February, 1992

Clay and Diana had only been walking into the woods for about ten minutes when they both felt compelled to stop. Neither of them had to say anything. They just looked toward each other, and Clay nodded. He squatted down and started brushing away the snow on the ground. After he’d cleared away enough that the dirt was showing, he took off his gloves. Diana brushed some snow from a stump and sat on the stump. Back in the woods, the wind was still, and everything was quiet.

Clay put his hands on the ground. It was cold, obviously, but there was something beneath that. Or maybe the thing he felt was within the cold ground but somehow cloaked by it. Clay closed his eyes and tried to reach out, to pinpoint what was actually going on. While this specific spot was new to him, Clay had been in and around Northcentral Wisconsin enough that the soil shouldn’t have had any surprises for him. Maybe this was more of a question than a surprise, anyway. Eventually, Clay put his gloves in his jacket pockets and stood up. Diana stayed sitting. She said, “Well?”

Clay shook his head. “It’s weird.”

“Weird,” Diana said. “Hard to tell if that’s good or bad.”

Clay laughed a little and nodded. He wondered why they’d been called to this general area, how much the directors or whoever already knew. “I mean, there isn’t really a word for it, I guess. I can tell you when it’s too dormant to be of help, and I can tell you when the energy is really flowing. This isn’t either of those things entirely. It’s like trying to talk to someone who speaks a whole different language.”

Diana cleared a line in the snow with her feet. “So, you’re not able to actually get a sense of it?”

“Kinda.” Clay unslung his backpack and took out his water bottle. “I can feel what’s going on; I just can’t actually put it into words.”

“Seems like a skill that the Dirtbag representative should have.”

Clay took a long glug before speaking. “Maybe. Or maybe you have to be a Dirtbag to get it.” He looked at Diana; she’d raised one eyebrow. “Or maybe my folks think that this is a fool’s errand and they’re sending me just to fail at something that can’t really be done.” He held the bottle out to Diana. She shook her head, and Clay put it back in his backpack. “Many dead things out here?”

Diana kicked a little more snow, leaving a spot where she could look at the dirt. “There are all kinds of dead things this far out in the woods. If I’m being honest, there aren’t many places that you can go that you won’t find dead things.”

Clay laughed. “Good to know. Let me ask it this way: Is there anything that a Stiff could put to use for us?”

Diana let out a long breath, her head tilted back so that it looked like she was smoking. “Hard to say if there’s anything helpful when we don’t really know what exactly we’re doing.”

Clay snapped a branch off a tree. “Fair enough.” He snapped the branch in half and went to the spot he’d cleared the snow away. He laid them down in an X and put his hands on the right and left side of it. He closed his eyes again. After a few seconds, a shiver went down his back, and he had to pull his hands away. “You know why Iceland first got called Iceland?”

“Because it’s an extremely cold place with a bunch of ice?”

Clay put his gloves back on and put the sticks away from each other, breaking the x. “No. Early explorers recognized that there was potential for cultivation of land there, so, to throw everyone else off, they called it ‘Iceland’ so that nobody else would go there.”

Diana wiped her nose with the back of one of her gloves. “So, you’re going to call this place ‘New Shitsville’, because you don’t want anyone else to experience all of its frozen glory?”

Clay put his backpack back on. “I just mean that what you call something the first-time matters. If you call it the wrong thing, people will always misunderstand it.”

Diana stood. There were lots of dead things out in the woods. It was oddly comforting, knowing that she could not only bring them but also do so freely in front of Clay. Diana looked around the woods. “Is that Iceland story true?”

Clay squinted for a second. “I don’t know. But maybe the truth doesn’t really matter. The point holds either way, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.” They were quiet for a moment, then Diana said, “There is something specific that’s dead here.”

Clay said, “Is it some kind of ancient evil that’s going to be brought back in a vain attempt to save us all?”

Diana gave a quiet laugh. “Not at all. This thing is of our world. But it’s…like nervous or something. Like it wants to say something or explain something, but it can’t quite work out what it’s supposed to say. The dead don’t usually like to speak from their bodies.”

“Are there ghosts that speak?”

Diana smiled but didn’t look at Clay. “Surprisingly, that’s outside of my jurisdiction.”

They were quiet again, and then there was rustling in the distance. Diana walked backwards toward a tree, feeling for it with the back of her hands. Clay squatted down and looked around. “Could just be an animal. These are woods.”

Diana said, “They should’ve sent an Ape with us.”

