Barry approached. The beast tried to crawl away from him, eyes rolling in terror, but its hind legs wouldn’t move at all. By desperately wriggling and clawing at the sand, it managed to writhe from side to side, feebly inching toward the woods.
Steve got out of the car, stood watching.
The dog bared its fangs, whined and then growled again as Barry stood over it, taking careful aim for the head.
Steve caught a flash of yellow movement in the trees.
“Behind you!”
A thick-furred pregnant bitch tensed to leap.
Barry whirled around, firing several shots. The animal bolted for the woods. A bullet buzzed past Steve as he ducked behind the car. Knocked sideways, the bitch never slowed but vanished into the trees, leaving only a smear of blood on the ground.
Barry looked around, then walked back to the wounded cur. His long shadow densely black before him, he took aim again. He pulled the trigger, and the revolver clicked. “Shit.” He stared in disbelief for a moment, then his booted foot lashed out again and again.
As he walked back toward the car, he wiped his boots in the sand as best he could. Behind him, the dog looked like road kill.
Steve closed his eyes. “It was just a puppy. You can tell by the size of the paws.” A headache gnawed his brain.
“I winged the other one.” Barry sounded pleased with himself as they got back in the car.
Steve nodded with a whiny grunt. He needed a drink.
“What do you think? Should we go after it?”
“We’d never find her.” Steve turned away and gazed toward the woods. “Not out there.”
Sunset was a lava flow along the horizon.
Ancient, rusted tin cans lay scattered about the clearing. As the last redness drained from the sky, the sand grayed, and colors shifted to darker hues. Shrilling with cicadas, the slender trunks of the surrounding trees grew indistinct.
“Was this really the bottom of the ocean?” Amelia’s eyes held a fearful wonder. “Is that why it sort of looks like the beach with trees?”
“That’s why”—rolling the last of several logs into a rough circle, Casey spoke between grunts—“everything’s so flat.”
From the clearing’s edge, he was closely watched.
Sitting on a log, Jenny randomly traced mystic-looking symbols in the sand…and sneaked a glance at the stranger.
Pallid and handsome with coarse red hair, he couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty. The bright hair accentuated his unhealthy paleness; sharp cheekbones showed like ivory through white skin. He hardly spoke, as though a long illness had left him sullen and shy, wasted. Yet there was a furtive sexuality about him, the powerful shoulders seeming out of place on his emaciated frame. He wore a soiled shirt, and dirt had worked deeply into the folds of his neck and arms. He’d told them his name was Ernie and that he was a camper, out here alone. Periodically, his body would heave with a tubercular-sounding cough.
Jenny didn’t care for the way he never took his eyes off Casey. She didn’t care for the way he just sat there, indistinct in the fading twilight. A childhood memory scratched elusively at the back of her mind, and then she had it: he reminded her of a stable hand she used to see during summer vacations. She remembered there’d been some problem, something the adults whispered about, some reason she hadn’t been allowed to talk to the unwashed boy. As though aware of her attention, Ernie looked over, and she caught another glimpse of those sickly, bloodshot eyes before quickly turning away.
“Somebody gather some wood,” Casey called to the group. “You ever…Ernie?” He sat on a log and mopped sweat from his forehead. “You ever catch any fish in that stream?”
After their swim, they’d hiked another hour before making camp, partly pressed on by Casey’s timetable, mostly in hopes of shaking their new acquaintance.
Ernie choked on phlegm, spat thickly. “Can’t eat the fish.” Raising his shoulder, he wiped his mouth on the shirt.
“Why’s that?”
“Full of worms.”
Jenny grimaced. Almost the first thing he’d said to them was that someone had recently drowned in a canoe accident right about where they’d been swimming.
“There must still be wet ground nearby,” said Casey, waving at insects, “a pond or something.”
Ernie nodded.
“Maybe we ought to move.”
“But it’s almost dark,” Jenny objected. “Besides, I’m awfully tired.” She immediately regretted her words—if they moved they might finally get rid of Ernie, who presumably was only hanging around in hopes of being fed. After all, he wouldn’t even speak to anyone but Casey, and then only to exchange boring wilderness lore.
“Could somebody help me?” called Sandy, gathering firewood in the scrub. “Alan? Jenny, are you doing anything?” she asked in loud, sugary tones. “Shit!” The log in her hand had released a cloud of flying insects.
“Must we have a big fire?” Jenny sighed again, her vision already blurry with perspiration and humidity. “I’m smothering as it is. How come it gets hotter at night? We should have stayed by the stream. Amelia, don’t go too far.”
Chasing lightning bugs, the little girl paused to watch a bat, wings pinkish and translucent against the evening sky as it darted after moths. “Eww!”
“What is it?”
“Something flew up my nose!”
Having scooped out sand in the middle of the circle of logs, Casey meticulously finished stacking branches, using small twigs and dried pine needles for kindling. “Where are the matches? Oh.” Once lit, the fire only served to make the woods darker. Only the nearer trees remained visible, and they seemed to waver as the firelight now caught them, now let them go.
Casey dug out the supplies—plastic forks, fruitcake remnants, half a loaf of bread, smoked hot dogs, canned corn. “Who the hell packed this?” he muttered under his breath. Canned goods, no less—no wonder it weighed a ton. He wished his friends could grasp the difference between backpacking and picnicking. “We’ll need more wood,” he called, sharpening sticks with a pocketknife with a mother-of-pearl handle.
“Nice knife.”
Casey looked up to find Ernie standing right beside him.
“You’ll stay and eat with us, won’t you?” Alan asked, smoothing his mustache with a comb.
Insects descended in a vampiric swarm. The mosquitoes, wet and bloated but still feeding, surrounded them. Conversations in the clearing became peppered with slaps and curses.
Flames licked up around the pine chunks. Because the smoke kept away some of the bugs, they all sat close to the fire, in spite of the heat. When Alan passed around insect repellant, Ernie declined wordlessly. Jenny rubbed some into Amelia’s small back, already covered with bites, and the oily scent mingled with the odor of smoke. Smelling the food, they sat in relative silence, while corn slowly heated in a pot perched among the coals, and hot dogs sizzled and blackened on sticks.
Ernie drooled. Jenny stared—she’d never seen anything like it before. Shocked, she turned away. Finished with Amelia, she rubbed repellant on her own legs and arms. It stung a spot on the back of her ankle, the spot where Casey had burned off the leech.
Scorching their fingers and mouths, all ate ravenously, jaws and throats working rapidly.
Amelia turned to her mother. “I don’t like him. He smells bad.”
“Amelia!”
Ernie froze. A hunk of bread halfway to his mouth, he peered through slitted eyes as though afraid someone might try to take the food. Jenny stared at the grease around his mouth.
“Uh…good food,” said Alan. “I’m hungry as a wolf.”
