Chapter 61

They were way off the beaten track.
Jack and Tamara Lee were following Isha down whatever trail she wanted. It didn’t much matter which way they went, they knew every track and trail around Sunken Lake. Jack grew up here, and Tamara was a quick study.
It was turning out to be a pretty freezing morning. Jack knew they’d have to turn around soon and make the morning walk a quick one.
Tamara had her brown wool cap pulled low on her eyebrows. Her hands were pushed deep into the tight pockets of her jeans, pulling them firmly around her globe rear-end.
She was angry.
The first time Jack met Tamara she was angry like this, at an orgy at an Alan Lee party in West End Halifax.
He remembered that she was on her knees in front of some guys on a big king-size bed in the master bedroom, totally buck naked.
She was arguing with that husky voice about something with a tall naked blonde stripper who was on the bed too. They were both on their knees, yelling at eachother, tits bouncing all over the place. Everyone in the room was watching. Everyone thought it was going to come down to a cat fight.
Jack fell in love.

He married her about three months after that, even though he was old enough to be her father if her father had waited a while to have children.
But this morning, Tamara was angry for a different reason.
She was angry at life itself.
Jack was having difficulty knowing what to say to her, to snap her out of it. There was nothing he could do to make it alright again, it seemed.
Her little sister Ashley was dying. For what? For some reason this normal, beautiful, fun-loving kid had cystic fibrosis and was suffocating to death.
Tamara got mad like this whenever they were going to Halifax to visit Ashley at the IWK.
Tamara walked in front of Jack, moving along the narrow path in the cold woods. All he could hear was the loud, wet, tremble of a nearby mountain stream, splashing over shale rock, underneath a thin shell of opaque, white ice.
He looked around the trees for something to talk about, something to try and break the ice covering his wife. But there was nothing.
Yellow birch, fir, curly maple, ash, spruce, hemlock… red pine.
“Ishe,” he said out loud, finally. The dog had run off a while back after a rabbit or something. He called just to break the silence.
“C’mere Ishe!” Jack called again.
A man was standing in the woods, through a thicket of red pine trees just around a slight bend in the trail up ahead. He was not moving. He just stood there, completely still in the middle of the winter forest.
“-Jesus, you scared the shit out of me,” Jack called out to the man, loud enough for him to hear. He didn’t respond.
Then Jack saw the dog. Isha was sitting in front of the man’s feet, it looked like, crouching on her front paws. The dog was not moving and looked to be in an awkward sitting position.
“Ish-a!” Tamara yelled in her bluesy voice. “Come here, now!”
But the dog stayed in that weird position. She didn’t even turn her head.
“What the hell?” Jack felt a buzz of adrenaline charge down his elbows and knees. He started jogging in the direction of the man and dog.
The forest man was wearing an orange toque and a balaclava covered his face. He was dressed in dark pants and a long coat. Apart from the bright toque, he blended into the stillness and drabness of the forest, like he was made of wood himself.
“What’s going on with you, man?” Jack yelled at the forest person, stalking faster.
Tamara was strenuously trying to move past Jack and reach the dog first, but he held her back firmly with an extended arm. “Stay behind me. I mean it.”
Tamara exploded forward, pushing her chin out: “What’d you do to the dog!?”
Jack cut in front of her, rounding the bend in the path, connecting up a straight line between himself and the stranger.
As soon as he did, a two-foot piece of wood came hurtling through the air. It struck him in the forehead, like a gunshot. Crack-ack!
One end of the log hit his forehead, the other hit against the base of his left ear as the branch continued to spin after impact. It then ricocheted off Jack and flew sideways at Tamara, striking her painfully in the arms, hard enough to make her cry out in pain.
Jack’s skull, meanwhile, bit back into the nerves of his brainpan, ferociously, like a wild animal, forcing him to clutch at his eyes and yell in a loud voice.
“Arrrgh,” he dropped down to his knees. Warm water was gushing through his cupped fingers, like from a bathroom faucet. He couldn’t open his eyes enough to register that it was blood.
Tamara was bawling behind him, in a buzzing cry that came in and out of focus: “Ja-a-ack-a-a-ack-a-a-ack!!”
Jack was blind. He curled himself up in the snow, oblivious to everything but the biting pain clamped over his skull like the jaws of a shark.
His head felt broken, like his mind was being exposed to all the freezing darkness of the world, unprotected. He struggled to hold his mind together, but the water just kept spilling through his fingers.
A crippling pain registered in his neck, as if piling on. It felt like his spine had been ground to chips under an enormous boulder.
To make matters worse, the forest man had only begun his assault.
As soon as he’d thrown the first stick, he was running flat out, scooping up another branch from the ground and immediately whipping it sidearm into Tamara’s face.
The second, slightly rotten, log shattered across her cheek and elbows, blowing her clear off the path, through a cluster of sugar maple saplings and crashing her body into the icy creek.
Jack heard the clattering water sounds, but could not make sense of them. His senses were overwhelmed by his own suffering.
His skull was broken, and the brains were dying painfully underneath, being slowly killed by stinging exposure to the air.
He knew he would not recover. It was too late to come back.
The thought of dying filled him with a dreadful sinking feeling in his gut.
He knew it was coming.
“Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh…”
All he could do was whimper.
A rock the size of a frying pan plunged into the back of his skull, from above. He could taste the grainy hardness of the rock as it broke through bone and ruined brains underneath, forcing all his final thoughts to scramble into nonsense and pile up in his forehead like an electric train wreck.
His arms and legs started to twitch, comically, or at least the killer thought so.
“Woah! Hahahaha!”
Jack could hear his laughter. He felt his legs and arms go wild, but he was not in control of them anymore.
His heartbeat began to rev higher and higher in his chest, the rythym spinning out of control, as the heart prepared to stop forever.
His heart did not feel connected to his body.
His body felt numb, almost calm.
He heard more sounds, muffled sounds. He tried calmly to figure out what they were.
Whackle-greeecreeeek…
The attacker was behind him somewhere, clubbing Tamara to death, like a seal, maybe… or maybe the sound was the killer digging in the snow. Digging graves…
Jack couldn’t decide one way or the other, but by that time he was dead, so he didn’t care.