by Ike Hamill
“Ha!” Leonard said, turning his broad smile over to Patrice.
Patrice didn’t share his excitement. His face was blue-green in the glow from the SUV’s dashboard. His jaw was tight. Patrice was looking straight down at his own lap and his head started to vibrate. Patrice’s left hand was lifting up from his lap.
Outside, Marie had stopped banging on Leonard’s window. Andrew backed away from Patrice’s side of the vehicle.
“What are you doing?” Leonard asked as Patrice’s hand, shaking, started to cross the divide between the two seats.
When Patrice didn’t answer, Leonard said, “Fuck it,” and he snaked his hand under Patrice’s to pull the gearshift down into drive. His foot hadn’t even stabbed the gas pedal when Patrice slammed the SUV back into park.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Leonard asked. “Come on, man.”
He tried to move the gearshift again, but Patrice batted his hand away with astounding force.
“I can’t…” Patrice said through clenched teeth.
The hand, shaking with internal conflict, reached up towards the keys.
“No,” Leonard said. He threw his elbow into Patrice’s arm, regaining some territory, and held it aside while he reached for the gearshift again. The engine roared as he stomped the gas. Before he could pull back the shift lever, Patrice’s hand closed on his wrist and squeezed. The strength was crushed from Leonard’s hand and he grunted at the pain. The bones in his wrist ground together. Letting go of Leonard’s mangled wrist, Patrice’s hand darted back for the keys again, shutting off the engine and snatching them from the ignition.
The charger on the booster clicked off as the engine died.
“What the fuck?” Leonard asked, clutching his wrist with his other hand.
Until the sound of the passenger’s door opening, Leonard hadn’t realized that Patrice’s other hand had reached for the handle.
“No!” Patrice screamed as the interior lights came on.
Andrew leaned in and took the keys from Patrice’s hand.
“We need your help first,” Andrew said.
“Bullshit,” Leonard said. It only took one quick motion to unzip the rifle bag and fill his hands with the cold metal and wood. He ignored the flare of pain in his wrist, slipped the weapon right across Patrice’s chest, and aimed it squarely at Andrew, who still held the keys.
“Drop those keys,” Leonard said.
The interior lights of the SUV began to fade, but Leonard saw clearly what happened next. Patrice’s right hand wasted no time. It grabbed the barrel of the rifle and squeezed. The hand didn’t try to deflect the barrel from pointing at Andrew, but did something impossible instead. It squeezed the metal and Leonard actually heard it bend. When the hand fell away, it left the barrel crushed and bent. It had manipulated the steel as easy as a pipe cleaner in a fraction of a second.
“What the fuck?” Patrice whispered, looking down at his own hand.
Leonard jumped when Marie slapped his window again.
“We need your help first,” she said.
* * * * * * *
(Patrice)
They got out of the SUV slowly, like hostages. Leonard had his hands raised. Patrice could only look down at his own hands. The traitorous limbs couldn’t be trusted and he was horrified at what they might do next.
“I can’t,” Leonard said, sounding utterly defeated. “I can’t walk any farther. My clothes are frozen and my toes are about to fall off.”
“You have to,” Marie said. “We need you. There are dry clothes inside and spare boots that might fit you. They’re upstairs in the bedroom on the left.”
Leonard lowered his hands and walked with his head down. Patrice followed him, not knowing what else to do. Inside, the place was fancier than Patrice had imagined. From Marie’s description, he had pictured a simple hunting cabin with bare walls and lots of rough-hewn wood. This cabin was more like a small house, with actual furniture and decorations. It was also cold as hell. The fire had gone out and one of the windows had been smashed through. Patrice followed Leonard over to the stairs and paused at the bottom. He wasn’t sure if he should go up or not.
If Leonard was furious, Patrice couldn’t blame him. His hands had betrayed them both.
