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By the time the sun has set again I am nearly four feet down. I cannot believe how hard, how long the work is. The ground resists when I strike it, but then once I’ve cleared a few inches the sides crumble in to erase my progress. I dig wide and deep, wide and deep. How deep do I need to go?
It was hard to see from where I’d hidden, but the hole had to be deep enough to fit the crate and the body and not have a fox or a wolf dig him up, so I think at least a few feet. And they had to clamber out, help each other out of the hole. How tall was Dad? I can’t remember.
Can’t remember, either, the color of his eyes. The way he walked. He was a stranger, a stranger, a stranger, the shovel says as it strikes the ground again and again. Nothing to you, nothing to you.
I wish it was true.
And then I dig deeper, deeper still. Darkness falls, but I keep digging because if I stop I will be killed. And cold kills you first.
So I dig.
Slower, slower. Weariness buzzes at me like flies. I can hardly see the shovel, it’s so dark. I don’t know how I’m still standing. How I’m still working. And then my shovel hits something. Something hard.
Bone, I think.
No. Not the crunch of metal on bone, but the scrape and clang of metal hitting metal. Shovel hitting box. Good. I don’t want to hit my father with the shovel, to hurt him.
Stupid.
I scrape at the dirt with my hands, searching for his body. And I find it.
The stench hits me. It feels alive. Like a squelching, rippling creature moving over my skin, up over my lips, down my throat. My eyes water and I retch, but nothing comes up.
Choking, I pull my collar over my nose and mouth. It doesn’t help. The smell is worse than rotting meat, worse than anything I’ve smelled before—a wet yellow smell.
I can’t tell at first what part of him I’ve found. The skin is caked in dirt. It doesn’t feel like skin anymore. It gives under my fingers, splits. Then my fingers brush through the dirt and catch in a clump of hair. It comes away in my fingers—and a chunk of scalp with it.
I scramble backward. I wrench my collar down just in time.
I vomit, a thin stream of water and bile. I heave again and again, throat scorched.
I press myself against the wall of the hole I’ve painstakingly dug, rest the side of my face against the dirt. I suck down the earthy scent, but the stink of decay won’t let go. It seeps through every pore until my skin feels greasy.
“Move,” I whisper to myself. “Move, move, move.” But instead I stay crouched, shivering and shuddering.
The cold finds me quickly. I sweated while I worked and the moisture has cooled on my skin. The cold tries to burrow deeper, get into my joints and my bones and my lungs. I can’t stand still. I can’t get up.
It’s not some great act of will or logic that gets me to my feet. I don’t know what it is. I just suddenly stand. My mind is empty, like it’s been shut off. My body is in charge, and that’s better.
My body walks back to my father’s corpse without me, foot dragging. It crouches. It rakes its hand through the earth by the corpse’s side until it finds cloth—my father’s coat—and pulls a flap up, dirt tumbling off it. It tries the pocket. No bullets. A plastic bag with a folded piece of paper in it, and something thick.
The girl who isn’t me turns it over in her hands, testing the shape of it. It’s something from a different life. An energy bar. Wrapped in its foil. Safe from decay and dirt.
The empty girl tucks it slowly in her own pocket with the plastic bag and the paper.
She moves to the other side of the body. She digs. She finds another lump of cloth, another pocket. And there they are: six bullets, gleaming, whole and untouched except for a few stray flecks of dirt.
I stare at them cupped in my palms and come back into myself, inch by inch. Six shots. It’s nothing against months of winter.
Six shots. Nothing compared to the unknown stretch ahead.
I don’t even know if Griff will ever be back. Maybe he’ll stay with his daughter instead. Will he send word? Will anyone else know how to find us?
Find me. Not us. Just me.
And no, I think. No, that man who’d come—he was probably my last chance. He’ll tell people Dad is gone, is dead. Maybe Griff will come anyway, to check. But I can’t be sure.
Suddenly I feel like a fool. All of my energy spent for a few bullets. And I’m not even that great a shot. I’ll waste at least one bullet, maybe more. Maybe all of them. They were a talisman. A piece of magic I was searching for, but now I have them and I remember that magic isn’t real.
