“One night in Anchorage and he was in a verrrrry big hurry to get home,” Lenna agreed. “He missed someone badly, and I don’t think it was Key.”
Everyone laughed. Fine. Whatever. At least now nobody thought he was falling short of making Izzy’s trip worthwhile. He swung the ax down, leaned the handle against a standing tree, and stretched. “I was just trying to get you guys home expediently. Figured you night be tired after a red-eye from Seattle.” So saying, he turned and started up the hill, away from the trail.
“Hey, where’re you going?” Rose called after him. “We’re not done yet. I need to tell everyone about the phone call Lilah overheard while she stayed over at your place last night. Come back here.”
He rolled his eyes heavenward and kept walking but raised a hand to his ear. “You hear that?”
“What?” Rose replied. “I hear nothing.”
“Really? I hear nature calling. Do you all plan to listen in on that as well?” There were absolutely no boundaries in a small town.
“Naw.” Tom laughed. “I think I’d rather hear about the other call.”
Great. He climbed a fair distance away, went behind an outcropping of rocks that pretty well walled-off the section of woods, unzipped his fly, and aimed for the base of a cottonwood. Sighing, he relaxed his shoulders and stared off into the distance.
“Heyyyy…” A voice faded in from lightyears away to just over his shoulder. He jumped, turned, and…
Oh fuck. Not again. Not now, in broad daylight. Was he daydreaming?
His dead brother’s form wavered there, less than an arm’s length from him, wearing the navy blue worsted wool peacoat Bridget had given him for his birthday—and Shay had “borrowed” without thinking to ask first—the sturdy old Crispi hunting boots he’d called his “lucky” boots for reasons that had nothing to do with hunting, and the devil-may-care smile that accounted for more of Shay’s enduring lucky streak than the boots.
“Not good,” Trace muttered, hoping the sound of his own voice would snap reality back into place. It didn’t. Shay continued to fade in and fade out like a…spirit? Hallucination? A delusion brought on by a psychotic break? His head suddenly felt like a helium balloon. That was new. He mustered enough wherewithal to zip his pants. He didn’t want to pass out in the woods with his dick hanging out.
Already dreading the experiment, he opened his mouth and forced the name past his numb lips. “Shay?” His voice sounded hollow and far away.
“Yeah. Give me a second. Dang it. I suck as this materializing business.”
Oh God. It answered. Shay answered. Which was impossible, and yet he sounded just like himself. The parts of Trace’s nervous system in charge of keeping him from going timber like a two hundred-year-old tree with rotted roots started shutting down. “I’m…out.” He didn’t know if he was warning himself, his dead brother, or any small animals that happened to be in his path, but he knew his brain took a long, slow swim around inside his skull, his eyes found the treetops, and then the gray sky, and then…just gray. Cloudy gray, with little black dots that flickered like gnats across his vision.
Shay’s voice came again, a little farther away. “Don’t do that. Shit. I can’t seem to…get a…fix on this place. Sorry. I’ll be back. Later.”
“Please no,” he mumbled, or thought he did, and then everything went blank.
Chapter Nineteen
“Is he dead?
“For Christ’s sake, Wing. He’s not dead. His eyes are wide open. He’s breathing.”
Trace blinked two faces into focus. Protective goggles perched atop each head. Flecks of sawdust decorated their hair. Mad and Wing stared down at him in concerned fascination, goggle imprints around their eyes.
“Wha…” He cleared his creaky throat and tried again. “What happened?”
“Unclear,” Mad replied. “Someone called my name—I thought it was you—and we killed the saws and came over to find you conked out right here. Your turn. What happened? Branch get you?”
He raised his head, slightly, and frowned, trying to recall. “No, I don’t think so. Last thing I remember, I had to take a leak, and then…” Uh-oh. He’d had another visit from Shay, complete with conversation this time.
Someone called from below, and Wing bellowed, “Up here! Something’s wrong with Trace.”
That brought the sounds of many feet racing through the underbrush. Great. The whole gang would soon be hovering, looking at him like something on a microscope slide. Not sure he was ready for it, but unwilling to be the thing on a slide, he pushed himself into a sitting position. A dizzying wave washed over him, and he must have looked like shit because Mad said, “Whoa, there,” and put hands up like he was ready to grab hold if he had to.
“Take it slow,” Wing suggested, as Jorg, Lenna, Tom, Annie and Rose broke through the trees and formed a semi-circle around him.
“I’m okay.”
Rose elbowed her way to the front row. “What happened?”
“I—”
Wing took over. “We found him lying here, kinda…” He rolled his eyeballs back in his head and let his mouth go slack in an impressive zombie impression.
Rose held her hand up in the victory sign directly in front of his face. “How many fingers?”
Because he’d go cross-eyed trying to bring it into focus, he took her hand and moved it back half a foot. “Four, and one thumb. Same as always.”
“Ha. Ha. Good to know your smart-ass isn’t broken,” she deadpanned. “Not so sure about your hard head.” She reached out and began palpating his skull.
He leaned away. “I’m fine. I just…”
She wouldn’t be evaded. “No bumps,” she told the rest of the group, as if he was an inanimate object. “No bruises. I say no blow to the head.”
Wing crouched closer and looked at him with wide eyes. “Did you see a light kind of hovering the air? A fire in the sky? Do you remember a feeling of weightlessness, or any kind of probe?”
He scrubbed both hands over his face and prayed for patience. “I was not abducted by aliens.”
“It can happen, like that—” Wing snapped his fingers. “They have powers over time and space. You’re gone for a minute or two, our time, but up there in the mothership, they do a full workup, their time, before they spit you back out where they found you.”
“Did they have three tutte?” Jorg asked. “The ones that got to Hans Henderschott did. Says Hans.”