The Wrath of Angels

46





Wolfe’s Folly was silent as night fell, and the only movement came from the shifting of the shadows thrown by the trees upon it, or so it appeared until one small shadow separated itself from the rest, moving against the direction of the wind. The crow circled, cawing hoarsely, then resumed its perch with its brethren.

The passenger had no memory of his original name, and little understanding of his own nature. The plane crash, which he had caused by breaking the arms of his seat, freeing him to attack the pilot and co-pilot, had left him with significant injuries to the brain. He had lost the capacity of speech, and he was in constant pain. He retained virtually nothing of his past beyond fragments: scattered recollections of being hunted, and an awareness of the necessity of hiding himself, instincts that he had continued to follow ever since the crash.

And he remembered, too, that he was very good at killing, and killing was his purpose. The co-pilot did not survive the crash, but the pilot did, and the passenger had stared at his face, and one of those shards of memory had glittered in the darkness. This man had hunted him, and therefore the pain in the passenger’s head was his fault.

The passenger had pushed his thumbs into the pilot’s eyes and kept pushing until the man ceased moving.

He stayed in the wreckage for a number of days, feeding on the candy bars and potato chips that he found in the co-pilot’s bag, and drinking bottled water. The pain in his head was so terrible that he would black out for hours. Some of his ribs were broken, and they hurt whenever he moved. His right ankle would not support his weight at first, but in time it healed, although imperfectly, so that he now walked with a slight limp.

The bodies in the plane began to stink. He pulled them from the wreckage and dumped them in the woods, but he could still smell them. He used a broken panel from the plane as a spade and dug a shallow pit in which to bury them. When the snacks from the plane ran out, he salvaged what he could, including the emergency kit and a gun that he found among the pilot’s possessions, and started exploring the wilderness, which was how he came upon the fort. He built a temporary shelter for himself inside its walls, and he tried to sleep, even as the girl prowled the woods beyond.

He thought that he might have seen her on the first night after the crash, although he could not be sure. There was a face at the cockpit window, and he might have heard a scratching upon the glass, but he was unconscious more often than he was conscious, and his waking hours were spent in a kind of delirium. The presence of the girl was just another splinter in that cloud of memories, as though his whole life had been part of an intricate painting on a glass wall, and that wall had just exploded.

It was only later, when he began to recover his strength, that he recognized the reality of her existence. He watched her at night as she circled the plane, and he thought that he felt her anger and her desire. His senses were troubled by it just as they had been bothered by the stench of the pilots. Rage was her spoor.

She grew bolder: he woke on the third night to find her inside the plane, standing so close to him that he could see the bloodless scrapes on her white skin. She did not speak. She merely stared at him for a single, long minute, trying to understand him even though he did not understand himself, and then he blinked and she was gone.

That was when he decided to leave the plane. He still could not walk far on his wounded ankle, and when the fort had presented itself to him he had been grateful for it, more so when he found that the girl would not cross its threshold. There he grew stronger. He hunted during the day, while the girl hid herself away. At first he wasted his shots on squirrel and hare until his hunter’s instincts led him to a young doe. It took two shots to kill it, and he field-dressed it with the knife from the emergency kit. He ate what he could, and cut the rest into strips to dry; to keep pests away, he covered them with fabric ripped from the seats of the plane, and the deer skin helped to keep him warm as the winter drew in.

In the quiet of the fort, the Buried God began to call to him.

He heard its voice imperfectly, but it was familiar to him. It came to him the way music might come to one who had been struck deaf but retained enough of his hearing to discern muffled chords and rhythms. The Buried God wanted to be released, but the passenger could not find him. He had tried, but the voice was coming from too far away, and he could not understand its words. Sometimes, though, he would stare into the depths of the still, dark pool near to which the plane had come to rest, and he would wonder if the Buried God might not be down there. Once, he reached into it, sinking his forearm up to the elbow, straining his fingers in the hope that his hand might be grasped by whatever waited below. The water was frighteningly cold, so cold that it felt like a burning, but he kept his arm submerged until he could stand it no longer. When he withdrew it, the water dripped slowly from his fingers like oil, and he gazed in disappointment at his numb, empty hand.

