Frostbite

by David Wellington

  She could head back to the little lake—assuming she could find it again—but what would she discover there? Broken bones with the marrow sucked out? Bobby’s wraparound sunglasses, the lenses shattered on the rocks?

  Shelter was the main thing. She needed to get inside someplace warm. She needed clothes, if only to help her feel human again. Such things would be in short supply in the drunken forest, she knew, but there had to be something.

  There was, and she found it purely by accident. The only real idea she had was to try to get to higher ground, where she might be able to see better. Climbing a sinuous ridge, she stumbled right into a cleared path, one of the meandering logging roads Dzo used. The way was overgrown and full of tiny saplings—clearly it hadn’t been used for years—but it had been cleared by human hands once, and that was something. She headed southward, toward the sun, and followed the path no matter how it turned or bent back on itself. She climbed a tree from time to time to try to look around. With her new strength it was a lot easier than when she’d climbed to escape from Powell’s wolf. Nothing presented itself to her from the treetops, though, except a chaotic expanse of more trees.

  The road seemed to run on for kilometer after kilometer. After what felt like hours Chey began to think she’d made a mistake, that she was doomed to wander the logging road until she transformed again. At her lowest moment she stopped and looked up, one last time. And there, between two trees, she finally saw what she was looking for. A squat bunkhouse elevated on a scaffold of rusted metal girders. A tower—a fire lookout. It wasn’t much, but it had four walls and a roof. She ran through the trees and climbed up the rickety stairs two at a time.

  35.

  Chey discovered the limits of her new domain pretty quickly. The fire tower comprised a single square room twenty feet on a side. It had a pitched wooden roof through which she could see sunlight peeking in. The walls were painted a peeling green, and were cut away at waist height so they could be opened upward like shutters. The walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in block-letter graffiti carved into the wood with a pocketknife. Very little of it was legible or made any sense—mostly it was just names and dates, presumably memorials left by the people who had stood lonely watch high above the trees, making sure they didn’t all burn down. Chey propped open one of the shutters even though it let in a gust of frigid air and made her feel even chillier. She took a long look at what her predecessors in the tower would have seen. The drunken forest all around rolled and pitched like an ocean frozen in mid-heave. In the distance she could see sparkling light bouncing off some water, but she couldn’t be sure if it was the lake where Bobby had set up his camp. Powell’s cabin was nowhere in sight. Beyond that she had no points of reference—beyond those two locations the forest was a unicellular seething mass, an entity without boundaries or form. She let the shutter fall back with a bang that made her wince.

  A big footlocker along one wall proved to be locked up tight. Chey tugged at the latches a little as if they would come loose in her hands, but the metal locks were solid, perhaps rusted in place. Chey inhaled deeply—she wasn’t going to let even such a tiny mystery go unsolved if she could help it. Then she used all of her wolf-given strength and tore the locker open, sending pieces of the lock flying around the small room.

  Inside the locker were kerosene lamps (but no kerosene), boxes of firestarters, tin plates and cups, and other camping supplies. Underneath the supplies she found an old sweater with a bad tear down one sleeve and struggled into it. It was far too big for her and came down to mid-thigh. She pawed wildly through the other contents of the locker, looking for more clothes, but didn’t turn anything up. There were some old books, but they smelled musty and when Chey picked one up the cover was damp and spotted with mold. The pages stuck together in one thick, gloppy block.

  On the far side of the room stood a table and a pair of folding chairs. There was a big electrical outlet under the table—perhaps there had been a radio once—and a single light bulb hung from the ceiling, but the power had been cut off. With the shutters down the room was dark and oppressive. With the shutters up the wind tore right through and cut her to the bone. She compromised by bracing one shutter halfway open, then sat down in one of the folding chairs. It creaked badly under even her relatively slight weight—rust had been working at its joints for years.

  If she sat very still it didn’t make any noise. She experimented with drawing her feet up underneath her, sitting almost in lotus position on the chair. She pulled the sweater down over her knees, stretching it out.

  She had no idea what to do next. If Bobby and Lester were dead, if Powell was going to kill her the next time he saw her—she couldn’t stick around. She knew she was going to have to leave if she wanted to survive. Still, she couldn’t very well walk back to civilization. And even if she did she would just be putting people at risk. What would she do, walk into a hospital and ask to be treated for lycanthropy? There was no cure. Powell had been quite clear on that—he’d been looking for one for a hundred years, he’d said.

  She bit off all her fingernails, thinking her way through her situation. Then she jumped up and tore open the footlocker and took out one of the books. It was called Black Sun, by somebody called Edward Abbey. She’d never heard of him, but she didn’t care. She tore off the cover, then started peeling the pages apart one by one. Carefully she arranged them on the floor, left to right, then across when she ran out of room. The paper felt slimy in her fingers but it crumbled if she rumpled it too much. She was careful not to rumple it. She figured she could dry out the pages and then read them one by one over by the propped-open shutter where the light was better.

  Before she had fifty pages laid out to dry silver light came and carried her away.

  36.

  She came to, naked and stiff, on the floor of the fire tower. It was nearly pitch dark inside but she recognized the texture of the floorboards under her cheek and her stomach.

