I sat there for a while, giving my eyes a chance to adjust. Outside, the cloud moved past the moon. A thin stream of light came in through the front window, and shapes started to appear in the room. I saw the table, the stove, the refrigerator. The door to the back room.
They had trashed the place. It was already a mess before-now it was completely destroyed. There were pieces of Styrofoam all over the floor, and what looked like the stuffing from our sleeping bags. When I moved back and took a look in the back room, I saw the wood stove pushed completely over, the exhaust pipe pulled right out of the ceiling. I came back out into the kitchen, checked the refrigerator and the cupboards. Every bit of food was gone. The pots and pans were gone, even the utensils. Old Mother Hubbard, I thought, and what a fucking strange thing to think of at a time like this. They had probably taken everything that could have been of any use to us and thrown it right in the lake. For the hell of it, I tried turning on the stove. There was no propane.
I got down on my hands and knees and checked the floor. Maybe they had missed something. There was an empty plastic bottle under the table. Good for holding water. I put that in my coat. And what was this? It was something silver. I reached under the table and grabbed it. A half roll of duct tape. I put that in my coat, too. You never know.
A sound. Outside. Something close.
Where’s that club? Where did I put that fucking club?
Over there by the door. I grabbed it and crouched down next to the door, waiting for it to open. The sounds got closer. My heart was pounding in my chest. This is it. This is the showdown.
It was joined by another sound. Some kind of hissing. It sounded like-
Fuck, it was Vinnie. What was he doing?
I looked out the window. A big black bear was coming toward the cabin. His fur glistened in the moonlight. Vinnie was hissing at him, trying to keep him away.
I slipped out the door and waved at him. We met up on the back side of the cabin, moving quickly, back into the cover of the trees. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I didn’t want that bear to come right through that window again.”
“He can have the place now,” I said. “They totally destroyed everything inside.”
“That figures. If they’re not gonna be there themselves tonight-”
“Maybe they’ll come back here. Should we stick around?”
He leaned over with his hands on his knees. “I don’t know, Alex. I don’t know what the fuck to do now.”
“Let’s move back in the woods,” I said. “If they come back, we should be able to hear them.”
We made our way through the trees until we were about a hundred yards from the cabin. We found a thick mass of hemlock, perfect for hiding behind. If they came this way tonight, we’d hear them long before they got to us.
I took the roll of duct tape out of my coat pocket, made Vinnie roll his sleeve up, and taped up his arm. “It ain’t perfect,” I said. “But it’ll do for now.”
His face was a different story. I knew I had to do something with it, but the slightest touch made him flinch. “Here,” I said, grabbing a stick. “Bite this. And hold your hair up.”
He did as he was told. I stretched a piece of tape from his jaw, down his cheek, over his ruined ear, and around to the other side of his face. He closed his eyes and bit right through the stick. I put another piece of tape over the first, and then another. It looked like hell, but it seemed to stop the bleeding.
He sat down in the dirt and leaned back against a tree trunk. I sat down next to him. I listened closely to the night, but didn’t hear a thing. The crickets were all asleep, buried under the ground. The birds had all flown south. The bears were out there somewhere, but at that moment I couldn’t hear them.
“We need another plan,” I said.
Vinnie didn’t answer me. His head bobbed down, snapped back up, then bobbed down again.
“You should rest awhile,” I said. I pulled him closer, so he could lean his head against my shoulder, with the bad side of his face in the air.
“No,” he said. But he put his head on my shoulder and kept it there.
I spent the next couple of hours just sitting there, careful not to move. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t make things look any better. We were lost.
As I drifted off, I wondered if the next time I closed my eyes would be my last.
Chapter Sixteen
I opened my eyes. There was a dim light, and a wet fog hung heavy in the air. I could feel the cold dew on my face. When I tried to straighten out my neck, the pain ran right down my back. Holy God, I thought. This cannot be happening.
My heart stopped when I realized Vinnie wasn’t sitting next to me anymore. For one horrible moment, I wondered if they had gotten to him somehow. They had killed him like the others and now they were on their way back for me. Then I heard him behind me.
“Good morning,” he said. He was working on a long stick, carving the end into a sharp point. The duct tape was still wrapped all around his head. The black and red stripes had run into two great smudges on his face.
“Is that a knife?”
“Just a little jackknife. Too small to hurt anybody.” He put the stick down and started on another. “Now if you had brought your gun-”
I thought about it. “My gun’s on the bottom of Lake Superior right now.”
“Too bad,” he said. “Want some breakfast?”
“What do you mean?”
“Here,” he said. He threw me the plastic bottle I had taken from the cabin. He must have gone to the stream to fill it with water. “I found some dandelions. It’s just something to put in your stomach, if you want.” He dropped a couple of plants in my lap.
I took a long drink of water and tried taking a bite of one of the leaves. It tasted like bitter lettuce.
“I can’t find any insects,” he said. “It’s too late in the year.”
Insects, I thought. If he had found any, I’d be eating them. The way my stomach is feeling right now, I’d do it.
“Today’s the day, Alex. Are you ready?”
I looked at him. I couldn’t understand why he suddenly had so much more energy than I did. “Vinnie, are you all right?”
“For now, I am. Tonight will be a different story.”
“What are you talking about?”
“By the end of the day we’ll be really hurting. There’s hardly anything edible up here. We can’t signal for help, not that anybody else is even gonna fly over here. We can’t build a fire. They’d find us in a minute. We can’t get back on our own. It’s too far. We’ve only got one hope.”
“What’s that?”
“Their plane.”
“What are we gonna do? Steal their plane and fly it?”
“Not unless you know how. I was thinking about their radio.”
“How do we get to it?”
“Think about it, Alex. We know the plane’s still here, right? We would have heard them if they had left. We know they’re somewhere south of here. We have to find the plane.”
“Okay, that makes sense.”
“You know what else? If we find their plane, we’ll find them. Or at least one of them. That plane is their only way out, too.”
“The plane is their only vulnerable spot,” I said. “They have to protect it.”
“Exactly. We have to hit them there. We don’t have any other choice.”
“Except sitting around and waiting for them to make a mistake.”
“Which we can’t do,” he said. “Not for much longer.”
I grabbed the tree and pulled myself up. I had never felt more drained in my entire life. Vinnie handed me one of his sharpened spears. “One way or another,” he said. “We have to end this today.”
We went back through the trees, toward the cabin. When we got to the edge, we both stopped in our tracks.
“If there’s more than one of them,” I said, “there might be somebody watching the cabin now.”
“Could be. In the daylight, we’d be easy targets.”