I woke to the sound of frightened children. The wind swung in through the broken windows of the wrecked bus and curled around us, stealing in under our clothes. It almost drowned out their prayers. One or two of them were trying to contact their parents with cell-phones, well aware that we were out of signal range, but begging the network-gods anyway. Others were simply crying for their mothers.
I heard someone die.
I was still in my seat, but sitting lurched over to the right, with my shoulder up against a freezing, twisted, metal pillar. My head was throbbing dully and there was a small piece of glass that had shorn through my parka and into my arm. I reached across with my numbed left hand and shakily pulled it out. The noise I made surprised even me.
“Who’s that?” said a voice directly behind my left ear.
“George. Who’s that?” I pressed a clean handkerchief over the cut and bared my teeth.
“It’s April. Are you OK?”
“I cut my arm. I’m all right. Are you hurt?”
“No. I—I don’t think so. Do you remember what happened?”
“Not much. I remember the driver arguing with Harris about getting us lost. I think we were on a dirt road…after that, nothing. What about you?”
“Pretty much the same. I heard the driver and Harris yelling at each other and then they both screamed and we seemed to go over some kind of drop. George, you were nearest the front—go see if they’re OK.”
I undid my seatbelt and tried to brace my sore legs against something that wasn’t sharp or unsteady. Reaching forward, I found the nearest backrest and used it to pull myself halfway between the two front seats. A thick branch was in the way. I felt around with my free hand and tried to find Harris’s shoulder, but my fingers closed around his face. It was cold and clammy and when my finger accidentally touched his eye, it didn’t close.
I recoiled and almost lost my balance. Impulsively, I wiped my hand on the chair.
More cautiously this time, I reached to my left and felt around for the driver. I found material this time, thankfully, but it was covered with something sticky to the touch. A coat and a shoulder and a collar and a neck and… and my hand touched a slick, rubbery flap of skin. There was nothing above it.
Nausea and gravity won this round and I fell back into my seat with acid in my mouth. Apart from some whimpering at the back, the rest of the bus remained silent and freezing. That was it, then. The only two sighted people on the bus were dead.
After what seemed like an eternity, April spoke up at last. “OK. All right. Well, let’s see who we have with us. George, you’re here; Tammy, I think I heard you earlier on—are you OK?”
“Yeah. Yes, I guess so.”
“Good. Now who’s sitting beside you?”
“It’s me, Pete. I’m all right, just a sore knee.”
“I think we’ve all got sore knees—these damn seats! Who else is with us?”
“I’m here,” said a small voice from the back. “It’s me, Kayleigh.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I—I think my arm is broken. I can’t move it.”
“All right, honey, I’ll get back to you in a moment,” said April, who, after me, was the next eldest in the group. “Who else?”
This time there was no reply. She repeated the question and Kayleigh began to whimper again.
“Simon? Petra? Vijay?” said April.
“There—there’s a branch or something in the back here,” said Kayleigh with bubbles in her voice. “It’s right where they were sitting. I—I think they’re all dead!”
April moved quickly to intercept the spreading panic. “All right, Kay, can you get up into the front, with us? Tammy, Pete, help her out, would you?”
I let April cluck around after Kayleigh and distract the others from hysteria whilst I pondered our situation. It wasn’t a bright picture, but, in the short term, we might be okay.
We had been on our way to the final self-reliance exercise of the week, a camping trip into the Canadian wilderness. We were well equipped for a few nights out in the open if most of the gear had survived the crash. With half our number already dead, the food would last us twice as long if we could survive the cold.
But survive for what? Rescue? The bus driver had been heading in the wrong direction for hours before the crash. We didn’t have any more idea of where we were than our potential rescuers. We could be anywhere.
“Do we have to walk out of here, on our own?” said Pete, sounding like the lost and scared teenager he was.
I snorted at that, a little more dismissively than I meant to.
“No,” said April, “we stay with the bus. I heard somewhere that, in situations like this, you should always stay with the vehicle. The bus is easier to spot from the air than we are.”
“But we’ll starve. And freeze.”
“We have food. We have shelter. We’ll be OK, I promise. We’ll make the best of it here and wait for rescue.”
I wasn’t sure if she believed that, or not. Perhaps she was just pretending for the sake of the younger ones. April was like that—a natural leader. I wasn’t sure that I could stand her for a week in the wilderness.
