by Chuck Logan
Chapter Forty-nine
There was this sleep-ocean and he was sinking to the bottom, down in the dark where he bumped into fish without eyes, who were blind dreams.
The whiskey on his tongue tasted like cold kerosene. Dingleberries of frozen blood stuck to strands of his hair. Then, a dream with eyes swallowed him and he was surrounded by an empty playhouse where he was the only one in the audience, while up on the stage a cast went through the wooden motions.
And, ah shit, man, I’ve seen this one before.
Amy, Jolene, poor Hank blinking, Popeye the ostrich, and Earl Garf emerging out of the shadows with his hand upraised.
A bad play. Not quite real life. Real life came down to a question of altitude. Vaguely, Broker understood that he’d spent the last two years on his knees in a world that was three feet high.
No real life without kids in it.
No way.
Poor Amy. Poor Jolene. No kids.
Tried to live in their play. Fun for a while. Flirting. Sex. Some rough stuff.
But not real life. Uh-uh.
Real life was the sound of his daughter’s voice; and the way it worked, just when you thought you were going to get a good night’s sleep—every time . . .
Daddy, I need you, said three-year-old Kit.
Broker thought she might be calling out to him from the other side of the world.
And he just had to get up.
Broker unglued his eyes in a fit of uncontrollable trembling and wondered how the hell he got hair in his mouth, with clumps of frozen blood on it. His hair was too short . . .
Okay. So it was a nightmare, after all. A nightmare in which a flap of his scalp had ripped off and dangled down the side of his face, and that’s how the hair got in his mouth.
And now he made out the faint twinkle of stars, but they were inches away, right in front of his eyes, and that had to be a bad sign. They should be up higher, over the black horizon with the other stars and the sickle moon behind the spidery branches of the trees.
With an extra-deep shudder he saw what an empty witch-tit woods it was; bleak enough to give a druid insomnia. Then he saw he was surrounded by shattered glass and the pulpwood log that had almost taken his head off projected through the windshield. Some twinkles of this glass fell from his hair, and he saw it was the worst kind of nightmare.
Your basic North Woods nightmare about freezing to death in a car wreck on the coldest night in history.
A tiny voice way down at the base of his brain hissed: Move, dummy.
Right.
He lurched against the seat belt, raised his hands, and found them frozen. Well, not quite; but definitely unresponsive. The individual fingers did not work and had joined together into a mittenlike flipper. His thumb refused to move. He raised his right hand and slammed it palm up against the steering wheel and felt excruciating, shark-bite pain. Good. Still some circulation left.
He moved the hand to the seat-belt buckle and . . . nothing happened. The opposed thumb, which separated him from other mammals, was no longer an option. He had a paw. In a few more minutes it would turn into a hoof.
He tried to picture Earl and the sequence of events that delivered him here, and immediately rejected the notion as a waste of time and heat. All he knew was now: shock, head wound bleeding, probably broken ribs, whiplash. And the biggie—hypothermia.
He was minutes—less—from passing out for good.
It was up to the lizard to save the human.
All he had was reflexes.
And a few old Indian tricks.
If somebody’s going to kill me in the woods, give me a city-boy mouse-clicker every time.
Earl, you fucking dummy, you should have checked my truck. Broker shoved his petrified right hand into the back and levered up the rear-seat backrest. His numb fingers pawed on the stock of the Mossberg twelve-gauge that he’d loaded and prepositioned within easy reach, because—always go with your gut—he was worried about Earl.
He herded, perhaps paddled, the shotgun forward and pawed it across his lap. Then he reached back, hooked a strap of the survival pack on his thumb, and yanked it out. Panting jerky clouds of breath, he pawed the bag to his chest and used his teeth to open the snap, fumbled inside, and found the haft of a Buck sheath knife. Using both palms and his teeth, he tore the knife from the scabbard. Then, with the knife awkwardly positioned between two hands frozen in an attitude of prayer, he sawed though the seat belt.
