“If you kill yourself, you go to hell.”
Dekka snorted, a derisive sound, as she spit dirt. “You believe in hell?”
“You mean, like, it’s a real place?”
Dekka waited while he thought it out. And suddenly she wanted to hear the answer. Like it mattered.
“No,” Orc said at last. “Because we’re all children of God. So he wouldn’t do that. It was just a story he made up.”
Despite herself Dekka was listening. It was hard not to. Talking nonsense was better than remembering. “A story?”
“Yeah, because he knew our lives would be really bad sometimes. Like maybe we’d be turned into a monster and then our best friend would get killed. So he made up this story about hell, so we could always say, ‘Well, it could be worse. It could be hell.’ And then we’d keep going.”
Dekka had no answer to that. He had completely baffled her. And she was almost angry at him, because baffled was a different thing from despairing. Baffled meant she was still … involved.
“What are you doing out here, Orc?”
“I’m going to kill Drake. If I find him.”
Dekka sighed. She stuck out her hand and eventually encountered a gravelly leg. “Give me a hand up. I’m a little shaky.”
His massive hands found her and propped her up. Her legs almost gave way. She was drained, empty, weak.
But not dead.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” she said.
“Me neither,” Orc said.
“I’m…” Dekka stared into the darkness, not even sure she was looking in his direction. She paused until a sob subsided. “I’m afraid I won’t ever be me again.”
“Yeah, I get that, too,” Orc said. He sighed a huge sigh, like he’d walked a million miles and was just so weary. “Some of it is stuff I did. Some of it is stuff that just happened. Like the coyotes eating on me. And then, you know, what happened after that. I never wanted to remember that. But none of it goes away, not even when you’re really drunk or whatever. It’s all still there.”
“Even in the dark,” Dekka said. “Especially in the dark.”
“Which way should we go?” Orc asked.
“I doubt it matters much,” Dekka said. “Start moving. I’ll follow the sound of your footsteps.”
“Aaaahhh,” Cigar screeched. His hand in Astrid’s squeezed with incredible strength.
It was not the first time he’d suddenly cried out. It was a fairly regular thing for him. But in this case there were other sounds. A rush of wind, a stink like rotting meat, and then a snarl.
Cigar was torn away from Astrid.
She instinctively dropped into a crouch. A coyote missed its attack as a result and rather than closing its jaws around her leg just plowed into her with enough force to knock her on her back.
She fumbled in the dark for her shotgun, felt something metallic, not sure which way it was pointing, fumbled, and was brushed aside by a rushing coyote, fur over muscles.
They could hunt in the dark, but the close-in killing work was harder without sight.
Astrid rolled over, flat, stretching her arm, trying to find the shotgun. One finger touched metal.
Cigar was screaming now in that despairing, beaten voice of his. And the snarling was intensifying. The coyotes were frustrated, too, it seemed, unable to pinpoint their prey, snapping blindly where their ears and nose told them the prey would be.
Astrid rolled toward the gun and now she was on top of it, feeling with trembling fingers, searching for—yes! She had the grip. She pushed it forward, probably filling the barrel with sand, probably jamming the trigger. She tried to tell where Cigar was, rolled once more, pulli