To The Skies Only

He lays a trap for him up the mountainside, after killing Hart. Far away from Martha and from the remains of Fort Spencer’s winter residents – not far from where Colquhoun had led them, and if it occurs to Boyd that Ives knows this terrain better than he does, it doesn’t dissuade him from scrambling to the farthest spot he knows, with an iron chain dragging behind him.

The cliff face casts a long shadow over both of them, dappling the ground – this time it does not overlook a stand of breakable pines and a convenient drop. The only thing between Boyd and his escape is Ives. They are very close now, both winded, both bloodied. The cross still smudged on Ives’ forehead is as clear as day.

They sink to the ground, over and under, Ives’ knee forcing between his legs, Boyd’s thumbnails scratching at Ives’ cheeks – brawling and grappling in their shared untrained strength, the coarse vigor that eating human flesh has given both of them. Ives seems to be enjoying himself.

It could have been Boyd just as easily, if he’d been the one to tumble down, if he’d thrust out a hand to support himself. Enough to lose his footing and go shuddering down a sheer gap, a crevice big enough for one man but not two. But it’s Ives who lands wrong, too distracted by his own enjoyment – Boyd sinks down, with Ives’ sinewy legs closing like a hinge around his neck, obscenely close and yet out of danger, Ives is laughing and laughing until the metal trigger goes click against stone.

The trap closes with all the finality of steel, and the unmistakable snap of bone. Boyd rises up again, shaking on his knees, and Ives does not.

Torn loose, Boyd can hardly draw breath, struck dumb by the audacity of it and moreover that it worked. If Ives is screaming, Boyd can’t hear it, only the blood hammering in his ears, his heart battering recklessly in his chest.

The shoulder joint is obliterated, stoven in, and the long bone of his upper arm is pulp. Even the neck lies at an odd angle. No one could look like that and survive. Ives is still breathing, but the breaths come shallow and wet, and the chain staked in the cleft rock sounds out in a groan – metal on metal, yielding nothing. Not bone or steel or rock.

Blood has begun to run from Ives’ nose, and from the corners of his mouth, in arresting bright rivulets. Even dead men groan and sag and seem to shift where they lie – Boyd knows this better than most, but still he prays, let the man be dead. Let it all be finished. Once this man dies, Boyd can die too. Let the man be dead.

He is not dead. His eyes open, dark and shining like something out of Boyd’s most private nightmares. And he is not pleased.

“Oh, John,” Ives says, running his tongue along his bloody upper lip, “you shouldn’t have.”

Fine, then. You can’t have everything you want in the world. Like so many times before, Boyd turns tail and runs.

*

Boyd will not kill to survive. The hunger in the pit of his stomach burns like a star. He’ll wither and die here, but he’ll die as a man and not what Ives has made him, everything short of that is only a poor stopgap – chewing slivered tree bark and cutting snares that never catch anything. Even the wildlife is avoiding him.

Ives has a vision for this place – of a kingdom of flesh-eaters, of cutting across the land with his own disciples, of swelling their ranks with the men and women who will make the trek seeking their fortune. Men and women crossing flat seas of grass and dry salt lakes and frost-eaten mountain passes, who’ll arrive in their new home famished and dissatisfied. This place would be better off as a wasteland. A barren place with nothing in it.

Boyd still dreams of the war – the crack of distant gunfire still rattling in his ears, the dust sticking to his lips, the oppressive heat and the slack weight of corpses bearing down on him from all sides. He sees his comrades’ accusing faces in the night, bullet-eaten and mutilated. These dead men know what he’s already done to earn himself the rank of captain, and what he’s on the verge of doing now.

What is he doing, here on the frontier? What is he bound to do? He’ll hunt for himself, and cut hooks to catch fish, and keep well away from other living men.

*

John Boyd, as it turns out, is a poor hunter. The first night he visits Ives, after a few days of howling have bled together and his captive has turned from pleading to invective to mute resentment, he brings him a half-skinned squirrel.

(It might as well be a squirrel, anyway, Boyd never made much of a study of nature. It had screamed like a baby in the snare.)

It’s easier once the sound of Ives’ wheedling is out of his ears, once a few days tethered like a dog while exposed to the elements have softened the man into sullen silence and not a volley of obscene appeals that echo off the rocks. Boyd roams the mountainside for those few days like a wild man, bleeding into his boots from blisters and half-blind. No place he can go to escape Ives’ cajoling is too far.

Sprawled on the ground in his own smudge of filth, Ives is without dignity. The cross is flaking on his forehead, but still present, as if it’s been burned in place.

Boyd flings the carcass down. The pelt still hangs on by a band of flesh, but a lump of meat is a lump of meat and its wetness fills him with horror. Ives makes a face, like a man who’s asked for a glass of beer and received a glass of water.

