A Darkness Absolute (Casey Duncan #2)(60)

“I think it’s because of what Beth did to him. He’s equating that with hostiles. He looks back and thinks he couldn’t have held Nicole captive for a year when he was in that mental state, so therefore hostiles couldn’t either.”

“I guess so.”

Dalton goes pensive, and I can tell he doesn’t like that explanation. After a moment, he says, “Yeah, there are hostiles who could do it. I remember this one time, maybe twelve years back, we had a group that left town. Four people. The sheriff … my, uh, father…”

Dalton doesn’t talk about the former sheriff much, and when he does, there’s a discomfort with the language. Sheriff, father, adopted father … kidnapper. What exactly is Gene Dalton to him? I don’t think Dalton knows himself. I don’t blame him.

“My father,” he says, firmer. “He used to be less understanding of runners than the sheriff before him.”

“Ty Cypher?”

“Right. Cypher didn’t give a damn if people left, and my father thought that was just Cypher being an asshole, but I think it was more…” He shrugs. “If you want to go, go. Cypher saw it as a valid alternative. I disagree, but only because people don’t know what they’re getting into. It’s not Little House on the Fucking Prairie.”

“First, there’s no prairie.”

“Exactly.”

“Second, you’ve read Little House on the Prairie?”

His eyes narrow in a mock glare. “You got a problem with that?”

“Not at all, Sheriff. Continue, please.”

“People have idealized views of the wilderness. That it’s some kind of natural paradise. If they want to become settlers, I try to disabuse them of that notion. But if they insist? It’s not as bad as my father…” He clears his throat. Shifts. “It’s not what he thought.”

Because Gene Dalton really had seen all outsiders as savages. He’d “rescued” Dalton from his birth parents, which is like “rescuing” a kid from a family voluntarily living off the grid.

“Anyway,” Dalton says, “these four snuck off, and the hostiles got them.”

“Killed them?”

“Took them. I found their camp. It was a week later, and it’d been long abandoned, but there was stuff there, from their packs. Personal stuff. Photos and mementos they’d brought from down south.”

“Things no one else would have wanted. And things they wouldn’t have left behind.”

He nods. “I found evidence of a struggle, too. Marks in the dirt. Blood. I followed the trail for a while; at some point, though, their captors realized they were leaving a trail and took steps to cover it. I lost it in a stream.”

“They deliberately covered their tracks. Which suggests a reasonable degree of intelligence. Are you sure it was hostiles?”

“Yeah.” He goes quiet for a moment. “I saw one of the captives. The woman. It was a year later. She … she’d become one of them. A hostile. She still wore some of the clothing she took, but it wasn’t more than rags. Her hair had been hacked off. One of her ears had blackened from frostbite. A couple of her fingers, too. It was … hard to take. I knew her. She’d been a biologist down south, and we used to talk about that. Just talk. She was nice. Smart and kind and nice. And when I met her in the forest? She attacked me. Hitting, biting, clawing. I thought I was going to have to shoot her. Later, I wondered if maybe I should have, if that wouldn’t have been—” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Fuck, I don’t mean that. I don’t. That’s not my decision to make. But seeing her like that, it was hard. What she’d been. What she’d become.”

I entwine my fingers with his, move against him, and stay close, listening to him breathe.

“How did she get that way?” I ask gently.

He looks at me.

“This is the question I’m trying to work out,” I say. “How do hostiles become hostile? Was she tormented and abused until she just lost her mind? Can that happen in a year? Someone like Nicole pulls through—mentally intact—and someone else doesn’t? And if so, then what about the others? The ones who captured her? How did they get that way?”

I tell him about my talk with Mathias. When I finish, he’s quiet. Then he says, “I never thought of it. Hostiles just … they are, you know. For me, there have always been hostiles in the woods. My parents—my birth parents—warned me about them from the time I was able to wander. Asking how they got that way would have been like asking why bears or cougars would attack if I got too close.”

“Just another kind of animal.”

“Yeah. Which they aren’t, and they weren’t born that way, so…” He turns onto his back. “I’m going to need to think about this.”

*

It’s the middle of the night when we wake to Kenny banging on Dalton’s door. Sutherland is conscious. Kenny takes the puppy to Petra’s while Dalton and I yank on clothes and hurry out.

Sutherland is still groggy and feverish. Interviewing him in that state feels almost as cruel as interviewing Nicole, but it must be done. We manage to keep him awake long enough to get a semicoherent account.

After he ran from Rockton—“I can’t believe I was that stupid”—he’d heard us coming after him on the sleds and veered into the forest—“I wanted to get back to town on my own, figured I’d get in less trouble.” He’d been making his way in the direction of Rockton when someone hit him in the back of the head—“I never heard a thing. Just felt it and then everything went black.”