Read Online Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle - Free Book Online

other than those two: total understanding or total denial. Either they’d get what I meant, or they’d shut their ears to it and we’d head down our sad road together. I didn’t see a third way.
    Where the railroad used to run, there’s a little less overgrowth. As you travel, you keep your eyes on the ground ahead of you, trying to make out a path. Hours turn into days. You become a human bloodhound. You notice things others didn’t as they tried and failed to walk the path that now is yours. As you progress the path becomes less clear: with every less clear point you know you’re going beyond the places where the others lost the trail. Stopping to rest, you see a spot where plants seem to grow higher. If they have followed your path faithfully, bounty hunters will be here within the hour. North lies Nebraska.
    This turn came accompanied by one of my occasional bonuses, a status upgrade. It was an aluminum coin; I’d had fifty of them minted for me by one of the companies that made tokens for video games, back when there’d been a video arcade in every mall. There was a picture of a dome rising from an empty plain on one side, and on the other, it said PATHFINDER. I had only ever had to send out three of these coins over theyears. Two of them were in the hands of longtime players in distant places. The other was in a plastic bag labeled EVIDENCE on the table in front of me.
    I felt embarrassed when the text of the turn was read out loud at the hearing; most of Trace Italian’s latter turns were essentially first drafts, since hardly anyone ever saw them. They were turns in theory, not practice. Some were actually relics from all those long days in the hospital, formulae I’d memorized to keep myself from going insane during nights when I couldn’t sleep because of the pain in my jaw, or from days when the ringing in my ears demanded that I focus very hard on something until the sound died down. None of them were anything I’d looked at in years until Lance and Carrie’d gotten to them; they were crude artifacts to me now, or like somebody else’s work imitating mine. Given the whole thing to do over again, I might have written the late moves better, focused harder on the phrasing. But I hadn’t, and now they were cast in stone. I’d thought once or twice about revisiting them, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. Trace Italian had existed long enough to have earned self-determination. I didn’t feel like I had the right to revise it. That right belonged to the younger man who’d written the game, and that younger man was dead. Besides, there were people playing toward the latter moves; the moves had to remain as they were in case anyone ever got there. It seemed almost a moral question.
    Like all turns, this one ended with the player’s options presented as an unnumbered list of possibilities in typewritten capital letters, each possible next move occupying its own line of type. When, in the hearing room, the turn was handedaround the table for all to examine, I smiled a little inside. I had tried, so long ago, to limit the player’s options if he ever came to this pass. I had failed, but the effort seemed clever.
    FORAGE FOR ROOTS
    FOLLOW THE RAILROAD
    WAIT FOR HUNTERS
    NORTH TO NEBRASKA
    When I was a child, my mind wandered a lot, and most often it would wander to the dark places, as though drawn there by instinct. It found them again now. I saw Lance and Carrie freezing in the middle of the hard Kansas night. I imagined their hunger. I remembered skimming the autopsy report: Carrie died early; her coat was thinner. What had it been like for Lance, lying in the dark, waiting to be next? The pit they’d dug for themselves: Had it bought them some time? Or had the energy they’d wasted digging shortened the time they’d had left? Does a person gasp like a dying old man when he’s dying of cold, or is it different? Did they see their nail beds going blue, and feel panic, or had their minds gone past