Lich -- A Novel

.One.

.one.

I stood at the edge of a large lake. Winter hung heavy in the air, my breath a crisp fog billowing around my head. Ice had covered the lake, small cracks and imperfections glistening along its surface. Pine trees held handfuls of snow in their branches all along the shorelines and out in the middle of the lake stood an island, abandoned and alone. I could see smoke rising from the chimney of a ghost-like shack, nestled into the trees.

Tom Boggins was inside that shack.

If the ice were thick enough, I could make it across. I wasn’t sure, though. It was still early winter and there had been a few warmer days in the past week that could have thinned the ice. It supports mounds and snow drifts, but that doesn’t mean it will support me.

I tapped my toe against the ice in front of me. It didn’t chip or splinter. A good sign. Id’ never fallen through ice before. It seemed like something I should have been familiar with, given my line of work, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know if I should be grateful or upset that I didn’t have the experience. It would make a good resume builder.

Taking a few tentative steps out onto the ice, I hesitated just a few feet away from the shore. The sound of a slow cracking, like the ice cubes in a glass as you pour in your lemonade, filled the air. The ground beneath my feet was temporary. It would be gone soon and I knew it, but I needed to get to the cabin. So I ran.

I could almost picture the waves beneath the ice reaching up to snatch me as I ran by. The ice splintered like glass with each fall of my boot. The closer I got to the island, the worse the splintering got and I wondered what I would do once I got there. Would I have to stay the winter because of the ice? I didn’t see a boat. There would be no swimming, either.

Once my foot hit dirt, a sigh of relief escaped my lungs. It was short lived as I ducked behind a fallen tree. My hand went to the gun tucked into the back of my jeans, the snow soaking through them already. I shivered involuntarily and poked my head above the tree trunk so I could catch a glimpse of the shack. The windows were dark, maybe tinted or mirrored to make seeing through them nearly impossible. I could only see the reflection of the setting sun, painting the horizon pink and orange.

Wood had been chopped and stacked on the side of the shack. The snow covering the logs was disturbed, like someone had come to collect a few very recently. The thought of a warm fire inside the shack sounded like heaven, with how cold the rest of me was. My gloves were soaked and I could barely feel my fingers or toes. I had been out the elements for too long. I was ready to go inside.

But Tom Boggins was inside that shack.

I breathed warm air onto my hands, trying to make them warm enough to at least be able to pull the trigger of my gun if need be. I brushed the hair out of my eyes and stood. I was half surprised that a bullet didn’t come flying my way. It could mean a multitude of things that I had made it to the island and could approach the shack without getting a sniper’s gift to the head. It could mean I had caught him while taking a nap. Or eating dinner. Or it could be that I had gotten better at sneaking up on Tom Boggins. I doubted the last one. No one snuck up on Tom Boggins. No one.

Making my way around the shack, I headed for the double doors of a cellar basement. The window above the cellar doors was boarded up with a plastic bag taped around a hole in the glass. It couldn’t be helping the shack stay warm, that giant hole. I tried to listen through the broken window for a sign or something from inside, but I couldn’t hear a thing. There was no electricity on the island and I couldn’t hear the generator from the cellar. The shack was dead in the water.

I pulled on one of the cellar doors, the locks catching it and keeping it from opening. I didn’t have a key, nor anything to cut the locks with. The only other option I had was the front door. The open floor plan didn’t leave a lot of room for mistakes when it came to infiltrating the shack, but it was all I had to work with at the time. The window was too narrow to climb through and the cellar was detached, with the outside doors being the only way to access it. It was an old shack. Older than dirt.

Sneaking back around to the front of the shack, I stood and carefully leaned against the wall, just next to the door. I held tightly to the gun in my hands, hoping that a .45 was enough power. I’d cleaned the gun just that morning, checked the bullets, and oiled the barrel. I took good care of my guns and this was one of my favorites. If I had a lucky gun, this was it.

I thought I would need it today, because Tom Boggins was inside that shack.

At the same time I kicked open the door, a loud blast exploded from somewhere inside the shack. I had just enough time to try and throw myself sideways before I felt the sting of a hundred shotgun pellets striking me in the shoulder and the side. I’d been able to turn just enough to keep from getting a chest full of buckshot.

The blast caught me offguard, though, and I fell backwards into the snow. Red was already seeping from the hundred little holes the shotgun blast had left in my skin. My hand started to go numb and I grit my teeth. I thought one of the pellets had nicked my lung. I couldn’t be sure.