His hand closed on the bannister. Patrice began to wonder if he had a choice in the matter. It was better to go up the stairs than find out. He climbed. There was a little more warmth at the top of the stairs. In the bedroom on the left, it was even warmer. Leonard had stripped off his coat and was digging through the closet. He tossed a jacket on the bed.
“Looks like my size,” Leonard said.
“We were so close,” Patrice said. He looked down before the tears could spill from his eyes.
“It’s not you,” Leonard said. “They did something to your hands.”
“Yeah,” Patrice said.
“Look in that bureau and see if there are socks,” Leonard said.
“I’m not sure that I…” Patrice said as he turned to the bureau. His hand reached out and pulled open a drawer. “Oh, fuck, Len. I don’t think I can deal with this.”
Leonard tossed a flannel shirt on the bed and then closed the closet.
“Get it together,” Leonard said. “We’ll go help them capture Jake and then they’ll give us the keys, right?”
“No,” Patrice said, looking down at his hands. “I can feel this thing right at the outskirts of my brain, Len. I can’t…”
Patrice shook his head and the tears flew from his eyes. He had cried in front of Leonard before, but he hated himself for it. In hard times, they propped each other up. Now, he was failing and bringing them both down.
“It’s not your fault, Bub. They did something to your hands. You can’t be blamed for that. If anything, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left you there on the ground when I went to get the first aid kit. I should have sent one of them or something.”
“I don’t care about that,” Patrice said. “I just want this thing out of me. I can feel it trying to get control. It’s banging at the door, Len. I don’t know how long until it breaks it down.”
“I hear you,” Leonard said. He sat down on the bed and began to untie his shoes. He had to pick at the frozen laces. Once he did, the tongue crunched as he peeled it up from his foot. “We tried to skate around it, but this is one of those problems we’re going to have to fight at the root. Your hands are fucked. Andrew’s fucked. Jake is double-fucked. We can’t run and we can’t hide. Marie and Andrew seem to think that we’re necessary to fix the problem, and they seem to know a lot about a lot. I guess we go along with this shit until we get to the headwaters.”
Under his socks, Leonard’s feet were pale. He sucked in a sharp breath when he squeezed his toes between his hands and tried to massage warmth back into them.
“What else is in those drawers?” Leonard asked. “Everything I’m wearing is moist, including your grandfather’s anthrax flannel.”
Patrice snorted out a laugh through his tears. He watched his hand reach for another drawer and pull it open.
“Tons of stuff,” Patrice said. “Long johns, t-shirts, and plenty of briefs.”
“I’ll stick with my own skivvies, thank you,” Leonard said.
“What do you suppose stopping Jake entails?” Patrice asked. “They haven’t exactly laid out the plan, you know?”
Leonard moved around him to get the long johns. Patrice held his breath, hoping that his hands wouldn’t take it as a threat and strike out at Leonard. They didn’t.
“Well,” Leonard said, looking up at the ceiling as he pulled on the dead man’s clothes.
It occurred to Patrice that Leonard had thrown himself into icy water earlier that day in an attempt to save Nelson. Now, he was scavenging through the man’s clothes, still trying to recover from that dunking.
“I’m not sure exactly what they mean by it. It seems to me that we should be able to capture him and maybe tie him up or something. All we need to do is ge
t him back to the SUV and we can drive the five of us out of here. Then we let smarter minds ply their trade to the issue.”
“I don’t know,” Patrice said, shaking his head. “I can’t imagine you getting control of Jake by yourself. What if he has super strength, like she said Tyler had? You saw what my hands did. How are you going to take him down, tie him up, and frog march him all the way back to the SUV?”
“I guess I figure I’ll have some help from Andrew and Marie, right? This is their plan.”
“Yeah, but what if it’s not?” Patrice asked. He blurted out the question and his hand twitched when he did.
“What are you thinking?” Leonard asked.
Patrice almost didn’t want to say. It was just a crazy idea that had been building in the back of his head. As soon as it left his mouth, he was going to have to deal with the idea in the real world. He wasn’t sure he wanted that responsibility.