“George, crawl into the front and see if you can get the CB radio working,” she said.
I thought of Harris and the driver and a shiver ran through me. I didn’t say no, but April sensed my hesitation. “I know you don’t want to, George, but it’s important.”
I wanted to snap at her for talking down to me, but I had kept up a sullen silence throughout most of the past week and was out of practice. I was nearly thirty years old; I had left home at seventeen; I even held a pilot’s license for God’s sake! I didn’t belong in blind-camp with these kids. I didn’t deserve to die out here with them, either.
I grunted an acknowledgement and gingerly pushed myself between the two front seats. The dashboard was a lot closer than it should have been. The plastic was buckled and I had to tug the CB handset out from one of the foot-wells by gently pulling the other end of its wire. Predictably, it was very dead.
“Can you fix it?”
“Maybe, if I still had my sight,” I said, which sounded bitter even to me.
There was a palpable pause while she composed her next question more carefully. “Could you fix it by touch if we all helped you?”
The short answer was no, but I knew what she was fishing for. “I could give it a go, once we’ve got our camp set up. We’ve got to be careful not to cut ourselves on all this jagged metal.”
“Right. Has anyone got the time?”
A ridiculous, tinny voice answered from Tammy’s watch. “The time is six…forty two…PM.”
“We don’t have long before the temperature starts dropping even further. Let’s spend the night in the bus, then start exploring tomorrow. We’ll shore up the broken windows with seat cushions and whatever we can find to keep the cold out.”
“What shall we do about them?” said Pete.
“We’ll take the bodies outside tomorrow.”
“What about bears?” I asked.
Dead silence.
“I heard somewhere that they’ll leave you alone if they hear you coming. We’ll all sing songs as we work tomorrow and…”
“Idiot! I mean, what about the bodies? If we leave them outside and a bear gets wind of them, we’re all going to have a pretty short camping trip.”
“I—I guess we’ll have to bury them.”
“They’ll need to be deep. Very deep. A bear will sniff them out and come running if not. And once he gets a taste of what’s on offer…”
Kayleigh burst into tears and wailed. I had gone too far again.
“You’re scaring everyone, George. We’ll do whatever you think is best with the bodies tomorrow. Right now, let’s try to do something about this cold.”
We set about trying to patch the holes in our colander of a bus. The front end was a lost cause, but we managed to get most of the back wind-proof. That night, as we all huddled together for warmth, I wondered how April would manage to put a cheery spin upon dying.
It was a fitful, deranged sleep. In my dreams, I could see again and saw the bus. It wasn’t cold anymore. What had I been worried about? The bus looked in good shape. I could probably even drive it out of there myself!
I saw Tammy and Pete and April and Kayleigh as I pictured them in my mind. I dreamed that April had long, silky, chestnut hair and an Alice-band…
I snapped out of it, abruptly, and was back in the icy darkness of reality. So cold I could barely move. Just as an experiment, a crazy idea, I reached out and gently touched April’s hair as she slept. It was soft and wavy and finished several inches above her shoulder…
Sleep. I was back in the nightclub. The little guy with the pinched, angry face. Except this time, I said sorry and bought him another drink. This time I didn’t give him a shove and tell him where to go. This time, he didn’t grab the broken pint-glass and grind it into my face and…
The bus again. Which dream was which? A snorting, snuffling sound behind me, at the front of the bus. Like someone polishing their shoes with a hard brush. Huff-huff, huff-huff, huff-huff. The bus dipped, creaked under some enormous weight. Somebody stirred, but the noise didn’t seem to wake them. A pause, then another dip. The sound of a nylon parka being tugged, tugged, and then the seams giving way. More snuffling. Silence.
In the morning, I almost wished I hadn’t woken up. The cold had entered every part of me that wasn’t in contact with someone else and, being the eldest, I had been on the outer edge of the group. A few lonely birds sang outside, but apart from that, I had no indication of the time. I heard April’s shivering breath as she tried to move and felt the cold too.
“April? Had any more ideas in the night?”
“No. You?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to tell her about the snuffling around the bus, the night before, but I figured she had a right to know.
“I heard something last night. A bear, maybe, checking out one of the bodies. The bus driver, I think.”
“Could you have dreamed it?”
“Yes,” I admitted, “but I don’t think so.”