With my gun hand, I tried to drag myself away from the door, out of the line of fire. It hurt to breathe for a moment, but I couldn’t tell if it was because my lungs were collapsing or if I’d just gotten the wind knocked out of me. There was always that awkward stage of doubt after taking a bullet blast to the chest. It was one of those experiences, like falling through the ice, that I wasn’t sure if I should be grateful or upset that I had.

I’d just finished dragging myself out of the doorway, propping myself up against the shack, when I heard a voice from inside call out.

“Irene?”

I smirked and I thought I could taste blood on my lips. Not a good sign.

“Hello, Tom,” I called out.

No answer came for a bit. I thought I could hear Tom reloading his shotgun, but there was a rushing in my ears that kept me from hearing all the small movements from inside the shack.

“Are you here to kill me?” Tom called.

Licking my lips, I could definitely taste blood on my tongue now. I turned to the side to spit crimson out onto the snow. I’d left a red drag mark in the slush just outside the front door of Tom Boggins’ shack. I was cold, but not shivering and I thought again how I was going to make it back across the lake. I wasn’t sure I’d make it off this damn small island.

“What do you think?” I asked, turning my head so I was facing the doorway. I wanted to see if he came at me again. He wouldn’t aim for my chest next time. It would be a shot to the head at close range with a shotgun. Messy, but efficient. It wasn’t the way I was really planning on going, but there were worse ways, I guess.

Tom walked just to the edge of the doorway, still outside my line of sight. I kept my finger on the trigger of my .45, trying to prop it on my limp arm to aim at the door. Maybe I would get lucky and when he came out to finish me off, I could pull the trigger before him. Maybe I could survive this and not get a face full of buckshot.

“I told you all to leave me alone,” Tom said.

I laughed. Outright laughed and it’s not just because I was losing blood. It’s funny that he thought just by asking to be left alone, people would obey his wishes. He should have known that no one cared about what we want anymore. No one cared about what a single, individual person wants or desires.

“Did you expect us to listen?” I asked, coughing as blood gets caught in my throat. I spat it into the snow.

Tom snorted. “Guess not,” he said. “If I leave you there, you’re going to bleed to death.”

“Probably,” I admitted. “Why the shotgun?” I asked, starting to find it hard to catch my breath. “Why not the rifle? You could have taken me out before I crossed the ice.”

“I wanted to see how far you made it,” Tom said. He stepped out from the doorway of the shack. I tried to grip the trigger of my .45, but my fingers wouldn’t squeeze it shut. I rolled my head back to look at him.

He’d gotten old since the last time I saw him. A short beard covered his face, his dark brown hair starting to go salt and pepper, shades of gray creeping in at the edges. His eyes looked tired, but that was nothing new. A rosy pallor had sunk into his cheeks, probably from sitting in front of a fire or standing out here in the cold. Maybe both. He held the shotgun to his chest, barrel pointed upward, like he didn’t even consider me a threat. I didn’t know whether to be offended or relieved that I wasn’t kissing the buckshot.

Tom smiled, reaching forward with one hand to pull the hood of my parka down, exposing my face to the cold.

“You dyed your hair,” he said. I had. Blue. It was bright and it was different and it was supposed to express my thoughts and attitude, but right then I didn’t feel like blue. I felt more like red or purple. Pink maybe. I needed a warm color because it was cold as shit sitting out there, bleeding into the snow. “I like it.”

I tried to tell him he would, he’d always been a down and depressed sort of guy, but I couldn’t get my mouth to work. I opened it, but found myself tipping to the side instead, the world tilting and going fuzzy around me. Tom leaned down to catch me. He slid the shotgun across the floor of his shack, getting it out of the way before he scooped me up into his arms. He lifted me up, carrying me inside and I thought it was strange because I’d come here to kill the man.

Inside the shack, a fire was burning brightly in a wood stove. It managed to warm up the open floor plan of the shack. A small table sat in one corner, with dirty wooden bowls starting to pile up. A cot was set up as a bed and there was only one other wooden chair. Otherwise, the shack was completely empty.

Tom carried me to the cot and set me down on top of it, my legs swung over the edge and his hand on my good shoulder the only thing holding me up. His hands started to pull at the zipper of my parka and I tried to bat him away.

“Are you going to torture me?” I found myself asking before I could stop.

I was surprised at the look of hurt that crossed Tom’s face. “No,” he said, unzipping the heavy parka and pulling it carefully away from the shotgun wound on my shoulder and side. The blood and torn flesh made it difficult and I had to grit my teeth, my head coming forward to rest on his shoulder when it got too heavy to hold up on my own. “I’m going to save you.”