Unfortunately, Leonard knew him too well. He wasn’t going to be able to shrug it off now that he had started the conversation.
* * * * * * *
(Leonard)
Leonard stopped buttoning the shirt and focused on Patrice.
Downstairs, Marie sounded like she was losing her patience for this diversion.
“We have to go,” she called up the stairs. “We have to catch up with him before he warms up his missing components.”
Leonard repeated his question to Patrice, as his friend struggled to form an answer.
“What are you thinking, Bub?”
“They keep saying they need us. What they really need is you, right?” With a weird twitch, Patrice’s hand flew to the side and hit the bureau. He ignored it and talked fast. “If Marie isn’t on our side—has never been on our side—then maybe she simply wanted to get you to the fungus all along. Maybe they engineered this whole thing.”
“There would be easier ways to do it,” Leonard said. He pulled on the dead man’s coat. His feet were actually warming up inside the boots. It was lucky that everything fit him so well—really lucky.
“Would there?” Patrice asked. His hand jerked back and he hit himself in the stomach. Leonard felt stupid. It should have been astounding that Patrice had used his hands to dig through the bureau. He wasn’t supposed to have control of his hands. Leonard hadn’t even noticed.
“Think,” Patrice said. “They haven’t lost any ground. Tyler got his head blown off in order to infect Andrew and Jake. Maybe Nelson went into that lake because…”
The strain on Patrice’s face showed his effort. He was fighting himself to get the words out.
Leonard finished the idea.
“Because they knew that I would go in after and swallow enough lake water to transmit dissolved Nelson inside me.”
The fact that Patrice had to struggle to communicate the ideas suggested that he was onto something. The infection wouldn’t be fighting him if he wasn’t onto something.
“And your job…” Patrice said.
The picture popped into Leonard’s head fully formed.
Leonard pulled on his hat and his gloves. He forced his mouth into a smile and tried to appear completely casual. Beads of sweat were starting to form on Patrice’s head. He was fighting an invisible battle and Leonard tried to make no sign that he recognized it.
“You’re crazy,” Leonard said, widening his smile and shaking his head. “Crazy.”
Leonard bolted for the door. Patrice’s iron grip closed around the back of his jacket.
“Run,” Patrice said. His voice was strained with effort. “Get out, Len.”
The urgency in the order gave Leonard the drive to pull that much harder. The jacket tore and he pulled free. From the top of the stairs, Leonard saw both Marie and Andrew waiting for him at the bottom. He turned for the other bedroom instead. There was a small window at the far end. Outside, the world had the soft blue glow of snow at night. Footsteps pounded up the stairs. Leonard didn’t hesitate. He threw open the window and threaded himself through, feet first. Pushing off from the sill he kept his legs bent as he fell. It wasn’t too far to the ground, but it was impossible to tell what the terrain was beneath the snow. When his feet hit the snow, they slipped out from underneath him and he rolled over to his back, into a snow drift.
Leonard scrambled to his feet and looked up in time to see a dark shape coming through the window above.
Running, he heard tearing fabric and wrenching wood behind him. He didn’t slow at the sound of breaking glass.
To his left, the woods were darker. The pines and firs had sheltered the ground. It would be easier going and he wouldn’t leave any footprints. Leonard ducked as he headed for the trees, knowing that the low limbs would be impossible to see. Every time he plowed into a brittle branch, it made a loud crack before it gave way. Leonard got even lower, moving on hands and feet, practically feeling his way. Behind him, he could hear the searchers spreading out. They didn’t call to each other as they moved through the woods. He figured that they probably didn’t need to. Some parts, if not most, of Marie’s story must have been true. She and Andrew were communicating on a fundamental level. They shared a consciousness.
A horrible thought occurred to him. If their infection let them share information, and he had picked up some of Nelson in the water, then they might be listening in on his perceptions as well. It was clear that they weren’t yet controlling him. Maybe he didn’t have a big enough dose yet. Leonard closed his eyes, held his breath, and made himself perfectly still.