“Surely you can do better than that, Captain.”

Boyd is suddenly breathless, nauseated at the sight of what he’s done. Sick at the sight of him. He shakes his head, mutely, feeling his throat tighten.

Ives nudges at the carcass with his foot. “You can’t deny me forever.”

He has to leave this place. He has to get out of here. He’ll take on a different name and find someone, anyone who will take him back east–

Boyd squares his shoulders, like an animal trying to make itself appear larger. His filthy hair draggles down into his eyes, making it difficult to look too stern. “I put you here, didn’t I? I can and I will.”

“You want flesh, Boyd. You won’t be satisfied with anything less.

*

When the true cold sets in, he doesn’t last long. The shallow streams dry up and the deep ones freeze. He does not know the way back to Fort Spencer from here. He has already met the officer who was to be his replacement by pure chance. Another exile. Weak-minded, or a drunk, or a coward. Not a very attentive man.

(After he kills the man, the banker’s son from Boston, he sucks the hot blood from his cupped hands like water from a public fountain – )

The man had gone up the slope to take advantage of the good weather to take a photograph of the view looking down over the fort. The intrepid man of the future, the kind of man this territory will be flooded with in five years. He’s dressed for the weather, as he fumbles at his tripod with mittened hands, and all the clothes on his back are new – swaddled in wool beneath a heavy fur coat. Boyd could smell him from a mile off.

He didn’t mean to hurt him. He only meant to keep him away from Ives – the way you’d fence in a dangerous animal, a chained bear or a ram with a penchant for goring people. He’d panicked. He’d acted in haste. Some parts of the frontier are not safe.

(The picture hadn’t turned out in the end; The metal plate had fallen from his hand, and the camera had been shattered. Boyd ambushed him by blind chance, striking the man with a stone before he could cry out. He had drank the blood that ran from the wound, cloudy with brain-matter and hair, and he had taken the man’s coat. For warmth, maybe. For a prize, certainly.)

He had eaten, and sated himself, and despised himself for it. But he cannot deny, he’s stronger. More of a man. Man or not, he can never go back to Fort Spencer. The officer he killed will almost certainly be missed, and before long that man’s replacement will be out here looking for him, with reinforcements of his own. Boyd will sleep tonight in a splintering shack with its roof half-stoven in by the weight of the snow, the bedding moldered into a single slick surface, and with a full belly Boyd will be grateful for it.

(He buried the body in a snowbank, heaping fistfuls of wet snow until it was unrecognizable as a man, only a thing, an inert thing like the butchered horses – and by the end of it he had been retching blood in the snow. When he comes back again to that spot after nightfall, famished and wanting, other scavengers have beaten him to it. The dead man’s eyes are gone.)

He dreams of Ives. He wakes with his mouth watering and his blood hammering in his ears, smothered face-first in the waxy black fur of a stolen coat.

*

The trek is easier the next morning. His legs are already stronger, and he knows the footholds better than before – Boyd scrambles like a deer through thick drifts of snow and shuddering branches that catch at his face and clothes, stooped for expedience and not from fear. It occurs to him that he’d be better off knowing for sure that Ives is dead than assuming Ives is dead. He doesn’t know the limits of their kind, or how long until this recovered strength will leave him. There are other places to shelter out the winter.

He’ll go to Denver and find another trade. He’ll never again be a soldier. He’ll be a schoolmaster, or dig ditches, and never kill to live again. If Ives hadn’t perished of hunger, thirst would have finished him off – a man can only go so long.

Boyd’s own thirst hasn’t left him. He’s hungrier now for having killed a man, not less.

There’s something in the air, a prickling freshness like an incoming blizzard. Something is wrong.

Ives is there to meet him where the treeline stops, dyed rust-red, with the broken trap behind him, its jaws twisted wide. His broken arm still hangs at a sick angle – healed wrong, Boyd can recognize it – and his shirt is torn from his shoulders, hanging from him like a rag. The exposed skin of his chest is scraped a ruddy pink. The edges of the wound – scalloping like a shell, it had after all not been cut, but torn – are already beginning to knit together. The iron stake is clutched in his hand like a prize.

Boyd can’t take his eyes off him.

This is the end. His heart lurches against his ribcage in irregular shudders of agitation – an animal heartbeat despite the raw strength in his arms and legs. This would be an extremely inconvenient place to faint.

Ives shelters his eyes against nonexistent glare. “Why do you come back here, captain?”

Boyd’s mouth twists. “I suppose I must need the company.”

“You should have gotten a head start.”

“Where would I go?

