You Only Die Twice

Chapter TWENTY-NINE





The forest floor in her shelter might be damp, but Cheryl Dunning knew better than to build the shelter out of damp wood.

She built it with dry branches, twigs that were close to the tree trunks and low to the base. Those always were the driest. The pine needles on which she sat had sapwood and fatwood running through them. They were filled with oils and they would burn when lit, regardless of whether they were wet or dry, so she was lucky that she was sitting on tens of thousands of them.

During all those hunting trips she once took with her father and grandfather, she was fastidious in learning the ways of the woods. Even at that young age, she could feel her father’s disappointment that his wife had given him three daughters and not one son. It was nothing he ever made known to her―her father loved her deeply. Instead, it was just something she sensed. It couldn’t have been easy for him to live in a house filled with women, including his own mother, who moved in with them when her husband died of pancreatic cancer.

And so she set out to become that son.

She hunted. She played sports in school and she learned how to fish, a pastime she still loved, especially when the family went to their camp on Moosehead Lake. She sat and watched the Red Sox games with her father during the season and the Pats games when their season began. Her mother wouldn’t allow her to swear at the television set as he did, but when she wasn’t around, her father almost encouraged it. Sometimes, they’d holler at the screen in such frustration or joy, he once said they’d make a fine couple of sailors.

When her body began to change and her interest turned more and more to boys, the time she spent with her father began its slow but inevitable decline as she began the ascent into her teen years and finally into adulthood. To this day, they still were close, but she realized now, perhaps more than ever, just how instrumental those days had been with him. He taught her what his father had taught him.

And that just might save my life.

She worked quickly. If she was going to torch this motherf*cker, then she had to build a fire that would burn hot and high, hopefully setting fire to the woods around her so that people would take note―if there were any people around here to do so―when the tall pines caught and started to rage as they became engulfed in flames. She didn’t know where he had taken her, but if she could set these woods on fire, there was a good chance that someone would see it, fire departments would be called, and she just might get out of here alive.

If he doesn’t shoot me when I set the fire.

She couldn’t think that way. Instead, she started to move about the shelter. She gathered a handful of dry leaves and placed them in a mound. Then, she plucked sticks from the shelter itself and created a tight layer of insulation on top of the leaves, thus separating the sticks from the damp forest floor. She sprinkled the top of the sticks with pine needles and more leaves, and then gathered from the shelter a host of other branches, all the time worrying that with each one she pulled out, he could hear her. Would he know what she was doing? Probably not. Did it matter? Probably not. His aim was to kill her. Period. And he was coming this way.

I can’t let him win.

The fire would take time to catch and grow and overwhelm the shelter, which would fuel it and turn it into a kind of pyre, but the time it would take for that to happen was another strike against her.

But not if the breeze remains steady.

The breeze, which was increasingly becoming sharp gusts of cold wind, was the best friend she had right now. That and her Bic lighter. Oxygen is what she needed to make this shelter ignite quickly and right now, the universe was cooperating with her in ways that it hadn’t since she was left alone at The Grind the night before.

“You go through stretches of misery and stretches of fortune,” her grandmother used to say. Living on the farm, her grandmother never had an easy life, but like her grandfather, she knew it could have been worse. Back then, living on the land is what they had and while the land often gave its fruits easily because the land was fertile, sometimes it didn’t because either the weather was off or blight ruined the crop.

“You go through stretches of misery and stretches of fortune.”

She was fairly sure that she was on the side of misery right now, but at least she had a plan, and that was better than being without one.

When she was finished, she stopped and listened, expecting the worst and finding it. A rustling of leaves. The sound of footsteps. He wasn’t alone. She was sure of it now. He had someone with him.

Another psycho.

She wanted to cry at that moment because she knew that with them so close to her, she didn’t stand a chance. Before the moose attacked, she saw him. She also saw his gun. Naturally, his partner would also have a gun.

I’m going to die.

No, I’m not.

You’re in a stretch of misery.

I’m not. I still have a chance.

But her thoughts held no conviction, only a whiff of desperation.

She lit the base of the leaves and blew on them as a breeze sucked air into the shelter. She stood back, surprised, as a fire, bright and sturdy, bloomed. And then it quickly grew. And then it sparked toward the shelter’s shallow ceiling, where it tasted the branches and twigs. When it decided it rather liked them, it devoured them with a fervor that stunned her.