Chapter Twenty #3
But her parents needed her. Imani grabbed a thick blanket they had left folded at the foot of their bed. The blanket was black with a red and gray pattern that looked to Imani like interlocking teeth as sharp as the ones on the Monster that had taken her mother.
Clutching the blanket, Imani rushed back outside to the road.
She hoped Dad would be conscious when she got back, but he still hadn’t moved.
He looked like every dead body she’d seen on TV or in a movie.
They laid the blanket down flat beside him, stretching it to its full size.
And then carefully—very carefully, with Sharise cradling his head to prevent further injury—they rolled him onto it.
Sharise posed his arms across his chest so they could pull up both sides of the blanket, nearly swaddling him, and began the difficult, tedious process of dragging the blanket’s weight to the lodge.
While she strained alongside her sister, grunting, Imani blinked away tears from the persistent silence around them.
She hadn’t heard any sound from Mom in longer than she wanted to ponder.
The deer’s head and severed hand were evidence that this Monster would savage her.
But then why didn’t it kill her on the road?
Why did it drag her away? Where is it taking her?
Imani forced herself to hold on to hope. They just had to get to her in time.
Dragging Dad took much longer than Imani wanted, since their shoes didn’t have traction on ice and snow.
Their rubber soles slipped with almost every other step, straining their arms when their unreliable legs lagged.
Imani felt like she was uprooting her shoulders from their sockets with every drag.
Beside her, Sharise started crying again, maybe because she had never heard Mom after the Monster took her.
Sharise probably was afraid Dad might die too, that they were orphans already and just didn’t know it.
Imani felt herself wanting to cry, but she thought that would just make it harder to pull.
And the sooner they got Dad inside, the sooner they could go find Mom. That was all Imani could think about.
When she felt her throat closing or she got dizzy remembering Mom’s kicking legs as the Monster took her, Imani imagined they were only pulling a blanket piled with stones.
It wasn’t her father who might be dying.
She was not an orphan. She had a family.
The closer they got to the lodge, the more Imani could almost see them eating burgers at the dining room table.
Her real life was on the other side of this old wooden door with a knocker shaped like a bear’s head, mouth open, fierce.
With sharp, sharp teeth. Why hadn’t she noticed it before?
The steps were hardest because they could hear Dad’s body knocking against the wood as they pulled him up.
An elbow. A shoulder. Sharise let out a terrible wail when she thought she hit his head on the last step.
But then the hardest part was over, and after Imani opened the door, they slid the blanket easily inside and stopped in the foyer, closing the door behind them.
The lodge was warmer than Imani remembered. The generator was still working. Sharise looked around the room, frantic, as if she wanted to find a way to turn back time as much as Imani did. It seemed so plausible here, where they had just been huddling by this door.
“Now we find Mom,” Imani said. “You promised.”
“Just let me think.” Sharise sounded so much like Mom that Imani was compelled to stay quiet.
Then Imani remembered the rifle. She and Sharise had left it on the road, and they would need it if they found the Monster.
Or if the Monster found them. Dad never had a chance to take her hunting, so Imani hoped they would know how to use it.
“We forgot the gun,” Imani said.
“We’ll both go get it,” Sharise said. “We stay together. No matter what.”
As they went toward the door, Sharise saw a guest book on a small table. She grabbed the pen attached to a rubber band and started writing. “I’m leaving Dad a note,” Sharise said. “So when he wakes up, he’ll know where we went. Maybe he can go get help.”
Imani looked over Sharise’s shoulder to make sure she wouldn’t make the note too long and waste precious seconds.
Sharise wrote: We’re following the trail to find Mom.
Get help!!! Then she laid the page on the floor beside Dad’s unmoving figure.
Dad looked so dead that Imani stared at his chest to make sure he was breathing.
She couldn’t tell with his jacket on, so she hovered her hand above his nose until she felt his breath from his nostrils.
Relief made Imani feel so weak that she wanted to collapse on the blanket beside him.
Instead, she and her big sister went outside to retrieve the rifle.
Hunting on their own.
Grabbing the rifle was quick and easy. Afterward, all their gear was waiting in the garage where they’d left it. Wordlessly, they put on their snowboard boots and helmets and grabbed their boards. Imani shoved her gloves in her pocket.