“You said ‘was’ – did you die and then wake up here, too?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you kick the bucket?”
“Avalanche. Up in Alaska.”
“Holy shit. That musta been somethin’.”
Things were weird enough under the circumstances, but I decided to keep them weird with some more gettin’ to know ya chitchat. It might buy Lelia and the others some more time.
“Where’re you from, Weaver?”
“Upstate New York.”
“How’d you die?”
“Last thing I remember, I was drinking Jack Daniels out of my flask in a hunting blind, waiting for a buck. Guess I fell to sleep and froze to death.” His tone turned bitter. “Fuckin’ bullshit – if I had to die and go somewhere, why the fuck did I have to wind up here? Wished I died in fuckin’ Hawaii, snorting coke and gettin’ a blowjob from a hooker.”
“And you had the gun with you when you woke up?”
“Yep. In fact, everything I had on me when I punched out, I woke up with here.”
Made sense. I’d wound up here with all my ice-climbing equipment; if Weaver had died in a hunting blind, it was logical he would have a gun on him.
“Wish I’d had a shit-ton of booze, though,” Weaver said bitterly. “I’d finished the whole goddamn bottle when I woke up, too.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“ ‘Bout nine, ten months. Feels like fuckin’ forever.”
Ten months – interesting…
Lelia had said that all the men of the tribe had been killed hundreds of days before. I had always assumed that meant about a year.
Weaver had been here long enough that he might have been the one who sent the skiris after the men in Lelia’s tribe.
I might not just be talking to a piece of shit who enslaved women…
…I might be talking to a mass murderer.
“How ‘bout you?” Weaver asked.
“Two months, roughly.”
“Two months… huh. Well, welcome to the frozen ass-end of nowhere, Jack.”
“Thanks.”
I thought that maybe we’d turned a corner. I mean, we’d chatted about where we were from… how long we’d been here… how we’d died.
You know… all the usual bullshit when you meet a new acquaintance in the afterlife, on a frozen planet with two moons.
I was almost thinking that we might end this amiably until I heard Weaver’s voice darken.
“Still haven’t told me what the fuck’s up with all those arrows, though.”
I’d actually been thinking up an excuse the entire time. When he finally asked, I was ready.
“A couple of days ago, I ran across four skiris down in the woods. They tried to kill me, but I killed them first. Sorry… didn’t realize they were your pets.”
“No offense taken. Can’t really say they’re my pets, exactly. Too goddamn dumb. Glad I showed up here with this gun, otherwise the bastards would’ve torn me limb from limb. But big boomstick make injuns jump to, y’know what I mean?”
He laughed maniacally.
“So anyway – you were sayin’?” Weaver asked.
“Uh… well, I killed the four that were trying to kill me, and then I followed their tracks back up here. I saw the fort, but I didn’t see you. I figured they’d built it.”
“Yeah, right,” Weaver said with a laugh. “These fuckers would be hard pressed to build anything bigger than a pile of their own shit. Anyway, go on.”
“Well, uh… I was worried they would just keep coming after me, so I, uh… attacked the fort.”
“You attacked the fort,” Weaver repeated in a calm voice.
“Yeah.” I threw in a completely insincere apology. “Sorry about that. Like I said, I couldn’t see you down there in it.”
“You decided to go mano-a-mano – more like mano-a-beasto – with 30 of these motherfuckers,” Weaver said with amused disbelief.
I paused.
“…it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“What was the plan, Jack? Have them all follow you – and then what?”
“Um… well… I was kind of hoping they would dive off the cliff after me and plummet to their death. But that didn’t happen.”
“No, it didn’t. So you’re kind of in a tight place now, aren’t you, buddy?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“What’re you – some kinda mountain climber?”
I wanted to say, Didn’t you ever see the show? but that was a little too ridiculous.
“Yeah. That’s how I died in the avalanche – I was climbing Denali.”
“De-what-ee?”
“Denali National Park. In Alaska.”
“Uh huh… so, when you ran across my four boys and they tried to kill you, you didn’t happen to see any blue-skinned bitches down there in the woods, did you?”
Shit.
“No,” I lied.
“Really,” Weaver said, his voice full of surprise. “None at all? Look like regular chicks, except they’re blue and got pointy ears and white hair?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied again. “I haven’t seen one.”
“You didn’t see the ones I got over by the fort?” he asked with exaggerated surprise.
Of course I did, you sick fuck.
“No.”
“Ohhhhh, well, you’re missin’ one of the best parts of this frozen hellhole, Jack. In fact, the only good part about this fuckin’ place. Got three of ‘em. Call ‘em my girlfriends. Don’t know if they’d call me their boyfriend, thought,” he said, and laughed nastily. “Trust me, though, they may be blue on the outside, but the pussy’s just as pink on the inside.”
My skin crawled, and my blood boiled.
Fucking psychopath –
Weaver laughed again. “They weren’t the first things I ran into, though. That was these shaggy Bigfoot motherfuckers here. First thing I had to do was get ‘em in line. My old man had this idea he used to tell me about. Wanna hear it?”
This could not get any weirder – listening to a psychopathic rapist’s anecdotes while I hung onto the side of a mountain.
“Sure,” I said, still trying to stall.
“Well, he said that the way kids’re actin’ up these days, schools ought to have a .45 policy. And by that he meant that every teacher got assigned a Colt .45 on the first day of school, and six bullets. And ONLY six bullets. Now, on the first day, when a kid misbehaves, you give ‘im
