Than was outside the trailer waiting for them, but he wasn’t facing the trailer. He was looking up into the woods, and when he spoke, his words were flat.
“We should go around back and make sure it’s dead.”
Cohen shuddered at the thought and the cold and the dread of facing it again. It wasn’t until that moment that he realized he had picked up the gun again. He looked down at it the way a child looks at a fresh injury.
Hippie led the way, starting for the other side of the trailer without a word, without waiting to see if the boys would follow her. The experience with the Beast in the doorway to the bedroom seemed not to have diminished or intimidated her. If anything, she had grown somehow, become more fierce.
Than followed her, looking first at the ground, then up at Cohen, and immediately Cohen could tell things had changed between them. Than’s look held respect, confidence, and a kind of equality Cohen hadn’t felt from him before. Than nodded, walked past, and followed Hippie around the corner. Cohen steeled himself and went after them, glancing over his shoulder, always feeling that something was coming up behind him.
By the time Cohen came around to the back of the trailer, Than and Hippie were turning from the broken bedroom window—it was covered in the black pitch—and moved over to the brambles where it looked like someone had rolled a large boulder up the hill. The Beast had cleared a path, everything flattened, trampled, broken. Sporadically along the path were splotches of the shadow, thick and unmoving in the cold, clinging to rocks and thorns and low branches like thick mucus.
“What next?” Than asked, and Cohen sensed the shifting of leadership. Something had changed. He couldn’t figure out why or how or even exactly what, but something had changed.
“We need to get some rest,” Hippie said. “Then we come back here and follow the trail.”
“Won’t it get away?” Cohen asked, surprised at the sound of his own morning voice, raspy and dim.
Hippie shook her head.
Than took a few steps into the trail the Beast had left behind. “Nah,” he said without further explanation.
Cohen looked over at Hippie.
“All of this?” she said, pointing at a nearby bramble covered from top to bottom with liquid shadow. “It’s dying. It’s going to run until it feels safe. We’ll let it get settled. It might even be dead by the time we find it.”
“We need to get some rest,” Hippie said again. “C’mon.”
“Where are we going?”
Hippie looked at him, and there was compassion in her eyes, and concern. “To where Than and I always go when we need to hide.”
Cohen followed them. They went to the front of the trailer again and walked up the meandering trail through the brambles to the top of the hollow. He looked back at the trailer at the bottom, now distant and empty.
When he turned back around, Than and Hippie were up the trail, and he hurried to catch them. The sky was icy blue without a single cloud, the previous days’ rain long gone. The air was still one minute, so still the trees looked frozen, and blustery the next, whipping branches and leaves at his face. When they got to the train tracks, Hippie turned and walked along them.
“Where are we going?” Cohen asked again, pausing.
Than looked over his shoulder for a brief moment, turned away, kept walking.
Hippie walked back to Cohen. “We’re going to a place where we can rest. Someplace warm. Then we’ll come back here and track the Beast once it’s dark. It won’t be long now.”
For a moment Cohen stood there on the tracks, weighing his options. He stared down at the gun still in his hand. He had held it for so long it felt like his old hand had fallen away and been replaced with a barrel, a hammer, a trigger, bullets. Lifting the gun, he nearly handed it to Hippie and walked straight back into the city, back to the funeral home and his own bed. They both looked down at the gun, and it stood between them like an offering.
But it fell back to his side. He nodded. She reached out and put her hand on his shoulder, gave him the slightest of tugs, and without thinking anymore he followed her, walking along the train tracks.
Hippie took the lead, and they walked for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, like silent apparitions looking for a way out of the world. At an unmarked point, Hippie veered from the tracks and plunged into the thickest part of the forest, bent over, nearly crawling on all fours. Than followed her. Cohen copied them, too tired to ask any more questions.
Soon the trail opened up and they could walk upright, but they were going up and down steep hills so that Cohen had to hold on to small trees to keep from sliding to the bottom. Hippie and Than vanished into a glade of evergreens with low, sleeping boughs, trees that lined a sort of cliff. Behind the green branches, nestled in among the soft needles, was a shallow cave in the rock.
Cohen went in among the shadows. It was dark there despite the morning. He placed the gun on a ledge. Than had already gone to the back and lay on a flat slab covered in leaves. Hippie worked up a small fire in the middle of the cave, and the smoke rose, drifted out into the woods. She placed a few large logs on the fire, sat with her back against a wall, and closed her eyes.
Cohen sat down beside her. He thought he would never be able to fall asleep, not there with his back against a hard wall, but the heat and the slowly rising smoke mesmerized him. He wondered what his dad was doing, if he had woken up yet, if he realized Cohen wasn’t at home. He wondered what his dad would do if he realized he was missing, if he would care.
He fell asleep.