North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud Page B

foreleg.” He opened one of the bags lashed to the rear sledge, removing an Army-issue revolver. “So go ahead and figure what we don’t need. I gotta tend to her.” He tossed a contemptuous glance at Garner. “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do it.”
    Garner watched as Connelly approached the injured dog, lying away from the others in the snow. She licked obsessively at her broken leg. As Connelly approached she looked up at him, and her tail wagged weakly. Connelly aimed the pistol and fired a bullet through her head. The shot made a flat, inconsequential sound, swallowed up by the vastness of the open plain.
    Garner turned away, emotion surging through him with a surprising, disorienting energy. Bishop met his gaze and offered a rueful smile.
    “Bad day,” he said.

    Still, Atka whimpered.
    Garner laywakeful, staring at the canvas, taut and smooth as the interior of an egg above him. Faber moaned, calling out after some fever phantom. Garner almost envied the man. Not the injury—a nasty compound fracture of the femur, the product of a bad step on the ice when he’d stepped outside the circle of tents to piss—but the sweet oblivion of the morphine doze.
    In France, in the war, he’d known plenty of doctors who’d used the stuff to chase away the night haunts. He’d also seen the fevered agony of withdrawal. He had no wish to experience that, but he felt the opiate lure all the same. He’d felt it then, when he’d had thoughts of Elizabeth to sustain him. And he felt it now—stronger still—when he didn’t.
    Elizabeth had fallen victim to the greatest cosmic prank of all time, the flu that had swept across the world in the spring and summer of 1918, as if the bloody abattoir in the trenches hadn’t been evidence enough of humanity’s divine disfavor. That’s what Elizabeth had called it in the last letter he’d ever had from her: God’s judgment on a world gone mad. Garner had given up on God by then: he’d packed away the Bible Elizabeth had pressed upon him after a week in the field hospital, knowing that its paltry lies could bring him no comfort in the face of such horror, and it hadn’t. Not then, and not later, when he’d come home to face Elizabeth’s mute and barren grave. Garner had taken McReady’s offer to accompany the expedition soon after, and though he’d stowed the Bible in his gear before he left, he hadn’t opened it since and he wouldn’t open it here, either, lying sleepless beside a man who might yet die because he’d had to take a piss—yet another grand cosmic joke—in a place so hellish and forsaken that even Elizabeth’s God could find no purchase here.
    There could be no God in such a place.
    Just the relentless shriek of the wind tearing at the flimsy canvas, and the death-howl agony of the dog. Just emptiness, and the unyielding porcelain dome of the polar sky.
    Garner sat up, breathing heavily.
    Faber muttered under his breath. Garner leaned over the injured man, the stench of fever hot in his nostrils. He smoothed Faber’s hair back from his forehead and studied the leg, swollen tight as a sausage inside the sealskin legging. Garner didn’t like to think what he might see if he slit open that sausage to reveal the leg underneath: the viscous pit of the wound itself, crimson lines of sepsis twining around Faber’s thigh like a malevolent vine as they climbed inexorably toward his heart.
    Atka howled, a long rising cry that broke into pitiful yelps, died away, and renewed itself, like the shriek of sirens on the French front.
    “Jesus,” Garner whispered.
    He fished a flask out of his pack and allowed himself a single swallow of whiskey. Then he sat in the dark, listening to the mournful lament of the dog, his mind filling with hospital images: the red splash of tissue in a steel tray, the enflamed wound of an amputation, the hand folding itself into an outraged fist as the arm fell away. He thought of Elizabeth, too, Elizabeth most of all, buried