The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Cora took the paper. She read it briefly, like a dry goods manifest or a power bill. “Suspicion of murder and—” her voice failed. Johnny Red took the page from her. “Desecration of a corpse?” he finished, both eyebrows up high.

Jane’s cheeks were red: bright and hot and burning. The tears in her eyes were probably scalding. “Her fingers were missing,” she said, out from somewhere far away. “And her stomach—”

“Hey,” Georgie said, and held up one hand. Big Mike Blondin looked like he planned to be sick.

“Wendigo,” Johnny Red said quiet, and it cut every voice in the restaurant dead.

Cora felt for her pack, dipped into it with chilly fingers: empty. “Bum a smoke?” she asked Mike Blondin quietly, and he didn’t even try to make her give him a smile for it. She rolled it between her fingers like a raven’s trophy, held onto it like there was nothing else to hold.

“What do you mean?” Georgie Fiddler said. He was sweating. “Wendigo’s a monster. They’re made up.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t explain wendigo to Georgie Fiddler, not now. Jane stepped in smoothly, taking his arm. “Wendigo aren’t made up,” she said softly. “My grandpa knew one.”

“What happened?” Georgie asked.

Jane hesitated. “They found him at the river and shot him down.”

“We can’t — that’s murder. He’s a person.”

“Not anymore,” Fred Tutcho said softly.

Poor Georgie Fiddler looked around the circle for backup; found none. “Maybe he won’t come back,” he said weakly.

Johnny Red shook his head. “He’ll come back.” There was no food or shelter for two hundred miles in any direction, and he had no jacket, and he was unarmed. Cora didn’t know a whole lot about wendigo, but there were ways in which they were just like people: they wanted above everything to live through the night.

“So what do we do?” Georgie asked.

“We get the shotguns,” Jane said, and shoved the restaurant door open, letting in the night.

“He’s still a person,” Georgie muttered, and the cigarette between Cora’s fingers bent and tore.

There were seven shotguns in the town of Sunrise. Six of them worked. The six shotguns and their owners gathered close in the Sunrise Restaurant with the other eighty-three townsfolk crammed in around them. They locked the doors and turned the outside lights on full. Whatever came, if it threw a shadow, they’d see it coming.

Jane and Georgie and Nate and Daisy and Fred Tutcho and Johnny Red stood behind the counter, lining up ammunition. It was most of it deershot: there weren’t no licences to carry for much else in this small a town. “They’re hard to kill,” Johnny Red said softly; loud enough for Cora to hear where she was pouring hot cocoa into salvaged and washed-up mugs. “You got to shoot and shoot again. Don’t stop, even if he’s got his hands up. Don’t stop ’til he stops moving.”

Cora popped one more marshmallow into the cocoa mug and drifted back to the counter, to the always-filling coffeepot. “Have a minute, Johnny?”

He looked down at her with a frown she hadn’t seen before; tense, old. Tired. “What’s up?”

She glanced around at her people, her family: the Okpiks and Tutchos and Blondins and Hookers and Fiddlers and Johnny Red Antoine from down south in the plains. “Georgie’s right,” she said. “He’s still a person.”

“You didn’t see what he did to Gertie,” Nate said, and she held up a hand, but gently.

“I looked into his eyes,” she said, swallowing back the thought of fingers snapped at the bottommost joint, of intestines looped and gnawed, teeth marks like wolves’. “The real ones. And… that’s still a person. He’s scared.” She hesitated, gathered her breath. “This isn’t old times, where you could just hunt someone down by the river. The Mounties’ll come. They’ll have an inquest. And you know what that means.”

It’d change Sunrise. Knowing everyone by name, knowing their children. Leaving your door unlocked at night. The way a man like Mikey Blondin was bad, but roll-your-eyes bad, and how people didn’t get run out of town or live on welfare or huff rubber cement or sneak liquor before noontime.

It’d change everything.

“He knows something’s wrong,” she finished, weakly. “He’s terrified.”

“We could deal with an inquest later,” Fred Tutcho said, but his heart wasn’t all in. “He’s out there, and the kids—”

“You don’t want to do this,” Cora said, soft. “I will not let no wendigo or man or Raven make me someone I’m ashamed to be.”

A moment passed. Fred Tutcho let out a breath. He shook his head.

Johnny Red squinted at her. “So what then?” A real question, not a challenge.

“We heal him up,” she said, faltering now. She didn’t know what then. She’d never expected them to say yes. “We find a way to drive it out, or keep him tucked away until the Mounties get here. He was raised a white man. It’s like as he doesn’t know what’s happened to him.”

Georgie made a little noise of protest. “C’mon, Cor.”

She patted his hand, absently. “There’s knowing and there’s knowing, George.”

Johnny Red’s shoulders were tight-wound. “Cor,” he said. “You don’t do medicine.”