Lexicon

to navigate along the side of the pickup’s bed.
    “Fuck,” Wil said, and pulled the trigger. The gun boomed. The man fell off the truck. Wil dropped the shotgun without thinking. “Goddammit fuck!”
    “Good,” said Tom.
    The transport’s engine bellowed. Its exhausts hissed; its wheels began to turn.
    “Now,” said Tom. “Help me, please.”
    Wil reached down and grasped Tom’s wrist. By the time he got Tom out of the cabin, the transport was close. They jumped into deep, shadowed snow. He began to forge forward. He made it out of the shade of the pickup and his shadow stretched out before him, long and thin and sharpening at the edges, coalescing into something vulnerable. The ground shook. There was a shriek of metal and Wil thought,
It’s through the railing; it’s thirty feet away
, and he didn’t need to turn and verify this but did anyway. The transport bounced toward the pickup and swatted it aside. The idea of running suddenly seemed very stupid to Wil, because the transport was as big as a mountain. It was going to run him down no matter what he did.
    Tom grabbed him by the ear. The transport hit deep snow and threw it up in a wave. Wil hadn’t factored in the snow: That would slow it. He realized he could survive, or could have, had he thought of this about ten seconds ago. The truck plowed toward him, fountaining snow. It slowed and stopped. Its tires spun. Wil reached out and touched its bull bar.
    Tom climbed the grille and raised the shotgun. The driver was a woman, Wil saw. Early forties. Glasses, kind of bookish. Not the sort of person he would have expected to try to kill him with an animal truck. She looked at Tom with an expression of mild intent and reached for a pistol that lay on the dash.
    Tom fired through the windshield. Wil looked away. In the light, the snow was diamonds. A trillion tiny diamonds.
    Tom dropped beside him. “Move.”
    He trudged through the snow. They didn’t speak. Beyond the reach of the transport’s headlights, the snow grew waist deep. Wil’s breath steamed. Eventually, he said, “I can’t keep going.”
    Tom looked at him. There was something terrible about his face. Tom looked at the cattle yard. Then, abruptly, he sat. He began to dig shells out of his coat pocket and feed them into the shotgun.
    Wil sat beside him, panting. The transport was perhaps five hundred yards away, its lights blazing. He could see the hole in its windshield. “Was that Woolf?”
    Tom looked at him. “What?”
    “That woman.”
    “No,” Tom said.
    “Oh.”
    “If that was Woolf, I would be weeping hot tears of joy.”
    “Oh.”
    “Your hometown, Broken Hill? Woolf did that. Not a chemical spill. Woolf. I would be dancing a jig if that was Woolf.”
    “Got it,” Wil said.
    “Not Woolf,” Tom said. “Not Woolf.”
    They sat in silence. Nothing moved but the wind. “Did you know that woman in the transport?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why did she try to kill us?”
    Tom didn’t answer.
    Wil shivered. He was wearing a T-shirt. “I’m cold.”
    Tom dropped the shotgun and lunged at him. Wil yelped, falling backward, and Tom grabbed his shirt, pulled him up, thrust him back to the snow, pulled him up again, and shoved him down. “What,” Wil gasped. Tom grabbed a handful of snow and mashed it into Wil’s mouth.
    “You’re cold?” Tom said. “You’re cold?”
    He released Wil. By the time Wil sat up, Tom had resumed his position and was facing the distant truck. Wil brushed snow from his face. “I’m sorry.”
    “You need to be better than this,” Tom said. “You need to be worth it.”
    Wil folded his hands beneath his armpits and looked at the sky.
    “So far, you’re not worth shit.”
    “Okay, look, I didn’t ask to be kidnapped.”
    “
Saved
, is another way of putting it.”
    “I didn’t ask to be saved.”
    “Go, then.”
    “I’m not saying I want to
go
.”
    “Leave. See how long you last.”
    “I’m not saying that.”
    “You useless fuck,” said Tom.
    “I did shoot a guy. I mean, not to overstate my contribution, but I did just fucking shoot a guy.”
    Tom exhaled.
    “And I pulled you out of the pickup.” A deep, numbing cold sunk into his body. He opened his mouth to give his jaw muscles something to do. “You didn’t run over those people.”
    Tom looked at him.
    “We could have gotten away. You just had to run over them.”
    “Yeah,” Tom said.
    “Why didn’t you?” Tom didn’t answer. “You shot that