The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [74]
“Holy shit, that’s hot,” John said, looking at the red splotches appearing on his shoulders and arms. “I hope this goes away.”
Carl smiled. “We’ll do that a couple more times and then wash up.”
“Wash up? Hey, I’m clean. I think I burned the dirt out that round,” John said as he dipped the ladle and handed Carl the first drink. Carl drank half and poured the other half on his head. His black hair glistened and steamed in the cool air.
“This is how we stay clean with no baths or showers. Steam for a while and then wash up. Not bad, eh?”
“It’s something, all right. Wow.” He felt light-headed.
“That was nothing. You should steam with me and my brothers. Probably melt your skin right off the bone.”
Carl cracked the door to the outside. The chilly night air rushed in, and John leaned back against the wall and sighed. The heat poured off his body and he felt relaxed, alive, rejuvenated, and tired all at the same time.
“Maybe next time your wife can meet you here when we’re done. That’s how most of our kids entered this world. Steam bath’s the best way. Best way for romance. You guys can’t have kids?”
“We’re still kids ourselves. Not yet.”
“Shoot. Here, most people your age got six or seven kids. You’re way behind. Ready?”
“It’s going to be hotter, isn’t it?”
Carl smiled and headed inside.
HE HAD BEEN pulling the girl in the sled for hours when she asked about Anna again. When he didn’t reply, she asked another question that made him even angrier.
“You said ‘I promise, I promise’ in your sleep last night. What did you promise her? Promises get people into trouble, you know?”
He was about to tell her to shut up, to never open her mouth again, when he spotted a thin snake of smoke rising from a plywood shack on the riverbank ahead of them, the roof of the smokehouse half covered by a green plastic tarp. He slowly sank to his knees and looked back to the girl on the sled.
“I smell the smoke,” she said.
“Just a little ways upriver. Looks like a fish camp.”
The girl closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and lifted her nose. She took a deep breath and her face shifted. She took another smell of the icy air and then shook her head.
“It’s not good,” she said. “The smoke. It’s … not a fire. They’re smoking meat.” Then she added, in a scared whisper, “Bad meat.”
Fear replaced his anger. He surveyed their choices. They could turn around and waste energy they didn’t have, or try to sneak past, below the fifteen-foot-high riverbank, just out of sight of the camp, and hope no one would see them. The problem with sneaking past was the tracks they would leave. One set of size-twelve boots pulling a heavy sled.
Either way, they would leave tracks, and either way he wouldn’t sleep knowing those tracks would lead from that smokehouse straight through the snow and right to their next camp. He wondered if the skier had somehow doubled back and was waiting for them.
He sat in the snow for a long time without saying anything. The girl held the rifle across her lap and he took it from her, put a round in the chamber, and handed it back to her. He pulled her behind the round shield of roots from a limbless spruce tree that had washed down from far upriver during the spring flooding.
“I’m going to have to go up there,” he said. “I want you to start counting to yourself slowly. When you get to two hundred, start screaming. Loud as you can. When you hear me shooting, quit screaming.”
She nodded.
“You’ll come back?”
“I’ll come back. Anyone else comes near, start shooting. You’ll know when it’s me.”
27
They had a hard time pulling the two sleds up the dozen steps that led to the heavy metal door of the fuel tank. The space beneath the platform that held the tank was wrapped in two layers of chain-link fencing with a gate locked shut by five or six heavy padlocks.
“Why he want you to put the guns in there?” the old woman asked as he closed the metal cabinet and began to lock it. He stopped, opened his jacket, and took out the Glock. He didn’t feel comfortable leaving the pistol, but he wasn’t about to betray the demands of