Frostbite

by David Wellington

  49.

  She forced herself to look at Frank Pickersgill’s body. It was awful. She got up and stumbled away from him, staggered down the creek bed.

  Forced herself to go back again.

  She’d made her choice. She’d known, when she jumped out of the tower, that she was letting the wolf out as well as herself. She’d known what it was capable of, better than anyone.

  Bobby, Balfour, the Pickersgills—they wanted her dead. They had accepted what she’d become and they were acting accordingly. She had to do the same.

  She had to start thinking like a fighter. Like someone who was going to survive this, no matter what. If she was going to live long enough to get back to Powell, to explain herself to him, there were things she was going to have to do. Things she was going to have to learn to live with.

  She managed to climb up on the far bank, a gentler slope. She rolled in the dead leaves and mud there and just breathed for a while, and thought of nothing. Then she went back to the body.

  His coat was stained with blood in a couple of places. She pulled it off of his arms anyway and struggled into it. He’d been a giant of a man and she was an average-sized woman. The coat sagged across her, dangled from her arms and across her knees. It was still warm. She shuddered, but she didn’t take it off. It was better than being naked in that trackless wilderness.

  She rifled his pack. It felt like sacrilege. Evil, pure evil.

  No.

  It was the smart thing to do.

  Her conscience stayed mostly quiet as she searched through his things. She found a packet of ketchup chips, which she ate with one hand while searching with the other. She found a mickey bottle of bourbon, which she put aside for maybe later. Though surely drinking a dead man’s liquor was enough to bring down heavenly wrath on her, if anything was. She found a box of silver shotgun shells and she took one cartridge out and held it in her hand. She unraveled the red paper wrapper and picked one of the spherical pellets out. It was perfectly smooth, but it felt like a piece of broken glass rubbed against her fingers. Blood welled in the whorls of her fingertips and she threw the pellet back into the pack.

  She reached up and touched her shoulder, then craned her head around and tried to look. There were distinct scratches there, ugly red marks that looked infected. They could only have been made by silver—so Frank Pickersgill had shot at her first, before she had attacked him. He had drawn first blood.

  That helped, a little.

  There was a map in the pack. A good one, with contour lines and lumber roads drawn in fine gray ink. She found the fire tower. Powell’s cabin wasn’t shown, but she found the tiny lake where Bobby had landed his helicopter. She had no idea where she was—she was near a little stream, but there were hundreds of those on the map. She could be anywhere. Giving up, she looked for Port Radium, wherever that was, and then she found it.

  Frank Pickersgill had said she should stay away from Port Radium. That had to be where Bobby had gone. And Bobby would be following Powell. It was where she had to go, if she was going to finish this. If she was going to survive.

  Port Radium was on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake, a body of water so big it filled the left-hand side of the map. There was something about its location that seemed odd to her. She studied it and turned the map around and wondered why it should seem familiar. She hardly knew this part of the world at all. Then she remembered. It was the same place she’d seen on maps before, the only town anywhere near Powell’s cabin. She’d always seen it before referred to as Echo Bay. Maybe they’d changed the name—“Port Radium” hardly sounded like a place anyone would want to visit.

  At the bottom of the pack she found a satellite cell phone. Just like the one she’d used to summon Bobby and screw up everything. Bobby. What a fool she’d been, to—

  No, she wasn’t going to think that way. She’d been used. Taken advantage of.

  Now Bobby had ordered the Western Prairie guys to shoot her on sight. He wanted to kill her. Just like Powell. All the important men in her life wanted her dead.

  Well—except for one.

  Not really knowing why, she placed a call. She had trouble remembering the number, but after a couple of false starts she got it. She pressed the phone against her ear and listened to clicks and static for a couple of seconds, and then the phone began to ring. Then it clicked and answered.

