The Preserve

by Patrick Lestewka

  “So you’re on the level?” Zippo said. “Whoever comes out of this shitstorm kicking gets a one-way ticket back to civilization and the cash?”

  Oddy could almost see the gears meshing inside Zippo’s head, the hitman’s mind playing more angles than a bagful of protractors. How did he see this going down? Did it end with Zippo boarding a heli solo, five million dollars wealthier? Everything changes, Oddy thought. Allegiances shift, loyalties crumble. Only dead things stay the same.

  “Yes,” Grosevoir replied with all the sincerity of an adder. “That’s the deal.”

  Edwards was moaning almost constantly by now. White foam frothed the sides of his mouth. He spat up tatters of red, spongy tissue. It’s his lungs, Tripwire realized. Jesus. Soon Edwards’s eye would open. That eye would be red with burst blood vessels, and would reflect nothing but cold hunger.

  “There’s no hope for him,” Grosevoir said matter-of-factly. “He’s been bitten. Of course, he’d make a fine addition to the preserve, but his continued existence may pose a threat to you.”

  “What are we going to do with him?” Tripwire said.

  “What can we do?” Crosshairs.

  “Grease the poor fuck.” Zippo.

  “I suggest you get moving. The clock is ticking.” Grosevoir.

  “Who’s going to handle it?” Oddy.

  Before anyone could say another word, Answer unsheathed his K-Bar and stabbed Edwards in the neck. The soldier’s remaining eyelid flew open like a window shade. One dead, red-threaded eye. Answer pulled the knife out. Brownish blood the consistency of motor oil pushed sluggishly from the wound.

  “Jesus,” Tripwire whispered.

  Edwards bit at Answer’s fingers. Answer jammed his knee down on Edwards’s throat, forcing his mouth closed. He stabbed the knife into Edwards’s forehead. It didn’t go through. Answer found a large, flat rock and pounded on the hilt. The K-Bar slid into skull bone, through gray matter, out the other side into the snow.

  Edwards gurgled. Edwards squirmed. Eventually Edwards died. Answer yanked the knife out and wiped it on his pants leg. He stood up. It was 2:33 a.m.

  Oddy said, “Let’s get humping.”

  ««—»»

  Grosevoir remained perched on his rock, a cancerous black raven. “Carpe diem,” he said, waving a stub-fingered hand at them.

  Oddy was gripped by an overwhelming urge to take a potshot at the little gnome. The only thing stopping him was the knowledge any such act would be useless, and a waste of precious ammunition to boot.

  “Here.” He handed out the silver bullets, then held up the tiny bottle of holy water and said, “Any of you jokers take up the priesthood during the past twenty years? We could melt some snow, get you to bless it.”

  “I’m fully ordained,” Zippo said.

  Crosshairs, gullible: “Really?”

  Zippo, smirking: “Oh, sure. In the church of a-jackass-says-what.”

  Crosshairs, hook-line-and-sinker: “What?”

  “I pegged you as more of a Hare Krishna myself, Zip,” Tripwire said. “I can see you dressed in an orange dashiki at JFK International, handing out pansies.”

  Crosshairs, doggedly: “What church are you ordained in?”

  “Are you deaf?” Zippo said. “A-jackass-says-what.”

  “What?” Crosshairs cupped his hand around his ear. “Speak slower.”

  “You’d make a great Jehovah’s Witness, Zip,” Tripwire continued. “Preaching the Word door-to-door.”

  “Today’s sermon,” Zippo growled. “Silence is golden.”

  “Seriously,” Crosshairs said to Zippo. “What church are you ordained in?”

  This went on for a few minutes until Crosshairs was informed that Zippo had been calling him a jackass. Crosshairs made a face and, affecting a schoolmarmish tone, said, “Oh, real mature. A jackass says what and I say ‘what’ so I’m a jackass. You’re sooo clever, Zippo.”

