Zeb almost stopped shivering when he saw the bear gun. He could've hugged it: at least now he might have half a chance. He didn't find the needle, though, the one Chuck was going to stick into him; too bad about that, he would've liked to have known what was in it. Knockout potion, most likely. Freeze-frame his waking self, then fly him to some seedy rendezvous where the brainscrapers hired by who-knows-who would be waiting to strip-mine his neural data, suck out everything he'd ever hacked and everyone he'd ever hacked for, then leave him a pithed and shrivelled husk, staggering around with induced amnesia in a far-distant ravaged swamp until the local inhabitants stole his trousers and recycled his organs for the transplant biz.
But even if he'd managed to get hold of the needle, what then? Test it out on himself? Stick it in a lemming? "Still, I could have kept it in reserve, for emergencies," says Zeb.
"Emergencies?" says Toby, smiling in the dark. "This wasn't an emergency?"
"No, a real emergency," says Zeb. "Like running into some other person out there. That would be an emergency. Stands to reason it would be a madman."
"Was there any string?" says Toby. "In the pockets. You never know when string will come in handy. Or some rope."
"String. Yeah, now that you mention it. And a roll of fishing line, we always carried that, with a few hooks. Fire-lighter. Mini-binocs. Compass. Bearlift gave us all that Boy Scout stuff, survival basics. I didn't take Chuck's compass though, I already had one. You don't need two compasses."
"Candy bar?" says Toby. "Energy rations?"
"Yeah, couple of shitty little Joltbars, faux nuts. Package of cough drops. I took those. Plus." He pauses.
"Plus what?" says Toby. "Go on."
"Okay, warning: this is gross. I took some of Chuck. Hacked it off with the pocketknife, kind of sawed it. Chuck had a fold-up waterproof jacket, so I wrapped it in that. Not much to eat up there in the Barrens, we all knew that, we'd had the Bearlift course. Rabbits, ground squirrels, mushrooms, but I wouldn't have time to hunt for any of that. Anyway, you can die of eating nothing but rabbits. Rabbit starvation, they called it. No fat on those things. It's like that whatchamacallit diet - the all-protein one. You start to dissolve your own muscles. Your heart gets very thin."
"What part of Chuck did you take?" says Toby. She's surprised she doesn't feel squeamish; she might have, once, back when squeamish was an option.
"The fattest part," says Zeb. "The boneless part. The part you'd have taken. Or any sane person."
"Did you feel bad about it?" says Toby. "Stop patting my bum."
"Why?" says Zeb. "Nah, I didn't feel too bad. He'd have done the same. Maybe a stroking action, like this?"
"I'm too skinny," says Toby.
"Yeah, you could use a little more padding. I'll bring you a box of chocolates, if I can find any. Fatten you up."
"Add some flowers," says Toby. "Roll out the full courtship ritual. I bet you never did that in your life."
"You'd be surprised," says Zeb. "I've presented bouquets in my day. Of a kind."
"Go on," says Toby, who doesn't want to think about Zeb's bouquets or what kind they were, or who he may have given them to. "There you are. Mountains in the distance, part of Chuck lying on the ground and the rest in your pocket. What time was it?"
"Maybe three in the afternoon, maybe five, shit, maybe even eight, it would still have been light then," says Zeb. "I'd lost track. It was mid-July, did I say that? Sun hardly sets at all then, up there. Just sort of dips below the horizon, makes a pretty red rim. Then in a few hours up it comes again. That place isn't above the Arctic Circle, but it's up so high it's tundra: two-hundred-year-old willows like horizontal vines, and the wildflowers all bloom at once because the summer's only a couple of weeks long. Not that I was noticing any wildflowers right then."
He thought maybe he should get Chuck out of sight. He put Chuck's pants back on and stuffed him under one of the 'thopter wings. Changed boots with him - Chuck's were better anyway, and they more or less fit - and left a foot sticking out so anyone looking from a distance would think it was Zeb. He figured he might be safer dead, at least in the short-term.
