‘You don’t,’ Oliver says. ‘You just get us in trouble.’
‘Go to sleep.’
‘I hate you.’ Oliver turns away from her. He cries quietly. Riley stops herself from reaching for him. He has to take it seriously. At length Oliver’s sobs slow and quieten. Eventually his breathing steadies. He has cried himself to sleep.
Riley doesn’t sleep. Danny’s dead face fills her mind. The curl of his stiffened lip over his teeth, the empty red tunnels of his eyes.
9Marc
He dreams of eating a pizza. He is enjoying it but then Kimble comes in, turns the pizza over and starts spreading butter all over the base.
‘You’re ruining it,’ he says, irritated, then comes awake with Kimble’s hand clamped over his mouth. They are not eating a buttered pizza, they are in a tent in the mountains.
Kimble taps the back of her hand twice. It meanspay attentionorred alert.Marc nods slowly and she takes her hand away. He hears it now, too – the stealthy movements. A quiet tread outside. Whoever it is stops by the tent. Marc can hear breathing through the thin walls. A bear?
A whisper comes. It’s thin and penetrating, it makes its way into his ear like a needle.
‘Here,’ someone hisses to someone else, sibilant. A long sound like a knife, or a nail, ‘Now here, now here, now here.’
Marc tries to scramble to his feet and falls, trapped in his sleeping bag. Outside, he hears feet running lightly away. No way to tell how many. Marc fights his way desperately out of his sleeping bag. ‘Wait!’ he calls. ‘Stop, don’t go!’ He fumbles for his prosthetic, cursing in thedark. When it’s fitted he struggles to the mouth of the tent, grabs at the zip at the entrance of the tent, yanks it down. Marc crawls into the night air. He knows it’s too late. They are gone.
Kimble is right behind and seizes him, pulls him up by the back of his t-shirt. ‘Chill, Marc,’ she says very quietly. ‘They’re armed, remember?’
‘They were—’ Marc’s breath comes fast. ‘Kimble, they were so close, right on the other side of the canvas …’
‘I get it,’ she says. ‘But we need to plan and be smart, ok? What we don’t need to do is follow voices into the forest in the night.’ Marc sees she is wearing her head torch and GoPro camera.
Marc nods, rubbing his brow. ‘Did you get anything?’
‘Mostly you freaking out,’ she says. ‘So no.’
Linus is kneeling at the entrance of his one-man pop-up. He clutches the shotgun so tightly that Marc can see all the bones in his knuckles.
‘They’re gone,’ Kimble says. She goes to Linus. ‘It’s ok,’ she says. ‘You’re ok.’
He nods briefly, as if he has been waiting to be relieved of duty.
‘We should set a watch from now on.’ Kimble checks her phone. ‘It’s two hours until dawn and I’ve slept. So I’ll sit up.’
Marc doesn’t sleep much after that. He watches the light bloom through the canvas. It’s good to know Kimble is just outside, watching the dawn too.
In the morning they move slowly, starting at imagined movements in trees. Marc eats fistfuls of Honey Nut Cheerios from the box, staring at the gate to Nowhere, a small patch of grey between two high walls of rock. At his feet two chickadees quarrel over a fallen Cheerio.
Linus spreads a topographical map out on the ground. ‘This is the road where I got picked up,’ he says. ‘Where Leaf Winham triedto kill me and where he then killed himself. It was exactly here.’ He circles it on the map. ‘The road is disused now. That’s where we start. And I suggest following a grid system from there, covering all the ground uphill, or west of the road.’
Marc nods.
‘Watch out for bear traps,’ Linus says, folding the map into a neat square. ‘Take a stick. When the leaf litter is deep, sweep ahead before you step. If you step in one they’ll take your leg off.’
‘Too late for me,’ Marc says, shouldering his pack. He used four extra linings when he put on his prosthetic this morning, to cushion his residual limb. It will be a long day. ‘Lead the way.’ As they go Marc notes the shapes of the peaks, the position of the sun. He winces and adjusts the GoPro on his head. It gets heavy, after a while.
Dappled sunlight falls on the narrow road. Its surface is cracked and cratered, half hidden beneath pine needles, fallen branches and broom pollen.
‘It was here,’ Linus says.
‘How can you tell?’ Marc asks.
‘I’ve thought about it a lot,’ Linus says. ‘You do, when someone cuts your throat.’
