Nayima was sure he would wake when she knelt beside him, but he was a strong sleeper. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, even as she leaned over him.
Was the stone rolling across her chest only her heartbeat? Her palms itched, hot. She was seventeen again, unexpectedly alone in a corner with Darryn Stephens at her best friend’s house party, so aware of every prickling pore where they were close. And when he’d bent close, she’d thought he was going to whisper something in her ear over the noise of the world’s last dance. His breath blew across her lips, sweet with beer. Then his lips grazed hers, lightning strikes down her spine, and the softness . . . the softness . . .
Kyle slept on as Nayima pressed her lips to his. Was he awake? Had his lips yielded to her? It seemed so much like Kyle was kissing her too, but his eyes were still closed, his breathing uninterrupted even as she pulled away.
She crept back to her PT Cruiser, giddy as a twelve-year-old. Oh, but he would be furious! The idea of his anger made her giggle. She dozed to sleep thinking of the gift of liberation she had given Kyle. Freedom from masks. Freedom from fear. Freedom to live his life with her, to build their village.
• • • •
By dawn, Nayima woke to the sound of his retching.
She thought she’d dreamed the sound at first—tried to will herself to stay in her happy dream of singing Kumbaya with well-groomed strangers in the horse stalls, hand in hand—but she opened her eyes and saw the guitar player hunched away from her. He had pushed his guitar aside. She heard the splatter of his vomit.
Nausea came first. Nausea came fast.
Shit, she thought. Her mind was a vast white prairie, emptied, save that one word. She remembered his laughter, realized she would never hear him laugh again now.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought for sure you were like me. An NI.”
She wished her voice had sounded sadder, but she didn’t know how. She wanted to explain that he might have contracted the virus somewhere else in the past twenty-four hours, not necessarily from her. But despite the odds and statistics on her side, even she didn’t believe that.
It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it, Gram would say. Nayima clamped her fingernails into both palms. Her wrist tendons popped out from the effort. Hot pain. The numbness that had thawed with his music and 4-H stories crept over her again, calcified.
The man didn’t turn to look at her as she stood over him and picked through his things. His luggage carrier held six water bottles and a mountain of candy bars. The necessities. She left him his candy and water. His 9mm had no ammo, but she took it. She left his guitar—although she took the strap to remember him by. She might take up guitar herself one day.
The man gagged and vomited again. Most people choked to death by the third day.
“I’m leaving now,” she said, and knelt behind him. She searched for something to say that might matter to him. “Kyle, I found that Rescue Center over in Farm Land—Farm World—and it looks nice. Somebody really thought the whole thing through. You were right to come here. Where I grew up, they just burned everything.”
Even now, she craved his voice. Wanted so badly for him to hear her. To affirm her. To learn her grandmother’s name and say, “Yes, she was.” Yes, you were. Yes, you are.
The man did not answer or turn her way. Like the others before him, he was consumed with his illness. Just as well, Nayima thought as she climbed back into her car. Just as well. She glanced at her visor mirror and saw her face: dirt-streaked, unrepentant. She blinked and looked away.
Nayima never had been able to stomach the eyes of the dead.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.
THE SIXTH DAY OF DEER CAMP
Scott Sigler
George didn’t want to be the one to say it, but it had to be said: “We can’t stay here.”
They all looked at him. Gloved hands flexed on hunting rifles. Jaco gave a tiny, weak shake of the head. Bernie closed his eyes and sighed. Toivo glared. Only Arnold nodded: older, wiser, but even he clearly wasn’t crazy about the idea of leaving.
The impossible had happened: an actual alien invasion. George and his three boyhood friends—and the man who had been a father figure to them all—were sitting in the same cabin they’d come to every November for almost three decades. A remote spot in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the middle of nowhere, really, and something had crashed here, something that wasn’t a plane or a jet or anything else they knew.
That something was out in the woods, the deep woods, behind the cabin, among the pines and spruces and birch and several feet of snow. They had seen it, a vague shape through the trees, red and green and blue lights filtering through the darkness and the wind-driven white. It was out there, this ship, and, according to the internet stories they’d read on Bernie’s phone, ships similar to it were attacking major cities all over the world.
That was all the info they had to go on. Cell phones weren’t working anymore—voice or internet—and even back in the day when landlines were all there were, the cabin hadn’t had one.
Why that ship had crashed here, George didn’t know. Neither did his friends. What they did know was that three days of steady snow had choked the narrow, back-country roads, making them impassible by car. They could walk out on foot, sure, if they could survive the cold long enough to reach shelter elsewhere. The very reason they came to this cabin year after year was because there was nothing near it—in this weather, with the snowpack, it was at least an hour’s walk to another cabin.
There was one snowmobile, an old thing that had sat idle this year and last. George remembered someone firing it up three years back. Would it even start? If it did, it could get one man out, maybe two, but not five.
Just say it . . . just tell them you should take the snowmobile because you have to get out of here, get to your sons, your wife.
