After a little longer, he sat up. He ran a tentative hand down his side, not looking, just in case, but didn't find anything sticking out. He saw the flashlight was lying ten feet away, glowing dimly in undergrowth, and crawled through cold mud to retrieve it. His vision was slightly doubled, but this had been the case for the last couple of hours so he wasn't unduly worried.
Retrieving his light source felt like a step in the right direction. It seemed he'd fallen into a wide rocky gully, designed to hold a decent spring-thaw stream but now home to a thin trickle which he could hear from ten feet away. Otherwise it was quiet. Very quiet, and very cold.
He decided he'd gone far enough. Tonight would do. There didn't have to be a tomorrow after all. School was out a little early, that was all.
He pushed himself backwards until his back was against rock. Then pulled the rucksack up between his knees and opened it. One of the remaining bottles had smashed — the bottom of the bag was soaking and sharp and the smell smoked up around his face. Shining the light, he saw there was no way he could just shove his hand in so he upended most of the bag out onto the ground instead. It took a while, but he found the packs of sleeping pills.
As he laboriously pushed each pill out of its individual foil pimple, laying them in a pile on a useful nearby leaf, he swam through an internal checklist.
Lost, check. Drunk, check. Christ yes. Great big check, in red.
He'd paid his motel bill, mentioning in passing that he was heading back up to Seattle. Check.
Anyone out hiking when it was this cold would have to be out of their fucking mind, and it was mid-week, out of season, and he'd headed away from known trails. Check.
Push, another pill. Push, another pill. He peered at the pile. Was that enough? Better make sure. He kept pushing. An overdose wasn't weak if done the way he was doing it. It was manly. And being way out in the middle of nowhere meant he would never be found, even if it went wrong. He was the man in control.
Oh yeah.
The car would be spotted tomorrow, perhaps, and in a day or two someone would investigate. Not on foot but from the air, most likely, a desultory grid pass at best. On his last day in Sheffer Tom had bought clothes and back-pack in autumnal colours, to make it even less likely that some passing plane or helicopter would be able to spot him. If he'd shelled out for some proper hiking boots too then his ankle wouldn't hurt so much, but it hadn't seemed worth it. Just went to show. Always get the proper equipment.
Anyway, a check in general. Checkety check.
As the pile of pills grew, he was surprised to find that he didn't feel afraid. He'd thought he might, that the proximity of the act itself might make him panic, that he would fight death as she had. He found he merely felt very, very tired. Somewhere in the journey from the car to this random gully he'd lost any remaining sense of his life as a process. It had become simply an event; this event, in this place, now. It was dark, and getting late. It was for the best. It was okay.
He was already very cold, his fingers thin and unmanageable. He started taking the pills, a couple at a time, washed down with more alcohol. He fumbled a few, but there were plenty. He took a lot, muttering in the dark. Bye bye Sarah, go find someone else. Bye bye William, bye bye Lucy. You'll hate me for this, I know, but you would have come to hate me soon enough.
At some point he seemed to accept he was into the realms of fatal dose, after which it all became more relaxed. Everything seemed easy, in fact. The forest got a little warmer too, though it was possible he just wasn't feeling his extremities any more. Everything went fuzzy and liquid as he sat and swayed in perfect darkness. He was cold and not cold, bone weary and awake. Fear circled in the bushes but stayed just out of reach, until he was barely aware of anything and didn't bother to keep putting things in his mouth. He sobbed briefly, then couldn't remember what he'd been thinking about. Trying to follow thoughts was like walking alone down a deserted street where the stores were closing one by one.
When his eyelids began to flutter he tried to keep them open, not with any sense of desperation, but as a child might push away the sleep he knew could not be fought. When they finally closed it seemed lighter in his head for a moment, and then began to fade into slate grey and beyond. He expected, in so far as he had any expectations left, that this process would continue until everything became black and silent. A brief dreaming moment, as if tilting slowly backwards, and then not even that. Goodbye.
He wasn't expecting to wake up in the middle of the night, still drunk, racked with whole-body shivers. He wasn't expecting to be alive, and in thirty kinds of pain. He certainly wasn't expecting to see something standing over him, something big, something that smelled like the scent of rotted meat carried on a cold, cold wind.
2
The restaurant was a big room split up into different areas, a section of tables in the centre and booths around three sides. Small lanterns hung at the entrance to each booth, but they didn't work. The walls had been done out in big retro-style murals, lots of powder blue and pale pink and scratchy black lines. The scalloped double-height windows at the entrance showed a parking lot blown drab with old leaves, and I watched as a cold wind played with them a while. I was in my usual spot, one of the booths in the back of the room. I liked it there. The bench wasn't too close in to the table, so you didn't feel hemmed in. The menu was riddled with cunning puns and full of stuff like burgers, burritos, big old chef salads and chilli (Cincinnati- or Texas-style, 'Hot, Hotter or W-W-Watch Out!'), which is very much my kind of thing.
All in all it was a perfect place for dinner, aside from one thing. The service sucked. I'd been waiting a long time now and no one had bid me welcome, reassured me I was in the system, or given me ice water I wouldn't drink. And actually, it wasn't just the waiting staff who were slacking. When I first arrived I saw someone had knocked over most of the chairs in the central portion of the room, which looked messy. I'd put them back up, tucking them neatly under the tables, but that wasn't really my job. It wasn't my job to replace the light bulbs either. I considered going back into the kitchen, but I knew it would be pointless. It was even quieter back there, and darker, with nothing but spatulas for company.
I leaned forward on the table, wondering what the hell I was doing there. Three days is too long to wait for a bowl of chilli, no matter how damned good it is.
— «» — «» — «»—
I sat for another couple of hours, until it was dark outside. A little after seven a pair of headlights swept into the lot, paused, then floated back out again. Cops, presumably. They evidently didn't feel their job extended to getting out of the car and checking the building's back doors and access hatches, otherwise they might have found evidence of how I'd forced the back way into the kitchen. The fact the place wasn't on fire was good enough. I could understand why they weren't too worried. The restaurant seemed to have a force field around it. None of the windows were broken. The chairs and tables remained in situ, along with pans and spatulas in the kitchen and maybe a hundred menus strewn over tables and the floor. Neither exterior nor interior walls had been tagged, and the smell of stale urine was notably absent. An empty USA Today dispenser stood outside the main doors, surely a clarion call for the moronic to explore what sounds it might make if hurled through the plate glass beside it. That call had gone unheeded. It was eerie. Vandalism evidently wasn't a huge problem in Relent, Idaho. It wasn't clear whether this said the town's youth were too refined or too apathetic for nihilistic self-expression, but brief acquaintance with the settlement suggested the latter. Evidence for refinement was scarce. Doubtless somewhere in town there were people living valuable and important lives, but from the outside it looked like a kid's trike left outside to rust.