Coates, Deborah - [Wide Open 03] - Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  The creature coughed again. The sound made Boyd think of parched cold desert, of barren frozen tundra. It made him thirsty, just hearing it, like he might never see water again. It made him long for oceans. He realized that there was nothing—nothing—to the creature, but black robes. The hood appeared to be empty, like there was no head at all, just the appearance of a head, a shaped hood around a stark, impenetrable blackness.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hallie said, her voice so quiet, she might have been remarking on the weather or a particular bit of local news.

  The creature moved forward, silent. Boyd didn’t quite hold his breath, but he couldn’t help a quick exhale of relief when it reached the hex ring and stopped, looked to the left and the right, tried again, then huffed out another dry breath. Boyd took a step forward, Hallie grabbed his arm, but he noticed, though he was not really looking at her, just aware of her presence and the feel of her beside him, that she moved up right along with him.

  “What do you want?” he asked, his voice as quiet as Hallie’s own, as if they didn’t want to spook it, whatever it really was, as if it would attack or run, and as if both those options—attacking or running—were equally bad. And yet, he asked, as if he’d already moved past apparition, past hallucination, into rational being of some sort, whatever sort that was.

  “Death.”

  The voice, not dry like the cough, but more like distant thunder, like storm warnings, sounded from somewhere deep inside the hood of the robe. It rumbled in Boyd’s chest, that voice, like ancient earthquakes and runaway trains. “Death talks to you.”

  Not to me, Boyd thought, though he knew it wasn’t him the creature was talking to, might as well not have been there at all for all the notice it took of him.

  “What are you?” Hallie asked. Her face looked as if it were carved from stone, as if she already knew, but wanted it to tell her something else, wanted it to be something else, like everyday, like both of them—Hallie and Boyd—wanted a different world, one vastly more ordinary.

  “You know,” the creature said.

  “Unmaker.” Hallie’s voice was cold like midwinter and old bones.

  This wasn’t— Boyd both remembered and didn’t remember what had happened back in November when Travis Hollowell dragged him into the under. But Hallie had told him about this.

  An unmaker. Who unmade the dead. Who had tried to unmake Hallie.

  “I thought—” Hallie stopped. Boyd could see her swallow hard; then she began again. “I thought you couldn’t exist out here.”

  And yet, here it was.

  “The harbinger told you,” the unmaker’s voice grew deeper, like the rumble of tectonic plates. “We can. Though the price.” A long hiss on the end of price, “Is everything.”

  Boyd thought he could see smoke spiraling up in tiny wisps from the creature’s robes. Or maybe it was the cold, like early morning frost. “Why are you here?” Boyd asked, even though it probably wasn’t going to answer him. Maybe it was here to talk to Hallie, maybe it was here to unmake her, maybe it wouldn’t go without a fight. He was ready for all that, for the fight most of all, even if he didn’t know what it meant or what he’d need.

  “Death,” the voice said, ignoring Boyd a second time, speaking to Hallie as if Boyd weren’t even there. “Death talks to you.”

  “Not lately,” Hallie said.

  “Death,” it said again, more emphasis on the word this time, “talks to you.”

  “Okay,” Hallie said, impatient. “Yeah, he has.”

  “That is…” The creature paused. “Incorrect.”

  “It’s weird,” Hallie conceded. “But I don’t know what it has to do with you.”

  “Incorrect,” the voice repeated, as if she hadn’t spoken. “There is a natural order. You risk everything.”

  “He comes to me,” Hallie said. “I didn’t ask for it.”

  An icy breeze rose spontaneously from the west, sweeping dry grass against the paddock fence. Nothing of the unmaker’s moved in the wake of that wind, not the robes, not the hood, nothing. Black smoke was more visible now, rising from the hem of the robe, the bottom of the sleeves, and the edge of the hood. The air smelled of burnt pinecones and abandoned buildings.

  “You must respond,” the unmaker said.

  “What?”