When Bearlift Central saw they'd lost communication, they were bound to send somebody. Most likely it would be Repair. Once they discovered there was nothing left to repair and that nobody was sitting around setting off little flares and waving a white hanky, they'd go away. That was the ethos: don't waste fuel on dead bodies. Let nature recycle them. The bears would take care of it, the wolves, the wolverines, the ravens, and so forth.
But the Bearlifters might not be the only ones who would come to have a look. For his brain-snatch caper, Chuck clearly wasn't working with the Bearlifters: if he had been, he wouldn't have hesitated to try something right at the base, and he would've had help. Zeb would already be a lobotomized shell parked in some zombie town, ex-mining, ex-oil, with a fake passport and no fingerprints. Not that they'd even bother going that far because who would ever miss him?
Chuck's bosses had to be elsewhere, then: they were wherever it was they'd phoned from. But how close was that? Norman Wells, Whitehorse? Anywhere with an airstrip. Zeb needed to move away from the crash as fast as possible, find a place with cover. Which was not so easy on the next-to-bare-naked tundra.
Grolars and pizzlies could do it, though, and they were bigger. But also more experienced.
Bunkie
Zeb started hiking. The 'thopter had come down on a gentle hillside sloping to the west, and west was the direction he took. He had a rough map of the whole area in his head. Too bad he didn't have the paper map, the one they always kept open on their knees when flying up there in case of digital failure.
The tundra was hard walking. Spongy, waterlogged, with hidden pools and slippery moss and treacherous mounds of tussock grass. There were parts of old airplanes sticking out of the peat - a strut here, a blade there, detritus from rash twentieth-century bush pilots caught by fog or sudden winds, long ago. He saw a mushroom, left it alone: he knew little about mushrooms, but some were hallucinogenic. That's all he'd need, an encounter with the 'shroom god while green and purple teddybears skimmed towards him on tiny wings, grinning pinkly. The day had been surreal enough already.
The bear gun was loaded, and he kept the spray ready. If you surprised a bear it would charge. The spray was no good unless you could see the reds of its eyes, so you had a narrow time window - spray and then shoot. If it was a pizzly, that's how things would go. But a grolar would stalk you, and come up from behind.
In a wet patch of sand he found a print, left front paw, and, farther on, some fresh scat. They were most likely watching him right now. They knew he had a packet of blood and muscle, no matter how tidily wrapped: they could smell it. They could smell his fear.
His feet were already drenched, despite Chuck's superior boots. Those boots didn't fit as well as he'd assumed they would. He pictured his feet turning to pallid, blistery dough inside his socks. To take his mind off them - and off the bears, and off dead Chuck, off everything - and to make some noise to warn the pizzlies so neither he nor they would be surprised, he sang a song. It was a habit left over from his so-called youth, when he'd whistle in the dark, whatever dark he'd been locked into. In the dark, in the darkness, in the darkness that was there even when it was light.
Dad's a sadist, Mom's a creep,
Close your eyes and go to sleep.
No, not sleep, even though he was so tired now. He needed to keep going. Forced march.
Idiotic, idiotic, idiotic, idiotic,
Maybe I'm a really bad, a really bad, a bad psychotic.
There was a line of thicker green downhill that signalled a creek. He headed towards it, over the hillocks and the moss and the bare gravelly spots where pebbles had boiled to the surface during the deep frost of the winters. It wasn't particularly cold on that day, it was in fact hot in the sun, but he was still shivering in fits, like a wet dog shaking. He hugged Chuck's vest around himself, on top of his own.
&
nbsp; When he was almost to the creek - it was more of a river, it had a swift current - he thought, What if it's bugged? The vest. What if there's a tiny transmitter sewn into it somewhere? They'll think Chuck is alive and moving, though mysteriously not answering his phone. They'll send someone to pick him up.
He took the vest off, waded across the creek to where the flow was the strongest, held the vest underwater. It puffed with trapped air, it wasn't going to sink. He could put stones in the pockets; but better, he let it float away, away from him. He watched it sail downstream like some odd bloated jellyfish, thinking, That was possibly not very fucking bright. I am not focusing.
