The Lonely Dead (4 page)

After a while one of these people caught my eye. He was tall and thin and went to sit by himself at a table in the back. I found I was keeping an eye on the table's reflection in the glass behind the bar. The Cambridge's lighting was subdued to the point of murky and I couldn't see the guy's face clearly, but a tickling in my scalp told me he was looking my way more often than randomly. I got up and took an unnecessary trip to the john but when I passed near that end of the room his head was turned away, ostensibly to look out into the night.

In the john I ran water until it was cold and splashed it over my face. I knew something was wrong about the man, but I wasn't sure what to do about it. Could be he was just noticing a stranger. But I thought it was more than that. There was a window high up on one side but nothing to stand on except a sink that didn't look like it would take the weight, and little chance my shoulders would make it through.

I decided I was just going to have to confront him. If it was going to happen, then a public place would be best.

When I went back out the table was empty.

Cursing myself for paranoia, I returned to the bar and took a swallow from a beer that was getting warm. The singing woman had been joined by a friend whose hair was even worse. Their combined voices made the veins in my legs vibrate. I signalled at the barman and the owner brought me a bill that didn't seem anywhere near big enough. I chatted with him for another few minutes, and tipped high. My father brought me up well.

It was even colder than I expected when I stepped outside. I was tempted to turn straight around again, see if they'd maybe adopt me or let me sleep at the bar, but once a door is shut behind me it never feels like I can go back. I headed along the street, staying close to the store fronts, trying to keep out of the rain. The street was deserted. I could have driven back with my eyes shut and endangered no one other than myself.

It took a minute or two before I realized a tightness across my back was trying to tell me something.

I stopped. Turned. It wasn't easy to see back down the street, but I could see someone was standing in a doorway about halfway back to the bar. I still couldn't see his face, and he wasn't moving, but no one was out in a night like this for the view.

'Can I help you?'

There was no answer. I put my hand inside my coat. I had left my gun in the car, of course. Who's going to need a gun in Relent, Idaho?'

'Who sent you?'

The guy stepped out. Stood on the pavement. He said something but the rain took it away.

I was tired and drunk and scared. Everything told me to turn around and take off. But I didn't. If they'd caught me here they could catch me anywhere. This was what my life was now. This was going to happen, somewhere or other, sooner or later. Suddenly everything I didn't have and didn't know was in front of me, and I felt light-headed and cold inside.

I started running towards him.

He took a couple of hurried steps backwards but not fast or directed enough. I was on top of him before he knew what was happening and I just started hitting him. I knew I ought to stop, that he might know things that I should know, but I didn't care. I used both hands and my head and we fell together out onto the street. I pushed him away to stand and kick and then bent back down to grab his head, hauling it up ready to hammer it down and up and down until this was over. I was dimly aware of noise in the background but didn't connect with it until I was being pulled back and I realized how stupid I'd been to assume they'd send someone on their own, that there wouldn't be a bunch of them and the only thing I had left to be surprised about was that one of them didn't just shoot and get it over with.

Someone grabbed me. I was held back, locked around each arm. Someone was knelt down next to the guy I'd been hitting, trying to keep his head off the wet street. His face was covered with blood but I saw he was a lot younger than I'd thought, mid-twenties at the most. I realized the person with him was a woman. She looked up at me, and I saw it was Sue, the woman from The Cambridge.

'You asshole,' she said.

'Big man, are you?' This voice came from behind my right ear, and I wrenched my neck around to see it was her husband.

'What the fuck?' I saw a couple people from the bar were standing around me. 'He was watching me in the bar,' I said. 'He was standing out here waiting for me.'

The woman straightened up. 'Ricky's gay,' she said.

I was panting, my face burning hot. 'What?'

Her husband let go my arm. 'You think you'd teach him a lesson? You got a problem with people like Rick?' He stepped away from me as if I was contagious.

'Listen,' I said, but they weren't going to. The frizzy-haired singers had helped the boy to his feet and were leading him back to the bar. The woman shot me one more look, started to say something and then just shook her head instead. No one I hadn't slept with had ever made me feel so small. She went back to the bar with the others, one hand protectively on the boy's back, and I realized way too late that Ricky was her son.

Then I was alone with her husband.

'I didn't know,' I said.

'Could have asked him.'

'You have no idea what my life is like.'

