BILLY

October 10, 2042. Gray Zone 

Billy pauses along the dirt trail. Ahead of him the path winds up through the forest toward the notch in Red Rock Peak, the westernmost ridge of the Allegheny Mountains. Behind him lies the valley that is dissected by what used to be Route 655, and the empty towns of Mill Creek, Airydale, and Menno, in what was once eastern Pennsylvania. He is halfway up the mountain. 

Billy slows his breathing so he can hear the sounds of the forest. The trail is steep, and blood is still pumping in his ears. A jay squawks angrily from the branches of a red spruce; a pair of squirrels chase each other across the blanket of pine needles that covers the forest floor. Jackie Metheny is twenty yards behind Billy on the trail, chattering endlessly about the self-esteem issues of the citizens of the Great Lakes Republic, about how they are like abused children, scared to stand up for themselves, scared to speak truth to power, and on and on and on. Jackie is full of theories about politics, and Billy thinks he speaks them aloud more to keep himself amused than to convince Billy of their truth. Billy doesn’t care about politics, and Jackie knows this. 

“The problem is, we were born as an afterthought,” Jackie says to Billy. “Everyone else makes a country with an idea in mind. New Liberty Union? Tax rebellion. Democratic Union of the South? Safe haven for all kinds of people. City State of New York? Bank money. The Great Lakes were what was left over, you know what I mean? We were the kid in the schoolyard nobody wanted to pick for their team, which is the goddamned story of my life. I got picked for nothing, not football, baseball, not even kickball. Not that I’m bitter. What did we have to offer in the Midwest? Detroit, Cleveland, a bunch of broken-down tire factories.” 

“Hush,” Billy says, with a powerful grunt. He is a big man, broad-shouldered, with thick forearms and powerful legs. He can carry a pack laden with 150 pounds of contraband on his back for sixteen hours straight, which is a good thing, because smuggling is how he makes a living. Billy doesn’t say much anymore, but when he does speak, people tend to take notice. He has that way about him, a quiet but solid authority. Jackie loves to tell the story of how once, Billy silenced a barroom full of bikers with a single look; people who tend not to scare easily. 

Jackie stops talking, but he is still breathing hard. Billy knows that Jackie is in poor physical shape. Jackie smokes. He drinks too much. Jackie’s young—thirty-two in December—but his body is already falling apart. He carries half the weight in his pack that Billy carries. He tries hard—because Jackie is a man who tries, and then tries again—but that is all he can shoulder. Billy doesn’t mind. He appreciates the effort. 

Billy listens again to the sounds of the forest. The jay has flown off. Wind is rustling the tree tops, pushing clouds across the late fall sky. Billy doesn’t hear anything else out of the ordinary, but he remains uneasy. He feels a tension in the silence, and it sets his teeth on edge. Billy has crossed the Gray Zone more times than he can remember, and he has a sense for when something is not right. And something is not right. 

*

The borders were the hardest part. The negotiators at the Truce of Denver drew a line down the spine of the Allegheny Mountains, separating the territory of the Great Lakes Republic from the city states on the Atlantic seaboard—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore—but that line was haphazard, cutting randomly across highways and towns, ignoring the wishes of the people who lived in the region. Back in the spring of 2032, the negotiators had been desperate for a deal, exhausted and afraid of the continuing bloodshed, and a line down a mountain ridge seemed like a natural compromise. 

Over the course of the first two years after the truce, citizens of the border region lived in an uneasy peace. A few moved east or west, depending on how they felt about the prospects of the GLR or the city states. In year three of the truce, soldiers from both sides started slipping across the border at night, raiding towns and farms. Who ordered the raids and why they did this was unclear. Some people said the soldiers did it for food—GLR soldiers were poorly paid and badly fed. Crops and livestock were stolen. But the guards from the city states were far from angelic: GLR farms were burned in retaliation. Then came bloodier reprisals. A GLR family was murdered in their beds. On Christmas Day of year four, rockets were volleyed back and forth over the mountains. Casualties were limited, but the rumors multiplied. People talked openly about another war. Some panicked. The migration started slowly, but soon gained a life of its own. 

By year five, the area on either side of the border had emptied out, becoming a collection of abandoned homes, grassed over roads and farmland gone to seed. The soldiers—GLR troops on one side, New England and the city states men and women on the other—retreated to the relative safety of the edges of their respective territory. The empty buffer land seemed to defuse the tension. No one wanted to live there, so why fight over it? 