The sounds of pursuit stopped. He could almost sense their frustration. In order to find him, they needed him to run. Or, maybe they just needed him to be headed somewhere. As hard as he could, he pictured the road leading to Marie’s cabin. He pictured finding his way through the woods to that road and then backtracking all the way to Patrice’s truck.
He was so tired, practically running all day, that the trance came naturally. It felt like slipping into a dream. He remembered the smells and sights of walking the long road to Marie’s cabin and simply reversed them. It was so real that when he heard the sounds of his pursuers heading north towards the road, he almost imagined that he would see them in a moment, following him through the blue snow. Leonard stayed in the fantasy until none of their sounds reached his real ears.
He was alone in the dark patch of woods, west of Marie’s cabin.
Opening his eyes again, he realized how helpless he was. Running away, he had lost his sense of direction. Leonard had only the vaguest notion which direction the cabin was. Before he moved, he made a guess which direction that Marie and Andrew had gone. Leonard pointed himself the other way. He began to crawl.
He whispered, “Get control. Stay calm.”
* * * * * * *
(Leonard)
Before long, he found his way back to the edge of snow. Leonard walked the margin between the dark woods and the snow, finding a place where he didn’t have to duck in order to stay away from the brittle branches. As far as he could tell, he was veering to the west, and that was the wrong direction. His best guess told him that he needed to head due south to get back to Patrice’s cabin. It wasn’t safe there either, but he could stock up on food and weapons and then continue south. Not more than thirty minutes south of the cabin, he could catch up with Bartlett Road and then take the long way around to Dunn’s Corner.
His phone was long gone. He had left it behind when he changed clothes. But there should be other hunting parties down at Dunn’s Corner. With some luck, he would run into someone before long.
Leonard went a bit farther, putting more distance between himself and Marie’s cabin before he ventured out from the bare ground and walked through the snow again. Through the trees, he spotted the rising moon and headed towards it.
The tracks he found almost looked like a ribbon, cutting through the snow.
Leonard dropped to his knees at the edge of the tracks and took off his glove. When he felt the ridges in the snow, tears sprang to his eyes. It was a snowmobile tr
ail—probably the one that Nelson had left on his trip south. Dotted right down the center, he saw Marie’s footprints. Leonard forced himself back up to his feet. It would be too easy to collapse down in the snow with this discovery. Every muscle in his body demanded rest, but he had miles left to trudge through the night. And, it was more than possible that Marie and Andrew were onto him. They might be seeing these tracks through his eyes, and they would know precisely where he was headed.
Leonard swayed on his feet for a moment and then marched on. He dug deep to find the energy to propel himself forward.
For an unsettling moment, he wondered if the strength that kept his feet moving was really his own. Maybe he was tapping into reserves that the infection had given him. If that was true, maybe he wasn’t fully in control of himself anymore. Stumbling through the woods like a zombie, maybe he was being controlled by the fungus and his own consciousness was only a passenger inside the body that it used to inhabit. It made perfect sense to him. He was on autopilot and barely felt in control.
He had been out in the cold most of the day. If the infection needed cold to progress…
A horrible idea occurred to him—what if he wasn’t heading south? What if he was heading north, back to Marie’s cabin? The fungus had tricked him.
He checked the position of the moon again. He bent over to study the tracks. He couldn’t tell the direction of the snowmobile, but he was going in the same direction as the small footprints. Assuming they belonged to Marie, he had to be heading the right way.
He sighed and kept moving.
“That’s how they get you,” he whispered to himself. “They convince you that you’re the crazy one, and before you know it, you are.”
It struck him as funny.
Out here, in the middle of nowhere, he was completing the world’s dumbest circle. They had hiked west to the truck, gone north and east to Marie’s cabin, and now he was completing the cycle to get back to Patrice’s cabin. The only thing different this time was his outfit. He covered his mouth to stop from laughing. When he did, he remembered how Patrice had been unable to control his own hands. That thought took the levity right out of the situation.