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“N-no . . . ,” he wheezed, forcing the word past the leather strap.
Riot leaned over and looked at him for a moment, studying his eyes. There was a strange expression on her face that Chong could not interpret. She gave him the smallest of smiles and a tiny nod, then bent back to her work.
Riot tried again. And again. Over and over, and each time it was worse than the time before. Chong wept unashamedly.
Then . . .
“It’s turning!”
Suddenly the pain and the awkward, terrible shifting of the arrow in his body changed. The arrow became almost still except for a faint tremor as the arrowhead turned and turned on its threads.
“Got ’er done!” cried Riot.
Chong closed his eyes and collapsed back, soaked with sweat and exhausted. The arrowhead was one step.
It was the easy step.
There were two more.
Riot got up and ran to the fire. She wrapped a piece of cloth around the knife and removed it from the fire. Three inches of the blade glowed yellow-white. She hurried back to Chong and knelt in front of him.
“Okay,” she said, and Chong could see that she, too, was sweating heavily, “here’s the fun part. I got to pull this puppy out and then cauterize the wounds. Both sides. You’re bleeding, so we got to do it right quick. You ready?”
“Stop asking me that,” he mumbled around the leather strap. “Just do it!”
Riot did something else first.
She quickly bent forward and kissed Chong on the tip of his nose.
“For luck,” she said.
Then she took the arrow in her left hand, took a breath, and pulled.
It came out with a dreadful sucking sound that Chong knew he would never forget. Blood welled hot and red from the wound.
“Bite down,” she ordered, and then she moved in with the white-hot blade.
The pain went off the scale, but still Chong held on. He screamed into the strap and bit the leather so hard he tasted blood in his mouth, but he held on.
And then he caught the smell of his own burning flesh.
That was when he passed out.
50
BENNY CAME DOWN THE HILL AND WATCHED NIX CLIMB. THEN, WITH A sigh and a certain knowledge that this was a bad idea, he took hold of one of the rents in the plastic and began climbing too.
The plastic was strong, and though it swayed with their weight, the climb was easy, and there were enough holes to provide easy purchase for hands and feet. Nix scrambled up ahead of him, nimble as a monkey.
“Slow down,” Benny warned.
“Catch up,” she fired back, and gave him a second’s worth of a smile.
Almost like the old Nix.
Benny scrambled up after her, and they reached the open hatch shoulder-to-shoulder. Very carefully, as if they were peering in through the window of an old abandoned house from which ghosts might peer back, they raised their heads above the deck and looked inside.
There was a lot of debris. Broken fittings and equipment from the plane that must have torn loose during the crash, pieces of shattered pine branches, and last fall’s dried leaves. And bones. Lots of bones. Leg and arm bones, the slender curves of ribs, and part of a skull.
