Chapter 60

The killer was up well before sunrise, feeling invigorated.
Feeling sane. “Sane as a fox,” he lied to himself, out loud.
He climbed out of a scratchy blanket he’d built out of dozens of green pine boughs.
He unfastened his balaclava and rubbed his face awake. His hands were freezing cold. He put his suede work gloves back on and did up the Velcro on his balaclava again and started to stir up the campfire coals.
After twenty minutes or so around the fire, the sun had powered-up enough in the white sky for him to feel like moving. He stood up and took a long, satisfying piss, watching his apple-juice urine poke holes in the crusty snow.
He kicked snow over the fire and began to move through the forest, down toward Sunken Lake, although not sure he was being smart by leaving the protective arms of the wilderness quite so soon.
He felt safe here.
He pulled off a sprig of green fir needles from a low-hanging branch and stuffed the light green ends into his mouth, chewing off the bitter Vitamin C.
“Mmm, breakfast,” he said.
Tall bars of closely stuck together pine trees towered all around him. There was an old, seldom-used snowmobile trail taking shape.
There was not much snow on the ground anymore. The forest seemed empty of life and colour. Everything was brown and gray from the bark of the trees, with just a slight sash of Christmas colour up above from the pine needles.
He walked a few minutes more and stopped dead in his tracks. The low grumble sound of human voices reached out to him across the quiet, cold air of the forest.
He froze.
Two voices, one male and one female.
“C’mere, Ishe,” he heard a man say, in a deep baritone.
Ishe? Who or what is an Ishe?
The killler stood in the woods silently behind a set of towering old power lines well back from Corkum & Burns Road. Why would anybody be back here?
He leaned over and picked up the first weapon he could find. A two-inch thick length of tree branch with no rot in the wood. Some frozen sap inside made the log feel heavy and solid in his grip, like an iron bar.
It would do serious damage.
He held it by the heavy end.