by Nick Petrie
The dog slipped in behind him and nipped at Peter’s ankle.
“Hey.” Peter jerked the leg back. The dog went for the other ankle. “Shit.”
Peter shed his pack and lurched upright. He had limited options in the bottom of this trench. The snowshoes were not helping. One had already come loose, the strap broken. The dog waited patiently as Peter bent and freed himself with frozen fingers. It was possible that the dog was laughing at him.
When he finally stepped out of the straps, it came in again and nipped at his calf. “Jesus, okay.” Turning, Peter scrambled up the steep side of the trench and into the farmyard. The dog came after him, alternating growls and feints at Peter’s heels.
The Aussie was a sheepdog, bred to herd livestock.
Now it was herding Peter.
The lit-up main house stood fifty meters away, past the parked vehicles. A simple structure with a wide-gabled roof and concrete walls, big enough for a large family. Peter headed that direction, but the Aussie didn’t like that idea. It came at him sideways and bumped his leg with its shoulder, turning him toward a long low metal barn, then nipped at his calf to urge him into motion.
“I’m not a goddamn sheep,” Peter growled, swaying on his feet. But he wasn’t feeling fully human, either.
Maybe the dog had a point. Peter was in no shape to meet Bjarni and the uncles. Despite his intentions, he’d never get a chance to explain things, to warn them of the danger that followed close behind. He’d never find Óskar. Bjarni would knock him down with nothing more than harsh language. The uncles would wrap him in duct tape, then let the river wash him down to the sea. And Peter wouldn’t blame them one bit.
No, he thought, the barn wasn’t a bad idea. The police had just left. Brunelli’s goons would wait until after midnight. Peter could warm up, sleep for a few hours, let the fever run its course. Although he didn’t like taking advice from a damn dog.
But he didn’t see a door, either. He angled left until the Aussie swung around and bumped him with its shoulder again, herding him to the right, around the corner. And there was the door, large enough for a tractor.
“Nobody likes a smart-ass,” he told the dog, leaning against the siding while the snow swirled and the world lost focus. The dog eyeballed him to make sure he didn’t make a run for it.
When he finally got the door open, he blocked the gap with his knees to keep the dog out, but the dog didn’t try anything. It had done its job, moved a lost sheep back to the barn. Which was more than Peter could say.
Inside, the white static rose and his head throbbed. Only a few dim bulbs shone in the high white ceiling, and the animal smell was strong. The wind moaned as he stumbled down the aisle between rows of waist-high stalls, each big enough for several dozen sheep. They were fluffy and dirty and scared, with horns that curled back over their heads. None of them wanted to be anywhere near Peter.
Large round bales stood at the intersections between stalls, the plastic wrapping cut away. He picked up a sharp-tined hay fork and kept moving away from the door, looking for a place to hide himself. At the rear of the barn, he found a stall with fresh hay and fewer sheep. When he stepped over the barrier, they fled from him, scrambling toward the farthest corner.
Icelandic sheep lived outside for six months or more each year. Farmers on horses brought them down from the mountains in the late fall for shearing, and to spend the winter sheltered from the weather. Unless they were slaughtered for meat.
He forked more hay into the stall as the white static rose higher. He shivered so profoundly that the tool trembled in his hands. The pale ceiling shimmered in his peripheral vision and he considered the lives of sheep. Was it better to be in jail, or dead? Did any of the sheep manage to survive the winter outside the barn? What about the lambs?
Why the hell had Peter come to Iceland, anyway?
Leaning on the fork, he closed his eyes and saw Óskar’s face.
At the back of the stall, where the angled ceiling met the wall, he sat and scooped loose hay over his legs. The fever void was held at bay by the internal tension of the white static crackling on his brainstem. Although staying outside in the storm would kill him, the static still didn’t want him indoors. Even in this big, open barn, it threw sparks. As if it wanted Peter to die out there.
If he didn’t get warm and get some goddamned sleep, he might just die in here. He closed his eyes but his heart hammered. He was afraid of the dreams. Of the dead waking up.