Boyd can’t stay back. Ives is coming for him, wounded or not. His eyes are blood-encrusted slits, canny and appraising beneath the shadow of his hand. “You’re stronger already. You can feel it, can’t you. Brawn. Potency. A certain… fortitude.”

Cowardice can’t save him now. Neither will lying. “I do.”

Ives inhales deeply, without wheezing. Even his ruined lung has restored itself. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’ll heal.”

He hadn’t noticed it yet himself. Boyd wears a deep welling scratch from shoulder to breast, uncovered by his shirt – not from the man he had hunted but from a broken branch knifing back to gouge at him. He has lost a single glove tumbling through the trees and brush.

The memory of his first fall is still clear in his mind, the sickening impact and later the fear, his terror of being completely alone and without help – that and Ives, the two of them the only men in the world, with the taste of Reich’s flesh still in his mouth. Reich is dead, and Boyd is not.

Horror of horrors, Ives looks happy to see him.

His first few steps crunch in the frosty gravel, as if stumbling forward until his arm snares tight around Boyd’s waist – Boyd expects a series of sharp punctures but all that presses against him is Ives’ bony body, forcing close against his equally ragged frame to mouth at the bloody gouge.

John goes bloodless, his stomach clenching – so faint at the sensation of a tongue scraping the white edges of his wound that his knees might buckle any moment. Ives suckles at his wound until he’s had enough.

He’s gotten a taste for this. Maybe he always had a taste for this, the painful part. Boyd clasps his face with fumbling hands – the tips of his fingers have gone numb, and they rake through Ives’ hair as stiffly as a comb, Ives is catching at his mouth with lips and teeth and the taste of rust is all around them.

Boyd crushes him against himself, half-savage with desire he has no idea what to do with and a hunger he has no way to feed – like a secretive barracks clinch, hands making painful fists in Ives’ coat, sucking greedy kisses with the taste of his own blood in his mouth.

They’re alike in this. The two of them are both monsters.

Broken away, now, breathing brokenly with an aching mouth – Boyd is speechless, staggered by blind arousal. Ives’ head has fallen against his shoulder to lick his wounds once more.

“Thank you for that,” Ives says when he raises his head; his beard is running with threads of blood and spit. He clasps Boyd’s hand to support himself, but the pressure of his grip hardly registers at all.

John has already forgotten the pain. He is stronger now. He hoists his arm around Ives, dead hand thrust under his ruined shoulder, and the two of them limp down to darkness.

*

By the time they arrive at shelter, the fingers of Boyd’s right hand have lost all feeling. The discolored skin stands out in bloody blisters, and no amount of friction will restore even a spark of sensation. Even his good hand fumbles at the iron lock; it’s Ives who guides him in under the shattered doorframe like a new bride.

It’s a sorry place to perform an amputation, but it can’t be much worse than the ministrations of the late Major Knox. The extremities grow back first. Ives has assured him of this, and Boyd doesn’t want to know how he found out.

The four walls provide a little shelter, if not much else – there’s a table cut from boards still oozing sap, though God only knows how long it’s been since its last resident abandoned it furnishings and all, and a bed in the corner whose straw mattress has rotted into a rag. Stashed between the bedframe and the wall there had been a tin cup, a razor with a broken handle, and a leather-clad New Testament.

Ives comments that at least they can burn the pages. Boyd’s hoarse laughter sounds like it’s coming from somebody else’s throat.

Time is moving slower here, in the pocket of their shared nightmare. As Boyd prepares for field surgery, Ives settles down on the bed to watch.

Three of them are beyond saving. There is no pain, and scarcely any blood. Even a dull blade shears through frost-burned skin readily enough, like glove-leather, but the bone poses an obstacle – Boyd’s shoulders are heaving and the cloud of his frost breath almost obscures the work. Ives hangs close to his shoulder, holding his forearm down against the splintering table while his fumbling left hand wrenches the blade through and down, against the white pebble of bone until it splits and snaps.

The blade is dull, and the sensation is strange, but there is no pain. It’s as exhilarating as it is horrible, cutting away weakness along with the dead flesh.

For a moment the world has gone white; the sound that escapes him, when the severed finger finally falls away on a hinge of dead flesh, is an animal sound. Boyd finds that he has bitten his tongue.

The two of them are brothers in arms now in their absolute destitution, trading cast-offs, scratching for rations. Ives’ stare is fixed in the universal expression of hunger.

Boyd knows what his enemy is considering, and gestures with his head to convey that Ives should consider himself permitted to take whatever he wants, without letting up his white-knuckle grip on the knife. He’s not particularly attached to these parts of himself any more, and the rest of this grim work remains to be done. Let Boyd’s loss be his enemy’s gain.

