The Raven's Gift (33 page)

“Don’t think it would make much sense,” Red said. “No reason to go hunting for trouble, which you’re sure to find. First sound of a machine running down the road will bring the guns. I’m worried enough about us firing up that Tundra for a few minutes.”

“How many people do you think are left?”

Red pointed to a ladder attached to the side of the tank. “Want to take a look? Pretty good view up there.”

John nodded and Red mounted the ladder. John worried that Rayna would get scared when she heard footsteps above her, so he poked his head inside. The girl stood near the sink, naked from the waist up, with her back toward him. She turned at the sound of the door, and he quickly closed the door to just a crack. “Sorry,” he said.

“I’m almost done washing my hair,” she said. “It feels so nice to be clean. You going to see if you can find Maggie?”

“Just going to look,” he said. “I didn’t want you to get spooked when you heard footsteps up top.”

He shut the door and climbed the ladder. Red reached down a hand, and John grabbed it and eased himself over the edge. He stood beside Red and looked out over the city. The tank was just high enough that
they could see most of the town. Two small tendrils of smoke rose from houses, one to the west of town, and one in the middle.

“With it being as cold as it is, and only two houses with heat, maybe a few others we can’t see, I’d say there are probably less than fifty people living here. Most left. Fled by boat or snow machine, or on foot. The rest are dead. No fuel, no food. Don’t make for easy living if you can’t return to the old ways. See all those burned-out places? I think some of those fires are from people trying to burn the sickness out. They figured sick houses had to be burned. I think some of it was just madness.”

John scanned the rows of houses and vacant buildings. The scene was not new, just on a larger scale. Hundreds of structures, blackened, broken, destroyed.

“I’ve been through the whole town, at night mostly. Just looking,” Red said.

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I guess for people who needed help, for supplies, for
anything
, mostly looking for meaning, probably. Redemption don’t come easy.”

Red pointed toward the high school. “They tried to set up a makeshift hospital. At one point, they had over a thousand sick people inside. All laid out on gym mats and cots. Then when the power went out and there was no water or heat, it all went to hell real fast. On the outside the building doesn’t look half bad, but inside. You don’t ever want to see in there. You ever see those pictures of the stacks of bodies in Rwanda or the killing fields in Cambodia? Like that—bodies just piled clear to the ceiling. Everywhere.”

He lifted his hand again and pointed to the middle of town.

“And the hospital. Talk of Hades on earth. They quit taking patients early on, but people were forcing their way in. Total chaos. Too many sick people to help anyone. This whole place, this whole damn town just imploded on itself. Desperation brings out the best and worst in
people, they say, but for the most part, what I seen wasn’t the best. Fear. Pure fear.”

Red coughed, and spit off the edge of the tank.

“You’re welcome to take a little spin through town, but nothing good will come of it. I can pretty much guarantee you that. You’re better off firing up the machine in the morning. We’ll say our goodbyes and you can get on up the river, quick as you can. The storm will have covered her tracks. Don’t suspect you’ll find the old lady.” Red took his rifle off his shoulder and looked through the scope out across the tundra beyond the wind turbines. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the skier. White camouflage. That changes everything, John, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“This is more than a government quarantine. This sickness was concocted. Man-made. Monitored. Maybe some government agency acting on its own under the guise of a pandemic.”

“And the man on skis?” John asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s here to finish the job. Make sure no one survives to tell the story.”

John looked out toward the west to see what the morning’s weather would bring. The skies were strangely clear. Like the day the two Blackhawks landed with Santa in the village. He thought of the entire village lined up across the gym floor for ice cream and oranges, like the stories of shivering Sioux grateful and unravelling warm wool blankets infected with smallpox and measles.

A crisp blue horizon told him the night would be bitter cold. He was glad to know they would have at least one more night of safety, warmth, and a bed.

“You’re worried about what the girl will think about our deal,” Red said.

“She’s not going to understand, I’ll tell you that. She likes you. And you’re growing on me.”

“Growing like a fungus. Listen, I can explain it to her if you’d like. She’ll get that I don’t want to be alone no more. That I can’t leave this place. She knows more than she lets on, you know.”

“I know.”

“What am I not going to understand?”

They both turned and looked down at the girl, standing on the deck beneath them with a red towel wrapped around her black hair.

“Nothing, Rayna. Nothing.”

“Red’s not going with us, is he? He won’t tell anyone about them, my cousins, will he?”

“I’ve got to stay behind, girl. In case someone else comes along and needs help like you guys did. In case that hunter dude comes along. You know old Red will take care of him, too. Bang! Bang! Now go back inside—it ain’t safe out here for a beauty like you. Plus, your hair is soaking wet. You’ll catch a cold.”

“I think it’s too late to worry about catching colds, Red,” she said and disappeared inside.

Red waited for the sound of the door latch and then whispered to John. “Now don’t you steal her hope that those kids are alive. You don’t know that she’s right. You do what you need to, but keep her hope alive. That’s all she’s got. Hell, she’s the only one with any hope in this whole damn place. Leave with her tomorrow, then tell her you forgot something, tell her whatever you need to and come back. That’s the deal. Got it?”

The man’s eyes showed no sign of conceding. John started down the ladder without giving him an answer. He had no intention of returning.

