Tim managed to open my door with a jerk. He saw me smashed against my seat, something pinning my shoulder. His eyes met mine soberly. “Shit,” he said.
I was trying not to cry. Tim’s nose was bleeding a bit, and a pink blotch on his face would soon turn into an ugly purple bruise.
“His antler is in your shoulder,” he said.
“No shit,” I said, my voice wavering.
“Okay, let me think,” Tim said. “This thing must weigh… like a thousand pounds. Goddamn.” He went to the front of the ATT and I heard him groaning and muttering. He came back around and said, “That was me trying to shift this thing. I grabbed its leg and pulled as hard as I could. But I have an idea—hang in there.”
Like I had a choice.
He opened the back of the vehicle and came back with the jack. He wedged it between the elk and the steel beam of the window and started cranking. For a minute nothing happened. Then the animal shifted a bit and I bit back a scream of pain.
“I’m sorry,” Tim said. “We gotta get you out. But this is going to hurt like a sonofabitch.”
Tim cranked the handle as fast as he could, but it was torturous agony an inch at a time. I’d figured the antler was three or four inches in, but as Tim cranked, the pain went on and on. Blood flowed down my shirt. As soon as I could move a little bit, I pressed my other arm against my mouth. Tears ran down my face and I felt faint and sick.
It seemed to last a week. My head hung limply by the time he was finished, and I still couldn’t move. All I knew was pain, a pain that radiated out of my shoulder and reduced the rest of me to a weeping kindergartner.
“It went right through you, through the seat.” Tim’s voice seemed to come from a distance. I felt him lift me, walk with me, lean me against a rock? A tree?
He cut off my shirt with a knife. I didn’t care. “Holy shit,” he breathed, leaning me forward so he could use the car’s headlights to see my back. When he poured alcohol into my wounds, front and back, I sobbed. Then he pressed one large, cool hand against the hole in front and his other hand against the hole in my back. He kept pressure on them for a long time, till I knew his arms, though ridiculously strong, must ache. Finally he gave me some pills to swallow, packed the wounds with gauze, and bandaged them the best he could. He buttoned one of his shirts around me, keeping my left arm pressed against my body. Slowly I leaned over and slept.
74
BECCA
ON BUNNY’S STOMACH WAS WRITTEN “They will.” In blood, a dark red against her dark skin.
On the back of Mills’s neck: “the Loner.”
I ran back to the car where Nate was stowing everyone’s gear.
“Ansel is gone,” I said abruptly. “But he seems to have left a message.”
Nate tried to pull away as I started lifting his sweatshirt, pulling his collar. When I pulled the neck of his sweatshirt down, in small letters below his collarbone were the words “take you,” in blood, already drying and flaking off.
“They will,” I said, pointing to Bunny, “take you,” I pointed to Nate, “to the,” that was Jolie, “the Loner.” On Mills. “They will take you to the Loner.”
“You don’t have anything written on you?” Bunny asked.
Last night I’d been asleep in the car with Nate, apparently clinging to him like lichen. Somehow Ansel had opened the car door, lifted Nate’s shirt and written on his chest, and closed the door without waking any of us. The thought made my face burn. Slowly Jolie started looking at the back of my neck, pushing up my sleeves, finally tugging my raggedy sweater up to show my belly, white as a trout’s. Nothing.
Suddenly Mills crouched and pushed up my pants leg. “Chip? Sorry,” he read.
On my leg. My leg. While I slept. “‘Chip? Sorry’? What the hell does that mean?” I practically snarled. “What does any of it mean? God! Let’s just get in the freaking car! I’ll drive!”
Later that day, we found that Ansel had been right: This big city was the capital, and its name was Chi-cah-go. How did we know? There was a huge sign a couple miles outside the city that said WELCOME TO CHICAGO: CAPITAL OF THE UNITED.
That had been an important clue. But what did “They will take you to the Loner” mean? What did “Chip? Sorry” mean?
The road we’d been on had gotten slowly bigger, the way a creek becomes a stream, then a river. We saw many more cars, the fancy kinds from the factory. No one seemed to notice or care that five kids were driving around by themselves. Maybe that was normal here.
When I crested a bridge and we first saw the
capital, I almost slammed on the brakes so we could just… absorb it. But the car behind us honked, so I sped up and tried not to completely lose my mind.
“It’s…” said Nate in wonder, and Mills said, “Yeah.”