  “Hello,” the phone told her. “You’ve reached the Bolton’s Valley Horse Ranch. We’re most likely out riding fences right now, but if you press one, you can—”

  She pressed one and shoved the phone back to her ear. She could barely hear the beep on the other end. Then she spoke, as quickly as she could.

  “Uncle Bannerman, this is Cheyenne. I wanted to let you know what’s happening to me. I’ve been…changed.” She closed her eyes. Let herself feel human for a moment. Was that what she was doing? Saying good-bye to the only human being she still loved? Or saying goodbye to the little girl she’d been, the little girl who was still human? “There’s no cure. There’s nothing anyone can do. But you should know that Bobby—Fenech—sent me up here expecting me to be killed. You were right; he wasn’t trustworthy. I guess …I guess that’s all I wanted to say. I’m going to a place called Port Radium. I’m probably going to get killed there, but if I don’t, I think I’ll be alright. I thought you’d want to know that.”

  She didn’t know what else to say. What else she could say. She ended the call and shoved the phone in a pocket of Frank Pickersgill’s jacket. Then she sat down and for a while just tried not to fall apart.

  She took Frank’s boots. He had three pairs of dry socks in his pack, and if she wore them all at once the boots almost fit her. For once, at least, her feet were warm.

  50.

  That night Chey walked through the forest with the fatalism of the truly damned. Her feet hurt, blistered by the loose boots, and her body trembled with cold, hunger, and fatigue. None of it mattered. If she had thoughts in her head they were dark, earthy thoughts that crumbled like clods of dirt when she tried to grab at them. The landscape changed around her as she hiked, but she barely noticed as the trees grew thinner and shorter. The world got wetter, too, became a realm of swampy half-frozen muskegs where the tree roots dipped like bent pipes into dark water. Once she had to ford an actual river, a ribbon of brown water deep enough in the middle that she was forced to swim across its width. The chilly dip woke her up a little—enough to see the dead forest beyond the further bank.

  The trees over there stood white as bones, pointing at random angles at the cold stars above. They bore neither leaves nor needles and their branches stuck out like broken ribs or were missing altogether.

  The ground at her feet was caked with ash. There must have been a forest fire here recently, she thought. Every step stirred up more of the powdery gray debris. What had happened? Surely the Western Prairie guys hadn’t been foolish enough to throw a lit cigarette butt into the underbrush. Maybe lightning had struck nearby. She knew that after a forest fire the smaller plant species—grasses, mosses, shrubs—came back quickly, but she could find nothing green anywhere.

  She trudged into the dead forest and soon found herself in a place as desolate as the back of the moon. No owls hooted in the darkness and no wildflowers grew up from the ash to tremble in the breeze. She saw very few insects—beetles, mostly, their wingcases snapping open as she approached, their greasy-looking wings convulsing in the air to zip them away from her on long curved paths. She touched the white trunks of the dead trees as she passed by and their wood was dry and rough as if they were half petrified.

  She still didn’t know exactly where she was. She had headed west from the stream where Frank Pickersgill died, figuring that no matter how badly lost she got, her wolf would find the way when the moon rose again.

  In time the trees grew thinner on the ground, and thinner still, until she was no longer in a forest at all but in a sandy flatland punctuated here and there by the occasional dead stump. S
treams rolled across bare rock and through drifts of shallow snow, as far as her eyes could see. After the myopia of the forest she felt like she could see to the very edge of the world. The starlight painted the ground white and the water black and the world seemed striped and piebald between the two. On the horizon she saw what could have been the ocean—an endless wrinkled mass of water. It had to be the shore of Great Bear Lake.

  She pressed on.

  The sun rose while she was still human. The sun’s warmth on her back and shoulders filled her up, made her skin tingle, eased the soreness in her joints, even as it painted the vast open ground with yellow light. It felt good. She knew it wouldn’t last.

  “Dzo,” she said, as if he could hear her. She thought maybe he could.

