Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey (8 page)

Nobody did.   We all stare though.  They were there. 
Or never there.
  Brother ghosts. 
Brothers of the dead.
 
Ghost walkers.
  Henrick looks at the snow where they marked, the paw-prints, the size of them, back at Luttinger.

“What do we do now?” he asks.

“Same as before.
  Get the fuck out.”  Ojeira looks from Luttinger across the clearing. 

“Maybe we should stay here,” Ojeira says.  Knox nods.

“Yeah,” Knox says.  They both look scared.

 “They mean to have it,” I say again.  Ojeira and Knox are still scared. 
The others too.
  All of us are.

“Get anything worth taking, and go.”  I say it in a way they’ll understand we’re in a hurry now, but I didn’t need to, they’re scared now, for real, and nobody else is arguing for staying here, everybody’s moving.  We look back at Luttinger, and go. 

We start pulling together the stuff we’ve gathered the night before, but now we’re rushing.  I’m finding I like the daylight, what little is left.  I find a knife that must have come out of somebody's bag.  Half the guys at the camp wear knives on their belts like they’re going to need to skin a deer before dinner. Henrick sees me pack the knife and he starts looking for one, and suddenly everybody thinks it’s a good idea to have one, rush or not.  We look in the split scattered bags and all the loose crap around trying to find more, we get three more, a buck-knife, a couple of silly little jack-knives, take them all, not enough for all of us but still.  Feeny gets up, holding his stump up, and finds the biggest, most asinine Bowie out in the snow wrapped up in somebody’s long-johns, it’s half a machete, and one hand or not he takes that for himself. 

We find some loose backpacks we dump out, and a little more food than we found in the dark, and Feeny finds a couple more lighters.  We go through loose clothes and pockets of the dead for more, and we find a few phones we take in case they suddenly start working, for telling us where we are, or calling the ambulance we wanted. 
Or a taxi.
 

Tlingit finds a tray full of mini-bottles they must have had locked on board somewhere, because there’s no booze on the north-bound plane, bar or no bar.  He stuffs his pockets with those, which, hurry or not, at that moment seems pretty sensible, and he sits down on the snow a minute sampling them, which makes just as much sense.  I’m tempted to sit there with him until they’re all down between us. 
But, daylight.
  Bengt sees him.

“Tlingit.
  Come on,” he says.  Tlingit digs in his pocket and throws a bottle to Bengt, then more to the others, me too.  I raise my bottle to the
dead,
and to us left.

“Fuck it,” I say, and drink it.

“Fuck it,” everybody else says, and drinks theirs.  It’s as good a prayer as any.

Henrick heads over to the dead fire where there’s unburned wood left.  He takes a ball bat-sized branch like the one he and Tlingit swatted the wolves off me with.  He shoves it in his pack and it looks like a good idea, I go and get one, too, Tlingit and the others find the best pieces they can.  We’re more or less ready.

Henrick looks at Luttinger, and out at the snow, then me.

“What if they come at us?”  Henrick asks.

“Don’t run. 
Can’t outrun them.
  Stand your ground, try to look big.  Better yet make noise, run right at them with that stick,
pray
they’ll think better of it.” 

Everybody looks at me, all of us hunching against the wind.

“If they get on one of us, do like you did for me, gang up,
swing
at them.  They’ll give up.  They don’t want us here, but they don’t care that much about us.  Maybe if they see us heading out they won’t come at us at all.”

They all look at me, skeptical again.  I don’t know if I believe what I’m telling them but I am trying to, it’s what my head is telling me anyway.  Bengt looks at me.

“Do you know what you’re talking about or are you blowing air so we’ll do whatever stupid thing you think we should do?”

“I know a little,” I say.  “And I’m blowing air.”

“How do you know?”  He asks.

I shrug. 
Doesn’t matter how.
 

Bengt shrugs too, nods, finally.  He’s signed up anyway, he isn’t going to stay here on his own, and he’s halfway to dead anyway like the rest of us, he knows, so what of it.

It feels like the day’s waning already after twenty minutes and I’m thinking we should go, and I look out to what I think is west or my best guess of it and it seems, as far as I can tell, to be a far enough direction away from any of the places we’ve seen wolves.  I know that makes no difference at all but it makes me feel a little better. 

So I look out to mark a point that might be west, in the line of trees on the far side of the clearing much further away than the ones we crashed through, but it’s west, I think, and we haven’t seen any wolves that way.  I think that, maybe, wherever their den is, it’s back in the trees by where we gathered the wood, and we’re lucky that west is the other way.   If that’s west.

“That way, OK?” I say.  There’s nothing to mark it, I see a peak, far past the trees, but it’s wide and buried in grey
sky,
and no mark at all anyway, because it’ll disappear, too easily.

“Try to use the plane behind us as a mark, take a line across, OK?”  Everybody nods, and we’re about to set off when I see a wallet lying in the snow, and like an idiot I feel for mine, which is long gone, somewhere.  I didn’t think of it till now.

“Lose something?” Tlingit seems to think it’s funny. 

I shrug. 

“My wallet,” I say, and he laughs, like I’ll
be needing
it to get a drink somewhere. I shrug again.  Nothing much in it that should matter to me, true enough.  But not
nothing
.

I pick up the one in the snow and look at it, his license, no idea who the guy is, who it belongs to, smiling like a goon and dead, somewhere around here, or fell out of the sky miles away.  His wife and kids are in there, their pictures, smiling, and I wonder if they’re on hold with the company while the company gets ready to tell them they will be sure to find him or his remains very soon and that pension benefits, which will cover a trip to the grocery store, will be paid promptly.  I look at his kids.

