The bear turned once, just an instant, and stared Charlie down. Massive, sullen, and for that brief moment Charlie could swear he saw a humanness in the eyes, but the darkness expanded in them, so that the bear was concentrated human and concentrated bear at the same time. Shadow. An idiot, or a monk. A saint or devil. Bear. So much bear that it was, simply, no longer the bear, but bear forever and eternal.
A dark, composite animal was beginning to rear, growing out of the mad dance of men, hounds, and bear: a face of lantern eyes, bloody man-hands, and dark fur. A new creature just given its life. Change into change into change as the mass of forms blurred before Charlie’s tired eyes. Blood leaping from indistinguishable flesh, trying to escape into the night air.
Suddenly Amos was leaping. “Watch his mouth, dammit! His mouth!”
Bear rips Flap ear to tail.
Jake rising, shouldering the gun. Firing once, twice. Pitching over, crying, throwing up over his red-checkered vest.
Amos firing, sobbing over his dog. “Needs to be gutted, soon as he’s shot, boys!” he cries. Leaning over. Amos painting his cheeks, chin, with blood-coated fingers, staggering a dance while the dogs yawp.
Then explosion after explosion. Jake throwing up somewhere, crying.
Reed groaned in his sleep, cried out against the roar filling his head, then leaped up at the rocking train window. Small lights dotted the ridges ahead. The Creeks? He couldn’t be sure. He suddenly wished he hadn’t come. Something was waiting for him up there in the hills, something just now whetting its teeth. Hungry for him.
He thought he saw tiny lights moving near the top of the Big Andy, but suddenly the brooding peak was dark again. He couldn’t be sure.
He closed his eyes, seeking more sleep, but it was the rocking, and the roar, that consumed him.
Charlie thought he’d finally found the campfire. They seemed to have been separated during the fight, and a long time passed. He hadn’t seen the campfire since it happened. But now it was glowing just ahead, between the trees. It seemed as if he had been wandering forever. Everything ached. He could hear some of the dogs off crying in the woods, but he’d stumbled over the carcasses of several. The warm glow was comforting, and maybe one of the others would be there, waiting. They had to get off the Big Andy soon. Things had gone just crazy up here.
He stepped right up to the glow. But something was wrong. It seemed covered… by fog, or… something.
He stepped right up to the glow. Her flaming hair. She floated by him… a beautiful thing. She wanted him to kiss her, to… be a man to her.
But he was afraid. He began to cry.
The dog was still moving. Joe Manors reached over for it, thinking maybe he could carry it back to the campsite, where it just might survive. Where was everybody? He suddenly hated Amos Nickles for bringing the dog up here, making it do all the dirty work for him, suddenly hated himself and Jake and Ben Taylor and Charlie and even that old dog Buck for getting him into this mess.
He touched the heaving sides, crawled over to examine it. Then pulled back. For a second he thought it was the body of a little girl. Her lips blue. Dead.
But just for a second. Just for a second.
Ben would have recognized his brother’s boy anywhere. “Reed?”
The boy kept running. Ben knew he was getting farther and farther away from the others, but he just couldn’t leave the boy out here.
Why was the boy here? How could he be here?
“Reed?”
Ben ran for a long time, but the boy was always way ahead. Sprinting like a young animal.
And the same age as he’d been ten years ago. He hadn’t aged a bit. Ben would have to ask him about that.
“Mr. Nickles, that you? Amos?” Jake rose up on his knees, wiping the puke off his jacket, embarrassed, afraid the others would see him that way.
“Seen it happen to a hunter, hundred damn times,” a voice behind him said. Amos! Jake twisted around.
Hector Pierce stood against the tree, naked as the day he was born. Staring straight ahead, his body rigid, emaciated muscles standing out like an animal’s hackles. It was the tree the bear had climbed. There were hounds lying all around—some of them whimpering and mewling, most of them dead.
And a red hunting jacket. A pale, withered face. Amos Nickles with his steaming gray guts looped over Flap’s flayed torso.
It was starting to rain.
“’Bloody teeth…” Hector whispered.
Chapter 12
Reed stepped down from the train at nine-thirty in the evening. Shivering, his head cold having spread to numb the rest of his body. His legs and arms moved stiffly. Rain was splashing off the tin roofs of Simpson Creeks in thick, broad strokes. Just as he remembered it, the still picture he’d always carried in his mind of the town: shallow pools and tides of water backed up on the hard clay, deepening in ditch lines and small sink holes. Off in the distance, toward the Nole Company mines, he could make out the gob piles steaming under the hard rain, the giant hills of mine waste bleeding down into the creeks in ribbons of scarlet.
The buildings here appeared all the same color: slab shacks like wet gray limestone with rusted tin chimneys anchored to the cracked rock slab his forebears considered some kind of lifeboat. And behind these, more gray shacks leaned back in rows far up the ridge and around the bend of the tracks—most of them empty, unless the mines were doing better than the last time he had been here. Dark scratches and wet paperboard on the dead wood sides of foreground buildings indicated old signs, but Reed couldn’t read any of them.
The town really hadn’t changed much; fewer trees dotted several more tons of clay.
The station house looked less well used than it had when Reed lived here. At least then there was always some equipment being shipped in for the Nole mine, and there were always a few miners commuting from further down the mountain for the night shift. He doubted there was a night shift anymore; he was the only passenger. And he watched the freight man unload the only freight: some crates for Charlie Simpson’s store.
It really wasn’t so bad. He felt sicker than a dog, but he could see nothing frightening here.
“Charlie should have been here to help me unload,” the potbellied freight man said. “He’s usually real good about that. Can’t figure what must’ve happened to him.”
Most of the windows in the station house were boarded up. When Reed tried the door, he discovered it was locked.
“We don’t use the inside of the Creeks Station no more,” the freight man told him. “No reason to. Just use the loading platform, is all.” Reed opened his umbrella and started to step off the platform. “You live around here, boy?” the freight man drawled.
Reed turned and stared, finally saying, “I do believe I’ve lived here all my life.”
The freight man laughed and Reed wondered if he really knew what he was laughing about.
The building across the street from the boarded-up station house had a bare yellow lightbulb over the porch: Charlie Simpson’s General Store. There appeared to be lights on inside, silhouettes. Reed remembered that Charlie had usually kept the store open at nights, selling beer and providing a place for people to gather and talk. He slipped around in the mud in front of the slab, but finally managed to climb up onto the first wide step. He took a few deep, wet breaths. That seemed to bring his energy back with a rush; he suddenly wanted to get things done, get them over with. He gripped the doorknob tightly and pulled.