The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [7]
Countless months later he would enter that house and find the blind girl hiding beneath a mattress in a back bedroom.
3
The shot dropped the man mid-step. His body fell, splayed out on his side, his right foot in front of the left, his hand slipping from the side pocket of his jacket. Dirt and grease covered the exposed hand, and the black under his fingernails and around his lips had a look of either dried blood or gangrene. John wasn’t sure.
“What’s he look like?” the girl asked.
“Dead.”
“No, describe his face to me.”
“I’m not doing that,” he said, “not now. Someone might still be in there. We need to get inside and warm up.”
He started to follow the man’s tracks that led to the house. He watched for ski tracks and pulled her in the toboggan behind. He doubted the dead man had been alone and he wondered why the man left the house unarmed in the first place. She put her mittens down against the ground, and when he felt her resistance, he stopped pulling. She turned toward the dead man, her blind eyes staring out at him.
“Tell me just one thing.”
He stopped, not wanting to completely leave his back exposed to the house. To make sure no one was coming, he scanned the thin grey line of horizon surrounding them and then back toward the river ice at the edge of the village that stretched over a mile wide and ran north and south as far as he could see like some giant frozen highway.
“I want to know. I want to know if he’s my uncle,” she said.
“He’s not. Come on.”
“Does he have burns on his skin?” she asked. “Raised, thick? On his neck? Here?”
She slid the brown beaver fur mitten to the left side of her face and down her own neck. He dropped the sled rope and walked around her to the dead man, nudged him over with his boot, and tilted his head so he could see the brown skin of the neck. A thin string of half-frozen blood ran from the side of the man’s mouth, down his collar, and into the snow where it pooled in icy red clumps.
“Not him,” he said.
“Would you lie? I don’t want you to lie to me. I don’t care if it’s him. He used to live in our village. Our village council kicked him out because of something he did and he had to move here. It’s okay if it’s him. I won’t cry. Is it?”
“It’s not,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s not him.”
“This man smells like him, though—like one of them, but like my uncle, too,” she said. “The outcasts smell different. Not a bad smell, just different. Wrong. Like a flower that’s rotting. Sweet, but not a smell you want around you,” she said and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “That smell comes through their skin, like stinky alcoholic drunks. They can’t hide what they’ve done. It’s in their pores.”
He couldn’t smell the hunger, not like the girl could, but he imagined he would be able to see it in the lifeless holes they used as eyes. Their teeth wolf-sharp, their hungry mouths slowly taking over their faces.
Or maybe it was what someone couldn’t see. He imagined a person lost some little part of their soul when they consumed another. But he hadn’t looked into a mirror, so he could only imagine what his own brown eyes looked like.
THE JET FLIGHT from Anchorage, “from civilization,” Anna joked, revealed to both of them right away that the world they were headed to was different. They left from the farthest end of the terminal four hours after the scheduled departure, walked out on the tarmac with the other passengers, who were carrying boxes of diapers, bags of fruit, paper sacks of fast-food cheeseburgers and fries, video game consoles, stacks of DVDs, and cartons of eggs. The route to the aircraft consisted of a walk down the jetway, down a flight of stairs, and then out on the tarmac, around the wing of the jet, and then up a tall, narrow rolling staircase near the jet’s tail.
“This is something, isn’t it?” Anna said. “You can take the window. Can’t say I’ve flown on a full-size jet with only a dozen rows of seats. You?”
He pushed his backpack