  “Death has made an offer. And you must respond. Things hang in the balance.”

  “The answer is no.”

  Boyd could hear something in Hallie’s voice, though. Uncertainty? Fear? Neither one of those, he thought, but related somehow. More like resignation, like this would never end, like she was the only one standing here.

  Which she wasn’t.

  Boyd wished he had his gun, even though it wouldn’t do any good not loaded with regular bullets. He wished he still had bullets primed with blood and blessings. That was something he remembered clearly—or remembered from before he’d been dragged under—he wasn’t entirely certain about the sequence. Either way, remembered or not, he didn’t have them, or his gun.

  “Look,” Hallie began when the unmaker didn’t speak.

  As if it had only been waiting for the sound of Hallie’s voice, the creature said, “There are…” Pause. “… Death reminds you that you already died once.”

  Boyd’s hand reached out almost involuntarily and gripped Hallie’s arm tight, like if something were going to happen right now, it would have to take them both.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Hallie asked. “Is that a threat? Are you the one who’s been threatening me? You know, I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for any of this!”

  But she had, in a way, Boyd knew.

  She was alive.

  Something happened in Afghanistan, when she’d been dead for seven minutes, when she’d come back. There was a reason that Hallie was here and not gone for good. A reason he was grateful for, but a reason nonetheless. Some offer had been accepted. Some deal had been made. There was a price. Boyd thought Hallie had done enough, had paid enough. But he didn’t decide. Hallie didn’t decide. It was someone else’s game. And they were just the pawns.

  “Hallie,” he began.

  “Think carefully—,” the unmaker said. Smoke from its robes rose like streamers now. “There is a price for every answer.”

  “Look—”

  Hallie stopped speaking abruptly, her head turned sharply right. Her arm wrenched from Boyd’s grasp and she gripped his shoulder like a steel vise. Boyd looked that way too, but kept the unmaker in the periphery of his vision. He actually thought he saw something where Hallie was looking—a mist so light, he wouldn’t have considered it anything if Hallie hadn’t directed his attention that way.

  “What?” he asked, his voice hushed, like speaking too loudly would precipitate disaster.

  “Laddie’s ghost,” she said. “But it’s— Oh, shit.”

  Boyd saw it at the same time that she did. Laddie’s three dogs, which had seen sniffing around the base of the old barn when Boyd came out of the house, were now trotting briskly across the frozen ground toward that same vague mist—toward Laddie’s ghost. The Jack Russell was in the lead, bouncing forward as if it were suddenly years younger.

  The unmaker moved toward them.

  Hallie ran. Boyd, a half second slower, ran in the opposite direction, back toward the house and his car and the iron fireplace poker he’d been carrying in the back since Travis Hollowell and the under. It took him maybe twenty seconds to cross a dozen yards, wrench open the back door, and rip the poker from the Velcro that held it in place. When he turned back, he could see that the Jack Russell hadn’t stopped, though the other two dogs had. It took one step, then two, its nose outstretched to sniff. Then the ghost, or at least the mist that Boyd could see, disappeared and the Jack Russell trotted straight across the line, as if searching for it, coming to a quick stop in front of the unmaker, which was almost entirely formless now, billowing black smoke in the vague general outline of a man.

  Hallie, a good twenty y
ards closer than Boyd, was too far away. Inches separated the Jack and the unmaker.

  “No!” Hallie shouted.

  “Left!” Boyd shouted, hoped she’d understand, planted his foot, and threw the iron poker like a javelin. Hallie dived hard to her left. The poker went straight through the unmaker and out the other side to land with a thump on the hard-frozen ground. The unmaker disappeared with a crack. The Jack Russell stretched its muzzle as far as it would go and sniffed the ground where the unmaker had been.

  “What the hell was that?” Boyd said, even though he knew exactly what it was. Normal words used in regular conversation seemed inadequate to the situation, as if for once what he said and what he meant were unrelated.

  “Damnit,” Hallie said. “Goddamn.”

