The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [23]
He looked up from the bottle and realized he’d been oblivious to the old Yup’ik man standing beside him, the grocery cart nearly shoulder-height to the man. The man wore a green flannel shirt, aviator sunglasses, a faded blue baseball cap with ARCTIC AIR printed in white on it, and jeans tucked into black rubber boots.
“Yeah. I’m John. John Morgan.”
The old man took his hand and gave it a single quick shake.
“Charlie,” he said. “I was at the cultural centre today, same as you.”
“The in-service?” John asked.
The old man raised his eyebrows. A non-verbal, he’d just learned, used as an affirmative answer.
“That woman who asked about famine ever happening here—she your wife?”
“She is. She was just wondering how food gets to villages. She didn’t mean anything by it. She’s just inquisitive.”
“Long time ago we had no food. Me, I was just barely old enough to walk, but I remember my stomach burning real bad. I remember we had only old dry berries and rotten old salmon with mould on it. The elders said it was punishment, that we were starving because we left the old ways behind.”
He waved his arm around at the store and then hefted the red plastic AC Value basket in his hand. In it, a blue box of Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, a can of hickory-smoked Spam, and a Weekly World News.
“Nowadays,” he continued, “maybe I’m almost an elder and maybe I think this way’s leaving us behind. They teach you what the word Yup’ik used to means?”
John shook his head. “No, not yet,” he said.
“Maybe they’ll learn you someday. Good luck out there, John.”
The old man gave a slight nod of goodbye and disappeared down the aisle, his red plastic basket swinging at his side.
SINCE HE’D DISCOVERED the girl his dreams were unlike any he’d ever had before. Not the normal dreams of daily life, of interactions with other teachers and students, not scenes from his youth, and not of Anna.
Instead, his dreams contained the atmosphere and darkness of a world without light. A combination of some horrific vision of what might be happening to the outside world, filled with the creatures and images from the girl’s stories of the ancient Yup’ik world.
He would find himself enveloped in a stark, bleak, lifeless void. He would walk down empty black streets in desolate and dingy towns. Sometimes towns he’d travelled to, sometimes just generic towns from books he’d read or films he’d watched. In all the dreams he walked. Just looking, listening, searching for life, sometimes looking for a letter from his grandfather that would explain everything.
And sometimes there were signs of struggle. Blood. Smeared tracks and tiny handprints. A small creature, half-human, crawled about in the shadows, devouring survivors before he could find anything more than a crimson trace.
Not in a single dream did he walk down along one of the frozen paths between the village houses, carrying his rifle, afraid of the life he might find. The dreams seemed to have nothing to do with him now, except for the desolation and that heavy feeling that the world was as empty and soulless as those small towns. He expected to encounter any one of her monsters or the blue-eyed gunslinger he’d dreamt of before, but perhaps even they were dead.
The dreams differed only in how they ended—with each dream stopping so abruptly it would rip him from his sleep. Heart contracting in his chest. Fists clenched. The grit of freshly ground bits of molars and incisors sticking to his dry tongue. And each time the girl would whisper, “It’s okay. Don’t cry. It’s okay, John.”
9
He pulled the pistol out and held it out in front of him as he moved along the hall, past the display cases full of basketball and wrestling trophies. No broken glass.
The building, aside from having no lights or heat, looked as though school let out for the day, the janitors vacuumed the blue hallway carpet and shut the doors. Of all the burned and wasted buildings he’d been in, he’d seen nothing so normal. He hadn’t been in a school building, village store, house, or fish camp that hadn’t been picked clean.
He peeked into the