Despite the pain, he felt a detachment from himself so intense it verged on out-of-body, like a filter setting up between what had happened in the field and his emotional connection to it. He felt a beautiful step removed. He watched himself listening to the soldiers. Watched himself lying on his side on the moist ground with his back against the tree trunk. Watched his eyes close as the devastation that was this day sat perched beside his head with the patience of a gargoyle, waiting to crush him.
At some point in the night, a noise from the field woke him, and it took Jack a moment to connect it with the growl of the dozer. Through the branches of the spruce tree, he could just make out the lights on top of its cab blazing down into the pit, the scoop pushing earth back into the open grave.
He shut his eyes but another sound wouldn’t let him sleep—a crunching like the snap of trees during an ice storm, and he’d almost let it go, so tired, so tired, when he realized what it was. It could only be the bones of those inside the pit, breaking under the dozer’s weight.
* * * * *
JACK woke to stomach cramps and the splintering brightness of the sun coming through the branches. He crawled out from under the spruce tree, lightheaded and sore, wondering how much blood he’d lost during the night.
The exposed bone of his left ring finger hurt more than his shoulder.
The meadow was abuzz with soldiers, many of them closer than he would’ve liked, and some of them with dogs.
He struggled to his feet and started into the woods. It was slow-going. He had no sense of direction. Just a dense pine wood that seemed to go on and on.
By midday, he hadn’t crossed a road, a water source, or anything resembling civilization, and as the light started to fail the forest began to climb, until in the twilight, he found himself on a steep, wooded hillside. He sat down. Shivering. Nothing left.
* * * * *
WOKE colder than he’d ever been in his life and covered in frost, curled up on the mountainside and watching the torturously slow progression of sunlight climbing the hill toward the spot where he lay.
When the sun finally washed over him two hours later, he shut his eyes and faced its brightness, let the warmth envelop him. He stopped shivering. The frost had burned off his clothing. He sat up and looked up the hillside and started to climb.
Somehow, he went on. Hands and knees. Mindless hours. Always up. Endless.
Late afternoon, he lay on a hillside covered in aspen trees. If someone had told him he’d been climbing this mountain for a year, he might’ve believed them. He was losing control of his thoughts. The thirst fracturing his mind. It occurred to him that if he didn’t get up and start walking in the next ten seconds, he wasn’t going to get up again. Could feel himself on the edge of not caring.
In the middle of the night, he stumbled out of the forest into a clearing that swept another thousand feet up the mountain to his left, and shot down a narrow chute between the spruce trees to his right. The sky was clear, the moon high, everything bright as day. A golf course, he thought. A steep golf course. Then he noticed the tiny lodge halfway up the hill. The metal terminals that went up the mountain and the cables strung between them. He stared downslope, saw a sign with a black diamond next to the word, “Emigrant.”
Jack’s legs buckled.
Then he lay with the side of his face in the cold, dead grass, staring down the steep headwall. He could see three mountain ranges from his vantage point, the rock and the pockets of snow above timberline glowing under the moon.
He closed his eyes, kept telling himself he should get up, keep walking, crawling, roll down this f**king mountain if he had to, because stopping was death, and death meant never seeing them again.
Saying her name aloud tied a hot wire of pain around his throat, which felt full of glass shards. So dry and swollen. He said the name of his daughter. The name of his son. He pushed himself up. Sat there dry-heaving for a minute. Then he got onto his feet and started down the mountain.
Jack was a dead man walking two hours later, a thousand feet lower, when he arrived at the foot of the dark lodge. He had to crawl up the steps and pull himself upright again by the wooden door handles. They were locked. He went back down the steps and pried one of the rocks lining the sidewalk out of the ground.
So weak, it took him four swings to even put a crack through the big square window beside the doors. The fifth swing broke through and the glass fell out of the frame. He scrambled over into a cafeteria, perfectly dark except for where moonlight streamed through the tall windows. So strange to be indoors again. It had been days. The grill in back was still shuttered for the season. He limped over to the drink fountain, mouth beginning to water. Pressed the buttons for Coca-Cola, Sierra Mist, Orange Fanta, Country Time Lemonade, Barq’s Rootbeer, but the machine stood dormant, empty.
He made his way between the tables toward a common area that accessed a bar and a gift shop, both locked up. He moved out of the long panels of moonlight into darkness.
Straight ahead, he could just make out a pair of doors. As he moved toward them, they vanished in the black, but he kept on, hands outstretched, until he ran into a wall.
He pushed and the door swung back.
Couldn’t see a thing, but he knew he was in a bathroom. Smelled the water in the toilets.
He ran his hand along the wall, found the switch, hit the lights.
Nothing.
Heard the door ease shut. He moved forward to where he thought the sinks might be, and stepped into a wall. Turned around, becoming disoriented as he moved in a different direction. He touched a counter, his hands frantically searching for the faucet. Cranked open the tap, but nothing happened.
Took him several minutes to get his trembling hands on the stall door. He pulled it open and dropped to his knees, hands grazing the cold porcelain of the toilet. Inside the bowl, his fingers slid into chilly water.
He didn’t think about where this water had been or all the people who’d sat on this toilet and pissed and shit and vomited here, or the industrial strength chemicals that had been used to clean the bowl. He lowered his face to the surface of the water and drank and thought only of how sweet it tasted running down his swollen throat.
* * * * *
A razor line of light. For a long time, Jack just stared at it. His face against a tiled floor. Cold but not freezing. Piecing together where he was, how he’d arrived here, beginning to face the fact that he wasn’t dead. At least he was mostly sure he wasn’t.
He crawled out of the stall. The raging thirst gone, but the hunger pangs doubled him over when he stood, his feet so badly blistered he was afraid to see the damage.