I want to get out of here but I go back over to the dead we brought out and reach and roll, looking to see if anybody has wallets, Lewenden, Luttinger, throw them in a pile, and I check the other dead I can get to also.  Henrick comes over, he and the others stare at me, like I’m a lunatic. 

“We should take them,” I say. 
“For the families.”
 

They all nod, suddenly.  Henrick takes off the backpack he’s put his food and his knife in, stuffs the wallets in.  It’s foolish, with so many we haven’t gotten, but we do it anyway.  We find ourselves looking at the bodies lying there.  Henrick wants to have a service for them, say something, at least.  They’re all frozen stiff by now, and we’ve turned them all this way and that for knives and cell-phones and satellite phones and now their wallets.  We tried to lay them straight after that but we’re hurrying, now.

“Should we cover them over, at least?” Henrick says.  I don’t want to.  I don't feel good staying another minute, I feel stupid enough taking the wallets. The light already looks weaker.

“The snow will do it,”
  I
say.

Henrick looks at the ones we brought out and the rest, all we can see, Lewenden, the others, and the ones we can’t, I suppose. 

“God bless everyone who died here,” he says. 
“Us too.”
   

He stops, doesn’t know what else to say.  But we’ve sent them off as well as we’re going to, and now there’s us.  I see we’re standing there looking at each other.

I pull my bag over my shoulder on my good side, turn to the trees.  

The clearing is bigger than it seemed.  We’ve been walking a long time, we can barely see the plane behind us, anymore, we’ve as good as lost it as a mark, but somehow the trees don’t look any closer.  The daylight bled away before we even hit our stride, went to dusk, now it’s hanging there between that and night again.  We’re out in the middle between what seems like the safety of the plane and the trees, feeling stranded, gone wrong already, Ojeira and Feeny struggling to keep up, falling behind. 

“Should we stop?  Make a fire?”  Henrick asks. 

I don’t know.  I look at the trees, try to guess how far.  And the wind is getting up even more than the morning, so I don’t know if we could, and all we have to burn is the wood we took for clubs.

 “We should keep on, if we can,” I say.  “They might let us slide if we make the trees. 
If they’re still around.
  We’d be less obvious, maybe.”

“How much further are the fucking trees?” Bengt says.  As if when we’re in the trees we’re home free,
which isn’t what I meant.

“I don’t know.  I misjudged the distance.”  Bengt looks at me like I’m a tour guide who doesn’t know his job. 

“That’s fucking great.  So we’re here for the night?”  Bengt says.  It’s all night, more or less, from here.  And the trees aren’t going to save us from wolves, if they want us.  But I don’t say anything to him.  I keep looking back to where I think the plane is, along our tracks, and Ojeira and Feeny trailing behind. 

Ojeira’s at the back, hobbling pretty
bad
, but he's still going better than he was before.  I think maybe he’s not as bad off as he seemed, after all, even with his hernia or whatever it is he doesn’t know about, if he still hasn’t noticed.  He didn’t want us to help him like Luttinger and I did before, maybe he’s mending already.  Feeny’s with him, he’s only got the missing hand, but he might have fever or something, he’s wobbling, walking drunken, it looks like.  He looks worse than Ojeira.  The snow’s hip-deep in places so none of us are going that fast, and they haven’t dropped behind too badly.  But they will before long, as slow as we’ve been going, they’re going slower.  They’re strung pretty far back already.

“We should wait a little for those two, though,”
  I
say.

The others look back, waiting.  After a minute Tlingit and some of them sit, breathing hard.  We look around, again and again, I
do,
the others too, and I know we’re looking for the wolves that are supposedly going to leave us alone, and not come at us, because we think we’re trying to respectfully go the fuck home.  Ojeira and Feeny barely seem to be getting any closer, and Feeny keeps stopping to hold his stump up high.  I think it’s hurting whenever any blood fills into it so he gives up and walks with his hand in the air like he’s on strike for something.  We should have stopped sooner.  As I look again Feeny looks like he’s dropped further back than Ojeira.  The wind is creeping up harder, getting to be a slam, pushing cold through us, making it harder for Ojeira and Feeny, us too.  I stare back at them, in the half-light that’s left, waiting for them, wishing they’d hurry. 

Then, like before, I see something I’m not sure I’m seeing at all, lines moving in the dark, grey or black, two from the right, two from the left, one from behind, coming at Feeny.  They don’t seem interested in Ojeira.  They’ve chosen Feeny, like they choose any animal, based on some invisible thing, though not so invisible this time, and that’s going to be that, nothing will turn them away, unless it’s a threat.

I start running before the others seem to see them.  I start straight for Feeny, but then I shift, head for the one of them coming from the right, the one closest it looks like, waving my arms, shouting, trying to look like a threat. I hear the others doing the same, behind me, same as they did to beat that one off of me. We’re far away.  Feeny looks at us, sees us running,
looks
around.  He sees the one from the right I’m charging at but he doesn’t see the ones from behind him, or the left.  Ojeira looks too, almost falls backwards but catches his balance, stands there, frozen, then he starts jump-hobbling as hard as he can to help Feeny, yelling like the rest of us, but all they seem to care about is Feeny.  They don’t even care about me, so I yell louder and wave my arms.  I realize there’s a log and a knife in my pack and I’m empty-handed, running at them, but there’s no time.