People started calling it the Gray Zone.

A few stayed: hermits, cultists, survivalists, the very poor and the very stubborn. But there was no electricity in the Gray Zone, no clean water, not even basic government functions, and by year ten, all but the truly determined—or truly crazy—were gone. There was one barely maintained highway—the interstate once known as I-80—but only the most intrepid drivers braved it. The pavement was pitted and broken, fallen trees or stray rocks were only sporadically removed, and rumor had it that criminal gangs stopped trucks, stole the cargo, and executed the drivers. Most trade went north through Canada, south through the Democratic Union, or was flown overhead by plane. 

That’s not to say that no one ever went into the Zone. People did. They just did it very carefully. Billy Crawford was one of them. 

*

“We keep going,” Billy says, motioning up the hill with his right hand. “But quietly.”

“You want to tell me what the problem is?” Jackie asks. 

“Don’t know yet.”

“But something? You’re not just chasing your own shadow?”

Billy shoots Jackie an annoyed look, but Jackie grins in return. Jackie is happy go lucky. Billy is not. Jackie believes that everything works out in the end, and that the universe will look after him. Billy believes the opposite, that if he is not constantly vigilant, forces will conspire to put him in the grave. He is only thirty-five, but he has been close to that grave more than once. He has a ragged, inch-wide scar running down the left side of his face and neck, stopping at his chest, that he feels proves his point. A Federal artillery shell exploded at Billy’s feet during the Second Battle of St. Louis. That he wasn’t killed was a miracle, but the hot gases from the explosion burnt his cheek and the skin of his throat. Shrapnel from the shell cut through ligaments in his left knee. Because of it, when the pain flares, Billy sometimes limps. He doesn’t like to look in mirrors. The scar reminds him of his own stupidity—he will never fight other people’s battles again, ever. Billy prefers the anonymity of the forest—smuggling may be hard work, but nobody stares at his deformities in the Gray Zone. 

“Keep an eye out,” Billy says, trying not to get annoyed. 

“All I seen are rabbits, deer and piles of rotting leaves.”

“Look harder.”

“See, that’s unfair. Your default is to think that I’m shirking. But I’m not. I can do two separate things at the same time. I can watch the forest for border guards, and I can expound on the corruption of the Smith family—”

“Easy,” Billy says, eyes flashing to the thick brush all around them. Getting caught smuggling is one thing, but denouncing the ruling family of the Great Lakes Republic is orders of magnitude more dangerous. To Billy’s mind, Jackie is always too free with his opinions. Billy believes that no good ever comes of antagonizing the powerful. And they are smugglers after all—near invisibility is their stock in trade. 

“We’re four hours into the Zone, Billy. We haven’t seen another soul since Altoona. And anyway, to hell with those Smith bastards. They are keeping us in chains. I speak truth to power. You’ve got to have a point of view on the world, Billy, or what’s your reason for being alive?”

“Do I need a reason for being alive? Can’t I just be?”

Jackie laughs merrily. He’s gotten Billy talking, which Billy suspects is half the point of Jackie’s rants to begin with. “Classic Billy Crawford. Just be. Never get involved. You know what Karl Marx said—the unexamined life is not worth living.”

“I don’t think Karl Marx said that.” 

“Whatever. Someone said it, and the point is, it’s true. You’ve got to look inward, Billy, or you’re just the same as those stupid squirrels, running around, collecting nuts and then eating nuts. To what end? Is a nut collection what you’re working towards?”

“Not sure,” Billy says. “I kind of like nuts.”

Jackie snorts a joyous laugh, and for a moment, Billy lets his wariness go. Despite his eccentricities, Billy enjoys Jackie’s company: Jackie is Billy’s best friend. Truth be told, he is Billy’s only friend. Billy’s life, right now, is as good as he can expect it to be, and that’s just fine. The forest is just the forest, the stirring in the bushes is just animals. The October sun is bright enough to keep him warm, and the fall clouds are beautiful enough to keep him happy. For a few seconds, Billy lets his guard down. He closes his eyes and lets the sounds of the empty forest wash over him.

When he opens his eyes again, there are four soldiers standing in his path. 

Archive of the Unraveling: Artifact #2

Chapter 17 of THE HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA, required social studies textbook for 12th grade students in Fulton and DeKalb counties. Volume 7, 2042 edition. Answers to the knowledge quiz can be found in the appendix on page 223.

BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF THE UNRAVELING

October, 2030. The aftereffects of the H3N7 pandemic push the US economy into the second deep recession within a decade. The unemployment rate in the United States hits 37 percent. 

November 2. Citizens for a New Future, a third party, wins 169 seats in the United States House of Representatives. 

January 10, 2031. Congress passes Omnibus Bill 4077. Tariffs and taxes are raised on 13 sectors of the economy, including oil production, car manufacturing, and farming. 

March 14. Kansas wheat farmer Max Sepoil chains himself to a fence at the Wichita Statehouse and goes on a hunger strike. He demands Omnibus Bill 4077, with all its farm tariffs, be rescinded, and refuses to pay his taxes. 

March 20. Max Sepoil makes his “What Price Freedom” speech on the steps of the Kansas Statehouse. The speech is televised live across the country. Immediately following the speech, Sepoil is arrested and brought to a Lawrence, Kansas hospital, where he is force fed through a tube. 

April 1. Seven anti-tax farmers, thought to be stock-piling weapons, are killed in a raid by federal agents at the MacMillan Farm outside of Dodge City, KS. The incident becomes known as the Kansas Tax Massacre. 

April 4. Max Sepoil is shot and killed in his hospital room. The assassin escapes. 

April – July, 2031. One quarter of all households in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri refuse to pay their federal taxes. Evening street protests erupt in cities across those states. The movement is dubbed The Sepoil Rebellion. 

BILLY

Gray Zone

Why did Billy do it? Why did he join the rebellion? 

The reasons were unclear to him—Billy was not much given to self-reflection—but certain things stood out. Before the war, in high school, back before everything went to shit, Billy had been a minor star. He was an all-Missouri high school middle linebacker. He was moderately handsome, was dating Katie D’Angelo—the second best-looking girl in his class—and had a football scholarship offer from the University of Missouri. His parents weren’t wealthy—his dad paved roads for the county—but they always had food on the table. Billy did well enough in class, but he preferred reading science fiction and fantasy novels to studying. When he blew out his knee during a spring practice session and the scholarship offer disappeared, he wasn’t too disappointed. He’d never loved football—it was a means to an end. But with the training gone, he started smoking a lot of pot and drinking too much beer, even on weeknights. In hindsight, this was less a fork in the road of his life and more of a continuation of his true nature. Billy was not a joiner. He liked to keep to himself. He was a homebody and a bit of an eccentric, and he was fine with that. Being on a football field in a stadium full of screaming students and parents made his skin crawl. 

Then the rebellion happened. To Billy, the whole thing came on so quick, like a cold you wake up with one morning when you went to bed feeling fine the night before. Only, this was so much more than a cold. A fever. No, worse, a cancer. Billy remembered watching the television coverage of Max Sepoil, his speech on the steps of the Kansas Statehouse, the way the farmer’s words tugged at some long-buried place in Billy’s pride. The people of Kansas were sick of being told what to do by fancy folk in the rest of the country. Fancy folk on the coasts, was what Billy was pretty sure Sepoil meant. Independence was the cure for what ailed them. When the fighting started, a few of Billy’s friends joined the militias right away. One day they were hanging out drinking Coors in Rickett’s Park, the next day they were gone. Just like that. Billy remembered feeling a twinge of jealousy. His friends were going to test their courage, have adventures, cover themselves in glory. Wasn’t that what Billy wanted as well? 

Billy smoked an enormous bowl of pot the morning he signed up for the 2nd Missouri Irregulars. He had a vague memory of thinking that people in DC and New York and California were trying to force him to change his way of life. They’re trying to make us live like they do, think what they think, believe in things that we, the people of Missouri, just cannot abide by. We can’t let that happen. But had he really thought that? Maybe he’d just been stoned. Maybe he’d just wanted to join his friends in their adventure. He could no longer remember. And what were the things that the coastal elites wanted us to believe in? Abortion? Flag-burning? A socialist utopia? Truth be told, if he wasn’t going to the University of Missouri to play football, what else would he do with his life? Pave roads in Phelps County like his dad? Work the chicken fryer at Popeye’s? That future seemed too bleak to contemplate, while fighting for freedom—that seemed simple and just. Billy understood how to fight and knew he’d be good at it. He was strong, he was unafraid, and he was a crack shot. He’d practiced his entire childhood, hunting deer and wild hogs through the forests of central Missouri. All he needed was an enemy. 

