The Hunger(91)

Eddy picked up Stanton’s rifle. “You want me to reload it?”

“No, take it with you. You’ll need it. I’ll be fine.” To Mary: “Go now. I want you to live, Mary. Without that, there’s no point. No point at all.”

Still, she wouldn’t move from his side. “I won’t leave you. I won’t.” Her voice was like the crack of ice; she was breaking. They were all breaking.

His mouth began to sting and water. His vision began to glaze and sparkle. Mary’s pale face loomed so close. He wanted so badly to kiss her.

But he didn’t trust himself. Who knew what the taste of her lips might do to him?

Who knew what the sudden hunger singing in his veins might do to her?

“Go,” he said, one last time, a final surge of certainty moving through him, taking the rest of his strength with it. He was glad that Eddy hooked her under the arms and hauled her to her feet. He wouldn’t have had the will to ask her again. He might have pleaded with her to stay with him. He might have begged her to lie down in the snow, her arms wrapped around his chest, until the beasts came to devour them.

He might have kissed her until he’d devoured her himself. He curled his fingers into the snow, trying to cool the rising heat in his veins, making him burn.

For a long time he could still hear her shouting, screaming his name, calling for Eddy to release her. Finally it became as distant as the whistle of wind through the peaks.

He waited until he could not tell the difference before reaching into his pocket. He’d brought two items with him, sentimental indulgences. One was his tobacco pouch; it held his last twist of Virginia gold. He had to blow hard on his hands to put any motion in the joints; then, he carefully took a sliver of paper and placed the last shreds of tobacco in it. Licked the end of the paper and rolled it between thumb and forefinger. Somehow got the flint to strike, caught a lucky spark. Babied the tiny spark into a flame. Took a deep breath and carried the spicy, warm smoke down into his lungs. Good. A last good thing.

The heat inside him was all-consuming now, but he tried to still his mind. Memories passed through him like shadows over water: His grandfather, usually so stern and unforgiving, counseling a parishioner for grief over the death of his wife. The rain running hard on the roof in the attic of Lydia’s house, how she pressed against him, her hair tickling his face when she leaned down to kiss him. His life could’ve stopped at that moment and he’d have been fine with it. He had failed her, and had struggled to make it right ever since; maybe, after all, this was his penance. The mills of God grind slowly, yet grind exceedingly fine. He wondered where Edwin Bryant was, and hoped he was alive.

He forced himself not to think about Mary—not yet.

Finally he had smoked the cigarette down to his nail beds and released it to the snow. From his other pocket, he took out a small pistol. Mother-of-pearl inlay, pretty as a piece of jewelry. He’d held on to it, thinking it the perfect reminder of Tamsen Donner. Beautiful but deadly. He checked the chamber for a bullet.

Only now did he close his eyes and imagine Mary’s face. He coaxed it up from the darkness of his mind and held it, let it burn there like a star, his final memory.

The gun was small, and fit nicely between his teeth.





CHAPTER FORTY-ONE





The remaining seven members of Forlorn Hope were halfway up the next ridge when they heard the shot ring over the valley.

   By then, Mary had stopped screaming. She stumbled only once. Then she kept walking, blinking hard against the sudden onslaught of blinding snow.





CHAPTER FORTY-TWO





God had abandoned them, Tamsen knew. She only wondered how long they’d been left to the mercy of a godless world—had it been so since the very beginning? Had it happened the night she took Jeffrey Williams, the family doctor, as her first lover, or long before then? Had the devil followed her all this way? Or maybe the devil was in her, and had been since the day she was born.

Maybe it was the devil who was keeping her alive.



* * *



? ? ?

THE NIGHT HE WAS BITTEN, Solomon Hook, Betsy’s son by her first husband, had been taking a tin cup of hot water to the watch-standers. Until that moment, it had been a peaceful night at Alder Creek. Tamsen and the rest of the family heard his cry from inside the tent and went running out into the cold and wet to find him on the ground, a shadowy figure darting away toward the woods.

Tamsen screamed and when Walt Herron pulled a rifle and shot in the creature’s direction, she didn’t feel any kind of vindication, only a new depth of terror. There could be no denying that something deadly and inhuman was out there, inching in on them.

Jacob rushed his stepson into the tent and Tamsen looked to the boy’s wounds while Betsy stood to the side, crying into her hands. A foul smell clung to the boy from the creature like a miasma, a bad omen. The boy didn’t look too bad but there was a tear on the side of his neck that worried Tamsen, and even as she cleaned the wound, she sensed something was wrong.

Solomon revived the next morning and by afternoon, it was as though nothing had happened. He went with Leanne to gather firewood, scooped snow in a bucket to melt for water. He had a good appetite. He seemed indefatigable.

By night, his cheeks were red and hot to the touch. He was damp with sweat.