“Better check the driver’s body, then. See if anything’s been… disturbed.”
I pushed myself between the two front seats again and felt around for the driver, being extra careful not to feel any higher than his shoulder this time. My hand found the seat cushion and some frayed strips of seatbelt. No body. No body parts. I felt around until my hand touched the doorframe.
“I think we’ve got a big problem.”
April digested the news stoically. Either she was much tougher than I was, or she had no idea what a brown bear could do to a human being. I, on the other hand, felt like crying.
“Okay, so what do we do?” she said, finally.
“I don’t know. There’s nothing we can do. Now the bear’s found a food-source, he’s not going to leave it alone. The driver’s side door is gone, so he can get in here any time he likes.”
“Can we block it up somehow?”
“Nothing we could do would even slow him down. Look, nobody will even start to search for us for another three days. We were traveling in the wrong direction for about five hours and that bear’s going to be coming back this way.”
“George, I need ideas here. Work with me.”
“What do you want me to say, April? We’re dead meat.”
A couple of the kids stirred and cold nylon creaked as they rolled over to listen.
“Look, you seem to know about bears and camping and stuff—think!” urged April.
“If I still had my eyes, I’d—” I stopped myself. There was silence. A feeble thread of hope dangled there in front of her.
“You’d what? What would you do, if you still had your eyes?” She was hanging on my words now, expecting some kind of revelation. I felt fraudulent offering it, but she wanted hope more than she wanted the truth.
“I don’t know. I’d fight it somehow. Make a weapon. Drive it away. I’d look for the trail we were on and try to follow it. Find help.”
“So why can’t you do those things now?”
“Because I’m blind, for God’s sake! Because I’m scared and lost and blind!” My voice cracked.
“You keep saying that. We’re all blind here, George. We’re all scared and lost. But you’re the only one who has even the faintest idea what to do. We need you to help us.”
I turned away and steadied myself on the driver’s seat. Everyone was awake now. Everyone had heard us.
Slowly, I realized that April was right. For all my sins, I really was the only hope they had. But I needed time to think. Space to breathe and stop my head from spinning off.
“Okay,” I said, finally. “At the moment, the bear just wants the bodies. The food is a temptation too, but it’s all sealed in tins and packets at the moment and is not so much of a problem. First we have to get those bodies as far away from us as possible and make tracks in the opposite direction. Look, I know that some of them were your friends, but now that the bear knows we’re here, it’s our only option.”
Pete and Kayleigh started to cry.
I found a cane and tried to locate the doors, but they were all jammed. Squeezing under the big branch and into the front, I tried not to think about Harris. I probed around outside the missing door and the cane struck ground. Crunchy, hard ground. Although we had packed for cold weather, the campsite was supposed to be at a lower level; in a valley where we were unlikely to get snow at that time of year. Somehow we had ended up high enough to find frozen ground.
I picked my way around the bus, testing the ground at every step, half expecting to stumble over the remains of the driver, but I found no sign of him. The bus had come to rest against two solid conifers and the thick branches of one had gone through the back, killing the three who had been sitting there. Another branch had probably taken off the driver’s head and killed Harris. As I fingered the damaged bodywork, it became obvious how lucky the rest of us had been.
The slope that the bus had plummeted down was too steep to climb. Although the ground was frozen, it was loose and skittered away underfoot. The short section of level ground I was standing on dropped away sharply about ten yards from the rear left of the bus. I threw a rock down and heard it clatter away at some speed. This would be the best place to dispose of the corpses. To the right, there was the hint of a level path—probably a bear trail, and why one had found us so quickly—though no obvious clue as to where it went after the crash site. We would have to follow this until we could climb back out onto the logging trail we had been on before the crash.
This pathetic little reconnaissance took a long time. I didn’t know how long it would take the rest of them to get anywhere.
When I got back, April had sorted out much of what had and had not survived the crash. Things were, for once, looking up. The food and cooking situation was good; enough tents had survived, though I would have to replace the poles in one (because I, apparently, “knew about this stuff”); the medical kit had survived intact. Most of the backpacks which had been destroyed were owned by those who were already dead.
It was a group effort to remove the bodies. The wound on my arm was inflamed, Pete was limping and Kayleigh was too small and injured to be of much help. Tammy was as tough as April, but was younger.
