“How far do you think we’ve traveled?” I ask. I stutter the sentence out. My teeth keep chattering. Any harder and they’re going to break.
Jo shrugs. “What time does your watch say? Mine isn’t waterproof.”
I look at my watch, but can’t make anything out. I hold it up to my eyes and try to focus, but it’s no good-it’s just a blur of hands and dashes. Jo seizes my wrist and holds it in front of her face.
“It’s two sixteen,” she says.
“Late.”
“My watch says two ten.”
“It’s a cheap watch.”
“Exactly. It would have stopped when we dived in the water. We’ve been on the bank for probably four minutes. That means two minutes in the water.”
Two minutes in the water. The river was close to the cabin, but so what? There was a track we took that was barely a track and we walked it for maybe ten minutes. Easy to find if you know where it is. And when it’s daylight. And dry. I think harder, then realize some of what she’s trying to get at. We’ve come downstream toward the cabin. We’ve crossed the distance much quicker than if we’d walked.
“How far can you go?” she asks.
“Further than you.”
We both doubt it, but say nothing.
We carry on, but it’s barely a minute before we’re hit with a gradual slope. We struggle against it, often supporting ourselves against trees and each other. Some feeling begins to return to my legs and arms, but not my feet or hands. The slope becomes steeper as we walk further. I’m hoping, when the slope levels out, that we’ll be near the makeshift track. Then all we have to do is turn right and we’ll find the cabin. Or left.
My feet have gone, but my toes remain-ten individual spears of pain ready to be snapped off. This little piggy went to market. This little piggy drowned. And this little piggy caught pneumonia and died. I remember Landry telling me the cabin was a minute from the river, but I don’t know how much that’s going to help. The trees form a tent that keeps the rain off our faces, but not the wind. If we don’t get out of our wet clothes and find somewhere warm we’re going to die. It’s that simple. With each passing second we’re slowing down. Jo’s wrist tells us time has stopped. My watch suggests differently. I don’t know which one to believe. My jeans are so wet I can hardly bend my legs.
I quickly explain what Landry told me.
“Then we follow the river,” she says.
“Yeah, but which way?”
“Which way do you think?”
“I don’t know. If we go left we might end up where we started. We should go right first at least for a bit. We can always turn back.”
She looks at me long and hard, knowing we don’t have the energy to turn back if we go the wrong way, and in the end decides to follow my advice. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve fucked up everything I’ve done this week so I’m due for some decent luck. We turn right and start moving, doing our best to stay parallel to the water, using only its sound as a guide. The trees get thinner and closer together. I want to turn them into firewood, want to burn down the whole lot. We stumble between them, breaking our way forward. It looks similar to the track we’re looking for. Lots of black. Lots of trees. Lots of roots. We carry on in silence, watched by the night and the small, wet, unhelpful creatures living in it. Kathy and Luciana are watching me too. I can feel them, but that’s all.
My foot snags on a root, and as in the early minutes of Monday morning I fall onto my hands and knees, only this time I don’t lose hold of a tire iron. I roll onto my back and look up at the trees. Jo kneels down next to me. She rests her head on my chest and I can hear her labored breathing. I want to put my arms around her and think back to better times, but those times have gone, they are gone and the forest is here replacing them and the killing hour has arrived.
I close my eyes and look for Kathy and Luciana and hope that Landry isn’t there too.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Darkness and death aren’t as scary as I thought. No Heaven, no Hell, just a place with no feeling or time or emotion. A dark place with a soft sound and cool air and, best of all, it doesn’t hurt.
“Wake up, Charlie.”
I was wrong to be frightened. Wrong to think that death was going to be an eternity of torture and mayhem. Wrong to think that I wasn’t going to like it. Hell, it isn’t even boring. Had I known this before, I never would have struggled.
“Charlie.”
I roll over. Jo is next to me. This isn’t death. I can’t tell if she’s on her knees or not. Pine needles have created a blanket for us to rest on, but not one to crawl under and get warm. Branches rustle and leaves tear from their stems above us. Cones fall to the earth and pine needles fly through the wind.
“I’m awake.”
“And shivering,” she says.
“I can’t stop.”
“It’s a good thing,” she says. “It means hypothermia hasn’t started.”
I have no idea if that’s true. All I know is it doesn’t feel good.
She forces herself up, pressing against my stomach to raise herself. “I think there’s a light in the distance, perhaps only thirty yards away. If we can make it, promise me we’ll go to the police.”
“I promise.” I don’t want her help in getting up, but I need it. When I’m on my feet we stagger forward.
Head toward the light.
If this is the trail we took earlier and the cabin is ahead of us, then that makes Cyris. . where? Anywhere? Lost? Or here? We break through the trees into the clearing. Seeing Landry’s car is awful. It makes me realize that life goes on, no matter who is no longer in it. In ten years the car will still be here. The paint job will have cracked in the heat, the metal will have rusted in the rain, the tires will be flat, the rims of the wheels will have cut through them and made impressions in the ground. The whole thing will be covered in mold. The car is a slice of life waiting for the return of its owner, but it will never happen-its owner is pinned against a fallen tree, its owner will decay over the following weeks and break apart.
The cabin looks like a palace. Limping forward, I reach the porch. I can’t climb up onto it so I sit on the edge and roll myself on. Jo does the same.
I can’t clutch the door with my frozen hands, but Jo has more movement so she nudges me aside. The cabin was cold before, but it’s warmer and drier than outside. The wind ushers us inside and we close the door behind us.
“We can’t stay here,” I say.
“I know, I know,” she answers. “But I know I can’t drive either. What about you?”
I want to say I can. But I can’t. Put me behind the wheel of a car and I don’t even know if I’ll have the strength to change gears. And if I do, I’m only going to drive a few feet before hitting any one of a number of trees. “Not yet. What are we going to do?”
“Stay here,” she says.
“But we can’t.”
“Just a bit,” she says, rubbing her hands together in an attempt to get the process started. “Just long enough to warm up.”
“That could take hours. Let’s just warm up in the car.”
“This will be quicker,” she says. “I know it’s tough to do, but we have to hold out hope that Cyris is lost.”
“Yeah, but he may not be. He might be right outside.”
“If we try driving we’re going to crash. Then what? Start walking back to the city?”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Two minutes,” she says. “We spend two minutes warming up and then we leave.”
Two minutes isn’t a lot of time. In two minutes I’m probably going to be colder than I am now. She moves over to one of the lanterns. She picks it up, hooking it as if she has a claw. Plenty of dry kindling has been set in lots of old newspaper in the fireplace. Jo tries removing the glass top of the lantern, but her hands are too cold, then comes up with a more practical way. She throws her lantern into the fireplace. The glass breaks. A flame is released. The brittle paper lights up like an inferno.