That little voice nagged at him, told him to use the parent trump card that all parents of young children used. But this wasn’t getting out of work a little early to pick the boys up from soccer practice, this wasn’t asking someone else at the office—someone who didn’t have kids—to stay late because you had to get the babysitter home . . . these were his closest friends, men that he loved, and leaving them would be the most selfish thing.
If they’re really your friends, they’d understand. You’ve got kids, just ask them if you can—
“Can’t stay here, you say,” Toivo said. “We sure as hell can’t leave, Georgie.”
Toivo had sobered up. Mostly. His eyes still looked tired, hungover-tired, and a bit of gleaming snot stuck to his mustache. Dressed in a full snowsuit over two sweaters, he looked like a brown Pillsbury Doughboy. So did George, for that matter. So did everyone else.
Toivo gestured to the cabin’s ratty wall. “What da fuck do you think we’re gonna do outside, Georgie? Hide in da woods? It’s fuckin’ forty below out there.”
George nodded. That was the problem, wasn’t it? Cold was one thing. He was a grown man—he could handle cold—but forty below wasn�
��t cold, it was something else altogether. And then there was the snow. Still falling steadily from the night sky, increasing the thick whiteness that covered bare branches and pine boughs alike, adding to the three feet already on the ground. That snow hid all the sticks and logs and foot-snapping holes around the shack.
But . . . there were no trees or sticks on the road. Nothing there but snow. The road would take them away. They needed to be on that road, and the sooner the better.
Get them all moving, it doesn’t matter, get them out of here and find a way to get home . . .
“That ship is close,” George said. “We’re the only building in the area.” He pointed to the cabin’s small, black, wood-burning stove, which gave off heat that seemed far more delicious now that he knew he’d soon leave it behind. “The stove is putting out smoke. If they have IR, they’ll see the shack lit up all red, or whatever, and know that people are here.”
Arnold’s wrinkled face furrowed. “IR? What da hell is that?”
“Infrared, Pops,” Bernie said. “Like in Predator.”
Arnold’s bushy eyebrows rose. “Ah, yeah. Like Predator.”
Those two, Arnold and Bernie, had such a strong father-son resemblance they looked like a before-and-after picture: this is you before you start to smoke, kids, and this is you after. Bernie, over forty, same age as George and Jaco and Toivo, with a full “hunting cabin beard” that had taken him only a week to grow. Arnold, white stubble in and on the folds of his face, tired eyes peering out from behind thick glasses.
“This ain’t a movie,” Toivo said. “This ain’t about IR. Georgie, I love ya, but stop lying—you think you can get back to Milwaukee.”
A stab of guilt, like George had been caught in a crime. He couldn’t lie to these men, at least not convincingly. They knew him too well.
“I do,” George said. “We have to get out of here, you guys. At least out of the cabin. If they’re killing people all over, they’ll come here, and if they find us, they’ll probably kill us, too.”
Bernie walked to the stove. “We should put da fire out, anyway. If there’s no fire they can’t see us, maybe. We’ll lose heat, but at least we’re protected from da wind.”
Jaco shook his head. “Putting it out makes way more smoke. Just let it burn out on its own.”
He was right about the smoke, but the tone in Jaco’s voice made it clear he was more worried about the cold.
Everyone looked worried, scared, but Jaco more than the rest. His oversized glasses framed wide eyes made wider by the thick lenses. He was the smallest of the five, always had been, so small that his rifle made him look like a preteen boy dressing up as a hunter for Halloween. He had children, too, a pair of daughters. At five and seven, they were the same ages as George’s boys. George had often teased Jaco that his boys would someday date those girls.
Toivo tried to sling his rifle over his shoulder, but his snowsuit’s bulk blocked him.
“We’ve got guns,” he said. He tried to sling the weapon a second time, succeeded. “We can defend ourselves, eh? We stay here, we won’t die from da cold. Maybe you forgot what it’s like living in a big city, Georgie, but in da woods, you don’t fuck with forty below.”
Jaco righted a folding chair that had been knocked over when the alien ship had screamed overhead—so close and loud the cabin rattled as if struck by artillery. He sat.
“Defend ourselves,” he said. “Toivo, those things are blowing up cities. From what those websites said, they’re taking on the military, and winning. You think hunting rifles are going to do anything?”
Toivo shrugged. “I’m not a physedicist,” he said. “But bullets will probably kill those things just like they kill us.”
“Physicist,” Jaco said, shaking his head. “You dumb-ass, phys-ed is gym.”
George didn’t want to listen to them jabber. His sons were probably terrified, wondering where their father was. His wife was . . . well, she was probably loading the shotgun and getting the boys into the basement. No trembling flower, his wife.
“Bernie, put out the fire,” George said. “Sorry, Toivo, but we have to get out of here. I’m telling you, they’ll come for this cabin. They crashed, they’ll want to secure the area.”
Toivo snorted. “Secure the area. What da hell are you, Georgie, some Delta Force guy or something? Chuck Norris?”
George didn’t have any military experience. None of them did. Just four men in middle-age—and one well past it—who knew nothing more about soldiering than what they’d seen in the movies.