'No.' He shook his head. 'I don't. Don't want to know. Don't know where you're staying, either. But you should move on. You're not welcome here.'

He walked back to the bar. As he opened the door, he turned. 'I'd be surprised if you're welcome anywhere.'

The sound of the door shutting behind him left just the rain.

—«»—«»—«»—

Nietzsche said that men and women of character have typical experiences, patterns of events they seem destined to undergo time and again: things of which you have to say, 'Yes, I'm like that.' I think it was him, anyway: it could have been Homer Simpson. Whichever, they probably had something more positive in mind than fights in places no one had ever heard of, taking paranoia out on people who didn't deserve it. I'd done the same thing the night of my parents' funeral, unbelievably, pulling a gun in a hotel bar and scaring a bunch of corporate types and also myself.

Relent finally showed me this was no way to live. As a girl had told me three months before — a girl who had first-hand experience of what the Upright Man was capable of — there was only one person for the job I had to do. I had to stop running. I had to turn around, and chase.

By four o'clock the next day I was in San Francisco, and by the end of the evening I finally had a trail.

3

Dawn found Tom crouched at the bottom of a tree, wild-eyed and frozen solid. It found him and tried to put him back, but he was awake and couldn't be returned. He wasn't going to be denied a morning now, even if this was a day he hadn't expected to see.

When he'd woken in the night everything happened fast. His back brain found the flight pedal and stamped with all its weight. It didn't allow for rampant malfunction in all other quarters, and Tom was sprawling before he was even on his feet. With awareness came a terrible understanding of how badly messed up he was, but then the smell cut through again and the naming part of his mind woke up like a siren — BEAR! BEAR! BEAR! — and he was moving.

At first he was on hands and knees more than his feet, but claw-fear got him upright fast. He ricocheted off the sides of the gully until it came up to reach the forest floor, and then scrambled up over the muddy lip and was good to go. He went.

Not looking back was easy. He didn't want to see. Reports came in from distant outposts — head messed up, ankle screaming, don't have the flashlight — but he over-rode them and went twisting into the darkness. All pains and disappointments were as nothing to what it would be like to be caught by the BEAR, and he ran in a way that short-circuited everything his species had learned since the ice age before last. He ran like an animal, driven by pure body magic. He ran like a fit. He ran like diarrhoea. He pinballed through bushes and over logs, tripping and running, eventually bursting out into an area where the trees were more widely spread.

As he scrabbled towards higher ground he noticed it had snowed again, long after the information had filtered to him through the loud crunching of his feet. This combined with the whacks of thin branches and the wailing in his lungs to make such a cacophony of panic that it took him a while to realize these were the only sounds he could hear. He slipped, crashed down on hands and one knee. Struggled up but slipped again, momentum lost. He stopped, turned around. He was near the top of a small rise in the forest floor. Ready to run again, or die, whichever came first.

No BEAR.

He quick-panned his eyes back and forth across the low hill. Thin moonlight, blue-white reflections, no depth of field. He couldn't see anything. Couldn't hear anything, either, even when he held his breath to stop the panting. His chest hurt like fire.

He backed up a little, into the proximity of a large tree. He knew trying to climb it wouldn't help. The BEAR would be far more adept than he, not least because it probably wouldn't be so close to passing out. But being near the tree felt better.

He waited. It stayed quiet.

Then he thought he heard something.

Something down at the bottom of the rise, deep in the inky darkness and frosty shadows. A cracking of twigs.

His body went frigid with dismay, but he couldn't move. He'd run out of panic and had only terror left. Terror didn't know how to work his limbs.

He just stood, absolutely still, and didn't hear the noise again.

Finally he turned, making a full circle, staring and listening. Nothing. All he could see was snow and shadows. All he heard were dripping sounds, a soft nearby
whoosh
as a handful of snow sloughed off a branch. He didn't know what to do.

So he stayed where he was.