Ives holds up a severed ring finger to the light, squinting at it like a jeweler. The skin has rotted to the color of pewter. “It isn’t what you’d call appetizing,” Ives says, and his eyes are laughing, “but I appreciate the gesture.”

He strips the scanty flesh away from the bone with his teeth, and Boyd methodically begins on the next finger.

That night Boyd curls up by the empty hearth and does not look at his empty hand. His good hand is balled up close to his chest, under his shirt where the only remaining warmth seems to reside. Ives’ body is a weight of certainty against his back, smelling like wet hair and grease. He does not lick his cheek, or probe at the bloody beds of his fingers beneath their sorry bandages. In the sour darkness Ives holds him like a comrade until the shudders pass and the new stubs of bone knit themselves together into a limb.

*

in the morning the burned-out kettle seethes with snowmelt water – Boyd’s new hand does not feel the heat of the fire. Ives is avoiding his gaze after last night. It’s strangely brazen, in its own way, like the coyness of a well-bred young lady. God only knows what kind of climate bred Ives. Boyd corners him at the hearth and strips the shirt from his shoulders like they had stripped Colquhoun at Fort Spencer – it had been lighter work, with more men, to rinse the filth from his hair and boil the deep frost out of him before flesh could blacken. The knowledge that these things grow back doesn’t take the edge off his dread.

He wipes the blood from Ives’ face with a steaming rag and the contours of his face begin to emerge again, pink and new. His shoulders are once more without a scar – his body is thin but unmarked, and as supple as ever. Boyd can place a hand where the damage once was. He can trace it with his fingers. It’s a miraculous body. His skin stands out in goosebumps.

Ashamed, Boyd tosses his shirt back and leaves him in front of the fire to dry. This man recovered from consumption, blood loss, gunshot, and the wrong side of a rusted bear trap, and Boyd’s afraid he’ll catch cold.

The principal emotion in his face when he sees fit to meet Boyd’s eyes again is something like curiosity.

*

“Hold still,” Ives says. He holds a razor, so Boyd is resigned to doing as he says. There’s an abundance of clean water if they’re patient enough, and enough wood to burn, if not enough to repair the sinking roof or do more than prop it up under the weight of snow. His back is to the fire.

He’s brought a razor and a tin cup of cold water. One of those noxious black cigars he’d smoked at Fort Spencer is fixed between Ives’ teeth. John sits very still and lets the blade scrape over him through a wreath of smoke, startled by the deftness of Ives’ hands against his sunburned cheek.

The action is agonizingly slow. A stripe of fresh skin is exposed to the air with each patient stroke – he’s never been especially fastidious, but the awareness of how ragged he’s grown is prickling at him, even through the ache of his present vulnerability. Ives could slit his windpipe without much trouble, he could make revenge for the ruined arm easily and teach Boyd a thing or two about the limits of resurrection. It’s as present in his mind’s eye as if it were happening, in an impression of quickness and sleekness and bright pain – Ives making a fist in the hair at the back of Boyd’s neck and wrenching back his head to bleed him like a pig. Ives could slit his belly and play in his guts, but he hasn’t. He’s like a sculptor, whittling out something recognizable. Making a man out of him.

His hands are warm and steady. He must have managed himself first; Ives already looks more like the officer he had been, less haggard and more polished. The bones still stand out in his face, but the effect is good.

The last scrape of the razor leaves Boyd shivering, and not from cold.

Ives makes a sound of satisfaction when his work is done, and wipes the razor clean. He puts his mouth – sedately and deliberately, not wet – against the side of John’s throat, where the pulse sits. Maybe he’d nicked the skin bloody while going about his task, or maybe he hadn’t. He’s daring him to flinch.

Boyd lifts his chin and closes his eyes, isolating their closeness into a series of places where they touch – mouth against skin, hand against wrist, leg pressed against leg. Before Fort Spencer he’d have balked at being touched at all. He can no longer find it in himself to care.

They are not precisely enemies any more.

*

Twice he leaves to gather firewood, twice he comes back with hanks of frozen flesh – pieces the scavengers wouldn’t take, cut clumsily from the long muscles of the leg. Once he comes back with a snow-crusted coat that still stinks of the general store. Ives doesn’t remark on it when he places it over his shoulders.

The pot on the fire has broth in it when he returns, and the sharp smell of cooked flesh no longer makes Boyd’s gorge rise.

Their own little fort is growing practically snug. There’s less to do for amusement around the place than there’d been back at Fort Spencer – there’s nothing to divert them from one another. It won’t be long until Boyd can no longer resist whatever it is his body wants, and Ives will be happy to profit on it. Until then, they can play checkers, maybe whittle. The spring thaws will come eventually, and with them more stragglers. It feels right. The wilderness is theirs.