She kicked toward the spot where they’d left their packs. A clenched mass of roots gripped the shore, and below her, the streambed sloped away sharply, sliding grittily underfoot. To steady herself, she caught at a root, and her hand slipped down it. Slimy as a water snake, it left a wet sheath of green in her palm. She floundered, with one leg sunk to the calf in clammy silt, the streambed tilting farther beneath her. Hardly able to stand upright, she felt herself being dragged back into the middle of the creek and again tried to haul herself out. Clutching, she got a foot up on the bank, but it crumbled under her, sliding into the water. Panic gave her strength, and with a springing leap, she cleared the side.
She clambered onto the sand as a big hunk of the bank fell away. “Oh!” She crawled faster. At last, breathing rapidly, she sat on a flat rock, well away from the edge. The sun slanted down on her, and a column of midges whirled in the light over the water. “Amelia?” Anxiously, she watched the others, as moisture spread around her on the rock. “Aren’t you tired yet?”
Long-shadowed birches crowded near the creek, and tufts of pointed grass covered the sand hills. Beyond the bank, scrub merged with unbroken dwarf forest.
She dried quickly. As she rubbed her naked body, beads of water rolled off, leaving a smooth residue, like a fine powdering of rust. Slowly, her muscles relaxed, yielding to the sunlight.
Something fat and black glistened like a garden slug on the back of her ankle.
Behind her, somebody spoke. “There’s a leech on you, girl.”
They were making their final rounds of the day. The road between Chamong and Hobbston bent around a cranberry bog, where red and green mats of vegetation lay thickly on the water. They rounded another curve, and dogs filled the road.
“Jesus Christ!”
More than a dozen mongrels scrambled madly as Barry gunned the engine, whipping the wheel hard over. The car barely clipped a collie mutt, knocked it tumbling over the sand. Barry hit the brakes, and the police car scudded, plowing deep furrows in the road. Revolver drawn, he leaped from the car.
Frozen, Steve gaped in disbelief.
Most of the dogs had already scurried off, disappearing into the pines. Except for the straggler—a runty shepherd mongrel, tail between its legs. A moment before, it had been secure in the midst of the pack. Now, looking around in confusion, it just stood in the middle of the road.
Flushed with excitement, Barry fired three shots, two of the bullets whipping harmlessly into the pines. One caught the animal at the base of the spine.
The dog screamed. It bounded, then sprawled in the sand, blood bubbling from its rump when it tried to get up and run. The oversize paws splayed all over the road, and the dog tumbled in panic, collapsed, kicking spasmodically.
Barry approached. The beast tried to crawl away from him, eyes rolling in terror, but its hind legs wouldn’t move at all. By desperately wriggling and clawing at the sand, it managed to writhe from side to side, feebly inching toward the woods.
Steve got out of the car, stood watching.
The dog bared its fangs, whined and then growled again as Barry stood over it, taking careful aim for the head.
Steve caught a flash of yellow movement in the trees.
“Behind you!”
A thick-furred pregnant bitch tensed to leap.
Barry whirled around, firing several shots. The animal bolted for the woods. A bullet buzzed past Steve as he ducked behind the car. Knocked sideways, the bitch never slowed but vanished into the trees, leaving only a smear of blood on the ground.
Barry looked around, then walked back to the wounded cur. His long shadow densely black before him, he took aim again. He pulled the trigger, and the revolver clicked. “Shit.” He stared in disbelief for a moment, then his booted foot lashed out again and again.
As he walked back toward the car, he wiped his boots in the sand as best he could. Behind him, the dog looked like road kill.
Steve closed his eyes. “It was just a puppy. You can tell by the size of the paws.” A headache gnawed his brain.
“I winged the other one.” Barry sounded pleased with himself as they got back in the car.
Steve nodded with a whiny grunt. He needed a drink.
“What do you think? Should we go after it?”
“We’d never find her.” Steve turned away and gazed toward the woods. “Not out there.”
Sunset was a lava flow along the horizon.
Ancient, rusted tin cans lay scattered about the clearing. As the last redness drained from the sky, the sand grayed, and colors shifted to darker hues. Shrilling with cicadas, the slender trunks of the surrounding trees grew indistinct.
“Was this really the bottom of the ocean?” Amelia’s eyes held a fearful wonder. “Is that why it sort of looks like the beach with trees?”
“That’s why”—rolling the last of several logs into a rough circle, Casey spoke between grunts—“everything’s so flat.”
From the clearing’s edge, he was closely watched.
Sitting on a log, Jenny randomly traced mystic-looking symbols in the sand…and sneaked a glance at the stranger.
Pallid and handsome with coarse red hair, he couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty. The bright hair accentuated his unhealthy paleness; sharp cheekbones showed like ivory through white skin. He hardly spoke, as though a long illness had left him sullen and shy, wasted. Yet there was a furtive sexuality about him, the powerful shoulders seeming out of place on his emaciated frame. He wore a soiled shirt, and dirt had worked deeply into the folds of his neck and arms. He’d told them his name was Ernie and that he was a camper, out here alone. Periodically, his body would heave with a tubercular-sounding cough.
Jenny didn’t care for the way he never took his eyes off Casey. She didn’t care for the way he just sat there, indistinct in the fading twilight. A childhood memory scratched elusively at the back of her mind, and then she had it: he reminded her of a stable hand she used to see during summer vacations. She remembered there’d been some problem, something the adults whispered about, some reason she hadn’t been allowed to talk to the unwashed boy. As though aware of her attention, Ernie looked over, and she caught another glimpse of those sickly, bloodshot eyes before quickly turning away.
“Somebody gather some wood,” Casey called to the group. “You ever…Ernie?” He sat on a log and mopped sweat from his forehead. “You ever catch any fish in that stream?”
After their swim, they’d hiked another hour before making camp, partly pressed on by Casey’s timetable, mostly in hopes of shaking their new acquaintance.
Ernie choked on phlegm, spat thickly. “Can’t eat the fish.” Raising his shoulder, he wiped his mouth on the shirt.
“Why’s that?”
“Full of worms.”
Jenny grimaced. Almost the first thing he’d said to them was that someone had recently drowned in a canoe accident right about where they’d been swimming.
“There must still be wet ground nearby,” said Casey, waving at insects, “a pond or something.”
Ernie nodded.
“Maybe we ought to move.”
“But it’s almost dark,” Jenny objected. “Besides, I’m awfully tired.” She immediately regretted her words—if they moved they might finally get rid of Ernie, who presumably was only hanging around in hopes of being fed. After all, he wouldn’t even speak to anyone but Casey, and then only to exchange boring wilderness lore.
“Could somebody help me?” called Sandy, gathering firewood in the scrub. “Alan? Jenny, are you doing anything?” she asked in loud, sugary tones. “Shit!” The log in her hand had released a cloud of flying insects.