  It was somewhat reassuring to find herself in the same place she’d been before. She was a little surprised, though, to find herself still there—surely her wolf would have wanted to get down to the forest floor, to get out among the trees and run and hunt. Then she noticed the trapdoor that led to the stairwell. It opened easily; in fact it was on a spring, so you barely had to tug with one finger on a ring to make it pop open. Of course, what’s easy for a human finger might not even be possible for a wolf’s paw.

  Rising to her feet, she pushed open one of the shutters to let in some morning light. Then she turned around and jumped in surprise.

  The wolf had been busy while she was out.

  It must have gone wild when it realized it couldn’t escape through the trapdoor. The walls of the small room were gouged, scarred with claw marks, scratches whole meters long, some deep enough to put her finger inside. The graffiti left behind by the tower’s human occupants were obliterated by the scratches. The table and the chairs had been broken into pieces, while the footlocker had been smashed up against one wall, its contents strewn across the room, battered and trampled. Nothing remained of the Edward Abbey book except tiny scraps of paper that littered the floor like big moldy snowflakes.

  She understood, of course. They had been human things. Maybe they even smelled, to the wolf, like their previous owners still. Trapped and alone, the wolf had resorted to the one thing it really understood, which was destruction.

  The smell of the wolf was thick in the tiny room. A little like wet dog, a little sharper than that. Chey pushed all the shutters open and let in a frozen wind to try to disperse the funk. Then she sat down on the floor—the chairs were useless, broken—and put her head in her hands.

  She didn’t even hear the helicopter at first because she was too sunken into her own depression. It wasn’t a particularly loud sound, either, not one that demanded attention. Just a rhythmic chattering carried on the wind. As it grew closer she did look up, but she had no idea what she was listening to. Then the light coming in through the
shutters changed and she jumped up.

  Out over the treetops, maybe five hundred meters away, Bobby’s helicopter zoomed past in a long arc. It was curving inward to get a better look at the fire tower. Chey waved her arms and shouted, then thought to open and close the shutters rapidly as a signal. The helicopter tilted backward and stopped to hover in midair, then slowly moved closer. She redoubled her efforts until the pilot waggled his vehicle back and forth to tell her she’d been seen. He hunted around for a minute, then started to descend toward a clearing she could make out in the distance.

  Chey didn’t waste any time. She rushed down the stairs and across the forest floor, her bare feet aching from the cold in the ground, from sharp rocks and pinecones and broken branches. She stumbled and tripped, but she ran as fast as she could toward the clearing.

  When she arrived Bobby and Lester were both waiting for her. They didn’t look like they’d been hurt at all.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought I’d killed you!”

  Bobby wasn’t smiling. “You very nearly did,” he told her. “I thought I was pretty clever bringing that chain along.”

  “What happened?” she asked. “What did I do?”

  “You don’t remember at all?” he asked. He glanced down at her legs. Involuntarily she took a step backward. “I really should have thought it through better. You did what wolves in traps are famous for doing. You gnawed off your own leg. Except, there wasn’t a lot of gnawing involved. Then you came for us like you wanted to swallow us whole.”

  “How—how did you get away?” she asked. What she really wanted to ask was why he hadn’t just shot her. He had a pistol full of silver bullets, after all. No one could have blamed him for defending himself.

  “The second you changed you started straining against the manacle. I had a bad feeling, so I told Lester to get the chopper warmed up. When I saw what you were going to do we jumped in and took off. You still came for us and you even jumped at us but, well, with only one hind leg you didn’t get much air.”

  Chey put an arm across her mouth. She could hardly believe it. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and moved to reach for him, to grab his hands, to hug him.

  It was his turn to step backward. Maybe he was afraid she would scratch him and pass on the curse. Maybe he was just afraid of her.

  She stood there for a moment with her hands out. She needed something from him, something she couldn’t ask for. Maybe not ever again. But he was still alive—he and Lester were both still alive. That had to be enough. She backed off until he looked a little more comfortable and stood there, hugging herself in the cold.

  “Do you have any food?” she asked.

  37.

  “There’s something you need to see,” Bobby told her. Fenech, she thought. She should start thinking of him by that name, since it was clear that whatever had once been between them was over. It was hard, though. She watched him as he turned and walked away from her and she thought about how she knew exactly what it would feel like to run up behind him and run her fingers over the top of his spiky hair.

  “Lester, get this thing ready, okay?” he snapped. It looked like he might have had a bad morning.

  The pilot ducked his head and ran to his helicopter. He was ready to go by the time the other two got there. “Might be there’s room for three in here, as long as we’re all friends,” he assured her. He held open the Plexiglas door on the side of the bubble cockpit and moved around some of the baggage for her. Chey clambered into the space behind the two seats and sat with her knees up around her chin. She had to hold down the front of her sweater to keep from flashing the two men.

  Then Bobby and Lester got inside and pulled the door shut. The air in the cockpit changed, subtly, and Chey found her breathing came a little faster. She didn’t know what to make of that. Once Lester had them off the ground and she could look out at the blue sky and the trees below them she was pretty much fine, she decided.

