"Something Got At Them"

Part 7

It hit us in the early morning of November 17th.

Food wouldn't be a problem until spring, or guns: the Brimsons and Terry Calhou each had their irons, and I'd practiced with a Colt pistol. It was batteries and electricity that were trouble out here, keeping our lights and heat and CB radio alive. Hugo knew people all around the North Woods, wily old timers and reservation folk with their own radios, many of them also holed up and missing in action from the outside world. Through them we learned that Prent was deserted by Halloween, everyone left behind packed up and shipped to Duluth for testing.

By then they had to admit that it wasn't Lyme disease. It was in deer, moose, coyotes, dogs, and recently herds of cattle down in Saint Cloud. Cats were fine, as were the birds.

Terry Calhou made trips out for batteries and work, keeping us informed and secret and using our hidden way after we took out the bridge over the washout, but he didn't come back as expected on October 20th. The CB radio lasted until early November, but we got no clear answers from anyone before the old batteries Paul had collected in their hundreds died. Hugo's old-timers on the horn had started clamming shut, or been forced to move, or had been found out by whatever forces out there were looking for people like us and locking them up for tests. Soon it was just me and the Brimsons, and I was getting nervous.

Mike had gloves on in the cold weather, which made sense - but he kept them on indoors now, and at some point he stopped using a sharp knife. And he was getting too tired to help with a wall, or a shelf, or the sputtering generator that we used once the region's powerlines got clipped around Canadian Thanksgiving, or on the dock on the little pond which squeaked and creaked too much to my liking, sure to eat a foot. The seventy-year old man was more active than his son, still in his neon orange sweater, going out into the wilderness for most of some days to make maps, see what else Paul and scattered out around here.

He came back one evening while I was hammering on the dock and just said, "It's in the raccoons."

Hugo had been hunting out here since before I was born, and I quietly suspected that he had to have known about the dumping, maybe done some himself. Being on good terms with Paul, he had a bunch of extra trails and cave spots in his head, a few of them going down on a map on the counter inside map. Sometimes Hugo brought stuff Paul had left out there in his deteriorating state months ago - other times he just mentioned big stuff, like an icefishing shack put northeast for some reason

I think all three of us were using our Covid muscles to keep the elephant in the cottage out of sight, which was Mike's health. Just keep your head down, plow through this one day at a time, and before any sort of argument or decision could be made it was before dawn on November 17th. The leaves were all down and dry on the hard ground, no wind stirred the pines, and from this stillness the dying night started growling.

I fumbled with the Colt as I got out of bed, fumbling with the bullets like a rookie, hearing Hugo already out of his bedroom and shouting for us to get to the cottage's east windows. My room's windows looked south, and outside all was dark, the eastern sky still a black wall. A woodstove burned in the cottage's common room for heat, and from under the door I saw the orange light of a swinging lantern in Hugo's hands - and a jittering light from the lantern in Mike's hands.

"What is it?" I asked as I stumbled out, almost getting shot as I surprised them. The Brimsons were crouched under an east window, facing me. Mike was panting as if he'd sprinted a mile, with his lantern set down, while old Hugo was torching a rolled-up newspaper from the open stove, and my only answer was another howl.

Not a dog, not canine. Too big.

And I had the wild, silly thought that I knew what it was: the prion disease was real, it was in the mosquitos and everything they bit, but that didn't rule out the campfire nonsense. This was the cave-dweller, the only thing that could be left out here after two months of infections and roadkill clearing out these woods, the thing that had run off with Spike when he'd been too sick to travel out of sight from my driveway in September, the thing that had wounded the moose that crushed Harold. Typhoid Mary was immune, after all, so here she was: the patient zero monster, full of rotten guts and now stalking the surface, drooling and pissing and shitting prions to spread her mind-eating death.