“I’m trying not to jump to conclusions,” I whisper against Dalton’s chest.
“Yeah, pretty sure I’m trying not to jump to the same ones.” He pulls back to look down at me. “We can discuss it, if that’ll help you sleep.”
I shake my head. “Once I start, I won’t stop. We’re thinking the same thing. I know we are. It can wait. It can all wait.” I glance at the clock. “At least for another couple of hours.”
He pulls me to him in a kiss, and I lose myself in it, pushing the rest back, at least for now.
* * *
It’s 6 A.M., the sun fully risen, and I’m in the clinic, cupping a mug of hot coffee between my hands as Dalton stokes the fire. My sister had been up all night with the patient. We’ve sent April to bed now, and we’re sitting vigil waiting for the woman to wake. We’ve left Storm with Petra—the clinic is no place for any canine, but especially not one who can destroy a thousand dollars in equipment with one enthusiastic wag of her tail.
As for the patient, the sedative wore off long ago, and this is simply the deep sleep of exhaustion. She’s hooked up to an IV replacing her fluids. There’s a heart monitor, too. That is all we can do for her right now, that and antibiotics.
Last night, April and Anders looked after the stomach wound, sterilizing it better and using the ultrasound to get an internal look. Those images rest at my elbow, and they add nothing to the story of this woman’s trauma. As predicted, the weapon pierced mostly muscle. It was intended to kill her. I’m certain of that. The only question is whether her attacker expected her to immediately perish from her injury … or knew it would take time, leaving her to a slow and agonizing death alone in the forest.
I’ve barely taken a few sips from my coffee when a soft rap sounds on the exam room door. Dalton opens it to find a dark-haired woman hovering uncertainly.
“Hey, Maryanne,” I say. “Come in.”
As she does, her gaze flits to the patient and then quickly away. Anyone seeing that would dismiss Maryanne as a nervous woman. I know better. I understand that what’s making her uneasy is the patient lying on that bed and what she represents.
“Kenny came by the stable this morning to take Champ for an early ride,” she says, “and he mentioned you’d brought back a woman. A tourist who was attacked in the forest.”
“Kenny talks too much,” Dalton grumbles, but there’s no rancor in it. We both know there’s a reason Rockton’s carpenter—and head of militia—let Maryanne know. The same reason that brought her here this morning.
Maryanne came to Rockton nearly fifteen years ago, yet no one here except Dalton had ever met her before last winter. Rockton is a town of transients. It’s meant to be a way station on the journey back to an ordinary life. You come, and catch your breath and wait for the storms to pass, and then you return. Residents are guaranteed a two-year stay. After that, they may apply to extend their stay for up to five years. We do have two who’ve gone beyond five years—Mathias and Isabel—but they secure those extensions by blackmailing the council.
When Maryanne came to Rockton, fleeing a nightmarish marriage, she’d fallen in love. Not with a person, but with the wilderness. She’s a biologist, and the child of hippies, and here she rediscovered her passion for wild places. She joined three others and set off into the forest.
That isn’t an officially sanctioned choice. In reality, it depends on the sheriff. If someone wanted to go these days, Dalton would try to talk them out of it. If they weren’t equipped to survive, he’d dump them in Vancouver before he’d let them walk into the wilderness. But if they could handle it and truly understood what that life entailed, then, as a child of the forest himself, he would look the other way.
Gene Dalton took a very different view, not surprisingly given that he stole Dalton from that wilderness life. Gene aggressively pursued would-be settlers, and he’d done that with Maryanne, gathering the militia for an all-out search. When they found the camp, a week later, it’d been empty, supplies ripped apart, mementos abandoned, the ruined remains of their temporary settlement telling a tragic story.
The true tragedy, though, came later.
As Maryanne leans over the mystery woman, her graying hair falls in a curtain and she reflexively starts to tuck it behind her ear. A pause, then she tucks it back anyway, and that’s partly defiance, but partly, too, because she knows there’s no one here who hasn’t seen the frostbite. The elements don’t explain the odd pattern of scarring on one cheek. Ritualized scarring. She speaks carefully, her lips hiding teeth that will get dental caps this spring to hide the damage. That damage wasn’t tooth decay—it was intentional filing.
What happened in Maryanne’s camp all those years ago wasn’t a bear attack. It was humans. Humans that belong more in a badly researched prehistoric movie than in twenty-first-century reality.
We call them hostiles. They’re former Rockton residents who have reverted to something more primal, adopting a hodgepodge of tribal elements and presenting as wild people barely capable of communication, more dangerous than any creature out here.
To the people of Rockton, hostiles have always been the bogeyman. An urban legend created by law enforcement to keep residents out of the forest. Dalton knew better. Yet to him, they were as much a part of the wilderness as the settlers and caribou, and he’d accepted the council’s explanation that this was what happened when people immersed themselves too fully in the wilderness life. They lost what it means to be human.
I’m sure that can happen, but …
In Rockton, Dalton and Maryanne had been friends, as much as a teenage boy and a thirty-something woman could be. She’d taught him biology, and he’d taught her naturalism. Two keen and curious minds eager to discover everything the other knew. A year after she left Rockton, he met her in the forest and she attacked him. Nearly forced him to kill her to escape. She’d become a hostile. That kind of deterioration cannot naturally happen in a year.
I’d had lots of theories about how it did happen, most more outlandish than I care to admit. The key came, fittingly, with Maryanne herself. Dalton met her again last year, and she did recognize him. Thus began six months of encounters in the forest, until finally, she was in a mental place to accept help. She’d spent four months living in a cave once inhabited by a friend. She had recently agreed to move into town, taking over from the stable worker who left this winter.
So what happened to Maryanne in the forest? Two words that often go together. Cult and drugs. The hostiles have two narcotic tea-like brews, which they seem to have adapted from the Second Settlement.
Rockton gave birth to two settlements out here, unoriginally known as the First and Second Settlements. Both were created by residents who didn’t want to go home. The first is led by Edwin, now an old man. The second, founded in the seventies, reminds me of a commune, complete with mildly narcotic teas.
I believe the hostiles began as a small group who left the Second Settlement to pursue a more nomadic life, not unlike Maryanne and her comrades. They took the settlement’s tea recipes with them, and at some point, the brew went from mild intoxicant to hardcore drug.
The Second Settlement has two teas, referred to as the peace tea and the ritual tea. The former acts like a nice glass of wine. The latter, which they only use for rituals, induces mild hallucinations. The hostiles created stronger versions of both, brews that can no longer be called anything as benign as “tea.”
The first keeps them in a state of moderate euphoria where their former life becomes a shadowy dream they no longer care about. The second whips them into the frenzied state that Dalton first encountered with Maryanne, when she tried to kill him.