“A lot of animals will do that,” he says. “Under stress. Means you don’t have to put the energy into digesting. Lightens the load.”
“Were you cold?” says Toby.
Zeb’s teeth were chattering, he was shivering. He took Chuck’s down vest, added it to his own. It wasn’t ripped much. He checked the pockets, found Chuck’s cellphone, mashed it with a rock to destroy any GPS and eavesdropping functions. It started ringing just before he did the mashing; it took everything not to answer it and pretend he was Chuck. Maybe he should’ve answered, though, and said that Zeb was dead. He might’ve learned something. A couple of minutes later his own phone rang; he waited until it stopped, then mashed it as well.
Chuck had a few more toys, though nothing Zeb didn’t have himself. Pocketknife, bear spray, bug spray, folded-up tinfoil space-age survival blanket, those things. By great good luck the bear gun they always carried with them in case of groundings and attacks had been tossed out along with Chuck. Bear guns were the exception to the new no-guns rules because even the dickwad CorpSeCorps bureaucrats knew you needed a bear gun up there. The Corps didn’t like Bearlift, but they didn’t try to shut it down either, though they could have done that with one finger. It served a function for them, sounded a note of hope, distracted folks from the real action, which was bulldozing the planet flat and grabbing anything of value. They had no objection to the standard Bearlift ad, with a smiling green furfucker telling everyone what a sterling lot of good Bearlift was doing, and please send more cash or you’ll be guilty of bearicide. The Corps even put some of the cash in themselves. “That was back when they were still massaging their trust-me images,” says Zeb. “Once they got a hammerlock on power, they didn’t have to bother so much.”
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.