Faintly in the slender moonlight, he saw blood on the blade. Didn’t feel the slash he put in his thigh.
Onward.
Tipping sideways, Broker fell through the open driver’s-side door holding the knife, the shotgun, and the bag in his cramped arms, and crunched down on the icy ground. His insides milled around, confused; having fallen, he found it impossible to get up.
So here’s the deal, which his dad had beat into him, and the Airborne sergeants at Benning had refined: After you die, then you get to quit.
Yeah. Yeah. Broker lurched up on elbows, blundered to his knees, and fumbled in the pack. There was a heavy fleece sweater, mittens, a space blanket; but he was too far gone for that. What he needed was . . . a flare.
He held the beautiful red cardboard tube between his palms—sulfur, wax, sawdust, potassium chlorate—and strontium nitrate for its own internal oxidation. This fucker would burn at 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit underwater.
Yes.
Urgent now, he left the flare with the shotgun and lurched forward on his knees because his feet wouldn’t work, his ankles ended in wooden blocks. He’d adjusted to horror as normal working conditions for this night, so he didn’t waste time being surprised when he saw that Earl had exchanged his warm boots for running shoes.
He tottered on his knees and fell against the crumpled front fender of the Jeep where one headlight still burned weakly. Thus illuminated, he knee-crawled past the pile of pulpwood logs to where the loggers had heaped the pile of slash.
He filled his arms with branches and knee-crawled back and heaved the thicker branches under the gas tank. Going back and forth in this fashion, his head was briefly occupied with warm hallucinations from his childhood. Hot chocolate. Toasted marshmallows.
Now he moved to the front of the Jeep and kneed and elbowed himself up between the stack of logs and the crumpled hood. Clamping his forearms and elbows, he hauled at the pulpwood. One by one, he yanked the tiers of logs forward, piled them on the hood and through the shattered windshield.
He rolled over, fell off the Jeep, and, as he studied his makeshift pyre, he entertained more childhood memories. “To Build a Fire,” one of the first stories he’d ever read, by Jack London. Except that guy fucked up.
Not me.
His knees buckled and he toppled over and crawled on his belly, a crab shape shifting to a snake. He wormed his way to the pack.
Holding the flare and the shotgun between his palms, he kneed his way back to the pile of wood under the gas tank. It was too dark to read the instructions printed on the flare, but he knew they said, among other things: always point fuse away from face and body while igniting
Just have to ignore that little bit of advice for now.
Broker couldn’t use his hands for fine gripping, so he had to clamp his teeth on the strip of black tape on the side of the flare and yank it to expose the cap. Then, carefully, he bit down on the metal cap and pulled it off.
To ignite the torch he had to strike the friction surface on the top of the cap against the fuse end he’d uncovered. But right now, the friction surface was between his teeth, pointing down his throat. When he used his knuckles and his teeth to revolve it around so it faced out, the cap promptly froze tight to his lips and tongue.
But it was generally in the right direction.
Immediately, he gripped the flare between his palms and struck it like a fat red match across the cap in his mouth. The sulfurous whoosh charred his cheek and shot a fiery spout in the night. Broker dropped the flare in the wood
under the gas tank, thrashed the frozen cap from his lips, and scuttled back with the shotgun.
Cradling the Mossberg in his elbows, he crawled away from the flames sputtering under the Jeep—six feet, seven, eight. Enough.
The flare might do the trick by itself. But the wood was really cold and the gas tank far away from the flame. He didn’t have the time to wait and find out. So he rolled over, pawed the safety latch, and set the gun to fire.
Squirming now, he came around with the shotgun still cradled in one elbow and jammed his blunt fingers into the trigger guard.
All his life he’d lectured people about not riding around with loaded guns in their cars. And because he was basically a lizard right now, his memory was faulty. Had he jacked a round in the chamber in J.T.’s Quonset hut? Because if he didn’t, there was no way, with these hands, he could work the slide and load one now.
Broker aimed the muzzle at the gas tank and poked at the trigger.
