There’s no answer. Shock is beginning to settle into Riley, cold ripples up her spine. Her teeth clench then chatter. She presses a hand hard over her mouth.
A sound comes from a clutch of alder. She goes quickly.
Oliver is curled up behind the bush.
‘I hid when the demon came,’ Oliver says. ‘I tried to keep quiet.’
‘Smart, smart boy. You did right.’
‘Sorry, Riley,’ he whispers. ‘I didn’t hide good enough.’
‘It’s ok,’ she says. ‘It’s ok, Oliver Olive, he can’t hurt us now.’ She goes to hug him. She sees it for a couple of moments before she understands – the strange angle he’s lying in, how he clutches his shin, the dark, wet stain seeping through his jeans. Riley pulls up his pants leg. The third bullet made a neat hole in the muscle.
‘It’s ok,’ she says again stupidly. ‘Don’t move, Oliver Olive.’ She hunts through her pack, torch beam juddering. At last she finds the little medical kit. Gauze, baby Tylenol, water-purifying tablets, antiseptic, bandaids, sterile gloves. It’s not nearly enough to treat a bullet wound.
Riley pushes down her panic and puts on the gloves. The hole in Oliver’s leg is leaking blood. Not a lot, but a steady, constant trickle. She can’t find an exit wound; the shot must still be in there, buried in his calf muscle. He moans and weeps. ‘You’re brave, so brave, Oliver Olive,’ she says over and over as she swabs the hole with antiseptic and covers it with gauze. She gives him a baby Tylenol with a swallow of water. She finds him a sturdy branch to use as a crutch.
‘We’ll go slow,’ Riley says, bright. ‘There’s no hurry.’
‘What if there are more demons?’
‘There aren’t,’ she says. ‘That was the demon. I got it.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise. Hey, look at the sunrise.’ Riley makes a shield of her palm, hiding the man’s body from his view. ‘Stay over there, ok? Look at the mountain.’ She thinks. ‘We have to leave some stuff behind.’
Riley supports Oliver as he hobbles back to the narrow trail. She sees how slow he goes, how much he leans on the crutch.
‘Rest, Oliver Olive.’ Riley sits him down on a rock. She takes the heavy stuff and throws it hard down the hill, to the bottom of the gully. The pans ring and clang as they go. Riley and Oliver can eat trail mix and dry food. Riley throws the gun down the hill too.
She looks once more at the dead man. In the pink light of dawn his face is young, much younger than it looked by the light of the moon. He’s not a man, he’s just a boy – not much older than her. He’s shorter, thinner than he looked in the night. Riley peers at the thing the dead boy holds in his hand. It’s an old-fashioned compass, gleaming silver in the dawn. It wasn’t a blade after all.
This is too big to think about. Riley lifts and pushes the dead boy, turning him, rolling him down the slope. He is not stiff at all, which she had been expecting. His upper lip has receded, curled up to reveal his teeth. She looks away and rolls him. The boy’s body thumps heavily down the hill – down, down into the tangle of brush. When he comes to rest Riley sees that a frond of fern has settled in his weteye socket. She reaches out a gentle finger and removes it. Then she makes to close his eyes, to cover those staring red holes. Her fingers meet only an open gash, fast cooling. There are no eyelids to close. Riley’s fingertips are red and brown with slick matter. Riley gets up quickly and stumbles as far as she can before she bends double and throws up the Powerbars.
When she’s done she closes her eyes and forces it all deep, deep down, what just happened. The boy, the red holes. She pictures it like a cool, deep cave, the place where the bad things live. She puts the memories down there and there they stay, suspended in the dark.
‘Riley?’ Oliver calls from above, voice high, near panic.
Riley tears a handful of leaves from a bush and wipes her fingers clean of the blood. ‘Coming,’ she calls. ‘Hold on, Oliver Olive.’
Oliver sits on the rock, mouth pursed with worry. He tries to get up and run to her. He sits down again, wincing.
‘You ready to go, bud? Does your leg hurt too bad?’
She strokes his dark head and he smiles up at her. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s ok.’
Some problems can’t be forced down into the dark place. They’re happening now and all around her. Riley knows that Oliver can’t walk through the wild for long.He’s going to die, she thinks, almost marvelling.I have killed my brother.
2Marc
Marc and Kimble interview the kidnapped woman under a tree, with the mountains blue and rolling behind. It makes a good background for the shot. Annie sneezes, apologetic. She’s sensitive to pollen.
‘My “Anniegies”, my husband calls them.’ Annie is diminutive, blonde, and shakes as she tells her story. She holds herself close with her arms at times, as if she is cold. Kimble asks her more than once if she would like to move inside. Annie smiles and shivers and says in a little voice that outside is best. It feels better to talk about it in the open air. After the third time Kimble stops asking. Outside is better for the shot anyway. Annie is framed by the mountains. Somewhere in those peaks lies the place where they took her that day, and kept her for three weeks.
She was in her home, asleep in her bed. She woke at the touch of something on her lips. Dimly, she realised that her husband must have come home early from his trip. Then the cloth settled gently over her mouth. She opened her mouth to scream and it clamped down hard. Annie struggled, then breathed, was pulled suddenlyinto the black maw of the chloroform. Gone, pecked up into darkness like seed by a bird.
After that, she says, there was dark. Weeks of dark. Then a blazing square of light. Someone cut her bonds and she was free. She was stumbling and slipping down the dew-slick mountainside until she threw herself in front of an eighteen-wheeler, waving her hands and pleading with the driver to stop.