  The pit bull approached them, shoved its head into Boyd’s hand, and he petted the dog without quite realizing that he was doing it.

  “You know what, Boyd. I’m tired of being afraid.” Boyd had no idea what she was talking about, but as he moved to retrieve the iron fireplace poker, Hallie headed toward the house, started at a walk but was running by the time she was halfway across the yard, and Boyd found himself watching her, not understanding what it was she was doing but realizing that it was more a piece of everything else that had happened than a separate mystery of its own.

  The pit bull kept pace with him as he retrieved the poker, and by the time he’d put it back in his SUV, Hallie was back outside with what looked like several pieces of paper.

  “It is time to face your fear.” She shoved one of the notes into his hand. “Face your fear.” Two more notes. “What are you afraid of—that’s what they’re asking.”

  “Dying?” Boyd asked. Not, what is this? Or, where did these notes come from? But the answer to the question. The rest would follow, had to follow. Or at least he hoped it would.

  “Someone’s been leaving me these notes,” Hallie said.

  “Leaving them?”

  “On posts. Outside the hex ring.”

  “And you think this—that—?” He gestured toward where the unmaker had been standing moments before.

  “I think … yeah—I think that’s where the notes came from. From one of them.”

  “You’re afraid of dying.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Boyd didn’t answer. He’d believed not so many months ago that he was going to die, had dreamed it and known it was true. Instead, Hallie had happened. And he hadn’t died. Still, he believed he’d faced it, dealt with the seeming inevitability of it, and gone forward anyway. He didn’t want to die. But he wasn’t afraid of it.

  Or at least he wasn’t afraid for himself.

  “Hallie—”

  “I’m sorry, you know.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry I sacrificed you. There was so little time, or I thought there was.”

  Boyd reached out and took her hand. She looked at his hand holding hers, but she didn’t look at him. “You have to let that go,” he said. “You didn’t sacrifice me. I’m right here.”

  “You don’t remember. It’s easy to say it’s not important if you don’t even remember what happened.”

  “You took a risk,” he said. “And it worked. You saved everything.”

  “Risks are what you do with your own life, not someone else’s. You don’t sacrifice your—you don’t sacrifice people you love. You protect them.”

  “You can’t protect them if you sacrifice the world.” There was something about this conversation that he didn’t want to have, could feel tight muscles all along his jaw, straining across his back, holding back what he really wanted to say, what they were really talking about. And he wasn’t even entirely sure what they really were talking about, or even if they were both talking about the same thing. It felt like they weren’t just talking about Hallie, like they weren’t just talking about November, like the vision he’d seen, the one where Hallie died, was part and parcel of it, a price that hadn’t yet been paid.

  “You can,” Hallie insisted. “There has to be a way that you can. Because otherwise, you can’t promise anything to anyone.”

  “Hallie”—he spoke slowly both for himself and for her—“I forgive you. I’ve always forgiven you. The thing is, you have to forgive yourself.”

  She closed her eyes, kept them closed for a long time, like she was holding something back that she didn’t want to say. When she opened them, she said, “Look, it’s—it’s fine. It is. What’s important, really, is that there was an unmaker in my yard. In my yard, Boyd. I have to deal with that.”

  “We have to deal with it,” he said.

  “No.” She said it calmly and quietly, but decisively. “You have Prue’s murder. Laddie’s murder. Your house. The stones. You have enough.”

  He wanted to protest. Not that he didn’t have all those other problems to deal with, but he had this problem too. Because it was Hallie’s problem.

  “The coordinates,” he asked her. “Do you know where that is?”

  “I do,” she said. He wondered if she was going to tell him. He felt the doubt of it like a thin stab between his ribs. But then she continued, “You have to let me—” She stopped like she was rethinking her words. “You have to give me the space to do this. It’s my—” She stopped again, but for a different reason, he thought, a word she didn’t want to say. “It’s my fear,” she said. “I have to face it. Me. I have to know that I can face it. You can’t do that for me.”