  She heard a splash behind her and saw him clamber up out of a black pond. His furs streamed with water, but by the time he reached her he was dry. He tipped his mask back onto the top of his head. “Uh, yeah?” he asked, as if he’d been with her the whole time. She still had no idea what he really was, but she understood he was a lot more at home in this weird land than she would ever be.

  “Dzo,” she said, “is it much farther?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But your wolf can make it today.” His face screwed up in bewilderment. “You scared or something?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  “Humans seem to get scared a lot. When animals get scared, sometimes they just freeze. You know? Their muscles lock up and they can’t move. You ever try that?”

  “That won’t work for me. Dzo—I killed a guy. Kind of. I don’t know what that makes me.”

  “A predator?” He sat down on the ground and rubbed his hands together. “I’m not really the guy you ought to be asking these questions.”

  She nodded. “I know. The funny thing is I’m not as scared of getting killed as I am of talking to Powell again. But you wouldn’t understand that.”

  He raised his hands in weak apology. “Maybe you’ll get killed before you get that far,” he offered.

  “Yeah.” She started walking again. “Thanks, Dzo,” she said.

  “My pleasure. Listen,” he called after her, “this is as far as I can go. They poisoned the water out there and I can’t follow you now. If you do see Powell, will you give him a message for me?”

  “Sure,” she said, turning around.

  “Tell him I have his boots in my truck. In case he’s looking for ’em.” Chey smiled. It felt wrong on her face, but she liked it all the same. “I’ll do that.”

  An hour after the sun rose, the moon followed.

  51.

  The wolf didn’t understand why the breath in her lungs felt rank and bitter. She did not understand why her skin crawled as she closed on her goal. She barely cared. The human stench was full upon her and a few toxins weren’t about to stop her.

  She trotted out to the top of a sand esker, a long, low bar of sand atop slickrock that had been deposited by glaciers when true dire wolves still roamed the earth. She wanted to howl in jubilation and anticipation of the bloodshed to come, but she didn’t want to alert her prey to her presence just yet.

  Her eyes were not sufficiently keen to see the buildings a half kilometer from where she stood. She could make out some square outlines—unnaturally square, humanly square. She could not see the red and green pigments that painted the tops of the waters all around, but she could smell the heavy metals floating in great swirls like oil slicks there.

  She could not feel the radiation that leaked upward like darkness from the very ground she stood on. She could not in any case have understood that the very land here was cursed with uranium, with radon gas, with the vast deposits of pitchblende and raw radium that gave the place its old name.

  But she could tell the place was cursed.

  Cursed, she panted, cursed, cursed. Cursed forever. She would have chosen another place if it had been up to her. Any other place. But she was a predator and she followed her prey. If they went to ground in tainted earth she would wallow in poison to get to them.

  And they were nearby, she knew it. Even over the bitter wind, over the stinks of heavy metals and broken ore and disturbed earth and rusted metal and decayed plaster and crumbled concrete, she could smell the humans. The human. The one who had chained her and tried to drive her mad.

  As the sun began to set she picked her way down from the esker and into Port Radium, and it was there she yelped and whined, for the change came too soon.

  Chey cursed and spat at the pain in her limbs. Her arms and legs were sore and stiff. She rose slowly and saw that the world had changed while she was gone.

  She was standing, for one thing, on a road.

  Not just a logging path or an animal track. A real, paved road. Long broken slabs of concrete led off to the horizon in either direction. In places they had cracked and rotted away, and in the gaps some grayish weeds had poked up, and the uneasy soil of the Arctic had bucked and shifted the concrete around until it looked half like crushed rock. Nature was busy reclaiming the abandoned road. But it was still a road.

  Chey covered her breasts with her arms. She had become accustomed to waking up naked in an uninhabited forest, where the nearest voyeurs were hundreds of kilometers away. But now she was effectively in a town—and she was completely lacking in clothing.

  She hurried off the road and between a pair of giant steel cargo containers, one rust red, one a faded and streaky blue. She ducked inside the blue one and listened to her footfalls echo alarmingly. She had to be in Port Radium, she decided. Her wolf must have reached the fabled town.