—«»—«»—«»—

By six a.m. he felt appalling. He could have balled up all the other hangovers in his life and dropped them into this without touching the sides. A bump on his right temple — presumably a result of the second fall — added its own whirling note. Parts of his body ached shrilly whenever he shifted his weight: the ribs on his right side were mouth-open painful whether he moved or not. The cold squared the whole effect up into the unquantifiable. He realized he'd never been truly cold before. He would have liked it to have stayed that way. At one point in the night he had gotten to the point where it felt like every inch of his skin was covered with bugs, and he'd spent much of the next few hours trying to keep moving, shifting silently and in what he hoped was a very small and invisible way. He wriggled his toes, or tried to. The response was increasingly hard to gauge. He kept his hands wedged into his armpits, occasionally removing them to rub meagre warmth over his face and ears. He drowsed off a few times, but never for long. He was in far too much scared discomfort to realize that at some point he'd stopped trying to die.

He felt nauseous too, dry-retching through the night, and was visited by half-memories that failed pill suicides left you with some key part of your innards badly screwed up. Was it the liver? Kidneys? He couldn't recall. Neither sounded a good state of affairs. Quite early into his vigil he'd worked out the reason he was still alive. It was stuck to the front of his coat, an icy substance with pill-shaped deposits. He'd thrown up in his sleep. He'd been too drunk, after all that. His body had jettisoned some of what was ailing it, and a lot of the drugs had come up before having a chance for effect. His upright position had prevented him from choking in the process. Perhaps the sickness had stopped the pills from having enough time to mess him up. Perhaps.

As the air around him gradually seemed to deepen, to allow shades of colour back into the monochrome flatness of night, Tom began slowly to accept that he was going to survive into another day. He didn't know what came after that. He was scared, pissed at himself, pissed at life, and most of all, he was
monumentally
pissed at the old fool in Henry's. If you were trying to scare people, and bears were likely, surely you mentioned them? What kind of rancid old scaremonger didn't tell about the bears? Impenetrable woods are one thing. The same woods plus huge carnivores famous for intractability are something else entirely. You owe it to your audience, especially the suicidal ones, to
bring up the fucking bears.

As he lurched out from behind the tree Tom realized something. The idea of going back and slapping the old codger was the first he'd been excited by in a long while.

—«»—«»—«»—

The snow wasn't thick, but it was easy to retrace his progress down the hill. At the bottom he was confronted with tangled and frosty bushes. He turned, favouring his swollen ankle, and looked up the rise. He dimly remembered swerving right to bank up it. So he now needed to turn left. This would take him through the thickest section of the undergrowth. No thanks. Instead he took a detour up around higher ground, stepping over rocks and clambering unsteadily over nursery logs, until he could rejoin the right direction.

He didn't have any clear idea of how far he'd run. In the cold, beautiful light of A Good Day To Die + 1, he wasn't even sure why he was going back. Walking was warmer than standing, and if he was going to walk, it felt better to have a destination: a real one for the moment, not the dark, vague place he'd been stumbling towards the day before. That place was still out there, and there was probably enough left in his backpack to bring it closer still. He was no longer sure what he felt about the prospect, but finding the pack was something to do.

He walked for twenty minutes. The cold helped meld his myriad aches into one giant super-pain, a humanoid discomfort trudging between the trees. He spent some of the time muttering to himself about how cold it was, which was pointless but oddly comforting. He stopped frequently, turning his head in hope of recognizing something and to reassure himself that his environment remained BEAR-free. He'd just about given up when he heard something that sounded like running water.

He abandoned the path of least resistance and pushed his way through the undergrowth, very carefully. One more fall and he would not be walking anywhere any more.

On the other side of the bushes was a clearer area, and then a gully.
The
gully, he hoped, though it didn't look at all as he remembered it. He'd only been there in darkness, of course, and had no time to observe its appearance before finding himself at the bottom. His glimpses with the flashlight had shown it to be fairly wide, however, and about fifteen feet deep at the point where he'd holed up. What was in front of him could only be about twelve feet across, but was a lot deeper. The sides were extremely steep — far too steep and rocky for him to consider climbing down.

He must have overshot his position of the night before.

He glanced right, the direction he'd have to go. Tough-looking trees and bushes grew right up to the side of the drop. He could go back around the long way, but it was a long way. Hence the name. Left looked more clear, but was going in the wrong direction. And it was steep.

Christ,
he thought, wearily. His stomach was full of razor blades. His head felt like an avalanche of glass. Did he even need the bag? Maybe it was the smell of alcohol which attracted the bear. Maybe it was still there, waiting. And drunk. He stood irresolute.

Get the fucking bag, he thought. What else are you going to do?