He’d put the bottle of Valium in his coat pocket with his map. Now with shaking hands, he battled the childproof cap. It finally popped off with a jerk and his last four pills flew into the hay. He picked desperately through the brittle stalks, rescuing pills from the manure-stained floor, one by one.
He wiped them off with his dirty fingers and swallowed them dry. His water bottle had frozen.
Despite everything, they tasted fine.
He was glad June couldn’t see him now.
As the Valium took hold, he swiped more hay over his coat. His nerves began to unknot and the static hushed. See, this is why drugs are so popular, he thought. Then fell into a bottomless void.
He woke swimming in sweat, the dog’s nose cold in his good eye.
57
A broad-shouldered young woman with dark hair falling from an ice-blue stocking cap stood at the edge of the stall.
When she saw Peter push the dog’s nose from his face, she turned her head away and called out. She held a square-tipped manure-stained shovel in one hand. She wore a brown jacket and rubber boots.
She carried the shovel like a tool, but it could serve as a weapon, too. Someone turned on more lights and the bulbs wore fuzzy haloes that almost sparkled. The dog whined softly.
Peter tried to bring back his few words of Icelandic. He cleared his throat and his head spiked with pain. His whole body ached. “Gud dai, ungfru’. My name is Peter.”
She just stared at him. He didn’t want to think about what she might see. A battered, one-eyed man covered with hay and sheep shit, passed out in her barn.
A giant in an orange coat stepped into view. He put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. Peter was relieved to see that he didn’t take the shovel. He just scowled at Peter and spoke into his phone. He had a gold earring. Peter knew his name, but he couldn’t remember.
He needed a weapon. Moving slower than he wanted, he scrabbled under the hay but found nothing.
The orange giant shook his head. “Ku’kalabbi.” Ingo, that was his name.
Peter’s hand brushed something hard. The hay fork. He grabbed it and put his elbows back to lever himself up. Ingo called something over his shoulder and put a foot on Peter’s chest, pinning him to the floor. The foot might have been an anvil, for all Peter could do to dislodge it. The woman stepped in, knelt on his arm, and pulled off his hat. Peter thrashed and she caught his chin with one hand and stared at his face.
Axel appeared in the aisle and stepped over the stall wall carrying a big sheet of dirty plastic. Bjarni stood behind him with a coil of rope hung over the cast of his broken arm.
“Óskar,” Peter said. “They’re coming.”
Ingo and Axel closed in. Peter fought but they were too many, and too strong.
As the plastic closed over his face, he fell into the void again.
58
He woke on a hard floor in a small, low-ceilinged room with the dirty plastic sheet beneath him. The broad-shouldered young woman knelt on one side, and a slim older woman, with hooded eyes and hair like a gull’s wing, knelt on the other. They were cutting the clothes off his body with kitchen knives that slid through the seams like water.
Two lamps stood nearby. Their light hurt his eyes. The walls thrummed and pulsed. His head pounded, an artillery barrage that shook the earth. He turned and saw his winter coat and bibs hanging on the wall. They looked like human skin. Peter was the c
arcass.
In the shadows stood the enormous uncles, crossed arms like tree trunks. Bjarni still wore his red coat. The floor was hot under Peter’s back, but gave no warmth. He tried to speak but the words never got past his clattering teeth.
His fleece sweater and pants were gone. When the young woman reached for the sleeve of his long underwear, Peter jerked his arm back. The older woman spoke and the uncles stepped in and held his arms and legs. Thin fabric parted like gossamer under their blades, releasing the trapped stink of his fermented sweat. His chest and legs were mottled with bruises. The women’s faces betrayed nothing.
The older woman looked at Bjarni, who raised his broken arm and muttered angrily. Then Ingo said a few words, and Axel nodded. Bjarni spoke again and gestured at the door. Naked and trembling with fever, Peter didn’t need to understand Icelandic to know they wanted to put him out in the snow.
The older woman stood and surveyed Peter on the floor. Her face was creased, her dark eyes set deep. Peter had never felt so exposed, or so lacking. She raked back her hair with a claw-fingered hand, then spoke sharply and turned away.
