August Ansel - Shadow Road

“Oh she liked to eat a bear just fine,” said Handy. “But a yearling that size, a hundred or a hundred-fifty pounds, head and paws taken off already, hanging neck-down and stripped of its fur, well—”

“Looks for all the world like a decapitated person dangling there, shiny side out,” finished Arie. “Even a dedicated meat-eater would take pause.” The last branch in the fire had burned nearly through, and she knocked it into the embers. “Of course, Julia Flink was always on the skittish side, as I recall, tender flower that she was.”

Handy uttered a small snort of laughter and got slowly to his feet. He wasn’t as tall as Curran, but the low rock ceiling still made him careful.

“Clear-headed are you?” said Arie, watching him carefully. In point of fact, he looked better than he had for days, color in his skin.

“Like a new man,” he said. He knotted the ends of the thin blanket around his chest sarong-style.

“Your jeans took a big wetting,” said Arie. “They’re damp, yet. More than damp, really. Best leave them by the fire tonight.”

He nodded. “I’ll take a piss then.”

“Here,” said Curran. He stripped out of his sweatshirt and tossed it to Handy. “Stay warm, fool.”

Handy pulled the sweatshirt on and flipped up the hood. “The breeze will catch me one way or the other,” he said. As he exited, he pulled the blanket aside and briefly showed his ass. Renna’s mouth fell open, and then the three of them burst out laughing.

“Just make it quick out there,” Arie called after him. “Curran,” she said, “you did well today. Any other treasures?” She pointed at the carry basket.

He upended it and a jumble of items slid out. “There was way more, but I grabbed what I could.” He laid it all in a neat row: a hairy ball of jute twine, a depleted roll of duct tape, a sheaf of seed packets, a rusty yellow box cutter, and a garden trowel. A pair of flowered cotton garden gloves rested on top of the pile. “I figured the gloves might help in the cold.”

Arie sorted through the seed packets, admiring the colorful pictures of tomatoes, Swiss chard, beets—someone had been a true lover of beets—and scarlet runner beans. She smoothed them between her hands with great care. “May we find the time and place to put these in the ground.” The little bumps and knobs of the seeds inside their envelopes felt like the perfect intersection of possibility and despair. A faint burn of tears prickled behind her eyes.

“What about this?” said Curran, holding out a plastic bag about the size of a cantaloupe.

Arie took it. The contents were weighty and shifted in her hands like a sack of tiny glass beads. She unknotted the top and dipped her fingers in. “Oh yes, this is another good find,” she said.

Renna leaned close. “What is it?”

“Bird seed,” said Arie. “More specifically, millet.”

“Bird seed,” repeated Renna. Her voice was relaxed and sleepy. “In case we need to feed pigeons.”

“Has a warm meal made you stupid?” said Arie. She re-knotted the plastic bag with a firm tug. “The seed would be splendid in a snare, and then you’d have pigeon to keep your belly company. Pigeon, or whatever small beastie hustled out of the brush to grab such a treat.”

“I don’t think we’ll be setting traps any time soon,” said Curran, running a hand over Talus’s thick pelt, pulling off burrs and brambles.

“Tomorrow I’ll cook this into porridge and we’ll be damned glad to have it,” said Arie. “Other bits and pieces are in with the millet—dried corn and such. It’s all edible.”

“Less work than acorns,” said Renna, yawning. She moved into the shallow niche where she slept with Handy and stretched out.

“You’re right about that. Though we’ll likely need those, too, before long,” said Arie. “Better to pack them up against another hungry day.”

“Like squirrels,” Renna said, sounding half-asleep already.

Handy eased inside, clutching the blanket tightly around him. “Temperature’s dropping,” he said. “The rain will quit tonight.”

“Not for long,” said Curran.

“No,” said Arie. “And we’re not even into winter yet.”

“It’ll get wetter before it gets better,” said Handy in a singsong voice.

“Don’t start quoting Mammy Delonda to me,” she said, “or I’ll toss you right out the door.” It disoriented her every time he came out with a relic of their shared upbringing. She gathered the various items Curran had brought back with him, taking special care to wrap the seed packets in a bandana before tucking them deep into the pocket of her old coat.

Curran gave Talus a final rough rub on the tummy and moved the carry-basket out of the way. “I’ll keep an eye on the fire—try to keep us from freezing tonight,” he said. “You hang onto the sweatshirt,” he told Handy.

“Stinks a little,” Handy said.

“No problem. I can air your funk out of it later.”

They smirked at each other like ten-year-olds. Renna was snoring lightly.

Arie stood and turned up her collar. “I’m stepping out,” she said. “You two crack wise while I’m gone. Get it out of your system.”

“I’m done,” said Curran. “We’re done, right Cheeks?”

She didn’t wait for Handy’s reply. “Just stay awake a minute, will you? We have a decision to make. You, too, Renna. Don’t drift off just yet.” Renna made an unintelligible mumble.

The air outside had definitely acquired a colder bite. Arie moved a few yards into the trees to relieve herself. From this distance she could watch thin wisps of camp-smoke curl from the spaces in the woven mat at the cave entrance, shot through with yellow beams of weak firelight. What a strange portal it looked from the dark outside, an underworld entrance where a race of tiny people indulged in some fiery industry. Wee smithies, perhaps.

Back at the mouth of the shelter, she found the metal pail where Renna had left it. She scrubbed the inside with a handful of pebbles and a small fir cone. A hard rap knocked it mostly clean, and she returned it to its spot behind the humped burl, ready to catch water they would use in the morning.

She rested one hand on the mat of boughs, the only thing between their cramped huddle of rock and anything that might want to get at them. The rain had let up, but under the trees there was still an incessant patter of drops, millions of them falling off every limb and leaf. That sound blended with the small crackle of their fire. Someone put another piece of wood on the flames and in the momentary flare of light she could see that it was Curran. Far over the treetops, the shifting cloud cover showed wide gashes of black sky, flickering stars. Arie stared out at the wheeling universe for a few moments, until it gave her a familiar twinge of vertigo, the sense of falling into space. The moon was there beyond the murk, nearly full again.

It was almost a month since they’d fled into the woods, and half of that had been spent at the abandoned house, waiting for her to recover from the burns she’d taken at the hands of Russell and his bootlickers. Now—badly accoutered for the foul weather and with very little in the way of supplies—they’d hardly done more than sit still. They were fraying at the wet and dirty seams. If they had any chance of making it many hard miles to the family place, they needed to fortify somehow.

Curran may have done a lot more than find them a meal of beets and bear stew. They needed that cabin.

HE DREAMED OF SCREENS. A sleeping mind produces the thing it longs for, and Russell—self-appointed King of the Konungar—longed for a relentless, numbing avalanche of images and information. The complicated nothingness of pixels and sound bites, a keyboard his weapon of choice.