Page 72 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“We could try. We could pull it, maybe, or find a place where it’s not so steep.”
In reply, she simply glances up and down the river, where the bank is just as steep.
“Kerry, we’re ten miles from the cottage. We don’t even know if this Justine will be where you think she is. We don’t have time to walk all this way. We need to try.”
Kerry lets out a weary sigh. “I don’t know why I let you convince me of these things,” she says, shaking her head, as she heads back the way we came.
It takes fifteen minutes of trudging through the snow to get back to the bike. As Kerry goes forward to right it, a figure suddenly straightens from behind the quad. It’s one of the guys from the truck—craggy-faced, squinty-eyed, holding a rifle, which he points right at Kerry. I don’t recognize him, but I know what kind of man he is.
“Well, hello there, missy,” he says. “We thought you might be back.”
Kerry freezes; in the darkness, the guy hasn’t seen me yet, standing about fifteen feet away. His rifle doesn’t waver.
“Aren’t you a pretty thing,” he tells Kerry.
“In your dreams, Grandpa,” she replies in a bored voice.
Fury flashes across his face. “You want to be nice to me,” he warns her. “I’m the best of the bunch.” And then he lets out a laugh that gives me the noise cover to unstrap the rifle from my chest. My fingers don’t shake at all as I take aim. The man reaches for Kerry. I pull the trigger.
The crack sounds abnormally loud, echoing up and down the river, as the man freezes for a moment, looking stunned, and then falls backward, the rifle dropping from his hands.
Kerry spins toward me, looking about as stunned as he did. “I can’t believe it,” she says in an awed voice. “Alex, I think you killed him.” I can’t tell if she’s horrified or impressed: maybe both.
I lower the rifle; my hands aren’t shaking at all, and I feel strangely empty inside. I’m not sorry at all. “Get his gun,” I tell Kerry. “And anything else he has.”
Shaking her head slowly, she strips the guy of his weapons. It’s very clear he’s dead, and I try not to look at him. I still feel calm, but the shock and horror are there under the surface, the surging water under the black ice. I right the quad as Kerry slips on his coat, straps his gun across her chest.
“There’s nothing else,” she says, and in silence we get on the bike. I put the key in the ignition and then we are heading down the river, back toward the bridge.
It’s clear after just a few minutes that we need to get off the river as soon as possible because the ice will start breaking up. The snow is soft in spots, and ahead are the rapids. I think of the churning water we saw in Corville just a few months ago, the chunks of ice bobbing in its frigid depths.
“Here,” Kerry says, pointing to a place where the bank has a gentler incline, although it’s still ridiculously steep. Silently, working in fluid synchronicity, we stand on either side of the quad and begin to push it up the bank. Our legs sink into the snow up to our knees as we heave and push, strain and pray,to absolutely no avail. Even with the two of us, we’re not strong enough to do it.
Then Kerry loses her footing, and I can’t hold the quad on my own. I fling myself out of the way as it rolls back toward the river, and we simply watch it go, too dispirited and exhausted to try to save it. A few seconds later, we hear a crack like a gunshot; we think itisa gunshot, and we both startle and jerk around, looking for our attacker. But our enemy now is the ice—the cracking sound was it breaking up, and we watch in silence as the ice begins to crack, and the bike begins to list. For a few seconds, it simply rests there, at a tilted angle like theTitanic, and then, slowly, it starts to sink. In about thirty seconds, it is gone.
“Well,” Kerry says after a moment. “Good thing we weren’t on it.”
I find I can’t reply. I’m numb and so very weary; there are too many things I can’t think about, to process, to accept. My daughter, who might already be dead. The man I killed. The fact that our situation has never seemed more hopeless.
“Let’s keep going,” I say, and we scramble up the bank on our hands and knees.
The road is empty and silent, but we still keep to the trees as much as we can as we begin the four-mile walk toward Eagle Rapids. Above us the sky is scattered with stars and the night is still and clear; in another universe, in the life I used to take for granted, I would stand still for a moment and tilt my head toward the sky, breathe in the cold air and let my lungs and soul expand. The way I did the first night we arrived at the cottage, when I was so determined to believe we could have a fresh start, and yet already feeling so jaded.
Or at least I thought I was jaded. It was nothing to what I feel now, and yet in the midst of the cynicism and the weariness,there is a strength of conviction like a pillar of flame. I amnotgiving up. Not now, not ever.
We don’t encounter anyone on that walk; we don’t even hear the distant thrum of a motor, thankfully. We don’t speak; we just trudge through the snow, putting one foot in front of the other.
By the time we reach Eagle Rapids, it is well after midnight and my feet and hands are numb. We look around the shuttered houses, half of them deserted; both the gas station and the tiny Food Mart are, of course, looted and empty.
“Do you know where Justine lives?” I ask Kerry.
She hesitates, peering around in the dark. “I picked up a prescription from her once…I think it was past the gas station, on the right.”
Shethinks? More and more I’m afraid this was a fool’s errand, and the costliest one I could ever imagine. I don’t say as much, though; I simply follow Kerry down the street, keeping to the shadows.
There are three shabby-looking ranch houses in a row, made of either clapboard or concrete, all of them looking dilapidated and forgotten and very unlived in. The hope I’ve been clinging to, as stubborn as a weed, wilts at its root. Surely, Justine can’t still be here.
“The middle one, I think,” Kerry says, sounding uncertain. The house is dark, the windows boarded up, but I don’t suppose that actually means anything, these days.