Toivo pointed to the cabin’s warped wooden floor. “We’re staying here. They come? We’ve got guns.”
“If we stay, we put out the fire,” Bernie said. “I agree with George. Infrared.”
Jaco shook his head. “Don’t put it out, you idiots. Whatever is in that ship probably has its hands full. We leave it burning, but we get on the road. I’m with George—I’ve got to get to my daughters.”
Two men—George and Jaco—with little kids. Two men—Bernie and Toivo—with none. And Arnold, whose grown son was standing right next to him. Three sets of needs, three sets of perspectives.
Arnold coughed up some phlegm, then swallowed it in that abstract way old men do. “George is right,” he said. “You boys get out of the cabin.”
George felt a sense of relief that Arnold, the man who’d practically raised him, the best man George knew, was with him on that decision.
“Okay,” George said. “So we hit the road, we stay together and hope for the best.”
Arnold shook his head. “I said you boys get out of the cabin. I’ll keep an eye on the ship, make sure nothing comes after you.”
Bernie rolled his eyes, as if his father’s sudden act of bravery was not only expected, but annoying as well.
“Dad, we don’t have time for that shit,” he said. “We’re all going.”
“I’m seventy-two goddamn years old,” Arnold said. “I’ve been faking it just fine, but there’s only so much left in my tank. My bum hip is killing me. No way I’ll make it in this cold, son. So you do what your father tells you, and—”
“Shut up,” Jaco hissed. “You guys hear that?”
They didn’t at first, but the noise grew; over the whine of the wind through the trees outside, they heard faint snaps and cracks.
Something was coming through the woods.
Something big.
“We move, now,” Arnold said. “You boys come with me.”
• • • •
They rushed from the house, bumping into each other, stumbling off the rickety, two-step porch. Toivo fell sideways as he ran; the snow bank rising up from the thin path caught him at a forty-five-degree angle, so he didn’t fall far.
George had assumed Arnold would run for the road, but he didn’t—he turned right and stumbled through the snow toward the cabin’s corner.
“Arnold! Where are you going!”
George stopped, but the others didn’t. They followed Arnold, three men carrying hunting rifles, stutter-stumbling through snow that came up to their crotches, moving too fast to walk in each other’s footsteps.
Jesus H., was the old man attacking? They vanished around the corner, not running away from the oncoming sound, but toward it.
George found himself alone.
The cold pressed in on him, on his face, tried to drive through his snowsuit as if it were armor that would slowly, inexorably dent and crumble under the pressure. Out of the cabin for all of ten seconds, he already felt it.
The porch light cast a dim glow onto the path, the blanket of white on the driveway, and the walls of the same stuff that made the truck nothing more than a vehicle-shaped snow bank.
He looked at the snowmobile, or rather the curved hump of white burying it. The keys were inside the cabin. He could grab them—the others had left him alone—he had to get back to his family. He could dig down to the snowmobile . . . no, that would take twenty minutes all by itself, then the thing probably wouldn�
�t start. He had to run, get as far down the road as he could.
Little Jaco . . . Bernie . . . Toivo . . . Mister Ekola.
The people who had made him who he was: go after them, or head down the road alone and start a three-hundred-sixty-mile trek to Milwaukee.
From the other side of the cabin, he heard the crack of a tree giving way, a brittle sound quickly swallowed by the snowy night.
George couldn’t do it; he couldn’t leave his friends.
I’ll get home as soon as I can, I will . . .
He held his rifle tight in both gloved hands and ran to the corner of the cabin, stumbling through the snow just as the others had done.
• • • •
Most people don’t know real cold. Sure, they’ve been cold before; they’ve sat through a football game in below-freezing temps; they’ve experienced winter here or there, perhaps even been dumb enough to take a vacation to Chicago in December. All of those things are cold, but real cold? Don’t-fuck-with-forty-below cold?
That can kick your ass. That can kill you.
George tried to stop shivering, but he couldn’t. Wind slid through the trees, drove the cold into him as if he wasn’t even wearing a snowsuit with the hood up over a hat, three sweaters, jeans over long johns, three pairs of socks, gloves and even a scarf wrapped tight around his nose and mouth. His hands felt like there was a steel vice on each knuckle of each finger, and the fingertips themselves stung like he’d sliced off the ends and dipped the raw stubs in battery acid.
And he’d only been outside for five minutes.
Forty below? Maybe worse than that, maybe far worse with the wind-chill factored in.
He followed the footsteps of his friends, mostly by feel because it was so dark. No porch light here, no stars; he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all if not for the barest glimmer from the covered moon turning the snow gray. He had a flashlight in a snowsuit pocket, but knew better than to use it.
Most people don’t know real cold, and most people also don’t know real snow. The kind of snow that piles up week after week, a crispy layer near the bottom with the hidden logs and sticks, a layer so firm that when you break through it and stagger on, sometimes your foot slides right out of your boot. Above that, the dense snowpack, then finally, on top, several inches of the fluffy stuff. Every step sank so deep he couldn’t quite raise his boot all the way out to take the next one. He was wading more than walking.
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