  When the men settled into silence, the bay of Great Bear became very quiet. The sky held a perpetually dour cast: a leaden-green surface of stained glass with a tarnished sheen to it, as though sluggish light were burning on the other side of the pane. Way off in the sky across the lake, the treetops glowed dully in the dirty light. Stars showed here and there, cold and distant. A raw wind blew across the iced-over lake. The men trudged through the freezing twilight before dawn, boots breaking through a crust of frozen snow into the loose powder beneath. Snow got into the gaps between boots and snowpants, melting down their calves in ice-cold rivulets. The surrounding tree boughs bent beneath their frozen white weight; some branches were encased in frozen layers of ice, snapping like breadsticks as the men brushed past. They came upon a snarl of wind-crippled willows and were forced to crawl beneath the lowermost branches like snakes on their bellies. Twigs whipped and snapped, lashing their faces, cutting into their hands through their mittens. “I’m gonna be spending that million bucks on doctor’s bills,” Tripwire muttered.

  After a few hours of walking, it became clear they were following a rough path. Signs of previous passage abounded: a circle of ash-blackened stones forming a long-abandoned fire pit, a tumbledown pile of branches that had once been a bivouac, frayed lengths of rope descending from high tree branches where hunters hung their packs to keep marauding animals at bay. Here and there were small log shacks chinked with blackened seams of moss, lapped by birch bark roofs. Outside were trout and salmon nets, stacked firewood, pelt-stretchers. Most of the shacks had keeled over in the wind, supports rotted away though negligence or abandonment.

  Zippo and Oddy entered a shack that still stood, hoping to find equipment or food. The interior was dark and dusty-smelling, log walls cracked and split and blackened by the heat of a central rock stove. Knives and fish hooks were stuck in the wood, also the odd nail with tattered clothes still hung in them.

  The shack’s occupant, what remained of him, was propped up in a corner where the log walls met. The man was maybe forty, although maybe younger, or older. It was difficult to tell. His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye shut, the other a deep black pit, his ears torn off and pinned to the wall with fillet knives. Frozen blood splashed the walls in a dark fan. The web of a trapdoor spider hung suspended from the man’s upper palate, the tiny brown spider either dead or in a state of hibernation in the web’s gossamer filament. The man’s torn-off legs were draped over the shack’s central beam by the knotted bootlaces, arms held out in front of him, fingers spread as if to block something from his vision. Innards lay in a frozen clump next to the rock stove, the flesh coated in a layer of crystallized frost, resembling strips of freezer-burned flank steak.

  “Oh, man, Sarge,” Zippo said. “This is…not good.”

  “No.” Oddy tried to shut the man’s blankly staring eyes, but the eyelids were frozen open. “Not good at all, son.”

  As the men continued on, they saw other signs of life that seemed even more cryptic and foreboding. Runic designs were carved into the bark of trees, some primitive as cave-etchings, others elaborately detailed. Words in a dozen different languages were cut into trees and etched into rock-faces, prayers and warnings to future travelers. This message cut into an oak tree with jagged, knifelike strokes: HERE THERE BE TYGRES. Another: ONE-HORNED, ONE-EYED, TEN-LEGGED PURPLE PEOPLE EATER. Heaps of stone markers, or cairns, were erected here and there; Oddy wondered how many bodies were buried in hastily-dug graves sunk into the dark inhospitable soil, the men who dug them spurred by a sense of duty to a downed comrade. These same men, long-dead themselves, had probably placed stones atop the burial mound to memorialize the man lying underneath in some small way. Every mile brought other signs standing as proof of Grosevoir’s claim: a combat boot half-buried in the snow and stiff with frozen blood; what appeared to be a human ribcage and spinal column dangling from the crotch of a black maple.

  They moved counter-clockwise around the lake. The sun passed behind a bank of low gray clouds. Rooting through his parka, Tripwire
found a pack of Lucky Strikes. He sparked one and spindled the acrid smoke into his lungs. He offered the pack to Oddy. “I know you quit, but…”

  Oddy took the pack. “Suppose this is a fine time to rekindle bad habits, son.”

  Tripwire’s discovery prompted the rest of them to check their pockets. Crosshairs and Oddy found cigarettes and Zagnut bars. Answer found a fortune cookie, but the paper was blank. Zippo reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a roll of Benzedrine tabs.

  “Jackpot!” He unwrapped the foil tube and popped a tab. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  Oddy grimaced. A lot of soldiers, Zippo and Gunner included, had picked up the benny habit in ’Nam. They claimed the drug helped them stay awake, or goosed morale, or just kept the darkness at bay for a few hours. Zippo on bennies was like the Tasmanian Devil on speed, Speedy Gonzales on Ritalin. A bad combo. Overkill.

  “Go easy on those pink pills, son.”

