“Nope. Don’t know jack shit about ’em.”

Somehow hearing that put Blake at ease. Maybe he had overreacted. He’d probably find Jesse and Shane just fine the next day, but if he didn’t, he was relieved that Terry didn’t know their families or where they lived any more than Blake did.

“Them boys better hunker down tonight,” Terry said as they drove north on 441 through Dillard. “There’s panthers in them hills.”

Blake chuckled. “There ain’t no mountain lions or panthers around here no more,” Blake said, his mountain accent coming on stronger every minute he talked to Terry.

“Well...ain’t no mountain lions no more I reckon,” Terry conceded, “but there sure is heck is panthers. We got pictures of them with our deer cam on the Sky Valley side of Rabun Bald. DNR tells folks they ain’t no panthers cause if they admit it folks’ll want to hunt and kill ’em. Then there won’t be none.”

Blake listened to pass the time, wondering as he drove the winding road up to Sky Valley what really did lurk in the woods on that mountainside...what came out at night. He had hunted the hills a fair amount growing up in Rabun County and felt pretty comfortable in the woods. Comfortable enough to know one thing for sure. He wouldn’t want to be in those woods alone at night.

Chapter 11

Smoke wafted through the air and carried with it a symphony of odors. Yeast, burnt corn, fire: smells commingled with sounds, the crackling of a nearby fire, and the sizzling sound that accompanied another smell, bacon.

Ozzie’s eyes twitched open and quickly blinked shut, not ready to accept the harsh, late morning sunlight. He opened them again, squinting, feeling as if he were in a dream. He was lying on the ground and everything appeared sideways to him. Rolling his neck to the right, he was able to take in more of his surroundings. Above was a wooden structure, the underside of a porch. A cabin. Ozzie tilted his head back to see an open door that went into the cabin. A hard, wooden floor lay beneath him as he turned his attention to what lay across him. It had been a long time since Ozzie had felt anything as soft as the blanket that someone had draped over him. Slowly he regained consciousness, not yet thinking of how he came to be there. Rather, just painting a relaxed picture of his environment. Like someone on a morphine drip, conscious to the world, but absent of reason. He let his neck roll to his left. A few feet from him a fire ring encircled a well-tended fire, above which a flat, metal surface rested. Smoke rose from the surface, as did the sound of meat sizzling.

“Howdy,” a voice said from the other side of the fire. Ozzie’s focus shifted from the fire to the man the way an auto-focus camera resets its focus on a distant object. The feeling of sedation began to wear off as Ozzie saw the man. He labored with great difficulty to remember what happened, how he got here, but was able to string together only memory fragments. Hunting mushrooms with mom, running through the woods, getting shot! Coyotes! The fragments stopped there, not remembering Eduardo, Felipe, who this man was, or how he got here.

“The name’s Hal,” the man said. “Hal Skinner.”

Hal leaned forward and stoked the fire, and then sat silently for a second, not sure what else to say. He had not spoken to another human being in almost five years. In all that time he had spoken to himself countless times, concluding ultimately that that was all thinking really was; someone talking to himself. He had tested his new theory once a few years back trying to see if he could think without a voice in his head speaking. He wasn’t able to.

It surprised him a little that he was able to speak so easily to Ozzie. He thought of movies he had seen years before, in which people were stranded or isolated for years and almost forgot how to speak. Then again, Hal had never really stopped talking. He simply ranted to animals now. Of course, he hadn’t forgotten his own name, but hearing himself say the name “Hal Skinner” almost startled him, as if he had come to believe his identity had been erased along with his physical being in the civilized world.

Ozzie stared at Hal, not feeling afraid and unable to act on his fear if he had. The frazzled hood of a wool jacket loosely covered greasy, scraggly hair that draped over the man’s weathered blue eyes, the bangs shielding the dirt-encrusted crow’s feet around his left eye. His unkempt beard, a scruffy mixture of rust, gray, black, and dirt rose to meet his hair, giving his face the look of a soiled egg. His cheeks were well worn, stained with dirt, age, and tears. Indeed, he had his reasons to cry, to live here alone in the woods and to leave the rest of society behind.

“You probably smelled that batch of moonshine I got brewing over there,” Hal said. Ozzie said nothing and kept staring as Hal struggled to compose his next sentence. Ozzie understood none of Hal’s words, but did understand his tone. He wasn’t like any of the other men. He seemed kind, more like his mother.

“Got some bacon frying too,” Hal paused, thinking of something to add. “Not pork bacon, mind you. Venison bacon. I don’t—” Hal fought for words, not used to having to say anything. “I don’t care for pork too much, you understand. Hell, can’t get it much around here anyway. Isn’t like there’s a Piggly Wiggly in these woods.”

Ozzie stared at Hal.

Hal looked at Ozzie then back at the fire, poking it some. “Hell, I figure you probably can’t understand a word I’m saying,” he said. “You ain’t exactly answering back, but what the hell do I know? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Ozzie stared at Hal and farted. Hal laughed for the first time in over five years, since before his wife’s funeral. “Good idea,” Hal said, and matched Ozzie one. Ozzie blinked, but said nothing. He rolled his head again to look at the door, staring at the top of the entrance. A strange inscription caught his eye and Ozzie tried to turn to make it out.

“TEOTWAWKI” were the letters that had been carved and burnt into the cabin wall.

Hal caught Ozzie looking up.

“Tee Ought Walk E,” Hal said. “That’s how you say that, you know. It means The End Of The World As We Know It. Tee Ought Walk E. That’s why I came out here after,” Hal blurted, his blood boiling as the memory of his wife rose to the surface. He paused, realizing that no one had forced him to bring it up. He had almost volunteered to bring it up. Don’t go there Hal, please don’t relive that, he counseled himself, too late as the cork was set to pop and spill his bottled emotions. Hal’s grip on the poking stick tightened as he jabbed the fire and went back in time, unable to differentiate if he was merely thinking or talking aloud, as they had become one and the same to him by now.

“There was just nothing left to me, for me, after she died. Still isn’t. It’s like I’m trapped in a different world. Landscapes are in black and white, food has no taste, flowers have no smell. I see it all but everything is void of virtue,” Hal blurted, without knowing it. He was in some place else now, that other place he went to so often, where he kept himself right after she died, the time and place where suffering and isolation was the greatest.

“I imprisoned myself the minute the funeral was over. Didn’t take calls, allowed no one to see me, wouldn’t even talk to her parents. Just shut down, shut the world out,” Hal continued, spewing his stream of recollection as if on the sofa at a shrink’s office.

Ozzie stared into the fire. The realization that Ozzie couldn’t understand a word he was saying encouraged Hal to continue. “I took a month to get everything in order. You know, accounts, property, bills and all that bullshit. I decided I’d go into the woods and disappear. Don’t really know why. Figured I could suffer and die here, I guess I wanted that most of all. Didn’t have it in me to commit suicide. Just didn’t feel that was my right. But I wanted it to all be over. The hate, the suffering, the anger, the loss.”