Somehow we got Harris out of his seat and dragged him along to the edge of the drop without anyone falling down it. I relieved him of the contents of his pockets, then on the count of three we swung him by his arms and legs and pitched him over the edge. There was a rushing sound, a thump and then silence. I hoped he was far enough away.
The others were more difficult to extract from the branches in the back of the bus, but eventually we managed it. Cold, stiff limbs still clung on to each other and it felt wrong, somehow, to break their embrace. As if they hadn’t lost enough, we were now to deprive them of company. By unspoken consensus, it was understood that they should go over the edge together. Even April cried openly, then.
“Shouldn’t we say something?” said Tammy.
Nobody spoke. The wind picked up a little and the trees creaked harshly around us.
I swallowed hard and said quietly: “On the count of three, like before.”
We packed as much as we could reasonably carry and I roped everyone together in a single file, slowest at the rear, so we could help them along if need be. I went in the middle, being heaviest and least adept at walking with a cane, while April became our guide. Kayleigh was at the back and tugged on the rope if we were going too fast.
I was surprised at the speed we went at. It hadn’t occurred to me that the others would be so much more capable in this area than I was. April called out obstacles for us to avoid, and it was I who stumbled the most on the bear trail. We sang as we went. Any old song to keep our minds off our predicament and to warn any bears on the trail.
With nightfall came another drop in temperature. I was slow to realize this, and by the time we had found a flat area to strike camp our limbs were cold and clumsy. Snow began to fall, gently at first. The tents provided were designed for easy assembly and we had practiced thoroughly before we left, but it was still a struggle. April and I took one tent while the others camped beside us in another.
“The ground seems to be leveling off,” said April. “Tomorrow I’ll see if I can find a way up onto the track.”
“I’ve lost my bearings now the ground has changed. Which way?”
She took my hand in hers and pointed in the right direction. It was a slender hand, soft, but strong and directed with confidence. I searched for something to say.
She let go of my hand and settled back down. I still searched for something to say.
The slender hand slid over mine again, in the night. It wrapped itself around and squeezed. I awoke with a smile and gently stroked the backs of her knuckles with my thumb. The hand shook mine, urgently. I began to make some questioning noise, but her hiss cut me off.
The crunch and squeak of fresh snow being broken by a careful, but heavy, footfall. Pause. Another. Pause. Another.
I rolled slowly and quietly over to April and gently felt around for her ear before putting my mouth next to it.
“It could be one of the kids going to pee,” I whispered with barely any breath.
“I would have heard the tent zipper being undone,” she replied.
“Another camper? A lost hiker perhaps?”
“Why are they being so quiet, then? Is it the bear?”
“No—” I stopped myself. Not because I didn’t want to alarm her, but because it really didn’t sound like a bear. It sounded too slow, too cautious. And I was sure that whatever was prowling out there was moving on two feet.
The snuffling again. There was a noise at the entrance of the tent as something pushed in against the material. We were defenseless, apart from a slightly bent tent peg which I had found earlier. I fumbled around for it, trying somehow to find a secure grip with my numb, sweaty hands.
Huff-huff, huff-huff, huff-huff.
I grasped it in a downward, ice-pick fashion, with my thumb through the ring at the top, then sat up slowly and inched my way towards the entrance. My only plan was to fall upon whatever came through the entrance and stab at it wildly until it either went away or died. Hopefully both.
I could hear it probing at the material again, trying to figure out a way in. It wouldn’t be long before it simply ripped the tent apart in frustration anyway. I raised the tent peg and began feeling forward for a bulge in the material…
“April? George?” It was Kayleigh’s voice, sounding frightened.
The snuffling stopped suddenly and everything became silent.
“April? Is that you?”
A pause. A second and then the snow creaked as the thing moved away from our tent and towards theirs.
“George? Are you there?”
“Kayleigh, for God’s sake, shut up!” I hissed.
I heard the other tent being pulled around and the snuffling intensifying in greedy excitement. It knew what was on offer, now. The kids moaned and shifted around in fear. The snuffling became a whine. Almost a vocalization. Almost human…
Tearing fabric. The kids shrieked and yelled and one voice wailed higher than the others.
“Kayleigh, hang on! I’m coming!” I yelled.
I felt around desperately for the tent’s zipper, tracing the metal teeth with my fingers. Where the hell was the slider? I felt so slow and clumsy and still had no idea what I was going to do when I got out there.