Clay nodded. “It does seem like they’d come in handy about now.” He bent his head toward the ground, not letting his ear touch. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing a little. He started whispering. To Diana’s eyes, it looked like he was talking to the dirt. It must have worked, because a ring of earth started rising around him and then another one rose around Diana. The rings rose until they were just above their heads, then a very small tunnel opened up between the two rings. “Listen,” Clay said into the tunnel, “this should keep us safe for a while, and we can talk through this. Is the dead thing anything that could protect us if need be?”

Diana touched the ring of earth around her. It was cold and solid, like it hadn’t actually just been moving. “Probably not the thing that I was talking about before, but if you get a bunch of dead insects together, they can be surprisingly strong. Their exoskeletons make them durable, especially when they don’t feel pain. And individual bugs can pick up intelligence without being noticed.”

Clay sat down, leaning against the ring. “Dang,” he said, maybe we don’t need an Ape after all.”

Diana punched the wall lightly. “You’re not too bad yourself here.”

They sat for a few seconds. There was a little more rustling, then quiet, then louder rustling. Whatever it was, it was coming closer. Diana whispered, “Do we need to stay quiet if it’s an animal?”

Clay thought about it. “Couldn’t hurt. I mean, we don’t have to be completely silent, because, if it’s an animal, they’ll still smell us, and they won’t understand what we’re saying.”

“Maybe if we talk loudly, we’ll actually frighten it.”

“Do you have a gun in your backpack?”

“No. They gave me one, but I knew we’d be out in the middle of nowhere, so I didn’t think I needed it today.”

Clay wondered who “they” were. All of his direction to head north had been indirect or pure intuition, but this didn’t seem like the moment to ask. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a flare gun that I can use if need be. But maybe you want to get some of those dead bugs to check out what’s happening?”

Even though Diana knew that Clay wouldn’t be able to see, she nodded. She closed her eyes and reached out, seeing where any dead bugs might be. There was more rustling, but she managed to tune it out. It took less than a minute for her to get a few bugs to get up from the ground and start scuttling around. Once they saw what it was, they settled back into the ground. “Holy shit,” Diana said. “It’s a bear.”

“A bear?” Clay opened his backpack up and pulled out the flare gun kit they’d put in his backpack. “Aren’t they supposed to be hibernating right now?”

Diana frowned. “Yeah, you’re right. Do you think that somebody made it wake up to come and get us?”

“God, I hope not.” He looked at the kit and realized that he wasn’t entirely sure how they would get their supplies restocked, and this still technically wasn’t an emergency. “Maybe it’s a test,” he said.

“To see if we can fight off a bear?”

“No, to see if we can keep our cool and wait out something that isn’t an actual threat.”

Diana sighed. “That would be a shitty test, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not what’s happening.” She stood on her tiptoes and peeked over the side of the ring. A tiny bit of dirt crumbled where she held onto the top. The bear was still a little way off. It wasn’t looking directly at them, as far as she could tell, but she didn’t know how a bear would hold its head if it was sniffing the air. Diana lowered herself down. “So, we just wait until it wanders off?”

“Maybe you could bring the dead bugs back and have them annoy the bear until it goes away.”

Diana leaned against the tree and closed her eyes. “I’m not sure how good of an idea it is to purposely piss off a bear.”

“Yeah, I don’t hear a lot of stories that start with pissing off a bear and end on a positive note.”

Diana opened her eyes. “Do you hear a lot of piss-off-a-bear stories in general?”

“Let’s not talk about it. Anyway, I do have the flare gun if it does turn into an emergency.”

Diana said, “Could you raise another of these earth rings but around the bear, trapping it for as long as it takes for us to get out of the woods?”

Clay thought about it. “I could raise a kind of cage, and it might be strong enough to trap a regular bear. But if this bear has been, I don’t know, boosted or influenced by some type of magic, then I’m not sure if it might be stronger than an average bear.”

“Or smarter, like Yogi.”

“You know what I mean.”

Diana looked down at the hole of their talking tunnel. “Yeah, I do. It might have actually noticed the dead insects that I sent, and it might be reaching out to whoever woke it up.”

“Damn,” Clay said. “If you can’t trust a dead bug to do your work, then who can you trust?”

“Do you think this is what most of life is?”

“Dead bugs and bears?”

“No, hiding away from big threats and making random guesses and small talk while hoping that you don’t get eaten?”

Clay put the flare gun kit back in his backpack, and he put his fingers through the snow and onto the ground. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I do.”

They were quiet after that, just waiting for the bear to leave.