Eli's Trail

Day 34

Eli's trail left the logging road two miles down, where the cedars started.

I almost missed it. A broken fern stem, bent the wrong way. Then a scuff on a mossy log where a small boot had slipped. Under the big trees the snow was thin, and the ground told the story if you knew how to read it. My dad taught me. I taught Eli. Now I was reading my own lessons back off the forest floor.

"How do you know that's him?" Dante asked.

I crouched and touched a print half-hidden under a cedar bough. Small. Lug sole. The left heel worn down, because Eli walks on the outside of his left foot and always has.

"I know," I said.

We followed it for an hour. Then the trail reached the creek, and it stopped.

Not faded. Stopped. Prints going into the water, none coming out on the other side. I walked the bank a hundred yards each way. Nothing.

"He walked in the creek," I said, and my voice did something I didn't like. "I taught him that. If something's hunting you, get in the water. It can't follow your scent and you don't leave tracks."

Dante looked at the creek. Then at me. He didn't say so he's hiding from things like you. He didn't have to.

We searched until the light went. Upstream, downstream, both banks. Dante's breath fogged and his steps got heavy and his heart slowed into the long, tired rhythm of a man who'd walked three hundred miles on bad food. Mine didn't change at all.

At dusk, standing in the creek up to my shins and not feeling the cold, I saw the letters.

[Mission available: Gather infected.]

[The Horde hunts by heartbeat.]

[The Horde can find what you cannot.]

I stood very still.

It didn't say Eli. It didn't have to. It had been listening the whole time.

"No," I said out loud.

Dante turned from the bank. "No what?"

"Nothing."

The letters faded. They didn't argue. They didn't need to. They'd be there tomorrow, and the day after, and every day he stayed lost.

We sheltered in a hunter's lean-to a half mile up the slope. Dante built a fire and ate cold beans out of the can and watched me not eat.

"You're not hungry," he said.

"No."

"Four days, you said."

"Yeah."

He set the can down. The fire popped between us. I could hear his heart under the crackle, and I hated that I could hear it.

"Portia." Quiet. Never loud. "Were you bitten?"

I'd spent fourteen years lying to this man. I'll be back by Sunday. It's just one more storm. I'll call you when I get there. Every lie had been easy, because every lie had been about leaving.

This one would have been about staying.

"Yes," I said. "Three times. I died, Dante. On Day 30. I was dead on that cellar hatch for four days, and then I wasn't."

The fire popped again. His heartbeat climbed, fast and hard, and every beat of it went straight through me.

He didn't reach for the rifle. That was the first thing I noticed. The second was that he didn't move any farther away.

"Okay," he said finally.

"Okay?"

"I don't understand it. I'm not going to pretend I do." He rubbed his jaw, that dark shadow rasping under his palm. "But you're still the most stubborn woman I ever put on a pole, and you're still looking for your kid. So okay."

He slept. I sat on the far side of the fire with the hatchet across my knees and listened to his heart all night, and I didn't trust myself to get any closer.

Day 35

By noon we'd lost the creek in a maze of side channels, and Dante was limping on a blister he wouldn't admit to.

We'd walked every bank. We'd climbed the ridge to look for smoke and seen nothing but that one thin gray line, miles off to the southeast, too far for a nine-year-old on foot. Somewhere in this valley my son had climbed out of the water, and I couldn't find where.

The letters came back.

[Mission available: Gather infected.]

I thought about Eli spending a fifth night alone. About what else in these woods hunted by heartbeat and didn't need a system to tell it how.

"Dante," I said. "Whatever you see next, don't shoot."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he lowered the rifle.

I didn't call them out loud. I just let go of something I'd been holding tight since I woke up on the hatch, and I felt them out there. Three of them, then a fourth I hadn't known about, scattered through the cedars like coals in a dead fire. All of them had been following me. All of them were waiting.

Come.

They came out of the trees with their heads low. Dante's heart kicked so hard I flinched.

[Mission accepted.]

[Horde units gathered: 4.]

[Humanity: 100% → 94%.]

I'd never seen that number before. Six percent, gone. I felt every one of them go, like rungs pulled out of a ladder under my feet.

Find him, I told them. Find the boy. Don't touch him.

They lifted their faces to the air, all four at once. Then they moved, fast and silent, downstream and up a side channel I'd walked past twice.

We followed them. Dante didn't say a word for a mile. I didn't look at him. I couldn't stand to see what was on his face.

The cabin sat in a hollow of old-growth cedar, so tucked into the trees you could walk past it in summer and never know. Old trapper's place, half fallen in. Somebody had patched it. A blue tarp stretched over the broken part of the roof and lashed down with wire, twisted tight the way you'd tie off a line. A snare line ran along the game trail out front. Copper wire, double loop.

I stopped breathing, out of habit.

"Eli." Then louder. "Eli!"

The door was wired shut from the outside with a twist I recognized. I tore it open.

Empty.

A bed of cedar boughs in the corner. A ring of stones for a fire, the ashes cold but not old. His flashlight, dead, set carefully on a shelf. On the wall above the bed, scratched into the log with something sharp, a row of tally marks. I counted them without meaning to.

Four.

Four days alone, and then he'd stopped counting.

Dante was outside, crouched in the snow. "Portia."

Tracks. Adult boots, four or five sets, heavy, coming down from the ridge and going back up it. And between them, a smaller set. Lug sole. Left heel worn down.

Walking. Not dragged. Not carried.

He'd gone with them on his own.

The tracks led southeast. Toward that thin line of smoke on the horizon.

I stood in the doorway of the place my son had made safe, and the pale letters came up over everything.

[Safe nesting ground identified.]

Behind me, I heard them. The four I'd gathered filed past me into the cabin, slow and quiet, like they'd been invited. One by one, they lay down on the cedar boughs where Eli had slept.

[Nest established.]

[Well done, Mother.]