The Ritual

miserable and sorry for himself than anything else.
    And now they each held a crutch. Dom had found Luke his own wet branch, so they could both support their wincing, shuffling, wounded bodies with dead limbs from ancient trees.
    As they walked, Luke could not talk to Dom. In silence, he would point a hand at gaps in the forest floor, where he thought it best for them to proceed through, in an approximation of the right
outward trajectory. Inside his waterproof, he kept the compass close to his heart. More often than was necessary he would withdraw it and make sure they were close to the coordinates he’d
mapped from up in the tree.
    Talking to each other would waste what little strength they had left. Meeting each other’s eyes could vanquish whatever kept the other one going so slowly, and so carefully away from the
hill. They stayed close together, but somehow avoided each other at the same time.
    Luke kept the knife constantly in one hand, but had so little balance and so much pain throbbing against the walls of his skull, he had no fight left in him. If they were attacked, they were
dead.
    They just hobbled forward, unthinking and unaware of anything but the next footfall; both of them determined to walk in the direction that would take them out of the trees and on to the plain
and towards the river below; or to just keep moving until that time when their pursuer decided to take one of them, and then the other.
    When they found Phil hanging from a Scots pine, they didn’t linger. His butchery was worse than the condition of Hutch’s remains; was more akin to what had befallen
the animal they all found together, so long ago.
    Dom kept sniffing, mumbling to himself; Luke kept his eyes down. Just once he’d looked up at his friend, so wet and spread about the trees, but he would not look again after he’d
seen Phil’s face. They’d even held each other’s eye for a moment.
    Like frightened children, Luke and Dom briefly held each other, arms around necks; each leaning his weight into the other as they staggered under their dead friend’s cold pale feet, away
from him and deeper into the forest.

FORTY-THREE
    And he could think of nothing but water. Daydreamed of cold foresty wetness gushing down his parched throat. Silvery and bubbling across smooth cold pebbles it would rush and
foam icy through a clear stream bed and then pour over his dry lips and drench the desert of his mouth. If they found a stream, he would fill his stomach with aching loveliness for hours until
every cell in his body was saturated with water. Water. The very word burned his whole being with thirst.
    In his swimming vision he looked down at his hands and wrists that were pin-pricking and itching with sharp little sensations and he saw bandy-legged herds of insects drinking until their black
abdomens were bloated. His hands were gloved with them. His neck too. Maybe they were sand flies as the ground was often marshy. He had no strength or balance to knock them away so he let them
feed. At least someone is getting something to drink. He smiled, but it hurt the roof of his skull and took him seconds to ease the smile from his face, so that he was only in the rhythmic
pain and not the dizzy white agony. He would have liked to share the thought with silent plodding Dom, but speech had become impossible.
    He wondered if there was any synaptic fluid left in the ball sockets of his hips. A terrible bony grinding and clicking was felt throughout his body after every ungainly step now. Whitish dots
speckled his vision. To turn around and check on Dom involved stopping and turning his whole body about, because the movement of his neck created streak lightning inside his skull. So he stopped
turning about and checking on Dom. And when he did pause to ease over a rock, or a fallen dead tree, Dom often banged into him and grunted. They were walking so close together, and at such a slow
pace, any pause threatened to topple them both.
    Luke was too wretched in body and spirit to think long about dear Hutch any more, and poor Phil, whom they were leaving behind. As for the other thing that was surely following them, he would
not allow its presence into his exhaustion and delirium either. If he could help it. Not that . They would meet it again soon enough. He knew it. He assumed Dom knew it too.
    At 2 p.m. Luke threw away his crutch and sank to all fours. He would continue on his hands and knees. It was better to have his broken