He trudged up along the edge of the gully. It began to narrow, but not enough that jumping it was a possibility. Then he hit a bank of trees and had to dodge left for a little while before skirting back around to the gully.

He stopped. A tree lay across the gap. It had fallen there from the other side, chance bringing it down neatly so there was plenty of trunk either side of the void it spanned.

Tom limped up to it. The trunk was fairly large, perhaps two feet in diameter. The wood looked to be in good shape. He gave an experimental tug on a branch, and it rebounded crisply back, suggesting the tree hadn't been down for long. So it wouldn't be rotten. Maybe. It went from the side where he was to the side where he wanted to be. He could walk nine, ten feet, instead of many hundred.

Right — but nine feet during which there'd be nothing underneath him but empty space, and beneath that a lot of sharp rocks. Nine feet across a trunk that wasn't superwide, might be slippery, and which certainly had snow on it: nine feet which would be hard even if he didn't have a bad ankle.

Tom looked away, knowing he'd be taking the long way around.

Don't be a wanker all your life.

The voice which popped into Tom's head surprised him. Partly because it deployed a term (WANKER: orig. 'one who masturbates'; now vernacular for 'a weak and useless individual' [vulg.]) which he had only ever heard in the grim British indie movies Sarah liked to rent and which he thought should come with subtitles and a Valium and something to read while they were on. But mainly it surprised him because the voice sounded so impatient, as if he was making a big deal out of something very simple.

'My ankle's hurt,' he said, petulantly.

The response was instantaneous. It's
hurt whichever way you go. This is shorter.

'It's dangerous.'

Five paces? Six? You can't take five steps in a straight line?

'If I fall on level ground, I won't break my back or pelvis or skull.'

So don't fall.

Tom's head swirled for a moment, as if some hidden deposit of alcohol had tardily arrived in his brain. When the world stopped moving, he stepped up to the log and put his good foot on it. The trunk didn't seem to move. It was big and solid. It would take his weight. His mind was the only thing which would make it harder to cross than a stretch of icy pavement.

He slid his foot a little further along, accidentally brushing some snow off in the process. Interesting, he thought, immediately seeing the possibilities: don't walk it — slide it. That way you don't have to lift your feet (less scary), and clearing the snow will make the next step less slippery too. He poised his weight and lifted the other foot up onto the trunk, so that he was standing sideways on it.

He stood there a moment, testing his balance, looking like the world's loneliest and coldest surfer.

Then he started out along the trunk.

He slid his left foot out, tested, put his weight on it. Then the right. Left foot right on the edge now. He slid it out about nine inches.

The more steps it takes, the more likely you'll fall.

Aloud, Tom said, 'Who made you the boss of me?' Nonetheless, he pushed his left foot out six inches, pulled the right along to match. He was now officially standing in mid-air, though a dive would take him back to solid ground. He wasn't sure where to look. Not down, obviously. Not up. So straight ahead, presumably. Out over the gully. Yi — no, not out there. Shit no.

To
the left. To
where
you're going
.

He turned his head. Good move — the other side really wasn't that far away. He slid his left foot again. Then his right. Left, then right. He was now nearly in the middle of the trunk.

He slid out again. His foot hit a knot in the trunk, jarring up his leg. He thought he was okay but then realized he wasn't. His left leg was fine, but the rest of him was suddenly unsure. His torso felt three feet deep and heavily weighted towards the back. He sensed the mass of the planet beneath, willing him to join it.

Left. Look left.
He felt weightless for a moment, but he wasn't falling. He found himself again, and was still. He stared at the end of the trunk, half hidden in the white-topped bushes, and made it the centre of everything that was flat. He kept going.

Slid and pulled once more. He was over halfway. He slid again, feeling a strange kind of exhilaration. A lot of the time he felt like a character in a video game controlled by someone's mother, allowed a turn for comedy value on Christmas Day. But just for once…

He slid and pulled. He slid and pulled, and he didn't fall.

He shuffled sideways a final time, and then he was standing on the trunk still, but over land. He paused, suddenly incapable of falling. He looked out over the gully, feeling as if he was hanging in the air, then he stepped off onto the ground.

For a moment the earth too felt insubstantial, as if it could sway and tip and fade. He took another step away from the gully, and it settled. He'd made it.

Looking back and forth along the other side confirmed what he'd suspected: hard going in both directions. Whereas on this side it was going to be a relative stroll.