Eleven years later, with a limp, a scarred face and a life consigned to wandering the Gray Zone with backpacks full of contraband, all that reasoning seemed silly. That, Billy thought with a jolt of shame, was why you should think twice before joining some damn rebellion. That was why you kept your nose out of other people’s business. 

*

The four hard-looking soldiers are dressed in non-descript brown-green camouflage. There are no markings on their uniforms to let Billy know whether they are GLR or city state. Two are crouched low in a gulley at the side of the trail, backs pressed against a dirt embankment. The other two stand single file on the trail. Billy knows right away that these are not border guards. Border guards are mostly fat, lazy and drunk. They stop smugglers only to extract bribes and line their own pockets. These men are coiled and wiry, their faces smeared with black grease, their eyes calm and dead looking. The soldiers seem just as surprised to see Billy and Jackie as Billy and Jackie are to see them. One of them starts to reach for the assault rifle slung over his shoulder, but a second soldier—Billy sizes him up as their leader—makes the faintest of back and forth flicks with his finger, and the would-be shooter freezes. 

“Citizens of the GLR,” Billy says quickly to the men, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. The soldiers seem like mercenaries to Billy, and the only country that would put mercenaries into the Gray Zone is the GLR. “Don’t want trouble.” 

“Smuggling’s illegal,” the leader of the soldiers says. He is older than the other three, his square jaw coated with stubble. His voice is barely above a whisper. 

“Just trying to make a living,” Billy puts his hands in the air in a gesture of peace—and submission. “Not harming anyone.”

A third soldier, a long sniper’s rifle strapped to his chest, points at Jackie. “What’s in the packs?”

“Medicine, dude,” Jackie says, his voice quick and rambling. “Antibiotics. Penicillin and anti-virals. We get it half price at this pharmaceutical factory outside of Cleveland, and then we walk it across the Gray Zone. We got a pickup truck stashed at the border of the city states, and we drive it into Manhattan and sell it at a little bit of a profit. Like seriously, it ain’t much but it keeps us in cigarettes and—”

Billy makes a hissing sound with his teeth, and Jackie falls silent. The soldiers all look at Billy. They are reading him for signs of aggression, and he knows it. He has served as a soldier and knows how soldiers think. He also knows that what he does next will decide whether they kill him or not. Billy moves slowly, carefully, bringing his hands to his side. “We’ll just be on our way, and you can be on yours. All glory to the GLR.” He says those last words with as much passion as he can muster. 

“All glory to the GLR,” the soldiers reply in unison. 

Now I know where they’re from, Billy thinks to himself, so they aren’t keeping it that much of a secret. Billy reaches back and yanks Jackie hard by the arm. He pulls his friend behind him, sidestepping the soldiers and double-timing up the trail. “Don’t look back,” Billy whispers. “Just go fast.” 

“Are they going to shoot us?” Jackie hisses. 

“Don’t talk either. Just move.” 

They walk silently and hard for ten minutes. Billy sets a brutal pace, a jog just below an outright run, and Jackie can barely keep up. Billy expects to feel a bullet pierce his back at any second. Sweat pours down his neck, soaking the T-shirt under his leather jacket. 

“Got to take a break,” Jackie says, breath ragged with exertion. 

“No,” Billy says. “Keep going.” 

“Billy, please.”

“No.”

“Who the hell were they?” 

“Special forces. Great Lakes Second Army.”

“How do you know?”

“Tattoo. On the middle one’s forearm. White skull and red sickle. Harvest the dead. Their motto. Saw it when we walked past them.” 

“Oh good Christ, Billy. Special Forces. Those guys are killers. What the hell are they doing up here?” 

Billy has been asking himself the same question. Why are GLR special forces soldiers in the Gray Zone? Why weren’t they in standard GLR uniforms? And why didn’t the soldiers shoot them both on the spot? They clearly had considered it, but their commander had signaled them to wait. Noise, Billy decides. They were probably dropped by helicopter at the top of Red Rock Peak, and were working their way down the mountain. They were after something else—someone else, most probably—and shooting a pair of lowly smugglers would have given away their position. 

“They’re hunting,” Billy says. “Hunting someone, would be my guess.” 

“Fuck me. You think they’ll come after us? You think they’re going to track us?” 

