The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [82]
“Sorry,” she said.
“Sorry for snapping. Let’s sleep, okay?”
“Will you ever again?” she asked.
He turned away from her and took a small handful of snow, balled it up, and put in on his dry tongue.
The men back at the fish camp crawled to their feet.
Someone had relit the fire inside the smokehouse.
“Will you?” she asked.
They stumbled down the bank.
Axes and knives in hand.
“I was fifteen,” he said, “in a small little dome tent in a backyard in the summer. Her parents were at church. It was nothing special. I
don’t even remember her name.”
“I want it to be special,” she said.
“It will be,” he said, as he fought a vision of the four hungry corpses lurching through the dark toward their camp.
29
The figure on the screen staggered down the road toward Red’s shelter, drunk or sick, or both. Rayna and the old woman were still resting on the bed, and Red checked the clip in the assault rifle as well as the revolver John hadn’t noticed in a black nylon holster strapped to his skinny pale ankle. The bullet check seemed to be as much for show as anything, that or Red really needed to make sure he was ready for a firefight.
“Should just shoot the poor bastard to put him out of his misery,” Red said.
“Is he drunk?” John asked.
“I doubt it. My bet is that the only booze left within a thousand or so miles is right there in our glasses. He’s either delirious from hunger, or the bug. Or all three.”
“What’ll we do?”
“Nothing. There are people who have survived by any means necessary. The living dead, that’s what I’ve called ’em. I avoid them and if they give me any shit, I put them down. I would hope someone would do the same for me.”
John nodded. “The girl calls them outcasts,” he whispered. “A group of them we encountered were cannibals.”
“Like I said, any means necessary.”
John nodded his head in the direction of the sleeping girl. “She claims she can smell them,” he whispered.
“You know as well as I that you can see it in a person’s eyes. The eyes change when you kill a man, and they change again when your reasons for killing ain’t right.”
John leaned in closer to the screen. The person stopped, turned in circles, and then faced their direction.
“Does this camera zoom in?” John asked.
Red flipped a switch on the small control panel beside the screen and brought the image in closer. “It doesn’t zoom,” he said, “but it can pull the picture in digitally. How’s that?”
John put a hand over the top of the screen to block the reflection from the fluorescent above. He brought his face close to the screen. “Shit,” he said under his breath.
“You know him?” Red asked.
John nodded and swore to himself again and said, “I think he’s one of my students.”
The figure appeared skittish, less than human, almost feral. His movements were sharp and jerky. Was this one of them? One of the girl’s wild people? He glanced at her sleeping on the bed, and he knew he couldn’t stand there in the warmth and safety of Red’s shelter. He knew if he woke her she would beg John to do something magical, save him, perhaps spit on the boy or take one finger and gently push him down into the frozen tundra.
John pulled his parka on and from his pocket removed the key to the cabinet outside. “I’m going to have to get my pistol out,” John said, walking toward the door. He stopped and pointed the key at Red and then the girl. “If something happens to me, take care of the girl.”
THE WEEK AFTER Anna and John’s Slaviq celebrations, the remnant of a monstrous Japanese typhoon crawled its way north, into the Bering Sea, and slammed into the Aleutian Islands first and then the Yukon and Kuskokwim deltas with hurricane force, bringing record winds and snowfall.
They struggled through the three- and four-foot-high drifts to get to school only to find out that the District Office had called off classes, anticipating the blizzard would worsen.
John turned on the coffee pot in the main office and while it percolated, sat at the secretary