  Zippo jacked another tab. “You go your way and I’ll go mine.”

  They humped for six hours straight. The terrain took its toll. A line of fire lanced up Tripwire’s spine. Oddy’s blisters developed blisters. Zippo’s wounded biceps burned despite the benny high. Crosshairs’s legs were cramping constantly, though he didn’t feel it.

  They stopped for chow along the shore of a frozen stream. Answer broke a hole in the ice with his hatchet, dipping a pot into the clear water beneath. They boiled water for coffee and tore open dried food packs. The crackle and pop of twigs in the fire pit was the only sound as they ate.

  “So,” Tripwire said. “This is really happening.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be any way around the fact,” Oddy said.

  “Who says we got to do this?” Crosshairs spat into the fire. “What’s to stop us from laying tracks away from the lake, away from Grosevoir’s rehab center for disadvantaged monsters—”

  “I don’t think we can,” Answer said. “We’re a good three-hundred klicks away from anything resembling civilization. We’ve got enough food to last a week at the outside, and,” he cocked his ear to the silent woods, “I don’t think there are many animals left to hunt. We’ve got no option. Grosevoir set us up good.”

  Tripwire said, “Sounds like you admire the guy.”

  “I’m not running anywhere.” Framed by the parka’s furred hood, Zippo’s face was flushed, his eyes wild. “We’ve all killed before, right? Some more than others, but none of us are virgins. Now we got a chance to throw down on some fairybook freaks, fucks so sad-sack they allow themselves to be cooped up in the middle of nowhere by a humpbacked sideshow act.” He placed a benny on his tongue and swallowed. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  As usual, Zippo was thinking short-term; just cruise around a lake, pop a few beasties, catch a heli back to civilization, easy as pie. But this wasn’t ’Nam, where the worst-case scenario was you took a bullet in the gut and spent a few hours bleeding out, or got captured by the VC and spent a couple months dying of water rot in a half-submerged tiger cage. Out here, you got bit by a vampire and you run the risk of becoming one, spending your afterlife in this frigid wasteland. Or maybe you got bit by a zombie and end up wandering mindlessly over mile upon mile of frozen scrubland until you rot into a puddle of skin and fluids. Never was the saying, “there are things worse than death” more apt.

  Crosshairs said, “Anyone got any strategies on how we get out of this alive?”

  Oddy said, “Apart from moving as quickly as is humanly possible, no. We don’t know where these creatures are hunkered, but they know we’re here. Puts us at a distinct disadvantage. I imagine they’ll attack quickly, try to pick us off before something else gets a chance.”

  Tripwire said, “But we know vampires can’t come out in daylight. And don’t werewolves only change during a full moon?”

  “I don’t think so,” Answer said. “True lycanthropes—half-wolf, half-human—are in that form more or less permanently.”

  “Well,” Oddy said, “we best be prepared.”

  He snapped a few branches off a nearby tree and set about sharpening the ends. Crosshairs emptied his cartridge clips and used a knife to cut an “X” into each bullet-head: not only were they now dum-dum rounds, they were marked with a Cross.

  “Sarge, toss me that holy water,” Zippo said.

  Oddy passed the vial. Zippo unscrewed the cap on the flame-thrower’s fuel tank and poured half the vial in. He gave the tank a shake and flipped the vial back to Oddy. “Holy fire,” he said. “The best kind.”

  Oddy finished whittling the stakes and passed them around. He checked his watch and said, “Let’s get a few more miles under our belt.”

  They crossed the frozen stream gingerly, ice spiderwebbing under their boots. If any of them had cast a backwards glance, they may have seen that the trees on the far shore were carved with intersecting lines, one long, one short: Crosses. Had their eyes been more attuned, they may have seen the bulbs of garlic hanging in long garlands from many high tree boughs. There was no way they could see the perimeter of holy water that had been laid down on the ground, closing off some five square miles of land. There was no sign that read: “You are now entering Vampire Territory.”

  But indeed they had.

  They hiked another seven hours. Shadows stretched across the landscape. By 4:00 a premature dusk had settled. Temperatures dropped and the men took to stomping their feet and rubbing their gloved hands together for what slim warmth the actions provided. Darkness obscured the path. Suddenly they were tripping over rocks and exposed root systems they’d previously managed to avoid.

