Walk a Lonesome Road Read online

  He builds up the fire again and reinforces the brush shelter the stranger’s made, collapses the useless tent and uses that to strengthen the windbreak, then figures he’s got a long boring afternoon and night ahead of him. He fills both canteens with hot water, prepares more diluted honey, and goes back into the tent. The guy is awake again, his eyes darting anxiously around, trying to assess his surroundings. He stills as he sees Dek looking back at him. “Thirsty,” he whispers as he struggles to sit, but with his arm, he can’t do it. Dek helps him up, supports him on the pack, then tucks the canteens among the blankets. He starts to feed the guy sips of honey water, but the man grips his wrist weakly. “Can manage,” he says, and when a dubious Dek hands him the mug, fully expecting to have to clear up a mess in a few moments, he does manage, shaking hand raising the mug to trembling lips.

  “Slow,” Dek orders, but the guy just gives him a wry look and sips carefully, though it’s clear he’d knock the whole thing back if he could.

  “Thanks,” he murmurs as Dek takes the empty mug from him.

  Dek ignores him as he pours some of the hot water into the mug and hands it back. “Drink,” he says.

  “I’m Ren,” the stranger says. “Who are you?”

  “Drink,” Dek repeats, and the stranger...Ren...obeys, pulling a face at the unflavoured water. He lies back with an exhausted sounding sigh, and the mug is suddenly difficult for him to hold.

  “Sorry,” he says as Dek takes it off him and sets it aside. “Where are we? I got lost...camping expedition went to hell.”

  He waits expectantly, as if he really thinks Dek will believe that crap. Dek doesn’t. “Shut up,” he says, already regretting his altruism. He makes the guy lie down and settles the blankets around him again. He thinks about whether to tie the man’s hands and feet together, but though the mouth is working and the brain behind it is less foggy than he expects with the hypothermia, Ren isn’t doing much moving around. In the morning, it might be a different story.

  He stiffens as Dek settles down behind him. “W-what are you...?”

  “Shut up,” Dek repeats, and doesn’t move. The guy will figure it out in a second or two, he thinks, and he does, relaxing with another soft sigh.

  “Body heat, of course. Sorry.”

  It’s more words than Dek’s heard strung together in nearly a year, and the guy’s making his ears hurt. He pulls the blankets tighter around them both and the sleeping bag around his ears, and hopes the guy will take the hint. Fortunately he does, and then all Dek has to listen to is the soft sound of Ren’s breathing, the crackle of the fire outside, and the distant mournful calls of the fogels and the weiwe birds. He likes it out here most of all because it doesn’t ever sound remotely like Denebi jungle, never hears the crash of surf on sand, or the sharp rattle of automatic guns, or the screams of their targets. It sounds like nowhere else on earth, which is just fine by him because there’s nowhere else on earth he wants to be.

  Walk A Lonesome Road: 2

  The stranger spends a restless night, and the early lucidity gives way to confusion and nightmares that sound nearly as bad as anything Dek can come up with. His arm is troubling him, and in his frequent bouts of wakefulness, he moans with the pain and the cold. He mumbles a lot too, and Dek carefully files away in his memory each name that comes up. But now isn’t the time for an interrogation. Dek gets up every hour or so to offer the guy more water and build the fire—each time he gets back under the covers, the guy jumps a little, then he settles, like he keeps forgetting what Dek’s doing. A bit of an odd reaction, Dek thinks. Something else to find out about.

  It’s a long and tiring night, but far from the worst he’s spent. At first light he gets up to piss, and when he returns, the stranger is looking back at him with sunken eyes. “I...uh...need to get up.”

  Dek helps him upright—he’s got a sprained or damaged ankle too, so it’s all awkward, and as soon as they get out of the tent, the guy bends over and pukes. Nothing comes up but bile, but that doesn’t stop him dry heaving for nearly a minute, his good arm wrapped around his middle like he thinks his guts are going to fall out. Dek finds himself feeling sorry for the sod, despite himself.

