There was this sleep-ocean and he was sinking to the bottom, down in the dark where he bumped into fish without eyes, who were blind dreams.
The whiskey on his tongue tasted like cold kerosene. Dingleberries of frozen blood stuck to strands of his hair. Then, a dream with eyes swallowed him and he was surrounded by an empty playhouse where he was the only one in the audience, while up on the stage a cast went through the wooden motions.
And, ah shit, man, I’ve seen this one before.
Amy, Jolene, poor Hank blinking, Popeye the ostrich, and Earl Garf emerging out of the shadows with his hand upraised.
A bad play. Not quite real life. Real life came down to a question of altitude. Vaguely, Broker understood that he’d spent the last two years on his knees in a world that was three feet high.
No real life without kids in it.
No way.
Poor Amy. Poor Jolene. No kids.
Tried to live in their play. Fun for a while. Flirting. Sex. Some rough stuff.
But not real life. Uh-uh.
Real life was the sound of his daughter’s voice; and the way it worked, just when you thought you were going to get a good night’s sleep-every time. .
Daddy, I need you, said three-year-old Kit.
Broker thought she might be calling out to him from the other side of the world.
And he just had to get up.
Broker unglued his eyes in a fit of uncontrollable trembling and wondered how the hell he got hair in his mouth, with clumps of frozen blood on it. His hair was too short. .
Okay. So it was a nightmare, after all. A nightmare in which a flap of his scalp had ripped off and dangled down the side of his face, and that’s how the hair got in his mouth.
And now he made out the faint twinkle of stars, but they were inches away, right in front of his eyes, and that had to be a bad sign. They should be up higher, over the black horizon with the other stars and the sickle moon behind the spidery branches of the trees.
With an extra-deep shudder he saw what an empty witch-tit woods it was; bleak enough to give a druid insomnia. Then he saw he was surrounded by shattered glass and the pulpwood log that had almost taken his head off projected through the windshield. Some twinkles of this glass fell from his hair, and he saw it was the worst kind of nightmare.
Your basic North Woods nightmare about freezing to death in a car wreck on the coldest night in history.
A tiny voice way down at the base of his brain hissed: Move, dummy.
Right.
He lurched against the seat belt, raised his hands, and found them frozen. Well, not quite; but definitely unresponsive. The individual fingers did not work and had joined together into a mittenlike flipper. His thumb refused to move. He raised his right hand and slammed it palm up against the steering wheel and felt excruciating, shark-bite pain. Good. Still some circulation left.
He moved the hand to the seat-belt buckle and. . nothing happened. The opposed thumb, which separated him from other mammals, was no longer an option. He had a paw. In a few more minutes it would turn into a hoof.
He tried to picture Earl and the sequence of events that delivered him here, and immediately rejected the notion as a waste of time and heat. All he knew was now: shock, head wound bleeding, probably broken ribs, whiplash. And the biggie-hypothermia.
He was minutes-less-from passing out for good.
It was up to the lizard to save the human.
All he had was reflexes.
And a few old Indian tricks.
If somebody’s going to kill me in the woods, give me a city-boy mouse-clicker every time.
Earl, you fucking dummy, you should have checked my truck. Broker shoved his petrified right hand into the back and levered up the rear-seat backrest. His numb fingers pawed on the stock of the Mossberg twelve-gauge that he’d loaded and prepositioned within easy reach, because-always go with your gut-he was worried about Earl.
He herded, perhaps paddled, the shotgun forward and pawed it across his lap. Then he reached back, hooked a strap of the survival pack on his thumb, and yanked it out. Panting jerky clouds of breath, he pawed the bag to his chest and used his teeth to open the snap, fumbled inside, and found the haft of a Buck sheath knife. Using both palms and his teeth, he tore the knife from the scabbard. Then, with the knife awkwardly positioned between two hands frozen in an attitude of prayer, he sawed though the seat belt.
Faintly in the slender moonlight, he saw blood on the blade. Didn’t feel the slash he put in his thigh.
Onward.
Tipping sideways, Broker fell through the open driver’s-side door holding the knife, the shotgun, and the bag in his cramped arms, and crunched down on the icy ground. His insides milled around, confused; having fallen, he found it impossible to get up.
So here’s the deal, which his dad had beat into him, and the Airborne sergeants at Benning had refined: After you die, then you get to quit.
Yeah. Yeah. Broker lurched up on elbows, blundered to his knees, and fumbled in the pack. There was a heavy fleece sweater, mittens, a space blanket; but he was too far gone for that. What he needed was. . a flare.
He held the beautiful red cardboard tube between his palms-sulfur, wax, sawdust, potassium chlorate-and strontium nitrate for its own internal oxidation. This fucker would burn at 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit underwater.
Yes.
Urgent now, he left the flare with the shotgun and lurched forward on his knees because his feet wouldn’t work, his ankles ended in wooden blocks. He’d adjusted to horror as normal working conditions for this night, so he didn’t waste time being surprised when he saw that Earl had exchanged his warm boots for running shoes.
He tottered on his knees and fell against the crumpled front fender of the Jeep where one headlight still burned weakly. Thus illuminated, he knee-crawled past the pile of pulpwood logs to where the loggers had heaped the pile of slash.
He filled his arms with branches and knee-crawled back and heaved the thicker branches under the gas tank. Going back and forth in this fashion, his head was briefly occupied with warm hallucinations from his childhood. Hot chocolate. Toasted marshmallows.