Her screams were outside of the other tent, now. I tore open the zipper and spilled out, still clutching my useless, makeshift weapon. As Kayleigh’s scream turned from fright to unbearable pain, the snuffling had changed to a grunting, growling sound, like a dog trying to wrestle a toy away from its owner. I quickly shuffled forwards on my hands and knees, left hand probing forwards, right hand raised to stab down at anything non-human that the left should close upon. The hungry growling and screaming began moving off towards the trees, faster than I could crawl.
I found the drag-marks through the snow and smelled blood on the uncovered pine needles. A strip of fabric, sticky and warm to the touch. A clump of hair. I heard her cries turn to chokes, which then disappeared into the forest. It was at that moment that I knew there was nothing more I could do. Kayleigh was gone.
I crawled back along the track with lead in my chest and found everyone crowded into our tent. The kids weren’t hurt, but were covered in blood, and April was trying to clean them up with tissues. She seemed to be in shock.
“Did you find her, George?” she said as she scrubbed at the blood.
“She’s gone,” I said, thickly.
“Well, we’d better go find her, then.”
“She’s gone, April. We’ve got to get out of here before that thing comes back.”
“What was it, George?” said Tammy.
“It was a bear, honey,” said April. “Don’t worry, we’ll find Kayleigh and—”
“It wasn’t a bear,” she protested.
“Sure it was, there’s nothing else…”
“It grabbed my leg before it took Kayleigh. It had hands and—”
“That’s enough! It was a bear, do you hear me? Nothing more! Now keep still.”
“April, you’re hurting me,” whined Pete.
I found April’s arm and squeezed it before she could scrub Pete’s face right off. “April, I need you to help me with the other tent. Let the kids clean themselves up and let’s sort out our things.”
“It was a bear, George,” she insisted, quietly.
“Okay. Sure, it was a bear.”
We packed up camp and set off as before, all roped together in a single line. The ruined tent stayed behind and cut down on the weight somewhat. We traveled in silence, punctuated by sobs. I cried too, off and on, but tried to keep it quiet.
April lead us up onto the logging trail sometime before noon the next day. I felt the ruts with my hands—the deep herring-bone pattern of tractor tires seemed fresh enough to me, but in this frozen environment, who could tell? The only consolation was that they were heading in our direction.
I had sharpened some tent pegs on a small rock, earlier, and handed them out, telling everyone how to use them, as I had the night before. It was more to boost morale than for any practical purposes.
The temperature dipped with nightfall and with it came noises down on the trail. Some of them I could identify as animals, some of them I couldn’t. Fear and paranoia was clouding my judgment. I was imagining all kinds of—
“It’s here!” yelled Pete, at the back. “April! George! The bear’s here!”
Heavy feet were penetrating the crust of snow on the slope. It was climbing up onto the logging track, some way to the rear. I was sure, this time, that the footfalls were bipedal, not those of a bear.
We picked up our pace, but whatever it was kept up with us easily. It knew, or seemed to know, that we were disabled. Easy meat. Jumping off the track to appear just ahead of us, then crashing back to the rear, again. Harrying us to find the weakest member. It moved boldly through the undergrowth, unconcerned that we could hear it.
Pete and Tammy were panicking, sobbing between breaths; April and I weren’t much better. The creature seemed to take delight in the chase. Circling around, coming up close with its rasping breathing until we almost dissolved into hysteria, then dropping back again. Crump-crump-crump through the shallow snow.
Though we were exhausted and the track was uneven, we forced ourselves to run, even Pete at the back, who was being dragged onward with his injured leg. April picked out the path with her feet, rather than her cane, using the tire-tracks as a guide. The rasping noise began getting closer, ever closer, changing to the same breathy, hungry whine that I had heard the night before…
Suddenly, with a jerk, we were all wrenched off our feet, the rope cutting in around our ribs. A short cry, then a brief silence. Before I could gather my senses, or balance, we were being dragged backwards. Everyone was yelling now, but through the cries and screams, Pete’s wail rose above the others.
“Stab it, Pete!” I yelled. “Stab it!”
I tried to regain my balance to go to his aid, but another giant tug cut the air from my lungs. Again and again we were dragged back, until, with a final yell, the rope around Pete snapped and we all fell about, panting and crying. As the night before, I was forced to listen, impotent and defenseless, to the sound of a child being carried away to his death.