“Then why’d you shoot me in the first place,” I demanded.

Tom snorted. “Because you were going to shoot me if I didn’t.” It was true, but it didn’t mean I had to like the answer. I would have preferred it if he’d just killed me. I didn’t want Tom being nice to me. I’d come here to kill the man and I couldn’t guarantee that if I got a second chance, I wouldn’t take it.

Once Tom had removed the parka, he tugged at the hem of my old t-shirt with the new decorations of pellet holes and blood stains. It stuck to my side, soaked red. Tom reached into a pocket and pulled out a small Swiss army knife. He flipped through the gadgets until he came to his knife and he started to cut away at my shirt. I couldn’t help but feel a little self conscious as he pulled the fabric away. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before, but it didn’t mean I liked Tom seeing me in my undies.

“How’s your breathing?” Tom asked.

“Hurts,” I answered and I didn’t like the way the word came out a whimper. My eyes were getting heavy and Tom pressed his hand against my side, eliciting a small cry from my lips to keep me awake. Once he finished checking the wounds, he let me lay down on the cot. He’d placed a blanket beneath me to catch the blood and he used his Swiss army knife’s tweezers to start pulling any spare pellets that were still stuck in my flesh.

“Jesus,” I gasped as the tweezers stuck deep into one of the pellet wounds on my shoulder. “Can I get a drink?”

Tom smiled at me, but he focused on his work, pulling the bits of metal out and letting them fall into a tin cup at his side. He’d disposed of his wool gloves, leaving his fingers and hands covered in my blood and that went against every first aid video we’d ever been made to watch. But I guess there were worse things to catch these days that Hepatitis C.

The warmth from the fire lulled me as he finished pulling the pellets out. Then, in response to my request for a drink, he went to a cabinet and pulled out a fifth of whiskey. He poured two shots, downed one and brought the other over for me. As I threw it back, he held the bottle over the still open wounds, the whiskey practically burning through my skin. I managed to swallow my shot, but I couldn’t stop the scream of pain at the burn.

“God!” I grit out.

Tom smirked, pulling a roll of gauze out and I realized that he’d been prepared to survive in this shack. He had everything a man would need. First aid, whiskey, canned perishables. A stack of ammo was piled in the corner and there were several machetes hanging from hooks on the wall.

“That’s a habit we’ll have to break,” Tom said and I didn’t know what he was talking about. I tried to tell him that, but I was growing weak and losing the battle to remain conscious. Tom knew it and if he wanted to, he could kill me in this weakened state. I almost hated for it that he didn’t. If he wanted me dead, he wouldn’t have patched me up. “Calling out for God when things don’t go our way. I think he’s stopped listening.”

I snorted. “I think so too,” I said, feeling a little delirious as he started taping gauze to my side and shoulder to stop the bleeding. After the gauze was in place, he pulled several blankets over, piling them on top of me and once that was done, he plopped down to a sitting position on the floor.

“Why can’t they just let me go?” he asked, the question catching me off guard. I tried to study his face for any signs that he was joking or messing with me, but there was just sadness on his face. Just loneliness and fatigue. I thought again that he looked older than the last time I’d seen him.

I licked my lips and wished he’d give me another shot of that whiskey. “You know why,” I told him.

Tom nodded, running his hands down his face. “We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.”

“What’s that?” I asked, rolling my head to the side to look at him as he sat next to the cot.

“Voltaire,” he answered.

I snorted, because Tom was an educated man. He always had been. “What does it mean?”

“It means people are shit,” Tom said, taking a swig from the whiskey bottle. “That’s all it means.”

I thought it probably meant a little bit more than that, but Tom didn’t want to tell me. My body screamed out in pain and blood soaked through the gauze taped to my side. I didn’t want to be left alone and I had an inkling of a fear that as soon as I slipped asleep, Tom would leave me here in this shack by myself. I didn’t want to be left alone.

“Irene,” Tom said my name again and I realized my eyes had slipped close. “Why did they send you?”

Shaking my head, I kept quiet. I had my suspicions, but I didn’t have a solid answer for his question. I could feel myself drifting to sleep and Tom’s hand came out to rest on my forehead. It was comforting and familiar and I thought I knew why they sent me.

If there was one person who could be counted on to either kill Tom Boggins or bring him back, it was the girl he’d been fucking before he left. Maybe they just wanted him to come back. Or maybe they just thought I would be one spiteful bitch. I thought maybe it was a little of both.

Either way, I hoped Tom would be there when I woke up again.