Bits & Pieces (Benny Imura 5)

To live without.

That made the road so hard, so long, so lonely. And the man and his little brother were too far gone to be company to each other.

Dan never stopped watching. He never let his attention slacken.

“I’m cold,” said Mason, and the way he said it jolted Dan. It was in a sleepy, dreamy, resigned voice.

Dan knelt, feeling his brother’s face and fingers. They were like ice. The temperature was plummeting, and the fog was turning to crystals in the air. It was so humid he knew that it would start snowing soon.

Panic flared in his chest. He rubbed Mason’s cheeks and arms, trying to coax the circulation, fighting to keep alive the spark of heat in the boy’s limbs. He took Mason’s icy fingers and put them in his own mouth, breathing his own heat onto them.

Mason’s eyelids fluttered, but his eyes didn’t open.

“Please,” begged Dan, feeling tears break from his eyes and run like boiling water down his cheeks. “Please. God . . . please.”

He was aware, as everyone was aware, that prayers were not being answered anymore. If they ever had been. While on the road, Dan had a lot of time to think about all the desperate and needy ones who had begged for God’s mercy in times of war and famine, in wretched hospitals and on sinking ships. If there was a plan in God’s mercy, or his lack of mercy, Dan couldn’t see it. He still believed, but the structure of his belief had collapsed with the world. Those nights hiding in a church had not restored his confidence that grace would be afforded to him. He was pretty sure he didn’t deserve any anyway.

But Mason was a kid.

Six years old.

Dan did not believe in the concept of original sin. That seemed like bullcrap to him. Sin was earned. Babies don’t have any. They can’t, or God is a jerk. Dan didn’t think God was a jerk. Merciless, maybe, but not an actual malicious jerk.

So where was mercy?

Where, in the endless dark of this night, was his grace?

“Please,” he prayed as he tried to rub life back into his brother’s flesh. “Please.”

5

“Danny—?”

Mason’s voice was so pale, so empty.

But it was there.

The dead don’t speak. They can’t.

Only the living can do that.

Dan hugged his brother to him. He pulled the ends of his coat around the boy. Maybe together their heat would be enough.

Maybe.

Sobbing, Dan picked Mason up and squinted into the darkness. The snow clouds must have been thinner than he thought, because he could see light. Moonlight? Was it a full moon? Or a gibbous moon?

He didn’t know. He’d come to learn the phases of the moon during his months on the run, but it had been cloudy for days.

Still, there was light.

Cold and . . .

Yellow.

Yellow?

Dan frowned at it. Moonlight was white. Moonlight on snow was blue.