Four Live Rounds by Blake Crouch

wonderment.
    “Ya’ll hear that?”
    “What?” Nathan said.
    “Dan’s come back.”
    Oatha cocked his head. “I don’t hear
nothing.”
    “He’s callin out for me.”
    “You’re hallucinatin, Marion,” Nathan said.
“Ain’t a soul out here but us. Wasn’t gonna say nothin, but Dan’s a
ways down this mountainside, settin against a tree, froze. Saw him
two days ago, figured it wouldn’t do much for morale to mention it,
but there you go.”
    “That’s sad,” Marion said.
    “No, I’ll tell you sad, the fuckin tragedy of
the situation. Snow’s meltin so fast now, we could us probably walk
into Abandon in a day or two if we wasn’t so weak.”
    “Reckon it’s settled that much?” Oatha
asked.
    “Wouldn’t be the worst post-holin I ever
done.”
    Oatha lay there considering it, decided
Nathan was right at least about the one thing—he barely had the
strength to stand, much less walk the remaining ten or however many
miles it was into Abandon. And for the first time, lying there with
the sun beating down on the dirty canvas that had served as the
roof over his head for fifteen days, the prospect of dying didn’t
seem so bad.
     
    Twelve hours later, dying had advanced from a
pleasant thought to an all-consuming desire, Oatha wondering how
much pain a human body could stand, if he could hope to drift away
the next time he went to sleep, or if he had days of this torture
ahead of him—the slow wasting of his body, the slow fracturing of
his mind.
    When his eyes opened, Nathan was standing
over him, and the day had dawned, feeble light filtering through
the opaque membrane of the canvas.
    “I’m goin out there,” Nathan said, his voice
straining to produce a whisper, “and by God if I don’t come back
with food I’m gonna enlist one a you to put my ass out a this
unending misery.”
     
    McClurg lay facing him, his obese jowls
swollen to the brink of splitting, fluid pooling under the skin.
His eyes were open and glazed, and Oatha thought the man had died
until he saw them manage a lethargic blink.
    “You awake, Marion?” he whispered.
    “Yeah.”
    “Ask you something…you believe in God?”
    “Don’t reckon. You?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “How you figure you’ll come out if in fact
he’s runnin this show?”
    “Don’t know. Ain’t been particularly good or
bad. Just sort a plodded my way along. I was friends with a Navajo
when I worked the Copper Queen in Bisbee. Man named Sik’is. He was
always talking about walking on the good, red road.”
    “Ain’t heard of it. Where’s it at?”
    “Ain’t a place so much as a state a mind, you
know? Way a living. Balance and harmony—”
    “This some spiritual bullshit?”
    “It’s like walking the path where you’re the
best version of yourself. I don’t know. Always sounded nice to me.
Thought one a these days, I’d seek this road out. Start living
right, you know?”
    “Wouldn’t put much stock in the philosophy of
a injun. You never kilt a man, have you, Oatha?”
    “Me and my brothers fought against the
Federals at Malvern Hill, so yeah, I done my share.”
    “I kilt five, two in fair fights. Three was
plain murder in cold blood, and you know, I been settin here
thinkin on ‘em, especially one I met on a two-track outside a Miles
City. Young man. We rode together for a spell, shared a bottle, and
I knowed he was headed home to his wife and three younguns ‘cause
he told me, and still when we stopped at a crik to let our horses
blow and he bent down for a drink a water, I cracked open the back
of his skull with a rock and held him under ‘till he quit
kickin.”
    “Why?”
    “‘Cause he told me he had a pouch full a
seventy dollars he’d made workin in a Idaho mine.”
    “You ashamed of it?”
    Marion seemed to reflect on the question,
then he licked his dry, cracking lips and said, “I reckon. But it’s
a rough old world out there, filled with meaner hombres than the
one you’re starin at. Figure it was that young