“No,” Billy lies. “Not worth their time.” But Billy suspects that it is worth their time, that whatever they are in the Gray Zone to do, it is serious and it is important, and killing two random smugglers is of little consequence to them. Ten minutes ago the GLR men had been surprised, and needed a moment to think out the consequences of shooting Billy and Jackie on the spot; now that they’ve thought it over, hunting down the two smugglers probably seems like a good idea. But Billy isn’t about to tell Jackie that because, well, what good would it do? Neither Billy nor Jackie have guns. They both hate weapons, ever since the war, and neither has fired a shot since leaving the Irregulars. 

“So can we take a rest? If we aren’t worth their time. My throat is closing up.” 

“A little further. The notch is half a mile up.” Billy points. Barely visible through the trees is a V-shaped notch, a natural cut in the ridgeline where they can hike easily into the next valley and save a good two hours travel time. And where they will be safe from GLR special forces. 

“My lungs are burning, Billy. Please. Just five minutes.” 

Billy peers back down the trail. No leaves rustle in the distance, no birds flush from the bushes. Maybe the four hard men aren’t coming after them. Maybe Billy is being paranoid. 

“Three minutes,” Billy says, lowering his pack carefully onto the ground. Jackie had not lied to the soldiers. Each of them is carrying a hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds of pills and vials full of antibiotics. Ever since flus and Coronaviruses started periodically sweeping the globe, antibiotics and antivirals have become a scarce resource. They can be traded almost as easily as cash. Each pack full of drugs is worth two thousand dollars—New York City State dollars, not GLR Sovereigns, which are next to worthless—and Billy doesn’t want to break any of his load. Their margin on smuggling is low to begin with; losing product only makes it lower. 

“A smoke, a nip of a drink,” Jackie says, setting his own pack down with a thud. “And then good as new. My promise to you.” 

“Don’t make promises,” Billy says. “Just rest and then let’s keep moving.” The two of them crouch low in the shadow of a line of red spruce. 

“You’re mad at me,” Jackie says, lighting a cigarette and eyeing Billy’s face. “For sleeping late this morning. And drinking too much last night. I slowed us down. If we’d gone faster, maybe we don’t run into those guys.”  

“Don’t kid yourself. You’re not that important.” Billy continues to watch the thick forest below them.

“You always know how to make a guy feel better.”

“And when we left this morning had nothing to do with seeing those soldiers. Just luck.”

“You’re lying. But I don’t mind. Kind of appreciate it, to be honest.”  

“Two minutes.”

Jackie pulls a flask from his jacket and drinks. He holds it out for Billy. Billy declines the offer. “One minute.” 

Jackie finishes his cigarette and puts away the flask. “Ready.” 

Billy gazes up the mountain. Above them, the path to the notch leads out of the forest and through a sloping rock field, unprotected by trees, a stretch of open trail that zig-zags across bare ground before disappearing into the next valley. 

“Here’s the choice,” Billy says, nodding toward the notch. “We can—”

“Walk out over open ground and save four hours, toward the notch, but we might get shot, because there is no cover. Or we walk south to the next pass, and waste another half a day, but don’t leave the forest.”

“That’s about right.” Billy appreciates Jackie’s honesty in moments like this. Jackie is not the bravest man alive—in fact, he is an avowed coward—but he will face the truth in dark moments, and Billy believes that this is the best way to keep your sanity. 

“I think those soldiers got other crap on their mind,” Jackie says. “Bigger fish to fry. We just got unlucky and met them, but they don’t care. Like you said, we’re not that important.”

Billy considers this. Jackie has a point. But Jackie often has points, and most of them are proven wrong over time. 

“And also,” Jackie adds, “they might come after us if we go south through the forest too. Just track us down like deer. What’s the difference to them? So all things considered, I say we head out over the field toward the notch. The faster we make the next valley, the better.”

Billy exhales. “I go first. You count to ten and then follow me.”

“Got it.” 

Billy hoists his pack onto his shoulders. “You run hard. Hard as you can. You have to keep up.”

“Don’t need to tell me twice, bro. It’s my life.”

Billy counts down from three in his head, then charges out onto the path, out of the cover of the trees, huffing hard toward the notch a half mile away. He is forty yards out of the forest when he hears Jackie’s footsteps behind him. Now they are both in the open. All they can do is hurry. Billy does a quick calculation in his head, and figures it will take them about six minutes to cover the half mile of trail to the notch. Six nerve-wracking minutes. He glances back. Jackie is already falling behind, slowing, the incline taking its toll on his pace. Billy curses silently, slows, then stops. “Push, Jackie, faster.”