He began paying homage to the Buried God. He dug up the bodies in the forest and removed the heads, along with some of the major bones from the arms and legs. It was the beginning of the shrine’s creation, the altar of worship to an entity he could not name but whom he understood to be his god. He created impressions of false deities from his fractured memory, carving them from wood with a knife, and he mutilated them in the name of the other.

He was still weak, too weak to explore farther, or seek civilization. He should have died that winter, but he did not. He even wondered if he could die. The Buried God told him that he could not. When spring came, the passenger began to explore his domain farther. He found an old cabin, its walls built from thick logs, but its door long gone and its roof collapsed. He began to restore it.

In March, a man came into his territory: a young hiker, unarmed. The passenger killed him with a spear that he had made, and waited for others to come looking for him, but no one did. He scavenged all that was useful from the man’s pack, and a wallet with $320 in cash, although there was still a great deal of money in the plane, along with a satchel of papers that made no sense to him.

Two weeks later, he made his first, careful sortie back to civilization, his damaged skull hidden beneath the dead hiker’s cap. He bought food, and salt, and some tools, and ammunition for his pistol, all by pointing at the items that he wanted. He looked at a rifle, but he had no identification. He settled instead for a used hunting bow, and as many arrows as he could afford. He could have found a way to lose himself once again in a city or a town, but he was afraid that his appearance might draw attention. He also knew that he was damaged, and managing anything beyond the simplest of social tasks was beyond him. He was happier in the woods. He was safe there, safe with the Buried God, and perhaps, as he grew stronger, he might find the Buried God, and free him. He could not do that from a city.

And so he hid himself in the woods, and prayed to the Buried God, and tried to limit all human contact. He became adept at avoiding the men from the paper companies, and the wardens. The passenger killed another hiker the following year, but only because the hiker came to the fort and found the shrine nearby. Such trespasses were rare, because there was something about the fort that kept people away, or else most knowledge of it had been lost. Similarly, the cabin had lain undisturbed for decades before the passenger found it: because the ground had been cleared to build it, second-growth foliage had sprung up around it, so the dwelling remained virtually invisible.

Only once had he felt truly threatened. He had gone to the plane to replenish his supplies of cash, for he had to prepare for another winter. He had entered the plane through the canvas hatch at the back, noting once again how far the fuselage had sunk. It might take years, but eventually the plane would be lost entirely. He pulled back a piece of rotting carpet and lifted the panel that it concealed in order to retrieve the money.

He was just about to reach into the bag when he was struck by a blinding flash of white pain, as though a shard of metal had been forced through his right ear and into his brain. They came on him with increasing frequency, these attacks, but this was the worst yet. His body went into seizure, and he spasmed so hard that he broke two teeth on his lower row. The cabin of the plane began to close in on him, and he experienced a terrible sense of falling and burning. Then the world went black, and when he opened his eyes again he had somehow crawled from the plane, and the girl was nearby, circling him but drawing closer. She was angry at the passenger for taking the hiker when she had wanted him for herself. He had to get away from her, but his sense of direction was distorted. He reached for his gun, but it was gone, and he suspected that the girl had taken it. She hated the gun. Its noise troubled her, and she seemed to know that it was important to him, that without it he would be more vulnerable. He was forced to keep the girl at bay with stones until, through sheer luck, he managed to struggle back to his cabin, for in his confused, agonized state he was unable to find the fort. There he barred the door against her, and he listened from his pallet bed as she scratched at the wood, trying to force her way inside.

When at last he was strong enough to leave, he found that the door was scarred by the girl’s efforts, and he dug one of her old, twisted fingernails from the exposed white wood. He returned to the plane, and discovered the remains of a fire, and he saw that the interior had been disturbed. The money was gone, although he had retained enough good sense to separate it into three piles, keeping some of it at the cabin and some buried in plastic behind the fort. But it was not the money that concerned him so much as the intrusion, and the imminent risk of discovery.

He stripped the cabin and the fort of his possessions, wrapped them in plastic, and buried them. He hid the shrine beneath a screen of leaves and twigs and moss that he had constructed for just such an eventuality, then retreated many miles to the north where he had built himself a hide. After a month he risked returning to his cabin, and discovered to his surprise that the site was as it had been, and nobody had come to find the plane. He could not understand why, but he was thankful. In the wilderness, he continued his solitary worship, and his solitary search. He subsumed his pleasure in killing because he knew that, if indulged, it would eventually draw people to him.