  “Sorry,” the guy gasps as he stands up—Dek doesn’t respond. He leads him silently to the latrine, where there’s a repeat of the vomiting, both before and after the stranger relieves himself. This is more than hypothermia but Dek’s got nothing to offer someone with a stomach bug more than he has done. He figures it’ll either kill him or it won’t.

  He lets the man choose fire or the tent again—he chooses the fire, shivering as he hunkers down on Dek’s little folding stool. He’s listing badly and Dek suspects he needs more than sleep to mend him. The guy accepts another mug of sweetened water, which stays down, but when Dek opens the tin of cold porridge, he goes pale and his throat works. Dek doesn’t bother offering him any—no point in wasting food, especially when Dek only brought enough for one and now he’s going to have to split supplies. What they’ll do when the honey runs out, he doesn’t know. “Can you eat bread?” he asks.

  The guy swallows like he’s about to be sick again, but then he nods. “Yes, I think I could. A little. Sorry, I’m not usually so picky.”

  Dek wishes he’d stop apologising—it’s pointless. He cuts off some of the hard bread and warms it over the fire. The guy nibbles on it, apparently enjoying it. It’s obvious he’s pretty hungry—it’s just nothing much is going to stay down. “Don’t eat it and puke it up, I don’t have it to spare,” Dek warns.

  The man smiles in a rather strained way. “No. I’ll try not to. I appreciate it.”

  Dek grunts and eats his porridge. The guy watches him the whole time. Dek’s waiting for him to make his move—Dek’ll be ready when he does.

  He stows all the food and half the new melted water, giving the rest to Jesti, and spends a minute or two scratching her hide and checking her over. The guy stays sitting by the fire, apparently lost in thought. He still looks pretty sick, but they can’t stay here. Dek goes back over to the fire. “Got to get moving. Day’s wasting.”

  “Going where? Where are we? And who are you?”

  “Tell you when you tell me the truth,” Dek says, and the man’s eyes widen. “Get up.” He puts his hand on his gun and makes it clear it’s not a request.

  At least the guy knows how to follow orders, even if he’s useless for almost everything else. He does put the fire out tidily though, while Dek breaks down the rest of the camp, and when Dek tells him to mount up, he doesn’t argue. Jesti’s too small a mount for him, but urtibes are tough and far stronger than they look, so Dek’s sure she can handle it. When he slings the frozen harwe corpse in front of the pommel, the man looks at it and then at Dek. “You can’t walk. Not with that leg.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ren says, with a hint of a smile. Dek’s not amused. He’s commanded smartarse soldiers like this before and always made a point of getting them out of his unit as fast as he can. Even if this one isn’t a criminal, which he thinks is unlikely, Dek doesn’t like him. He talks too much.

  The temperature’s steadily dropping, the sky is dark and lowering, and an hour after they start out, it starts to snow. At first it’s bearable, a few flakes nothing more than brief irritants against eyes and exposed skin, but quickly the flakes get fatter and as the wind whips up, Dek realises they have to take shelter. He drags the stranger off Jesti and walks her over to the only protection he can see—the lee side of a huge dead tree. He gets her to hunker down in the snow, trusting her abundant wool to protect her, and her hairy bulk to protect them. “Get beside her,” he shouts at the guy. They’re almost blind now, the snow an almost solid wall of stinging white in their faces. He pulls out his two mini-tarps by feel, throws on the ground next to his animal, and then, as they sit on it, wrapping the other around their heads, holding it down with difficulty against the whipping, biting wind.

  Ren wraps his arms around Dek and buries his f
ace against his back, trying to get away from the freezing air that’s getting in around the edges of the tarp despite Dek’s best efforts. He’s shivering hard again, and it’s dangerous, letting him get chilled again on top of existing hypothermia but there’s not much Dek can do about it. It’s not like he dumped the guy in this.

  The wind howls around their ears, and Dek’s hands cramp up with the effort of holding the tarp down, until the sheer weight of snow holds it down for him. At least once they’re buried, it’s a little warmer, and the wind can’t penetrate their snow cocoon. They’re completely reliant on Jesti now—she’ll move if the snow gets too high for her, and she’s their only source of warmth, slight though it is through her insulated hide. Dek’s spent nights like this before now—he really doesn’t want to do that again.