For a while, all we could do was hug each other and shiver. We were so exhausted we couldn’t even speak. The horror of losing two of our group was starting to set in.
“George, you said before that you could make a weapon, somehow. Can you still do that? Drive it away or kill it?”
I had thought about taping Harris’s small penknife to the top of my cane as a feeble, makeshift spear, but I was stumbling so much that I would have been more of a danger to myself than anything else. Somehow, I didn’t think that our sharpened tent pegs would bother the creature too much. Right then, I didn’t have anything else to offer.
“Well, we can’t go on like this. Let’s make a fire and think about what to do. Maybe the flames will keep it away for a while.”
“Do you think we could keep it away with fires for the rest of the way?” said Tammy.
“We need a portable weapon, Tam, or we won’t be able to keep moving,” said April. “No, let’s just gather branches, while we have time.”
I sat by the meager warmth of the tiny fire and realized that I couldn’t even tell when it needed more fuel. In fact, I had only the roughest idea of how close I was sitting to it. If the creature (which April still zealously insisted was a bear) came, I wouldn’t even be able to grab a flaming branch and wave it about without grabbing a handful of embers too.
“April, I don’t want to be at the back tomorrow,” said Tammy, quietly.
“Nobody does, honey. I—I guess we’ll have to draw lots.”
“No.” I stopped her. “Not like that. I’ll go to the back tomorrow.”
She paused and I could understand why. Her morality said one thing, but her sense of survival said another.
“George, you don’t have to do that,” she said, to her credit. “Tammy can lead us from now on and I’ll…”
“Slowest at the rear. That’s what we agreed.”
Silence for a while. The fire popped and the wind whipped it away from me, making Tammy cough and shuffle around. If only I could direct the fire at our attacker, somehow…
A feral, manic howl erupted from the trees, perhaps two or three hundred yards away. It peeled against the rocky walls of the mountainside and echoed away down the valley. Birds burst from their roosts all around us.
I shivered, quickly moving around so the fire was between me and it and threw on another green branch of spruce. The fire rose, bubbling and spitting in feeble defiance of the creature. Somewhere, on another hill, the howling call was answered in kind. So there was more than one. Maybe a whole family of them.
Where was that tent peg? I clutched around in my pocket for something to throw or stab with and came up with Harris’s Zippo lighter. I turned it over in my hand for a few seconds before I remembered what it was. A vague plan began to form in my head.
“Does anyone have an aerosol can?” I asked.
We didn’t waste any more time, eating quickly and pressing on. I taped the lighter just below the nozzle of the spray can and filled an old thermos flask with lighter fuel. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was all I had going for me.
We stumbled on until morning and rested only briefly the next day. By the time night fell again, Tammy was near exhaustion, but we pressed on until she really could go no further.
I heard the snuffling and crunching footsteps not long after we stopped. It was confident now. No toying with us. No encircling. It was coming straight for me. The panting vocalization almost sounded like a chuckle this time.
Dropping my backpack, I stood up and shakily filled a mess-tin with lighter fuel. I closed the bottle and gave it to Tammy, then took the penknife and cut the rope, separating me from the others. To be sure of my aim, I waved my cane in front of me, in slow arcs. Nearer it came and nearer still, breathing excitedly as it had before. The vocalizations came again.
Something batted my cane away and I threw the mess tin, making the creature recoil in surprise, for a second. Enough time to roll open the lighter and—my left shoulder was seized by a giant hand, almost dislocating it. Almost making me drop the only weapon I had left. My hand swung up as it pulled me, brushing against its body. I actually touched it and deep horror at what I felt welled up in my throat…
As a small boy, a man had grabbed me in the park. I remembered the weightless feeling of fear; as though I had just fallen from an airplane. Helpless. Tumbling into the abyss with absolutely no control. Knowing that some terrible harm was coming my way and there was nothing I could do about it.
My elder brother had come to my rescue, then. He was only twelve years old, but he attacked that man like a wild dog. The will to protect his kin overriding his own inadequate strength. The man had fallen back, bloody and shocked. My brother’s shirt was ripped; snot and tears on his face and looking like the Incredible Hulk, veins all standing out.