The gun kicked back and out of his elbow. But a streak of flame shot from the barrel and tore into the under side of the Jeep. For a split second the muzzle flash illuminated the piled logs and brush. A gasoline mist curtsied with the flare’s chemistry. Then the gas tank erupted.
The explosion filled the woods with fire, rolled Broker over, popped his eardrums, and blistered his face.
He came up grinning.
Now that’s how you build a fire, Jack.
But it was way too toasty, so he scrambled away from the blaze that now reached up twenty feet into the air, snapping and sparking through overhead birch branches.
He was in agony, of course, smashed between freezing and roasting. He might lose fingers and toes. But he was back in the game. He thanked the lizard, proceeded up his brain stem, and tried to marshal conscious thought.
Earl. Somehow followed them.
If Earl did this then Amy and Jolene were in danger.
And Hank.
These thoughts, though dire, grabbed no traction on his shivering. More immediately he struggled to stand and tried to stamp circulation back into his feet. He managed one pirouette in front of the bonfire and toppled over. The blood in his hands and feet had turned to broken glass and needles.
Getting up, he noticed the reflection of the flames glitter beyond the trees. Lake ice.
And then Broker saw more lights appear across the lake. Squares of electric lights popping on. Windows.
Stamping, falling, getting up, he hugged himself and tried to flex blood back into his stinging fingers. Using his teeth, he managed to pull on woolen mittens from his pack. After working up the courage to explore the gash on his scalp, he pulled off a mitten and touched his fingers to his face. Nothing. Feeling ended at his wrists. He licked at the numbness next to his mouth and tasted blood Popsicles. Burnt steak from the flare.
His concern for Amy, Jolene, and Hank was still relative and dreamy, far removed from the local question of his own survival.
Then, a pair of lights beyond the trees caught his attention. They moved with purpose, slowly getting larger. A vehicle. But was it attracted by the fire?
Broker stamped and staggered and fell down and got up and waited as the headlights poked and lurched through the woods and materialized in the form of a Ford pickup. He hobbled to it as the driver got out and peered at him. They recognized each other.
It was Billie’s neighbor, Annie Lunder, which meant that Earl hadn’t hauled him very far from the lodge. In her late sixties, swaddled in wool and fleece, Annie had not changed one bit and was still edgy and mean as a doubled-bladed axe. She and his Uncle Billie had fallen out of love and hated each other since the Korean War—something about a property-line dispute and Billie marrying her sister, Aunt Marcy, now departed.
Annie winced, seeing his torn face in the firelight. “Philip Broker, you feral child; I swear you were raised by wolves. Look at you out here in tennis shoes in this weather. And playing with matches. What the hell are you trying to do? Burn down my woods?”
“Phone,” Broker croaked. “Life and death.”
“What’s that?” she squinted, cupping one gloved hand to the side of her hat.
“Nine one one. Billie’s lodge.”
Chapter Fifty
She had grabbed Hank’s legs and hauled him unceremoniously off the daybed, through the kitchen, and bumping down the hall into the bedroom. She positioned him with a pillow at his back, tilted against a closet door so he could clearly see her go to Amy on the bed.
“Okay, get a good look. Now you can be happy because we’re all going to die when they get back.” Jolene yanked the IV from Amy’s hand. Christ, his eyes were rolling again. She didn’t even know if he saw it.
Then, not even rolling. Shut. He now lay on the floor truly looking like a corpse. A few feet above him, Amy nodded on the bed, her breathing shallow and labored. A single tendril of blood marked her left wrist where the IV had been inserted. The plastic stent now dangled along her shoulder.
Jolene stood at bay, between them.
She held the scotch bottle in one hand and a shotgun she’d found in the bedroom closet in the other. Except the goddamn gun wasn’t loaded because she couldn’t find any goddamn shells for it. And the room was a shambles from her desperate search.
Fucking gun safety for you.
