The Upright Man by Michael Marshall Read Free Book Online Page A

the sides. A bump on his right temple—presumably a result of the second fall—added its own whirling note. Parts of his body ached shrilly whenever he shifted his weight: the ribs on his right side were mouth-open painful whether he moved or not. The cold squared the whole effect up into the unquantifiable. He realized he’d never been truly cold before. He would have liked it to have stayed that way. At one point in the night he had gotten to the point where it felt like every inch of his skin was covered with bugs, and he’d spent much of the next few hours trying to keep moving, shifting silently and in what he hoped was a very small and invisible way. He wriggled his toes, or tried to. The response was increasingly hard to gauge. He kept his hands wedged into his armpits, occasionally removing them to rub meager warmth over his face and ears. He drowsed off a few times, but never for long. He was in far too much scared discomfort to realize that at some point he’d stopped trying to die.
    He felt nauseous too, dry-retching through the night, and was visited by half-memories that failed pill suicides left you with some key part of your innards badly screwed up. Was it the liver? Kidneys? He couldn’t recall. Neither sounded like a good state of affairs. Quite early into his vigil he’d worked out the reason he was still alive. It was stuck to the front of his coat, an icy substance withpill-shaped deposits. He’d thrown up in his sleep. He’d been too drunk, after all that. His body had jettisoned some of what was ailing it, and a lot of the drugs had come up before having a chance for effect. His upright position had prevented him from choking in the process. Perhaps the sickness had stopped the pills from having enough time to mess him up. Perhaps.
    As the air around him gradually seemed to deepen, to allow shades of color back into the monochrome flatness of night, Tom began slowly to accept that he was going to survive into another day. He didn’t know what came after that. He was scared, pissed at himself, pissed at life, and most of all, he was monumentally pissed at the old fool in Henry’s. If you were trying to scare people, surely you mentioned bears? What kind of rancid old scaremonger didn’t tell about the bears? Impenetrable woods are one thing. The same woods plus huge carnivores famous for intractability are something else entirely. You owe it to your audience, especially the suicidal ones, to bring up the fucking bears.
    As he lurched out from behind the tree Tom realized something. The idea of going back and slapping the old codger was the first he’d been excited by in a long while.
     
    THE SNOW WASN ’ T THICK , BUT IT WAS EASY TO RETRACE his progress down the hill. At the bottom he was confronted with tangled and frosty bushes. He turned, favoring his swollen ankle, and looked up the rise. He dimly remembered swerving right to bank up it. So he now needed to turn left. This would take him through the thickest section of the undergrowth. No, thanks. Instead he took a detour up around higher ground, stepping over rocks and clambering unsteadily over nursery logs, until he could rejoin the right direction.
    He didn’t have any clear idea of how far he’d run. In the cold, beautiful light of A Good Day to Die + 1, he wasn’t even sure why he was going back. Walking was warmerthan standing, and if he was going to walk, it felt better to have a destination: a real one for the moment, not the dark, vague place he’d been stumbling toward the day before. That place was still out there, and there was probably enough left in his backpack to bring it closer still. He was no longer sure what he felt about the prospect, but finding the pack was something to do.
    He walked for twenty minutes. The cold helped meld his myriad aches into one giant superpain, a humanoid discomfort trudging between the trees. He spent some of the time muttering to himself about how cold it was, which was pointless but