  Peeking around the edge of the container, she saw buildings off to the west, long industrial sheds with lallen-in roofs and decaying walls. She saw dozens of smokestacks like cyclopean chess pieces on a board of upturned soil. Nearer than the buildings she saw a forlorn bulldozer, its blade gnawed by rust, its black leather seat turned into a nest for some absent bird.

  She got the message. Port Radium it might have been, but Port Radium had long since stopped being anywhere. There would be no people here other than those she’d come to confront. At least she had that.

  Moving as quickly as she could, she ducked out of her cargo container and scrambled up a slope of loose dirt and fist-sized rocks. The nearest building looked like an aircraft hangar, an enormous structure of corrugated tin. Wind and rain had bored holes in it until she could see the setting sun right through its metal walls. She found a door, or rather the frame where a door might once have been, and slipped inside.

  Orange light fell in dusty beams to make burning spotlights on the floor. Overhead a massive skeleton of iron girders remained partially intact. At the far end of the enclosed space stood a conical pile of rubble, bright brown and steep-sided. A dump truck stood by the pile, its bed tilted upward as if it had been abandoned in the middle of depositing a new load.

  Closer to her a small portion of the building had been enclosed to make office space. The wide windows were broken and smeared, but she could see desks inside and lockers—maybe there would be clothes hanging up inside that she could use. She went to the office door and pulled up on the latch, half-expecting it to be rusted shut. Half-expecting that she would need her extra-normal strength to open it. Instead the door almost flew open and she staggered backward, nearly losing her balance. It felt almost as if the door had been kicked open.

  In fact, it had. Bruce Pickersgill stood in the door frame, stupid mustache, fur collar, and all. He held his twin pistols at arm’s length, one barrel trained on her forehead, the other on her heart.

  He had orders to shoot on sight. Chey closed her eyes and prepared to accept the inevitable.

  He didn’t fire.

  52.

  Chey’s feet padded effortlessly across the broken ground, while behind her Pickersgill stumbled and cursed with every bump or irregularity of the stony earth.

  Bobby’s helicopter stood motionless in the air, maybe half a kilometer away, maybe seventy meters up. The bubble
cockpit was turned her way—was he watching her, was he watching Pickersgill march her across a field of broken stones? Was he wondering why she wasn’t dead yet? Maybe he wasn’t even inside. Maybe it was just Lester up there.

  “Okay, head over to that utility pole,” Pickersgill said from behind her. He wasn’t taking a lot of chances—she had to keep her hands straight up in the air or he would jab her in the back with one of his pistols.

  The field had been a parking lot once, she thought. It was relatively flat and it was interrupted here and there only by ten-meter-tall light poles, each crowned with a pair of long-broken Klieg lights. The poles were as thick as her arm and made of some metal that hadn’t corroded over the years.

  “Listen,” Chey asked, “could I get a coat or a blanket or something? I’m freezing like this.”

  He tossed her a pair of moth-eaten, grease-stained coveralls and she struggled into them. They were meant for a larger person than herself, but she was glad just not to be naked anymore. “I appreciate it,” she said. “Can we talk for a second? I’d like to—”

  He didn’t let her finish. “Turn around and grab the pole behind you with both hands,” Pickersgill said.

  She did as she was told. The metal was freezing cold and plenty sturdy, though she could feel that the pole was hollow. Nothing more complex than a pipe sticking out of the ground with a few wires running through. Pickersgill moved around behind her and clicked one end of a pair of handcuffs to her left wrist. She could feel him fumbling around behind her with the second cuff—he had to do it one-handed, since he kept a pistol in the crook of her neck the whole time.

  “It ain’t silver, but tensile steel’s got to be worth something,” he told her. He clicked the second cuff shut and came back around to face her. He had one pistol in his hand, the other in its holster.