  In the end, it’s not that long. After an hour, Dek risks digging his way out and finds the blizzard’s passed, though the sky promises more snow soon. He hauls Ren to his feet, clicks at Jesti to get up, and knocks the worst of the snow off her hide. “Mount up,” he orders, and Ren climbs clumsily into the saddle. It’s immediately obvious that he’s not doing so good. He’s listing again, barely keeping his seat, shivering and not even making the effort to brush the snow from his encrusted face. “Can you ride?”

  Ren shudders, but then nods and grips the reins in his good hand. Dek hangs onto Jesti’s pommel and urges her on, using her to haul him through the new snow that’s hip-deep in places now. It’s worse than walking in loose sand, and a hundred midecs feels like ten times that distance, so great is the effort. After an hour moving like this, with him struggling to keep his feet under him, and Ren sagging and nodding off in the saddle, Dek realises they’re never going to make his planned campsite.

  He forces them to keep going for another hour, though it nearly kills both of them, When he calls a halt, more or less because he can’t really move another midec, Ren almost falls out of the saddle, and promptly pukes again, which is as tiresome for Dek as it is for Ren. “How long you been sick?” he asks when the man straighten up again and wipes his mouth with a shaky hand, then grabs some snow to scrub his glove clean.

  “Uh...a while,” Ren admits, and Dek frowns. He’s got little experience of long-term illnesses that don’t involve injury and his field training doesn’t cover this. “Don’t suppose rijkil trees grow around here?” Dek glowers at him. “The...bark...folk remedy for...nausea,” he amends, and Dek wonders what he was about to say. “You make a kind of tea. I know it works.”

  Better than nothing, Dek thinks, but he’s got other things to worry about. He uses the time it takes to swallow some water to try and catch his breath, but they can’t afford for them to both be incapacitated, so he can’t rest too long. The stranger tries to help him put up the tent until Dek snarls at him to fuck off because he’s useless.

  It takes him twice as long as it normally would, but finally he gets it up and tells Ren to stay inside. “Don’t worry, moving’s a lot more trouble than it’s worth,” he says, giving Dek a wan smile. It’s getting close to the time when Dek will need to use a rope on the guy. But not now.

  He still has to collect wood, but that, at least, is in abundance here, and since he passes a couple of scraggly rijkil trees on the way back, he hacks off some of the reddish bark and shoves it in his pocket. He has no idea if it’s enough but he’s too tired to look for more.

  He builds the fire, and then crawls into the tent to grab an hour or so’s rest. Ren’s asleep, with the sprawled slack look of the utterly exhausted, and Dek wonders how much longer he would have survived if Dek hadn’t found him. Whatever this illness is, it’s coming on top of a lot of other bad crap. Dek needs to get the man to the defence outpost in Osiwen and let him be cared for properly. He has neither the skill nor the inclination to deal with it.

  He dozes for a little while—doesn’t allow himself to go to sleep because there’s still things need doing—and once he’s warmed up, he feels a little more human. Ren’s still asleep, but Dek doesn’t wake him—no point since the guy’s next to useless in camp. He crawls out carefully, and heads over to the dying fire to throw more wood on it. After drinking a mug of khevai and chewing some jerky, he wakes up a little more and can assess their situation. Food’s probably their worst problem, but they won’t starve even if it takes three times as long to get home as he planned, which it well might do because he can’t walk very far on a good day on his damn leg, and this deep snow is hell for someone like him. They’re about twenty pardecs as the fogels fly from his house—on Jesti, it’s a day, easy. On foot, it’s two, three days—probably more like four or five. He just has to keep them both alive for that long.

  Now he’s rested, and since he’s stuck with nothing much to do until Ren’s up to travelling, which won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest, he decides to make a virtue out of necessity and set some more traps, cut some more wood, do a little foraging. He’s in luck and finds some winter nuts and seeds close to camp which will make a good addition to their diet. He also skins and butchers the harwe because they’ll need the meat, and the thing will be easier to transport as a pelt.