  Crosshairs became obsessed with the signifiers that officially marked nightfall. Was it night when the sun sunk from view? Or was it nighttime only when the sky had darkened completely, when the stars shone in sharp contrast to the blackness? Never had the distinction seemed so crucial.

  The path fed into a small clearing. The trees were spindly and leafless, branches layered in powdery snow. In the upper reaches of one, the remains of a lightweight plane hung suspended by its tailfins like a criminal from a gibbet. Its wing coverings had fallen away, exposing fiberglass ribs and knotted electrical wires. Tatters of cloth hung in frozen strips from a lower bough.

  Oddy suggested they stop. Zippo was the lone dissenter, declaring himself fresh as a fucking daisy and scorning the others as dickless wonders. Answer told Zippo to shut the fuck up. Zippo thumbed the pilot light on his flamer, thought better of it, swivelled away from Answer and set fire to the pile of kindling Tripwire had collected.

  They squatted around the fire. Night had indisputably fallen.

  “How far have we made it?” Crosshairs asked.

  Oddy retrieved a map of Great Bear Lake. “We’re making great time. If the lake ice holds, we can cross it instead of circumnavigating the inlet. We do that, I’d say we’re a third of the way around.”

  Less than forty-eight hours and this nightmare will be over, Tripwire thought. I can go home. Sleep. I’m so fucking tired—going to take a nap that puts Rip van Winkle to shame. He stripped his gloves and warmed his hands by the fire. They were sweaty and pink and wrinkled, skin like a baby mouse’s.

  The skeleton of the lightweight plane rattled and shuddered as wind whipped through the empty cockpit. “Hell of a place to crash,” Crosshairs said quietly.

  “Should we set up camp?” Tripwire asked.

  “We’d best keep moving, son.”

  “Yeah, but if we don’t get some sleep, we’re bound to—”

  “Is anybody really going to sleep, knowing what’s out there?” Crosshairs said.

  “I’m with Sarge and the cyclops,” Zippo said. “Sleep when you die. Who knows—could be soon.”

  “Son,” Oddy leveled a finger at the benny-blitzed hitman. “I strongly suggest you lay off the attitude and the pills. You’re dogshit for morale.”

  Zippo tore the foil around the tube of bennies and popped another into his mouth. “We ain’t in 1967 no more.” He unfastened the fl
ame-thrower’s straps and dropped it. “You ain’t my boss. And if you don’t take that big black finger out of my face—and I mean right now—you and I are going to have issues.”

  Oddy shrugged the H&K off his shoulder and laid it on the ground. Then he pulled the Webleys from his waistband and set them beside the machine gun. “If that’s the way it’s going to be,” he said, “That’s the way it’s going to—”

  The words weren’t out of his mouth before Zippo bayed, “Yaaaww!” and clipped Oddy in the head with a roundhouse karate kick. Oddy dropped to one knee and Zippo hit him in the face with a front kick and tried for another roundhouse but Oddy caught his foot and pulled him down. They rolled around in the loose snow, breath coming from their mouths in white puffs, until Oddy got on top of Zippo, sitting on the hitman’s chest and slamming punches into his face. The sound of flesh on flesh ricocheted off the trees, carrying across the cold, lonely expanse. Zippo struggled beneath Oddy’s fearsome bulk; the hitman’s body was pressed so deep into the snow it was as if he was buried.

  “That’s enough, Sarge,” Crosshairs said. “You’re gonna do serious damage.”

  Oddy stared down at Zippo and, in that moment, he wanted to do serious damage. He wanted to beat Zippo’s mug until his knuckles split open and the bones poked through, beat Zippo’s face until it wasn’t recognizable anymore, just a shredded mess of raw tissue, broken bone and teeth. He was in the grip of something animal, something primal, something that resonated at the level of bone. He wasn’t himself. He felt his fist rise, fingers curled into a tight fist and poised to hammer down on the dazed hitman.

  “Jesus Christ,” he heard Tripwire say, “you’re going to kill him.”

  I know, Oddy thought. I know, and I don’t care.

  Then, like a cloud passing over the moon, the feeling lifted. Oddy’s fist opened. He got off Zippo and extended his hand. “Here,” he said. “Get your ass up.”

  Zippo’s left eye was nearly swelled shut. He spat blood and took Oddy’s hand. “Alright, boss,” he said as Oddy pulled him up. “You’re still big kahuna.”