He scooped cold water into his mouth - Don't drink too much, you'll waterlog - wondering if he'd just swallowed a pisspotful of beaver fever. But surely there were no beavers up here. What could you catch from wolves? Rabies but not from drinking. Dissolved moose poop - would that have tiny worms in it that would suck and tunnel? Some kind of liver fluke?
Why are you standing in the water talking out loud? he asked. In plain view. Go along the creek valley, he ordered. Keep to the shrubbery, out of sight. He was counting in his head: how long would it take from the moment Chuck hadn't answered his phone? Maybe two hours, if you factored in the what-went-wrong panic, the meeting they'd call, by remote or otherwise, the messaging, the wheel-spinning and buck-passing and veiled recriminations. All that crap.
Shoulder-high willows here, sheltered from the wind; grasses, bushes. Flies, blackflies, mosquitoes. Drove the caribou mad sometimes, it was said. You'd see them floating across the muskeg on their wide snow-shoe feet, running to nowhere. He used some of the bug spray: not too much, he needed to ration it. Worked his way west, towards where he remembered - he thought he remembered - that he would hit the remnants of the Canol Road. Nothing much left of that road now, but as he recalled from his overhead flights, there were a few buildings along here. An old bunkie, a shed or two.
He aimed for a leaning telegraph pole, an archaic wooden one. There was a tangle of wire beside it, and a caribou skeleton, the antlers snarled; farther on, an oil drum, then two oil drums, then a red truck, in almost pristine condition but no tires. Local hunters most likely took them, carted them away on their four-by-fours, back when they could afford the fuel to come in this far for game. They'd have had some use for tires like those. The truck was that rounded silhouette, streamlined, from the 1940s, which was when the road was built. Some bureauscheme to transport oil inland through a pipeline during World War Two, to keep it from being blown up by coastal submarines. They'd brought a whole bunch of soldiers up from the South to build the system, black guys, a lot of them. They'd never been in subzero cold and five-day blizzards and twenty-four-hour darkness; they must've thought they were in hell. Local legend had it a third of them went crazy. He could see going crazy here, even without the blizzards.
One foot sore now, must be a blister, but he couldn't stop to look. He hopped along the crumbled ribbon of the road, shrubs taller and nearby, one eye on the sky, and there was the bunkie. Long low building, wood, no door, but still a roof on it.
Quick, into the shadow. Then he waited. It was so quiet.
Plates of junkyard metal, scraps of wood, rusted wire. Beds must have been over there. Armchair ripped apart. Radio shell, must have been once; the rounded breadloaf shape of that decade. A knob on it still. Spoon. Remains of a stove. Smell of tar. Sunlight through ceiling crack, sifting through dust. Wisps of long-gone desolation, bleached-out grief.
The waiting was worse than the walking. Parts of him throbbed: feet, heart. His breath was so raucous.
Then he wondered if he himself was bugged; if Chuck had done that, just in case - slipped a mini-transmitter into his back pocket when he wasn't looking. If so, he was barbecue: they could be hearing him breathing right now. They'd even have heard him singing. They'd pinpoint him, shoot a mini-rocket at him, and poof.
Nothing to be done.
After - what? an hour? - he saw the ornodrone coming in low. Yes, from the northeast: Norman Wells. It went straight to the crash and made a couple of passes, transmitting visuals. Whoever was controlling it back at its base made a decision. It fired at the broken wing where Chuck lay concealed, couple of thuds. Then it blew up whatever was left of the 'thopter. It was as if Zeb could hear the voices: Nobody left alive. You sure? Couldn't be. Both of them? Has to be. Anyway, made sure, scorched earth now.
He held his breath, but the drone didn't follow the trail of the floating vest, and it ignored the derelict Canol bunkie; it merely turned and headed back to where it came from. They'd have wanted to get there first and mop up, then disappear fast before Bearlift Repair showed up.
Which it did, in its usual leisurely fashion. Get a move on, Zeb thought. I'm hungry. Repair hovered over the wreckage, Oh-my-Godding, no doubt, Poor-bastarding, Never-had-a-chancing. Then it, too, departed, back towards Whitehorse.
As the red twilight settled in and the mist gathered and the temperature fell, Zeb made a small fire on top of a slab of metal so he wouldn't burn the place down, inside the building so the smoke would hit the ceiling and disperse. No telltale column. He got himself a little warmer that way. Then he did some cooking. Then he ate.
