The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [48]
He waited until she crawled into her bag before scanning the horizon one last time. They were easy targets out in the open and with a tarp covering them, constantly rustling; they would never hear an enemy’s boots crunching in the snow.
He secured the covering and removed his boots. He held his hands on his toes and tried to warm them. The girl was already feeling the strands of grass, the way she always did to find her starting point. He watched her until her fingers stopped and she sat up on her elbow with her body turned toward him.
“Some of my memories of what people look like are gone,” she said. “Now, for most of them, I only remember what they sounded like, or how they smelled. I hope your memories of her aren’t bad ones.”
“They aren’t,” he said, stretching out on his back and pulling the top of the sleeping bag up over his shoulders.
He didn’t want to remember Anna like that. So pale, so wasted, so far beyond the vibrant, healthy woman she had been. Her cheeks sunken, the skin stretched across her cheekbones, her lips dried, cracked, bleeding. Her eyes vacant, drying, helpless, with the life all but gone.
Even when he tried to imagine her before the sickness, he would see that face. The sick face. The face that begged for help, for him to do something. Those eyes that might have even questioned why it wasn’t him. Why he wasn’t sick, too. Why he couldn’t do anything to help her.
The image of those final days stained his most cherished memories of her. She didn’t wear a veil at their wedding. That was too old-fashioned for her, but if she had, in his dreams he would have lifted the thin white fabric to find the ghost who had been his wife.
“Describe her to me,” the girl said as she began weaving and braiding her strands of grass.
She was beautiful, he wanted to say.
17
“I want to go back in the gym,” the girl whispered after the old woman appeared to be sleeping.
“We have as much food as we can carry,” he said.
She propped herself up on her elbow, facing him. “No. I want to see if they are there.”
“Who?”
“My cousins.”
“They are there. Everyone was in there. Now get some rest.” He rolled over on his back, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep. In the darkness of his closed lids he saw the beam from the flashlight moving over the dead in the gymnasium and what he didn’t see made him sit up with a lurch. On his hands and knees, he clawed his way to the door and heaved. The chewed chicken pieces and broth splattered against the plywood floor of the entry. His dinner wasted. He stayed on his knees, gasping at the cold air rushing past him into the house.
“What’s wrong?” the girl asked, standing over him. She ran a hand over the top of his matted hair. “What is it?” she asked.
“I told you stealing that food make you sick,” the old woman said from across the room. “The spirits gonna haunt you until you take it back.”
“It’s not the food,” he gasped as he fought another heave.
He could see the notebook sitting on the desk in the office. The three words, For the children, scrawled in black ink. “The kids,” he said to the girl. “You were right. I think I saw only one boy, maybe a couple of others. The rest were adults.”
“Shoulda been mostly kids in there,” the old woman said, sitting up. “You sure you seen only a few little ones?”
John crawled back to his bag. He was shivering and instantly hungry again. The bile burned at his throat, and when he spoke again his voice was raspy.
“Mostly adults.”
“Are the kids anywhere else in the school?” the girl asked.
“No,” John said.
“Maybe they still alive somewhere,” the old woman said, adding, “Even if they run away and become qimakalleq, you two gotta go find them.”
HIS STUDENTS WERE on to Columbus and they weren’t happy. He’d pulled an old Howard Zinn essay from a website, one that used excerpts from