“Trying man,” Jackie says. “I’m—”

Billy sees the damage the bullet does before he hears the muffled crack of the rifle. Jackie spins to his left as the bullet hits his shoulder, blood misting into the air in a spray of red. A second shot follows the first, a fraction of a second later, and this one hits Jackie in the neck. Jackie drops in his tracks, and Billy, his army training kicking in, drops to the ground as well. He yanks his backpack off his shoulders, and curls up behind it, hoping the mass of tablets and glass vials will blunt the impact of any follow-up bullets. It doesn’t.

A half dozen shots rip through his backpack, clipping the ground around him. Billy knows that he has seconds to act, maybe not even that, so he leaps to his feet, bullets snapping past his head, then dives behind a chair-sized rock near Jackie’s body. The shooting stops. 

Billy lies there in the grass and catches his breath. A desperate gurgle comes up from his friend’s wounded throat, a gasping moan mixed with the pop of air leaving his lungs. 

“Jackie, you hear me? Jackie? Talk to me.” 

Jackie moans in reply, his breathing coming in short rasps. 

“I’m going to crawl up behind you. I’m going to cut your backpack off. Then I’m going to carry you back into the woods. Okay? You got that?” 

Jackie answers with a wet gasp. Billy crawls closer to Jackie, trying not to let the tops of his shoulders peek over the tips of the rocks. He expects to feel the sharp cut of a bullet at any moment, and his body tenses in anticipation. But none comes. The special forces men are waiting, Billy knows, until he raises his head above the grass line, and then they will kill him. 

Billy pulls his hunting knife from his pants pocket, and saws off the straps of Jackie’s backpack, then shoves it away from the two of them. He looks into his friend’s eyes. They are wide open and panicked. Blood is pouring from the wound in Jackie’s neck. He burbles a word to Billy, but Billy can’t make sense of it. 

“Shh. Don’t talk. Just listen. I’m going to lift you. I’m going to put you on my shoulders and carry you back to the trees.”

Jackie nods his head slightly. Yes, yes, do that. 

Billy turns his back to Jackie, then pulls his friend’s arms around his own shoulders. He braces himself with his elbow against the rocky ground, then with one powerful squat, lifts Jackie into the air, a fireman’s hold on his back. Billy doesn’t pause to gain his balance, just bolts hard down the hill, barely upright, more falling than actually running, one foot pushing off after the other. The firing starts immediately, and Billy can hear the bullets whizzing past him. He thinks he feels an impact, and wonders for a moment if that is a bullet hitting Jackie, or himself. 

They make it to the edge of the trees faster than Billy expects, the bullets chewing up the wood of a nearby pine tree and then stopping. The special forces men no longer have a clear shot. Billy doesn’t stop—he runs as fast as he can, sideways along the face of the mountain, dodging tree trunks and brush, angling toward a series of small caves about a mile to the south. Billy figures they stand a decent chance of staying alive if they can make it that far. 

“Looking for the caves, Jackie. Remember the caves?” 

Jackie doesn’t answer. 

The run is a blur for Billy. Sweat and blood splashes into his eyes. His heart pounds so hard, and his lungs heave so heavily, that he has no sense if anyone is following him. Not that it matters—if the soldiers have a clear shot, they will take it, and he and Jackie will be dead. 

The first cave appears on his left, a black hole in the landscape beneath tangled tree roots. Billy skips it, looking for a larger one he’d slept in a few years back. He cuts up the side of the mountain, leaving the trail, passing a few rock outcroppings on his way. He finds the big cave on the far side of a brook. He hoists Jackie off his shoulders and carries him in both arms into the cave. The cave is dark and wet, three feet high and five or so across. Billy knows it extends in and down about twenty feet, and so drags Jackie on his knees deep inside. Once they reach the back of the cave, Billy props his friend on a thick bed of moss in the blackness, bending low to what he thinks is Jackie’s face. 

“Jackie. You hear me? Say something.”

Jackie doesn’t say a word. Billy tries to listen for his friend’s breathing, but there is only silence, and then the faint trickle of the stream outside the cave entrance. Billy roots around in Jackie’s pocket for his lighter, finds it, and then flicks it alight. Jackie’s face comes into view in the orange glow that lights up the cave. Jackie’s eyes are open, but they are blank and still. His open mouth is clotted with blood. 

Billy takes his thumb off the lighter and the cave returns to darkness.