Now he moved to the front of the Jeep and kneed and elbowed himself up between the stack of logs and the crumpled hood. Clamping his forearms and elbows, he hauled at the pulpwood. One by one, he yanked the tiers of logs forward, piled them on the hood and through the shattered windshield.
He rolled over, fell off the Jeep, and, as he studied his makeshift pyre, he entertained more childhood memories. “To Build a Fire,” one of the first stories he’d ever read, by Jack London. Except that guy fucked up.
Not me.
His knees buckled and he toppled over and crawled on his belly, a crab shape shifting to a snake. He wormed his way to the pack.
Holding the flare and the shotgun between his palms, he kneed his way back to the pile of wood under the gas tank. It was too dark to read the instructions printed on the flare, but he knew they said, among other things: always point fuse away from face and body while igniting
Just have to ignore that little bit of advice for now.
Broker couldn’t use his hands for fine gripping, so he had to clamp his teeth on the strip of black tape on the side of the flare and yank it to expose the cap. Then, carefully, he bit down on the metal cap and pulled it off.
To ignite the torch he had to strike the friction surface on the top of the cap against the fuse end he’d uncovered. But right now, the friction surface was between his teeth, pointing down his throat. When he used his knuckles and his teeth to revolve it around so it faced out, the cap promptly froze tight to his lips and tongue.
But it was generally in the right direction.
Immediately, he gripped the flare between his palms and struck it like a fat red match across the cap in his mouth. The sulfurous whoosh charred his cheek and shot a fiery spout in the night. Broker dropped the flare in the wood under the gas tank, thrashed the frozen cap from his lips, and scuttled back with the shotgun.
Cradling the Mossberg in his elbows, he crawled away from the flames sputtering under the Jeep-six feet, seven, eight. Enough.
The flare might do the trick by itself. But the wood was really cold and the gas tank far away from the flame. He didn’t have the time to wait and find out. So he rolled over, pawed the safety latch, and set the gun to fire.
Squirming now, he came around with the shotgun still cradled in one elbow and jammed his blunt fingers into the trigger guard.
All his life he’d lectured people about not riding around with loaded guns in their cars. And because he was basically a lizard right now, his memory was faulty. Had he jacked a round in the chamber in J.T.’s Quonset hut? Because if he didn’t, there was no way, with these hands, he could work the slide and load one now.
Broker aimed the muzzle at the gas tank and poked at the trigger.
The gun kicked back and out of his elbow. But a streak of flame shot from the barrel and tore into the under side of the Jeep. For a split second the muzzle flash illuminated the piled logs and brush. A gasoline mist curtsied with the flare’s chemistry. Then the gas tank erupted.
The explosion filled the woods with fire, rolled Broker over, popped his eardrums, and blistered his face.
He came up grinning.
Now that’s how you build a fire, Jack.
But it was way too toasty, so he scrambled away from the blaze that now reached up twenty feet into the air, snapping and sparking through overhead birch branches.
He was in agony, of course, smashed between freezing and roasting. He might lose fingers and toes. But he was back in the game. He thanked the lizard, proceeded up his brain stem, and tried to marshal conscious thought.
Earl. Somehow followed them.
If Earl did this then Amy and Jolene were in danger.
And Hank.
These thoughts, though dire, grabbed no traction on his shivering. More immediately he struggled to stand and tried to stamp circulation back into his feet. He managed one pirouette in front of the bonfire and toppled over. The blood in his hands and feet had turned to broken glass and needles.
Getting up, he noticed the reflection of the flames glitter beyond the trees. Lake ice.
And then Broker saw more lights appear across the lake. Squares of electric lights popping on. Windows.
Stamping, falling, getting up, he hugged himself and tried to flex blood back into his stinging fingers. Using his teeth, he managed to pull on woolen mittens from his pack. After working up the courage to explore the gash on his scalp, he pulled off a mitten and touched his fingers to his face. Nothing. Feeling ended at his wrists. He licked at the numbness next to his mouth and tasted blood Popsicles. Burnt steak from the flare.
His concern for Amy, Jolene, and Hank was still relative and dreamy, far removed from the local question of his own survival.
Then, a pair of lights beyond the trees caught his attention. They moved with purpose, slowly getting larger. A vehicle. But was it attracted by the fire?
Broker stamped and staggered and fell down and got up and waited as the headlights poked and lurched through the woods and materialized in the form of a Ford pickup. He hobbled to it as the driver got out and peered at him. They recognized each other.
It was Billie’s neighbor, Annie Lunder, which meant that Earl hadn’t hauled him very far from the lodge. In her late sixties, swaddled in wool and fleece, Annie had not changed one bit and was still edgy and mean as a doubled-bladed axe. She and his Uncle Billie had fallen out of love and hated each other since the Korean War-something about a property-line dispute and Billie marrying her sister, Aunt Marcy, now departed.
Annie winced, seeing his torn face in the firelight. “Philip Broker, you feral child; I swear you were raised by wolves. Look at you out here in tennis shoes in this weather. And playing with matches. What the hell are you trying to do? Burn down my woods?”
“Phone,” Broker croaked. “Life and death.”
“What’s that?” she squinted, cupping one gloved hand to the side of her hat.
“Nine one one. Billie’s lodge.”