Until that week, when he had taken the two hikers, and offered up the woman’s remains to the Buried God.

That was why he had returned to the fort, at least for a while. The girl always grew angry when he killed, and it would take days for her temper to subside. Just as with the hiker long before, she was angry because she had wanted the couple for herself. She wanted company. By killing those who strayed into her territory, the passenger deprived her of it, and the uneasy truce that existed between them was threatened. On those occasions, the passenger would take refuge in his cabin or, more often, in the fort, and from its safety he would watch the enraged girl stalking outside its walls, casting her whispered threats to the wind. Then the girl would disappear, and he would see no trace of her for weeks.

At those times, the passenger believed that she might be sulking.

So the passenger left the girl to her fury. He climbed into his sleeping bag in the fort and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come. The Buried God’s voice had grown louder recently, desperate to communicate something to him, but the passenger could not interpret the message, and so the frustration of both grew. The passenger wished that the Buried God would be silent. He wanted peace. He wanted to reflect upon the man and the woman he had killed. He had enjoyed taking their lives, the woman’s in particular. He had forgotten the pleasure that it brought.

He wanted to kill another, and soon.





47





Harlan Vetters and Paul Scollay had headed out on their fateful hunting trip in the afternoon, but it didn’t seem like a good idea for us to follow suit: the plane would be difficult enough to find in daylight, and flashlights would mark our position and progress just as surely as the noise of ATVs. Neither did it seem smart to leave at or before dawn, as the likelihood of encountering hunters was greater. I decided that we would leave shortly before ten a.m., which would give us a clear five or six hours of good light before the sun began to set, by which time we would, with luck, have found the plane, obtained the list, and be on our way back to Falls End without incident.

‘With luck,’ said Louis, without enthusiasm.

‘We never have luck,’ said Angel.

‘Which is why we always need guns,’ said Louis.

We were staying at a motel five miles south of Falls End. Next door was a diner that sold only seven types of bottled beer: Bud, Miller and Coors; Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light; and Heineken.

We were drinking Heineken.

Jackie Garner was back in his room, trying to explain to his mother why he was not joining her for their weekly movie night, especially as she and Lisa, Jackie’s girlfriend, had rented Fifty First Dates for him because they knew how much he liked Drew Barrymore. Jackie, who neither liked nor disliked Drew Barrymore, and had no idea how this neutral position had been transformed into something close to an obsession, had no satisfactory answer to give other than that a job was a job. He had told me earlier that his mother had seemed more like her normal self these past few days, which meant that she was just inordinately possessive of her only son. But it was also the case that Jackie’s mother, who had previously regarded Jackie’s girlfriend as a rival for her son’s affections, had softened her position over the past year. Having clearly noticed that the relationship between her son and Lisa was not about to fall apart any time soon, despite her best efforts, Mrs Garner had decided it was better to have her as an ally than an enemy, and Lisa had come to the same conclusion. The onset of Mrs Garner’s final illness now lent both a poignancy and convenience to this relationship.

The diner was full, and a lot of the conversation revolved around events in Falls End. There appeared to be no change in the condition of Marielle and Grady Vetters. By contrast, judging by the talk in the diner, the focus of the investigation into the deaths of Teddy Gattle and Ernie Scollay had rapidly altered, and Grady Vetters was no longer being treated as a suspect.

‘They got injected with somethin’, is what I heard,’ a big, bearded man had told me in the restroom just minutes earlier. He was swaying as he stood at the urinal, so he resorted to leaning his head against the wall to keep himself steady while he peed.

‘Who did?’

‘Marielle and Grady,’ said the man. ‘Somebody stuck a needle in ’em.’

‘How’d you hear this?’

‘My brother-in-law is a sheriff’s deputy.’ He belched hard. ‘No way Grady injected himself, so he’s no killer. I could have told them that. Anyone in town could have. You here to hunt?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Need a guide?’

‘Got one, thanks.’

If he heard me, he decided to ignore what I said. He fumbled in his pocket with his right hand while continuing to aim with his left, and produced a business card for Wessel’s Guide Service. Everybody seemed to be a guide in these parts.

‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘Greg Wessel. You can call anytime.’

‘I’ll remember.’

‘I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Parker.’

‘I won’t shake your hand.’

‘I appreciate that. You hear anything about the men who were killed? The folk on the news didn’t seem to know any more than I do, and I don’t know anything at all.’

‘Ernie Scollay and Teddy Gattle,’ said Wessel. ‘Brother-in-law says Teddy had track marks on his arm too, and Teddy was a pothead. Potheads don’t use needles. Old Ernie just took two in the back. What kind of f*cking coward shoots an old man in the back, huh?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You ask a lot of questions,’ said Wessel. It was a comment, and I heard no belligerence or suspicion in it. ‘You a reporter?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m just here to hunt and, you know, this kind of thing makes a man concerned for his safety.’

‘Well, you got guns, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you know how to use them?’

‘Kind of.’

‘Then you got nothing to worry about.’

He finished peeing, and waited his turn while I washed my hands.

‘Don’t forget,’ he said. ‘Wessel’s Guide and Taxidermy. I’ll be sober before dawn. Guaranteed.’

Now, back at the table, the waitress brought three burgers for Angel, Louis and me. They were not big. Around them were scattered a dozen very thin, very brown fries, like the detritus of a destroyed bird’s nest. Angel poked at his burger. It oozed a thin trickle of grease.

‘Did we order sliders to share?’ he asked.

The waitress returned to fill up our water.

‘You need anything else?’ she asked.

‘More food would be a start,’ said Angel. ‘Any food.’

‘It’s burger night,’ said the waitress. Her hair was very red. So were her lips, her cheeks, and her uniform. If it hadn’t been November, and the heart-shaped tattoo on her right forearm had not read ‘Muffy’s Bitch’, she might have seemed festive.

‘What’s so special about burger night?’ asked Angel.

The waitress pointed to a hand-lettered sign behind the register. It read ‘Burger Night, Wenedsday! $3 burger and fries!’

‘Burger night,’ she said. ‘Wednesday.’

‘It’s just that the burgers are kind of small,’ said Angel.

‘That’s why they’re three bucks,’ said the waitress.

‘Right,’ said Angel. ‘You know, you spelled “Wednesday” wrong.’

‘You know, I didn’t spell it at all.’

‘Right,’ said Angel again. ‘Who’s Muffy?’

‘Ex-boyfriend.’

‘He ask you to get that done?’

‘No, got it done myself, after we broke up.’

‘After you broke up?’

‘To remind myself that I was once Muffy’s bitch, and not to let it happen again.’

‘Right,’ said Angel, for the third time.

‘You got any more questions?’

‘Too many.’

The waitress patted Angel on the arm. ‘Well, you hold onto them. I get you boys another round of beers?’

The diner’s front door opened, and Jackie Garner walked in.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘And one extra for our friend who’s just come in.’

‘You think he’ll want to eat?’ asked the waitress. ‘Kitchen’s closing in five.’

‘He can share ours,’ said Angel. ‘There’ll be leftovers.’

Jackie didn’t want to eat, and was happy just to sip a beer. The kitchen closed, and gradually the crowd began to thin out, but nobody tried to hurry us along. We clinked our bottles, and toasted to luck, but Angel was right: luck rarely seemed to come our way.

Which was, indeed, why we had guns.

Across the road from the motel and diner stood an abandoned gas station-cum-general store, the pumps long since gone and the windows and front door of the store itself imperfectly boarded up. The back door had disappeared entirely, but the single piece of wood that had failed to deny access to it still remained, although unsecured, providing the illusion of closure.

Scattered inside were empty beer cans and bottles, a box of cheap wine that was still half full, and the odd used rubber. In one corner was a rat’s nest of blankets and towels, damp and moldy from the rain that had poured through the hole in the roof above, a consequence of a small fire that had also blackened the walls and left a smell of burning.

A firefly glow appeared in the darkness, its illumination growing quickly until it was entirely consumed by flame. The Collector put the match to his cigarette and stepped closer to the window. The lengths of wood used to block them were imperfectly nailed in place, and he could clearly see through them the four men drinking in the diner.