Ingo moved to Peter’s head, and Axel to his feet. They gathered up the plastic sheet and it bunched over his face like a dirty caul. They lifted and carried him, suspended and swinging, to a brighter place, where they laid him down on a hard surface. When the plastic parted, he saw white tiles and felt water falling down all around him. The younger woman pulled on rubber gloves. The dog sat, watching. Peter waited for the knives.
Mercifully, before they could carve him into steaks, he fell into the void.
59
When he woke again, he lay on his stomach on a new sheet of plastic, this time on a low bed. He was naked and dizzy and burning hot. Behind him, the young woman ran an electric clipper across his scalp with crisp indifference. His severed hair fell across his face and onto the sheet.
They were back in the small room with the too-bright lamps on the floor, their bulbs now ringed with pulsing colors. He saw shadowed shapes playing on the walls, dragons or demons. His head thundered and his mouth was dry as the desert.
He tried to turn. “Óskar,” he said. “They’re coming.”
“Shhh.” She held his cheek to the pillow with a strong hand on the nape of his neck and kept the clipper moving as if she’d done this every day of her life. He struggled harder. She put a hard knee between his shoulder blades and he was too weak to get free.
When she was done with the clipper, she took her hand off his neck and called out. Bjarni came in with a bowl and a cloth and a cup, and set them on the floor by his head. Then he looked at Peter, took a straight razor from his pocket, and flicked it open with a grim smile. The blade shimmered in the lamplight. Peter tried again to rise but she pushed his face into the bed and held him there.
He felt the odd sensation of a wet paintbrush on his stubbled scalp. Old-fashioned shaving cream. The scrape of the blade against his skin, then a cloth wiping away the remains, and a cold wet painful spike deep into his brain. He tried not to scream, and failed.
The young woman said, “Bjarni?”
Bjarni dropped to his knees and wrapped his good arm around the top of Peter’s head, pressing his cheek firmly to the plastic.
“Wait,” Peter said, or tried to say. “Wait.”
He bucked on the plastic, his skin slick with his own sweat. Bjarni thumped him with his heavy cast. The young woman called out and put her knee on his back again. The older woman came in and sat on his naked thighs, and he was held helpless and frantic.
He felt a stab of pain where Dónaldur had hit him with the bottle, then long moments of agony as she scoured the raw flesh. Then the cold, hard spike again, which he now recognized as alcohol, followed by pressure as she applied a bandage and tape.
“Okay,” she said. Bjarni stood away and the women rose to their feet. The older woman sighed, raked her hair back again, then lifted a huge steel Frankenstein syringe and stabbed him in the butt cheek. When she depressed the plunger, it felt like she’d set his ass on fire.
They left him thrashing in a scalding puddle of his own sweat.
“Save Óskar,” he said to the empty room. “They’re coming.”
Then Ingo and Axel came in, picked up the ends of the sheet, and carried him into a bathroom, where they dumped him into a steep-sided white bathtub. The young woman wrapped his shaved head in a trash bag, then patted his cheek roughly and stuck a thermometer in his mouth. Ingo and Axel came in with buckets of snow and dumped them onto his body, again and again, until he lay buried to the neck in Iceland.
They’re not cutting me into steaks, he thought. They’re harvesting my organs. But who will save Óskar?
When the void opened up, Peter tried to hold on, but he fell through anyway.
60
He woke with a start in the small room, unexpectedly lucid. The older woman sat in a chair beside the bed. Her gull-wing hair was cut in line with her jaw, framing the kind of face that belonged on a coin. She stared at him with an alarming frankness, as if measuring him for a prosthetic limb, or perhaps a coffin. Behind her, the open door beckoned in a rectangle of light.
He’d been dreaming of Baghdad again, the hot dusty street and the bloody dead rising, reaching for him. He knew this meant that the Valium had finally worn off, the end of his pills. Sparks climbed his spine at the thought. This would be very bad. The static pushed him upright, but he couldn’t get free of the sheets.