I had to help my brother home that day. He was spent. His whole body was almost dead weight after the adrenaline rush. I was proud to take his weight, though. To the neighborhood kids, he was like a war hero. Like someone from the comic books.
I lit the Zippo and thrust the can forward, pressing down on the nozzle. A whump sound, like someone shaking out a heavy curtain. The blast of heat was closer than I had anticipated, scouring the bare skin of my face. For a split second the creature’s grip closed even harder, claws digging into my muscle. Then suddenly it let go, shoving me away.
I fell to the ground, my left coat-sleeve on fire. A crazy, gibbering noise rose into a crescendo of screams in front of me. I heard the creature turn and stagger away into the forest with a crash of breaking branches. I dropped the can and plunged my left arm into the snow, smothering the flames and patting handfuls of it onto my scorched face.
“George, are you all right? Did you get it?”
“Y-yeah, I think so. I burned myself, but I got it. Just give me a moment.”
I lay there in the snow for a few moments, thinking of my brother and, if not exactly savoring my triumph, at least taking advantage of the lull. In some small way, I didn’t feel like a victim anymore. Maybe we’d even survive long enough to be rescued.
I could have slept for a week.
“Does anyone else hear that noise?” said Tammy after a while, shaking me back to reality.
I sat up and listened. A faint crackling in the trees behind us. A whiff of smoke on the wind. I groaned in anguish.
“The forest’s on fire.”
“Let’s go,” said April. “Let’s just get out of here.”
I was drained. Just a few more minutes. April grabbed me and hauled me to my feet, mercilessly.
“Let’s go!” she yelled in my face.
We stumbled on down the winding track, unsure as to whether we were going far enough or fast enough to escape the flames. The road twisted about so much, it seemed like we were heading back into the fire more often than not. Every way we turned the air was choking us. Now and then we would hear the roar as another coniferous tree burst into flame. Was it the effort of movement that made us so hot, or the inferno behind us? Animals were darting noisily through the undergrowth all around.
“I can’t go on,” said Tammy.
“You can and you will,” I said. “We’re not leaving you, we can’t carry you, and we’re not staying here. Move!”
We ditched our backpacks once and for all, sacrificing everything we had for speed. The air was almost unbreathable and the track was full of ruts, but we stumbled on like some relentless, half-broken machine.
Eventually the air became a little clearer and the sound of the fire faded into the background. And then, as my legs really were about to give way, we heard a different sound. A helicopter flying over the fire site. We yelled and screamed and waved and I signaled with bursts of fire from the aerosol can. I had no idea if they had seen us, but we stayed put for as long as the fire would let us.
Another engine, about twenty minutes later, this time a big diesel. As we heard the truck horn echoing off the mountainside, we each collapsed in relief. A man with a big, angry voice and a quick gait came towards us.
“Hey, you! Did you kids start that goddamn fire?”
“We’re blind,” blurted out April, through tears of joy. “We were in a bus crash a few days ago and we were attacked by a bear and we had to scare it away with fire. Please, please, just get us out of here!”
“You’d better get in the truck,” the man growled, without much sympathy. “Your friend here is burned up pretty bad.”
“What?” My mind filled with hideous images of burns victims. Perhaps the cold had numbed the pain. Perhaps the nerves in my skin were damaged. Then I felt foolish: what do the blind care for disfigurement? My face was already a mess from that bar fight anyway. At least April couldn’t see me like that. For some stupid reason, that was important.
“What about the monster?” said Tammy, out of the blue.
“She means the bear,” said April, quickly.
“It wasn’t a bear. It had hands. It grabbed me and…”
“I’m sorry, we’re all pretty strung out,” said April. “It was just a bear, honey.”
“It had hands! It wasn’t a bear!” she cried.
I grabbed her arm and squeezed.
“It was just a bear, Tammy. Okay?”
“Well, whatever,” said the man, dubiously. “You’d better get in the truck.”
I didn’t tell the others what I had really felt when I had touched the creature. It was better that they didn’t know. The natural touch of bearskin would have been a relief to my senses. A solid, predictable fact, in the face of all that uncertainty.
I shuddered at the thought and climbed up into the cab, helping the others up after me. The man put the truck into gear and chuckled to himself, softly. It was a rasping, hungry sound. Almost human. I pushed my thumb through the ring of the tent peg and April held my hand.