“We should open it,” Michael said. “What if this is all for nothing?”
Somehow, staring at the case on the dirt and grass, the point of their task no longer seemed worth it. Jonathan thought briefly of Schrodinger’s cat and wondered if the box was never opened, the boy would be alive somewhere.
“Nothing?” Conner said. “How’s twenty years in prison sound? Does that seem like nothing to you?”
“Things are meant to come apart,” Michael said. “That’s the way things are – everything breaks; it’s just reality.”
“Only if we let them break,” Conner said. “Since when do you talk like this?”
Conner was angry now. He sighed and put his arms over his head. “This isn’t difficult. It’s a seven-mile hike. Anyone can do this. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past. It only matters what will happen in the future if we don’t. They’re going to run a road and buildings right through this place, and they’re going to find this if we don’t move it now.”
“It’s the same either way,” Jonathan said.
“Fuck you both,” Conner said. “I’m not losing everything over a hike through the woods, and neither are you. This is just insurance. I do this every day. This is worth it! There are few things that translate to even money, and this? This is better than even money! We come out on top with this! Be logical!”
Conner reached down and seized a handle. He lifted the side of the case off the ground, and they all heard the contents slosh toward the lower end. Conner dropped it and stepped away with a look of revulsion on his face.
He stood silent for a moment. “I didn’t think it would weigh so much,” he said in a quiet voice.
“No air in or out,” Michael said. “It isn’t just bones in there.”
Jonathan had researched what happens to a body left in a sealed container. The bacteria feast on flesh and organs, releasing various gases into the small amount of air in the case, and leaving a sludge of putrescence. The gases, the chemicals, the living tissue – everything that had formed Thomas Terrywile’s body – existed simultaneously in three different states of matter. Jonathan tested the weight – easily eighty pounds. The ghost of Thomas Terrywile was heavy.
It was nearing 10:00 a.m.; the sun was over the mountains, glaring down on Coombs’ Gulch, the air warmer, but still they shivered as sweat dampened their skin. Jonathan looked to the northwest, trying to place the corridor between the peaks that led to the mountain lake, but he could not see beyond the pines. On its face, the scene was postcard beautiful, but he felt something working on them, the same way it had worked on Thomas Terrywile and turned his body into sludge.
Conner stood with his hands on his hips, breathing hard and sweating now in the cold air. His sharp jawline was accented by a close-cut beard, and his lithe frame nearly bent in worry and fear, his brown eyes looking desperate, rimmed with tears.
“If you guys won’t do this with me, I’ll just do it myself. I swear to God.”
He looked back and forth between Michael and Jonathan, eyes reaching across the divide of the case containing a dead boy’s body.
“I don’t care if it takes me three days to drag this damned thing to that lake; I’m going to do it. With or without you guys.”
“I didn’t say that,” Michael said. His words came out low and mumbled together, as if his jaw were clenched shut. Michael would never let Conner go off without his help. The fact that Conner doubted his brother’s commitment was a source of pain.
“I didn’t say that, either,” Jonathan said, but he lied. He wanted to leave this place, leave it all behind.
But he couldn’t leave them behind. Not yet. As much as they may have separated in the past ten years, as much as they had become strangers, he could not let them go into this alone. They were bound together in this – they were as close to brothers as he would ever know.
“I’m in,” he said. “All the way. It’s just… I wanted to be sure.”
“We are sure,” Conner said. “We didn’t imagine this shit. We need to be on the same page here.” Conner was practically begging. “We need to follow the plan and just do it, no questions asked.”
Jonathan reached down and grabbed the side handle of the case and looked at Michael, who walked over and took the other side. “Due north, right?” Jonathan asked.
Conner was holding back and couldn’t form the words. He just nodded.
Michael and Jonathan lifted, and together they followed the stream north and plunged back into the black spruce forests of Coombs’ Gulch.
Chapter Fifteen
It was more difficult than they imagined. Their shoulders burned with the strain. The case was heavy. It knocked into their knees as they hobbled through the underbrush. The sludge inside would shift and move in slow waves as they rocked back and forth. Although it was only eighty pounds between two men, the constant weight pulling down, the need to shift it up and over shrub brush and rock outcroppings and desiccated branches that could impale a body, turned eighty pounds into a hundred, then two hundred, growing heavier the longer they traveled. They worked in half-hour, three-man rotations, switching sides to give each shoulder a break, keeping one man free with the rifle. They kept pace and time through the rotation, and it quickly became the only time in the world
