I looked around the place while the water was heating up, on the off chance there might be a first-aid kit lying around. There wasn’t. I left him there at the table for a minute while I went outside to check the little shed by the dock. When I opened the door, I saw an outboard motor leaning against the back wall, and several life preservers hanging on hooks. Two five-gallon gas cans sat on the floor. That was it.
I was about to close the door when a horrible thought came to me. I picked up both gas cans, shook them, and remembered that Guy had done the same thing yesterday. At the time, he had been surprised that so much gasoline was gone.
Ten gallons of gasoline.
I dropped the cans and slammed the door shut. Vinnie was still sitting at the table when I went back into the cabin. He hadn’t moved, not an inch.
“Vinnie,” I said.
He just sat there, staring straight ahead.
“My God,” I said. “Vinnie.” It all washed over me in one moment, how tired I was, how hungry, how much my back hurt for some reason, how miserable my feet felt in the wet boots. I couldn’t solve anything else, so I focused on the small stuff. Get Vinnie cleaned up, and then get these boots off.
The water was finally boiling. I stirred it all up with a big spoon, and then I fished out the dish towel. I grabbed the little bottle of dishwashing soap, went over and sat down next to Vinnie, and went to work on him.
“This is gonna hurt,” I said as I put his left arm on the table, pushing the sleeve of his coat up. As soon as I touched his arm with the hot towel, he stood up and pushed me away.
“Tom,” he said. “I’ve got to help Tom.”
“Vinnie, get back here.”
He went out the door and jumped down off the front porch. “I’ve got to help him,” he said. “The bears.”
I chased him down, grabbed him around the waist.
“The bears,” he said. “The bears.”
“They’re gone,” I said. “Come on, Vinnie. Sit down. The bears are gone.”
I pulled him back to the porch and sat him down on it. We were back outside in the cold air now. I took a deep breath and tried to clear my head. Then I squeezed out the soap onto the hot towel and pressed it onto his arm. He closed his eyes.
I washed him off as well as I could, starting with the cuts in his arm, then his face. The blood turned the towel pink. “Stay here,” I said. I went into the cabin and took the pot off the stove, brought it outside and put it down next to him. I took out a strip of fabric and pressed it against his arm.
“These cuts aren’t as bad as I thought,” I said to him. “It’s a good thing you had this coat on.”
He looked at me. For the first time since I found him up there, he looked right at me. His eyes were red.
“We’ve got another problem,” I said. I took another strip out of the pot and wrapped it around his arm. “The plane came back a while ago. It circled around a couple of times and then it landed. Or at least I thought it did. But when I got back, the plane wasn’t here.”
With the fabric wrapped around his arm, I took two more thin strips out of the pot and tied them around the edges, tight enough to keep the bandage in place.
“The plane didn’t land on the lake, Vinnie. It must have gone down in the woods.”
Vinnie kept looking at me, until it finally sank in. He turned his head and looked out at the lake.
“You can’t land anywhere else,” I said.
As soon as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. You can land somewhere else. There were other lakes. If you flew over this lake and kept going north, and you saw that the bears were uncovering your secret, the secret you had buried in the loose ground on the side of the stream, you would know that Vinnie and Alex were about to become your biggest problem. And so you would circle back and land your plane, but not on this lake. You would land on a different lake.
I thought back to our trip up here, flying over the trees. The other lakes, all strung out like pearls on the ground, connected by the thin streams. There was one lake, to the south of this one. I tried to remember how far away it was.
You land on the nearest lake. You get out of your plane. You know these woods. You know there’s a trail to Lake Agawaatese.
You come quietly.
“Vinnie,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.” I stood up and looked around, leaving Vinnie on the porch. I followed the line of trees with my eyes, all the way around the lake.
That’s when I heard the first gunshot.
Chapter Fourteen
Vinnie was down. That was the first thing that came to me. I ran over to the front porch and said his name, saw blood on the side of his face. I heard another shot. Wood chips flew from the side of the cabin.
I grabbed him by the coat and pulled him to his feet. There was another gunshot, and then another. Everything after that was a mad rush of fear and adrenaline. We ran like animals, tripping over rocks and roots, pine boughs lashing our faces. There was nothing left but running. No thought. No sanity. No reason. Just running through the trees with our hearts pumping in our throats.
Vinnie tripped and went down hard. I picked him up, just as we heard a branch snapping somewhere behind us. We kept running. He went one way around a great rock, I went another. I thought I’d pick him up on the other side, but he wasn’t there.
There was a stream here, maybe the same stream we had seen before, maybe not. I had no idea where the hell I was. I almost called his name out loud, then realized how suicidal that would be. I stopped and listened. I could hear nothing but my own breathing and the soft sound of the water on the rocks.
Something moved in my peripheral vision. I ducked instinctively, waiting for the rifle blast. Vinnie’s face appeared around the trunk of a tree. He was holding his right ear, the whole side of his face painted in blood. He was leaning against the tree like it was the only thing holding him upright.
I went to him, pushed his hand away, and looked at his face. He brushed me away and pointed at the ground. I looked down and saw my own footprints. We were making it pretty damn easy for them to find us.
“Come on, this way,” I said. I was about to take him up the stream but thought better of it. That’s exactly where they’d expect us to go. Instead, I led Vinnie downstream for a good hundred yards, cutting back against our original direction. The water was cold and it soaked my boots again, but what the hell.
We jumped out of the stream and hit the woods again. We couldn’t run anymore. But we kept moving. There was no trail here. We didn’t want a trail. We squeezed our way between trees and climbed over rocks. I don’t know how long we kept going. I don’t know how far away we got from them, or how hard we made it for them to find us. When Vinnie started to slow down and stumble, I figured we had gone about as far away as we were going to get.
We came to a large ridge of exposed rock. I peered down over it and saw that there was an overhang. “Vinnie, down here,” I said.
I helped him crawl down over the ledge. He collapsed right there, his back against the wall of rock. I grabbed the trunk of a big pine tree that had fallen down and muscled it over, leaning it against the overhang. When I ducked inside, I saw that I had showered Vinnie with brown pine needles.
I brushed him off and finally got a good look at his face. There was a long furrow in his cheek, where the bullet had grazed him. His right earlobe was gone.
“Ah, fuck, Vinnie,” I said. “God damn it all.”
He was breathing hard, a long line of mucus hanging from his nose.
“Give me your arm,” I said. He was losing blood a hell of a lot faster from his face, so I rolled up his sleeve and untied his bandage. I took it off and pressed it against his cheek and his ear. He struggled, but I held on tight. Finally, he gave up and went limp against me. I leaned back against the rock. He slid down with his head in my lap. I kept the cloth pressed against his face, closed my eyes, and listened.