  Ren emerges, pale and none too steady on his feet, while Dek’s setting up the smoker. Dek’s sure he’s going to puke again, but he manages to hold onto it, and meekly asks about the rijkil bark. Dek gestures towards the fire with his knife and lets the guy get on with it. He finishes the smoker and sets out the meat, then curses himself. He’s forgotten the guy has a broken arm, but when he returns to the fire, Ren’s managed somehow, though his face is tight with pain. The knife and the red bark are in an untidy heap on the ground, but Dek doesn’t comment on the carelessness. “Want some bread?” he asks, feeling he should make slight amends.

  “Please. I didn’t want to touch your stores, but I’m...a little hungry.”

  Dek cuts him some bread, and offers some of the nuts he found, which Ren accepts and finds palatable. They chew their meal in almost companionable silence, but of course Ren has to spoil that once he sets his mug down. “I can’t tell you more than I have. It’ll endanger you. I don’t want to lie to you....”

  “Then don’t,” Dek says, brushing his gloves free of crumbs over the fire. He goes to get up, but finds a hand clamped tight over his arm. It’s pure instinct, the way he goes for his knife and moves into an attack posture, his hand bringing the weapon barely a mycdec from his assailant’s face. Ren sprawls backwards on the snow, his green eyes impossibly wide, his hand up in a gesture of surrender. “Don’t touch me again,” Dek growls, and Ren shakes his head frantically. Dek wonders if he’s pissed himself in fright, and decides he doesn’t care. He gets up and stalks over to the smoker to check on things, and tries very hard not to think about Ren and his own overreaction. There’s a reason he’s not in the army any more, after all.

  Ren hides in the tent the rest of the afternoon, and is very, very careful not to annoy Dek again, which, perversely, irritates him almost as much as anything Ren was doing before. When Ren accepts a bit of smoked harwe and forces himself to eat it even though it’s obvious his gorge is rising, Dek finally snatches the piece of meat out of his hands. “Eat the fucking bread,” he snarls, and throws the guy the slice as he hacks it off. Ren accepts that too and doesn’t protest, even though he struggles to eat the bread as well. Dek shoves a mug of sweetened water at him and Ren drinks every drop without looking at him.

  Dek builds up the fire for the evening and checks on Jesti one last time, before gesturing at the tent. Ren gets up obediently, but then stops, turns to him with a desperate expression. “Please...don’t get angry again...just tell me. Where are you taking me? Please, I don’t think I can....”

  “My house. Four days’ walk if you keep up.”

  Ren’s expression changes to surprised relief. “Thank you. I’ll try, I really will.”

  Dek grunts and points at the tent. Ren settles under the blankets without saying a word, not even when Dek takes up position behind him again. It’s not lik
e they have much choice about the positions unless he makes the guy sleep in the snow, and Dek’s not at that point yet. Ren sleeps no better than he did the previous night, and Dek not surprised Ren’s so tired, if this goes on all the time.

  The second day goes a little better, if only because the weather decides to behave and they don’t get caught up in any more blizzards. Despite the load on Jesti and his damn leg, they make decent time and Dek’s hopeful they’ll make the house in two more days. Ren doesn’t say a word except ‘thank you’, and ‘sorry’ just the once—he’s still nauseous, and actually faints when he gets up too fast after the noon break, which is when he apologises until Dek glares at him to shut up. But apart from that little setback, he clings stubbornly to Jesti’s back with his good hand, and doesn’t ask for anything until Dek offers it. That this forces Dek to anticipate his needs is annoying, but he can live with it.

  Ren’s still only eating enough to keep a bird alive, and since they’re out of honey, and Dek’s found no more nuts, he’s living on the remains of the bread. Not enough for a big man in this weather, but then there’s less to throw up. The cold is still affecting him badly, but as night draws in on the third night, Dek realises it’s Ren’s arm which is bothering him most. It was splinted surprisingly efficiently, but splints don’t hold forever. “Show me,” he orders, pointing at Ren’s arm.