Page 18 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

The place they’d found under the tree wasn’t out of the wind, but it was dry.

They had no idea where the camp was, or how to find the truck from there, or the highway after that. They didn’t even have a gun, just the knife the boy’s father kept strapped to his right hip.

The first two days, the father had shrugged and told the boy not to worry, that the storm couldn’t last.

The whole third day, he’d sat watching the snow fall like ash.

The boy didn’t say anything, not even inside, not even a prayer. One of the times he drifted off, though, waking not to the slap of his father’s fingernail on his cheek but the sound of it, there was a picture he brought up with him from sleep. A rabbit.

He told his father about it and his father pulled his lower lip into his mouth, smiled like the boy had just told a joke.

That night they fell asleep.

This time the boy woke to his father rubbing him all over, trying to make his blood flow. The boy’s father was crying, so the boy told him about the rabbit, how it wasn’t even white like it should be, but brown, lost like them.

His father hugged his knees to his chest and bounced up and down, stared out at all the white past their tree.

“A rabbit?” he said.

The boy shrugged.

Sometime later that day he woke again, wasn’t sure where he was at first. His father wasn’t there. The boy moved his mouth up and down, didn’t know what to say. Rounded off in the crust of the snow were the dragging holes his father had made, walking away. The boy put his hand in the first footstep, then the second, then stood from the tree into the real cold. He followed the tracks until they became confused. He tried to follow them back to the tree but the light was different now. Finally he started running, falling down, getting up, his chest on fire.

His father found him sometime that night, pulled him close.

They lowered themselves under another tree.

“Where were you?” the boy asked.

“That rabbit,” the father said, stroking the boy’s hair down.

“You saw it?”

Instead of answering, the father just stared.

This tree they were under wasn’t as good as the last. The next morning they looked for another, and another, and stumbled onto their first one.

“Home again home again,” the father said, guiding the boy under then gripping onto the back of his jacket, stopping him.

There were tracks coming up out of the dirt, onto the snow. Double tracks, like the split hoof of an elk, except bigger, and not as deep.

“Your rabbit,” the father said.

The boy smiled.

That night his father carved their initials into the trunk of the tree with his knife. Later he broke a dead branch off, tried sharpening it. The boy watched, fascinated, hungry.

“Will it work?” he asked.

His father thumped him in the face, woke him. He asked it again, with his mouth this time.

The father shrugged. His lips were cracked, lined with blood, his beard pushing up through his skin.

“Where do you think it is right now?” he said to the boy.

“The—the rabbit?”

The father nodded.