23

Kyle’s foot turned grayish, and his face grew damp with sweat. The skin around his wound crackled like plastic, and the air above it felt warm. Sometimes he moaned, but mostly he lay back and took shallow breaths. He did not look down when Mara changed the bandage, though she was sure he could smell it. She breathed through her mouth in the shelter. No matter how many maggots she picked off, within hours there were always more.

“Fuck it,” said Bullfrog. “I’m finding a way out.” He was gone much of the time, venturing farther and farther in his scouting missions. But even when he came back, he kept his distance from the shelter. Mara was afraid to hope for what he’d find. She couldn’t decide if she envied or resented him. Looking for help seemed far easier than staying with Kyle and Ashley, and when Bullfrog was scouting, she couldn’t do the same.

Ashley sat in the meadow and petted her fawn in a beam of golden light. Like a woman in a picture book, a princess or a witch.

“You have to cut it off,” Kyle told Mara.

It had been six days since his fall.

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “Someone could show up any second now. They’re probably loading the helicopter. I’m not going to make things worse.”

She gave him tea, and he drank it, but he didn’t stop.

“Look at it,” he said.

She didn’t want to look at it.

“Look at it,” he said.

Mara unwrapped the bandage, which draped only loosely now over the wound. She had covered the raw flesh with a mullein leaf, and Kyle winced when she tugged to peel it off.

The wound had grown. It was deeper now, as if it were a living thing, eating itself, and she thought she saw a tendon in the depths of it. There were more maggots, though she had cleaned them out recently, and she plucked them off with tweezers and dropped them in the fire. The wound was so thick with yellow pus that it was hard to tell where the maggots ended and the pus began.

“Maybe more vodka,” she said.

“No,” he said. “You have to cut off the infection. It’s the only way to keep it from spreading. But the vodka will come in handy.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“Dib dib dib,” said Kyle.

“See?”

“It’s from Scouts,” he said. “It means do your best.”

Mara was doing her best, and she could not do any more.

“Just listen,” he said. “Hear me out, okay?”

She didn’t want to listen, but she did.

“I think I should get very drunk on vodka,” he said, “and Bullfrog and Ashley should pin me down. You should be the one to do it.”

“Why not Bullfrog?”

“He wouldn’t,” said Kyle, and Mara knew he was right. “You have to let them handle the top half and you can handle my leg. I’ll probably try to fight them, but I’m pretty sure they can hold me down.”