The Collector was torn. He was not used to experiencing anger or the desire for vengeance. Those whom he hunted had not sinned against him, and the pleasure that he took in removing them from the world was general, not personal. This was different. Someone close to him had been killed, and another injured. The most recent conversation with Eldritch’s physician had revealed that he was not recovering as quickly as might have been expected, even for a man of his advanced years, and his stay in hospital was likely to be extended. The physician suggested that the effects of shock and grief were greater threats than his physical wounds, but Eldritch had rejected offers of counseling or the attentions of a psychologist, and when the subject of a priest or pastor had been raised the patient had laughed for the first and only time since his admission.

Kill them. Kill them all.

But they were dangerous, and not only because they were armed. They knew of the Collector, and understood the threat that he posed. He had relearned a painful but valuable lesson from Becky Phipps about confronting someone who was anticipating an attack. He preferred to prey on the unarmed and unwary. He supposed that this might be regarded as cowardice in some quarters, but he saw it simply in terms of practicality. There was no reason to make his task any more difficult than it had to be and, when required, he was prepared to fight for his trophy, just as he had done with Phipps.

Bu he also wanted the rest of the list, and these men could lead him to it. He didn’t know where the Flores woman was hiding, and he could only hope that she had not already found the plane. If she had located it and secured her prize, he would have to hunt her down, and that would be time-consuming, and difficult. No, ideally these four men would do his work for him, and he would start killing after.

He watched them finish their drinks and leave the restaurant. They walked to their rooms in two pairs, Parker and Garner in front, the others behind. The Collector’s right hand slipped beneath his coat and found the hilt of a knife. He rested his fingers on it but did not draw it from its sheath. Beside it was his gun, fully loaded.

Three rooms, four men. It was risky, but not beyond his capabilities.

Kill them all.

But the list, the list . . .





48





The first sign that luck might not be going our way came when I woke up and went out to get coffee. In the parking lot was a shiny white SUV, obviously a rental, and leaning against it, already drinking a coffee of her own, was Liat. She was wearing a parka over beige canvas combat pants and a green sweater. The ends of her pants were tucked into rubber-soled boots.

‘I guess you missed me,’ I said.

One corner of her mouth curled up in very slight amusement.

‘You didn’t want to come in?’

She shook her head.

‘Did Epstein send you?’

Nod.

‘Doesn’t he trust us to bring him the list?’

Shrug.

The door to Angel and Louis’s room opened, and Louis appeared. He was already dressed for the woods, but he still managed to make cargo pants look good.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked. ‘She looks familiar.’

‘This is Liat.’

‘Liat,’ said Louis. ‘That Liat.’

‘The same.’

‘Well, I only saw her from a distance, and not from the same angles that you did. She miss you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then why is she here?’

‘To bring the list back to Epstein.’

‘She’s coming with us?’

‘You could try to stop her, but you’d probably have to shoot her.’

Louis considered the possibility, then seemed to discount it.

‘You planning on inviting any more ex-girlfriends along? Just asking.’

‘No.’

‘Well, long as it’s just her . . .’

Angel joined Louis. He was also dressed for the woods, and still managed to make cargo pants look bad.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked.

Spare me, I thought.

‘Liat,’ said Louis.

‘That Liat?’

‘Yep, that Liat.’

‘At least we know she exists,’ said Angel. ‘All I saw was a shape in the distance.’

‘You think he made her up?’ asked Louis.

‘It seemed more likely than him actually being with a woman.’

Liat, who had been following the conversation with her eyes, blushed.

‘Nice,’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ said Angel. He smiled at Liat. ‘But, you know, it’s true.’

Another door opened, and Jackie Garner emerged. He squinted at Liat.

‘Who’s this?’

‘Liat,’ said Angel.

Jackie looked confused, as well he might have done.

‘Who’s Liat?’

It was just after eight. Ray Wray was drinking coffee, eating a protein bar, and, after the events of the night before, wishing he was back in jail.