  “But I can do it with you.”

  “It’s in the Badlands.”

  “The Badlands?” Boyd had been to the Badlands only once since he moved to South Dakota, but it had always given him a bad feeling. Sometimes just driving by the edges of it on the way to Rapid City gave him a bad feeling, like someday if the apocalypse came, it would begin in the Badlands.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  “Laddie said no.”

  “What?”

  “That night everyone came for supper.” She spoke very precisely, as if it were the individual words and not the sentence itself that was the problem. “Laddie said that I shouldn’t take you to the Badlands with me.”

  “What does that mean?” He held up his hand before she could repeat it a third time. “Never mind.” Because she had no more idea what it meant than he did, and if he was going to ask that she listen to him when he had a dream, he had to accept that maybe Laddie, who had told the future for a living, might have been worth listening to. He took a deep breath, let it out slow, like the instant between taking in a breath and releasing it would make the difference between hanging on tight enough to choke a person and letting go. Because he wanted to hang on, wanted to do it more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. He couldn’t forget what he’d seen in Jasper in the sleety rain. He’d seen her dead. Not dead like died-in-Afghanistan dead—dead like here, in South Dakota. Now.

  But … he looked at her, caught again by her straightforward gaze, her determination, her willingness to act because action was necessary, and he knew that if he didn’t, if he couldn’t, step back right now, then he would lose her anyway.

  This was not his choice. Because he had already made the choice. To love her as she was.

  “If you go,” he said. “If you insist on going by yourself,” which was unnecessary, those words, because of course she did, “please be careful. You’re smart as hell, and I don’t care if you think you’re afraid of death, you’re still one of the bravest people I know, but you take chances, Hallie. You don’t always think things through. And sometimes you’re just really damned lucky.”

  Hallie clenched her jaw. But what she said was, “Sometimes luck is all you have. And sometimes you’re lucky because you’re prepared. I’ll be prepared. I’ll be careful. I’ve dealt with enemies.”

  “When you had an army.”

  “Well, now I have you,” she said, and grinned.

  “Hallie—” This was serious.

  “I will call you if I need you,” s
he said. Her eyes held his, sure and steady. He had to accept this. Had to let it happen this way, not because he’d dreamt it, not because it was inevitable, but because what he wanted and what he cared about meant that this was how it worked.

  “Yes,” he finally said. “Take care. Call me if you need help. Actually, on second thought, call me even if you don’t need help. Let me know you’re okay.” He stepped forward, kissed her quick and hard, ran a finger along her cheekbone, and said, “I mean it, Hallie, be careful.”

  “I’m always careful,” she said.

  “And see how that works out,” he told her.

  25

  Boyd watched Hallie’s truck disappear down the drive, and he knew he was both wrong and right to let her go. Or—not let her, because you didn’t “let” Hallie do anything, but he hadn’t insisted on going with her. She said she needed the space to do this, whatever it was. And he suspected she wasn’t completely certain what it was either. But what was he going to do if she didn’t return, if this was the moment when Death asked her to take his place, if this was the moment she said yes? And she would say yes, at least under the right circumstances—to save the world, to save him, to save her father or Taylor County or even possibly a stray dog. He didn’t think that it was sacrifice to Hallie, more like—this thing needs to happen, okay, I’ll do it. Just like that, all one thought or breath or instinct.

  A contractor was coming at noon to check the flooring at his house and give him an estimate. It was just past seven and he thought, if he could concentrate on it, the best thing he could do might be to write what he knew about Prue’s murder and Laddie’s murder down in one of his notebooks and see if any of it made sense. Agent Gerson had said they’d identified the bones in Prue’s cellar as belonging to William Packer. The name wasn’t familiar to Boyd, but he hadn’t been in Taylor County all that long. There had been Packers on a ranch west of Hallie’s place who packed it in a few years ago. If William Packer was related, someone would know the story.