At first it looked like nothing worth stopping for. A dark shape half swallowed by a drift 20 yards off, close to where the tree line broke open. A trash bag maybe, blown loose from somewhere and caught against the brush. Jonah almost turned back for his sled rope and let it be. The way you leave alone anything strange in the woods when you're 9 years old and the afternoon light is already starting to lean gray, and the wind has that bite that means more snow is coming behind this snow.
Then the shape moved, barely. A hand, half buried to the wrist, flexed once against the crust of the drift and went still again. Jonah stood there with his heart suddenly going hard and fast in his chest. The cold feeling different now than it had a minute ago, sharper, closer, more real. The kind of cold that meant something instead of the kind you played in.
He thought about the three rules taped to the refrigerator. He thought about the winged skull and the red thread and every half-believed story he'd ever repeated at recess without checking whether it was true. And then, without exactly deciding to, the way you don't decide to catch something falling off a table, his boots were already carrying him toward it through the snow. Up close, the shape resolved into a man, and the man was enormous even folded up small the way the cold had folded him. One arm flung out stiff into the drift, the other curled tight against his own chest as if he'd been trying at the very end to hold something in.
He wore a leather vest zipped over a heavy flannel jacket, both crusted white where snow had melted against his body heat and then refrozen hard as shell, and Jonah's stomach dropped clean through the ice under his boots when he saw the patch stitched across the shoulder, the winged skull, the arc of red letters. One of them, one of the men from Ridge Road, out here alone, half buried, not moving, right? He almost ran. He would think about that half second for years afterward, the exact instant his legs actually turned him back toward the hill, back toward the safe, known, warned about world where you crossed the street and kept walking and never had to find out whether the stories were true. But the man made a sound then, low and slurred, not quite a word, more like a word trying and failing to remember how to become itself.
And something buried in that sound stopped Jonah cold where he stood. His grandfather had made that exact sound once at the kitchen table three winters back, the time his blood sugar crashed mid-sentence and his eyes went glassy and far away like he was watching something happening behind Jonah instead of in front of him. His mother had come running with a juice box shouting at Jonah to get the glucose tablets out of the bathroom cabinet fast, fast now, and Jonah, six years old and terrified, had done it. And it had worked that time and it hadn't worked the last time months later, and that was a different kind of memory entirely. He remembered the fear on his mother's face more than almost anything else from that whole year.
How it had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with time running out. He dropped to his knees in the snow beside the old man, cold soaking through his snow pants instantly. Up close, the man's face was gray-white and slick with sweat, which made no sense at all, sweating in 18° weather with the wind cutting sideways off the lake. Except that Jonah half remembered his mother explaining once, patiently, the way she explained things when she wanted him to actually understand them, that the body does strange backward things when the sugar drops too far, sweats when it should shiver, shakes when it should go still, confuses itself in ways that would look to somebody who didn't know better exactly like being drunk. That thought landed hard and ugly in Jonah's chest.
Somebody who didn't know better. That was most of this town. "Hey,"Jonah said, and his voice came out smaller and thinner than he wanted it to against the wind. ""Hey, mister, can you hear me? Wake up.""A mumble, something that might have been a word, might have been nothing. The man's hand twitched again, fingers scraping weakly at the front of his own vest over and over in the same small useless motion, like he was trying to reach something in a pocket and couldn't remember anymore what it was or where. That was when Jonah saw the bracelet. A dull steel band on the man's wrist, half hidden under a frayed leather cuff, engraved letters catching what thin light made it through the clouds. Type 1 diabetic.
Jonas didn't know all the words a paramedic would have known standing over this man, but he knew that word, diabetic, because it was the exact word that had been printed on his grandfather's medical alert card, the one his mother still carried folded in her wallet years later, just so she'd never have to forget it. He didn't have a phone of his own. His mother said nine was too young, no matter how many kids in his class already had one. And out past the tree line, there wasn't a signal worth having anyway. Half the bluff was a known dead zone.
Everybody in town complained about it every summer. What there was, a quarter mile back toward the road, past the boat launch and the old rail spur, was Fenwick's Hardware and Hunting Supply. Its lights already burning yellow through the storm because Grady Fenwick opened at 7:00 sharp, no matter what the sky was doing to the rest of the county. "I'm going to get help,"Jonah said, mostly to himself, mostly to make it true by saying it out loud into the wind where nobody could hear him promise it but him. He pulled off his own coat.