of this novel was written. To Debra DiDomenico, who is a constant in every acknowledgment I have written, thank you for your support and for introducing me to the Darrington boys and the property there. Tom Heye, your cabin was instrumental in the first iterations of this novel. Jim Haney, Rick Knight, and David Gronbeck, thank you for making the property in Darrington the beautiful place it is today and for opening that place up to me and making me feel welcome there. Thank you.
To Mary Perkins and Ernie Seevers, you two gave me a wonderful studio where I could disappear day after day, and amid all the chaos of everyday life that place became my constant. Thank you.
And speaking of everyday chaos, I would have none of this if it wasn’t for my wife, Karen, who somehow puts up with all my mental and physical absence while writing. You have always been there for me and there isn’t a thank you I can say or give that will ever be big enough, but I’ll keep trying. To you, and to my parents and yours, thank you for helping to raise our children. TiTi and Poppy, Gong Gong and Poh Poh, you guys make this all possible and, most important of all, you kept us all sane. Thank you.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Urban Waite is a good guy who writes evil things. His debut novel, The Terror of Living, was named a Best Book of the Year by Esquire, The Boston Globe, and Booklist. His second novel, The Carrion Birds, was a finalist for the New Mexico and Arizona Book Award, and called “a candidate for best crime book of 2013” by the New York Journal of Books. His third novel, Sometimes the Wolf, was The Sun Sentinel’s pick for Best Book of the Year. His short fiction has appeared in the Best of the West anthology, the Southern Review, and many other journals. His work has been translated into nine languages and is available in more than twenty countries worldwide.