He and Joe had bedded down in bags on the floor of the cabin, on the other side of the sheet from the boy and his mother, but only Joe had managed to get any real rest. Ray had drifted in and out of sleep, and at some point in the night he had woken to see the boy standing at one of the windows, touching his fingers to the glass, his lips moving soundlessly. His reflection hung like a moon against the night sky, the true moon suspended above it like a second face. Ray had been afraid to move, and kept his breathing regular so that the boy would not suspect he was being watched. After perhaps fifteen minutes, the boy prepared to return to his bed, but he paused at the sheet that divided the room and looked back at Ray. Ray closed his eyes. He heard the padding of the boy’s feet as he crossed the room, and then felt his breath on his skin. He smelled it too. It smelled bad. The boy’s face was so close to his own that Ray could feel the warmth of it. He forced himself not to pull away, and not to open his eyes, even as he told himself that this was only a kid, and Ray should just tell him to get his ass back to bed where it belonged. But he did not, because the boy frightened him. He frightened him more than his mother, if that’s what she was, with her ruined face and that dead eye embedded in it like a bubble of fat on barely cooked meat. Ray willed him to go away. He’d been so careful, but somehow the boy knew that he was awake.

Just a kid, thought Ray, just a kid. So what if I was awake? What’s he going to do to me: pull my hair, tell his mom?

The answer came to him without hesitation.

Something bad, that’s what he’ll do. The feel of the boy’s breath shifted. It was on his lips now, as though he were leaning in for a kiss. Ray could taste him in his mouth. He wanted to turn over so badly, except he didn’t want his back to the kid. That would be worse than facing him.

The boy moved away. Ray heard the sound of his footsteps as he made his way back to his bed. Ray risked opening his eyes.

The boy was walking backwards, his back to the sheet, so that he could keep watching Ray. The boy grinned when he saw that Ray’s eyes were open. He had won, and Ray had lost. He raised his left hand and wagged a finger at Ray.

Ray was tempted to get up and run from the cabin. If there was a forfeit to this game, he didn’t want to find out what it was. But the boy just pushed aside the sheet, and Ray heard him climb into the bed behind, and then all was still.

Ray looked at the window. The moon was no longer visible.

That was when Ray realized that there was no moon that night, and he had not closed his eyes again until morning.

Angel, Louis and I rode in Jackie’s truck. Liat followed behind in her rental. It was a private road, but one routinely used by locals and hunters. Still, Jackie had secured all the necessary permits, just in case, so we were right with the paper company, the warden service, and probably God Himself.

‘You didn’t want to ride with your girlfriend?’ asked Angel from the back.

‘I think she was just using me.’

‘Right,’ said Angel. He allowed a perfectly timed pause, then said, ‘For what?’

‘Funny,’ I replied, although there was an uncomfortable truth behind Angel’s joke.

We passed a couple of trucks and old cars parked by the side of the road: hunters, the ones who had set out before dawn and would return to town by early afternoon if they’d shot anything. Most hunters liked to stay close to a road, and within five miles of Falls End there were a lot of edges where deer came to feed. There was no reason to go very far into the woods, and so we were unlikely to encounter hunting parties where we were going; at least, not the kind that hunt buck. The road was narrow, and at one point we had to pull over to allow a company truck loaded with logs to pass us. It was the only such vehicle we met along the way.

We reached the point where the road made a definite dog-leg east, and there we pulled over. There was still frost on the ground, and the air was noticeably colder than it had been down in Falls End. Liat arrived a minute or two behind us, just as Jackie began unloading our supplies and Louis was checking the rifles. We had a 30.06 each, as well as handguns. Liat had no rifle, but I didn’t doubt that she had a gun. She kept her distance from us, watching the woods.

Jackie Garner seemed bemused by her presence.

‘She’s deaf, right?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s why you don’t have to whisper.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He thought about it, but kept whispering. ‘How’s a deaf woman going to get by in the woods?’

‘She’s deaf, Jackie, not blind.’

‘I know, but we gotta be quiet, don’t we?’

‘She’s also a mute. I’m no expert, but people who can’t speak tend to be quieter than the rest of us.’

‘Suppose she steps on a twig, and makes a noise. How will she know?’

Angel joined us. ‘What are you, some kind of Buddhist? If a tree falls in the forest, I can tell you now that she won’t hear it.’

Jackie shook his head in frustration. We were clearly missing the point.

‘She’s coming with us, Jackie,’ I told him. ‘Live with it.’