And looking for those shells may have been a fatal diversion, because she’d neglected to get her cell phone from the living room, and there was no phone in the bedroom and now they were in the house. She’d heard the glass break at the backdoor and heard the shuffle of their footsteps and their voices. Then she saw the doorknob twist. And the voices moved on, into the main room where they’d discover she had moved Hank.
Then they would be back.
Okay, she had to do it.
She raised the bottle, took a drink, and the whiskey surged in her throat, teared in her eyes, and caused her to cough. She set the bottle down on the floor and studied the door which was secured only by an old-fashioned hand slip lock. She picked up a straight-backed chair from next to the dresser and stockaded it at an angle, the backrest wedged under the knob. That would stop Earl for maybe half a second.
There was the window. Nothing but thermal glass and storms. She didn’t see them trying to break in through the window on a night like this.
“Okay, now what?” she said to Hank’s prone form. He’d apparently passed out from fatigue, so he wasn’t even there to witness her one big moment.
“Just like a fucking man, build me all up and then—pfsst—go limp on me.”
He’d never explained how there were no rules for this hero stuff; you kind of made it up as you went along. Being scared shitless was the main thrill so far.
She appreciated the irony; how she had quit drinking to change her life. Now she was drinking to get the courage to really change it.
No, she was drinking because Earl would understand the behavior under stress. And when she drank she always went to him for help. God, if only there was a phone in here.
Get . . . them . . . fight.
“Okay, baby,” she said under her breath. “I’m working on it.”
It meant she’d have to open the door enough to show the gun and let Earl smell her breath. Oh, Christ. It all came down to that. Here we go. Bottom of the ninth, two outs and two strikes, and one pitch to decide the World Series.
She reached for the Johnny Walker and took another slug, a big one that flooded her with warmth. And the footsteps were coming back down the hall, no longer cautious shuffling, striding. Angry.
A fist pounded the door.
Earl.
All her adult life she’d had to anticipate and avoid Earl’s anger. She had never manipulated it. Now it was the only way out of this mess.
“Jolene, goddammit, I know you’re in there.”
Earl. Real mad but, judging by his voice, trying to control it.
Good.
She put down the bottle and wracked the slide on the shotgun like they do in the movies becaus
e it sounds cool except, Earl always said, if you’re in the shit it’s kind of dumb not to have one in the chamber already and telegraph your position.
Silence after the mechanism. Like they heard.
Jolene blurted, “Earl, I got a gun in here. A shotgun was in the closet. I’ve been thinking, and no way I’m coming out if Allen is there.” The slight slur and wavering control in her voice was real, not faked. Thank you, Johnny Walker.
“Open the door,” Earl said.
“I don’t trust him and the more you’re around him I don’t trust you,” she shouted.
“Open the door, now!”
Jolene took a deep breath, removed the chair, shoved the lock latch, and cracked the door.
The big .45 came up smoothly at the full extension of Earl’s right arm so the business end of the barrel made a cool circle against Allen’s forehead.
Under his breath, Earl said, “Sorry, but you got to go along until I get her calmed down. Jolene management is an art I have spent a lifetime acquiring.”
Allen stared at the door, at the sounds of the chair moving, the latch freeing up. He was not reassured. They were getting tricky on him. They were deviating from his plan, and now there was the wild card of Jolene’s drinking on the play.
The door opened an inch, just enough to see one of Jolene’s eyes over the huge tube of a shotgun that poked out at them. The sour musk of alcohol was unmistakable on her breath.
“Okay, Jolene, see?” Earl wagged the pistol in Allen’s face.
“I’ll only talk to you if we’re alone,” Jolene said.
Allen spoke up. “Jolene, put down the gun. Where’s Hank?”
“Shut up,” hissed Earl.
Jolene’s voice was quick to capitalize on the edge of anger and frustration in Earl’s: “Don’t you see what he’s doing?”
The pistol pressed against his forehead was a steel tether that held Allen motionless. The shotgun sticking out the door was pointed at his chest. They were ganging up on him. Allen felt a rivulet of nervous sweat streak down between the scalpel handle and the hollow of his right wrist.