  Lester and Bobby had headphone sets so they could talk to each other over the roar of the engine. She had to make do with her hands over her ears just to keep from being deafened. Still, when she saw where they were headed she tried to shout over the noise and warn them away.

  Ignoring her pleas, Lester descended toward the clearing by Powell’s cabin. The rotorwash stirred up a ton of pine needles and curled brown leaves as they set down gently on the almost-level ground. As the engine wound down she grabbed Bobby’s shoulder and said, “This is a lousy idea. He’s probably lurking nearby, waiting for you to mess with his stuff.”

  “Good. If he is I can shoot him,” Bobby told her. He shrugged violently.

  They piled out of the helicopter and moved across the front of the house, Chey craning her head back and forth to try to pick up any stray noise.

  “Relax,” Bobby finally told her. “I’ve already been through this place once and he didn’t pop out of the woodwork to get me.” He pointed and she saw that the front door of the cabin stood open. She could only see shadows inside, but she understood what he was trying to tell her. Powell had moved on—as he always had before. Had he run off to the north? There wasn’t much farther he could go.

  “You think he’s gone for good?” she asked.

  “No,” he told her, “I don’t think he’ll leave until he’s dealt with you and me. That’s what I would do. But what the hell do I know? I skipped Werewolf Psychology 101 when I was at McGill.”

  “Maybe—” Chey hated the sound of her own voice as she said, “maybe we should leave. Go back south, I mean.”

  He turned to look at her then, and she realized that he hadn’t really made eye contact since they’d been reunited. He looked right into her eyes then and smiled a tiny, cold smile. “Chey, this guy’s a killer.”

  “I know,” she said, “but—”

  “Come on,” he told her. “Maybe you need a little reminder why we’re up here.” He led her around the side of the house to where the two small outbuildings stood. She remembered how one used to have smoke leaking out of its eaves. She had assumed he was curing meat in there. “There’s a big tank of diesel fuel in that shed,” Bobby told her, pointing to the other one. “Some tools, some firewood. No big surprise. When we looked in here, though,” he said, pointing to the smokehouse, “well, that’s where all the nasty is.”

  She expected him to walk over to the shed and throw open the door, but he didn’t. So she stepped up and pulled it open herself. She wasn’t immediately clear on what he’d found so exciting about its contents. It had occurred to her that instead of a smokehouse it might be a sweat lodge. What she found couldn’t be far off that guess. A small fire pit sat in the center of the tiny space and there were various implements lying near it—a smudge stick, an eagle feather, a copper bowl—that looked like the magical tools an ancient Paleo-Indian shaman might use. Hanging from a rack on the ceiling were long strips of tanned leather like belts with no buckles, dozens of them. Interspersed among them hung similar strips of fur. Wolf fur in various different colors.

  Powell had been making wolf straps. She remembered him telling her about the lycanthropes of Germany, who supposedly could change from wolf to human by putting on magical belts. He’d said he’d looked into the old legend and found nothing there. She hadn’t realized that he had tried to make his own wolf strap, but it made perfect sense now that she saw the proof.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He told me he’s been looking for a cure for decades now.” She left out the fact that he had failed at everything he’d tried. “What’s the big deal, though? So he works with leather.”

  Bobby stood by the side of the shed, not really looking inside. “That’s not cowhide he’s got there,” he told her. “That stuff is human skin. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of it came off your dad.”

  38.

  Bobby gave her back her old clothes—he’d gathered them up from the campsite at the tiny lake. She’d almost forgotten how cold she was until she pulled her parka back on and felt warmth, real
human warmth caress her. It made a big difference, though even getting warm didn’t seem to shake the hollow feeling she had, the strange high-pitched emptiness in her stomach and her limbs.

  She tried not to think about it. She helped Lester build a fire out front of the cabin. She couldn’t help but look up among the trees. She tried to focus on the wood in front of her, concentrate on building a little pyramid of medium-sized branches, but then Lester cleared his throat and she realized she was scanning the dark rank of trees again. Looking for Powell.

  He wanted to kill her. He had killed other people before. She had plenty of reason to be frightened of him. Right?

  Skin—human skin—hanging in his sweat lodge. What had Powell been up to? She didn’t like to imagine it. She’d come north to kill him. She had wanted to confront him, thinking she knew what kind of monster he was. She’d started to think things were more complicated than that. That there was something to him …something human. The straps told a different story, though.

  She watched the trees. Waiting. It was only a matter of time before he came back. To finish things with her. Maybe to finish her off.

  The little kindnesses he’d shown her—taking her into his home, teaching her the ropes of lycanthropy. Had those been the gestures of a human being reaching out to the only other person in the world who might understand him? Or had it been an initiation? Had he just been recruiting her into his own world of blood and horror? Breaking things to her slowly, so she wouldn’t get scared off. What dark secrets had he hidden from her? And then she had betrayed him—a creature capable of such violence.

  Maybe she’d made a very bad mistake when she didn’t shoot him. Maybe it was destiny catching up with her. Making up for the day twelve years earlier when she should have died.