We didn’t plan to be in the woods after dark, but Jackie had still insisted that we bring a groundsheet each. We also had plenty of water, coffee, chocolate, energy bars, nuts, and, courtesy of Jackie, a bag of pasta. Even with the addition of Liat, we had enough to keep us going for a day or more. There were also waterproof matches, cups, one lightweight saucepan, a pair of compasses, and a GPS unit, although Jackie said that we might have trouble getting a signal where we were going. We divided the equipment and supplies between us, and set out. There was no further discussion. We all knew what we were looking for, and what might be out there. I hadn’t shared what we suspected of Malphas’s possible nature with Jackie, and so Jackie had been skeptical that anyone who had survived the crash might still be out there. I shared something of his point of view, but I wasn’t about to bet my life, or anyone else’s, on it.

Jackie led, Louis behind him, then Liat, Angel, and I. Jackie’s concerns about Liat were unfounded: of all of us, it was she who stepped the softest. While Angel and Louis, unused to the woods, wore leather boots with thick treads, Liat, Jackie and I wore lighter boots with only slight ribbing, the better to feel what lay beneath our feet. Treads could mean the difference between stepping on a branch and bending it, or breaking it entirely. For now we also wore orange vests, and baseball caps with reflective strips. We didn’t want some overenthusiastic hunter to mistake us for deer, or raise the suspicions of a warden if we encountered one. Thirty minutes in we heard gunshots to the south, but otherwise we might have been entirely alone in the woods.

The going was relatively easy for the first couple of hours, but then the terrain began to change. There were more ridges to climb, and I could feel the strain in the backs of my legs. Shortly after midday we startled an adolescent buck from a copse of alder, his antlers little more than extended buds, and later there was a flash of brown and white to our left as a doe moved quickly through the trees. She spotted us, seemed to pause in confusion, and changed direction, cutting away from us until we lost sight of her. We noticed the trace of bigger bucks, and there were places where the stink of deer urine was strong enough to make one gag, but those were the only large animals we saw.

After three hours, we stopped and made coffee. Despite the cold, I was sweating under my jacket, and I was grateful for the rest. Louis dropped beside me.

‘How you doing, city boy?’ I said.

‘Yeah, like you Grizzly Adams,’ he replied. ‘How much farther?’

‘Two hours, I reckon, if we keep making this kind of progress.’

‘Damn.’ He pointed at the sky. There were clouds gathering. ‘Doesn’t look good.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

Jackie finished brewing the coffee and served it up. He gave his cup to Liat, and drank his own by pouring it from the pot into a small thermos. He separated himself from the rest of us, and stood on a small ridge looking back in the direction from which we had come. I followed him up there. He didn’t look happy.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

‘Rattled, that’s all,’ he said.

‘By what we’re doing?’

‘And where we’re going.’

‘In and out, Jackie. We’re not planning on settling there.’

‘I guess.’ He swished the coffee around in his mouth, and spat. ‘And there’s the doe we saw.’

‘What about it?’

‘Something spooked it, and it wasn’t us.’

I stared out at the forest. This wasn’t first growth, and so the foliage was still thick.

‘Could have been a hunter,’ I said. ‘Even a bobcat or a lynx.’

‘Like I said, maybe I’m just rattled.’

‘We could hold back, see if anyone comes,’ I said, ‘but there’s rain on the way, and whatever hope we have of finding that plane depends on good light. And we don’t want to be stuck out here for a night.’

Jackie shivered. ‘I hear that. Come dark, I want to be in a bar with a drink in my hand, and that fort far behind me.’

We returned to the others. Liat approached me. I couldn’t have mistaken the questioning look on her face, but she still mouthed the words, just to be sure: What is it?

‘Jackie was concerned that something might have spooked the doe we saw earlier,’ I answered, loud enough for Angel and Louis to hear. ‘Something, or someone, following behind us.’

She extended her hand. Another question: What do we do?

‘It could be nothing, so we keep going. If there is someone following, we’ll find out who it is soon enough.’

Jackie poured the rest of the coffee into his thermos, packed away his little Primus stove, and we moved off, but there was a palpable change in our mood. I found myself checking behind me as we walked, and Jackie and I would pause on the higher ridges, seeking movement on the lower ground.

But we saw no one, and at last we came to the fort.