He felt Jared stir, the movement traveling through the wooden poles and into his hands. “You can’t be seriously considering going down there.”
Zee didn’t answer. Hours of walking, dragging the stretcher behind him, had left his muscles rubbery and trembling. His hunger was a constant pain now; the canteen was nearly empty. The sun would vanish over the tops of the trees soon, and it would be dark. They needed food, shelter, water.
The thought of retracing his steps felt like despair.
It would be all uphill, some of it gradual, some of it steep. And to what goal? If they went back, it would be to discount this one hope he had—that his dream memories rang true, that Surmise was to be somehow reached at the end of this dark road. And if all hope was gone, then there was nothing left but to lie down and die, a thing he had no intention of doing.
“Hang on,” he said, picking up the crossbars of the stretcher. “Gonna be a rough ride.”
Rough and dark. As he descended farther down the path, the sun was lost to view. Occasional rays of light filtered through the thick wall of thorns, just enough to let him see how treacherous was the way ahead. Every footstep was a tentative act of faith that there would be solid ground to hold him, that he wouldn’t go tumbling away into some deep chasm. He worked his way across cracks and fissures and around obstructing rocks, manhandling the stretcher behind him. Jared cursed and muttered at every jolt.
Zee’s arms ached with the weight of his burden. Thirst burned in his throat, dried by a cold wind that blew constantly against him, searching through skin and flesh and probing his bones. His face hurt and his teeth ached and he choked on the stench of bitter emptiness. It brought to his mind all of his darkest days—the first time he had looked into his mother’s eyes and seen the unlove and indifference, not quite recognizing it for what it was but feeling it through every cell of his four-year-old body. The first time he was arrested and dragged off to juvie after beating another kid senseless. Sitting in a cement cell behind bars and knowing he had lost control of his life and the ability to come and go with freedom. The moment in Surmise where the whole world had disintegrated around him as he hung by one arm from a fracturing doorway, whispering Vivian’s name. The other memory, the darkest one, of Vivian’s body morphing into that of an old hag, was too fresh and he pushed it back with all of his will.
“Death would have been more merciful than dragging me into hell,” Jared muttered. “You should have killed me.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
He stopped to rest, sinking down to the ground. The stone beneath his palms felt hot, as though the earth itself were stricken with fever. He needed a drink, but the water was almost gone. He heard a rustling from the stretcher, a dry cough.
“We’re going to die here,” Jared moaned. “You should have left me in the clearing; at least there was water.”
Zee’s fingers tightened around the sword hilt. It would feel so good to slip the tip of the blade between Jared’s ribs. Give the man what he asked for. Straight into the heart. Blissful silence would follow. Call it a mercy killing and be done.
When he was a kid, the neighbor’s dog had killed a chicken once.
“You need to kill that dog,” Zee’s father said. “Now he’s got the taste, he’ll never stop.”
The old farmer disagreed. “There’s better cures than that.” He’d tied that dead chicken around the dog’s neck. Left it there until it was so rotten it was falling apart. The dog understood the punishment and the shame. He crept around, belly low to the ground, meeting nobody’s eyes, carrying his odious burden.
Apparently, Jared was Zee’s chicken, and he hadn’t learned his lesson yet. Dragging himself back up onto his feet, he handed the canteen to the sick man. “Here. Drink.”
Trying to swallow past the desert in his own throat, he listened to the sound of precious water being swallowed and waited for the inevitable comment.
“It’s empty.”
“Astute observation. Buckle your seat belt.”
“You’re insane. We can’t go down there. Can’t you smell the evil?”
Zee could. Or he smelled something, at any rate. The stench of decay grew stronger the farther they went. And with the increasing stink the darkness increased as well. No more patches of light. The stretcher jolted and tipped and caught on stones.
Jared cursed and moaned by turns.
At last they were no longer descending but on a level. The path widened and smoothed. Dim light filtered in from above, enough to see that they walked on a wide road, with high stone walls on either side. It was much easier going, but the sense of danger and death increased and the smell became so bad that Zee pulled his T-shirt up over his nose and mouth to provide a filter. He heard Jared begin to retch and couldn’t help thinking of the waste of good water.
Something blocked the path ahead.
At first he took it for stone, but then it began to take shape. A long, sinuous neck. A broken wing. Ridged back and spiked tail. His hand tightened reflexively on the sword, but the creature was long dead, the curve of ribs visible through decaying flesh, and there was no longer any question about where the smell was coming from.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Just be thankful it’s dead.”
Zee wasn’t really thankful, though. He wanted to kill it all over again. For the first time he asked himself why he felt such hate toward the dragons. Maybe because his other self had suffered much on their account in Surmise. But he didn’t think that was all of it. This went deeper, a primal antipathy of warring races. The impossible tale the old hermit had told nagged at him. Why couldn’t it be true, considering all of the other impossible things he had come to accept?
It didn’t really matter. The dragon was dead. And the path he needed to take lay over its inconvenient and very smelly body.
“Tell me we’re going back,” Jared said.
Zee laughed, a sudden and inexplicable burst of adrenaline flooding through him at the insanity of this entire situation. “Hang on tight,” he said.
Gathering his strength, he took a few running steps to gather momentum. His feet slid in a litter of scales and he lost traction for a minute, but he kept moving. Tightening his grip on the stretcher poles, he leaped up onto the neck and let his weight carry him down the other side, pulling Jared’s weight up and over behind him.
Instead of continuing on down a clear path, he was forced to skid to a halt. A skeleton lay directly in his path. It was human in shape and composition but nearly double his own size, in both height and breadth. Scraps of flesh still clung to the bones.
No human could be that big. Some sort of giant monkey, maybe. The skeleton would look pretty much the same to his untrained eyes. But then, here in the Between it could be anything. A dream door stood in the stone wall a few paces away, tall enough to admit a creature as big as the one lying dead beside the dragon.
His first thought was that dragon and man-thing had killed each other in combat, but this theory didn’t sit right. The skeleton showed no evidence of fire and was intact. No dragonish eating of heads or limbs or other body parts. There was no indication of any struggle. The straggling plant life was untrampled. No scorch marks. Nothing but a lot of bloodstains. Some of it was the thick black sludge he recognized as dragon blood; the rest looked human.
The idea of something roaming around that could kill both a giant man-thing and a dragon without a struggle was enough to push Zee forward into a slow jog. His immediate goal was to put as much distance between himself and this place as possible. He didn’t trust that dream door to stay closed, wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t being tracked by the black dragon he’d encountered at the well.
Two paths branched out, at last, from the one he was on. Briefly, he paused. They looked identical, leading into old-growth forest. He chose the one on the right for no other reason than a vague familiarity coupled with the sensation that he was prey, and that the predator was never far behind. Run he must, and his gut told him this was the path most likely to help him survive.