“Shit,” she yelped.
She fumbled for the flashlight and turned it on to check out the damage. It still worked, thank God. Her jeans were torn, her skin scraped and bleeding, but, all in all, it didn’t look that bad. She shone the light around to see where she’d ended up.
She was in a small chamber with rounded walls. There was a circular fire pit in the middle, full of half-burnt sticks. The floor was covered with rocky soil and gravel. On the walls around her were drawings and writing done in charcoal and red-brown paint (or was it blood?). Crude pictures of bodies buried in the ground rising up, coming back to the land of the living.
SLEEPER AWAKENwas written over and over, at least a hundred times.
“This is it,” she said out loud. She’d been led right where she needed to be.
She went to work quickly, pulling out a candle, matches, the rabbit’s body, and Gary’s camera.
She laid the snowshoe hare on its back and used her fingers to palpate its chest. The fur was soft, the rib cage tiny and flexible. Hesitating only slightly, she used the small blade on her Swiss Army knife to slice open the animal’s chest down the sternum, gently, delicately. It didn’t take much pressure. All her college biology came back to her as she located the lungs and heart with ease and carefully removed the tiny heart. It was still warm.
The old Katherine might have been squeamish about this act—but the new Katherine moved through it effortlessly, as if she did this sort of thing every day.
Fingers sticky with the rabbit’s blood, she lit the candle and picked up Gary’s camera.
“Gary, I call you back to me. Sleeper, awaken!” She said this seven times, each repetition more urgent, more demanding, until, by the last refrain, she was nearly shouting.
She plunged the large blade of the knife into the rocky soil and found it loose and sandy. Digging with the knife, she easily made a small hole; into this she dropped the heart and covered it up. “So that your heart will beat once more,” she said in a voice loud and sure.
She began work on another hole, loosening the soil with the knife, then clawing at the dirt and scooping it away with her hands until the hole was large enough to put the camera inside. “Something of yours to help you find your way.”
Katherine sat back and waited. “Come on, Gary,” she willed. “I did my part. Now you do yours.”
She held her breath, waiting.
She thought of Gary’s and her first kiss, in the painting studio at college all those years ago, the smell of oil paint and turpentine all around them. How she’d wished the kiss would never end, that they could stay there forever in the painting building, twenty years old and so in love it hurt. How that one moment had become the centerpiece of the rest of their lives; everything that came after it swirled around it, as if the kiss itself were the eye of a hurricane.
She let herself imagine what it might be like to see him again, to hold him in her arms, smell him, taste him, breathe him in. All the words they hadn’t had the chance to speak to each other could be said.
Seven whole days. What a gift! They could live a lifetime in seven days. They could get something of Austin’s from the apartment, bring it back to the cave, and call him back as well. Then they’d be a family again.
Still, the longer she waited, the more doubt set in.
What if it didn’t work?
Or—what if it did work, and the Gary who came back wasn’t the Gary she remembered?
Her mind filled with images from horrible zombie movies: theundead pale and rotting, losing limbs, moaning as they shambled their way through the land of the living.
She packed up her things, deciding not to wait any longer. To leave, get out fast.
As she crawled out of the chamber, she heard footsteps coming from the passageway to the left, the way she’d come. They were slow and steady, coming toward her. Worse still, there was a little scrape with each step, a horrible shuffle.
She turned and ran in the other direction, not daring to turn on her light, hands raised protectively in front of her as she groped helplessly through the darkness.
Martin
January 31, 1908
Martin stumbled as he made his way back down the hill. Home. Yes, home. He was going home.
He’d been out in the woods for at least two hours, running at first, then walking, then, finally, collapsing in the snow; there he lay, trying to convince himself that he’d only imagined the figure in the shadows behind Sara earlier, that he’d been a terrible coward to run.
He didn’t need his brother the doctor to tell him that he did not have long. He didn’t want to die up in those godforsaken woods. He wanted to see Sara once more, to tell her how much he loved her, in spite of everything. Above all else, he needed her to know that he had not hurt Gertie. He could not die knowing that Sara believed him guilty of such a thing. So he’d pulled himself up out of the snow and begun the slow descent down the hill.
As he took each breath, the wound in his left side seared with pain. The bullet had struck him just below his rib cage. Blood soaked through his shirt and heavy woolen coat. He could not stop shivering.
