Read Online Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers - Free Book Online

Bengt says.
    “They fucking ate him?  They ate the fucker?”
    I’m wishing I spoke the language, or understood the rules, but it isn’t complicated, they want us dead, or gone.  I look at him again.  I add him up, the pieces, he’s all this way and that but he’s all there, just scattered.
    “They weren’t eating him,” I say.  “Just killing him.”   They all look at me.  I nod to the snow, around us.
    “They pissed all over this place.  They mean to have it,” I say. “They don’t want us here.  We don’t belong here.  That’s all.” 
    A wolf can kill a bear, or a mountain lion, if he doesn’t want them around, if they’re too near his den.  He won’t eat those either, he just doesn’t want them around.  I’ve offended them, or scared them, or they don’t like our smell, and they’re going to correct the matter.  When my father was young he was a deputy one winter he needed the money, in a town on the coast, before he found his calling, slaughtering things.  He walked into a bar with his gun on and his badge on his stupid hat like a ‘shoot me’ sign, he said, and guys jumped up and chairs went over, a bunch of guys thought he was there to get them, they came off a stolen boat, full of stolen shit, whatever it was, and guns came out and he killed three of them, downed the other two and took four bullets himself and lived.  People would ask him how he lived through that.  “Bullets just go through me,” he’d say.  A secret of survival, he’d say, was not coming at anything sideways unless you knew you were doing it.  He gave lessons in survival, of all kinds.  So I pissed off the wolves like that, or scared them, like he did the guys in the bar, so now it’s going to be to the death, possibly, as unexpected as that seems, a conversation consisting of killing us all until the last word is dead on the snow.
    I look out around us, again.  I know we have to move, now, but thinking feels slow, in the cold.  Thoughts are freezing, and the dead are slowing me down, instead of making me quicker, as they should.  I look down at Luttinger again, which has no point to it, but I do, and then out again, around us, looking for a line across the snow, what feels like west.  But I look back to where we dragged the wood from, again, and out where the snow’s blowing thick I think I see blur-lines moving through the snow.  Wolves maybe.  Or nothing.   I keep watching, wait.  The others see me looking, they start staring, dead-still, like the night before.  I try to look through the snow until finally I figure they’re faded back.  Or were never there.   The guys see me staring.
    “What?” Henrick says.  “You see something?”  I shrug, and nod, which means maybe, or not.
    “Anybody else see anything?”  I ask.
    Nobody did.   We all stare though.  They were there.  Or never there.   Brother ghosts.  Brothers of the dead.   Ghost walkers.   Henrick looks at the snow where they marked, the paw-prints, the size of them, back at Luttinger.
    “What do we do now?” he asks.
    “Same as before.   Get the fuck out.”  Ojeira looks from Luttinger across the clearing. 
    “Maybe we should stay here,” Ojeira says.  Knox nods.
    “Yeah,” Knox says.  They both look scared.
     “They mean to have it,” I say again.  Ojeira and Knox are still scared.  The others too.   All of us are.
    “Get anything worth taking, and go.”  I say it in a way they’ll understand we’re in a hurry now, but I didn’t need to, they’re scared now, for real, and nobody else is arguing for staying here, everybody’s moving.  We look back at Luttinger, and go. 
    We start pulling together the stuff we’ve gathered the night before, but now we’re rushing.  I’m finding I like the daylight, what little is left.  I find a knife that must have come out of somebody's bag.  Half the guys at the camp wear knives on their belts like they’re going to need to skin a deer before