“Stay,” said the older woman. “You are not well.” She put a long, bony hand on his chest and pushed him back down. She didn’t have to work at it. He was weak enough that she could have suffocated him with a pillow. Watching her face, he knew she was plenty capable of doing just that, and it had crossed her mind more than once. This was Erik’s grandmother, Yrsa. The matriarch of the family.
“What’s wrong with me?” His tongue was thick.
“Karina believes you have an infection,” Yrsa said. “In your blood. There are indications.”
Sepsis, he thought. Which would explain some things. “How bad?”
“Perhaps you will die,” Yrsa said. “Perhaps not.” She held out a large glass of water. “Who else is with you?”
He took the glass and drank. “I’m alone. But the ones who killed Erik, they’ll come, too. They want Óskar.” He felt the static rise higher. Fight or flight. “Have you seen any strangers? Foreigners?”
“Only you.” Yrsa watched him with caliper eyes. “Why did you kill the man from your embassy?” She’d seen his face on the news.
“I didn’t,” he said. “The ones who killed Erik and Sarah, they killed him.”
Clearly, she didn’t believe him. “And why are you here?”
“Catherine Price sent me,” he said. “Óskar’s American grandmother. She’s afraid for his life.” His tongue felt thick. It was getting hard to organize his thoughts. The fever rose, and he heard his voice as if from a distance. “Why am I still alive?”
“It is poor manners to turn away a traveler in need.” She rose to go. “When you are well enough, we will decide.” She called, “Karina?”
The young woman appeared with the Frankenstein syringe. The plunger had a thumb ring and a needle like an ice pick. Karina made a circular motion with her hand. “Show me your, ah, backside.”
“What is that?”
“Antibiotics,” Yrsa said. “For sheep. Karina is the best large animal veterinarian in Nordhurland Vestra.”
* * *
—
Caught between the fever and the static, he thrashed in his bed and dreamed of the hot dusty street. Light that fucker up, he said. They did, and the small blue Toyota ground to a halt. He peered through the broken window at the dead, who opened their eyes and climbed into the street, reaching for him like long-lost family.
Now others came, too, from storefronts and side streets. Th
e fat man with the antique rifle who’d refused to surrender. The woman with plastic bags from the market, who’d stepped on an IED. A girl with her clothes on fire from a mistaken drone strike, a young boy playing with a dropped grenade. They stumbled toward him with grasping hands, the countless war dead rising in the wreckage of their bodies.
Peter backed away, hoping for shelter behind the Humvee, but more crowded in. Big Jimmy, who would die years later in Milwaukee. Paul Watson, killed months before in an ambush outside of Tikrit, and Sean Quinn, shot by a sniper in a nameless Afghan valley, and a dozen others Peter knew well or not at all, their familiar uniforms shredded and soaked through with blood and shit and tears.
They surrounded Peter, these men and women, these hungry dead, and reached for him.
He raised his arms to push them away, but they took hold of his fingers and wrists. They clutched at his clothes and pulled themselves close. Hands on his shoulders, hands on his neck, bearing him down, burying him under their weight.
He woke gasping in the small room, arms out to keep them at bay. Heart pounding, head split like a dropped melon. The door stood open a crack, and a sliver of light seeped through. He could hear several conversations at once, along with the cheerful squeal and thump of children.
Óskar. He pushed himself up but felt a sharp tug on his arm. He was connected to a clear IV bag that hung from the back of a chair. The best large animal veterinarian in Nordhurland Vestra. Fluids meant for sheep.
Sparks fired on his brainstem, bright and insistent. Lungs tight, gasping for breath, he pulled the needle from his arm and tried to stand. His feet tangled in the blanket and he fell out of bed, naked and sweating. Driven by static and fleeing the dream, he pulled the sheet around himself and stumbled from the dark toward the light.
At the end of the hall, in a vast room with two dozen people at a long dining table spread with the remains of a feast, he tried to explain something extremely important. “They’re coming,” he said. “Óskar.”