"Just like that?" says Toby. "Wasn't it a little abrupt?"
"What?"
"Well, it was ... I mean ..."
"You mean it was meat? You pulling a vegetarian?"
"Don't be wicked."
"You wanted me to say a prayer? Thank you, God, for making Chuck such a fuckwit and having him provide for me in this unselfish though truly unintentional dumbass manner?"
"You're making fun."
"Then don't go all old Gardener on me."
"Hey! You're old Gardener yourself! You were Adam One's right-hand man, you were a pillar of ..."
"Well, I wasn't then. A fucking pillar. Anyway, that's a whole other story."
Bigfoot
It wasn't that easy, of course. Zeb cut small chunks and used a rusted-wire skewer, and also gave a lecture to himself - This is Nutrition, capital N! You think you'll make it out of here without Nutrition? Nonetheless, there were some swallowing issues. Luckily he'd had a lot of practise in distancing himself from things that went into his mouth, most recently the grub at Bearlift - some of which probably was grub, a popular protein-enhancer in dried and ground form.
But his first tests of that nature had come earlier, one of the Rev's instructive punishments being that those with potty-mouths should be forced to eat the contents of said potty. How not to smell, how not to taste, how not to think: it was like the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil blind, deaf, and mute monkeys who sat on the miniature oil drum on his mother's dressing table with their paws clamped over their upper orifices, providing a role model for her that she was happy to follow. Have you been sick? What's that on your chin? He said, You're a dog, eat your own vomit. He pushed my head into the ... Now, Zebulon, don't make up stories. You know your father wouldn't have done such a thing! He loves you!
Slam the trapdoor on that one, roll a boulder. More to the point was how to stay warm. There was some crumbling tarpaper in the corner, not much use but some. He spread it on the floor, hoping it would act as a heat-retaining vapour barrier. Dry socks would have helped; he made a little teepee of sticks, draped the damp socks over it near the dying embers of his fire, hoping they wouldn't scorch. Then he heated several medium-sized stones in the coals. He bundled his cold feet inside the down vest, unfolded the two space-age reflecting survival blankets, his own and Chuck's, scrunched himself up inside them, added the hot stones underneath. Keep the core warm, that was Lesson One. Keep the feet from dropping off, always a good plan going forward. Remember that hands without fingers are not much use for tasks requiring small-muscle skills, such as doing up your bootlaces.
Was there grunting outside the bunkie in the dim hours, was there scratching? No door on the place, anything could walk right in. Wolverine, wolf, bear. Maybe the smoke kept them off. D
id he sleep? He must have. It got light soon enough.
He woke up singing.
Roamin' here, roamin' there, roamin' in my underwear,
I got a sweetie covered in hair,
She's all pussy everywhere ...
Some hoarse, twisted stagtime bellowing event. Energizing, though. Instant man-cave bonding. "Shut up," he told himself. "You want to die frivolously?" "Don't much matter, nobody's looking," he riposted.
His socks weren't dry, but they were drier. What a fool, he should've taken Chuck's socks from his gone but not forgotten fishbelly feet. He put the socks on, folded up the survival blankets, and stuffed them into his pockets - damn things would never go back into their little envelopes once you took them out - packed up his Practical Pig toolguy trinkets and the remains of his picnic, then took a cautious look out the door.
Mist everywhere. Grey as an emphysema cough. Just as well because now the flying visibility would be low, a good deterrent for airborne snoopers. Though not so good for Zeb himself because now he wouldn't know where he was going, as such. But surely it was a case of follow the yellow brick road, minus the bricks and with no Emerald City at the end.
There were only two possible directions: northeast to Norman Wells, rough going on a decaying track jumbled with glacier-dumped boulders; or southwest to Whitehorse, through the chilly, misty mountain valleys. Both of those destinations were far, far away, and if he were making odds he wouldn't have bet on himself. But the Whitehorse route hooked up on the Yukon side with a real road, one that could handle motorized vehicles. More chance of a hitchhike pickup there. Or something. Or other.