The Lonely Dead by Michael Marshall Page A

feeling a strange kind of exhilaration. A lot of the time he felt like a character in a video game controlled by someone's mother, allowed a turn for comedy value on Christmas Day. But just for once…
    He slid and pulled. He slid and pulled, and he didn't fall.
    He shuffled sideways a final time, and then he was standing on the trunk still, but over land. He paused, suddenly incapable of falling. He looked out over the gully, feeling as if he was hanging in the air, then he stepped off onto the ground.
    For a moment the earth too felt insubstantial, as if it could sway and tip and fade. He took another step away from the gully, and it settled. He'd made it.
    Looking back and forth along the other side confirmed what he'd suspected: hard going in both directions. Whereas on this side it was going to be a relative stroll.
    Nine feet, instead of hundreds.
    'Thank you,' he said, into the silence.
    The voice said nothing. Up above, the sky was turning grey.
    —«»—«»—«»—
    He walked for ten minutes, straying recklessly close to the edge. For the moment, in his own small world out here in the trees, things were good. It seemed to be getting colder, unbelievably, but he could take it. He could do stuff, it turned out. He could walk on air. He wasn't surprised when he spotted his backpack below, even though it was largely covered in snow and would have been easy to miss. His luck had rebooted, that's all. The world was looking after him, for once. He held onto a small tree, leaned forward and beamed down at it. It was surrounded by disturbances in the snow, no doubt caused by his feet and hands as he tried to take flight.
    But no BEAR.
    He moved on, keeping to the lip of the gully until he came to a place where he could scramble down. He noticed some broken branches and, using his newly acquired bush sense, guessed that was probably where he'd fallen the night before. The second descent went much better, with only a slightly hectic slide at the end. He at least reached the bottom on his feet. Feeling as if he was completing some kind of circle, he limped over towards the bag.
    It lay open, glass glinting inside. Next to it was a bottle, empty. There were a few scattered packets and a handful of the pills themselves, unnaturally blue. All in a little nest, a clear patch with the wall behind, the stream a way in front, bushes on either side. Tom stared down at it all, feeling like a ghost.
    All at once his mouth filled with water, and his stomach lurched.
    He took a hurried step backwards, not wanting to be too close to the backpack for fear of it pulling him back into the night, and then suddenly he was sitting down, the impact juddering up through his spine, the bushes flickering and wavering in front of his eyes.
    After a few minutes' deep breathing the pain abated a little. Could be hangover. Could be the sight of the pills eliciting a DON'T DO THAT AGAIN response from the brain in his guts. It could actually just be violent hunger. It was hard to tell. His body had turned into a tower of Babel. Everything below his throat felt as if it had been replaced by the operational but incompatible gastrointestinal tract of an alien species: it was saying things, and saying them loud, but he didn't know what they were.
    Oh, he felt bad.
    He hunched forward involuntarily. He was shivering now, too. Shivering hard. With a twist of real fear he realized he felt broken, damaged somewhere deep inside the core. He looked up at the sky and saw it was now darker still, a speckled and leaden grey. It looked like it was going to snow again, this time seriously.
    What was he going to do?
    Even if there were enough pills left, he didn't believe he'd be able to take them. He didn't think he'd be able to do anything, ever. There was no way forward. Nothing to do except sit, but how could he sit when he felt this bad? Vodka would at least make his insides feel warm. The prospect was not in the least appealing — in the light of relative