“We will. By a third.”
The meeting goes on for another thirty minutes until they adjourn. Thomas was the last to arrive but is the first to leave. On his way out the door, Packer puts a hand on his shoulder and he flinches away from her.
“Are you all right?” she says.
“Of course I’m all right.”
“Your ear?”
He touches it and examines his hand. “That’s nothing.” The glue dirties his fingers. “Just a cancer I had cut away.”
His eyes then follow Pimpton as the old man shuffles from the room and down a long hallway that will lead him to the entry that opens into the unforgiving white light.
Chapter 15
THEY DON’T WANT to waste their bullets, so they hunt with arrows. The quiver rattles at Clark’s back when she sneaks along the game trail, a thin strip of dirt polished down by hooves. She pauses often. To run her hand along the trunk of a birch tree and peel away a strip of its papery bark. To study the starburst of a white flower. To listen to the river bubbling. To watch a bird flit among the reeds crowding the banks. Everything is new. She feels as if she has stepped into one of those books read to her as a child—through the wardrobe, down the rabbit hole, up the twister—a portal that leads to the fantastic. It makes her feel giddy, girlish.
Last night they stripped off their clothes and bathed in the river. Though it was only calf high, they laid down flat in the water and let it pour over their bodies. They spread their arms and legs and twirled like pale stars. They dunked their heads and spit bubbles. They splashed at each other and scrubbed their skin with sand and shot arcs of water from their mouths. When she sat up and looked downstream, she could see the water had grown cloudy with the sweat and grime washing off them. The water softened her, melted her, like hard-packed dirt exposed finally to rain. Her clothes are still damp. They stick to her when she moves. It is an unfamiliar feeling, like a tongue touching her all over, and she likes it.
Her brother follows a few paces behind her. They come upon a clearing spotted with coneflowers and waist-high bunches of big bluestem, and in a crouch they wait near the water’s edge. At one point she hears her brother’s mouth open, forming a question, and she gives him a wilting stare. “Shh,” she says. After a time her legs go numb and her vision wavers—and then a deer untangles itself from the forest. A doe. Maybe twenty yards from them. The big pouches of its ears twitch. Its damp black nose tests the air. Then it lowers its head to eat. This deer is nothing like the ones she occasionally kills near the Sanctuary, their growth stunted and their bones showing sharply through their mangy hides. She can see its muscles jump with every small step it takes and imagines them peeled from the bone and spitted over the fire, dripping fat into the flames.
She notches an arrow, but before she can rise from her crouch and take aim, she hears the snap of string, the shriek of a broadhead cutting the air. York. There is a sound like a fist smacking a palm. The deer jackknifes and falls and stumbles upright again. It starts toward them, then rears back and darts into the woods. Its back leg drags. An arrow spikes from its hip.
They listen to it crashing off into the distance. Then she turns to York. His face is too long and too thin, and his chin juts at an angle, as if someone stepped on his head when he was a soft-skulled baby. No one has shaved since they left the Sanctuary—their water too precious—and his upper lip is wisped by a mustache and his sideburns have extended into a failure of a beard. He is grinning. She is not.
“I got him!”
“You got her.”
“Exactly.”
“Whether we’ll ever find her is another story.”
He flinches when she starts toward him. She marks out an invisible square on his chest. “Kill zone,” she says and then stabs a finger between his ribs.
“But it was still a pretty good shot, right?”
“It wasn’t terrible.”
They follow the blood trail for a half mile. A puddle among the pine needles. A smear along a tree trunk. What looks like a poisonous spattering of red berries on a bush. Occasionally the grass crushes down where the deer rests. She tells her brother he must have hit something vital.
Far enough from the river, the world dries up again. The grass yellows. The trees lose their leaves. Dust rises with every step and seems to give off its own light and heat when they breathe it into their lungs. They step out of the trees and onto what was once a driveway. Weeds have pushed their way through the fractured asphalt that runs up a hill to a three-story Victorian perched atop a rise. Its siding is gray, the paint long ago flaked away. A section of its peaked roof has collapsed. The wraparound porch is sunken and shot through with grass. The balusters, split or missing altogether, make the railing appear like a rotten mouth.
They find the deer halfway up the porch, laid out like a sacrifice. The front door is missing altogether. The surrounding trim is splintered away as if clawed apart. Her eyes stay on the door, the black rectangle of it, a space that swallows all light. So she does not notice—not until York says, “What is that?”—the white ball bulging from the deer’s flank.
At first she believes it to be a swollen strip of intestine that has somehow escaped the gash. But it is not. It is moving, pulsing, tumorous. Tiny claws hold it in place near the arrow’s shaft. There is the faint noise of sucking, lapping.
Too late, she says, “Don’t touch it.”