would, but there’s a tree in my back.”
“I feel like I’m sliding downhill.”
“You have to kind of wedge yourself in between the roots. Just pretend we’re camping.”
“If I was camping I’d have an air mattress and a sleeping bag. And I wouldn’t pick the side of a cliff to bed down on. This ain’t camping, bunnycakes, it’s sleeping rough. A dog wouldn’t even crawl in here to die.”
“Would you rather look for another place?”
Ruby thinks about it. “No.”
“Then try to make the best of it. It’s only an hour or so until dawn—this is just a pit stop. Try to rest.”
“I’ll try.”
Henry gratefully fades out, all of his aches and terrors sinking into the welcome oblivion of sleep.
With a start he awakens in darkness, feeling very wrong. Time has passed; he is freezing, covered with dew, his every joint and ligament rusted tight. His mouth is so dry he chokes on his tongue working up enough spit to swallow. The sky shows the faintest hint of pre-dawn, a slightly paler blue. His hand scrabbles in the damp hollow beside him, searching for his wife’s arm to check her watch.
Ruby is gone.
Henry thrashes around looking for her, vaguely remembering her scooting away to pee. She said she was going to pee: I’m just going to pee, she had said—then he was out like a light.
“Ruby!” he hisses. “Honey!” Skidding on his butt down to the road, Henry gets clear of the bushes and stiffly stands up looking for her. She is nowhere to be seen, the misty ramp of highway running vacantly up and down.
Where the fuck could she have gone?
Wait—he sees something at the top of the road, not far away: Lights. A dim glow up the hillside. Ignoring the nest of agonies that is his rickety skeleton, he heads towards it. If they’ve taken her, he doesn’t know what he will do, but something.
Play it cool, he thinks groggily. Scope out the situation. Determine the enemy’s strength, make a plan, and carry it out.
He thinks of his drill-sergeant—Gunny Ranklin—shouting, You’re a mean motherfucker, Cadmus! Yes, sir! Say it!—say you’re a mean motherfucker! I’m a mean motherfucker, sir! I couldn’t hear you just now—it sounded to me like you said you’re a sorry-ass cock-knocker! I’m a mean motherfucker, sir! Come again? I’M A MEAN MOTHERFUCKER!
“I’m a mean motherfucker,” Henry mutters, slogging uphill. He is alert enough to know he has to be careful about giving himself away, and that some form of weapon might come in handy. As he walks he collects some good-sized stones in his jacket pockets, and a stout stick which serves more immediately as a cane—he’s a wreck.
Approaching the light’s source, he finds that the main road peels off from a secondary dirt road, a chained driveway that disappears through thickets of sage and juniper. That’s where the light is coming from—it is the headlights of two parked vehicles, the same ones from before. They are deserted, their doors hanging open. A sheriff’s hat is sitting on the ground.
With the utmost of caution, Henry creeps ahead, ducking from cover to cover as the path levels and then begins to drop off into a kind of natural amphitheater, a sprawling crater surrounded by steep ridges. The peaks are dark against the gloaming rim of the eastern sky. At once Henry can see fire—a dying bonfire crackling in the clearing below.
The ground around it is trampled and littered with bones. Beneath the woodsmoke smell is a smell of rankness: human waste and something worse, like charred hair. There is no one in sight, but Henry knows that fire could not burn untended for long. In fact it has almost burned down.
Hiding in a stand of Christmas trees, waiting for someone to appear, something to happen, he stares at the fire pit, hypnotized by the glowering embers and blackening bones.
There is a sound behind him, a soft shuffle.
Henry turns, heart leaping at the sight of a huge, grotesque figure lurching towards him. It is the bison-thing, its shaggy head black and matted with blood, its shapeless, humped body gliding like a phantom on skirts of filthy pelts. As it comes it lets out a low, chilling moan.
Zagreus.
Henry reacts instinctively, responding not so much out of fear as out of relief. Not panic, not panic at all—the terror is all burned out of him. Every ounce of his being is primed for desperate action, even grateful for the chance at it. It’s what he came here seeking—some kind of violent