Once they were back inside, the two men watched in silence as Rayna combed and then braided her long black hair. The thick single braid reached down to the middle of her back when she finished. Red handed her a fat blue rubber band to hold it together. John stared at the collection of figure eights running down her back and tried to
remember if Anna’s braids had been the same. He didn’t remember ever looking closely at them. They were just braids then; he hadn’t paid attention. He looked at her braids and then at the girl’s grass creation. The braids were similar, three strands that tapered to two, and then one, and he wondered how the girl could weave the strands so perfectly without seeing.

“Are we going to eat tonight?” she asked.

“Of course we’re going to eat tonight, kiddo,” Red said, standing up and stretching out his lower back. “We’ve got to have a little going-away party. We should eat something special, don’t you think? Maybe I should order us a pizza.”

The girl covered her mouth with both hands and giggled. The giggle turned to a cough. She coughed twice and cleared her throat. “Maybe you could order some Chinese food, too. I always ordered sweet-and-sour chicken when I came to Bethel,” she said and giggled some more.

Red chuckled. “And Greek! I’ll order us one of them gy-ros and a cal-zoni!”

They laughed together at his awkward pronunciation and John began to chuckle, too.

Red reached over and picked up a cordless phone sitting by the computer. John hadn’t noticed it sitting there, useless. “Here’s the phone,” he said, handing it to the girl. “Order me some Pad Thai from Stinky Fingers, with some mango coconut rice.”

The girl put the phone to her ear, laughing, and rolled back on the bed. John stood up from his chair and walked over to her. “Let me see that thing,” he said. She stopped laughing and she held the phone out. He snatched it up and for a moment Red and the girl thought the fun was over, but then he put it to his own ear.

“Hello? Is this Impossible Hut? I’d like to place an order. Yeah. One order of new jeans, yeah, mine aren’t fitting so well. I’ve lost a couple of pounds on this crazy diet. And a jet to pick us up and take us
somewhere tropical, somewhere warm, yes, with a side order of cheesy fries. What do you want, Red?”

The girl held her stomach and rolled around on the bed, laughing and gasping for air.

“From Impossible Hut? I’ll take some king crab with drawn butter, a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and a Blackhawk chopper, fuelled and fully loaded for ass kicking.”

“Did you get that? Wait, one more order. Rayna, what do you want?”

She stopped laughing and sat up. Her face got serious. “I can get anything I want?” she asked.

“Anything. Red’s buying.”

“The hell I am!”

“Okay, I’m buying. Order whatever you want, girl.”

“Well, I’d like some ice cream. Chocolate with whipped cream on top. And I never had Japanese food before. What do they call it?”

“Sushi.”

“Yes, sushi. I want to try that.”

“Is that all,” John asked, still holding the phone to his ear. “You want anything else?”

The girl thought long and hard for a moment, turned her face up toward him, and smiled. “Just ice cream,” she said. “Chocolate ice cream.”

HE LOST COUNT of how many days Anna had been sick, how long they had been without power, how many snow machines had raced away from the village, and how many groups he’d seen carrying corpses out to the cemetery at the north end of the village, just past their house. At first there had been a few crude plywood coffins. He suspected those had been hand cut. Then the bodies were wrapped in sheets. And finally, he would watch as just one or two people used all their strength to lug a body, no coffin or sheet, to a snow machine with a sled.

One night, while Anna slept, he walked out to the cemetery to stretch his legs, but also to see what they were doing with the dead. He didn’t want to waste the batteries in his headlamp, so he kept the light off. He could see well enough with the snow reflecting the light coming from a waning half moon.

Each step through the snow zapped his strength. He’d started to ration their canned food. He figured help would be coming soon enough, but he didn’t want to take any chances, and he worried what extent people would go to if they started running out of food and fuel to hunt and fish.

He took several steps backward at the sight of the dead. The rows and rows of bodies stood out against the snow. Behind them the white wooden crosses from the old graves stood leaning like weary soldiers on guard. He didn’t count the corpses. There were too many to count.

In slow, short steps he backed away from the frozen, lifeless faces. Then he turned and sprinted home. He wasn’t close enough to see their expressions, but he knew some of them were his students, and from the size of the smaller corpses, some of Anna’s too. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if she joined them.

   36   

“S
ee you, Red,” Rayna whispered over the rattle of the Tundra’s motor. She held his face with her bare hands and kissed him on the forehead. “
Quyana-cakneq
.”

Red’s eyes welled as he watched the girl slide her hands into her mittens.

John was glad the girl couldn’t see the tears beginning to stream down the man’s weathered cheeks. He wished he couldn’t, either.

“You travel safe, kiddo. You’ll find gold where you’re going, girl,” he said. “And keep an eye on this goofy guy.”

She laughed. “So funny you are, Red.
Piuraa
.”

John took off his glove and shook Red’s hand. He gave a firm squeeze and nodded his head. He didn’t need to say any more.

“Got everything?”

“I think so,” John said.

“Well. If you need something else, don’t be afraid to come back and get it.”

John nodded again.

He swung his leg over the machine’s black seat, and the girl crawled on behind him and wrapped her arms around him. “I’ve never been so happy to be on a sno-go,” she yelled to Red.